Rolling Stone's art department published the funniest and most vicious newsletter in the world.
Hunter and I flipped spots from a previous survey, issued in 1974, in which he was named the favorite writer by 26 percent of some 1,500 respondents. I was named by 13 percent-half as much as Thompson, although I'd had four times as many bylines as he'd had in the twenty previous issues. Regardless of the 1976 ranking, I knew the score. Thompson was a star; I was a familiar byline. It was a long journey to familiar, however, and I'm getting ahead of myself.
After the highs, as a freelancer, with the Dino Valente article and a report on what we decided to declare the "third wave" of bands in the San Francisco rock scene (said "wave" consisting of bands ranging from Creedence Clearwater Revival and the metallic Blue Cheer to the countrified Mother Earth), I wrote mostly short, newsy pieces in my first months as an editor.
Perhaps because I'd been raised on Top 40 radio-that genre-blind format that essentially promised: If it's a hit, we'll play it-I was open to covering any and all kinds of music. From Joni Mitchell to Moby Grape; from the British band Jethro Tull to the gospel group, the Northern California State Youth Choir; from drug busts of Jimi Hendrix and the Jefferson Airplane to the death of Brian Jones-if it was rock and roll news, I was likely to be put on the story.
Those first months weren't exactly on-the-job training, since I'd written perhaps a dozen stories before getting hired. But I was still learning. Looking back, it's painfully obvious how much I still had to learn. Like many of us at Rolling Stone, I was guilty of attitudinizing, of tossing off all those lectures we'd had from our journalism profs about "objective journalism," and siding with ...well, our side. We were hipper-than-thou-and than you, too.
It was understandable; we were a downright phenomenon. Wenner had created the most unique new magazine, the most effectively targeted new publication since Hugh Hefner founded Playboy in 1955. Other, far more established, newspapers and magazines were training their spotlights on us. And, being young and full of spunk, we had fun with our notoriety and our perceived power. Before 1969 was over, several Rolling Stone staffers and conspirators had issued a hoax album, The Masked Marauders. Playing off the mini-trend of superstar jams, the album purported to be a bootleg of outtakes from a super-duper jam with Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, various Beatles, and who knows who else.
Just another birthday at the office, with (left) production nurse Cindy Erlich and associate editor Rich Wiseman.
And, so, at year's end, one of my articles was headlined: "Masked Marauders Expose Themselves." Yes, it was self-referential of us, but, hey-we'd become news.
Let me just clarify, here at square one, that I was not a rock critic. I was trained, at San Francisco State, to be a reporter and editor, and that's what I did at Rolling Stone. Of more than four hundred articles over twelve years, there were so few reviews that I remember them all: A Jackson 5 concert, a wild night with Van Morrison, and a Dylan album. In short, I did not crit. What I did was meet pop, rock, and R&B artists, engage them in conversation, and, through quotes and observations, tell their story.
This book is the flip side to my memoirs The Rice Room: Growing Up ChineseAmerican, further subtitled: "From Number Two Son to Rock 'N' Roll."
As the subtitles indicate, that book was the story of how I was born into a rigid Chinese culture and raised in a series of family restaurants, and of how I managed to break loose-into the sixties, into Rolling Stone magazine, into free-form FM rock radio, and far, far away from the doctor or lawyer's office my parents had hoped I would occupy.
Thirty-something years ago, a Chinese-American wasn't supposed to be in print or on the air. Hard as it may be to believe, Asian-American bylines and broadcasters were few and far, far between when I was going through high school in the early sixties. I had role models, sure, but they were people like Gary Owens, who did the morning show on a local Top 40 station before hitting Hollywood, and Steve Allen, the Renaissance man as comic entertainer.
I was fortunate to have chosen San Francisco State, where racial background was not a factor at either the campus daily or at the radio station. Call me deaf, dumb, and blind, but I enjoyed a similarly smooth ride into Rolling Stone and KSAN. If I could do the job, I had the job. And on the job, meeting with musicians, managers, publicists, concert promoters, and record company executives, I never sensed any surprise on their part as they discovered that the guy from Rolling Stone was Chinese. Far more often, I would hear that, from having heard my name on the phone, they expected a Latino ("Torres") or perhaps a Scandinavian ("Von Taurus," maybe?).
