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Oh, I don't care about typecasting.
I'm still identified under my name on TV interviews,
or documentaries, whatever,
as "rock critic."
And that's not me.
But then they say, "Oh, but can't we say senior editor at Rolling Stone"?
Well, dude, that was 30 years ago.
So get over it.
I just got over it last year.
I love these times you've come,
especially when you show up with a Spam sandwich in your hand.
Mm. And a bottle of wine for a nice picnic out in the backyard.
It's past 2 o'clock on a Sunday afternoon
on KSAN, the Jive 95.
Ben Fong-Torres with you. Or without you.
This guy, you know, he's got some history, Ben Fong-Torres.
He's met them all?
Well, I used to read him in Rolling Stone
going back to high school.
Ben Fong-Torres immortalized in Almost Famous.
This is Ben Fong-Torres.
I'm the music editor at Rolling Stone magazine.
What a moment for you,
to be up there in lights in a hit movie.
You must have loved it.
About the closest thing to my character
is in the movie is the loudness of my shirts.
-You've written an autobiography? -Yes.
-Have you lived an interesting life? -No, I haven't, but I sold the book, so…
All right, Ben.
Would you be interested in hosting? You're much more amusing than I am.
Before the Internet, before blogging, before tweeting…
Hello, Rolling Stone.
…there was the Rolling Stone.
Rolling Stone was the place that young kids went for pop culture.
It's where we went for our politics.
It's where we went for the news our parents didn't know.
And it was this subversive rag that we loved.
And there were superstars who worked there.
And one of the biggest was Ben Fong-Torres.
Everybody read Rolling Stone magazine.
Mick Jagger read Rolling Stone magazine.
John Lennon read Rolling Stone magazine.
And so everybody knew Ben Fong-Torres.
I remember Ben from the Fillmore
and the Avalon in San Francisco,
from that time when we all thought we could change the world,
and we'd all ingested psychedelic substances.
And Ben was right in the middle of the whole thing.
He's one of the great writers ever.,
They're not that great writers around.
Some good ones, but not as good as this guy.
He had a lightness and gravitas
at the same time, which I've, you know, not succeeded in replicating.
You do a wonderful Bob Dylan.
-Oh, well… -And I saw you doing it on television.
Yeah, that was a Dick Clark production called Your Big Break,
and they had me doing what else?
Okay.
George Harrison interview.
November 12th, 1974.
Let's see, there's Ray Charles.
Here is Tina Turner, and I-- oh boy.
This was an adventure,
because it was, as I wrote on the cassette 40-something years ago,
it says "buzz" on one thing, and then "poor" on the other one.
So those did not weather the years.
I'm sure there are a few others that have corroded or broken
because they were cheap drugstore cassettes that we used.
And so it's a wonder that, given the technology of cassettes,
that they survived.
There are probably about a hundred or so that I would--
Well, maybe even more that I would say are treasures.
And the accidental encounter with Jim Morrison.
Here it is.
Oh.
It's sharing a cassette with a Rolling Stone editorial meeting.
I'm not sure I want to hear that again.
Ben Fong-Torres got The Doors.
Raymond Daniel Manzarek.
-Occupation? -Musician. Organist.
I felt that Ben understood the jazz aspect.
The combination of jazz, blues, and psychedelic kind of music
that The Doors were trying to do with--
And he understood Morrison's lyrics.
Morrison's lyrics were, uh…
They were Jungian, you know. Carl Jung, the philosopher.
I want to tell you about Texas radio and the big beat.
It comes out of the Virginia swamps,
cool and slow with a back beat narrow and hard to master.
You know, sometimes the best stories happen by accident.
And that was the situation when I happened to be hanging out
at an apartment in West Hollywood with a friend,
a publicist for various bands, and in popped Jim Morrison.
How important is poetry to you now?
You still working on…
…on pieces?
Yeah actually, uh,
this book is--
is more of a collection
of aphorisms and--
and notes.
-Mm-hmm. -There's only five or six
really solid traditional poems in it.
I don't consider
that my career as a poet
has really even begun yet.
