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by Timothy White
From Billboard magazine, issue dated July 06, 2002
Like A 'Rolling Stone': How It Feels
This is Timothy White's final column. He filed it just one hour before his untimely passing on June 27, 2002.
A great day for grievous dismay. It was the first week of March 1979, and I was standing in the private Fifth Avenue office of Rolling Stone founding editor Jann Wenner, looking down at a copy of Advertising Age open to a full-page ad featuring a four-color mock-up—complete with an imposing portrait photo by Annie Leibovitz—of the cover for the March 22 edition of the magazine, whose sole headline was: The Rolling Stone Interview With Johnny Carson, by this writer.
Pivotal problem, though: The complete tapes to that as-yet-untranscribed interview, which had taken two years to arrange, were missing, and I couldn't bear to tell my new boss that the expensive trade ad ($5,000 in pre-inflation dollars) he'd placed might prove pointless.
These painful memories were resurrected when I read recent accounts in USA Today of Wenner's resolve to change the editorial direction of Rolling Stone, with him vowing: "We want a magazine that is not dull or boring." A few days later in the same newspaper was a "Snapshots" box with a bar graph, its text noting that "Though Johnny Carson left The Tonight Show 10 years ago, he still tops viewers' lists of favorite late-night talk-show hosts."
Whatever the future may hold for Rolling Stone, my years there (1978-82) as an editor were never dull or boring; the staff was exuberant and impassioned to a fault, all of us encouraging and arguing with each other—Wenner included, who was, after all, a contemporary and just as opinionated and mercurial. Twice a month we made a magazine based on what we jointly felt was absorbing and worthwhile, untrammeled by focus groups, the undue influence of publicists, or the tug of market forces. And we never sought to imitate anything else. It was a vessel of journalistic voices, constantly in the messy process of becoming itself.
The prospect of Rolling Stone landing the Carson interview—still the most in-depth of his entire career—had emerged at a heated editorial meeting in Wenner's office in autumn '78. The confab was called during an unsettled period in which Bob Marley-borne reggae was commercially ascendant and punk had managed to attain mainstream clout courtesy of the Ramones and the Clash, while pop-rock stardom was nearing a narrow new plateau, rivaled only by young comic actors (and their heroes) in film and TV.
Seated behind his long, rough-hewn wooden desk, Wenner arrayed his collection of butcher's mallets on the surface before him as he faced a mega-quorum of nearly every Rolling Stone writer and editor of note in that era. Then a splenetic Wenner hammered home his current credo that Rolling Stone had become complacent and unsurprising, each time picking the right mallet for proper percussive emphasis. Turning at one juncture to brilliant veteran David Felton, Wenner began castigating the dedicated but non-prolific contributing editor for the no-show status of a Johnny Carson Q&A he'd once suggested pursuing. I hesitated, then raised my hand and stammered that I'd spoken with Mr. Carson the previous week. Wenner wheeled on me and glared. "Why you?" he barked.
As I haltingly explained, I had cultivated a cordial phone-and-letter acquaintance with Carson during my former tenure as managing editor at Crawdaddy. "And I think," I ventured, my voice cracking, "that he might consent to the Rolling Stone Interview." What I didn't mention was that I had already asked Carson to consider the proposition; he'd suggested I come by his office to discuss it further "the next time you're in Los Angeles." Until the extreme-sports-styled editorial meeting, which occurred only one week after I was hired at Rolling Stone, I had neither plans nor means to make such a speculative trek.
Wenner duly authorized the trip. Luckily, soon after I arrived in L.A., Carson invited me over to his Bel Air residence—a visit that resulted in many hours of taped discussion of his career and that was further supplemented by another talk he initiated shortly after, when passing through New York on his way to London. Leibovitz also did an extensive photo shoot, and the project was quickly slotted for publication. A promotional campaign was set in motion, including a second-serial-rights deal with King Features syndicate for Sunday newspapers around the nation.
Most important, the poster-like picture frame cover was designed and pressed into service as an advance marketing tool. At the time, a "cover checklist" form had been developed by a committee composed of managing editor Harriet Fier, art director Mary Shanahan, consulting art director Bea Feitler, and this editor. For years afterward, this self-assessing memo/ballot would be the only official criteria for pre-evaluating effective newsstand sales: 1) Presentation: Simplicity and clarity. 2) Image: Visually dramatic, an editorial statement. 3) Timing: Nationwide appeal and curiosity; an event. 4) Strong appeal to our audience. 5) Large, readable cover lines. On each simple form, the committee (as well as Wenner, chief photographer Leibovitz, and others) would enter votes and sales projections. At the page-one meeting for the Carson issue, the design seemed to meet all the proper requirements, with Leibovitz ruminating thoughtfully about her intimate, close-up photo image of the tanned, silver-haired dean of late-night TV, attired in his dark suit, striped dress shirt, and blue tie with red and white flecks: "Johnny looks like a senator, doesn't he? He's like some kind of nonpolitical Midwestern statesman. It's unexpected."
