Rant #2,020: On the Cover of the Rolling Stone

Good morning (or good afternoon or good evening, depending on when you are reading this).

Today is Thursday, November 9, 2017.

It is the 313th day of the year (in leap years, which 2017 is not one, it is the 314th day of the year).

It is the day before my wife's birthday, but to most of us, the day has other significance.

Let's look back 50 years to see what was happening on this day in the hallowed year of 1967.

We were still looking to put a man on the moon back then, and today, 50 years ago, NASA sent up one of the precursor spacecrafts to meet that goal, the unmanned Apollo IV, which was actually set into space sitting atop the first Saturn V rocket.

If only we had that sense of wonder in the intervening years and today, we would probably have been to at least Mars and back by now, but our attention--and money--turned to other affairs since the early 1970s.

Also, November 9 back in 1967 marked the day that the first issue of Rolling Stone magazine was published.

Say what you want to about Rolling Stone--and I certainly have--but back then, it represented a first--it was probably the first mass published magazine that looked at the burgeoning rock and roll scene, and its music, with some seriousness.

Before Rolling Stone, publications looked at rock and roll as nothing but a curiosity, a type of music by and for the young, and something to roll your eyes about.

Even those publications that were literally created to cover this scene--like Tiger Beat and magazines of that ilk--looked at rock and roll and its personalities like one looks at the animals in a zoo--soft and cuddly, and ready to take home--and these publications were generally geared to the young, pre-adolescent females in the rock and roll audience.

Up to the plate came Rolling Stone, which looked at rock and roll as something more than a teen fad, and more like the societal changer it was becoming.

It looked with reverence and seriousness at the music and the personalities it felt were energizing that scene, and it looked down at the other vestiges of rock and roll, in particular the corporate infiltration of that scene.

Rolling Stone loved the Beatles--its first cover featured John Lennon--but it hated any iteration of the Beatles that had any corporate ties, such as the Monkees.

It was the anti-Tiger Beat, so to speak, because it disdained the teen idol nature of rock and roll, preferring to look at this scene with a much more critical eye than the teenybopper magazines used.

And it was successful, so successful that magazines that kind of treaded the line between the teen idol magazines and the more critical eye used by Rolling Stone came into being, such as Creem, but back then, Rolling Stone was it.

Some will argue--including myself--that Rolling Stone died in 1974, when it published a nude centerfold of then red hot teen idol David Cassidy.

Others will argue that it died because it basically ate itself, so to speak, by becoming as corporate a magazine as it once disdained.

Still others will argue that its publisher, Jann Wenner, destroyed the magazine with his own well reported excesses and magazine missteps, including faulty reporting.

But whatever the case, Rolling Stone has stood the test of time, even though right at the current time, its identity is more entertainment and show business magazine than rock and roll magazine, although it still maintains that original ethic.

Whatever Rolling Stone is today, it celebrates its actual 50th anniversary today, so you have to give it kudos for that.

Yes, 1967 was a time of wonder, and these two historical occurrences that I wrote about here show how our collective, societal head was certainly in the clouds back then, but in a good way.