A gilded anniversary in Rolling Stone doc
Wenner and friends trace 50 years of once-visionary magazine
Directors Alex Gibney and Blair Foster made a telling decision about how they would film the story of Rolling Stone magazine and its place in American culture during the past 50 years: Almost no one would be allowed to grow old.
Co-founder Jann Wenner does, so do photographer Annie Leibovitz and Ice-T, but we only see others like Mikal Gilmore, Greil Marcus, Jon Landau, Cameron Crowe and Ben Fong-Torres in archival images when they were younger. We hear many of them in the present day in HBO’s four-hour, two-part “Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge,” airing Monday and Tuesday, Nov. 6 and 7. But visually, it’s like no one ever grew older.
The decision may have been made for financial reasons, or simply to avoid the talking-heads template favored by many documentarians. But in this case, the decision underscores the Peter Pan element of the Baby Boomers who came of age in the 1960s and early ’70s. Every generation believes it will change the world in special ways, but the political, social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s seem to have fueled an exceptional sense of youthful transcendentalism, a kind of “you think you’re going to live forever and somehow find me there,” in the words of J.D. Souther.
“Stories From the Edge” is informative and self-congratulatory, at times seeming to inflate Rolling Stone’s
role in the culture somewhat beyond truth. That may have something to do with the fact that Wenner is a producer of the film and Rolling Stone Productions is one of the producing partner organizations.
One assumes that Wenner had better luck influencing how the film came out than he apparently did when he asked Joe Hagan to write his biography, only to denounce “Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone” once he read it.
The archival material is priceless, as much a summation of a generation as it is of the magazine that Wenner and the late San Francisco Chronicle critic Ralph J. Gleason founded in 1967. A younger Wenner is asked in an interview about the magazine’s founding and the importance of its first decade in San Francisco.
“The important thing about San Francisco is that it’s a scene,” a smugly cherubic Wenner tells a reporter back in the day. “It’s a warm, friendly city. … Historically it had the bohemians, the beats, (it) supports the arts, poetry, jazz, and similarly today, it supports rock ’n’ roll.”
Wenner says Rolling Stone was founded because “music — and the kind of cultural revolution that was attached to it — wasn’t being covered.”
Charles Perry, an assistant keeper at the San Francisco Zoo who also volunteered for the magazine, became its first employee. Crowe was so young when he hooked up with the magazine that he had to be excused from high school classes to do his job. The magazine offices were ramshackle, littered with pizza boxes and overflowing ashtrays, marked, at least in the vintage images, by barely controlled chaos.
Ten years later, the magazine’s move to New York made sense. Not only was New York the center of the publishing world, but the magazine had grown in its first decade, expanding into social and political coverage that eventually overshadowed its music coverage. It began as a chronicle of counterculture, but now the counterculture was growing up. In more recent times, we see a conference room in the present-day office looking like something out of Showtime’s “Billions.”
The documentary traces the magazine’s history through several benchmark stories, from the early coverage of rock groupies and the Plaster Casters, to the celebration of icons John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Dylan, the Patty Hearst kidnapping, Jimmy Swaggart’s secret sex life, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, ’N Sync, Britney Spears, the war in Afghanistan and, yes, the costly and destructive retraction of the detailed story about a young woman at the University of Virginia who claimed she had been gang raped at a fraternity party. The case is covered factually and fully because it could not be ignored.
We get a sense of Wenner’s style, that he is decisive, autocratic but also smart enough to know that even if he doesn’t like a particular form of music, it merits coverage in the magazine. That was true with the punk movement and of hip hop and rap. At times, writers had to push hard to get Wenner’s OK, but they got it and that’s how journalism should work.
There is an unconvincing effort to make the case that Rolling Stone still matters, but even if the UVA rape story hadn’t been such an egregiously revealing embarrassment, the publishing world has changed radically in the past recent years. As hard as the magazine may have worked to remain relevant, it is having trouble identifying its target audience.
The film’s emotional high point is in Rolling Stone’s coverage of John Lennon. The magazine published its first interview with Lennon on Dec. 8, 1970. It isn’t mentioned in the film, but you can see the dateline on the story. Ten years later to the day, Lennon was shot to death outside the Dakota. Leibovitz had taken what would be the last photo of Lennon only hours earlier.
The magazine’s stories on Lennon are superb, filled with insight and an important part of the collective documentation of the life of a great artist. But they also represent the apotheosis of Rolling Stone’s influence on culture. Pieces on Springsteen come close, but stories on Spears, ’N Sync and Ice-T are “just” good journalism. This was Rolling Stone trying to get a handle on moments in pop culture. With Lennon, there was a special symbiosis, a demonstrated understanding of, and even an involvement in, what the former Beatle was up to and who he was.
It’s probably a good idea to show Leibovitz talking to Wenner in the present day at the start of the film because while she says “those years at Rolling Stone formed me,” her photography defined the magazine for years.
That said, as you watch the film and hear all the writers recalling “how I got that story,” you may be struck by the obvious: Most of them are men. When we think of the great wordsmiths of Rolling Stone, we think Hunter Thompson, Crowe, FongTorres, Landau, Tom Wolfe, Gilmore, Robert Sam Anson, Michael Hastings, Marcus, Charles Young, Matt Taibbi. There were female writers, and a couple, such as Janet Reitman and Vanessa Grigoriadis, are mentioned, but it almost feels like ladies’ night at the Bohemian Club. Why are an overwhelming majority of the magazine’s “Stories From the Edge” written by men? At the very least, the imbalance suggests that the magazine may not have been quite as in touch with the times as it always claimed to be.
Oscar winner Gibney and Blair bring convincing directorial style to what is a useful and entertaining infomercial about an important chapter in American culture and journalism.
So now Rolling Stone is for sale. If it were a piece of property, it might be listed as a fixer-upper with a solid foundation and a rich history, in need of a seismic retrofit.