Yeah, uh, we'd like to
make an order, please.
Uh, Morrison.
Right. And, uh, a half-a-pint of… uh
…of… Beefeater.
Ben… you want some potato chip--? Yeah, a bag of potato chips.
A large one.
Thanks.
He was a guy who was, like, a rock god.
And he was doing stuff to himself that wasn't very healthy.
You know, that was very well known, his habits with drugs and alcohol.
And yet, to be surprised to sit down and encounter
this intelligent, charming, relaxed person
who had goals and ambitions beyond rock and roll.
Very specific and quite articulate.
I think you uh…
there's a certain moment when you're right
you're right in time with your audience,
and then…
you both grow out of it, and that
you just have to realize that
it's not that you've outgrown the audience
it's just that
the audience and you have
both are too old for that. You know?
How much longer do you have with Elektra?
Well, we're at work on our last album.
Mm-hmm. Do you see far beyond that?
I can't see too much beyond that, uh--
You know, it's a day to day thing.
We're at kind of a crossroads in our career.
You know, we'll know within the next
five or six months.
what the future will be.
Ben did the last interview with Jim Morrison
before he left for Paris.
In 1971,
July 3rd,
was Jim Morrison's last day on planet Earth.
In Paris.
I made sure that the front page headline
listed him as a poet as well as a rock star.
L.A. Woman would be their last album together as The Doors.
In our conversation that day,
Jim talked about the death of rock and roll,
and it reminded me of this song by The Doors:
"When the Music's Over."
The song that was hauntingly prophetic.
I know there are people who are driven to write every day.
I don't think I feel the need to write,
but by habit, it seems like, I write pretty much every day.
So when I go down to the office to my keyboard,
I know that it's going to be some--
Something good's going to come out of it.
"Tell me more" is one of the great questions you can ask.
Doesn't even seem like a question, right?
But you get people expanding on their lives, you say,
"Oh, no kidding. Tell me more."
Or find some variation on a way to say that.
Ben is the king of Tell Me More.
with, uh, the album, like I'm interested
Well before I do
Can I ask, uh, please hold that question
-Sure -Are you going to use
are you going to quote me, uh, uh…
Everything you've said so far.
You tell the truth as best you can find it.
You don't make stuff up. You don't bullshit people, right?
Um, word gets around that that's who you are and what you're about.
So people feel comfortable talking with you.
That's why after he'd done the interview with Marvin Gaye,
Elton John was interested in talking with him.
What about costumes, uh…
when you first got into that,
as you explained later on,
Two things: to avoid boredom and,
for yourself, and to be different
from all the others.
But now, that so many other acts
have become costumed,
do you feel like you must do something else again
to be different again?
Not really. I just do it to-- …for my own amusement
Um… um…
It really started as a completely tongue-in-cheek thing
because the songs that I was performing.
weren't the sort of songs you'd expect anyone to come in wearing a costume to.
'cause they were very moody songs.
and then I started to enjoy it.
And there's not-- I never feel-- Honestly, never feel like
comin' out in a suit or a pair of jeans
'cause I just, uh--
Even at sound checks I'm a little glamorous.
I was just rereading his interview with Elton John.
and you might not notice it's partly interview as in,
we had the question, then we have Elton's response.
A transcript-style response.
It goes from that to then Ben is then setting a scene,
or making some observations, and then back to the questions.
And to do that, just as a matter of technique,
to go from narrative, to Q&A, to narrative, to Q&A,
getting that balance just right so it doesn't show.
And that's craft.
Maybe it's art.
I don't think there's anybody else at the time
that could match Ben's writing, and I'm not sure there is today.
Bernie never gets
a musical idea that he can't restrain?
And you never have a phrase
in your head that you have
to put into a song or
to tell Bernie about, so he can write-- write a song out of it?
I sometimes get a title.
Um…
But I mean-- I'm sure--
When Bernie writes the songs and lyrics,
when he's writing, he's got-- visualizes a sort of a tune.
Which, I mean, you'd-- you'd have to.
