Rolling Stone 20th Anniversary Issue

I was cleaning up my office today and found The Twentieth Anniversary issue of Rolling Stone (I thought it was just yesterday I bought it) dated Nov 5th, 1987. The interviews will be the research material for this post. The author takes no responsibility for any fault found in the philosophy. The author takes full credit for any interesting, amusing, shockingly disgusting, or otherwise just fucking outrageous synicism associated with this blog.

Believe it or not, the pages are brittle, as if it was an antique book. There is no musty smell but the familiar brown tint has spread like a cancer, and even the shiny necklace around the close up of the hairs on "the Boss's" chest seems like it might have been cast from metals mined near the Parthenon or the Sphinx. The two "X's" (signifying 20th) which make the logo of the magazine and also the masthead for each of the 33 interviews (Bono to Sting, Pete Townshend to Brian Wilson, McCartney to Jesse Jackson, Lou Reed, Dylan, Edward Kennedy and Walter Kronkite) seem to be a stamp of counter culture meets Madison Avenue, where the later is trying to be the former and the former has fallen in to the lap of the later with abandon and great ease.

There's a Revlon ad featuring the undeniable beauty and voluptuous cleavage of Liza Minnelli, post whatever trainwreck hit her just before her last public appearance and a Smith Corona Typewriter advertisement with not a whiff of suspicion that they were advertising a dinosaur, which even though not yet extinct, would be long before the future sister-publication (Rolling Stone XLII, due out in a few weeks no doubt) hit the Amazon cyber stand.

Jessie Jackson says that everywhere he goes he finds the big troubles of wide use of drugs, babies making babies, violence and suicide. Searching through the rest of the interview, I spot the question, "Are you optimistic about the country's future?"

"We will survive," he predicts. He even suggests we'll survive getting locked out of the White House (he is speaking about race here). "You get your stars from your scars," he explains in the last line of the interview. Go Barrack!

Ralph Nader pointed out that when he was at Harvard, and you worried about issues of right and wrong, justice and injustice, you were considered soft intellectually. Hard intellect was analyzing securities regulations (hasn't that been proven to be an oxymoron now?), tax rulings, et cetera. Of course he then went on to become...well Ralph Nader. Do you think we'll pull his predictions out of the dust bin now? Na.

Jane Fonda & Tom Hayden. Skip. Some astounding images by Annie Leibovitz including Brian Wilson, draped in a shimmering blue habit, holding a surf board on some nameless beach. I wonder if lots were cast for that robe yet? Springsteen with dingo boots near his ass, bent kneed, head thrown back, at an altitude which only pole vaulters ascend to without the benefit of electrical rocker infusions and screaming fans.

John Fogerty said It's easy to be cynical, though, when you turn on your TV and you hear "Revolution" being used to advertise running shoes. (How many people know that Lennon really wrote, You can count me IN!?)

Bono with a big hair and no glasses, Joan Baez looks like she should be the publisher for Vogue, with her starched collar, sytlish short hair showing traces of gray. "Maybe there aren't as many clear choices now as there were back then," she says referring to a time of Make Love Not War. The quote of hers they put in the art directed box in the center of the page was: If your goal is serious social change, it is going to be measured at some point by the risks that people are willing to take for it."

Brian Wilson's interview was all about what made his music tic. "The Beatles beat us, in a way," he said. "Their songs were more original." More images. Madonna, just sexxy, no Sefer Yetzirah or signs of Buddha. Just thumb to lip with a lit cigarette, wearing a 1940's brassier and a sideways glance which said, "I know you want me, who doesn't." Sting, chisseled and fresh, like a college quarterback, just out of the shower and Sean Penn, pissed. Cyndi Lauper, fit to be tied, a collage of chains and glitter, layers and brown lipstick and Boy George immitating Cyndi Lauper, except with more make-up.

Daniel Ellsberg tells us in the subtitle of his interview that "A pattern of government deception has been part of our national life for twenty-five years." All I would add is tack on 25 years since he said it originally and then about 5,000 more prior to his birth. When will we learn to admit male domination and spirituality exempt of the Divine Feminine?

