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SANTANA

In June, 1972, my brother, Barry, was shot to death at his apartment in San Francisco. He’d been working in Chinatown for a year as head of the Youth Services and Coordinating Center, where he dealt with problem kids, including those in various gangs. I tell his story in detail in my book, The Rice Room. Although, all these years, the murder has remained unsolved, Barry, who’d been a probation officer across the bay, where he won praise for his work with black youth, apparently got caught between rival gangs.

Soon after the services for Barry, I heeded others’ advice and dove back into work. Needless to say, Barry was everywhere. My first story back, about the Miracles, wound up with the headline: What’s So Good About Goodbye? My next major feature was on Santana, a dysfunctional band of Latin rock pioneers built around a sensational young guitarist, Carlos Santana.

They were managed, at the time, by concert promoter Bill Graham, with whom Rolling Stone had a bumpy, sometimes outright bruising, relationship. Although he’d tossed me out of the Fillmore West one afternoon–he didn’t like the tone of an article I’d written about one of his side ventures–we had a civil relationship. Once comfortably immersed in an interview, Graham couldn’t help but open up completely–even emotionally.

Graham loved telling about young Carlos sneaking into the Fillmore; about his upbringing in the Mission District of San Francisco, where the Santana family settled after immigrating from Tijuana.

Somewhere in that story, as he spoke about Carlos and his brother Jorge, I remember breaking down. I had to apologize to Graham, who murmured a sympathetic, “It’s OK.”

It wasn’t. And it wouldn’t be the last time thoughts of our family’s loss would disrupt my work, throw me off track. It happened again, just now.

THREE DOG NIGHT

Most of the musicians in this book have made a lasting impression on music or on the pop scene. Three Dog Night have not. But I like this story, just as I came to like the band members after meeting them in Los Angeles in August, 1972.

Three Dog Night, as I’ve written, was one of those acts that no one else at Rolling Stone cared to do. They got a cover story primarily because their success was too big, too persistent to ignore.

Given the assignment, I had a challenge on my hands. What would I write about them? Like Chicago, they were a hit-making machine devoid of any outstanding personalities. Like almost no other rock artist we covered, they didn’t write their own music. Yet, they were as big as any band around, and on tour, they were breaking attendance records that had belonged to the Beatles and the Stones.

I found my story by looking into the machine behind the musicians, and at the men who operated the machinery. Until Charles Perry explored the Grateful Dead’s enormous support system years later, Rolling Stone had not delved into a rock band’s management structure, beyond quoting the usual complaints about labels and royalties.

Three Dog Night were all about management, and booking, and publicity. They were the stars of a team that numbered, by one executive’s estimate, 150 people, from producers who helped them to pick their hits to business managers who helped them invest their money, in preparation for their retirement, or for dog days that might lie ahead.

RAY CHARLES

When I’m asked to name my favorite story or subject from Rolling Stone, my answer is Ray Charles. And when I’m asked about the best thing about working at that magazine, the answer is the same. Or, as I wrote on the occasion of Rolling Stone’s twenty-fifth anniversary: “The best thing about Rolling Stone was that you could do just about any story you wanted. At an editorial meeting I’d raise my hand and say, ‘How about Diane Keaton?’ and offer a reason, then be sent off to go get her. Once I mentioned Ray Charles and had to say no more. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t selling a lot of records and that he wasn’t in the news. We all knew he should be in Rolling Stone, and so he was.”

In 1972, Charles was forty-three and had just completed his twenty-fifth year in the music business. He was busy making records and performing concerts, and he drew well, but he hadn’t broken into the rock circuit, the way Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and others had. The year before, in fact, he’d appeared at the Fillmore West in San Francisco–as a guest with Aretha. And it was not Ray, but Aretha who’d been on the charts in recent months, with “Spanish Harlem,” “Day Dreaming,” and her own composition, “Rock Steady.”

Charles’ last single to chart was “Booty Butt,” which reached number 36 on Billboard a year and a half before. He jumped at the chance to talk with Rolling Stone and, after we met at a concert in San Francisco, he made himself available for two days in a Los Angeles recording studio, and then for an extended visit in Washington, D.C.

After a busy week with Charles, I returned to what was no longer a normal life. In the aftermath of my brother’s murder, I moved from one apartment to another, dealt with tumultuous changes in my relationships with women, finished my lengthy feature on Santana, and finally, on a visit to New York City over the Thanksgiving weekend, began work on the transcripts of the sessions with Charles.

I remember my Thanksgiving Day. Josh Feigenbaum, who was selling advertising for Rolling Stone, gave me his apartment in the Village, after warning me about some drop-in roommates of his–namely, rats. What he didn’t say was that he had no office supplies–no scissors, no stapler, no paper clips, no blank paper. Just some Scotch tape. As I edited the dozens of pages of the interview, I folded and tore out paragraphs and taped the surviving pieces of paper together, until I had one long, ugly roll of a story to take back to San Francisco to retype.

But I knew that I had gotten the goods. In my research, I had noticed Charles’ reticence–no, it was an outright refusal–to talk about his battles with heroin. He wouldn’t talk with Playboy about it; nor with Downbeat.