That must be a mo-- That must be a moment for him then, when--
you turn it back to him completely written as music.
Say, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.
Yeah.
I am looking for the coolest guy in the history of show business.
It's Ben Fong-Torres. Oh my God.
-Hello, my brother.
Ben was my first kind of glimpse of what a professional journalist
and editor was like.
When I was on an assignment, I would always kind of think,
how would Ben carry himself with the proper amount of distance,
but giving the artist the comfort to say what's on their mind?
This is Al Green. Ben Fong-Torres.
-Oh, Al Green. -Right.
Shockingly, there were many journalists that I ran into
who were not like Ben.
They were kind of there to meet people, hang out, get drunk, or whatever.
Ben, to me, was never one of those people that was just really there to hang out.
He was there to get the job done, and to come back with the goods.
Because we only have one show, see?
We run off, we do that, bam, give me ten minutes and come on back.
-Yeah. -No problem.
Okay, could you tell Les--
-See you tonight. -All right, for sure.
Brian, you've had a lot of fun with your songs.
What makes you laugh?
Arguments. Whenever I hear an argument, I laugh.
Arguments between you and other people, or just--?
-No, other people. -Just listening in? Right.
You know, Ben was somebody
who just had that hipster kind of vibe
a long time before it really became the status quo.
If you were a young hipster in the 1970s,
a wannabe journalist, there was some guy that was a must-read.
Of all the people that wrote, even Hunter Thompson,
the guy whose byline we looked for
had probably the sexiest name in the whole magazine.
Ben Fong-Torres.
I've been trying to figure out what the hell
Ben Fong-Torres is…
since I first read it.
And now you know too much.
-I'm all Chinese. -Torres?
It's like, Fong? Asian.
Torres? Latino.
Ben Fong-Torres always seemed like a strange name to me.
You wouldn't think he was, you know, a Chinese guy right away.
You konw, until you saw him. And then you weren't sure.
A teacher asked, "Are you Norwegian?"
You're looking at me.
I did go to Ben at one point and said,
"Would you consider some type of pseudonym?"
"A new byline, you know, some kind of thing
that'd be easier for people to get a handle on."
You know, not for racial reasons. Just, it's sort of oddball, you know?
But I should talk. "Jann Wenner." You know what I mean?
I've got oddball names.
I finally learned
how Fong-Torres came to be our name.
My father came over from China with a Filipino birth certificate
that he bought for mucho dinero.
That was one way to circumvent the Chinese Exclusion Act.
And so he came across as Ricardo Torres.
After my father came to America,
he worked his way up from dishwashing, to cooking,
to becoming a co-owner of restaurants in Chinatown in Oakland.
Yeah, he'd been here a good number of years, and he was well into his 30s.
Friends began to inveigh him that he-- if he wants to start a family,
he'd better get cracking.
And so, in the home village,
word spread out.
And in a neighboring village, my mom was checked out
and deemed to be suitable.
And so, well, the marriage was arranged.
Almost impossible to imagine being in that situation
of coming from China and leaving their entire family structure
and community to come to America in the '40s
to what might be a very hostile environment.
Going back to 1854,
and the decision by our California Supreme Court
denying the right of Asians to testify,
and there was constitutional amendments that prohibited public companies
from hiring Asians.
Everybody from all over the world
was allowed to enter United States.
The only three people that could not enter were the prostitute, moron, and lepers.
So in 1882, Congress added Chinese to that list.
Because of the family business, the restaurant,
we were raised with a work ethic,
and we were told from the early stages that it was more than just us as kids.
That it was family. It was the parents. It was their sacrifice.
It was what they had done to get to America.
And so we heard lots of stories to the point,
really, where you kind of shrug them off.
Oh, here we go again about how hard it is in China,
and they made it over, and now we have to do our share.
And that got through to me as… in the areas of responsibility
of being part of the family team,
and that probably made me more sensitive to other people.
I do remember that when I was able to go to a party--
high school, for example,
I would often wind up asking people questions and never talking about myself.
I think I felt, like, what's there to say about bussing dishes?
