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JIM MORRISON

When I bumped into Jim Morrison in West Hollywood in early 1971, I had no idea that we’d wind up doing the last interview he’d ever give to an American publication.

I hadn’t met Morrison before, and soon after Diane introduced us, I asked for an interview. He had nothing better to do, he said, and I grabbed my cassette recorder.

And then things got weird. For some reason, he was feeling playful. Having done no research, and with no questions in mind, I was happy to play along. We decided to pretend as though we were doing a talk show on TV, and he kicked things off with a decidedly lewd riddle or two.

While he joked, I searched through my memory for the latest news on Morrison’s never-dull life, and we settled into a pretty serious interview. He got into it enough that when Pamela showed up, he continued with our conversation, one that turned out to be his last with the press before he left, in March, for Paris.

Four months after settling into Paris with Pamela, Jim Morrison died, and I was dispatched to Hollywood to write his obituary. A few non-stop days and nights later, the article was complete, except for a headline. Jim had considered himself as serious a poet as he was a rock musician and stage performer. By and large, his poetic interests had been dismissed. In fact, one reason Morrison gave for going to France was that the people there would give him his poetic due.

That’s why the headline on Page One of our 88th issue, dated August 5, 1971, read: James Douglas Morrison, Poet: Dead at 27.

JEFFERSON AIRPLANE

In the book, Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History, author Robert Draper writes, in a section about the “Bad Craziness” of deadlines: “Ben Fong-Torres was so late on a story that an art director was moved to have a plateful of spaghetti at him.”

This is not true. No one at the magazine would ever waste food like that.

More to the point, I never missed a deadline. It is true that, often, I barely made it. In fact, a sentence preceding the alleged spaghetti toss reads as though it could have been about me as much as about one of Rolling Stone’s most gifted writers, Tim Cahill. His 1973 feature on Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz, Tim is quoted saying, was “written in seventeen hours straight, with them taking each page as it came out of my typewriter and running it over to the printer.”

Me, too. In the early Seventies, Rolling Stone had grown too big for the old-fashioned linotype setters to handle, and we were still awaiting the computer age. In the meantime, we acquired our own typesetting machines. Once keyed in by typists, they’d be printed – in the desired typeface and size–onto glossy white paper, ready to paste onto layout forms.

So we never wrote material that would go directly to any printer; rather, copy editors would read it, make corrections, and take it down the hall to our own makeshift composing room. My own Mark Spitz moment happened in the fall of 1971. I was working on the latest of my articles about the Jefferson Airplane–they were big and newsworthy enough that they amounted to a regular beat. Suddenly, a major story at Rolling Stone fell through. Late one afternoon, I was told that my story would need to double in length, start on Page One, and occupy the feature well. And it would have to be submitted that night. I will never forget the way it was, back in the days before computers.

As I wrote, Bob Kingsbury, the art director, stood at my door, waiting to take each typewritten page to our typesetters. I was a fast typist, hitting about ninety words a minute in full throttle, but whenever I slowed...like, to think for a second about the next sentence, I’d catch Kingsbury standing there, and feel guilty.

It’s no wonder that I would soon burn out, and take a leave of absence from Rolling Stone.

But first, as always: the story:

IKE & TINA

Is it possible to love four women all at once? Actually, I proved it possible in 1971, but that’s another story. Bygones. Five years earlier, in 1966, I caught a the Ike & Tina Turner Revue at a fabled San Francisco club, the hungry i. I saw rock and roll past, present, and future.

Ike & Tina didn’t have a hit going back then; I wasn’t with Rolling Stone or on assignment for anyone. I was simply out that night, and Tina, along with her three Ikettes, killed me.

After the gentrified steps of Motown acts like the Supremes and Gladys and the Pips, and faux sex kittens like the Shangri-Las, Tina and the girls were pure and sweaty sex.

When Rolling Stone first hit the streets a year or so later, the Turners were still nowhere, commercially speaking. But someone at the paper had the shared my feelings. Issue number two had a huge photo of a raging Tina Turner on page one. No particular tale to tell; there was a short review on page two, knocking the band and praising Tina and the Ikettes to no end.

