Once Upon A Time You Dressed So Fine

One night last week I took my Media Studies class on a field trip to see the opening night of the San Francisco Film Festival’s Doc Stories at the Castro Theater. As befits an opening, the theater was all lit up, and nicely dressed people were flooding in, but my students, aged 19 to 22, were the youngest people by some thirty to fifty years so they rushed to the candy counter and bought popcorn before they sat down – all of them, I noted, near the aisles, in case they wanted to bail. Then they stared somewhat uncomprehendingly at the organist, who rises up and plays during the pre-show interlude, and giggled. To them, I fear, the Wurlitzer and its music were of the same era, and equally schmaltzy, as the subject of the film, which was the magazine Rolling Stone.

photo by Emily Marcus

Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge is a new documentary that will run on HBO on Nov. 6^th and 7^th by filmmakers Alex Gibney and Blair Foster; it is funded and sponsored by Rolling Stone magazine itself. (Note: the documentary is in two parts; we only saw only part 1.) It comes hard on the heels of Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, the new biography of Jann Wenner by Joe Hagan, which apparently is surprisingly critical of its subject: according to the New York Times, Wenner was so angered by his portrayal, he pulled out of planned book tours and called the finished book something “deeply flawed and tawdry, rather than substantial.”

Of course, this so-called ‘controversy’ has only helped the book’s overall profile and sales, and surely indicates a far better book than one might expect. Rolling Stone, the documentary, is it’s opposite, a fawning hagiography, much more what Mr. Wenner probably intended as his legacy. And while it is nonetheless enjoyable to watch and probably, in many ways, very accurate – Rolling Stone DID scoop the main stream press on the Patty Hearst kidnapping, it did create a venue for new journalism, it did observe, mirror, and chronicle the vast cultural changes of the 1960s, the irony of watching this movie in this era of fake news and constant self-promotion was truly vexing. I would definitely recommend watching it anyway, for its great footage of Tina Turner, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen and Hunter S. Thompson, but as a teaching tool, it worked only in a negative fashion. When the lights came up, I noted that, as expected, all but one of the kids had bailed.

The thing is, there is much that my students cannot know about Rolling Stone – a back story that is too complex to add to any film. Some of the back story here is great – I enjoyed Greil Marcus’s description of Mario Savio’s arrest at a UC Berkeley free speech rally, though it’s buried at the end of the film for some reason – but you have to bring a lot of knowledge to that. Plus, it’s different watching footage of a very early Bruce Springsteen show (prefiguring the ‘I saw the future of rock ‘n’ roll…’ remark) having been there (that is, at a show very like it); to paraphrase Greil himself, it was performances like those that both saved my life and broke my heart.

This era Bruce.

It’s different, too, knowing the fates of some of the writers and of the magazine itself. In one scene, Cameron Crowe talked about a piece he wrote on Led Zeppelin, which Jann Wenner later criticized to his face for being too deprecatory; for saying exactly what the band wanted to hear. Crowe praises him for his editorial acumen, but you can only wonder then, where did it go? It’s sort of heartbreaking comment, in light of subsequent events: not just this film, and not just Wenner’s anger at his biographer for NOT saying what he wanted to hear, but the whole descent of Rolling Stone magazine; the descent of journalism itself. Are they all just tools of the machine now? It would seem so.

scene from almost famous: not crow, not bangs

Rolling Stone has recently been put up for sale, presumably it will go to a media conglomerate, a move which will no doubt change it, though probably not that much, since it has long just been a vehicle for big stars and movies and Hollywood in general. In some ways, Rolling Stone has been a victim of the internet, but not entirely, it was also a victim of its own world view.

What the film gets right – and my students don’t know – is just how meaningful it was for so many years. I cannot even stress how much mileage I personally have gotten out of having “written for” Rolling Stone. I never wrote a feature for them – those were almost all assigned in-house – but I did a lot of record and live reviews, and people really respect that, even now. I’ve written way more and better stuff for other places, but at job interviews, no one looks at my CV and says, “Wow, you wrote for Spin?” Incidentally, watching the film made me think a little bit about that. You know how I got assignments in the days before email? I called them on the phone. Obviously, it’s easy for editors to not take a call from a writer they don’t want to hear from. So getting them to take your call involved meeting those people in the real world and schmoozing them, generally at CMJ or SXSW, and that, as you can imagine, has its perils.

