While writing a review for the San Francisco Chronicle of Rolling Stone: The Complete Covers, 1967-1997 (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998), I finally tallied up the cover stories I’d written at the magazine. I was amazed to learn that there’d been 37. That’s out of about 400 articles, and who knows how many Random Notes and uncredited, long-forgotten short stories.

I collected 30-something of those pieces—along with material from other publications—into my book, Not Fade Away. Here, you can find the introductions for many of the artists (they’re underlined on the list below). Since they’re part of a book’s narrative flow, you’ll have to pretend, in some cases, that you know what’s come before. Don’t worry, you’ll do fine.

In the near future, I’ll include excerpts from the original articles. And, following the introductions below, you can check a complete list of the entertainers I’ve interviewed over the years.

And, now, from Not Fade Away...

SLY STONE

By early 1970, we’d hired on additional editorial staffers, and, budget willing, we were more free to travel. My first trip for Rolling Stone–my first one since the visit with Joni Mitchell in Laurel Canyon in April, 1969, would be to...Los Angeles!

These were the days of $14 fares for flights on an extremely friendly airline, PSA, to the little airport in Burbank. I would make that commute many times in my first years with Rolling Stone.

This time, I was writing a cover story. Joni Mitchell had been a cover, but, through some kind of screwup, I didn’t get a byline on my story about her, and I never thought of that piece as any great achievement. I was still in spring training.

But now...Now, I’d be spending a few days with Sly Stone and his Family Stone. As things turned out, most of my time with Sly was in the evenings, evenings that turned into mornings. I followed him from recording studios to television studios to far more private spaces. I heard and saw things that I chose not to report, for fear of landing the former Sylvester Stewart right in the slammer. The things involved his casual, yet careful sifting of a large amount of white, powdery substance from one bowl into another.

As if I really knew what I was witnessing. I’d just had my 25th birthday when I went sliding with Sly, and, as was required of any good young citizen of San Francisco, I’d gotten high. But I’d yet to experience the real thing.

Sly Stone, a radio favorite of mine when he was deejaying on local R&B stations; a cool cat of a producer with fellow DJ “Big Daddy” Tom Donahue’s Autumn record label, and, now, a super-slick musician blending black and white into something anything but gray, was the real thing.

JANIS JOPLIN

With the publication of the Sly and the Family Stone article, I had my first cover story under my oversized leather belt. By now, in the spring of 1970, I’d been at Rolling Stone for almost a year. I’d written about 60 articles, most of them short and published without a byline. Since we were cranking out four or five pieces each issue, it didn’t look right to have the same names popping up on every page, so we often went without.

For me, one such story came about after a phone call I received from Janis Joplin one night in April. It was around midnight, and I was in a basement in Chinatown. Perhaps I should explain.

Having settled in at Rolling Stone, I had heard from Gordon Lew, the publisher of East West, the bilingual Chinese-American weekly. He wanted to jazz up the English side of the paper, and wanted a more youthful perspective on Chinatown and other social issues. I came in with Exacto knives blazing, writing and editing articles and designing and laying out the pages, working with next to no budget, charitable contributors, and artwork clipped out of other publications.

With a full-time job, I could give East-West one or two long nights a week.

One of those nights, the phone rang. Ken Wong, an editor and columnist, answered, then turned to me. “It’s Janis Joplin. It must be for you.” I had called her a day or so before, and hadn’t really expected an answer. She and Rolling Stone had a tumultuous relationship. Here she was, a San Franciscan, by way of Port Arthur, Texas, and she couldn’t get decent press from the one rock paper that should’ve been behind her. Instead, we’d run a review with the headline: “Janis Joplin: The Judy Garland of Rock?”

She’d been reduced to tears by some of our articles, I’d been told. Now, having left her original band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, she had a new group together and was said to be ready to make an album.

Despite the late hour, she’d tracked me down to this subterranean Chinatown office, and, perhaps because of the hour, she was in a great mood, raving not only about her new band and the music they were rehearsing, but also about a new tattoo, and about a recent vacation.

I scribbled notes, wished her luck, and went back to the typewriter, where I was writing a review of a book on Chinese arts, Ting: The Caldron.

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