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* "on the cover of the Rolling Stone...."

We (occasionally ourselves amid tangents in reviews or features, sometimes our readers via letters to the editor) have once in awhile given a hard time to Rolling Stone in the pages of No Depression, and there are ways in which it's well-deserved, certainly (this is, after all, a magazine that has put Britney Spears on its cover multiple times).

On the other hand, whenever I run into longtime Rolling Stone writer David Fricke at South By Southwest (as I did again this year), I feel a little bad about it. David has consistently brought both great writing and great critical judgment to the pages of RS, championing the likes of our artist of last decade (Alejandro Escovedo), pioneering alt-rock acts such as R.E.M., and old-school greats such as the Stooges. At SXSW, we talked briefly about Led Zeppelin, with whom he'd recently spent time in the midst of their reunion hoopla, and also about Robert Plant's side-project with Alison Krauss that has become a huge deal in its own right. Talking with Fricke is a good reminder that Rolling Stone does still cover some very worthwhile things musically. (And politically, too; give them credit for the recent Barack Obama cover).

More to the point, though, the one thing that's beyond debate about Rolling Stone is its place in the history of American music journalism. No national publication had covered rock 'n' roll so thoroughly before they came on the scene in 1967; and while their gradual ascendance to mainstream culture left the door open for hundreds of underground magazines in the ensuing decades, every single one of those magazines has owed a debt to RS. (Including No Depression, quite obviously -- and not just because a small handful of our regular contributors were among the original voices in Rolling Stone.)

All of which is a preface to this blog-entry's plug for Rolling Stone: Cover To Cover, an enormously valuable DVD-ROM collection that was recently released in conjunction with Bondi Digital Publishing. Prices on this set vary considerably depending on where you get it, and while it's worth looking for the bargain deal to get it for less than its $125.00 list, you could make a pretty fair case that it's actually well worth the list price.

What you get with this thing, via three discs, is, amazingly, every single page of every issue Rolling Stone ever published in a nearly 40-year span, from its debut in November 1967 up through May 2007. The database (which includes an installation disc of software which allows you to navigate through the archives) is rather well-organized and superbly indexed, which means it's quite simple to search for specific topics or time-frames that may be of specific interest to you.

Being the self-centered snot that I am, my first search was for "Peter Blackstock," and, sure enough, it turned up both of the small news items I wrote for RS back in 1995 (shortly before my attention was diverted to starting my own magazine later that year). A search for "No Depression" located, rather amusingly, a live review of Mary Lou Lord which mentioned her performance of the song "His N.D. World" (which was adapted from Lord's original "His Indie World" by, uh, well, some self-centered snot...).

Getting beyond the ultra-provincial focus, other searches turned up some real revelations. For instance, an article in the October 25, 1973, issue about the Joshua Tree death of Gram Parsons (and subsequent coffin-heist) shares a page with an article about the plane-crash death of Jim Croce. While I knew they'd both left us in the early '70s, I had no idea their deaths were just one day apart -- Parsons on September 19, Croce on September 20.

That's just the tip of the iceberg of what's here, of course. Every page of every issue of Rolling Stone is one hell of a lot of musical and cultural history -- and as a card-carrying college history major, I find it to be endlessly fascinating. I could probably spend a month solid just paging through these archives. (And maybe I will, given present circumstances....)

By the way -- one last little connection: You probably recognize the subject-line to this entry as the title of Dr. Hook's 1973 top-10 single. What you may not know is that it was written by the late Shel Silverstein, whose nephew, Mitch Myers, contributed to ND on occasion for many years. And yes, Mitch has a byline in the RS Cover To Cover set, too -- he wrote the obituary for his uncle in RS #815, June 24,1999, page 26.

adios,
peter

Posted by peter on April 9, 2008 1:11 PM | Permalink