CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Like a Rolling Stone?

Photograph Source: FontShop from USA – CC BY 2.0

Many US residents around my age, especially men, have a story regarding the first time they read Rolling Stone magazine. Mine goes something like this. The first time I read the magazine from cover-to-cover was its issue devoted to the Woodstock festival that was published in the fall of 1969. Rolling Stone was hard to find in the redneck suburban town I lived in at the time; only underground newspapers from DC were rarer. It was only through some new friends at the Catholic high school I was a freshman at that year that I was able to get a copy of the paper; friends who lived in suburbs that bordered Washington DC where the record stores and head shops were more plentiful. I became a committed reader a few months later, when my family moved to Frankfurt, Germany as a result of my military father’s deployment there. The base library subscribed to the magazine and it was one of the most popular journals on its shelves. I eventually made friends with a GI who worked the circulation desk and he would hold the latest issue for me every other week. The mail delivered it to the library on Thursday and I made it a point to go there as soon as my classes ended on those days. Over time, he and I would discuss the stories in the latest issue. In fact, it was that library clerk who insisted I start my reading in Fall of 1970 with an article titled “The Battle of Aspen” and written by a journalist who would take the magazine well beyond the alternative music weekly it was at the time. That journalist was named Hunter S. Thompson and his work for Rolling Stone magazine remains some of the best writing to ever appear in a US magazine even today; cynical, idealistic, comic, feral and truthful beyond the facts. Indeed, his article,........

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