Gathering No Moss

Mascaraed Rock Singer Alice Cooper plans to market a line of men's cosmetics under the brand name Whiplash. George McGovern claims that he was never allowed access to a secret FBI file on Senator Thomas Eagleton's medical history. Mick Jagger will portray Merlin, the Arthurian wizard, in a forthcoming film. Director Bernardo Bertolucci thinks that the average man is a fascist at heart. The hidden structure of ex-Beatle Paul McCartney's melodies is a "rotating riff." To stave off a receding hairline, Watergate Principal John Dean once shampooed regularly with a pungent concoction called Grandpa's Wonder Pine Tar Toilet Soap. It took 19 federal and county lawmen, aided by an Army helicopter, to trap and finally kill one young hippie; the drug mill he was suspected of operating never existed.

This rich mix of trivia, gossip, music criticism and serious general reporting is now the standard offering of Rolling Stone. What started as the bible of rock, operating on loans, credit and optimism, has become the West Coast's major purveyor of the New Journalism. Along the way, Stone has become solvent and earned the trade's respect.

The voice is still vaguely radical, and the reportage is usually sympathetic to counterculturists. But last month's piece about the murder of a drug suspect, written by Associate Editor Joe Eszterhas, was not mere anti-cop propaganda. A federal agent has been charged with homicide in the case.

Groupie Gossip. Unlike the underground sheets that it still outwardly resembles, Stone resists becoming obsessed with one type of story. Tom Wolfe recently wrote a perceptive rumination on the terrestrial thoughts and problems of the astronauts. When Truman Capote failed to come up with a commissioned article on the Rolling Stones' U.S. tour last summer, Stone assigned Andy Warhol to interview the writer. The result was a 20,000-word opus long on groupie gossip, insights into Capote's creative process, and epic banalities ("Wait, wait, wait, wait. We want two more double Margaritas, and I want some ice in my drink, and ...").

Some facets of Stone remain unchanged. It still meticulously notes the musical chairs played by rock groups famous and unsung ("Ronnie Lane, Face, has been replaced by Free's former bassist, Tetsu Yamauchi"). Record reviews bristle with formidable expertise. Stone still looks like something put together the morning after. Color pictures on rough newsprint turn flesh tones green or shocking pink. Endless columns of small print seem as inviting to the eye as coils of barbed wire. But the old foldover format -which enables readers to open one cover and find another is on the way out, a victim of the biweekly's growing affluence. Limited by its present design to 80 pages, Stone will switch to regular tabloid style this summer, making room for a waiting list of prospective advertisers.

The navigator of Stone's changing direction is Jann Wenner, 28, who founded the paper in 1967, owns the controlling interest, and still serves as its editor. Operating out of a converted warehouse in San Francisco, he directs a youthful staff of 80. Office eccentricities are few: occasional picnics on the floor, an incongruous barber's chair in one editor's office. Day-to-day operations are run in a low-keyed style by Managing Editor Paul Scanlon, 28, who once worked for the Wall Street Journal and shares his colleagues' distaste for organization charts and the intra-office pecking order. "Most of us came from newspapers and magazines," Scanlon says, "and we wanted to get away from all that."

Life at Stone has not always been so serene. Wenner, who grew up with the Berkeley uprisings in the mid-'60s and worked for Ramparts, scraped together $7,500 to start the paper. He cajoled six volunteers into a rent-free San Francisco loft provided by a printer in return for Stone's business. The first issue had a press run of 40,000, of which 34,000 were returned unsold. But Wenner's conviction that most of what he read about rock, drugs and the New Left "was either myth or nonsense" led to the paper's distinctive tone: tough, often thoughtful reporting of what Wenner calls the "cultural, stylistic, attitudinal change" then fermenting among the young. By mid-1969, Stone boasted 60,000 readers and had geared up a British edition.

Then the Love Apocalypse promised at Woodstock collapsed into a later welter of drug overdoses and ritual murders. Weakened by poor business management, the recession and a whopping $7,000-a-month rent bill for its new quarters, Stone seemed destined to fade along with the flower children it had celebrated. But the paper bounced back, expanding its coverage to meet a new -and far bigger -story. Lengthy investigative pieces on the Manson killings and the murder at the Altamont free concert won a 1971 National Magazine Award and a commendation for "presenting material that challenged many of the shared attitudes of its readers."

Since then, the shift toward general-interest articles has been consistent. Such prestigious over-30 contributors as Richard Brautigan, William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess and Yevgeny Yevtushenko supplement in-house writers. The hottest staff member at the moment is National Affairs Editor Hunter S. Thompson, 35, a former freelance journalist and an author specializing in the bizarre (Hell's Angels, Fear and Loath ing in Las Vegas). His spaced-out coverage of the 1972 presidential campaign was, in the tradition of New Journalism, self-indulgent, overlong and far livelier than the event itself.

The paper's editorial maturity has been matched by financial growth. With a U.S. circulation approaching 300,000 (at 750 a copy), Stone also sells 35,000 copies in Great Britain and on the Continent, and has profitable licensing arrangements with publishers in Japan, Australia and New Zealand. A Spanish-language edition is under consideration, with a prospective circulation of 80,000 in Latin America.

The paper carries an average of 30 pages of ads per issue (at rates of $2,900 per page for black-and-white, $4,950 for color). Wenner now runs a publishing house, Straight Arrow Books, and a book-distributing firm, Quick Fox. Total revenues for fiscal 1972-73 have reached $5,000,000, up from $3.87 million a year ago. The operation, Wenner says, has been "pleasantly profitable."

The demands of a growing enterprise have lately consumed more of Wenner's editorial time than he would like. He insists that he would rather be an editor than a minimogul, but his complaints are understandably muted by prosperity. Stone's slow evolution from music sheet to general-interest publication undoubtedly involves some risk; old readers may seek grassier pastures without necessarily being replaced by new customers. "Growth worries me on and off," Wenner admits, "but I still feel confident that I know what people want to read." Despite its expansion, Stone remains very much his personal show, and it is only half a joke when staffers call him "Citizen Wenner."

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