Original subtitles

[bright tone]

[dramatic sting]

[crowd cheering]

- Uh, this next song is very different

than most of my songs.

Don't make fun of me, guys.

["Same Drugs" begins]

This--this song is very personal to me,

and, uh, I wanted to, uh--

to share this one with you guys.

[humming]

♪ Today ♪

♪ Today, took it down ♪

♪ Took it, took it down, down ♪

[audience singing along] ♪ We don't ♪

♪ Do the same drugs no more ♪

♪ We don't do the--we don't-- ♪

- This is crazy.

all: ♪ Do the same drugs no more ♪

- ♪ Ooh ♪

- ♪ When did you change? ♪

♪ Wendy, you've aged ♪

♪ I thought you'd never grow up ♪

♪ I thought you'd never... ♪

- Chance the Rapper.

He's young, he's newsy, he's got hits.

I'm interested.

- ♪ I was too late, I was too late ♪

♪ A shadow of what I once was ♪

♪ Yeah, 'cause we don't do the same drugs no more ♪

- "Rolling Stone" launched a reaction

to straight establishment culture,

and it was like this explosion of color

and kids growing their hair long, sex, drugs.

- ♪ Do the same drugs ♪

- How's the John Lennon piece coming?

- I think it's a-- it's a fantastic story.

I just--it just doesn't feel like a cover to me.

- If you start out in the counterculture,

you can't stay there.

- ♪ You always were so forgetful ♪

- The counterculture doesn't even stay there.

I mean, you either grow, or you die.

- Oh-ho, look at this, look at this.

- Oh, Hunter!

- Hunter.

We had talked about, you know,

we were going to do a story about fake news?

How's that coming along?

- The magazine that has criticized the mainstream

or pushed the mainstream and tried to make it

feel uncomfortable for decades--

I mean, the question now is,

well, what happens when these people grow up?

- Next!

You know, a good series online.

We still doing Texas border? - Yeah.

- Bill McKibben's plan to fix the plan, all right.

Some solid ideas.

Okay.

Things had changed.

Now...

You know, the generation matured, got older,

but we never rejected "Rolling Stone's" past

and where it came from.

♪ ♪

[laughter]

- One last question.

Do you have anything to say to the youth of America?

- Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I do.

[laughter]

I know where it's at. Follow me.

- Hey.

["Like a Rolling Stone" plays]

- "Rolling Stone" was born in San Francisco.

The magazine grew out of the youth culture

on the western edge of the continent.

But after ten years there,

they had offices in New York that were growing,

and it was clear that New York was the center of publishing.

And we're gonna have to make a choice.

He not busy being born is busy dying.

The clear choice was New York.

In order to cover the period in which we actually moved,

we had lined up this special issue about New York,

and we actually had a cover by Andy Warhol

all ready to go,

and then Elvis died, uh,

within, you know, days of getting there.

[Elvis's "Blue Suede Shoes" plays]

So we had to all of sudden produce on the spot

in less than five days an Elvis cover.

- ♪ One for the money, two for the show ♪

♪ Three to get ready, now go, cat, go ♪

- Elvis was the king of rock and roll,

because he was the embodiment of its sins and virtues.

Grand and vulgar, rude and eloquent,

absurdly simple and awesomely complex.

He was the king, I mean, in our hearts,

which is the place where the music really comes to life.

- ♪ Do anything that you wanna do ♪

♪ But uh-uh, honey, lay off of my shoes ♪

- For "Rolling Stone,"

Elvis Presley was the central liberating figure

at the heart of rock and roll.

We might think "Rolling Stone" wouldn't have happened

without somebody like The Beatles

and the Rolling Stones.

- ♪ Drink my liquor from an old fruit jar ♪

♪ We'll do anything that you wanna do ♪

♪ But uh-uh, honey, lay off of my shoes ♪

♪ And don't you ♪

♪ Step on my blue suede shoes ♪

- But the truth is "Rolling Stone"

would not have happened without people

like Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry.

Those were the real revolutionaries

who really broke things open

and changed what was possible.

You know that sneering attitude that Presley had,

his own embodiment of seeming like a threatening punk...

♪ ♪

- ♪ All right, all right, all right ♪

♪ Well, it's blue, blue ♪

♪ My blue suede shoes ♪

- It became something else with The Beatles

and the Rolling Stones, just as it did

with the Sex Pistols and The Clash.

I came into "Rolling Stone" in 1977.

Punk had supplanted that radical element in music

that initially inspired "Rolling Stone."

I wanted to go to England and do a story on The Clash.

I had to do a fair amount of convincing.

- ♪ He's in love with rock and roll, whoa ♪

♪ He's in love with getting stoned, whoa ♪

♪ He's in love with Janie Jones, oh ♪

♪ He don't like his boring job, no ♪

♪ He's in love with rock and roll, whoa ♪

♪ He's in love with getting stoned, whoa ♪

- The Clash still were almost completely unknown in the U.S.

There was no way The Clash would be a cover story

or even a lengthy feature.

It'd be what was called a front-of-the-book piece.

- [signing indistinctly]

♪ Evening comes ♪

♪ ♪

- "Never mind that shit," says Joe Strummer,

the thuggish-looking lead singer of The Clash,

addressing some exultant kids yelling "Happy New Year"

at him from the teeming floor of the Lyceum.

"You've got your future at stake!

Take it!"

Together with the Sex Pistols,

The Clash helped spearhead the punk movement in Britain,

along the way earning a designation

as the most intellectual and political new wave band.

When the Pistols disbanded early last year,

rock press and punks alike looked to The Clash

as the movement's central symbol and hope.

- When punk began to become a sensation,

it was implicit that it was a cultural statement

of rebellion and rejection.

It was The Clash, though, who really gave punk

a necessary moral and political center.

♪ ♪

They had a sense of the political moment,

especially in England during the rise of Margaret Thatcher

and what they saw in America at the same time

under the years of Ronald Reagan.

And they stood for the people

who were under fire at the time,

people who had their opportunities

being stripped away from them.

- ♪ Police, police, police and thieves ♪

- ♪ Oh, yeah ♪

- ♪ Police, police, police and thieves ♪

- ♪ Oh, yeah ♪

- ♪ From Genesis to Revelation ♪

♪ Throw it up, throw it up ♪

♪ Ooh-ooh ♪ - ♪ Yeah, yeah ♪

- ♪ And all the crowd walking ♪

♪ Day by day ♪

- Strummer's vocals sound as dangerous as he looks.

Screwing his face up into a broken-tooth yowl,

he gleefully bludgeons words.

- ♪ Turn war officer ♪

♪ Hear what I say ♪

- I try to say as much

to a reticent Joe Strummer after the show

as we sit in a dingy backstage dressing room.

"Our music's violent," says Strummer.

"We're not.

"If anything, our songs are supposed to take

"the piss out of violence.

"We sing about the world that affects us.

"We're not just another wank rock group

"like Boston or Aerosmith.

What fucking shit."

♪ ♪

- I often think of The Clash

as being the real extension of The Beatles.

[playing "Let the Good Times Roll"]

♪ ♪

- ♪ Come on, my baby, let the good times roll ♪

- Lennon and McCartney had a style when they came in,

but they responded to changes in music.

They responded to changes in the society around them.

- ♪ All night long ♪

- The Clash did pretty much the same thing.

They grew.

- ♪ Come on, baby, let me thrill your soul ♪

- And like Lennon and McCartney,

it was pretty clear to anybody who listened

to their lyrics or saw them

that they, um-- they knew what they stood for.

- All right, what we got for you tonight is--

You ain't got no baseball!

No baseball tonight!

You ain't got no football! They're on strike!

But what we have got for you is a little bit

of what's going on in London at the moment!

- Punk music was vital.

The magazine was not going to overlook it.

- The Clash, come on!

- But it wasn't going to give it the same prominence

it would give somebody like Tom Petty or Fleetwood Mac.

Certainly by the 1980s, there was some division

about what should the magazine cover.

There were arguments between writers and editors

about where had the values gone,

or where was the judgment going.

["Should I Stay or Should I Go" begins]

- [yells]

♪ ♪

- ♪ Darling, you got to let me know ♪

♪ Should I stay or should I go ♪

♪ If you say that you are mine ♪

♪ I'll be here till the day I die ♪

♪ Come on, and let me know ♪

♪ Should I stay or should I go ♪

- So you know what the problem is here.

The problem is here a guy like you is not supposed

to end up wealthy and this successful.

You were a hero figure

starting this bold, new publication.

Here you are now in the plush New York offices,

nice suit on.

- I think it's wonderful that something that started

in the '60s and as part of the '60s

and part of that generation is successful

and is true to its ideals.

- ♪ Should I stay or should I go now ♪

- "Rolling Stone" had a big advertising campaign,

in which they were trying to get more advertisers

really by--by saying they weren't quite as irresponsible

and hippy-like as they once were.

- Hate it.

[laughter]

- ♪ This indecision's bugging me ♪

- I'm not responsible for the yuppie generation.

"Rolling Stone" is not a yuppie publication.

Never has been, never has advertised itself as such,

never has used the phrase,

never has had an advertising campaign

that says "we're yuppies" or anything like that.

I mean, that is all nonsense and horse[bleep].

- ♪ Come on, and let me know ♪

- If you want to sit back and drive your [bleep] BMWs

and eat your white wine and pesto,

you're gonna get what you deserve.

- [yells]

- And, you know,

you'll get out of politics and stay rich.

- ♪ Okay, wise guy ♪

♪ So what's the big secret? ♪

- And you become a generation of swine.

How's that?

[Strummer yelling]

♪ ♪

♪ Should I stay or should I go now ♪

- ♪ Yo me enfrío o lo soplo ♪

- ♪ Should I stay or should I go now ♪

- ♪ Yo me enfrío o lo soplo ♪

- ♪ If I go, there will be trouble ♪

- ♪ Si me voy va a haber peligro ♪

- ♪ And if I stay, it will be double ♪

- Why did you do this campaign?

- Uh, to attract more advertisers.

Try and say, "Well, is 'Rolling Stone,'

"trying to reject, you know, these--

some old values or, you know, something like that?"

Um, are really way off the mark.

In fact what it does,

it really celebrates all that stuff.

- ♪ If I stay, it will be double ♪

- ♪ Será el doble ♪

- That was a "Rolling Stone" reader.

And this is us today, and we've changed.

- ♪ Should I stay or should I go ♪

[crowd cheering]

- It started off as music and politics.

The gossip crept in.

That was a deadly thing.

Bon Jovi or whatever, you know,

what color he paints his fingernails

is more important than the fact

that Ronald Reagan is president.

I think it's a shame.

I don't know how you feel.

Uh, I think Jann,

in the darkness of his private nights,

should be ashamed and is ashamed

that "Rolling Stone" is not more of a weapon and a tool.

- Hunter, come back to work, then.

I mean, I can't go out and create a, you know,

a new Hunter or do what Hunter does.

I mean, if Hunter feels that his stuff or his interests

are missing, well, that's 'cause he's not doing it.

I can't go out-- I mean, there's not another

Hunter Thompson around.

I can't go out and-- and make that happen.

That's up to him more than it's up to me.

- The situation with Hunter when I arrived

was that he and Jann were still chewing

over that old argument about the magazine.

They were like crazy dogs growling over this

for years and years and years.

But then this Roxanne Pulitzer story began leaking out.

