Like A Rolling Stone

“Did you see that piece in ROLLING STONE?” I asked Willie G. Moseley, a local author and senior writer for VINTAGE GUITAR magazine.  (He hangs with Frampton, Nugent, Shaw, other rock luminaries).

“I don’t read fashion magazines,” he opined.

Mr. Moseley is probably right about ROLLING STONE.  I have been a reader for over twenty-five years now, a subscriber for most of those years, but occasionally find it difficult to hang in there.

I wasn’t around for the early days of flagrant pro-drug usage advertisements and articles back in the 1960s, or when the magazine was a black-and-white tabloid.  I started reading it in the 1980s, when my musical interests had first started to take control.

Renewing my subscription to ROLLING STONE each year is a habit.  I used to take their record reviews as gospel, even going to the record store to seek out the albums they’d recommended for purchase.  So much of my musical education – not the classical one, but the rock and roll one – came through reading feature interviews with my musical heroes in all these intervening years.

Jann Wenner, the founder of RS, is still there, and many essays are still contributed by writers who have decades-long associations with the periodical.   Some of the best hard-hitting investigative journalism out there, in my humble opinion, can be found in the pages of ROLLING STONE.  Despite their rep as a lefty, Communist-leaning rag, I am finding that some of the most even-handed reporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the BP oil spill, and the Wall Street bailout fever has appeared in these pages.

The magazine has been calling out all politicians, even Democratic ones they supported in 2008, for failing to make good on various promises.  The feature writers also have become experts at locating hypocrisy in all levels of government, even when your guy is the one who is letting you down.

Everyone has favorite writers; for investigative reporting, Matt Taibbi is in a class by himself.  Rob Sheffield keeps a humorous eye on pop culture.  And good old David Fricke is still reviewing records with all the passion of a teenager finding out about rock and roll for the first time.  I guess you could say these are the kind of guys who keep me coming back.

However, the choice of cover material – often done for shock value or as a way to sell magazines to an ever-younger demographic – has been disturbing of late, and bordering on pornographic.

Somewhere around the time the magazine transitioned into its current ESQUIRE-looking appearance, there became a marked departure from covers featuring the real Rolling Stones and other musicians in favor of half (sometimes fully) naked celebrities.  How can this magazine be displayed on newsstands without being encased in a plastic slipcover?

The famous issue that featured the bombshell interview with General Stanley McChrystal – the one that not only tainted his relationship with the U.S. military, but ended a 30-year career – also showed Lady Gaga in bondage gear on the cover.  Preacher’s-daughter-turned-envelope-pushing-pop-tart Katy Perry then graced the cover of the very next issue in a photo that left absolutely nothing to the imagination.

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