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Spanish.— On November 9, 1967, the first edition of Rolling Stone went on sale. Not in the traditional magazine format for which it would later be known, but as a newspaper that circulated every two weeks.
November 9 was a memorable date, not only because a new publication was born; the first to deal with rock n’ roll and counterculture in a serious way, with a journalistic approach, but it was also right in the middle of the hippie movement and when the last breaths of LSD and Pot of the Summer of Love would be breathed.
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If there are moments that define and encapsulate an era, both the birth of Rolling Stone (on this day) and hippie counterculture qualify at the highest level. That first edition of RS, founded by the young-College Dropout- Jann Wenner and the not-so-young critic and jazz enthusiast Ralph J. Gleason had the key elements that would make Rolling Stone its trademark (and although everyone knows that the name of the publication has nothing to do with the band led by Mick Jagger but with songs by Bob Dylan and Muddy Waters); John Lennon on the cover and an investigation into the Monterey Pop Festival (the first major rock festival in the United States), but not from the angle of a music fan who could easily get carried away by the performances of The Mamas & the Papas, The Who, Hendrix, Grateful Dead or the magnetic and immortal voice of Grace Slick (Jefferson Airplane) and her almost-alien-subliminal presence on stage… No, the Rolling Stone report focused on answering the question of What had happened to the money generated by the festival, since the numbers did not seem to match reality.
That was a statement: we are here to do serious things and its slogan “All the news that fits” continues to echo in the memories of millions of readers around the world.
Although it started as a trench, a home to reflect the counterculture, soon, in the seventies, it would become – thanks to an unconventional writer – a powerful voice of liberal politics. There were many writers, journalists and other authors who passed through the editorial staff of Rolling Stone, but few – really none – compare to the master of Gonzo journalism: Hunter S. Thompson. Hunter had been fascinated by the way Rolling Stone reported the tragedy of the Altamont Festival, which ultimately sealed the beautiful hippie dream with violence and death to confront it with the terrible reality of a society that loves self-destruction. Hunter obviously wanted to be part of Rolling Stone and it was enough to send Jann Wenner the beginning of a story he was writing, initially for Sports Illustrated magazine, to begin a legendary relationship between Thompson, Wenner and Rolling Stone: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” and this was the beginning of a wild trip that touched the heart of the battered American Dream and would become the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Rolling Stone lived up to its slogan: it covered everything; all the music, all the artists… the importance of music, when music changed the world… the great interviews that revealed the humanity behind fame. Lennon telling his version of the dissolution of the Beatles, Elton John coming out of the closet; even Charles Manson opening his horrible and cynical psychopathic mind… And so the years passed, like a Rolling Stone, the decades… In the 80s, another giant of letters, Tom Wolfe, published in the magazine (as serialized) the drama of a man named Sherman McCoy and his fall from being a Wall Street Master of the Universe to burning at the Bonfire of the Vanities.
But times change, eras close their cycle… they end. And although to a large extent we humans comply with Nietzsche’s eternal return (reliving our mistakes over and over again)… culture, music, politics… everything was changing, in the same way that Rolling Stone tried to do it, adapting to each new cycle… until one bad day, it stopped being that counterculture publication and the inevitable happened: it was absorbed by the system that it fought so hard against.
So on a day like today, the anniversary of the birth of Rolling Stone magazine, I am sure, just as Hunter Thompson was at the time, that if you look hard enough at the diffuse horizon of our days… there it will be, unstoppable, the sublime wave with its crest rising until it can no longer hold up… and collapses, bathing us with the saltpeter of our own memories.