And so I began to just kind of take notes on other people's affairs,
and events, and news.
And that probably led to the choice to be a writer
about other people's stories.
Oh, lemme see. You want some tea, Ben?
-Yeah. -Uh, that'll be two--two teas.
So, it'll be two cups
and maybe a large container
you know, with tea.
So, when as a child…
when did you first become aware that--
that there was something missing
according to other people's standards.
When did you know that you were in a sense, handicapped?
I never really knew it.
You know?
In school, they didn't tell you that Hey, you have to deal with this.
You must cope with a handicap. Did they do it positively?
They never--
They probably said things.
I cannot remember. I cannot--I don't even--
They must have been so insignificant.
The only thing that was said to me in school,
and this is like my early part of school when I was in Detroit,
was like, you know,
something that made me feel like
because I was Black
I could never be or I would never be.
-Mm. -You know?
Mm-hmm.
You mean, that Black was--
being Black was considered to be even a--
a bigger weight on you?
More of a handicap?
I guess so. I mean it's…
You know…
You know, this cat said in the article one time,
It was funny, man.
"Damn, I mean, he's Black,
he's blind and
what else?"
A lot of people are very sensitive about that
but like…
That made me, I guess, only because maybe
I'm a Taurus or whatever, it just made me fight it.
I said, you know, "Bullshit!"
I don't want to hear that shit. You know?
Sarah was the first born, followed by Barry and then me.
I was followed by Shirley and then Burton.
The firstborn son is pretty much the supreme leader of the kids battalion.
And so I was in the middle,
just kind of picking up the hand-me-downs from Barry,
and not having that responsibility of being the one who has to go to college
and and have a great white-collar job.
And I didn't feel that pressure that Barry felt.
We had a family of seven crammed into a two-bedroom, one-bathroom flat.
Barry and I read our comics by flashlight under the covers.
We also managed to get a pocket radio in the shape of a rocket.
We would reach out our bedroom window
and attach it to our clothesline, which is handy.
Then you just dial the rocket base to pull in the station.
And that was radio back in the early days of rock and roll,
or rocket and roll.
I was inspired by one of the greatest voices of all time,
Gary Owens, who was a disc jockey on-- in Oakland, on KEWB.
This has been KEWB instant news,
no sooner done than said.
- At the tone, music.
"Hi there. Hi, gang. Gary Owens on KEWB Color Radio."
So early on, I just kind of appreciated these entertainments in my life,
and thought that possibly I could do that.
We couldn't afford a new phonograph player,
so Barry decided to make one himself.
He got a children's 78 r.p.m. model at a thrift shop,
and honed the cap stand down until the speed decreased
to the speed of rock and roll: 45 r.p.m.
So you understand why I looked up to Barry all the time.
I kind of gravitated to people who were in some ways marginalized.
Having come from my background helped to direct the way I went with subjects
and the way stories were done.
But in terms of a musician who was awe-inspiring
and lived up to what I had been thinking about him as for many years,
Ray Charles.
He was the man in my mind, because as a kid in junior high school,
I was listening to "Hit the Road Jack," "Georgia," and "What I'd Say."
Ray Charles was famous before I got to him,
but he was overlooked.
He was being ignored by a lot of the rock culture audience.
And I said, "Man, how about Ray Charles?"
Without him, I don't know that we'd all be here.
So-- and I'm sure he's got himself a story to tell.
And he did.
they had ads in the paper
where they were trying to find anybody
that could sing like me.
Uh-huh.
You think about that for a minute.
Here I am and here's a guy will go and spend millions of dollars
to find a White cat just to imitate me,
and he'll do far better than me.
Let's break it down.
an-an-and tell it like it is.
This is the real truth.
When you get a guy
who come up,
man, say like an Elvis Presley--
an-an-and let's face it, man,
you had more people going out
shaking their behinds an-and stuff like that.
What'd they call--Elvis the Pelvis?
-Yeah. -You know where Elvis got that from?
He used to be out on Beale Street
in Memphis! That's where he saw
the Black people doing that.
