Rolling Stone the Seventies: The Seventies Book

When future archeologists pick apart the 1970s in America, due reverence will be paid, no doubt, to blaxploitation films, Watergate, gun-toting million-heiress Patty Hearst and her Symbionese Liberation Army pals, the finer points of the Hustle, and the collision between imported punk rock and U.S. hip-hop. Meantime, Rolling Stone--the quasi-music magazine that put its impudent stamp on that decade--has turned in a hip and heady timeline of those days of yore. Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) weighs in on the birth of Gonzo journalism, his peculiar brand of drug-driven, paranoid, and often inspired ravings that turned cultural and political reportage into mental pinball. American Indian Movement leader Russell Means recalls surviving three blizzards and "more than five million rounds of ammunition" aimed at the Native Americans who held the South Dakota village of Wounded Knee. Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders writes about her freshman year at Kent State University in Ohio when the National Guard opened fire on students protesting the Vietnam War and killed four. On alternate pages, a column chronicles such momentous events as the FDA ban of the potentially carcinogenic dye that gave us red M&Ms; John Travolta's smash hit Grease; and the prescient pardon bestowed on former President Nixon for "all federal crimes he may have committed," although he had not yet been charged with any. Though far more entertaining than intellectual, Rolling Stone: The '70s is a wondrous revival of a sandwich decade sometimes marked off as a wasteland. --Francesca ColtreraRead More