Of course, to be writing about pop, rock, and R&B music was to be traveling in relatively loose, liberal, and enlightened circles. But even when those circles extended into, say, the Deep South, there were no problems. That may be, in part, because musicians on tour move in a protected bubble.
We were, oftentimes, in our own world: private aircraft or buscraft taking us directly to an auditorium, then to a hotel, then back to the performance venue, then to a party perhaps, before the return to the hotel and the road. Still, in those moments of interaction with people in the audiences or on the streets, we were, by and large, seen not as black or white, yellow, red or brown. If anything, we were seen, and treated, as part of that massive and mysterious entertainment machine.
I like to think that we were just people.
In this book, I have tried to offer more than the typical compilation of articles. With The Rice Room as a takeoff point, I wanted my collection to include what I would call "memoir-ish narrative" between the articles. I wanted to give readers more than a setting of the scene. I wanted a larger backdrop. When I got assigned a piece on so-and-so, I wanted to say, here's what was going on in my life. Here's what was happening at Rolling Stone-this out-ofnowhere newspaper in San Francisco that had become a publishing phenomenon. Here's why we wanted this story. And here's how I went after it.
We must have been told how long our articles should be. I don't recall such instructions, however, and, looking over the various pieces for this book, I was stunned to learn that I'd occasionally strayed into Tom Wolfe, Joe Eszterhas, and Hunter S. Thompson territory, logging ten thousand words on, say, Santana-and having them all published. Whatever length a story went to, it was tightly edited. However, to be able to offer as many pieces as possible, I've done some judicious paring here and there, most often for space, but sometimes to make better (retrospective) sense, to correct factual or typographical errors, and, frankly, to hide some embarrassing over-, under-, and plain bad writing.
In my time at Rolling Stone, I wrote more than thirty cover stories, and, at various other magazines since, articles on Robin Williams, Sean Connery, Eddie Murphy, Linda Ronstadt, Steve Martin, and James Brown-to name a few-served as cover stories. But I didn't select the articles for this volume based solely on the prominence of the subject or of the story. These are, by and large, my favorite pieces out of several hundreds. Most of them are big, big names. But there are some that are here because they offered opportunities to peek behind the scenes at the people who drive the machine; to look at the machine itself. Some articles are short, a quick snapshot; others were built over several days or weeks of reporting.
One thing was constant: the deadline. No matter the time afforded for a story, it was never enough. As with all of us at Rolling Stone, and as with all of us in this line of work, I was always up against the wall, shuffling through notes and notebooks, pounding away at my poor old Royal manual typewriter, fending off interruptions with a glare and a bark.
But it was all part of the rush.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Rolling Stone first, because, thanks to Rolling Stone, I've met not only Beatles and Stones, Miracles and a Wonder, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, and a couple of Pips, but also Woody Allen and Mae West. Through a media softball league, I got to chat with Joe DiMaggio. At a charity event, I met Willie Mays; at another, I got to pitch off the Oakland A's mound-the same hill Catfi
sh Hunter, Vida Blue, Dave Stewart, and the Eck threw from.
Years after leaving Rolling Stone, I was visiting with Jann Wenner in his office overlooking Central Park, when in the midst of our chat, he said something that has never left me. I'd accumulated bylines in GQ, Esquire, American Film, TV Guide, and Parade. "But," Jann reminded me, "you'll always be Rolling Stone."
It's true. I can fork over a credit card or send e-mail to a stranger on a Web site, and my name brings instant recognition and flashbacks to the little San Francisco magazine that could. Once, while looking for back issues of Rolling Stone (we lost a pile in a flood a few years back), I participated in an online auction. On two occasions, sellers refused to let me buy the issues I wanted. That is, they refused to charge me for them. While hosting a radio show in 1994, I met Maya Angelou. Describing the task of writing the Inaugural Poem for President Clinton in 1992 as "challenging," she interrupted herself. "As you know, because you have as varied a life and as highly respected a life ...I have loved your work since the early Rolling Stone days. I knew if I saw your name, I knew it would have something of substance. So you know very well that each thing is of importance. One has to be absolutely present."
