Apologies...old guy story:

Way back in 1987, as Rolling Stone was just hitting its 20-year mark, I was a poor student, not quite 25 yet, finishing up my long-delayed college courses. At the time this book came out, I happened to have just started a four-month student placement on Your Money magazine in Toronto. I was lucky, most of the students were doing their placements for no pay. I was pulling down the princely sum of $100 per month. I don't think it covered the public transit fares I paid to go into Toronto five days a week. Getting up at 5:30 am to get in the car by 6:30 to get to the train by 7:00 to get to Toronto by 8:00, to get to the magazine by just before 9:00...then get home somewhere around 6:30 or 7:00 at night. No time for a part-time job.

So, I was broke.

And Rolling Stone puts out this gorgeous book that I wanted badly. By this point, I was a bit of a magazine freak, and read RS as much as I could. But this book was selling for a third of what I was being paid for a month's work. There was no way I could justify buying it, though I walked past a bookstore that displayed it prominently, every day. I heard it calling my name. I never bought it.

Flash forward 38 years, and a much older, now 62-year-old guy, slightly more flush, who never reads RS anymore because the magazine is just not fun anymore, is browsing through a used bookshop in cottage country. 

Out of nowhere, my eye catches the "20 Years of Rolling Stone" on the spine. I pull the book down, and it's in pristine condition. I mean...come on...the damn thing was STILL calling my name. I bought it, for the princely sum of $15, or about the equivalent of paying about $5 in 1987 dollars. 

It took forty years, but what a deal!

The question is...was the book worth the wait?

It was.

Reading through the thoughts of a mid-twenties Alice Cooper and Michael Jackson, a not-quite iconic Springsteen, the absolutely crazy Keith Moon five years before his too-early death, the not-quite-post-Police already-too-full-of-himself Sting, the strange ramblings of Brando, the relaxed vitriol of Jack Nicholson...fascinating stuff.

But there's the other side of Rolling Stone that they used to do so well. Hunter S. Thompson's ramblings about...well, anything. The story of Karen Silkwood, a year after her suspicious death, the walkthrough of the kidnapping, turning, then capturing of Patty Hearst, Ron Kovic's idealism crushed under the uncaring American bootheel, the terrifying glimpse into Charles Manson's thoughts.

And, the deaths. John Lennon. John Belushi. 

This is the America that existed under Nixon and Reagan. The pre-9/11 America. The world before social media. There were still cover-ups (the Kent State shooting investigation, Silkwood), but there was also a greater sense of hope (Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock, Hunter S. Thompson's election coverage).

It was a different world, and one that I'd forgotten much of. 

So, overall? I'm glad I got to read a snapshot of the glory years of Rolling Stone forty years after the fact. I think it gives the selected articles and interviews far more weight.

A great read.