The Rolling Stone Interviews

December 1, 2007
That strangely worshipful pop-culture chronicle, Rolling Stone, is 40 years old, and founder Wenner celebrates with this collection of excerpts from the magazine's interviews. Featuring an interview in every issue was undertaken, he says, because no one was bringing the . . . rigor and seriousness of Playboy and Paris Review interviews to rock music. In pursuit of rigor and seriousness, Wenner found in 1969 that Phil Spector felt the post-Satisfaction Rolling Stones no longer made the kind of contributions they had before, and in 1971 that John Lennon freely admitted being a genius. More recently, Wenner induced Bono to share his deep thoughts (as if that were difficult), and David Fricke learned that Keith Richards always kicked his heroin habit before tours to avoid going cold turkey in some little Midwestern town. Also interviewed: Bill Clinton, the Dalai Lama, and Hollywood heavyweights Jack Nicholson, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola. Great stuff if you can stand the self-congratulatory RS ambience that suffuses it; otherwise, just an enjoyable stumble down Memory Lane.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)