Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I argue that Ramparts was the most influential magazine. Jann has
spoken about that influence, and that's where he and Ralph were
before they started Rolling Stone. Ramparts was known for its
investigative and whistleblower stories, showmanship, irreverence,
iconoclasm, and an interest in what we would now call media
criticism. 

The similarity wasn't restricted to the content or tone. Jann lifted
Rolling Stone's design from Ramparts' spinoff newspaper. Rick
Griffin's lush title was probably the only original design element.
When Rolling Stone switched away from that logo, the initial letter
in the title resembled the initial letter in the Ramparts title
design. 

There were other influences. The founders name-checked New Musical
Express and Melody Maker in their recollections. They were also
reading The Village Voice, The New Yorker, Esquire, etc. They
borrowed ideas from Playboy and the Paris Review. They said they
weren't interested in the underground newspapers, but they hired
writers and editors who worked at those places. John Lombardi was at
Distant Drummer (Philadelphia), Abe Peck was at the Chicago Seed,
etc. 

I can't remember if the cofounders mentioned New York magazine, but
that was a key outlet for New Journalism, and they were definitely
interested in that style of journalism, especially when Clay Felker
was in charge at New York.  

When Rolling Stone lost people, it was often to places like The
Village Voice, Creem, Esquire, etc. So the traffic ran both ways.
Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus, for example, wrote for Creem and the
Village Voice.  

I wouldn't call Newsweek's San Francisco bureau an influence on
Rolling Stone, but Michael Lydon and John Burks both worked there
before Jann recruited them. 

Once Rolling Stone achieved liftoff, it influenced many other
magazines. As I argue in the book, it created a brand new beat, the
rock music beat, by insisting on the importance of its topic. 

Sometimes the magazine's influence was indirect. Creem, for example,
made a point of saying it WASN'T like Rolling Stone. It was
grittier, realer, no flower power BS. But that's a kind of
influence, too, when magazines are defining themselves against you.
Likewise, SunDance went after Rolling Stone for not being more
radical, but when it closed, Weir and Kohn caught on at Rolling
Stone. I saw a letter from SunDance cofounder Ken Kelley, who also
wanted a job and essentially pinned his magazine's criticisms of
Jann on the other cofounder. 
  

    
When I see that 'R' I think of Rainier beer before I think of
Ramparts  magazine.
  

    
Before RS, I read Crawdaddy but never liked the pretentious
overly-erudite sounding writing style there.  RS was written like
people talk.  I got the first issue and read every issue after that
for a couple of years until I was too broke to buy magazines and
such things, in which case I read them at the library.

We had a subscription to Ramparts at our house most of the time I
was in high school.   
  

    
I had my own subscription to Ramparts when I was in high school, but
somehow I never got that it had influenced Rolling Stone. 

Found a bunch of Ramparts covers on Flickr:
<https://www.flickr.com/photos/idahobert1/albums/72157628388238107/>
Brings back memories.

I was watching the fires burn from a safe middle-class home in a
small West Texas city...
  

    
I was part of the Ramparts July 1969 cover story where they describe
me thus, "John Coate is white but he has long hair and is obviously
another traitor to his race..."

http://johncoate.com/Archives/Ramparts%20July%201969%20O'Brien%20Trial.pdf


(apologies for the digression, but Ramparts doesn't come up in
conversation that much.)
  

    
Always happy to talk about Ramparts. My book on that topic got me
started here at the WELL and also on the San Francisco
counterculture more generally ... even though that book grew out of
my Carey McWilliams bio. I didn't know a thing about McWilliams or
Ramparts until I was in my 40s. 

Ralph Gleason, who was a contributing editor at Ramparts, later
called it the white hope of the square left. 
  

    
Crawdaddy wasn't paying its writers when Rolling Stone launched.
That made it easy for Jann to recruit Jon Landau, who later
described his early style as "messianic." Lots of sharp judgments,
especially when it came to the West Coast bands. In one letter, a
furious Landau rebuked Wenner for leaving some of those remarks on
the cutting room floor. 
  

    
We've talked about Rolling Stone's emergence in the context of the
counterculture. How did the magazine, as a business, balance the
ideals of the counterculture with the realities of advertising,
circulation, and corporate growth?
  

    
When I was there (in 1973) we high mindedly refused cigarette ads
and I think booze too. As Pete noted in the book, after the mag
moved to New York and got a real publisher, those qualms were
dropped 
  

    
Oh yes...seemed like the home of Joe Camel for a long time.
  