It was a divorce case,

heir to the great Pulitzer fortune

and young, beautiful Roxanne.

I thought this was perfect for Hunter.

- Nasty? Public? You bet.

This is divorce Palm Beach style.

At stake?

The Pulitzer fortune,

estimated at up to $25 million.

- They were suing each other for basically doing drugs

and sleeping with all of the same people--

the upper crust of society in Palm Beach.

- There was, the court was told,

Belgian Grand Prix driver Jackie Ickx,

French baker Hubert Fouret,

real estate broker James Murdoch,

and a trumpet, which Roxanne allegedly took

to bed with her to communicate with the dead.

- I called Hunter, and I said,

"This is really a story about the invention

"of American tabloid journalism.

This is your chance to just tee off on all of that."

He said, "Well, Jann will never let me do that."

I said, "Well, Jann says you won't do it.

He says you don't want to do the work anymore."

He said, "Ah!"

- Case number 81-5263

in the Juvenile and Family Division

of the Circuit Court of the 15th Judicial Circuit,

uh, family division.

Ooh, here we go.

Roxanne Pulitzer blew into town

more than ten years ago.

A ripe little cheerleader just a year or so

out of high school in Cassadega, New York.

[Donna Summer's "Bad Girls" plays]

♪ ♪

Herbert "Pete" Pulitzer Junior,

52-year-old millionaire grandson

of the famous newspaper publisher.

He had his pick of the ladies,

and he particularly enjoyed the young ones.

- That Pulitzer piece was, I think, the sort of birth

of a consciousness about tabloid journalism

because of the way Hunter just took it to all the limits.

- ♪ Bad girls ♪

♪ Talking about the sad girls ♪

- "She was an incorrigible coke slut," he said.

And on top of all that, she was a lesbian

or at least some kind of pansexual troilist.

In six and a half years of marriage,

she had humped almost everything

she could get her hands on.

- You have to stop yourself for a second

and realize that all of the people

he was writing about in that divorce voted for Nixon.

I mean, it was a different way to slice up the culture.

- ♪ But you want a good time ♪

- The very name "Palm Beach,"

long synonymous with old wealth and aristocratic style,

was coming to be associated with berserk sleaziness--

a place where price tags mean nothing,

where pampered animals are openly worshipped in church

and naked millionaires gnaw brassieres

off the chests of their own daughters.

- ♪ Whoa-oh ♪

- With all the vile treachery among friends

and cheap witchcraft and champagne troilism

all day and all night in front of the servants

while decent people were asleep

or at least working at real jobs

for sane amounts of money,

what mainly emerged from the testimony was a picture

of a lifestyle beyond the wildest and lewdest dreams

of anything on "Dallas" or even "Flamingo Road."

Nowhere in the record of the Pulitzer trial

is there any mention of anybody

who had to go to work in the morning.

- ♪ Beep, beep ♪

- Now, tell me about the goings on in Palm Beach.

- Well, I've been going to court every morning

for, uh, two weeks at 7:00. - Yeah.

- And, uh, for me to go anywhere at 7:00 is real hard.

So I, uh--I tend to stay up all night.

- Yeah.

- So, in other words, I stayed up all night for two weeks.

- Sure, you don't sleep at all, do you?

- This is about the 188th hour.

- Yeah. - I want to prove something.

You know, I want to prove--

I'm not sure what. [laughter]

[mockingly] Ha ha ha ha.

- So you're, uh-- [laughter]

- This is the Palm Beach I've been trying to look--

I've been, uh, educating myself to think

like the Palm Beach life. - Uh-huh.

- And, uh, I've come to some surprising

life stances in this.

[funk music]

- I am living the Palm Beach life now.

Cruising the beach at dawn in a red Chrysler convertible

with George Shearing on the radio

and a head full of bogus cocaine,

two beautiful lesbians in the front seat beside me,

telling jokes to each other in French.

We are on our way to an orgy,

and the girls are drinking champagne.

There is a wet parking ticket

flapping under the windshield,

and it bores me.

The girls are naked now,

long hair in the wind and perfumed nipples

bouncing in the dull blue light of the dashboard.

One of them is tipping a glass of champagne

to my mouth as we slow down for a curve near the ocean.

♪ ♪

And...hello.

And that's what you don't want to do, you silly bitch.

There is a lot of wreckage in the fast lane these days.

Not even the rich feel safe from it.

People are looking for reasons.

The smart say they can't understand it,

and the dumb snort cocaine in rich discos

and stomp to a feverish beat.

The stomping of the rich

is not a noise to be ignored in troubled times.

It usually means they're feeling anxious or confused,

and when the rich feel anxious and confused,

they act like wild animals.

Vultures, vultures, vultures, hideous!

Thick necks, beaks.

Hovering creatures looking for carrion.

- I was Hunter's fact-checker on that story.

Now, to be Hunter Thompson's fact-checker

is one of the sketchiest professions

in all of journalism,

and Hunter takes it totally seriously.

The stuff that he wants to get right that's not

in the Gonzo realm, you know, he really wants to get right.

♪ ♪

You know, Hunter's great aphorism

about fact-checking is, if you call somebody

a thieving pig-fucker,

you better be able to produce the pig.

[pig squeals]

- When you go against taboos,

you bring a combination of humor and seriousness to it,

which, uh, opens a few more doors

than if you bring a sledgehammer.

Occasionally I'll make a mistake.

I don't like to hurt people,

but if you're going to have to deal in this world,

which is occasionally pretty rough,

you're going to hurt somebody usually by accident,

so you may as well hurt the right people,

and that's a value judgment.

- That's a pretty good-- - And, uh--

I mean, if I'm wrong,

well, I'm going to suffer for it.

- He had this fondness for Roxanne,

but I think she liked him, too,

and they were peas in a pod.

- In the end,

she got even less than her lawyer--

no house, no children.

The whole package came to not much more than Pulitzer

had spent on the day-to-day maintenance of his boats.

- ♪ Rock on, gold dust woman ♪

♪ Take your silver spoon ♪

♪ Dig your grave ♪

- Many people said Roxanne Pulitzer

is gold digger.

She wants her husband's money. - Right.

I was dealt a certain hand of cards back in 1982,

and I lost a lot, and all I've tried to do

is play those cards the best I can,

and, um, I don't feel that I've done anything wrong.

- Roxanne is a star now.

She was on the cover of "People"

and a featured celebrity guest on "Good Morning America."

The best piece of ass in Palm Beach

is a curious case these days.

From the ashes of scandal and defeat,

she has emerged as a cult figure of sorts,

a kind of national bitch for the '80s.

- ♪ Well, did she make you cry ♪

♪ Make you break down ♪

♪ Shatter your illusions of love? ♪

♪ And now tell me... ♪

- Long after the Pulitzer case was finally over,

I was still brooding darkly on it.

Why do the finest flowers of the American dream

turn up in asylums, divorce courts,

and other gray hallways of the living doomed?

What is it about being born free

and rich beyond worry that makes people crazy?

- There's that darkness to the American spirit.

You know, Hunter was deeply invested in America,

whether you call it the American dream

or American politics,

or all the things he wrote about, you know,

were always looking at the dark side

of the American dream,

the dark spirit as well as the hope.

- Any fool with a hundred dollar bill in his pocket

can whip a gram of cocaine into his head

and make sense of just about anything.

[sniffs] [animal growling]

Ah, yes, I see it all very clearly now.

These bastards have been lying to me all along.

Stand aside. Let the big dog eat.

[towel snaps]

[glass shatters]

- It was during that period that we were winning

doing cultural coverage.

People would complain that we were abandoning the music,

but that was bullshit.

We were covering the culture.

[crowd cheering]

[Talking Heads' "Burning Down the House" begins]

- Who got a match?

♪ ♪

- There was no musical center to the '80s

as there had been in the '50s or '60s.

Music had split off into a lot of fields

and different mainstreams.

- ♪ My house is out of the ordinary ♪

- ♪ That's right ♪

- And we were trying to persuade the magazine

to give coverage to Talking Heads

or give a lead review to Joy Division.

- ♪ Burning down the house ♪

♪ ♪

- As a music magazine

that tried to be a magazine of record,

"Rolling Stone" wrote

about many musical forms of the time.

♪ ♪

- ♪ Burning down the house ♪

- That music created room for people

that had been successfully kept out before.

♪ ♪

- That power of risk, of threat, of change,

certainly existed in the '80s.

- ♪ Burning down the house ♪

[crowd cheers]

- It's 22 before the hour,

and here's some news you can use.

If you want to buy a rock magazine, don't go to Walmart.

The department store chain based in Arkansas

has stripped all rock publications

from its shelves,

from "Rolling Stone" to "Super Teen."

Walmart took the action after evangelist Jimmy Swaggart

condemned rock magazines on national television.

Joining us to talk about this in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,

this morning, the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart.

Well, I've got a copy here of "Rolling Stone" magazine,

and it has--oh, it has an article about a comedian.

It has an article about some rock groups.

Now, do you really think that's a--

that's a bad influence on young people?

- These magazines, as far as I'm concerned,

are pornography, pure and simple.

And they're the only pornography that's printed

for children and distributed to children

and distributed by family outlets,

and this is very serious.

[thunder rumbles]

- God was speaking to Jimmy.

He came to him in a dream.

There was an enormous field of cotton below a gloomy sky.

God told Jimmy that the field

needed harvesting before the storm came.

"If you fail, there is no one else to do it."

This was the stark commandment that Jimmy lived with.

He had become the new messiah.

- People who live intensely religious lives

are in some ways living symbolic lives,

and as a writer, that's what really drew me

to Jimmy Swaggart.

[musical flourish]

- Well, hallelujah!

Praise the Lord!

- I have to say, I loved the music

in his church.

The service began with a drumbeat,

and then, wow, we were on our way!

- And all over this place,

let's have an old-fashioned camp meeting.

- ♪ I'll fly away ♪

♪ Oh, Glory ♪

♪ I'll fly away ♪

- ♪ Fly away ♪

- ♪ And now, when I die ♪

♪ Hallelujah by and by ♪

♪ Oh, I'll fly away ♪

- I saw it as a "Rolling Stone" story

for several reasons.

One, there was the connection

to rock and roll, because, you know,

Jerry Lee Lewis is Jimmy Swaggart's cousin.

- ♪ Now, when I die... ♪

- And Mickey Gilley, a country music singer,

is also a first cousin.

They all lived in this little town of Ferriday, Louisiana.

- All right, now, I want to turn you guys loose,

and let's relive the old days in Ferriday, Louisiana.

["Lewis Boogie" begins]

- ♪ My name is Jerry Lee Lewis ♪

♪ I come from Ferriday, Louisiana ♪

♪ I'm gonna do you a little boogie on this old piano ♪

♪ Doing mighty fine, I'm gonna make you shake it ♪

♪ Make you do it and do it and do it and do it ♪

♪ And do it until you break it ♪

♪ It's called the Lewis Boogie, Lewis way ♪

♪ I like to do my boogie woogie every day ♪

- There was this little Assembly of God church,

and there was a piano

that these three kids learned how to play.

♪ ♪

- Play me one, Mickey!

- They had very few outlets to escape,

but music was one,

and religion was the other.

♪ ♪

- [shouts indistinctly]

♪ ♪

Yeah! Go, boy!

♪ ♪

- So Jerry Lee took the musical escape route,

as did Mickey Gilley.

