The Trash-Mouth Wisdom of Chris Rock

By Fred Schruers Rolling Stone October 2, 1997 A summer night in Brooklyn, N.Y., and a fine one. You can actually sit on your kitchen chair, instead of the stoop, and feel the breeze off Upper New York Bay. The streets of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant district are...

Bruce Springsteen and the Secret World

By Fred Schruers Rolling Stone February 5, 1981 Bruce Springsteen, in the abstract, is just the kind of guy my little New Jersey hometown schooled me to despise. Born seventy-seven days apart, raised maybe fifty miles apart, this beatified greaser and I grew up...

The Last Celluloid Desperado

By Grover Lewis Rolling Stone March 15, 1973 After 20 years of playing a comic strip character called Superstud, Mitchum at last is being recognized as the gifted actor he has always been. He is a master of stillness. Other actors act. Mitchum is. He has true delicacy...

Sympathy for the Devil

By Lawrence Wright Rolling Stone September 5, 1991 Is the Devil real? This certainly looks like the Evil One himself getting out of a black Jaguar and coming through the glass doors of a restaurant with a blonde on his arm. It’s an interesting proposition and one...

The First Church of Rednecks, White Socks and Blue Ribbon Beer

By Lawrence Wright Rolling Stone December 13th-27th, 1990 “I had meant to time the closing of the door with a subtle emission of a fart,” my guru said as he pulled shut the door to his room at the Holiday Inn in Oxford, Mississippi. “Evidently my timing was off.” He...

Diana Ross: An Encounter in Three Scenes

By O’Connell Driscoll Rolling Stone August 11, 1977 One: A Backstage Party September 1976: The Performer’s Lounge, Backstage at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles. A windowless basement room with concrete-block walls. The furniture consists of several couches, some...

Growing up Stevie Wonder

By O’Connell Driscoll Rolling Stone January 19, 1975 There were four old ladies sitting in the lobby of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. They were four of the oldest ladies to be found anywhere. They sat facing one another in a quartet of lackluster wing chairs, holding...

A Fistful of Dollars

By Gail Sheehy Rolling Stone July 14, 1977 November 20th, 1976, a Saturday night, Clay Felker, the New York magazine publisher, invited Rupert Murdoch, the Australian publisher, to dine at Elaine’s to celebrate the announcement that had hit New York by surprise the...

Splendor in the Short Grass

By Grover Lewis Rolling Stone 1971 Flying west, through Texas, you leave Dallas-Fort Worth behind and look out suddenly onto a rolling, bare-boned, November country that stretches away to the horizon on every side—a vast, landlocked Sargasso Sea of mesquite-dotted...

Sam Peckinpah in Mexico: Overlearning with El Jefe

By Grover Lewis Rolling Stone October 12, 1972 Limping delicately as if his boots are a couple of sizes too tight, so rockinghorse loaded on Juarez tequila he’d flunk a knee-walking test, Roy Jenson, one of the neo-Wild Bunch of characters and character actors that...

Up in Fat City: On The Set With Keach And Huston

By Grover Lewis Rolling Stone 1971 Stockton, Calif.—The Memorial Civic Auditorium, located not far from the central ganglia of this crumby hick town, is old, cavernous, sweltering hot, and overripe with the stink of vintage sweat and piss. The litter-strewn floors are...

Drinks with Liberty Vance: Lee Marvin Shoots from the Hip

By Robert Ward Rolling Stone September 3, 1981 Ransom Stoddard, attorney at law, is doing his best to cover up, but the hell-forged maniac above him just keeps grunting and drooling and lashing him with a bullwhip. Stoddard is backed up as far as he can get against a...