Little did he know about "W" when he said "To their credit and good judgement, the American people do not want to be aggressors. They do not want to be terrorists." As we kick through the debris of the world chaos we've created, it would be hard to find his sentiment written in another language, concerning an American population which has come to be defined by the years between 2001 and 2008.

"Every person who took acid has his or her own story to tell," reminds Timothy Leary. "You simply cannot understand psychedelic drugs, which activate the brain, unless you understand something about computers." As I search for the next punch line, I ask the computer to match up key words and cross check them with our present dilemna, in order to predict the smartest next move. Then I hear Hal say, "Sorry Dave, I can't do that." (Er, I mean Dubby).

Hunter Thompson predicts that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours and Jack Nicholson says he still gets high and still likes to have a good time with the women, even though he says that's not where it's at today...darn. Bridging the gap between Leary (acid), and Nicholson (reckless behavior), we read about how Michael Douglas brought Ken Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest to the big screen..."It was magical. It was pure. Because we did it outside of the system, and we didn't know what we were doing, and there was an innocence on the part of all of us." Since then he's either produced or been in all of these:


2007 - King of California
2006 - The Sentinel
2006 - You, Me & Dupree
2003 - The In-Laws
2001 - One Night at McCool's
2001 - Don't Say a Word
2000 - Wonder Boys
2000 - Traffic
1999 - One Day in September
1998 - A Perfect Murder
1997 - The Game
1996 - The Ghost and the Darkness
1995 - The American President
1994 - Disclosure
1992 - Basic Instinct
1992 - Falling Down
1992 - Shining Through
1989 - Black Rain
1989 - The War of the Roses
1987 - Wall Street
1987 - Fatal Attraction
1985 - The Jewel of the Nile
1985 - A Chorus Line
1984 - Romancing the Stone
1983 - The Star Chamber
1978 - The China Syndrome
1978 - Coma
2006 - The Sentinel
1997 - The Rainmaker
1993 - Made in America
1990 - Flatliners
1985 - The Jewel of the Nile
1984 - Romancing the Stone
1978 - The China Syndrome

Profitable? Oh yeah. Magic? Not so much.

Wow, here's a line, by William Burroughs: "The biggest danger now is a fascist takeover under this pretense of the war against drugs." Remove drugs and insert Terror. Bingo. God, I hope that is behind us!

Here's Tina Turner on Jagger's saddle and Bono with big hair, saying, "Perhaps the Sixties was the product of a generation of spoiled children who could afford to drop acid and set off for Peru." Hang on, I've got to take a call from my friend in Iquitos who is planning the 5th annual Amazonian Shamanism Conference...

Don Henley is prognosticating...a very radical way of thinking..."Believe me, America is not back on track. People are still homeless, people are still out of work, the farmers are going out of business, and we're experiencing the biggest deficit in history." Uh-excuse me, we have a few more zeroes to show you Don...

And Lou Reed seems to be at the same table when he blares out, "Think of what's going on in the world today. If this was the Sixties, the college kids would be in the streets tearing the buildings down." All I can say is "and the colored girls go doo do doo, do doo, doo do doo..."

Sting predicted that "The power of rock & roll is gone. There's nothing rebellious about it at all." When asked by the interviewer if he consciously decided to use the system, he shamelessly admitted, "I used it to the hilt." Chaching.

They saved a frowning eyebrow and mussed hair clad Dylan for the last interview. Asked if Life gets complex as the years go by (duh), Dylan seemed thoughtful. "Yeah. You get older; you start having to get more family oriented. You start having hopes for other people rather than for yourself."

Toward the end of the interview, Kurt Loder asks Dylan, "Do you think there's any point today in people getting together--the way they did in the Sixties--to try to change things?" He answers with some hopeful thoughts but goes on to say "...but there's so much evil. It spreads wider and wider, and it causes more and more confusion. In every area. It takes your breath away."

"Like living your life just to make money?," asks Loder. "Yeah," answers Dylan, who already seemed, even then, way less Freewheelin, "But it isn't really accepted. Maybe in America it is, but that's why America's gonna go down, you know? It's just gonna go down. It just can't exist. You can't just keep rippin thing off. Like, there's just a law that says you cannot keep ripppin things off."

And many people laughed when they read that.