Moss Gathering

INVENTORS have a way of getting bored with their creations, and would-be magazine mogul Jann Wenner has proven to be yet another restless mind too impatient to busy himself with perfecting what he gave birth to. As his personal plaything Rolling Stone magazine approached its tenth birthday, Wenner evidently decided that major changes were in order. First came the announcement earlier this year that the magazine would move its main offices from San Francisco-America's rock & roll center at the time of Rolling Stone's founding a decade ago-to-the center of media glamour and respectability, Manhattan. Wenner then reaped another bumper crop of publicity when he cultivated the acquaintance of two pseudocelebrities (famous only by dint of their surnames). William Randolph Hearst III and Jack Ford, and gave them a magazine supposedly all their own, Outside.

Even at this point, Wenner was still on the receiving end of the hype, even if he had consciously courted it, but from here there would only be a short step to self-hype, a move that Wenner was not above making. Out came the two-page ads in this autumn's issues of Rolling Stone touting the upcoming tenth anniversary television show and the accompanying special issue. The headline on the ads said it better than the grumblings of any critic; "Rolling Stone sells out: The 10th Anniversary TV Special." The magazine had gone the way of so many other children of the Sixties, but with a difference-Rolling Stone was now flaunting its hip capitalist style with relish. Yet this exercise in electronic self-promotion by a member of the print media might have been excuseable if the two-hour birthday show had at least amounted to a competent rock history documentary. Instead, the hapless viewer witnessed grating excesses of Felliniesque imagery accompanied by watered-down renditions of Beatle standards. The program featured such rock minor leagues as Ted Neeley (that's right, the Ted Neeley), Patti Labelle and Jeff Holland-and to top it all off, Steve Martin wasn't even funny.

Given this televised splash of mediocrity, followers of Rolling Stone had little reason to expect anything special in the published commemoration of the magazine's ten years, and the issue lives up to these very lowered expectations. Where an objective chronicle of the trends in rock over the last 120 months would have sufficed, the reader instead turns to pages of unabashed narcissism and a muddled, warped view of rock music during the years of Rolling Stone. In other words, the subject is the magazine itself, rather than the culture that nourished it.

The best example of this journalistic onamism is appropriately enough, the opening feature article, a paean to the glories of Rolling Stone bearing the byline of--to use Wenner's own words--"critic emeritus" Chet Flippo. The title of the piece sets the tone for the rest of the article, (not to mention the issue), "A Style is Born: The Rock & Roll Way of Knowledge." Flippo's article begins by tracing the author's infatuation with his employer back to his days on a U.S. Navy destroyer when he read the first issue of the magazine, which featured an interview of Donovan and a story on a dope bust of the Grateful Dead. Gushing lines of self-congratulation abound in the piece, such as "Ten years of Rolling Stone is the best history of the past ten years in America that I can think of." Or try this assertion on for size, if not downright smugness: "The growth of rock & roll journalism, which paralleled the growth of rock & roll, is a fascinating subject in itself...Nowhere has it been practiced better than in Rolling Stone..." it's true that Wenner's publication is several cuts above glossy groupie rags like Creem or Crawdaddy, but the self-evident really doesn't warrant repetition.

Of an apparently different but in fact all too similar ilk is David Felton's article on his seven years at Rolling Stone. Written in an obnoxious first-person style, the piece pretends to be an indictment couched in cutesiness, a tongue-in-cheek account of the trials and tribulations of a Rolling Stone "Lifer." Felton hurls the obligatory barbs at Wenner, whom he portrays as an insufferable tyrant prone to harassing Felton and other staffers who can't seem to meet a deadline. But it is all done in good fun, you see; despite all the apparent frustrations and hassles of working for the magazine, Felton clearly is every bit as enamored with Rolling Stone as the sycophantic Flippo. As he writes in his conclusins:

But what it boils down to is we're a family, with its own kind of love and its own kind of respect, a family that's shed its blood for one of the few magazines around that still has a purpose beyond the bucks. And as the world outside grows meaner and more meaningless, who wants to run away from home?

Fortunately, the anniversary issue is not completely devoted to articles declaiming Rolling Stone, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways." Jon Landau's analysis of the contemporary rock's tendency toward sterile sophistication may not contain any earth-shattering insights, but he does stitch together a number of perceptive comments on the evolution of rock into a very readable and succinct three-page piece. And the fifty-page album of Rolling Stone photographer Annie Leibovitz's finest work provides the kind of pictorial history of rock that only this magazine could. From the first full-page shot of a pensive John Lennon gazing into Leibovitz's lens to a melancholy Keith Richard swathed in a makeshift black headdress, Leibovitz's collection captures virtually every major rock star of the last ten years in some special pose, along with non-rock celebrities ranging from Truman Capote to Jimmy Carter.

DR. HUNTER S. Thompson weights in with yet another of his inimitable tracts of Gonzo journalism, a rambling tale of how he learned of the whereabouts of his erstwhile companion Oscar Zeta Acosta, the 300-pound Samoan attorney of Fear and Loathing in Vegas fame. It turns out that Acosta is in fact a crazy Chicano militant who has traded in his law books for the accoutrements of drug smuggling. Studded with the usual bizarre quotations and extravagant graphics, Thompson's piece ends with a series of burned-out ruminations on the unseen forces in American society that coalesced to wreak havoc on this self-styled Brown Buffalo. While the article makes precious little sense, it does at least furnish an appreciated respite from the self-congratulation filling most of the other pages in the issue.

A reading of the first issue of Rolling Stone as it enters its second decade will lay to rest many of the doubts aroused by the anniversary issue. Greil Marcus's sensitive feature on Graham Parker and Dave Marsh's cutting review of a recent Rod Stewart concert prove that Rolling Stone remains an important publication that should be taken seriously, Jann Wenner's megalomania notwithstanding. But judging from the double-barrelled fiasco marking the tenth birthday of his magazine, Wenner would be well-advised to make the next celebration of a Rolling Stone landmark a more private affair.