This thinking led to the ad in the March 5, '79 Advertising Age, which consisted of the upcoming cover hovering in white space over the spare copy: "It's exclusive. That's the Rolling Stone style." Well, yes. But it was also the Rolling Stone style to fly by the seat of one's pants; we did everything organically, on original instinct. There was seldom much distance or politics: only trust, conviction, and a great deal of human frailty. Which brings us to the missing Carson tapes.
The untranscribed Carson interview was scheduled to be my second published Rolling Stone cover story; before it appeared, I also had to pen a page-one piece on the Blues Brothers for the issue dated Feb. 22, 1979. At this stage in my existence, I was an unmarried 27-year-old subletting a two-room flat on East 11th Street in Manhattan from former Crawdaddy editor and periodic Rolling Stone contributor Mitch Glazer, who's still my best friend. Unfortunately, Mitch was too easygoing about the routing of either my rent checks to him or the payments due our landlord. The night before I was to leave for San Francisco to rendezvous with the Blues Brothers, I came home from a party at Leibovitz's to find the door of the 11th Street flat plastered with a big red-ink banner from the City Marshal's office. The sign proclaimed that the premises had been repossessed. Speaking to the building superintendent through his locked door at 1:30 a.m., he explained the flat's contents had been impounded and carted to a municipal warehouse in Harlem and that any overspill was in ashcans in the sub-basement. He suggested I sift through the trash to see what was salvageable. I did, but I found no Carson tapes.
It was now 3 a.m. I still had my plane tickets to San Francisco in my jacket pocket. Yet I no longer had a home or personal effects or—soon, I was sure—a job. Limping back tearfully to the Rolling Stone office, I slept on the couch in the foyer. At dawn, I went to an Army & Navy store, bought some clothes, phoned Glazer in San Francisco—where he happened to have flown out to see the same New Year's Eve Blues Brothers gig (a co-bill with the Grateful Dead, on the occasion of the historic closing of Winterland)—and then caught my plane.
I wandered into the Winterland rehearsals just as Blues Brother John Belushi was introducing "Shotgun Blues" with the wry homily, "This is dedicated to Mitch Glazer, who just fucked over his best friend, Tim White." Convinced my career was over, I nonetheless pressed on with the interviews with Belushi and partner Dan Aykroyd. That night, there was a big champagne bash at the Jefferson Starship's mansion in San Francisco; despite warnings from concert promoter Bill Graham not to drink anything I didn't uncork myself, I took a swig from a bottle of electric wine proffered by a blissfully addled Aykroyd. I spent the next 48 hours on an inaugural (bad) LSD trip, a hallucinatory hell ride so horrific that Mitch, Belushi, and his wife, Judy, sat on either side of my hotel bed for hours, talking me down and giving me Valium and John's Blues Brothers Ray-Bans as a souvenir—anything to dissuade me from a manic desire to be taken to a hospital, the worse place on earth for those bumming out on excellent windowpane acid.
Straggling back to New York that weekend, I was still tripping mildly but nonetheless had to pull two all-nighters writing the Blues Brothers cover package so it would meet the press deadline. That Tuesday, Mitch and I went up to the aforementioned Harlem warehouse to reclaim my impounded possessions. Since I'd lost my fixed address, Belushi let Mitch and I truck the huge boxes down to the cellar of his town house on Morton Street, where we frantically rifled through them in search of Carson cassettes. After a tiny eternity, I located the tapes in the bowels of the last box.
During the next 24 months, I wrote another 16 cover stories and numerous other features as a Rolling Stone senior editor. Cover projects often fell through at the stress-fueled, Zeitgeist-addicted bi-weekly, and we'd have to concoct another to which we could all commit. And yet, by dint of mutual hard work and pride, all parties' highest aims were satisfied. A circulation of 600,000-700,000 rose slowly but surely, owed to an intuitive faith that we understood our audience and felt a kindred curiosity about the music and the culture.
A year to the day after the Carson issue hit newsstands, I ambled sheepishly into Wenner's office with a bottle of Dom Perignon, asking Fier and senior editor Barbara Downey (who'd edited the massive Carson transcripts) to join me. I thereupon disclosed for the first time the whole saga behind the saga, admitting I'd waited so long to reveal the near-calamity for fear that Wenner would fire me on the spot. Jann picked up his glass, said "You're probably right," and ingested his champagne in two short gulps. We all immediately returned to work, and Rolling Stone once more went to press.
-- Timothy White
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