Last week, I picked up Rolling Stone: Cover to Cover, a set that includes a book on the history of the magazine and a digital archive that includes every issue from 1967-2007. When it arrived I installed the viewer on my computer and within a few minutes was knee deep in an issue from the 70’s.
I haven’t read Rolling Stone for many, many years now except for the random article or interview that I pick up online. It’s just a little too slick and polished now, at least in my perception. But looking back at these old issues brought back what I saw in the magazine as a young man. The issue I was viewing was from 1971 and has the frantic, ink splattered drawings of Ralph Steadman illustrating a serialization of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a book that I used to read every year or so with great glee. If you’ve read the book, you know how perfectly the drawings mesh with the story.
Leafing through on the computer screen, I could almost feel the rough newsprint of the paper.
Inside, it came back immediately. The ads for Marantz tuners and Ovation guitars. The classifieds at the end of the magazine with multiple ads for rolling papers of all sorts. Ads hailing new albums from bands long gone and sometimes barely remembered. An ad offering any 2 Rolling Stone albums free with a subscription to the magazine. It was like dropping back into a time, as from a time machine of sorts.
Dr. Hook Finally on the Cover of the Rolling Stone
But the thing that struck me most was the amount of print on the pages. It was jammed with page after page of print. Oh, there were ads and pictures. But it was primarily the written word. I had forgotten how long their articles were then, how the interviews sometimes went on for 12 or more pages and were truly in depth. It was wonderful to see all those words and sentences and paragraphs.
It made me wish I still had an attention span.
Perhaps in the dead of this winter, when the snow is piled up and I feel like idling away a few hours, I will be able to muster up a remnant of my existing attention span and read more of those pages. But for now, I just jump in here and there when I have a minute and browse, taking in the artifacts of our culture and my youth.
And hum along to Dr. Hook’s refrain that’s playing in my head—-Gonna get my picture on the cover, gonna buy five copies for my mother…
Redtree Times 