The magazine featured Tina on the cover again in 1969. Again, there was no story inside to merit the cover. However, the featured article was on Phil Spector, who had produced Ike and Tina’s “River Deep, Mountain High.” The editors apparently decided that Tina was a bit sexier than the reclusive producer.

“River Deep” was criminally ignored by American radio–both Top 40 and the supposedly hipper FM side. But the Turners finally broke through in 1970 with “I Want to Take You Higher,” and followed up with “Proud Mary.”

It was time for another cover. This time, we decided to include an actual article.

The piece speaks for itself. But, when it was included in a 1977 anthology, Reporting: The Rolling Stone Style, editor Paul Scanlon provided some context:

Music writers are often criticized for taking the easy route: being spoon-fed press releases; succumbing to contrived interviews with a press agent or manager hovering nearby, recording idiotic quotes with groupie-like awe. Ben Fong-Torres not only avoids these pitfalls, he also brings hard-nosed reportorial skill to his work...At first Ben envisioned this story as a “loving portrait of a group that knocked me out at a tiny club in North Beach in 1966.” As Ben explorerd, the picture became considerably sharper and more distressing. Diligent research and tough questioning made this story successful. So successful that for a long time afterward we were still feeling violent reverberations from the Turner camp.”

[From the epilogue:]

I think I know what Ike Turner thought of my article. What did Tina think? I never heard, back then. But fifteen years later, in 1986, I was in London to conduct interviews for a visiting San Francisco station, KFOG. Tina was in town to tape a concert for television. By then, she’d long been liberated from Ike and established herself as a solo star, scoring hits and sweeping the Grammys with songs like “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” “Better Be Good To Me,” and “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome).” In the book, I, Tina, she’d finally told the full story of her life–warts, bruises and all.

KFOG got some tickets for her London taping, but, with the next morning’s show to study up for, I declined. That next morning, the producer and the host raved about the concert. They’d met Tina, they said, and told her I was part of the crew in London. Tina, they said, sounding somewhat amazed, expressed deep disappointment that I wasn’t there. She sent her love.

I was disappointed, too. But at least I knew, finally, how she’d felt about that story.

MARVIN GAYE

In the summer of 1970, I did my first “Rolling Stone Interview,”with Crosby, in the summer of 1970. In presenting these transcribed conversations, Jann Wenner had more magazine models in mind. Playboy set a tone, with its serious treatment of well-known personalities and artists, while the Paris Review was known for examining–in depth, detail and the theories of the craft itself–styles of working habits and processes.

Crosby, like Jerry Garcia, Pete Townshend, John Lennon, and so many of the rock artists of the day, was a gifted “rapper,” as we called conversationalists long before hip-hop, and his interview was a successful blend of personal revelations and political insights–not to mention a large dose of polemics.

For my second Rolling Stone Interview, I returned to my Top 40 musical roots in Motown, with a visit to Detroit, and to Marvin Gaye. However, by the time of our interview, Gaye had left his “Hitch Hike” and “I’ll Be Doggone” days far behind. He was one of the first of the first-line Motown artists to break from the label’s rigid structure, in which singers sang whatever Berry Gordy, Jr. and his team of producers and writers decreed.

In Detroit–where, for the sake of economy and efficiency, I was also interviewing veteran pop songwriter Barry Mann and the radical rock band MC5 for separate features–I had no idea how Gaye would work for the RS Interview format. In fact, he didn’t. That is, he was almost too good, too vivid, too active, for a straight, transcribed conversation. He was hyperactive, and so we moved from place to place, in and around his home outside Detroit. As the scenes shifted, I felt it important to describe them. I mean, when Marvin Gaye suddenly stands up and performs a song over a tape of backup music (years before anyone had ever heard of “karaoke”), you don’t simply copy down the words he sings. You soak it up, and you write it down, best as you can, to share it.

In the first collection of Rolling Stone interviews, Jann Wenner referred to the process as that of “the unloading of heads.” With Marvin, that’s exactly what it was.

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