- ♪ Lewis Boogie, Lewis way ♪

♪ Now, me and Mickey do our boogie every day ♪

♪ ♪

[audience applauds]

♪ ♪

- Jimmy turned to religion,

but he hung on to the music portion of it as well.

There's certainly the element of performance

that reminded me so much of his cousin.

♪ ♪

But there was a kind ecstasy about his rapturous sermons.

- I'm coming out!

Without sin! Of the salvation!

To set the country free!

By the power of Almighty God!

[wild cheers and applause]

You say, Jimmy Swaggart...

you're preaching to hundreds of millions of people.

You're not supposed to be that exuberantly emotional.

[cheers and applause]

You have lost your dignity and your decorum.

I'll admit I have.

[laughter]

But when I speak of Jesus Christ...

[speaking in tongues]

That He lifted man above the shadows,

broke the bombs and the chains

and the shackles,

because when He walked out of that tomb,

I walked out of that tomb with Him.

When He walked out of that tomb,

I walked out of that tomb with Him!

When He walked out of that tomb,

Jimmy Swaggart walked out of that tomb with Him!

[cheers and applause]

- No single person had ever assembled

such a global television audience,

and it was difficult to foretell

what the consequences

of such a supranational phenomenon might be.

Although Swaggart's goal was to evangelize the world

in the last days before Armageddon,

he also had allied himself with the Christian Right

and was vigorously pressing its social agenda.

- Homosexuality,

the filth that I will touch upon in this message

that beggars description.

I want to make a statement.

The homosexuals are not gays.

They are perverts.

[applause]

And today there are nearly 300

publicly advertised meeting places

for homosexuals called "glory holes,"

where gangs of homosexuals meet

and, with little or no sanitation,

practice oral-anal and oral-penal sex with many men,

sometimes as many as 16 in a single encounter,

writhing like snakes on the floor,

protected by the United States government and politicians.

- It was kind of funny to me,

because I was representing "Rolling Stone,"

which, if anything, stands for all of those

cultural issues that Swaggart opposed.

- People in the reporting profession

thought he never believed any of this stuff anyway.

He was just in it for the money and the power.

I thought maybe he did believe it.

Maybe he is actually living out some sort of drama.

I was interested in him,

but the scandal gave me the excuse to write the story.

[The Stone Roses's "I Wanna Be Adored" plays]

- The secret that burned inside Jimmy Swaggart

was that he had been a slave

of sexual perversion since the age of ten.

He had been chosen by God to evangelize the world

in the last days, and yet his own soul

was losing ground in a desperate battle with Satan.

- ♪ I don't have to sell my soul ♪

♪ He's already in me ♪

♪ I don't need to sell my soul ♪

- His cousin Mickey Gilley would say later,

"Jimmy to us was like Jesus

walking on the face of the Earth again."

- ♪ I wanna be adored ♪

- "But Jesus was a role Jimmy wasn't quite ready to play."

♪ ♪

- You want to know the very first time

I saw Jimmy Swaggart?

I was standing in the Texas Motel.

I told my girlfriend, I said,

"Look at this man, he keeps riding around

and riding around in this big Town Car."

And I looked, and I looked again, and I said,

"Girl, that's Jimmy Swaggart."

I got in his car, and he asked me,

if he gave me $10,

would I pull down my pants and let him

play with my pussy while he jacked off.

- It seemed that he was more interested

in depravity than in sex,

and in bringing himself low.

- ♪ I wanna be adored ♪

- He might have had a mistress.

He might have been able to hire a high-class call girl.

After all, you know, he was getting

half a million dollars a day in contributions.

People were sending in their wedding rings.

He had his own zip code.

He was, uh, one of the most powerful figures

in the country.

And yet he would go to these depressing,

squalid little motels on airline highway

and seek out women who were advertising themselves

by sitting out in a plastic chair

in front of the motels.

- ♪ You adore me ♪

- If you take the symbolic view

of Jimmy Swaggart's life...

- ♪ You adore me ♪

- There was a devil on one shoulder

and the angel on the other.

- ♪ I wanna, I wanna ♪

♪ I gotta be adored ♪

- And it was almost like he was begging to be caught.

♪ ♪

- To my Lord and my savior...

I have sinned against You, my Lord.

And I would ask that Your precious blood...

Would wash and cleanse

every stain,

never to be remembered against me anymore.

[Eurythmics's "Missionary Man" plays]

- On April 8th, he was officially defrocked

by the Assemblies of God.

He has been booted off

the two major Christian television networks.

Students have deserted his Bible college.

IRS agents are poring over his books.

"Maybe there is no other man in history

more humiliated than me," Swaggart has said,

with his usual breathtaking perspective

on his own importance.

- ♪ Well, I was born an original sinner ♪

♪ I was born from original sin ♪

♪ And if I had a dollar bill for all the things I've done ♪

♪ There'd be a mountain of money ♪

♪ Piled up to my chin, hey ♪

- The agreement that he had made with the church

was that he would lay low for a while,

and he couldn't.

He couldn't bring himself to do that.

I went to one of his services,

which was normally filled to the brim,

but after all of his scandal, it was sparsely attended.

There was another preacher that morning,

but Swaggart kept jumping up

and seizing the microphone and talking in tongues.

He reminded me of a cult, you know, that wanted to run.

He just could not be suppressed.

At the end of the service,

people were lining up to give him money,

and I got in the line.

He put his arms around me, and I said,

"I'm from 'Rolling Stone.'"

And he said, "'Rolling Stone'? Good God!"

- ♪ But don't mess with a missionary man ♪

- Then the guy behind me was a private investigator

who stuck a subpoena in his hand.

So it was a bad morning for Jimmy Swaggart.

♪ ♪

- I think Swaggart's disgrace

put the brakes on that whole televangelist movement.

all: Right now. - This morning...

- It's still very much a part of us,

but it's not near as potent

and doesn't pose quite the danger that it did

in the late '80s when Jimmy Swaggart

was at his full bloom.

[applause, organ music]

[crowd cheering]

[U2's "Bullet the Blue Sky" plays]

♪ ♪

- ♪ In the locust wind ♪

♪ Comes a rattle and hum ♪

♪ Jacob wrestled the angel ♪

♪ And the angel was overcome ♪

♪ You plant a demon seed ♪

♪ You raise a flower of fire ♪

♪ See them burning crosses ♪

♪ See the flames higher and higher ♪

♪ Bullet the blue sky ♪

♪ Bullet the blue ♪

♪ Bullet the blue ♪

- You know, I loved my time at "Rolling Stone."

I did a U2 cover, and I did a Neil Young cover,

and I did all this other stuff, too,

but hip-hop was the most vital

and the most exciting thing that was going on.

1992, a lot of people still looked at hip-hop

as an outsider genre, which felt crazy.

That was like covering jazz in the '40s,

to be there when bebop happened,

or, you know, covering rock and roll in the '60s.

You knew every day that this was

the most vital and the most creative force

that was happening,

and you were watching the world changing around you.

[Public Enemy's "By the Time I Get to Arizona" plays]

[people screaming]

♪ ♪

- ♪ Well, I got 25 days to do it ♪

♪ If a wall in the way, just watch me go through it ♪

♪ 'Cause I gotta do what I gotta do ♪

♪ P.E. number one gets the job done ♪

- The year began with an overblown controversy

over Public Enemy's video

"By the Time I Get to Arizona"...

- ♪ That's the way it is, he got to get his ♪

♪ Talking MLK ♪

- Which depicted the group assassinating the state's

elected officials for refusing to establish a holiday

honoring Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday.

- That I am a racist...

that I am a supporter of the KKK.

- Looming over all of the year's events

was the specter of the April riots in Los Angeles.

- ♪ This is Sister Souljah ♪

♪ Public Enemy, security of the first world ♪

♪ And all allied forces ♪

- In June, presidential candidate Bill Clinton

took a cheap shot at Sister Souljah,

quoting questionable riot-related remarks.

- She told "The Washington Post"

about a month ago, and I quote,

"If black people kill black people every day,

why not have a week and kill white people?"

- Clinton's use of those comments

was clearly out of context,

presenting Souljah as an indefensible racist.

- If you took the words "white" and "black"

and you reversed them,

you might think David Duke was giving that speech.

♪ ♪

- Democratic presidential contender Bill Clinton

has chosen to attack not the issues

but a young African woman

who is very well educated and a community servant.

When the rebellions occurred in Los Angeles,

everybody ran...

- ♪ So I pray, I pray every day ♪

♪ I do and praise Jah the maker ♪

- To the hip-hop community

and asked us were we surprised.

I said that, no, I could not possibly have been surprised.

In the mind-set of a gang member,

why not kill white people?

- ♪ On my freedom, oppressor, people beater ♪

- What was so revolutionary about hip-hop at that time,

kids who were listening to those records

understood tensions between the police

and the black community in L.A. before the riots,

and nobody else did.

- ♪ Go, go, go, go ♪

♪ ♪

♪ By the time I get to Arizona ♪

♪ Zona, zona, zona ♪

♪ By the time I get to Arizona ♪

♪ Zona, zona, zona ♪

- I remember being at "Rolling Stone"

and kind of being furious

when Nirvana broke and saying,

"God damn it!

"You all want a rock band so bad

"that here's one and they have one big song,

"and they get the cover of the magazine,

"and I can't get Public Enemy

"on the cover of the magazine after, you know,

three or four world-changing records."

- ♪ Hey, young world ♪

- ♪ The world is yours ♪ - ♪ Hey, young world ♪

- You know, in the '80s, hip-hop was a--

this was an East coast thing,

this was a New York City thing.

- ♪ This rap here ♪ - ♪ It may cause concern ♪

- Nobody had written about urban L.A. gang culture.

Nobody had written about the violence in Los Angeles.

That didn't really exist.

- ♪ Times have changed ♪

- ♪ Hey, it's cool to look bummy ♪

♪ And be a dumb dummy and disrespect your mommy ♪

- ♪ Have you forgotten ♪

- ♪ Who put you on this Earth, huh? ♪

- ♪ Who brought you up right ♪

- ♪ And who loved you since your birth ♪

- And then Ice-T started making

some of his early records like "6 in the Mornin'."

- I was deeply involved in the streets, hustling.

I would make rhymes for my crew.

Gangsta rhymes, criminal rhymes.

But when hip-hop came along,

I would try to rhyme like the rappers in hip-hop rhymed,

about parties and stuff.

- ♪ Scream, whoopee-doo, go for yours ♪

♪ 'Cause dreams come true ♪

- And my friends were like,

"Say that shit you say about us!"

You know, I'm like, "But those are criminal rhymes.

Like, you don't want to say those."

And they would-- they said,

"Say them, just sing them!"

So I did a song called "6 in the Mornin" with,

"6:00 in the morning, police at my door.

"Fresh Adidas squeak across the bathroom floor.

"Out the back window I made my escape.

"Didn't even get a chance to grab my old-school tape.

"Mad with no music, but happy 'cause free,

"and the streets to a player is the place to be.

"I got a knot in my pocket weighing at least a grand.

"Gold on my neck, my pistols close at hand.

"I'm a self-made monster of the city streets.

"Remotely controlled by hard hip-hop beats.

"But just living in the city is a serious task

"Didn't know what the cops wanted.

Didn't have time to ask."

This was the invention of what they call gangsta rap.

