In Print

NOT FADE AWAY: A BACKSTAGE PASS TO 20 YEARS OF ROCK & ROLL
By Ben Fong-Torres
Miller Freeman Books
$14.95; 384 pages
Recalling the inner struggle over pecking out his initial assignment from then Rolling Stone music editor Ben Fong-Torres, rock-writer-turned-filmmaker Cameron Crowe-in his foreword to Fong-Torres' "Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass To 20 Years Of Rock & Roll"-reveals the simple advice from the author that carried him through: "Write as if you were writing a letter to a friend."
Taking his own advice in "Not Fade Away," Fong-Torres offers up refreshingly candid and bombast-free missives interwoven with original articles on rock and pop colossi of the '70s, mostly drawn from the pages of Rolling Stone.
Via Fong-Torres' friendly introductions, we meet Sly Stone, Ike & Tina Turner, and Marvin Gaye at the top of their games. Janis Joplin and the Doors' Jim Morrison come alive in interviews (Morrison's last, as it turned out), and there are remarkably prescient "comeback" features on Santana ('72) and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young ('74), as well as prismatic encounters with ex-Beatles George Harrison (on his difficult, groundbreaking 1974 tour with Ravi Shankar) and Paul McCartney (soaring with Wings in '76).
There are, of course, many more pieces collected in "Not Fade Away," and the majority of them meet the title's earnest criterion; thus, they form a rough draft of music history, mainly of the early '70s, and refract much of the light and heat of that particularly fulgent period of pop history.
Yet what truly sparks this assortment of features and interviews to a brighter life than what Fong-Torres calls the "typical compilation of articles" is his true "backstage pass"-the "memoir-ish narratives" that explain the why and whither of each piece.
Fong-Torres (still the "greatest byline in the world" as a lure to the music-loving reader, according to Rolling Stone veteran John Burks) begins the tour of his past and our collective pop culture at ground zero for both-San Francisco in 1967, when he discovered the first issue of Rolling Stone.
Following his "bracing find, a new high," this Chinese-American son of an Oakland, Calif., restaurateur embarked on a still open-ended, often insecure odyssey that-against heavy parental and cultural expectations-led him to 11 years with Rolling Stone as an editor and writer and then to freelance writing, radio hosting, the managing editor post at radio trade weekly Gavin, and stints as journalism professor and book author.
Fong-Torres' whole story is well-told in his 1994 memoir "The Rice Room: Growing Up Chinese American-From Number Two Son To Rock'N'Roll," but "Not Fade Away" builds on the earlier book, focusing on the glory days of "the little San Francisco magazine that could" and illustrating the demiurge of the music writer in that post-garden/pre-punk milieu.
As tied as this book is to the incunabula of Rolling Stone (of the 34 collected pieces, 22 of those date from the magazine's 1970-77 era), Fong-Torres shows-through his variegated explorations of rock, pop, soul, and R&B artists and industry insiders-that he clearly made the most of his own talents to help create a Rolling Stone that in its golden age reflected his interests and inclinations as much as anything else.
Further, to turn on its head Rolling Stone owner Jann Wenner's imprecation that despite Fong-Torres' continuing success he would "always be Rolling Stone," one might say that the qualities that once made the magazine a cultural touchstone seem to be those of Fong-Torres himself; for you couldn't hope for a more upbeat, sane, and dryly revealing observer of popular music's halcyon era.
In the post-Stone articles in "Not Fade Away," including a portrait of Annie Leibovitz (who contributed photographs to this book) and ride-along interviews with Rickie Lee Jones and Billboard Century Award winner Joni Mitchell, Fong-Torres proves his continuing passion for music, as well as his keen eye for the vagaries and vulnerabilities of the public artist.
And luckily for the reader, Fong-Torres' modesty allied with his sensitive portraiture permit a rare glimpse beyond the "protective bubble" of the artist, into the workings of what he calls the "mysterious entertainment machine."