Darcy Gerow on the sudden rise and long, long decline of Rolling Stone:
The suffocating media bias of the 1960s was difficult to escape. A lethargic gray specter of middle-class America was distributed with cunning sterility through the generic, bogus smiles of cable news networks and traditional print. Despite the election and assassination of Kennedy and the signing of the Civil Rights Act, if you had turned on a T.V. this was still Eisenhower’s America: regimented, religious, conservative. And the cultural vacuum created by the Eisenhower years had began to suck even harder with Lyndon Baines Johnson at the helm.
American media was out of touch with this new generation. Elitist authoritarians were preaching their moral superiority stamped with stars and stripes to a generation of cynics. These kids didn’t have a fucking clue what they wanted, but they wanted no part of what they were being given. So rose Rolling Stone, a counterculture bible for babyboomers, co-founded by Jann Wenner.[…]
Things were different in the 1960s. The anti-war movement and the civil rights movement were a just cause. The catalyst for a just movement of equal rights for women and gays and minorities was free speech, of which Jann Wenner was a huge proponent. When students at U.C. Berkley marched in the streets in the 1960s, it was an attack on the elitist, authoritarians and an establishment hellbent on keeping opposing viewpoints and the ideas of personal liberty stifled. The gang of “cruel faggots” kept the official narrative running but no one under 30 was listening.
The whole goddamn world had had enough of the travesty of war in Southeast Asia. There was no ignoring the ineptitude of American politics. The only reasonable thing to do in 1969 was to drive out to Altamont for the weekend, load up on heinous chemicals, hunker down and rethink your approach to the political process.
Thompson, the then-young, liberal anti-hero, could often be found gobbling LSD and firing his guns (he was a lifetime member of the NRA) at propane bottles for a crowd of jeering burnouts or Bay area bikers at his fortified compound, Owl Farm, in Woody Creek Colorado.
It was Jann Wenner’s idea to put Hunter, with all of his fear and loathing, on to the campaign trail in 1972. Why not get the guy who wrote Hell’s Angels? Hunter was someone with a penchant for dealing with vicious thugs and sick freaks gone crazy on power, someone who could draw a parallel between Richard Nixon and Sonny Barger.
Thompson’s openly-biased, subjective and wild account of the 1972 presidential election was the red Chevy convertible of campaign coverage. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ on repeat and at full volume, barrelling across the country at 110 miles an hour or so and in search of an honest politician. In Hunter’s eyes, the only one that even came close was George McGovern, the senator from South Dakota.
McGovern’s non-interventionist platform focused on a complete withdrawal from Vietnam, amnesty for draft evaders and a Milton Freidman-inspired, negative income tax meant to replace the bureaucratic burden of social welfare programs and a complicated tax code. Thompson’s version of events is the story of an idealistic underdog fighting against the odds only to be crushed by postmodern Americanism and the establishment incumbent, “Tricky Dick Nixon.” McGovern might have owed a White House win, in part, to Thompson’s and Rolling Stone’s relentless support had he not owed his White House loss to the mental distress of his vice-presidential pick, Thomas Eagleton.
There’s no way to properly explain how great Rolling Stone was in those early years. How well the magazine represented the anti-establishment culture, individual liberty and equality for everyone. It can’t be compared to anything else because there was nothing else, only the traditional mainstream garbage and Rolling Stone.
