Tuesday, November 12, 2024

strawberry fields forever

 -------------- [excerpts from Rolling Stone Magazine, by Robert Draper] ---------------------------- By the end of 1969, Jann Wenner's two-year-old Rolling Stone - or simply Stone, as many affectionately called it in those days - was generally accepted as the most authoritative rock & roll magazine in the land.  


By 1971, Rolling Stone was what Esquire had been in the sixties and the New York Herald Tribune a decade before that:  the breeding ground of explosive New Journalists like Hunter Thompson, David Felton, Grover Lewis and Joe Eszterhas.



        [The magazine's] very nature was to avoid the set positions assumed by its psychedelic and left-wing counterparts in the underground press.

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        The magazine seemed to understand exactly how important pop music was.  Teen magazines trivialized it; Crawdaddy!, the first American rock magazine, placed it on high with the utterances of Plato and Aristotle; and the straight press scorned or ignored it.

-------------------------------- [end / excerpts]


I think, sometimes, that humans suffer from a poverty of imagination.  The above passages from Draper's book tend to confirm this idea.

        All this revolutionarily fantastic music is emerging around them, and these people writing in the magazines that already existed before Jann Wenner started R. S. can't respond to it in any kind of coherent, thoughtful way.

("The Beatles?  Let's just ignore 'em.")

lol

A slight lack of vision...?



-30-

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