Re-Rolling The Stone

Back at Glastonbury Festival in 1988 I came across a little stall that was exclusively selling vintage copies of Rolling Stone magazine. Many of them covered the 1969-75 era when the publication was arguably at its best, and so I bought a stash of these issues and read them with satisfaction.

Rolling Stone came out of San Francisco when the city was trying to envisage a counter culture - a fresh way of dealing with music, politics, materialism, writing and lifestyle. You could sense some of that adventure in the yellowing newsprint, people who believed in the giddy promise of the Aquarian age.

Alternately, some of the writers were in a lather about Vietnam, Watergate and phoney music, but that was an important part of the brief also. I came to appreciate that Rolling Stone had given a platform to wonderful writers like Hunter S Thompson, Tom Wolfe and later, PJ O' Rourke.

A few years later and I encountered a book, The Rolling Stone Story by Robert Draper. It was a much less flattering account of the publication and its founder Jann Wenner. I wasn't totally surprised to learn that egotism and social advancement were also part of the agenda and that the publication had lost a big deal of its rebellion in the bid to chase advertisers with large budgets or celebrities with aggressive PR handlers.



That's why I was so delighted to read the Michael Hastings profile on General McChrystal and to learn that it caused trouble at the very top of the US establishment. 'The Runaway General' is vintage RS stuff: a writer with access to revealing scenes and who's bold enough to tell it that way. Hastings had his lucky moments, notably when the volcanic ash kept him in Europe and at liberty to follow the story even deeper. He listened well, told it with clarity and caused the President to remove McChrystal from his position.

Old-fangled journalism. Revolutionary, eh?