♪ Didn't want trouble but the shit must fly ♪

♪ Squabbled with this sucker, shanked him in the eye ♪

♪ But just living in the county is a serious task ♪

♪ Nigga didn't know what happened ♪

♪ Didn't have time to ask ♪

That record hit.

"6 in the Mornin'" hit.

And I was like, "Wow.

People like this shit."

- Ice-T and I had a relationship in place.

The first big piece that I did with him

was I did a feature

when the "New Jack City" movie came out.

And then we did some other things in between.

I remember speaking to him on his car phone

in the midst of the L.A. riots.

Ice-T, by this time, had established

not only his rap career,

he had already started exploring

these other interests that he had.

He made no secret ever that he was also

this metalhead, rock and roller.

[upbeat hip-hop music]

- Now, I'm doing this rap, and I noticed

that when we would play the up-tempo records,

they would mosh.

Mosh pits would start.

♪ ♪

A mosh pit is fascinating.

What is really going on? Is that dancing?

Is this some kind of release of energy,

you know, male testosterone just going crazy?

So I came back home and I'm like,

I want to do a rock band.

So I got my bandmate Ernie C.,

who played guitar all through Crenshaw.

I got Mooseman, who was a weed dealer,

but he could play bass.

Beatmaster V, who was a weed dealer,

but he could play drums.

I said, "We're going to make this group Body Count."

We're going to mix Suicidal with Slayer with Black Sabbath.

It's gonna be fast, evil music.

[Body Count's "Body Count" begins]

♪ It's real fucked up ♪

At this time, Body Count, we were just a concept.

We hadn't made an album.

We were playing, like, pizza joints.

♪ Goddamn, what a brother gotta do ♪

♪ To get a message through ♪

♪ To the red, white and blue? ♪

Yo, Beatmaster V,

take these motherfuckers to South Central.

♪ ♪

Ha ha!

The craziest member of Body Count

was my drummer, Beatmaster V.

We used to always say he's got, you know,

one foot in the penitentiary,

the other one on a banana peel.

He was that guy.

- ♪ Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est ♪

- I, uh, walked into the rehearsal hall

singing, "psycho killer, qu'est que c'est."

And he goes, we need a cop killer!

And he started just rambling off all the stuff

the cops were doing, how they were whupping people's asses,

running up in the spot, shot this guy's baby.

Just dirty cop shit.

And my wheels started turning.

I'm like, "What if somebody snapped?

What if police brutality sent somebody over the edge?"

So coming off of "Psycho Killer,"

I turned the psycho killer into a cop killer.

This next record is dedicated

to some personal friends of mine--the LAPD.

For every cop that has ever taken advantage of somebody,

beat 'em down or hurt 'em,

for every one of those fucking police,

I'd like to take a pig out here in this parking lot

and shoot 'em in their motherfucking face.

["Cop Killer" begins]

♪ ♪

The album was out for a year...

♪ Cop killer ♪

Before it was brought to the attention

of the Fraternal Order of the Police from Austin, Texas.

all: Hey-hey, ho-ho, Time Warner's got to go!

- Texas police who started the controversy

urged Time Warner to pull the album made by Ice-T.

- It calls for cold-blooded, premeditated murder.

- And I call on every American to condemn that kind of thing!

- Actor Charlton Heston, an NRA supporter,

joined the protest against the album.

- "Die, die, die, pigs, die.

Police, I know your family's grieving."

Catchy little number, isn't it?

- ♪ I know your family's grieving ♪

♪ Fuck 'em, cop killer ♪

♪ But tonight we get even, ha ha ♪

- For the police, it was a very savvy political move,

because at the moment, the cops were under siege,

just like they are today.

They turned me into the enemy, and everyone got mad at me

and stopped looking at what they were doing.

So they--they-- they used me in a way.

♪ ♪

- When this story broke,

I remember going to Jann's office and saying, "Look,

I can make one phone call and go and get with this guy."

- "The Source" magazine, which was the hip-hop

so-called Bible at the time, they were telling me,

"You got to give an exclusive interview to us."

So I was like, "You guys aren't the source, I'm the source.

Y'all report on the source."

"Rolling Stone" was very polite.

Alan, who wrote it, was a friend.

He was like, "Ice, you know, we would really be--

we'd like to give you this," and I was like, "You know what?

"I can be in 'The Source' every day of the week, right?

I'm gonna do 'Rolling Stone.'"

So now I go to "Rolling Stone,"

I say "Yeah, let's go. Let's talk about this shit."

No, I mean, I wrote the record.

It's a record about a character.

I know the character.

I've woken up feeling like this character.

I've never clicked over,

but when I saw that shit on TV,

I wanted to get out there. I know a lot of people did.

And to me, to say I can't write about this

because I'm gonna offend somebody

is bullshit, you know?

I didn't think it was going to be the cover.

Mark Seliger, he took the picture, right?

He had these ideas.

"We're going to put you in a police uniform."

So I'm like, "What?" [chuckles]

He goes, "No, this is the ultimate nightmare

"of a racist cop, is getting pulled over by you

and having you have the billy club."

And it actually did what he said it was going to do.

It outraged a lot of people.

See, one thing about being, you know, a black artist,

a lot of people don't think that rappers

are capable of art.

They don't--they take everything we say literal.

They don't understand that we might have

a grain of intelligence.

So that's all a part of the racism and shit

that goes into it.

You know, like, when they attacked the record,

they called it a rap record, which it wasn't.

It was a rock record.

- ♪ B-C, B-C ♪

- ♪ South Central, nigga ♪ - ♪ B-C ♪

♪ ♪

You know, if they say, "Well, it's a rock record,"

well, people might go,

"Well, hey, I like Fleetwood Mac.

"Maybe, you know-- maybe it's like

"one of those '60s records

where people were against the police, you know?"

But by saying it's rap, it's like,

"Oh, it's the niggas talking that shit."

That became the issue.

I saw deeper than even the song.

It was me transferring black rage to white youth,

and once you cross that border

and you put those white fists in the air

singing about the same injustices, that's the fear.

The fear is he's crossing over to our kids.

And, you know, when that parent wants to say,

"Oh, yeah, you know, those niggers are rioting,"

his little daughter is going,

"They're not niggers, Dad, and they have a reason."

♪ ♪

But I learned firsthand

that you have the right to say anything,

but people also have the right to get angry.

If I want to say something anti-gay,

well, I got to be prepared for the gay movement to attack me.

If I say something against women--they have that right.

So you can't just, you know, like I say,

you can't go home to your girl and say,

"Yo, I fucked your sister. Free speech."

It doesn't-- you know, it's like,

"Yeah, free speech, but, yeah!"

So my mistake was thinking I could sing anything

and there would be no repercussions.

- Sitting next to Ice-T is one of his main critics,

Tipper Gore, who is founder of the PMRC,

which for years has been actively fighting

what they call the destructive influence

of today's music lyrics on children.

- We have freedom of speech in this country,

and you have a right to have lyrics that abuse women,

that use racism, but was have a right

to speak out against them, and we also have a right

to alert parents that this is being marketed aggressively

to very young kids at a time

when they are forming their opinions.

- I think what nobody was prepared for

in this situation was just how strong an adversary

they had picked in going after Ice-T.

- I'll just put it all in a nutshell.

The enemies of the music is what fuels the fire.

As soon as a kid comes home from school

and his mother says,

"Have you listened to your Ice-T album today?"

I'm through.

Rock and roll has always got to have an enemy.

That's what keeps it rock and roll!

[overlapping shouting] - Stop hating his music!

- You were dealing with somebody

who was absolutely up for whatever sort of debate,

whatever sort of challenge you were gonna throw at him.

- You know, Tipper was very outspoken,

but if you noticed when Clinton

and Al Gore ran for president,

you never heard anything else from her.

Someone issued a gag order.

Someone says, "We're trying this youth vote.

You must remain quiet."

And I guess Tipper is just shopping for shoes now.

I don't know where she's at.

But she ain't, uh, speaking.

She was unhip, and they came off as the hip guys.

- Here's Arsenio....

Hall!

[lively saxophone music]

♪ ♪

- Bill Clinton was the first Baby Boomer

to run for president,

and the first Democrat to come along in a long time,

and, of course, I found this extremely compelling.

♪ ♪

And I just thought

this is a perfect subject of "Rolling Stone,"

which accompanied the rise and spoke for this generation

through the music we spoke for,

the things that they had read in "Rolling Stone"

or the crusades we'd been a part of.

- The big man...

[crowd cheering]

- The first time we interviewed Clinton,

we went down to Little Rock, Arkansas, during the campaign.

It was kind of this joint interview between myself,

Hunter, P.J. O'Rourke, and Bill Greider--

our top political team.

- I was managing editor at "The Washington Post,"

and Hunter claims that he was up late one night

taking a leak and thought of me,

and that was the inspiration for my career change.

In "Rolling Stone," you're not talking

to the professor you had in English 201.

You're talking to the people who read this magazine.

It was liberating.

- ♪ Come on, baby, let the good times roll ♪

♪ Come on, baby ♪

- You know, Jann Wenner was this kid

who loved rock and roll

and decided he'd start a rock and roll magazine,

and he's interviewing

the next president of the United States

in this group that he assembled

that's a pretty weird group.

- ♪ Come on, baby, show me how you feel, yeah ♪

- We had drank too much the night before

and got up in the morning raring to go.

It was taking place in this joint called Doe's Café,

which is where all of the campaign people

and the press people ate and drank.

- ♪ Come on, baby ♪

- Jann was in love with the Clintons,

but Hunter was also quite thrilled.

And he gave Clinton a couple

of high-quality French saxophone reeds.

- I think we're on the right side of history.

I think the time has come for America to change

its policies fundamentally.

- Hunter had his own list of questions

about the gun laws but also the drug laws.

- You've seen the statement I put out last week...

- Clinton wanted that interview

to make it very clear

that he was not your standard-brand liberal

who was for smoking dope.

Hunter was so offended.

He gets up from the table.

He came back in about 15 minutes with a tall drink,

and he never asked another question.

It was like, "Interview is over for me.

You've shown me who you really are."

And then P.J. O'Rourke,

who was a sharp-witted right-winger,

has come to the table loaded for bear

with ideological questions.

- Sometimes the most conservative thing

in the world to do is to change.

It's the only you can preserve those things

which are most dear to you

and that's what I'm obviously hoping

the American people will believe.

- And Clinton just turned him around on a dime.

So it's now down to me and Jann Wenner,

and I'm left entering into a pretty wonkish

conversation with Bill Clinton.

Shift in tax burdens and savings and loan...

He knew what would fetter my ego,

asking about obscure things

that most people had never heard of.

That was terrific. - You're a really smart man.

Thanks, Hunter!

- Jann, P.J., Hunter were of a certain age.

- You remember Hunter Thompson.

- They had a feeling that they were going

to change the country again, maybe the world, and, uh,

I didn't share that self-glory because I was a bit older.

- So now we know, you know,

his favorite Beatle is Paul McCartney.

He voted for the skinny Elvis stamp, and he bites his nails.

- So you came away feeling less enthused

than you were going in?

- I'm not going to, uh, go out and campaign for him,

'cause there's other people to.

- Is that good or bad news for Bill?

- During the war in Vietnam and during the Nixon era,

the youth culture had gotten pretty well stomped,

but rock and roll prevailed.

- Together for the first time since 1982,

Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood,

Christine McVie, John McVie,

and Stevie Nicks!

Fleetwood Mac!