    
Yes, Renshin is quite right about the advertising. (Thanks for your
cooperation with this project!) Joe Armstrong went after the big ad
accounts, and his success was an important part of the move to New
York, where he was based. 

The reluctance to run certain ads was perhaps the only attempt
Rolling Stone made to balance business realities with
countercultural ideals. Jann was very clear that the magazine was a
capitalist operation. 

There were only a few staffers with organic connections to hippie
culture. One of them was Charlie Perry, the editor who used to room
with LSD mogul Owsley Stanley in Berkeley. Hunter Thompson was no
hippie, nor was Jann, nor Jon Landau, nor Ben Fong-Torres, nor Greil
Marcus, nor Marianne Partridge, and so on. The magazine identified
the counterculture and its music as its main focus, but it was never
a hippie operation. Jon Carroll said as much at the time. So did
Ben.

Of course, Jann knew he needed the counterculture to accept the
magazine. He lambasted the Yippies and their politics, but he wisely
included lots of Grateful Dead coverage long before they sold any
albums. He knew they had plenty of countercultural cachet, which the
magazine needed. In return, Rolling Stone lifted the Dead's profile.


When Jann wrote for the magazine, he drew on hippie diction, but his
letters to record executives tapped a different idiom. My sense was
that Jann and the record executives were speaking the same language.
  

    
I remember in the early days RS ran a story about a Mt Tam gathering
run by Farm founder Stephen Gaskin with the headline "Mt Tam Energy
Bash."  Everyone up there was on acid was basically the story.  This
as an example of how they focused a lot of the local beat.  But I
also recall that when they moved to NY, they characterized SF as a
"cultural backwater."
  

    
Right, the magazine ran lots stories about drugs and the drug trade.
Also stories about rock festivals, of which there were many across
the country. 

Stephen Gaskin appears in the book in a story about Bill Graham. I
think an early draft also included a biographical sketch. Not sure
that part survived the final cut. 

I included that comment about San Francisco as a provincial
backwater. But when Jann announced the move to NYC, he had to mask
his own excitement. No one else in the office was happy about it.
Charlie Perry, who stayed in the Bay Area, felt betrayed. Ben
Fong-Torres and Tim Cahill also stayed. Most of the staff who made
the move left the magazine within a few years.  

The move to NYC weakened the magazine's connection to the
counterculture, including the Silicon Valley strain. But at least
one of its writers, Steven Levy, was paying attention to tech. His
first book, which started as a Rolling Stone article, was about
hackers. 

Speaking of Charlie Perry, he and Abe Peck will appear with me on a
panel at the first Santa Barbara Literary Festival this weekend.
Charlie wrote a book about Haight-Ashbury and became a food writer
at the Los Angeles Times. Abe edited the Chicago Seed before joining
Rolling Stone for a brief stint in the 70s. He later wrote an
important book about the history of the underground press. He lives
in Santa Barbara, but I believe he's still on the journalism faculty
at Northwestern. 
  

    
I was a fan of Lester Bangs back in the day. What was his
relationship to Rolling Stone?
  

    
Jann had a pair of socks with dollar signs on them. We low-level
staffers who thought we were working for a counter-cultural icon
were horrified by them.
  

    
To this reader, RS really stood apart from the true underground
press. I read it for the music reviews, which ranged from deeply
insightful to entertainingly obtuse.  I went elsewhere for coverage
of politics and culture.
  

    
Haha, I forgot about the socks! Yes, the album reviews were a big
draw. They could help or hurt sales in those days. Then the music
video was the ticket. Now a tweet from a big star is all you need. 

In his youth, Lester Bangs really wanted to be a staff writer but
never was. That didn't stop him from placing many reviews in the
magazine. He SHOWERED John Burks with them when he was still living
in San Diego. They were accompanied by long cover letter. Finally
Burks reached out to him and began running the reviews. His main
source of income came from working at a shoe store. 

Greil Marcus invited him to the Bay Area. Bangs thought it was a job
interview, so he wore a brown suit. He stayed with Greil and was a
terrible houseguest, so Greil asked Langdon Winner if he could put
Bangs up. The visit didn't lead to a job--that idea had never
occurred to Greil--and later Bangs was put on hold due to his
negative reviews. That embargo was finally lifted, but Bangs moved
on to Creem, where he found a home. Then he moved to New York and
wrote for The Village Voice before dying young in his apartment. 