We couldn't do that on TV.
There ain't no way, man,
There ain't no way in hell they'd let anybody, like-like,
get on TV and do that.
But he could be-- He's White.
And when Ray Charles would talk about firsthand segregation,
that wasn't even just in childhood, but even as a star.
You see, I done seen all this, man.
I know all about
the places where I couldn't drink out of the fountain.
I know all about the places
I couldn't go to the bathroom
when I had to pee.
Somethin' that's natural for every human being.
You understand me? And if I do it on the highway
and the cops see me
he gonna put me in jail for it.
You understand?
And maybe beat my head, too depending on where I am.
See, I know all about that.
Yeah, but I don't want to let
that get into what I'm doing.
I--I'm in this business for--
because I love music.
Barry and I and Shirley and Burton
all wound up doing a lot of restaurant work,
packing orders, taking orders, waiting on tables, bussing dishes.
That kind of stuff.
We had to just do wash rice.
I'm talking about a massive amount of rice.
It's a storage area comprised of a room
where we have a table and chairs, and we have a radio.
And then there was a cage-like thing where there were sacks upon sacks
of mostly rice.
I said it was more of a holding cell than anything else.
Or peel shrimp.
As it turned out, I think all the kids were allergic to touching raw shellfish.
Not that they were allergic to eating it.
Just the work part of it.
Being in that restaurant environment,
you just knew all the time that you were different.
nd so it was really a moment of hope to, at age 12, be escaping Chinatown,
to go off to some area of the country I'd never even thought of:
the Panhandle, in Texas.
My father getting another shot at a business venture.
Being a chef and operating a restaurant.
And we wind up at this home of the main partner.
And it's a wonderful house.
It's an American house, large living room, a pet dog.
Oh man, it seemed like we were in for a pretty good ride there.
And suddenly, things changed.
I learned that we are going to be housed not in a house, but the parking lot.
They put us with two other chef partners in a low-slung two-room shack
hidden in the back behind the restaurant.
We had no more furniture than a jail cell, and no air conditioning or heating.
It was in Texas that I could see discrimination firsthand.
The local school district decided that I'd go to the all-White
rather than the all-Black school.
I was the only Chinese-American kid of more than 450 students.
I'll never forget the gym teacher calling me Chop Chop.
It was a very humiliating.
Chop Chop, of course, from the Blackhawk comic book series.
And it's amazing when I think back to it,
it still stands out that this short, pudgy guy named Chop Chop
had a very bright yellow face amid the pink and other faces
that populated the comic book.
And so, yeah, stood out, and not in a good way.
In speech class, I learned to mimic Texas accents
to camouflage my Chinatown upbringing.
I tried to be cool.
The passport to cool-dom in 1957 was rock and roll.
So in the shack behind the restaurant in front of a mirror,
I lip-synced to Elvis Presley songs.
The coolest sounds were being made by Elvis, and Jerry Lee, and Buddy Holly,
but also by Little Richard and Chuck Berry.
My classmates in Texas invited me to join them
for root beer floats after school,
and to listen to rock and roll and R&B on the jukebox.
Inside that jukebox, there were no racial borders.
No segregation.
Rock and roll was an equalizer.
And for me, it was more than a way to have fun
or to feel like part of the crowd.
It was a way to feel Americanized.
I met Ben when he was just getting out of high school.
I've known him that long.
I was born in Louisiana,
and I came here in San Francisco when I was five,
and I know what he's talking about for that era,
because I'd gone through things down there myself.
So I could imagine that that affected him, and he would fill the soul of that
by living in Texas and being made less than a person that he was, you know,
and that the deep sensitivity and the spirit that he has, you know.
But it didn't wear him down. It helped him.
It helps him in his writing, and the feeling the soul of the music.
-Thank you, Jules. -Thank you. Very good. Yes.
In Texas, the restaurant was not doing as well
as they had anticipated.
My father was a very good cook, but he never had much of a business head,
and so his restaurants almost invariably failed.
And then to go to Amarillo with high hopes and to have them dashed
was very difficult.