["Don't Stop" plays]

- ♪ Why not think about times to come ♪

♪ And not about the things that you've done? ♪

♪ If your life was bad to you ♪

♪ Just think what tomorrow will do ♪

- ♪ So don't stop thinking about tomorrow ♪

♪ Don't stop, it'll soon be here ♪

♪ It'll be better than before ♪

- It was a generation taking power.

- ♪ Yesterday's gone ♪

- We all got shaped in the same way,

so justice and equity

and a kind of deep belief in America.

- Sir, would you join us, please?

- Those are the ideals of my generation.

- ♪ It'll soon be here ♪

♪ It'll be better than before ♪

- I was very invested in them as leaders

trying to carry out the principles and ideals

of that generation in a very tough real-world situation

of the power and all the interests

they had to navigate.

- ♪ It'll be better than before ♪

- I had the same optimism

that was widely shared about the Clinton potential.

My one regret is that I was slow,

and I'm talking months, not years,

in saying in print what I saw happening in Washington.

- ♪ Yesterday's gone ♪

- Clinton was essentially

abandoning organized labor and working people.

It happened literally

in the first year of the administration.

And that was a sort of double-cross of the values

he expressed as a young candidate.

- I think I do need to be reminded

that what I'm doing every day is for these folks.

- Right.

- It was a very quick thing

for Clinton to make some gestures...

- Hi, folks! - Hi, Bill!

- Which his people applauded

and made a big deal out of

but were actually trivial or even deceptive.

- I think we accomplished an awful lot.

Maybe you can say some of it was due

to newness or a touch of, you know,

the arrogance of being new.

- There's a word called hubris.

- Sure is. Greek word.

- Certainly is.

- At the beginning of his administration,

he had just come off a couple of big victories

and Bill Greider went on to interview Clinton

in his little executive dining room

off the Oval Office.

- To understand Clinton,

you have to understand he was a seducer.

He knew how to appeal to people in a way

that would flatter them or beguile them.

And he's good at it, but I'm a reporter.

After everything else, I'm a reporter.

And I realized there was something

that I should have asked about.

At the very end,

as we're literally getting up from the table, I said,

"What do you care about that you would fight and die for?"

And he--he just exploded.

- I have fought more damn battles here for more things

than any president has in 20 years

and not gotten one damn bit of credit

from the knee-jerk liberal press,

and I'm sick and tired of it,

and you can put that in the damn article.

- He thinks he has beguiled me especially,

but also Jann.

And this was a signal

that he did not succeed in seducing me.

- And you get no credit around here

for fighting and bleeding.

And that's why the know-nothings

and the do-nothings and the negative people

and the right-wingers always win...

because of the way people like you

put questions to people like me.

Now, that's the truth, Bill.

- I'd been toe-to-toe

with angry politicians over the years.

He was more personal in his tone and bearing.

- And I'm sorry if I'm not very good

at communicating it, but I haven't got

a hell of a lot of help since I've been here either.

- Thank you.

- I think Bill was a well-intentioned good man.

As a president, he was a little slick by half

and flawed and--

and somewhat undisciplined as a person,

but you do have to accept in politics

and in life that it's not all going to be pure,

and it's not all going to be exactly what you wanted.

- I misled people, including even my wife.

I deeply regret that.

I can only tell you I was motivated by many factors.

First, by a desire to protect myself

from the embarrassment of my own conduct.

I was also very concerned about protecting my family.

Indeed I did have a relationship

with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate.

In fact, it was wrong.

- ♪ I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests ♪

- Do we need to let the impeachment process

continue much further?

Vote down this inquisition.

- My memory of that period was that Jann and me--

we didn't see this story the same way.

- In this special issue,

we have collected many of the voices

of our culture, speaking out

to Congress and to the media.

- I thought that Democrats were being way too forgiving,

including women who called themselves feminists.

- I wrote this one very strong piece

to say people on the left were tolerating things

they shouldn't have tolerated.

- That's part of that explosion

in our famous White House interview,

'cause I was going right at it in that question I asked,

and he knew that he was selling out.

- ♪ I heard one person starve ♪

♪ I heard many people laughing ♪

- The distortions that both political parties

get away with constantly, deliberately,

left us with an electorate that's mad as hell,

and they don't want to take it anymore.

- ♪ And it's a hard ♪

♪ It's a hard, it's a hard ♪

♪ It's a hard ♪

♪ It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall ♪

♪ ♪

- ♪ You're all I ever wanted ♪

♪ You're all I ever needed, yeah ♪

♪ So tell me what to do now 'cause ♪

[harmonizing]

♪ I want you back ♪

- In a distant demographic echo

of the Baby Boom, the American teen population

has reached the kind of critical mass

that makes the culture industry sit up and listen.

Welcome to the new Teen Age.

- They sing well,

and they're very hot, and I really just love them.

- Teen pop became this huge phenomenon in the late '90s.

So we would do Britney Spears

and NSYNC and Backstreet Boys.

Every generation of readers thinks that magazine

has sold out, because they're putting

who's currently popular on the cover,

not who was popular when they were 17 or 18.

You know, it's like, we weren't gonna put

Grace Slick on the cover in the '90s

just because she had been cool in 1974.

[chuckles] You know?

There was a pretty hardheaded approach

to figuring out the covers.

What we're really thinking is, like,

you know, "What's going to sell?"

- ♪ Back ♪

[crowd cheering]

♪ ♪

- I guess my way of reliving my youth

and sharing this with her.

- ♪ I want you back ♪

- Even though my leg is broken,

I came here because it's the kind of thing

a good parent would do for their child.

all: You're the one I want!

- Louder!

all: You're the one I need!

- ♪ Girl, what did I do? ♪

♪ ♪

♪ You're the one I want ♪

♪ You're the one I need ♪

♪ So tell me what to do ♪

♪ You're all I ever wanted ♪

♪ You're all I ever needed ♪

- I'm not, in any way, ashamed

of the amount of coverage we gave to various pop stars.

If you look at what teenage America is thinking

and you understand what's changing

in their morality and their values--

it's important to know that

because soon enough they're young America,

and soon enough they're young adult America.

- ♪ You back ♪

[wild cheering]

- When I got the call from "Rolling Stone"

asking if I would write about Britney Spears,

I immediately said yes,

and the next thing I did was ask my girlfriend,

"Who is Britney Spears?"

- Two, three...

- I probably started dancing when I was three years old.

It's tough. - Okay, music.

[upbeat dance music]

- She had a sort of steel core of show biz values.

This is the kind of girl who would get up

at the second grade talent show

and knock everybody out with her version of "Tomorrow."

- I really love living in Louisiana.

- Britney Jean Spears is a golden child,

the chart-topping apotheosis of a generation

that's breathing life into an imperiled business.

- ♪ You drive me crazy, I just can't sleep ♪

- First came the Britney Website, email address,

an 800 number advertised

on several hundred thousand postcards.

In summer 1998, Spears performed

at 26 malls across the country.

- It occurred to me that we were going back to the '50s,

when you had people like Frankie Avalon,

Annette Funicello,

these very wholesome pop stars

just singing, you know, boy-girl love songs.

- ♪ Got my new gown ♪

♪ Let me hair down ♪

♪ All I need now is the boy ♪

- ♪ I got my striped tie ♪

♪ Got my hopes high ♪

♪ Got the time and the place, and I've got rhythm ♪

♪ Now all I need is the girl to go with them ♪

[Britney Spears's "Sometimes" begins]

♪ ♪

- The Britney Spears that I met

had this very chaste persona, really.

When she talked about her cover shoot,

she thought it would be a good idea if she dressed up

in vintage lace dresses

in some quaint antebellum setting.

[Britney Spears's "...Baby One More Time" begins]

Of course, when the photographer,

David LaChapelle, rolled up in rural Louisiana,

his vision for America's new sweetheart

was more like Jodi Foster in Taxi Driver.

♪ ♪

- ♪ Oh, baby, baby ♪

♪ How was I supposed to know ♪

♪ That something wasn't right here? ♪

- She was similar to the kind of pop stars

that they had in the '50s, but by 1999,

she was often wrapped in the imagery of soft-core porn.

- ♪ Show me how you want it to be ♪

♪ Tell me, baby ♪

- It was regressive, but it was wrapped up

in the styles of the day,

which goes to show that there was a generation

that knew how to have it both ways.

- ♪ When I'm not with you, I lose my mind ♪

♪ Give me a sign ♪

♪ Hit me, baby, one more time ♪

[school bell rings]

- What's always struck me as odd, "Rolling Stone,"

their highest-ranked covers are Dylan, right?

And that famous George Bush cover and, like, Jimi Hendrix,

but this is what people were thinking about

and talking about.

- I mean, a lot has been said about Britney

being a toy of some male impresarios

and that she herself was not the genius

behind the Britney phenomenon.

- ♪ Baby, can't you see I'm calling? ♪

♪ A guy like you should wear a warning ♪

- But the fact is that she won a Grammy for "Toxic."

She was like a football quarterback on that stage.

She never missed a beat, and she never missed a step.

- ♪ I need a hit, baby, give me it ♪

♪ You're dangerous, I'm loving it ♪

- But I do think of her

as a celebrity culture tragedy

and a tragedy of fame.

- ♪ I'm on a ride ♪

♪ You're toxic, I'm slipping under ♪

- That out of the ashes of Britney Spears,

Rihanna and Katy Perry and Beyoncé

all rose like a phoenix.

There were some very serious conversations

that went on among managers and producers

and pop stars about, how does this not happen?

You don't want to go so crazy that you end up on the cover

of "Rolling Stone" for the wrong reason.

- Vanessa Grigordia-- Grior--

Grigoriadis. I'm sorry, I--

Vanessa, I knew I was gonna mess up your name.

She's written a cover story about Britney Spears

for the current issue of "Rolling Stone" magazine.

You describe one occasion

where she really kind of lost it with a fan and a cashier.

Can you give me the crib notes on that?

[The Cure's "Pictures of You" begins]

- February 21, 2008--

a pop star at the mall

is an eternal cause for happiness.

One moment, shoppers in the Westfield Topanga mall

are living in the real world,

but upon the rapture of Britney Spears,

they are giggling, laughing,

already sharing their secret on cell phones

as Britney beelines for the Betsey Johnson boutique.

- ♪ I've been looking so long at these pictures of you ♪

- Britney rifles the racks as The Cure's

"Pictures of You" blasts in the airless pink boutique.

A crush of managers try to keep the peace,

but the crowd running after Britney gets larger,

and now the shop girls have started to catch up to her,

one of them slipping spectacularly

in her platform shoes.

She pulls herself up,

mustering the strength to tap Britney's shoulder.

"Um, I'm from the South, too," she mumbles.

"And I was wondering if I could get a picture with you

for my little sister."

Britney whirls around and stares the girl

deep in the eyes, her lips almost vibrating with anger.

"I don't know who you think I am, bitch,

but I am not that person."

[Britney Spears's "Piece of Me" plays]

- ♪ Oh, yeah ♪

- ♪ I'm Miss American Dream ♪

♪ Since I was 17 ♪

- The huge issue with her was just that she collided

with the height of paparazzi culture.

- ♪ Pictures of my derriere in the magazine ♪

♪ You want a piece of me, you want a piece of me ♪

♪ I'm Miss Bad Media Karma ♪

♪ Another day, another drama ♪

- I do feel like I have been attacked

for being too harsh on her in the story.

