BY DEN FONG-TORHES
CONTENTS
Foreword bij Cameron Crowe 5
Introduction 7
Acknowledgments 15
EuergbodiJ Is a Star: Trauels with S1iJ Stone 17
Heil, Janis Is Feeling Great 30
The Jackson 5: The Men Don't know, But the little Girls Understand 33
Jim Morrison's Got the Blues 44
Jefferson Airplane Grunts: 'Gotta Euolution' 49
Ike 9 Tina: The World's Greatest Heartbreaker 57
maruin Gaije: Honor Thq Brother-in-Law 73
Three Dog Might: See How Theq Run 90
The Resurrection of Santana 100
The Rolling Stone Interuiew: Rag Charles 118
The Rolling Stones in Paradise 131
The Formerlq Little Steuie Wonder 139
Dick Clark: Twentq Years of Clearasil Rock 149
linockin' on Dijlan's Door 158
The Ego Meets the Doue: The Reunion of Crosbq, Stills, Rash E Young 1 72
Elton John: The Four-Eijed Bitch is Back 185
George Harrison: Lumbering in the Material World 197
Linda Ronstadt: Heartbreak on Wheels 209
Bonnie Raitt: Daughter of the Blues 221
Yesterdaij, Todaij, and Paul 2 3 3
The Importance of Being Neil Diamond 244
The Life and Lurues of Diane Keaton 256
What Is This Thing Called Hunter S. Thompson? 269
Fifteen Years Dead 2172
Rodnetj Dangerfield: He Whines That We MaU Laugh 280
Steue Martin Sings: The Rolling Stone Interuiew 289
Rnnie Leibouitz: The Photographer Its an Rctiuist 299
Rick Nelson: R Trauelin' man at His Own Pace 302
Eddie murphg: Who Does He Think He Is? 306
Tom Hanks Plaijs It Cool 3 1 3
Rickie Lee Jones: Sau Goodbije to That Slinkq Black Dress 319
James Brown: The Godfather's Back, with a Bullet! 324
Iggq, We Hardy Knew Ye 3 31
Joni Mitchell Rocks Again 3 3
Epilogue: MU Back Pages 3 3 9
Index 343
Biographg 3 5 1
Credits 152
FOREWORD
BY CAMERON CROWE
March 16, 1999
Dear Ben,
I'm writing to tell you that I will be late with the introduction to your book. Being a brilliant writer, reporter, and editor, you're familiar with all the usual excuses. In fact, you're an expert. "I'm not feeling well." "I don't have my lead yet." "1 need more interview material." "My tape recorder malfunctioned, and I have to reconstruct everything from memory." In all your stellar years as music editor at Rolling Stone, besides being one of their most treasured writers, you heard 'em all. Let's face it. It is impossible to bullshit you, so I'll just say it straight out. There is too much honor and responsibility in this. I can't just whip a few paragraphs off. l mean, this is no simple writing assignment, Ben. After all, it's you-my first real editor.
Do you remember when we first met? As a die-hard rock fan living in San Diego, I smuggled Rolling Stone into my house. My mother, a teacher, was a progressive thinker in so many ways... except one. Rock and roll was not welcome in our home. It was, she said, a waste of brain cells. My first chosen profession, based on loving the movie To Kill a Mockingbird, was to be a lawyer. I wanted to beAtticus Finch, a proud and noble crusader, a pillar of the community. Oh, did this make my family happy. Then rock and roll slipped into my world, courtesy of a rockin' sister who had returned from a visit to San Francisco with a copy of Big Brother and the Holding Company's Cheap Thrills. I started buying records on the sly. I read your articles in Rolling Stone, not even realizing you were responsible for assigning and shaping all the other music profiles too. I wanted to interview Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. I wanted to be you. I began writing about music for my high school paper, and a local underground publication called The Door.
