The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [0]
INTRODUCTION
PETE TOWNSHEND
JIM MORRISON
PHIL SPECTOR
JOHN LENNON
RAY CHARLES
TRUMAN CAPOTE
JOHNNY CASH
NEIL YOUNG
ORIANA FALLACI
BRIAN WILSON
GEORGE LUCAS
JOHNNY CARSON
JONI MITCHELL
FRANCIS COPPOLA
TOM WOLFE
JACK NICHOLSON
BILL MURRAY
CLINT EASTWOOD
ERIC CLAPTON
TINA TURNER
ROBIN WILLIAMS
LEONARD BERNSTEIN
SPIKE LEE
JERRY GARCIA
AXL ROSE
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
DAVID LETTERMAN
DAVID GEFFEN
KURT COBAIN
COURTNEY LOVE
MICK JAGGER
PATTI SMITH
DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON
BILL CLINTON
THE DALAI LAMA
BOB DYLAN
OZZY OSBOURNE
KEITH RICHARDS
EMINEM
BONO
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Copyright © 2007 by Wenner Media LLC
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group USA
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Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com
First eBook Edition: November 2007
ISBN: 0-316-02312-4
INTRODUCTION
On August 14, 1968, the Who finished a show at the Fillmore West with “My Generation.” Pete Townshend did not smash his guitar—not that night—and I wanted to know why. So I made my way backstage to ask him if he’d sit for an interview with Rolling Stone.
I wanted to know much more, in fact: where Pete grew up, what shaped his music, what his relationship with Roger Daltrey was like, what he thought rock & roll could accomplish, what his plans for the band were. We went back to my house, started talking at two A.M. and finished sometime after dawn. Pete was articulate, passionate, and lost in his own thoughts (at one point, he asked if I’d dosed his orange juice with LSD; I hadn’t). He talked about the Who’s next album, a project he was then calling “Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Boy.” A year or so later, he told me it was the first time he’d ever sketched out the whole plan for Tommy, even for himself.
That was the first fully realized Rolling Stone Interview. We’d included Q&A’s starting with the first issue of the magazine—one of our goals had always been delivering the voices of the artists behind the music—but this went deeper. It accomplished everything I loved about the in-depth interviews with writers in The Paris Review—it brought you into the working process of the artist—and it also opened up the private life and aspirations of a defining force in popular culture, the way the Playboy Interview did. In those days, The Paris Review and Playboy were the only places you could read a thoughtful, in-depth magazine interview, and no one was bringing the same rigor and seriousness of purpose to rock & roll.
Rolling Stone was different. From the start, we were devoted not only to rock & roll but to the culture and politics that surrounded the music, that shaped it and were shaped by it. And though we knew how to have fun (we did, after all, offer a roach clip as a subscription premium with our February 24, 1968, issue [RS 6]), we were all about seriousness of purpose. These were not casual interviews. Our reporters researched their subjects deeply, and the musicians we spoke with responded. They were bored by the short-form interviews they did with fan magazines and radio stations. We presented them with a new opportunity to articulate what they were thinking and doing, to communicate with their audience in a direct and unfiltered way.
The Rolling Stone Interview gained prestige quickly. Prestige and size—nowhere else could you read ten or fifteen pages of Jerry Garcia talking about his childhood, the first music he loved, his experiences in the army, and the days of the Acid Tests. And we spoke not just with musicians but with writers, directors, philosophers, presidents and religious leaders as well.
Sometimes these interviews lasted for hours; sometimes they stretched