Many moons ago, I worked at the New Musical Express magazine, which transformed me from virgin schoolgirl to the fabulous creature I’ve been for the past four decades. It’s hard to describe how influential the NME was at its 1970s peak. I’ve met people who waited in exquisite teenage agonies for two-week-old copies to arrive in the Antipodes, while my colleagues were regularly flown to the USA and supplied with groupies and cocaine as if they themselves were rock stars.
And then punk came along and rocked the gravy boat — and the internet finished the job. Last time I saw a copy, it was lying wanly in a bin marked FREE — PLEASE TAKE ONE.
What happened to Rolling Stone magazine is, in the American way, a far more epic tale than the descent of my alma mater—though it certainly isn’t given away, and indeed has seen a rise in circulation in recent times. But it has fallen further from the giddy heights it enjoyed when the editor, Jann Wenner, was a confidant of Bob Dylan, the Beatles and — yes! — the Rolling Stones. It was started as a music comic for addled hippies, with a modest loan from Jann’s parents and in-laws in 1967. (The rags-to-riches thing really does lose oodles of glamour when you find out that it was the Bank of Mom and Pop that got an empire-builder started — even more so an outlaw bankrolled by in-laws.)
But Rolling Stone soon became a serious political magazine for consipracy theorists, as personified by its chief ‘reporter’, Hunter S.Thompson. Now it’s up for sale, and I’d hazard a guess that this is in part because it has served its purpose, and the people Wenner used to cuddle up with are dead, doolally or doddering their way to a quiet grave.
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