I was stunned into speechlessness. Thank Buddha that Dr. Angelou could carry on our conversation.
My thanks, then, begin at the top of the Rolling Stone masthead and with Jann S. Wenner. I thank my first fellow staffers, including John Burks, Charles Perry, John Morthland, Robert Kingsbury, Jon Goodchild, and the person who held that first office together, Gretchen Horton.
As the years and issues rolled on, the staff and family grew, and I came to work with, admire, and love, among others, Ralph J. Gleason, Baron Wolman, David Felton, Annie Leibovitz, Tim Cahill, Paul Scanlon, Laurel Gonsalves, Pat Sullivan, David Hamilton, Abe Peck, Rick Wiseman, Chet Flippo, Greil Marcus, Dave Marsh, Jon Landau, Cindy Ehrlich, Joe Eszterhas, Cameron Crowe, Mikal Gilmore, Bryn Bridenthal, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Grover Lewis, Harriet Fier, Barbara Downey, Marianne Partridge, Timothy White, Mary MacDonald, Christine Doudna, Charles M. Young, Judith Sims, Amie Hill, Andrew Bailey, "Big" John Crowell, Judy Lawrence, Lila Hughes, Melinda Bergman, Patti Hafferkamp, Valerie Kosorek, Vicki Rosen, Nancy Haigh, Laurie Goodchild, Mick Stevens, and David "Banjo" Leishman.
I recall, with appreciation and affection, my editorial assistants, Nancy Kilmartin, Leslie Strauss, Faybeth Diamond, Cynthia Bowman, and Darlene Pond. Cynthia was such a dynamo that I hired her despite her inability to type. I wound up typing her letters-and doing so happily.
Many of us went from Rolling Stone to even greater heights. Sarah Lazin, who began as an editorial assistant, is now one of the best literary agents in the business. She eased me into the difficult world of books, and has been a comfort as well as a champion and friend.
I thank my postcollege roommates, Tom Gericke, Doug Leighton, and Abe Jacob, with whom I shared those first issues of Rolling Stone. At the magazine, I often fended off publicists, but many of them became friends who paved the way to good stories and good times. They included Bob Gibson, Gary Stromberg, Bobbi Cowan, Patti Faralla, Judy Paynter, Bob Levinson, Linda Gray, Paul Wasserman, Paul Bloch, Michelle Marx, Vicki Rose, and the marvelous Paula Batson.
Despite my fears, I did have a life, and a career, after Rolling Stone. For that, I thank, among others, Walter Anderson, the editor of Parade magazine, Keith Bellows, who sent me to the South of France to hang with Michael Douglas, and Claire Harrison, who led me to the San Francisco Chronicle. For fun on television and radio, I thank Bob Zagone, the first director of Evening Magazine; Charles Jennings, who took me to China and turned me into a TV writer; Thom O'Hair, Jerry Graham, Wes "Scoop" Nisker, Edward Bear, Tom and Raechel Donahue, Dusty Street, Stefan Ponek, Bonnie Simmons, Bob McClay, and so many others at KSAN; Dave Logan, the first program director of the rock and roll version of KFOG, and Claire Greene and Adlai Alexander of Fog City Radio on KQED.
For overall fun and games, I thank Bob, Candace, Celeste and Justine Barnes; Jane Brown and Steve Voss; Holly George-Warren and her husband Robert Warren; Jaan Uhelzski and her husband Matthew Kaufman, who turned my Jim Morrison interview into a CD, and Kathi Kamen Goldmark, who, through her Stranger Than Fiction CD of authors trying to be rockers, unleashed my impressions of Elvis and Dylan (in a duet!) onto an unsuspecting world. I honed those-and other-voices at the Yet Wah restaurant in San Francisco, where the audience members are the stars. Except, of course, for me. I'm just a reporter.
