LOST IN MUSIC

CLASSIC IMAGES FROM 50 YEARS OF ROLLING STONE

IN 1983 James Hencke wrote a feature in the American music magazine Rolling Stone about the British music press. In it he enumerated the differences between the American music press and its UK equivalent. “One is the sheer number of publications,” he wrote of the latter. “In addition to the NME, Melody Maker and Sounds, there are two other weekly magazines: No 1, a Smash Hits imitator that just began publishing this year, and Record Mirror, a former newsprint tabloid that recently switched to a glossy format. Then, of course, there’s Smash Hits, which comes out every other week, and, finally, The Face, a slick, extremely classy monthly that delves into such areas as film, fashion and politics, as well as music.”

All these years on and every one of those British titles has gone. But Rolling Stone rolls on, as immovable, as irritating, as exhilarating as ever.

Those of us who grew up reading those 1980s UK titles mostly looked down on Rolling Stone. The word “hippies” would be uttered. And not approvingly. But it turns out the hippies had more stamina than they were given credit for. Rolling Stone is 50 years old this year. It was set up in San Francisco by publisher Jan Wenner in the same year the Beatles released Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

“I thought rock ’n’ roll needed a voice,” he writes in the introduction of the new book 50 Years of Rolling Stone, “a journalistic voice, a critical voice, an insider’s voice, an evangelical voice – to represent how serious and important the music and the musical culture had become.”

Wenner employed writers such as Griel Marcus, Joe Eszterhas (later to script Basic Instinct for the screen) and Cameron Crowe, who would eventually turn to film directing, as well as big beasts Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson, whose contributions would take the magazine far beyond the confines of music journalism.

Then there were the photographers. The likes of Baron Wolman and Annie Leibovitz, who responded to Wenner’s visual ambition for the magazine. (“I took cues from the great, sensuously designed German magazine Twen and the Swiss magazine Camera,” he writes.)

The result were images that helped define the stars who graced the magazine’s pages, from a near naked David Cassidy to a teenage Britney in her underwear.

A voice of the counterculture, Rolling Stone has never hidden its liberal politics. The music and the belief system went together for those 1960s kids. In a way it’s why it still stands out today as the world has lurched to the right in the last few years. Even now, Rolling Stone still believes in rock ’n’ roll.

Someone has to.