Everybody Must Get Stoned http://thesil.ca/?p=2534
February 26, 2009 by Corrigan Hammond There is something distinct about being on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine. Something pure rock-n-roll, decadent and cool. Rolling Stone is, after all, a chronicle of the condensed desires of the post-war generation howling and hip like Dylan or the Stones, equal parts forever young and leather-faced ego. And for the first 42 years of its existence Rolling Stone just sat there, glaring out of the newsstands, all gall, with a smiling famous face on its cover oozing sexually charged American, defiantly proclaiming "hail-hail rock-and-roll" all at once subject to counter-culture infamy and counter-culture disdain. Throwing John Lennon at the height of Beatlemania onto its first cover, Rolling Stone hardly pretended to be the final word on the underground. Its ambition, after all, was never to be the most credible of all music magazines or counter-culture rags. In those days Rolling Stone had a sort of mainstream ambition and edge somewhere half married to the San Francisco counter-culture scene that it spoke for, and in recognition of a niche, a need, a market for a more mature music publication that did not pander to the boy-crazed, screaming-girl and teenaged-dreams rock-and-roll magazines of the day. Bringing in serious reporters and veteran counter-culture writers with self-destructive political inclinations and gonzo tendencies, the Rolling Stone in those days behaved more like classic Penthouse or Playboy only with less sex and more electric guitars, than its peers like Teen Talk or 16 Magazine. Rolling Stone was more interested in channelling the shifting spirit of young America circa-67', than in pimping boy bands with California good looks or in husking the revolutionary fervour of the new underground presses that were popping up in every college town from Berkley to Austin. However, as Rolling Stone became more and more a corporate magazine and recognizable cultural-institution, it quickly found itself in the dubious position of being a mainstream brand chasing a market of aging hippies and aspiring hipsters with a sharp sense and resolute disdain for sell-outs and phonies. Unafraid to court all music figures from Neil Diamond to Neil Young, by the early seventies, Rolling Stone had earned itself a reputation for being just another marketing tool for record labels more interested in selling 20 million Fleetwood Mac or Led Zeppelin records than in discovering the next Bob Dylan or Otis Redding. Rolling Stone got to be just another piece of rock-and-roll excess, alongside private jets and sold-out coliseums, every two bit hit-maker with their own "Sweet Caroline" was allowed to grace its cover. Bands even sang about Rolling Stone, just like Chuck Berry used to sing about jukeboxes or Buck Owens about movie-stardom: "wanna buy five copies for my mother, wanna see my smilin' face on the cover of the Rolling Stone." With a name copped from one of those Dylan tunes that Hendrix always covered, Rolling Stone always kept a distinct political aptness and dangerous hip within its pages that that no amount of Doritos ad or full page Axe Body Spray spreads could synthesize. It was the originator the envy of every tuned-in kid pushing out their own zene on some co-opted Xerox machine. Rolling Stone, with its mandate for quirky news with a relevant counter-cultural spin, and tendency to deride the absurdities of pop-culture, became the model for a particularly ballsy type of publication, a breed of counter-culture news that each subsequent new generation of could aspire to print. Rolling Stone had a distinct look. Ordinary magazines usually only measure about eight by ten and a half inches, up until last October, Rolling Stone tacked on an extra two inches belt-length and height. And although Rolling Stones publishers long since did away with the magazine's original newsprint the type that left behind a sweet black inky residue on your fingers after reading being oversized for decades imbued Rolling Stone with a particular aura of rock-and-roll authenticity. Its pages looked like something you could find in the restroom of sleaze bars with grease bands playing hot rock. Unlike Cosmo or Maxim, Rolling Stone wasn't bound with some blinding glare. Even if Kurt Cobain had once graced its cover, sly and ironic, wearing his "Corporate Magazines Suck" t-shirt, Rolling Stone and its extra two inches may have looked like a sell-out yuppies publication of choice, but it still had some feisty counter-culture zest left in it. The crinkle as you turned its pages screamed like analog white static. Reading Rolling Stone was like throwing on the Stooges or the Stones Beggars Banquet, filled with threatening distortions and unforgiving, relentless violent inclinations. Picking up Rolling Stone was like picking up some radical newspaper off the streets of Paris 1792. It was like getting a hold of something off Benjamin Franklyn's Philadelphia press dangerous and revolutionary. That is, until those dangerous two inches were lopped off. Suddenly, Rolling Stone with its glossy paper and perfect binding was that "Corporate Magazine." Everything its many critics had ever lobbed against it, in the simple act of become like every other magazine at the supermarket, was confirmed. Or was it? . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. 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