Rich legacy of magazine celebrated in ‘Stories’
Directors Alex Gibney and Blair Foster made a telling decision about how they would film the story of Rolling Stone magazine 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 musician Ice T. But others — including Mikal Gilmore, Greil Marcus, Jon Landau, Cameron Crowe and Ben Fong-Torres— are seen in younger days through archival images.
The documentary “Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge” is an engaging reflection of the publication and its place in American culture.
The archival material in the four-hour, two-part program being shown tonight and Tuesday on HBO is priceless. The program is as much a summation of a generation as it is of the magazine, founded in 1967 by Jann Wenner and the now-deceased San Francisco Chronicle critic Ralph J. Gleason.
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.”
Rolling Stone was founded,
Wenner says, 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. Cameron Crowe was so young when he joined the publication 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, Rolling Stone’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 would eventually overshadow its music coverage.
“Stories From the Edge” recounts 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 and Bob 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.
The film’s emotional high point emerges in Rolling Stone’s coverage of Lennon. Rolling Stone published its first interview with the Beatle on Dec. 8, 1970. (The date isn’t mentioned in the film, but the story dateline is visible.) Ten years later to the day, Lennon was shot to death outside the Dakota apartment building, where he lived. Only hours earlier, Leibovitz had taken what would be the last photo of him.
The magazine’s stories on Lennon are superb, filled with insight — an important part of the collective documentation of the life of a great artist. But they also represent the apotheosis of Rolling Stone’s cultural influence.
Pieces on Springsteen come close, but other stories — on Britney Spears, ’N Sync and Ice T — equate simply with good journalism. With Lennon, there was a special symbiosis —a demonstrated understanding of and even an involvement in what he was up to and who he was.
When writers recall “how I got that story,” viewers might be struck by the obvious: Most are men. Hunter Thompson, Crowe, Fong-Torres, Tom Wolfe and Michael Hastings, to name a few, are among the great wordsmiths throughout the history of Rolling Stone.
There were female writers — with Janet Reitman and Vanessa Grigoriadis even mentioned — but the discussion almost feels like ladies’ night at the Bohemian Club.
The scarcity of women among the writers in “Stories From the Edge” suggests, at the very least, that the magazine might not have been as in touch with the times as it claimed to be.
The program is as much a summation of a generation as it is of the magazine, founded in 1967 by Jann Wenner and the now-deceased San Francisco Chronicle critic Ralph J. Gleason.