In other words, the race wasn’t always to the fittest, it was to the boldest – yet another reason why women’s bylines appear so infrequently. In my day, the early 1990s, you could count on one hand the names of women who appeared in Rolling Stone in the reviews section. And have a few fingers left.

I want to emphasize here that at the time, I didn’t think that was weird. It never really occurred to me that we, women, as a class, were oppressed: my male editors, Anthony and Will, were great guys; I liked them, and nothing bad or abusive ever happened to me there. (#notme #notthere.) But the thing is, in that era, I did not have the language or the tools to understand how I was being marginalized anyway. The film Rolling Stone really helped me understand why that was, because the film does it too. A simple example: at the start of the film, it acknowledges that the magazine was begun by Jann Wenner and his wife Jane, who brought much of the money to it; it also says she worked extremely hard, though it doesn’t say at what (ad sales, probably). But she’s never mentioned again in the film – not until, in the Q and A after the screening, her son Gus, said, “the magazine founded by my father and mother.” (My italics.)

Next, early on, the film devotes an enormous and really pretty salacious segment to groupies, including explicit sex scenes, plaster casters, etc. From the cinematic point of view, it’s very true to Rolling Stone's ethos – that women were objects, groupies, fun and funny, ‘stylish’ etc. But if that’s what women are regarded as within their hermetic world, you can see exactly why women as critics weren’t encouraged or welcomed, and why women like me, who desperately wanted to be that, felt weird and other around the whole scene.  If you’re supposed to be giving blowjobs, you certainly aren’t also supposed to be also  saying things like, “Hmmm, that song sounds incredibly similar to “Pale Blue Eyes.” At least that was always my experience. Looking back, trying to navigate that milieu as a woman was hard and confusing. It took a huge emotional toll on me.

Plastercasting. Duh.

The film gives a little bit of love to Tina Turner, though Yoko Ono is practically ignored in favor of John Lennon (after all, she’s just his wife). Otherwise, the female world of Rolling Stone is represented entirely by Annie Leibovitz. As I said, the film is brutally true to what it was like there, but it would have been nice if they’d acknowledged that as problematic: by not doing so, the kids in my class just dismissed it – the magazine, that is, which they don’t worship in the same way and now never will -- as old fashioned and sort of full of shit. Anyway, they’re good Media Studies students, and they know self promotion when they see it.

All this aside, I would not dismiss this film entirely. I would even recommend watching it when it comes out on HBO if you are interested in media, magazines, and especially in the cultural history of the 1960s and 1970s. Although it is not an objective document, the filmmakers made some great choices of how to illustrate the making of a magazine. One great choice was having actual stories themselves, the prose, read aloud over footage of the artists they are discussing. Another was using the actual taped recordings of the interviewees over the text – so you hear the transcript of  John Lennon’s interview, being spoken…by John Lennon.  It’s riveting. The sequence on Hunter S. Thompson (read by Johnny Depp) is especially good, and reminded me of reading “Fear and Loathing On The Campaign Trail” with my class at Evergreen last year; re-reading, or maybe a better way of putting it is re-swallowing, his outraged  tirade against Richard Nixon and Republican political machine just after that election of you know who was so pointed and poignant that it helped us all work through hard times. 

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail was originally published in Rolling Stone as a monthly feature, and even today it stands out as a unique and fearless document: not only does it commend Rolling Stone for sticking with it, but it entirely convinces one of the merits of subjectivity as a journalistic tool. It’s a great moment in the form, but as we all know now, it ends in tragedy. As does Rolling Stone, I think. As does Rolling Stone.  

Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge airs on HBO on Nov. 6 and 7.

Sticky Fingers: the Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine by Joe Hagan, is available in bookstores everywhere.