He talked with me. And all it took was patience; waiting for an opening. As it turned out, he opened the door himself when he began critiquing the “blaxploitation” films of the day, and how unrealistic he found their depictions of drug use. “Oh?” I thought. “Then you tell us how it really was.” And he did.

The year wound down in a surrealistic blur. I wrote the introduction to the Ray Charles interview and began work, along with the late Larry Lee, a newscaster on KSAN, on an article about the Nixon Administration’s plans to deregulate the broadcasting industry. I saw Bette Midler perform at a favorite local club, The Boarding House, where she was accompanied by a gangly pianist and music arranger, Barry Manilow. We were going to press on December 26th. Two days before–on a Saturday, I was at Rolling Stone when Jann Wenner began asking for changes in the layouts of the music section, then asked if I could spend a few hours hosting an out-of-town visitor: Tom Wolfe. The conclusion of his two-part opus on the NASA astronauts was our cover story. I had to beg off. I still had to finish the Nixon piece, which I would just minutes before my Sunday radio show began. On Monday–Christmas Day–I was back at Rolling Stone, with fellow staff members, and Wolfe, putting the finishing touches on the issue.

Wolfe richly deserved the cover for a feature that would become a book and, later, a movie. Ray Charles settled for a headline along the top of the cover, for a huge photo on Page One, and for a chance, after years of silence and neglect, to have his say.

[Afterword]

The Ray Charles interview won the prestigious Deems Taylor Award for Magazine Writing in 1974. I tend to think of it as Ray’s award; I provided the Scotch tape. Ray himself would return to Atlantic Records in 1977, and he would tell his story in book form, with the writer David Ritz, in 1978, in Brother Ray.

ROLLING STONES

Before the Ray Charles piece went to the presses on December 26th, we were in touch with the Rolling Stones. Having spent a good part of 1972 touring North America, they’ve mapped out a short Pacific tour, of Hong Kong and Australia. But, as additional stepping stones to Sydney, they decided to perform a concert in Los Angeles to benefit the victims of a massive earthquake in Nicaragua and a pair of shows in Honolulu.

I drew the assignment and, exhausted as I was from the previous year, headed into 1973 feeling as if I was about to take a big step. Yes, I’d profiled Ray Charles and Marvin Gaye, conducted additional Rolling Stone Interviews with Leon Russell, Grace Slick, and David Crosby, met personal favorites, ranging from Linda Ronstadt and Joe Cocker to Roberta Flack, Jackie DeShannon and Boz Scaggs, and covered some of the biggest bands of the day–the Airplane, the Dead, Santana, and the first band crowned a “supergroup” before they’d finished their first album: Crosby, Stills & Nash.

But these were the Stones. Now we were in Beatles and Dylan territory.

I honestly can’t say that I was nervous, flying down to L.A. to write about the benefit, and then to Honolulu, where I’d hook up with the band for the first time. Besides having grown accustomed to a regimen of several stories every issue, mixing big names with small, long features with brief Random Notes, I had some of the confidence–others might have called it smugness–that came with being associated with Rolling Stone. In his 1972 song, “If the Shoe Fits,” Leon Russell probably spoke for more than a few musicians when he sneeringly portrayed rock writers asking to use his phone, his car, his pad, and more, reasoning, “We’re from Rolling Stone so it’s okay.”

The fact that we’d be invoked in a song was one sign of our place in pop culture. (Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, at that moment, were on the charts with “The Cover of Rolling Stone.”) We were also being portrayed in a Marvel comic. There was a parody issue called “Ruling Stooge.” I was “Ben Virgo-Taurus.” A ragtag television documentary crew took up residence at our offices for several days, looking to do a critical piece on the magazine. Back in the late Sixties, mainstream magazines and papers like Time, Newsweek, and the Washington Post, as well as media publications like the Journal of Communications Arts wrote admiring stories about this long-haired upstart. Jann Wenner was being called the rock generation’s Hugh Hefner.

Now, as the little rock paper, born on an investment of $9,500, hit the 250,000 circulation mark, and reported revenues of some $2.5 million, we became targets. Wenner didn’t care. He’d founded Rolling Stone as a business, and his mission was to grow it. He had already tried other magazines, with varying degrees of failure. We’d begun issuing anthologies of interviews, articles, and reviews, and I got the call to edit several of the paperback books.

As for the magazine: We had just switched to four-color printing in January. Now, in spring, Wenner was thinking about switching from the tabloid format to a full-size magazine, the better to accommodate more pages and to please mainstream advertisers. Although the publication reported on record companies and reviewed their artists, Wenner had no qualms about forging partnerships with labels; about becoming friends and partners with, among others, Mick Jagger. The Rolling Stone helped Rolling Stone to establish a British edition of the magazine.

It was all very cozy. But, whatever arrangements were being made from Jann’s corner office, we, the staff, were rarely involved.

I had enough on my hands, shuffling through articles about the Stones as I flew to Honolulu. All right, I was intimidated. If any band was going to have me in awe, it might as well be The World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band.

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