- ♪ And with a kid on my arm ♪

- And I think, in retrospect, I was.

- If there is one thing that has become clear

in the past year of Britney's collapse,

the most public downfall of any star in history,

it's that she doesn't want anything to do

with the person the world thought she was.

She is not a good girl.

She is not America's sweetheart.

She is an inbred swamp-thing who chain-smokes,

doesn't do her nails, and screams at people

who want pictures for their little sisters.

She is the perfect celebrity for America in decline.

Like President Bush, she just doesn't give a fuck.

But at least we won't have to clean up after her mess

for the rest of our lives.

[jet engine whooshing]

- I remember, in the time I was brought in,

being struck by the way "Rolling Stone" was perceived.

I was interviewed on CNN, and the host of the program said,

"'Rolling Stone,' I thought they just covered music."

That was really the reputation of the magazine.

People didn't know

P.J. O'Rourke and Hunter Thompson.

The great tradition that the magazine had

on the political scene had really been forgotten,

even by people in journalism.

- So, at that moment, Jann was really focused

on restoring the magazine as a primary source

of hard-hitting political journalism.

"Rolling Stone" interviewed

every president it could interview.

Certainly we would have interviewed George W. Bush

had he let us.

And Obama arrived in such a history-making way.

Obama was the first president where the magazine decided

to endorse a Democratic candidate for president

before the primaries were over.

- At that time, there was the war in Iraq.

There was the financial meltdown in 2007 and 2008.

There was no shortage of pressing political issues.

While there were all those issues,

there were still a lot of stories

that weren't being told in a very compelling way.

I had been lobbying for months and months

to do a piece on Afghanistan.

Afghanistan was kind of off the radar at that moment.

But I was really convinced that there must be some way

back into Afghanistan.

And then we met Michael Hastings.

- I'm not trying to be a smartass here,

um, though it takes effort

for me sometimes, and I apologize for that.

Uh, working for "Newsweek," the most interesting parts

of my stories were actually being taken out.

The news was always there, but it was, you know,

the offhand comment, what people really say,

how people really act, what it was like to be there.

These sort of details that I find really fascinating.

When I decided to leave "Newsweek," one of the things

I wanted to do was capture all those details.

- Michael was absolutely obsessed

with Hunter S. Thompson--

shocker for a young journalist like him, uh,

but, you know, he even named his corgi Gonzo.

Writing at "Rolling Stone" was something

that was always very aspirational for him.

- "Rolling Stone" is a rock and roll-style journalism.

You know, no holds barred, kick down the doors,

you know, toss the hand grenade,

expose the powerful, sort of journalism.

- He went in to pitch about five articles,

and one of them was that he wanted to profile

General McChrystal, who was the commander

of forces in Afghanistan.

At the time, he said, you know,

"I don't know if I'll get any access at all."

- Michael himself thought

he was never going to get to see McChrystal,

that McChrystal would turn him down.

And I said, "Well, give him a call,

because I think you'll be surprised."

"Rolling Stone" at that point had really remarkable access

to the military for a very simple reason,

which is that the U.S. military wanted to recruit

and send our readers into battle.

- ♪ Only in dreams ♪

♪ We see what it means ♪

♪ Reach out our hands ♪

♪ Hold on to hers ♪

- So he called up McChrystal's folks,

and lo and behold, they said, "Come along,

and we'll give you all kinds of access."

- ♪ And so it seems ♪

♪ Only in dreams ♪

- Generals tend to be tight-lipped,

and their press aides aren't just, you know, giving you

unfettered access.

It was just so bizarre, and it doesn't happen like this.

It had never happened like this

in his previous reporting.

It really was "Almost Famous"

but with the rock star general.

- McChrystal is a snake-eating rebel, a Jedi commander.

He carries a custom-made set of nunchakus in his convoy,

engraved with his name and four stars.

And his itinerary often bears a fresh quote from Bruce Lee.

"The fucking lads love Stan McChrystal,"

says a British officer.

He went out on dozens of nighttime raids unannounced,

with almost no entourage.

You'd be out in Somewhere, Iraq,

and someone would take a knee beside you,

and a corporal would be like, "Who the fuck is that?"

And it's fucking Stan McChrystal.

♪ ♪

Paris is the most anti-McChrystal city

you can imagine.

It's a Thursday night in mid-April,

and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces

in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite

at the Hotel Westminster.

He's in France to sell his new war strategy

to our NATO allies...

to keep up the fiction that we actually have allies.

Last fall McChrystal dismissed

the counter-terrorism strategy

advocated by Vice President Joe Biden

as shortsighted, saying it would lead

to state of "Chaosistan."

Now, flipping through printout cards

of his speech in Paris,

he and his staff imagine the general dismissing

the vice president with a good one-liner.

"Biden?" suggests a top adviser,

"Did you say, 'Bite me'"?

In private, Team McChrystal likes to talk shit

about many of Obama's top people on the diplomatic side.

One aide calls Jim Jones, a retired four-star general

and veteran of the Cold War,

a clown who remains stuck in 1985.

- It was very apparent that the opening section,

in particular, where they're saying nasty things

about Joe Biden and displaying

their contempt for the presidency

and the commander in chief fairly openly

was really explosive,

but Michael was telling me that he was convinced

that McChrystal was untouchable

and that nothing could happen to McChrystal.

[sirens wailing, gunfire]

- World Police! Get down on the ground!

- The general's staff is a handpicked collection

of killers, spies, geniuses,

patriots, and outright maniacs.

- You lose.

- They jokingly refer to themselves as "Team America,"

and they pride themselves on their can-do attitude

and their disdain for authority.

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

After arriving in Kabul,

Team America set about changing the culture.

McChrystal banned alcohol on base,

kicked out Burger King and other symbols

of American excess.

- McChrystal himself keeps a murderous schedule.

Up at 4:30, this is his idea of leisure time.

- In the month I spend around the general,

I witness him eating only once,

a staple in almost every media profile.

- He eats one meal a day.

Anything more makes him feel sluggish.

- You have what you have, and that's all you need.

You realize you don't need a lot of other stuff.

One thing of course you miss is family,

but besides that, it's-- it's pretty much perfect.

- It's a kind of superhuman narrative

that has built up around him,

as if the ability to go without sleep and food

translates into the possibility

of a man single-handedly winning the war.

- General McChrystal was challenging the status quo.

You know, McChrystal wouldn't allow Fox News to be played.

He wasn't your typical Republican general.

That was something that Michael found fascinating.

He found Mike Flynn, who at the time

was General McChrystal's intelligence chief,

also to be a really interesting character.

It was, you know, a lot of men

who had really dedicated their lives

to fighting these wars and had suffered great loss,

and so, I think on some level,

they got each other's mentality,

but at the end of the day,

he was going to be honest no matter what.

He saw as his main responsibility

telling the truth to his readers.

- After nine years of war,

the Taliban simply remains

too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military

to openly attack.

There is a reason that President Obama

studiously avoids using the word "victory"

when he talks about Afghanistan.

Winning, it would seem, is not really possible,

not even with Stanley McChrystal

in charge.

- I remember walking

into the managing editor's office and saying,

"I think this story is really going to get some attention."

I remember no one else taking that very seriously

at the time. It was kind of like,

"Oh, yeah, really? Okay, great."

But there was no moment of recognition

until the morning that the story hit.

- "Rolling Stone" making trouble.

How did you get the leading general trashing the President,

trashing the ambassador, trashing the head of the--

- The story was supposed to come out

on a Wednesday morning.

On Tuesday morning, at 4:00 in the morning

my phone rang, and it was a producer from "Morning Joe,"

and he said, "The story has been leaked,

"and President Obama has called General McChrystal

back from Afghanistan."

The McChrystal story brought down McChrystal

before it was even published.

- The conduct represented

in the recently published article

does not meet the standard that should be set

by a commanding general.

It undermines the civilian control of the military

that is at the core of our democratic system.

- The White House was fighting.

The State Department was fighting.

It was openly spoken about among people who were

over in Afghanistan,

and no one was really telling the story.

- A lot of blowback came not from the Pentagon,

but from other reporters who began to attack

the story almost immediately, saying,

"This can't be true,"

or, "Michael must have heard these things off the record

and violated that agreement by printing them."

- He was a rat in an eagle's nest.

What he did is removing a fine soldier

who's risked his life for this country time and time again.

- Okay, okay, I got it. Geraldo, we got it.

"Rolling Stone" says it ran the quotes by McChrystal.

Do you believe that?

- I--I-- If they say they did,

I know Jann Wenner, I assume that it's true.

I have to take him at his word.

- He really broke an unspoken code

of putting military leaders

up on a pedestal, and by stripping off

that veneer and reporting honestly,

he got so much flak.

- Michael Hastings, if you believe him,

says that there were no ground rules laid out.

And, uh, I mean that just doesn't really

make a lot of sense to me, because I know these people.

They never let their guard down like that.

To me, something doesn't add up here.

I just--I don't believe it.

- It wasn't so much that they played

by certain rules and we didn't.

The real issue was that they were beat reporters.

They covered this day in and day out.

So they had to make certain choices every day

about the things that they saw and the things that they heard

and whether sharing them would mean

that they wouldn't be allowed back in the room.

It disappointed me that they would attack Michael

when what Michael did

was a very different kind of journalism.

- What it illuminated was the extremely cozy relationship

that many in my profession have established

with--with very powerful figures

and how much they cherish that relationship.

Basically, the criticism is,

"Wait. This guy wrote down what he heard and saw.

Wait a minute. We're not supposed to do that."

- The McChrystal story was the biggest story

that "Rolling Stone" had ever had online,

because it's history.

It was a piece of history,

and that work,

the work of long journalism, in-depth journalism,

deep-dive journalism,

there's still a hunger for it.

- In the early-morning hours of June 18, 2013,

Michael Hastings died in a car crash in Los Angeles.

A colleague remembers, part of his passion

stemmed from a desire to make everyone else wake the fuck up

and realize the value of the life we're living.

He always sought out the hard stories,

pushed for the truth, and let it all hang out on the page.

[indistinct chatter]

- The very first editorial meeting I went to,

it was a story-idea meeting, and Jann was leading it.

I was the only woman at the table,

and so I was thinking of stories that I might be able

to bring to the paper that would be important.

The level of violence towards women

was at that time completely unknown.

So I had thought that if people understood

what a rape was,

what an actual rape was,

what--what a rape did, that it took

the most, uh...

precious relationship between two people

and turned it into the most horrible thing--

And I thought that if we could really get a rape case

and simply go through the rape case,

it would wake people up.

Well, when I started to tell this story,

of course I was a nervous wreck,

and someone at that table said,

"Why don't you just lean back and enjoy it?

Then it wouldn't be a rape."

I, um, was carrying on

about how the story would be constructed,

how the ideas, what the ideas would be,

and there was still this titillating laughter,

and I turned around and looked at Jann,

and Jann was looking at me just like,

"Yes, yes."

He wasn't laughing. He took me seriously.

- Sipping from a plastic cup, Jackie grimaced

then discreetly spilled her spiked punch

onto the sludgy fraternity house floor.

The University of Virginia freshman wasn't a drinker,

but she didn't want to seem

like a goodie-goodie at her first frat party.

She smiled at her date, whom we'll call Drew,

and he smiled enticingly back.

She took his hand as he threaded them out

of the crowded room and up a staircase.