It was dark at that concert in Los Angeles. The Rolling Stones, The Forum, the 1973 concert for Nicaraguan relief. You and Annie Leibovitz were on tour with the band for that great cover story, the one with Mick in the Hawaiian shirt. (Hope it's included in this collection) We were introduced by Bobbi Cowan, rock publicist extraordinaire, and one of the many with whom you had a pleasantly adversarial relationship. The Rolling Stones were about to go onstage, and the lights had dimmed. You didn't see that I was 15 years old. Because of your name, like many others, I had built up an exotic and Salingeresque persona in my mind. But then, there you were. Affable, yet utterly professional. We spoke briefly; l told you I was a freelance writer from San Diego. You asked if I had any interviews in the can, anything I wanted to send you. I suggested the group Poco. You said to send you 750 words, and you also told me to send along some of my tearsheets. I didn't know what "tearsheets" meant, but I nodded. I knew it had to be good, and we shook hands again. The Rolling Stones were now taking the stage. Mick Jagger ripped into "Oh Carol," but all I was thinking was I just got an assignment for Rolling Stone from Ben Fong-Torres.
I sent you the story on Poco, and a few days later followed up with a phone call. "It's Cameron Crowe from San Diego."
"Crazy," you said.
"Was the story okay?"
You shuffled through some papers. "It's fine." It was that simple. My first story for Rolling Stone. Though I'd written a piece or two for Lester Bangs at Creem magazine, this is when my career as a professional writer began to take off. More assignments followed, including a longer feature on the group Yes. It was during this phase that you called my home, and my sister answered. You spoke with her for a few minutes. You asked her how old I was, and she was only too willing to reveal the precious information I did not want to share with you. "Oh, he's 16 years old," she told you. You printed it in the magazine. It was embarrassing to be a journalistic novelty.... What the hell, it's twenty-six years later, I can tell the truth: I loved it. I still run into people who remember the magazine in those early days, such was the personal connection between your readers and the pieces you wrote and edited. They still remember me as the kid writer who was 16. It's your fault, Ben. It's all your fault. My mother, who still can't believe she allowed me to tour with the Allman Brothers Band and Led Zeppelin and David Bowieall assignments you gave me-is still in mourning that I never went to law school. It's your fault, and rarely has a month gone by that I didn't privately thank you for it. But how can I put that in an introduction to your collected book of writings?
A long time ago, staying at your home in San Francisco, struggling with my first full-length feature, you gave me a piece of advice: Be informative, but also be personal. Write as if you were writing a letter to a friend. And so I have. Thank you, Ben.
Love,
Cameron from San Diego
Cameron Crowe spent many years as a Rolling Stone staff writer, and is now a screenwriter and director whose credits include Jerry Maguire and Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
t was November 1967 when my two college roommates-buddies who worked on the edges of the rock scene, doing audio, video, and lighting work-came across the first issue of Rolling Stone. It was a bracing find, a new high, and it jumped around from one set of hands to another in our flat in San Francisco.
For one thing, it came from San Francisco. But with its correspondents in London, New York, and Los Angeles, it was clearly out to be a national publication. It didn't appear to be either a newspaper or a magazine, but a hybrid. It was printed on newsprint, in black and white, with a single splash of color on the Rolling Stone logo. It didn't even open like a magazine. It was
quarter-folded (a term I'd learn from reading, later, about the publication)-that is, folded twice. The first issues didn't have covers, but a newspaper-styled front page with several stories.
Those stories were about rock and roll, written in a style that was knowing, critical, goodhumored, and hip-neither fawning, like teen and fan magazines, nor crude and condescending, like so much of the mainstream press (when it deigned to cover rock and roll).
And, careful to avoid being lumped in with the underground papers of the day, the magazine eschewed psychedelic lettering, emulating instead the classic typefaces and layouts of The New York Times, the London Sunday Times, and Ramparts, a magazine where Rolling Stone's founding editor, Jann Wenner, had worked briefly. Wenner, who'd also written for the campus paper at U.C. Berkeley, set professional copyediting and proofreading standards from the first.
But he also took care not to take either rock and roll or his own creation too seriously. (Rolling Stone's first premium for new subscribers was a roach clip, its wood handle customlathed by the art director.)
I had covered the emerging rock scene for the Daily Gater, the campus paper at San Francisco State, where I was a reporter, a columnist, and, finally, the editor. In the mid-sixties, our campus pulsed with music. Our annual folk festivals, long infused with gospel, country, and blues, were beginning to rock. Musicians like Dan Hicks (later of the Hot Licks) were registered students. And then there were the visitors. One day, it might be Big Brother and the Holding Company, with their new lead singer from Texas, setting up a public address system in the art gallery and running through a few tunes. Another day, Grace Slick and her first band, Great Society, would play a lunchtime concert in front of the men's gym.