I thank Matt Kelsey, editorial director at Miller Freeman Books, which published my previous book, The Hits Just Keep on Coming: The History of Top 40 Radio, for his support and direction. To put thirty-something articles into my computer, I called on technology-the OmniPage Pro optical character recognition program by Caere-and on one fine human being, Katie Zarling. To make it more than words and pictures, I was fortunate to have the services, once more, of designers Dodie Shoemaker and Peter Grame. At Miller Freeman, I got additional help from editors Dorothy Cox and Carolyn Keating, along with Jan Hughes, Jay Kahn, and marketing wizard Corinna Cornejo.
I love my family. I know you're required to, but even if I wasn't, I'd love them-especially my mother (who still hopes I'll grow up to be a doctor), Sarah, Dave, Lea, Jason, Shirley, Tina, and Burton. More than anyone else, I love Dianne, who lived through most of the articles in this book, and through this most recent rush to a deadline with her usual grace, patience, and support. Her sisters Robin and Eileen, and their husbands, Chuck Ward and Richard Powers, have been equally wonderful.
And, finally, my thanks to all the artists who lit the world with their talent, and who let me into their worlds. Your work, and my memories of our time together, will not fade away.
EuerUbodff Is a Star:
TRAVELS WITH SLY STONE
was freaked. On the outside, you couldn't tell. I was always good with a straight face, and I had learned, at the San Francisco State newspaper, to comport myself like a journalist, to look and act with a cool dispassion and detachment. Buddha help us if we ever displayed emotion. But really, I was freaked. It was 1970, and I had flown to Los Angeles to interview Sly Stone. I'd been raised to be a good Chinese son, to strap on a white collar, marry a good Chinese girl, raise a nice Chinese family, and, above all, make my parents proud. But I'd left the phone company, where they were showing off gold watches after my first month there-This, son, is what you could have someday!-and joined this long-haired rock and roll rag. I wasted no time letting my hair down, and began cultivating what would become, at its peak, a wisp of a moustache. I was dating both white and Asian women, as I had since college, but now, I was seeing more than one at a time and needless to say, I was smoking dope.
Going home on occasional weekends to Oakland, and out to the family restaurant in Hayward, I told my parents nothing about my work, other than to say that I was at a music magazine. They would hear about the exact nature of this particular magazine soon enough, I figured. Although it wasn't quite as stable as, say, the phone company, Rolling Stone looked to have legs. For one thing, other publications were writing about us. "Rolling Stone Gathers Youth," the Washington Post headlined in the spring of 1969. More importantly, we began gathering readers and, subsequently, advertisers.
By early 1970, we'd hired on additional editorial staffers, and, budget willing, we were more free to travel. So my first trip for Rolling Stone-at least my first one since the visit with Joni Mitchell in Laurel Canyon in April 1969-would be to Los Angeles.
These were the days of $14 fares for flights on an extremely friendly airline, PSA, to the little airport in Burbank. While I would make that commute many times in my first years with Rolling Stone, this time, I was writing a cover story. Joni had been a cover, but I never thought of that piece as any great achievement (and in retrospect, was grateful that my byline had been left off). Soon after joining the magazine as an editor and writer, I had written the first of what would be a long-running series of reports on the Jefferson Airplane (and, later, th
e Starship). I also covered a fierce showdown between concert promoter Bill Graham and the groups of artists who provided light shows for concerts at the Fillmore, the Avalon, and other venues. The meeting; at which Graham announced that he was quitting the business (it was the first of several such announcements over the years) even drew a reporter from Time magazine. And in December 1969, I did a feature on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Those were big stories, but the Airplane story appeared in the same issue as a Rolling Stone interview with Jim Morrison; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young played second fiddle to cover boy Mick Jagger; and Bill Graham was not considered cover material. Although that article ran on page one, the cover featured Joe Cocker. But now, we'd decided to put Sly & the Family Stone on the cover. And I had asked for and drawn the assignment.
Sly had been a favorite of mine since he was a DJ on two local R&B stations. He'd gone on to become the house producer for a record label run by two kingpin Top 40 disc jockeys"Big Daddy" Tom Donahue and Bob Mitchell. (The label, Autumn, was home to the Beau Brummels, whose bass player, Ron Meagher, had been a high school classmate of mine.) Now Sly was atop the charts himself with "Everyday People," "Hot Fun in the Summertime," and "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)." Blurring the lines between black and white music,
Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll Page 2