Drew ushered Jackie into a bedroom.

The room was pitch-black inside.

Jackie began to scream.

"Shut up," she heard a man's voice say

as a body barreled into her,

sending them both crashing into a low glass table.

There was a heavy person on top of her,

and another person kneeling on her hair,

hands pinning down her arms

and excited male voices rising all around her.

"Grab its motherfucking leg," she heard a voice say,

and that's when Jackie knew she was going to be raped.

- I'm drawn to stories

about people who do bad things

or bad things have been done to them,

especially people who deceive other people.

I think that really fascinates me.

And then on the other end, I'm really interested in,

like, the repercussions of all those bad things.

You know, what happens to people

when bad things happen to them?

- Sabrina was very, very valuable at "Rolling Stone,"

like an MVP.

She was somebody that they could count on.

She turned out a lot of really good stories

that were really hard, and she nailed them.

- A chilling account of a gang rape

at the University of Virginia has reignited a tension

over the problem of sexual assault on campus.

In this case, it is provoking new investigations

and questions about the university's response

to assault cases

and whether it has covered them up.

The story appears in "Rolling Stone" magazine.

It's an account of what happens

to an unidentified freshman who is called Jackie.

- The article comes out.

The first thing off the bat, it galvanized everybody.

It got so much attention.

We felt, "Oh, great, look at--

we're causing the issue of rape on campus to be examined."

Surely a worthy issue.

- Sabrina, thank you for talking with us.

First of all, how is she doing?

And what's--is there is an investigation under way?

Where does it stand?

- Jackie herself is still incredibly traumatized

by her assault, and, um, she feels really good

about having spoken out.

Um, it was a very difficult situation for her to speak out

because she was really criticized for it by her peers

and very much discouraged for it.

- And then within a couple days,

the writer of the article called up in tears,

saying she doesn't trust her principle source anymore,

and it was like a punch in the gut.

It just started collapsing from there.

- Two weeks ago, a "Rolling Stone" article

with this headline got worldwide attention.

Well, today "Rolling Stone" magazine backed off the story.

In a letter to readers,

the managing editor wrote, quote...

- At "Rolling Stone," a big part of my job

is managing a lot of personalities,

a lot of creative people and sort of figuring out...

how you get the most out of each person.

These were our best people.

I had no reason to second-guess.

You know, maybe I should have, but, you know, I didn't.

- The magazine also acknowledged its reporter,

Sabrina Rubin Erdely,

never talked to Jackie's alleged accusers,

saying Jackie asked the publication not to

for fear of retaliation.

- You've got this very young woman who's telling you

that she's afraid of retaliation by this fraternity

where you believe she has been gang raped.

And the other thing is that

in the ten years that I worked at "Rolling Stone,"

there were men at the top of the masthead the entire time.

Being a progressive man,

working at an antiauthoritarian magazine,

they believed that they should not question women

about cases of rape.

- Representatives with the fraternity

released a statement saying they never had a party

during the weekend in question

and sexual assaults are not a part of a pledge ritual,

as Jackie alleged.

In an article today, "The Washington Post" reported

Jackie's friends recently began

to question her account.

- Nothing like that had ever happened to us before.

50 years.

- The editors of "Rolling Stone" committed

one of the worst journalistic sins in recent memory.

- How can you fact-check something and not go around

to some other people who were there and say,

"Is this how you remember it?"

- This is actually a tremendous act

of public disservice to survivors

of rape everywhere and to the people who are doing

everything we can to make sure that this becomes

a culture in which we honor and believe survivors of rape.

- You know, it was a disheartening

and dispiriting and sad experience.

The only thing I could do about it

was commission an investigation.

So I called up the Columbia School of Journalism.

We'd open up everything we had,

all of our records on it,

and would they come in and investigate

and write a report up and I promise to publish it.

- "Rolling Stone's" repudiation

of the main narrative in "A Rape on Campus"

is a story of journalistic failure that was avoidable.

The problem was methodology.

Journalists with decades of collective experience

failed to bring up and debate problems

about their reporting.

- Most of the famous cases of journalism failure

involve a fraud.

So Janet Cooke invented

and lied to her editors about that.

So did Jayson Blair. So did Stephen Glass.

What's so interesting about the "Rolling Stone" case

is that's not at issue here.

Sabrina Erdely worked honestly.

She did not invent anything.

She took really rigorous notes.

And it also wasn't primarily a failure of fact-checking.

It was a systems failure.

- The fact-checking system

is essentially based on the notion

that the person is telling you the truth.

And we had this extremely rare situation

where someone has made up a story that is so elaborate

and so complicated at so many different levels and layers.

- The failure of "A Rape on Campus"

was not due to a lack of resources.

"Rolling Stone's" editorial staff

has shrunk in recent years,

yet the magazine continues to invest

in professional fact-checkers

and fund time-consuming investigations.

Erdely and her editors had hoped their investigation

would sound an alarm about campus sexual assault.

Instead, the magazine's failure

may have spread the idea

that women invent rape allegations.

- It was pretty damning.

It did not help us in the eventual trial.

I mean, we had been writing these kinds of stories

for a long, long time.

Maybe we were too cocky

or sloppy,

or it was just dumb fucking luck.

Dumb fucking bad luck.

- We opened ourselves up

to a very transparent investigation,

and it wasn't seen as like,

here's an otherwise trustworthy place that made a mistake.

It was seen as, oh, this is those elite

mainstream-media journalists revealing their true colors.

People used to view "Rolling Stone"

as being on their side,

and something shifted more recently where...

you know, it became just another piece

of the mainstream media that couldn't be trusted.

♪ ♪

- 2015 was a very, very bad year for this magazine.

The UVA thing had happened.

We lost our managing editor, and it was a big blow.

It impacted our reputation, in that it became very easy

for those on the right to just call us fake news.

- Um, "Rolling Stone," they were fake news before CNN.

The whole UVA hoax-- that was bad.

I'm surprised they're still in circulation

after those guys sued the pants off of 'em.

- It was in that summer that Donald Trump

had announced his candidacy,

and covering this was a chance for the magazine

to get back to what it has always tried to do.

Taking what you read in a newspaper article

and then, you know, zeroing in on it

and--and finding what it's really about.

[Alabama Shakes' "Don't Wanna Fight" plays]

♪ ♪

For the 2016 campaign,

Matt basically went around the country,

talked to other people to find out

how we as a country got to this point.

It was just like in the '70s when Hunter S. Thompson

reported on Richard Nixon

in his different Gonzo, bizarro way.

- [squealing] ♪ My lines ♪

- We love you all, folks. Have a good time.

Make America great again. Thank you, thank you.

Thank you.

- When I started to cover the campaign

for "Rolling Stone," I realized that the 1972

and 2016 presidential election had a lot in common

in--in terms of an approach to covering news.

Hunter Thompson believed,

and I actually believe this, too,

that there is no such thing as objectivity.

Objectivity is bullshit.

Every single thing you do is an editorial choice,

whether it's in a headline,

how big the photo is, what page it's on.

You're always having an opinion.

You might as well just admit it.

- Keeping up with the Trump revelations is exhausting.

By late October,

he'll be caught whacking it outside a nunnery.

There are not many places left for this thing to go

that don't involve kids or cannibalism.

We wait miserably for the dong shot.

- He referred to my hands,

if they're small, something else must be small.

I guarantee you there's no problem.

I guarantee, all right? - Okay.

- There's evidence that human polling

undercounts Trump's votes,

as people support him in larger numbers

when they don't have to admit their leanings

to a live human being.

Like autoerotic asphyxiation,

supporting Donald Trump is an activity

many people prefer to enjoy in a private setting,

like in a shower or a voting booth.

- And similar to the way Hunter Thompson

and Ralph Steadman had the same sense of humor--

they were both crazy in kind of the same way--

I work with an illustrator named Victor Juhasz.

Victor has the same sense of humor that I have.

He asks me early on in a story

what the big metaphor is gonna be,

and I have to come up with the encapsulating image

before I even write it, and then he runs with that.

- ♪ I don't wanna fight no more ♪

- The image that I thought was the best from this year

was the one where he sort of riffed

on the statue of the Death and the Maiden story.

Trump is playing the role of the Devil,

and he's got his hand

up the Statue of Liberty's kilt,

and it's just an amazing iconic image.

♪ ♪

- I'm always just knocked out by Matt's writing.

I try my best to top it

with some totally inappropriate image.

♪ ♪

Back of my mind, I thought the campaign

with Trump, it was gonna be chaos.

It could fucking destroy everything, all right?

But there are a fair amount of people who would think

it's a great idea to fucking destroy Washington.

Uh, those were his voters, you know?

The tornado.

[The Beatles's "Revolution" begins]

♪ ♪

- [yelling]

♪ You say you want a revolution ♪

♪ Well, you know... ♪

- Whenever he came in to his events,

he always had The Beatles playing "Revolution,"

you know, with that amazing, like,

guitar riff that comes in,

but, of course, if you listen to the song,

the song is about don't be fooled

by false political prophets

who are peddling fake revolutions,

which is exactly what-- what Donald Trump was doing.

♪ ♪

But he understood that the dominant emotion

out there in America is anger.

When he went into these events,

he did whatever he could

to kind of work the crowd up into a frenzy.

- Build a wall! Build a wall!

all: Build a wall!

- The presidential election campaign

is really just a badly acted billion-dollar TV show

whose production costs ludicrously include

the political disenfranchisement

of the audience.

- It drives us apart

during two years of furious arguments

and prevents us from examining the broader

systemic problems we all face together.

- ♪ Someone's got it in for me ♪

♪ They're planting stories in the press ♪

♪ ♪

♪ Whoever it is, I wish they'd cut it out quick ♪

♪ But when they will... ♪

- I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue

and shoot somebody,

and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay?

- ♪ They say I shot a man named Gray ♪

- Donald Trump's innovation was to recognize

what a bad TV show the campaign was.

Any program that tried to make stars out of human sedatives

like Scott Walker and Lindsey Graham

needed new producers and a new script, so here came Trump,

bloviating and farting his way through his campaign stops,

acting like Hitler one minute and Andrew Dice Clay the next.

TV couldn't take its eyes off of him.

- ♪ Now everything's a little... ♪

- Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star.

It doesn't know how to turn the cameras off,

even when it's filming its own demise.

- You want to challenge me to a match at WrestleMania?

- Absolutely right.

100%.

I will kick your ass. - Ohh!

- What Trump understands better than his opponents

is that NASCAR America, WWE America,

always loves seeing the preening,

self-proclaimed good guy get whacked with a chair.

He knows how to play these moments like a master.

- This is a tough business to run for president.

- Oh, I know, you're a tough guy, Jeb.

- And we need to have a leader that is--

- Real tough. - You're never going to be

President of the United States

by insulting your way to the presidency.

- Well, let's see, I'm at 42, and you're at 3.

So, so far, I'm doing better. - Doesn't matter.

[crowd cheers]

- Mr. McMahon just got--

- ♪ Idiot wind ♪

♪ Blowing like a circle around my skull ♪

- I don't know what I said. Ahhh!

I don't remember!

- He even mocked the neurological condition

of Serge Kovaleski.

That left puppies and cancer kids

as the only groups untargeted by his campaign.

- Get him out of here. He's all mouth.

He's all mouth. Get him out.

- ♪ You're an idiot, babe ♪

♪ It's a wonder... ♪

- Isn't it great to be at a Trump rally, really?