My roommates thought I was a natural candidate to write for Rolling Stone. Especially since, in early 1968, I was unhappily ensconced in a job writing bits and pieces for a local television station. One of my roommates, Abe, was road manager for several pop acts, including Peter, Paul & Mary and Jimi Hendrix, and one day in February, he told me about a free concert in a nearby park. Some friends of his in the Siegal-Schwall Blues Band were playing, he said, and the show was to promote a movie Dick Clark was making about the Haight-Ashbury.
Dick Clark and hippies? "Rolling Stone! " I thought. I phoned the office, offered the news tip-amazingly, no one there had heard about the concert-and got the assignment.
I saw Rolling Stone's offices for the first time when I delivered my report. They were in a part of town unknown to most San Franciscans. It was sometimes referred to as "South of Market," a region of warehouses, wholesale outlets, and heavy industry. Rolling Stone's publisher, Jann Wenner, had scored free rent in a loft above a printing plant. But as I entered through the lobby and walked along the back wall and up the wooden steps to the loft, ink and gigantic rolls of paper weren't the prevailing smell in the air.
The magazine was just across the alley from a slaughterhouse. That would explain the increasing popularity of incense around the offices.
Rolling Stone had a bare-bones staff: Jann, one other editor, an art director, and a secretary. I handed in my report, looked around a moment, and left.
My story appeared in March, in the issue dated April 6, 1968. Actually, it wasn't even a story. It was just a few paragraphs and ran in a column called "Flashes." I got five dollars and no byline. I had no complaints.
A week later, KMPX, an FM radio station that had been taken over by a band of creative hipsters in the spring of 1967, struck. It was the first "hippie strike," as the papers put it. Rolling Stone, of course, had to cover it. I called to volunteer to help on the story, making sure to say that I'd worked on FM radio in town. They teamed me up with a staff writer, but after our first story he left Rolling Stone. As the strike dragged over several months, it became my beat.
In my room, amidst clipboards and albums, in 1972.
Covering a long and emotional labor strike called by hippie radio revolutionaries was exhilarating, but the $10 and $20 checks I received were not.
So I joined the telephone company, where I wrote for the employee magazine. In my spare time, I was a rock reporter. After helping out on the KMPX story, I wrote short pieces on Gordon Lightfoot and record producer Erik Jacobsen, then got my first assignment for a full-length artist profile: of songwriter Dino Valente, the composer of the hippie anthem "Get Together."
Although I learned some valuable lessons at the phone company (mainly, that I didn't want to stay there for long), it was Rolling Stone that gave me a continuing education in journalism.
Even though his magazine was less than a year old, it was clear that Jann knew what he wanted. Even in that rent-free loft, with its view of The San Francisco Screw Company across the street, Jann managed to impart a sense of style, of Victorian chic-hip, but clean and orderly. Similarly, he knew how he wanted Rolling Stone stories to be done.
After assigning me the profile of Dino Valente, Jann called me into his office.
"Don't just ask him questions," he said, the certainty in his voice belying his twenty-one years. He turned to his antique oak desk and grabbed a couple of magazines. They were issues of the New Yorker. "Lookit these," he said, handing them over. "This is the kind of detail, description, and reporting I want in our profiles."
I went home, just managed to get through one of the magazine's lengthier articles, and ventured out to Valente's houseboat in Sausalito. I took in his scene-freshly showered, he sat shirtless over a cup of tea and a slice of pie served by three-three!-beautiful chicks-and wrote it up.
Before I got my first byline for a feature story, however, my name had to weather a challenge from Jann. When he first saw it on a KMPX story, he went to John Burks, his savvy new managing editor.
"So what is it with his name?" he asked. "Is it like a pen name? If it's not real, let's have him pick one or the other. No one will believe this is a real name."
"No," said John. "It's the real deal." John knew me from SF State and had heard the story behind my name. My father, named Fong, had bought the name Torres in the twenties, when Chinese weren't being allowed into the U.S.; that way he could slip through as a Filipino. "Besides," said John, "it's the greatest byline in the world. People are gonna be saying, 'Where's this guy coming from?' and be lured into it! "
Jann relented, and my first feature ran over two glorious pages in the issue dated February 1, 1969.