He was another contributor with an extraordinary voice and comic
flair. He later rued what he called his bad case of Hunter
Thompsonism, which sets in when a writer starts thinking of himself
as a character. 
  

    
We'd be negligent if we didn't ask about Ed Ward's Rolling Stone
history and contributions, and the legendary broom fight with
Wenner. (Ed was part of the community here on the WELL, and many of
us knew and loved him.)
  

    
I count myself as a friend and fan of the late great Ed.
  

    
The Marin County California Film Institute film festival DocLands is
showing THE LAST CRITIC, about Robert Christgau, this Saturday at
7:15pm at the Rafael Film Center. I'm not a huge fan of his, but I
reflexively watch films about critics--anything interesting about
his brief periods at Rolling Stone?

<https://app.doclands.com/film/the-last-critic>
  

    
Any stories about Langdon Winner? He was a friend of my wife's
father, and he gave teenage Susan a number of LPs she still
treasures. She will sometimes say, on hearing certain songs, Oh,
Langdon gave me this album.
  

    
Ed Ward took over Greil's job as album review editor. He was at
Crawdaddy before that. He admired John Burks, the first managing
editor, but never clicked with Jann Wenner. In Ed's view, Jann put
him through a hazing process by asking him to interview Bill Graham,
who denounced Wenner for 15 minutes while Jann giggled. Bill and
Jann later buried the hatchet, but after Jann nagged Ed one too many
times about his messy work area, Ed chased Jann around the office
with a broom. That was probably his last official act. 

Jon, did you help me contact Ed's sister? David? I needed permission
to quote some of Ed's stuff, and Louise Ward graciously permitted
that.

Christgau wrote something for Rolling Stone, and Jann tried to edit
the opening paragraph. Christgau wrote a sizzling reply that I quote
in the book. He said that Jann's ideas were dumb, and that he should
get a nice teaching job where he wouldn't do much damage. 

Later he wrote that The Village Voice was the best rock magazine
after Rolling Stone. Ellen Willis said something similar. So I think
there was some consensus about that. Jon Carroll later said that it
wasn't such a big deal to be the best rock magazine in 1967, but it
was a very different matter in 1975.

Two things about Langdon Winner, who was another Cal graduate
student and friend of Greil. First, he reviewed Theodore Roszak's
The Making of a Counter Culture for the magazine. That indicated to
me that the magazine had a certain intellectual heft even in 1969.
(Roszak is my book's secret hero.) 

Second, Winner was asked to cover a Black Panther press conference
for the magazine. Jean Genet was speaking. Before he said anything
else, he asked if anyone from Rolling Stone was there. Winner
identified himself. Genet told him what the magazine should do for
the cause. Winner said some of the writers were trying to do more
political stuff, but they were also a rock magazine, etc. "Those are
just words," Genet said. "You must do more!" 

As you probably know, Winner left the magazine to teach at MIT and
eventually landed at RPI in upstate New York. At around this time,
the magazine also lost Burks, Ward, Marcus, John Lombardi, Jon
Carroll, and others. It was, one person said later, a case of the
ship deserting a sinking rat. But several key people stayed, and
Jann rebuilt. Over the next several years, he added Hunter Thompson,
Paul Scanlon, Grover Lewis, Cameron Crowe, etc. He also patched
things up with Greil, who returned in a different role. Jann called
that period the magazine's golden age. 
  

    
I think I lost at least one line of type in my previous answer. I
meant to include Marianne Partridge, Ellen Willis, Joe Eszterhas,
Tim Cahill, and Tim Ferris in the list of people Jann recruited
after the fallout in 1970. 
  

    
You said earlier that "the move to NYC weakened the magazine's
connection to the counterculture," As the counterculture faded in
the 1970s, Rolling Stone survived and even thrived. What does the
magazine's evolution tell us about the broader fate of the 60s
counterculture?
  

    
Thanks for the info on Winner. Rolling Stone was an unusual part of
his career, he has been mostly an academic studying the technology,
politics, and society.

Winner was also part of an episode at Rolling Stone I've never
heard: The Maked Marauders, a Greil Marcus-led hoax that started
with a fake review of a new supergroup comprising Dylan, Jagger,
McCartney, Lennon, and Harrison, that turned into an actual
recording by Marcus, Winner, and the Cleanliness and Godliness
Skiffle Band, a real group from Berkeley. LPs were made and it
actually got on the Billboard charts!

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Masked_Marauders>