Cover stories

NO, I’M NOT going to start with the obvious, with that ditty from Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show from 1973 about wanting to be “on the cover of the Rolling Stone.” As the writer of 37 cover stories for that magazine (not that I was counting), I’m going to pull rank and tell about my own first cover.

It happened in spring of 1969. I was freelancing back then, and Jann Wenner, the founder and editor, sent me from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and into Laurel Canyon, to visit a newly popular singer-songwriter, a willowy blond from Canada named Joni Mitchell. The magazine paired my article with a profile of Judy Collins under the title “The Swan Song of Folk Music” and, in a last-minute decision, put Mitchell on the cover. Not only did I not know about it, my byline was dropped. Welcome to rock journalism.

Now, as Rolling Stone celebrates its 40th anniversary with a series of special issues, every cover is carefully planned. It wasn’t always so. As Wenner said in the collection “1,000 Covers,” “When the magazine started in 1967, I didn’t understand the importance of a cover.... It not only defines a magazine’s identity but greatly determines sales and also confers a special status to the cover subject. There were some odd choices in the early years, but on the whole they were adventurous, and often powerful -- we simply weren’t driven by newsstand considerations in the first 10 years.”

In the first seven issues, in fact, there was no cover; there was a front page -- Rolling Stone was a tabloid newspaper. The first one featured a photo of John Lennon from the film “How I Won the War.” For its eighth issue, Rolling Stone folded the paper twice, creating an 8 1/2 -by-11-inch cover space. But three issues later, in May 1968, the editors had no suitable photo of a musician for the cover and used a shot of photographer Baron Wolman’s wife, Julianna, with no explanation.

As the magazine learned about the value of the covers, they grew from funk to flash, from clueless to fearless. One cover featured a nude shot of Lennon and Yoko Ono; numerous newsstands refused to display the issue. Although it was a rock magazine, early covers ranged from Abbie Hoffman to Charles Manson, from Miles Davis to the 13-year-old Michael Jackson.

Over the years, the covers have gone from spare to sassy, with sex a common denominator, beginning in 1976 with a shot of Linda Ronstadt in a red slip and continuing with an unending string of hot babes willing to show skin, including Demi Moore, Jennifer Aniston, Madonna and Britney. Also, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, totally naked; Fleetwood Mac in bed in 1977 and, just last year, the three judges of “American Idol” -- in bed. Hey, whatever pumps up the circulation.

Rolling Stone photographers became stars, none more than Annie Leibovitz, whose portfolio includes the blue-faced Blues Brothers, a rose-bedecked Bette Midler and the last portrait of Lennon and Ono together, taken just hours before he was murdered. Leibovitz provided stellar photographs for several of my cover stories, including Steve Martin, his white tux painted in big black brushstrokes, becoming part of a Franz Kline painting.

As for Dr. Hook: When “The Cover of the Rolling Stone” made the Top 10, we could ignore their wish no longer, and we put the scruffy-looking band on the cover -- but with a cartoon illustration.

I’m not sure they ever bought five copies for their mothers.