Thanks to a liberal boss at Pacific Telephone, I was able to take the occasional day offto fly to Reno to write about Creedence Clearwater Revival, or to go interview a young singer and songwriter, Joni Mitchell, at her home in Laurel Canyon. I visited with her, met her boyfriend, a charming Englishman named Graham Nash, and admired a painting of hers, propped on a grand piano, that would become the cover art for her second album.
The story appeared alongside a profile of Judy Collins in an issue that, to my surprise, had Mitchell on the cover. It was my first Rolling Stone cover, but it was a momentary high. Someone had left my byline off of the article.
Rolling Stone was still paying between $10 and $40 for stories, and I was content to straddle the corporate and the rock worlds until early April, when, on the stub of a $30 check for a Jethro Tull profile, Jann Wenner scribbled an unsigned "Call me soon."
I didn't even notice the message for a week or so, and when I called, it was a slightly miffed Jann who suggested we have lunch. We met at an outdoor seafood cafe near Rolling Stone.
After asking a few questions about my background, he offered me a job. He was as loose as the phone company had been rigid. "Just come in and, you know, do what you think needs to be done," he said. To me, it was a dream job. Rock and roll-and no more suits. I leaned back, squinted at the sun, and, trying to sound casual, asked about the salary. After all, I was just about to be raised to $730 a month at Pacific Telephone. But Jann knew what he had going, and he could read the interest in my face. He offered me $135 a week, and without bothering with the math, I accepted. It was May 1969.
Rollin
g Stone operated with only a couple of editors and an art director. They were by no means stereotypical hippies. The art director, Bob Kingsbury, was a bearded, older man-well over 30-who was a sculptor, and who'd never done any graphics design work until he was recruited by his brother-in-law, Jann Wenner. John Burks was a tall, bespectacled man with a Beatle haircut and a jazz jones, who left a job at Newsweek to sign up with this music paper. And proofreader Charles Perry, roommate of LSD legend Augustus Stanley Owsley, was semibald and wore, as a uniform, mustard-colored shirts and flowery ties. A lover of wine and dead languages, he'd never worked at a magazine before.
The informality of the office setup recalled my college paper. Only here, this small group of people were professionals, taking the best of journalistic traditions and rules, yet creating their own unique publication.
I took on the title of news editor, which made the first few pages of each issue my responsibility. I soon learned two things: first, the news was whatever interested us, whether it came over the phone, by mail, or through an experience the night before at a club, concert, or friend's house. Outside of our network, we relied on the British pop press, from which we liberally pilfered for the "Flashes" column.
Second, I discovered that titles were meaningless. Whatever we called ourselves, we did a multitude of jobs. We all wrote; we all edited; we all made assignments; we all pitched in with captions, headlines, and story ideas. We all worked around the clock, except for the accountant, who popped in once every couple of weeks to remind us that Rolling Stone was also a business. To the capitalistically impaired on the staff, those reminders-advertising rate cards, subscription ads, and advertisements about Rolling Stone in other publications-were always a surprise.
Sometimes, those efforts at increasing readership contained pleasant surprises.
Goofing with Artie Garfunkel at KSAN.
In the mid-seventies, Jann commissioned readership surveys to determine what readers liked. In the 1976 survey, in the category "Favorite Rolling Stone Writers," I topped a list of two dozen regular bylines. Sixty-one percent of respondents named me as someone "you'd like to see more from." Others in the Top Ten, in order, were Hunter S. Thompson (54%), David Felton (51 %), Tim Cahill (44%), Tom Wolfe (42%), Cameron Crowe (40%), Chet Flippo (33%), Dave Marsh (31 %), Timothy Crouse (24%), and, in a three-way tie with 21 % each, Joe Klein, Ellen Willis, and Wenner himself. Jann scribbled several notes on the page, noting that Felton had a cover story in the current issue, asking whether Joe Eszterhas and occasional contributor Michael McClure had been listed, and drawing two exclamation points by Tom Wolfe's name. Wolfe, after all, popped up only on very special occasions.
Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll Page 1