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over days or even months. Over a period of weeks in 1969, Jerry Hopkins spoke with Jim Morrison at the Doors’ management office in Los Angeles, a nearby bar, and a strip club where Morrison was a regular. In 1973, Johnny Cash was so pleased that the magazine wanted to speak with him at the ripe old age of forty (“I’ve often read those interviews and wondered if they’d be interested in someone like me,” he said) that he sat with Robert Hilburn in his Las Vegas hotel suite after finishing a midnight show, then invited Hilburn back for more the following morning over breakfast. Neil Young broke a years-long silence in 1975 to talk with Cameron Crowe (the coup landed Cameron a staff job); they talked for so long Cameron ran out of tapes and Neil had to give him some cassettes that had alternate takes of his songs on them. (Yes, he recorded over them, but later he did also capture a long band rehearsal of then-unreleased “Cortez the Killer.”) I remember the interview that Charles Reich—the author of The Greening of America and a Yale law professor—and I conducted with Jerry Garcia in 1971. We spent hours in the July heat on the front lawn of Jerry’s house near Mount Tamalpais in northern California, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. A few days later, Reich attended a Grateful Dead recording session to get more, and then he went back a few weeks after that to talk with Jerry for another two hours. In the fall, I spent four more hours giving the whole thing a more journalistic perspective. The result—both far ranging and incredibly specific—ran in two issues of the magazine and eventually was published in book form.

From the start, our subjects were explorers, discussing things for the first time. And we were exploring right along with them, finding new journalistic territory as we went. We were hungry for insights, for the stories of how the music and culture we loved came to be, and who the people who made it were. We wanted revelations, and we got them. In December of 1970, I interviewed John Lennon in New York at the time of the release of his first solo album, Plastic Ono Band (still one of the most painfully honest and greatest rock records ever made). Rolling Stone already had a long history with John and Yoko (when the cover of their Two Virgins album was banned, Rolling Stone cofounder Ralph J. Gleason had the idea of putting it on the cover of our first anniversary issue [RS 22]). Lennon chose the magazine to discuss the devastating pain behind the dissolution of the Beatles.

Remember that the Beatles had been hermetically protected for years, and however much their image had changed, much of the world clung to the fantasy that they were the same clean-cut boys who’d worn matching suits on The Ed Sullivan Show. Lennon’s Rolling Stone Interview ended all that. He lifted the curtain on the “orgies” that accompanied life on the road (“The Beatles tours were like the Fellini film Satyricon”), spoke frankly about the band’s drug use (“Help was where we turned onto pot and we dropped drink, simple as that”) and went through the Beatles catalog song by song, the first time he’d ever discussed the band’s music in this kind of detail (“ ‘Yesterday’ I had nothing to do with. . . . ‘Eleanor Rigby’ I wrote a good half of the lyrics or more”). For weeks afterward it was everywhere, because none of the other Beatles had yet publicly explained the breakup of the band. The effect was shocking. “One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were,” Lennon said. “And that’s what I’m saying with this album—I remember what it’s all about now, you fuckers, fuck you all! That’s what I’m saying: ‘You don’t get me twice.’ ”

That strong, unfiltered voice was everything I wanted the Rolling Stone Interview to be. The best interviews of the past forty years—excerpts of which are collected in this volume—are documents of the individuals and of the times. They are visits as well as interviews, and they bring you face-to-face with the person talking. While we clean up the syntax to make it more readable—remove the ums, ahs and repetitions