Lots of people will get their pictures on the cover
It cost ‘Rolling Stone’ $1M to produce the special 3D cover for their 1000th issue.
After all, Wenner says, Sgt. Pepper’s colorful cover pictured people who had influenced The Beatles and the 20th century, and there was some fun involved: You had to look closely to recognize all the faces.
An homage to Sgt. Pepper’s ensued. “We said, ‘Let’s pack it’ ” with faces, Wenner says.
As a lark ó and for the extra $1 million it cost ó he also had the cover of the May 18 issue, which hits newsstands Friday, printed in 3-D. “In the back of my mind, 3-D was always in a bag of tricks that somehow I wanted to pull out one day.”
The cover features more than 150 pop icons of our times, from Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin to Britney Spears and Eminem. George Clooney is there, and so are Angelina Jolie and Tom Cruise and Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. “There are plenty of famous people who are not in there. There just wasn’t room for everybody,” Wenner says.
But even if there had been room, President Bush, whom the May 4 issue of RS called the “worst president in history,” would not have made it, Wenner says, citing a “combination of incompetence, laziness and ineptitude for the job.” Meanwhile, Clinton ó whom Wenner ranks as his favorite president ó is in the second row, between Joni Mitchell and Justin Timberlake.
The 1,000th issue is a milestone for Wenner, who starting publishing RS on cheap newsprint from a loft in San Francisco, thanks to a small loan from his future wife’s parents. The first issue was Nov. 9, 1967.
“I fell in love with rock ‘n’ roll and The Beatles and Bob Dylan, and, with a good helping of drugs, I wanted to live my life that way,” says Wenner, whose all-time favorite group is ó who else? ó the Rolling Stones.
A magazine sounded about right. He had done some writing in college, and at the 1964 Republican convention, he was a copy boy for NBC anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley.
Today, nearly three decades later, at a time when some younger readers wouldn’t know Sgt. Pepper from Dr Pepper, RS still attracts them to its slick pages: The magazine’s rate base of 1.4 million readers, its highest ever, has a median age of 27.
“It is one of the few magazines that stayed true to its original mission and audience from the beginning,” says Samir Husni, a University of Mississippi journalism professor. “Wenner was able to maintain the original flavor and keep the passengers on board while bringing in new ones. RS is unique. There is nothing like it on the same scale.”
Some might argue that the magazine’s best years ended with the turbulence of the ’60s and ’70s, but not Wenner, now 60. He says its profiles are among the best in the business: “I don’t think it’s lost its clout culturally. If you look around at all the media and think about the most impactful place you can be, if you’re a musician or a movie star, Rolling Stone still carries more weight and prestige, I dare say, than Time, which used to have a lock.
“Most other magazines have an interview in a hotel room with a PR person present. It’s nice, it’s fun and there’s some prestige to being in some of these magazines, but there’s no real depth. We go inside a person’s life. You really see stuff.”
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