Rolling Stone, the American music and pop culture magazine, is celebrating a milestone this month with the release of its 1Â 000th issue.
For 39 years, the magazine has straddled the divide between countercultural and conventional journalism, with covers that have depicted and even created modern-day icons.
The first issue of the biweekly publication, founded in San Francisco by Jann Wenner and Ralph Gleason with a $7Â 500 loan from friends and family, appeared on November 9 1967, featuring the first of several covers of Beatles legend John Lennon, dressed like a British World War I soldier.
Although it was a publicity photo from Lennon’s role in the anti-war film How I Won the War, the photo actually “speaks so clearly to the paths of culture and politics that came to define Rolling Stone“, Wenner, the magazine’s publisher, says in an article on its website.
“In those first few years, we were thinking as much about getting to the printer on time as making a statement,” he says.
The magazine was born in an era full of debate and new music that demanded a different focus.
Rolling Stone was the second magazine devoted to rock-music criticism in the United States, after Crawdaddy, launched in 1966.
But in addition to focusing on modern music, Rolling Stone forged its identity by bringing together some of the most compelling writers in “new journalism” in the US — such as Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson, the father of so-called “gonzo” journalism — and by keeping a watchful eye over its covers.
“After a few years, we learned that the newsier, hotter, sexier covers were the key to selling the magazine on newsstands,” Wenner says.
He stresses that the arrival in 1970 of Annie Leibovitz, an art student who became the magazine’s chief photographer and went on to shoot 142 covers, had a major impact.
With her on board, Wenner says, “the cover of Rolling Stone went from spontaneous to specially crafted”.
“Without any doubt,” he adds, “hands down, the greatest cover we’ve ever done is Annie’s portrait of John and Yoko [Ono], taken on the eve of his death” in 1981.
The photo shows Ono and Lennon lying on a bed; Ono is dressed in a black shirt and jeans, while Lennon is completely nude and curled up almost in a foetal position by her side, embracing her.
Yet Leibovitz says the photo — recently voted the best magazine cover of the past 40 years by the American Society of Magazine Editors — came about purely by chance.
“What is interesting is she [Ono] said she’d take her top off and I said, ‘Leave everything on,’ — not really preconceiving the picture at all. Then he curled up next to her, and it was very, very strong,” Leibovitz says.
But in addition to its trademark edgy pop-culture coverage, Rolling Stone has never shied away from jumping into the political fray.
One recent example of this is its cover story devoted to US President George Bush, which asks if Bush is the “worst president in history” and if his presidency is headed for “colossal historical disgrace”.
“Our mission to deliver ‘all the news that fits’ has taken us from Haight-Ashbury [in San Francisco] to the Oval Office,” Wenner says.
“Our subjects have been the architects of their times — presidents and poets, the outsiders and insiders with their shoulders to the wheel and their pictures beneath the logo.
“Over the years we have devoted ourselves to this task with all the passion, energy and talent that we had to give, and I believe that nobody has done it better,” he says. — AFP
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