- What Trump did is he created

such a cathartic experience

of letting your anger out

that people went out, and they told two friends,

and they told two friends, et cetera, et cetera,

and that's how this movement started.

And I could see that Bernie Sanders

was on the same thing that Trump was.

He just had a different take on things.

They're completely opposite people.

The way I put it in the--

in the magazine was that, you know,

Trump would eat a child in a lifeboat,

while Bernie, you know, cares about the poor.

- ♪ As I went walking ♪

♪ That ribbon of highway ♪

♪ I saw above me that endless skyway ♪

- I actually have a relationship

with Bernie Sanders.

I did this long feature

following him through Congress.

I really like and respect and admire him.

- ♪ This land was made for you and me ♪

- ♪ This land is your land ♪

- At "Rolling Stone," there was an assumption

that Hillary was gonna win,

and then there was a love affair with Bernie.

It was a love affair.

- ♪ To the New York islands ♪

- At "Rolling Stone," within the staff,

those under 40 were all about Bernie,

and those over 40 were about Hillary.

- ♪ For you and me ♪

- Jann looked back on that campaign trail in 1972

with a little bit of regret.

By supporting George McGovern,

Jann worried that they had

basically elected Richard Nixon

and that was the rationale that Jann openly referred to

in his editorial when he decided

to endorse Hillary Clinton.

- "Rolling Stone" has championed the youth vote

since 1972, when 18-year-olds

were first given the right to vote.

We worked furiously for McGovern.

We failed.

Nixon was re-elected in a landslide.

- We endorsed Hillary in the primaries against Bernie,

and I said, "I've been to the revolution before,

and it's not happening."

Bernie has got much less of a chance

of beating the Republicans than Hillary.

I could feel the Bern, like everybody else.

But as an older guy, rather than, you know,

the young passionate guy

that I was in the '72 elections,

I understood, if we're really gonna get something done here,

we must have somebody who has all those

somewhat pedestrian things

that go into making a great leader.

- When Jann did that editorial,

I just felt like it would be good to kind of say,

you know, just because young people got beat once

doesn't mean we're going to get beat every time.

What was so cool about that is that there aren't

many publishers or editors who would allow a dissenting,

um, endorsement in his own magazine.

- The millions of young voters that are rejecting

Hillary's campaign this year

are making a carefully reasoned,

even reluctant calculation

about the limits of the insider politics

both she and her husband have represented.

Young people don't see the Sanders/Clinton race

as a choice between idealism and incremental progress.

The choice they see is between an honest politician

and one who is so profoundly a part of the problem

that she can't even see it anymore.

- To give undeniable evidence of our commitment

to justice and equality by nominating

Hillary Rodham Clinton as our candidate.

[cheers and boos]

- At the DNC, I realized that Democrats were in trouble.

The Bernie people-- they are booing her,

and it was speaking to something

that nobody wanted to focus on.

I mean, my whole story was about the hatred of Hillary.

I saw this on both sides,

but especially with people on the right.

What always gets recognized with Hillary Clinton

is how polarizing she is, how controversial she is,

and not why electing her would have been important

and what it would have meant to people.

all: Lock her up! Lock her up!

[Radiohead's "Burn the Witch" plays]

♪ ♪

- The piece began at the Republican Convention.

It was all about the hawking of hatred of Hillary Clinton.

The visceral hatred for Hillary Clinton is--

how dare she even run?

Who does she think she is?

She got to the White House on her husband's coattails,

and it's really, underneath it is--

she's a woman, that's not her place.

In the broader sense, the 2016 campaign

was a referendum on cultural attitudes towards women

and how casual misogyny had been accepted

for so many years.

- Crooked Hillary-- we're going to end

the Clinton corruption

and restore... [cheers and applause]

- Hillary Clinton is a person that people love to hate,

so Trump was telling people what they wanted to hear,

and it worked.

all: Lock her up! Lock her up!

To his supporters, he sounds like an ordinary person

because he has the same passions

that ordinary people do.

- Well, I know one thing, Mr. Trump has good taste.

- He is exactly what they would be

if they had a billion dollars.

You know, he's just a guy who travels the world,

balling models and talking

about how great it is to be rich.

That is the American dream,

the modern American dream, and he's the embodiment of it,

whereas Hillary Clinton

represents something else entirely.

- ♪ I saw her today at the reception ♪

- If you want a graphic picture of the cluelessness

of people inside campaign bubbles,

just watch Hillary Clinton's now infamous

Mannequin Challenge.

As a metaphor for an overconfident

and incompetent ruling class

that was ten miles up its own backside

when it should have been listening

to the anger percolating in the population,

the Mannequin Challenge is probably unsurpassable.

Here was a planeload of effete politicos

all dressed in blazers and smart glasses,

and buzzed at being on the same plane

as two Clintons and Jon Bon Jovi.

If those people had known the election

was even going to be close,

they would have outlawed smiling on that plane,

let alone making nutty souvenir videos.

- And we're good. [cheers and applause]

- She was exactly the wrong person for this campaign.

The college-educated liberal class

just does not resonate when the central issue

is about resentments that have built up over decades.

I remember on one day that Trump was giving a speech,

the press as always is behind the rope line,

and he pointed to us,

and he said, "Look at them, look at those people,"

how we hated him, we didn't believe in him.

And the crowd physically turned toward us.

all: CNN sucks! CNN sucks! CNN sucks!

- If Crooked Hillary Clinton were up here

and they had this kind of a crowd,

the cameras would be showing the crowd all day long.

- He villainized us.

He turned the media into a character in a story,

and that was the moment where I realized

that Trump was on another level.

That and the fact that when he left, the song was usually

"You Can't Always Get What You Want,"

which I always thought was a very strange message.

- ♪ You get what you need ♪

♪ Ah, yeah ♪

- Knock the crap out of him, would you?

Seriously.

♪ ♪

- Trump unleashed something dark and violent

in the American psyche.

Pull a lever for me, he promised,

and you'll horrify them all, and they did it.

60 million of them chose it.

They wanted us to feel the way we feel this morning.

They wanted to watch our faces

as the dream went up in smoke.

- Okay, you got enough tape over there?

- Yeah. - Uh...

- So you, uh-- you've got 45 minutes?

Fire away. - All right.

Well, so I got to start with last night

and ask you, you know, how you're feeling about it

and how you felt last night when you were watching it.

Could you believe what you were seeing?

Were you blown away like the rest of us?

- Well, um, you know, I'm disappointed,

because a lot of the work we've done

is only partially complete.

[thunder rumbling]

- It was a grim day.

It was drizzling, it was raining, gray,

and of all the times I've been in the White House,

it's this bustling center of activity and people.

This was a deserted White House.

It was quiet.

But Obama was there, and as much as he had

the same contempt as so many other people had for Trump,

that a man of this character would become the president,

he had to put the best face on it.

- There's no benefit that's derived

from pulling into a fetal position.

You know, we go out there, and we work,

and we slog through challenges,

and over time things get better.

History doesn't travel in a straight line.

It zigs, and it zags, and sometimes you take

two steps forward, and then you take a step back.

But if you look at the data from the election,

if it were just young people who were voting,

Hillary would have gotten 500 electoral votes.

So we have helped, I think, shape a generation

to think about being inclusive,

being fair,

caring about the environment.

- You think it's still a progressive country?

- There's a group of working-class white voters

who turned out in huge numbers for Trump.

They are hugely suspicious of Wall Street,

hugely suspicious of the establishment.

Whatever policy prescriptions that we've been proposing

don't reach,

are not heard by the folks in these communities.

This is not simply an economic issue.

This is cultural issue.

- ♪ 'Twas in another lifetime ♪

♪ One of toil and blood ♪

♪ When blackness was a virtue, the road was full of mud ♪

♪ I came in from the wilderness ♪

♪ A creature void of form ♪

♪ "Come in," she said ♪

♪ "I'll give you shelter from the storm" ♪

- Given the strangeness

and the disheartening quality of our times,

I think when you turn to Bob Dylan,

you find a mind that's looking at a bigger America,

an America that wasn't simply divisions

of conservatives and liberals.

- ♪ Hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn ♪

- Dylan was writing about a sense of history

that ran through both America's promises

and its sins.

- Mr. Dylan is a poet.

He'll answer questions about everything

from atomic science to riddles and rhymes.

- What poets do you dig?

- W.C. Fields, Smokey Robinson,

Allen Ginsberg.

- Dylan was already a meteor crashing

through the sky by the time "Rolling Stone" was born.

- ♪ "Come in," she said, "I'll give you"... ♪

- But what the magazine did was start documenting

what Bob's up to all the time,

and Dylan started using the "Rolling Stone"

interview format as almost an existential game.

- ♪ Now there's a wall between us ♪

♪ Something there's been lost ♪

♪ I took too much for granted ♪

♪ I got my signals crossed ♪

- The dialogue between "Rolling Stone" and Bob

covered our whole 50 years.

He so powerfully expressed everything that young people

in general and my generation was going through

as they came up against

all these contradictions of America.

- ♪ Well, the deputy walks on hard nails ♪

♪ And the preacher rides a mount ♪

♪ But nothing really matters much ♪

♪ It's doom alone that counts ♪

- Bob Dylan writes about these are dark lands,

these are dark times.

It is a landscape in which you

have to be prepared to face the truth.

"Rolling Stone" has always been unflinching,

not afraid of the truth.

- ♪ I've heard newborn babies wailing ♪

♪ Like a mourning dove ♪

- What "Rolling Stone" is, and certainly was,

and I hope continues to be really good at

is dissecting a story that nobody is even aware of

and finding its larger universal meaning.

♪ ♪

- "Rolling Stone" never lost its idealism,

but also it got tempered with a lot of cynicism

and, you know, reality, and--

and yet continued to fight and struggle for the things

that we believed in, a generation believed in,

and it's still a struggle.

I mean, it hasn't been won, it hasn't been lost.

And I think that the heirs to this generation,

our own children, our next generation

believe in all those things

and are there to fight the fight

and will be even smarter.

♪ ♪

In that sense, time is on our side.

[Muddy Waters' "Rollin' Stone" plays]

♪ ♪

- ♪ Well, I wish ♪

♪ I was a catfish ♪

♪ Swimmin' in a, oh, deep blue sea ♪

♪ I would have all you good-looking women ♪

♪ Fishing, fishing after me ♪

♪ Sure enough after me ♪

♪ Sure enough after me ♪

♪ Oh, enough ♪

♪ Oh, enough ♪

♪ Sure enough ♪

♪ ♪

♪ I went to ♪

♪ My baby's house ♪

♪ And I sit down, oh ♪

♪ On her steps ♪

♪ She said, "Now, come on in now, Muddy ♪

♪ You know my husband just now left" ♪

♪ Sure enough, he just now left ♪

♪ Sure enough, he just now left ♪

♪ Oh, enough ♪

♪ Oh, well ♪

♪ Oh, well ♪

♪ ♪

♪ Well, I feel ♪

♪ Yes, I feel ♪

♪ Feel that I could lay down ♪

♪ Oh, time ain't long ♪

♪ I'm going to catch the first thing smoking ♪

♪ Back, back down the road I'm going ♪

♪ Back down the road I'm going ♪

♪ Back down the road I'm going ♪

♪ Sure enough, back ♪

♪ Sure enough, back ♪

♪ ♪

[bright tone]