Happy 50th birthday, Rolling Stone
Fifty years after he launched an underground newspaper that changed music journalism and a great deal more, Jann S. Wenner finds Rolling Stone being showcased in a once-unthinkable forum: a museum.
“At least it’s a museum I own,” Wenner said with a laugh as he anticipated an anniversary exhibition at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, an institution that Wenner helped found in the 1980s.
The three-floor Rolling Stone/50 years exhibit is now open and runs through late November.
There might not have been a Rock Hall or museum without Rolling Stone, which as much as anybody moved rock and the lifestyle around it from the fringes to the mainstream.
Rolling Stone not only chronicled music, politics and culture, but it also helped change it, whether through Wenner’s revelatory 1970 interview with John Lennon, the photography of Annie Leibovitz or the “gonzo” reporting of Hunter S. Thompson.
Among those getting early starts at Rolling Stone were Leibovitz, Thompson, the music critics Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs, screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and filmmaker Cameron Crowe.
The common thread among the best Rolling Stone contributors has been “extraordinary talent,” Wenner says, along with a “sense of purpose” and a distinctive way of “seeing our times.”
Wenner was only 21 when he and his friend and mentor Ralph J. Gleason started Rolling Stone from a San Francisco warehouse in 1967.
The first issue dated from November of that year.
Youth tycoons are common now, but 50 years ago it was rare for someone Wenner’s age to be running any business, at least one that hoped to make money.
His hope then was to bring attention to the music he loved and how it was changing the culture, changes he believed were ignored or belittled by the mainstream media.
By the 1970s, Rolling Stone was so much a part of the music business and its cover such a symbol of success that it inspired Dr. Hook’s hit single The Cover of Rolling Stone.
Rolling Stone become so synonymous with hip, alternative journalism that several movies have featured Rolling Stone reporters, including the 1981 release Rich and Famous and, from 2015, The End of the Tour, starring Jesse Eisenberg as a Rolling Stone reporter and Jason Segel as David Foster Wallace.
Crowe made a whole film about his days with the magazine: Almost Famous, which introduced the movie world to a young Kate Hudson.