My father was upset with the restaurant. I was upset with the restaurant.
And so, left to my wiles,
I would grab some rocks and throw them at the neon sign
for the Ding How restaurant,
as if that really would help the situation any.
But hey, you know, I'm 12, 13 years old.
And so it wasn't long before we were packing up and heading back to to Oakland.
And so I kind of went back to Oakland.
Uh, I think I thought that, if at all possible,
I would follow a different road.
I thought about becoming a broadcaster or a writer or an artist.
In high school,
I began to write for the school paper, the Oakland High School Aegis,
and then Commission of Assemblies.
So I was already kind of straddling the two worlds.
There were no opportunities at the time.
There were no Asian Americans in media in general to speak of.
And so nobody, least of all my parents, encouraged it.
You know, they had the idea of Dr. Fong-Torres,
or Benjamin Fong-Torres, Esquire.
In the mid-'60s,
just as I was going to school at S.F. State,
it seemed like the world completely changed.
As a reporter and then editor for the school paper,
that pretty much became our beat.
So I would hear about things like legalizing marijuana, sexual freedom,
the war in Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement.
All of that was going on on an almost daily basis.
Off the pigs!
During a Civil Rights Week event,
I went and took the voting test that was being given
to Black people in the South,
and rigged so that there was no way you could pass the test.
So I took it and did the best job I could,
and failed miserably, and then wrote about it.
People just were experimenting with all kinds of new ideas.
At Berkeley, there was the Free Speech Movement.
People today don't realize that before this happened,
every movie you saw, every television show you saw,
and every book you read was censored.
Everybody was very scared about what were you students saying,
what were they allowed to say and that sort of thing.
Reagan called out the National Guard.
There's pepper spray going on, there's a helicopter with pepper spray.
The tear gas is in your eyes, you can't see.
Knowing that you're part of a revolution
is kind of an act of faith.
You just have to know it.
Ben was in the middle of this revolution from the get-go.
And, you know, it all came together in the music.
And the music itself was revolutionary. It was being made in a different way.
individuals with their electricity, and their guitars, and their garage bands
were creating the whole thing, producing it, creating it,
writing it, performing it.
That was all brand-new.
San Francisco sound was known everywhere.
The bands who were playing were also a major part
of the definition of the '60s.
The Grateful Dead, The Jefferson Airplane,
and you had Big Brother and the Holding Company
popping up on campus and just deciding to do some rehearsing there.
We wrote songs about changing the world,
and Ben Fong-Torres had a very accurate and forward-looking view
of what was going on.
We thought, it's actually possible that we can make a difference, you know,
and maybe stop the war in Vietnam,
and have people be a little kinder to each other.
And I was still a student in graduate school at Berkeley.
We were all, like, 18 and 19,
and we were going to go, you know, we were going to get our asses shot off,
you know, in Vietnam for a very specious purpose, you know.
And so we caught on right away, because it was life and death for us.
In the '60s, the lyrics of many songs carried messages.
Artists were singing protest songs, people like Edwin Starr.
-Give me an F! -F!
-Give me a U! -U!
-Give me a C! -C!
-Give me a K! -K!
-What's that spell? -Fuck!
What's that spell?
I'm well known for the song about the Vietnam War,
called "I Feel Like I'm Fixing to Die."
And I wrote it in 1965.
And it became popular in 1969,
Although it was banned on the radio and television,
it's pretty commonplace now.
But it was shocking to hear that kind of working-class language in 1969.
But it was a new kind of protest song.
It wasn't blaming soldiers for war.
And it blamed politicians and parents and the industrial complex.
You were one of those who was really candid
about the price people paid for some of the excesses of that era.
Yeah, that's a…
a good thing about me and a bad thing about me.
-All right!
This was a young person's revolution,
but it was really a cultural revolution, which meant that it was--
involved politics, sex, drugs and rock and roll.
This is Jann Wenner. I'm the editor of Rolling Stone.
Finally, Jann came over one day and said,
"How about a magazine that would cover, not just the records and the music,
but cover the whole culture?"
As soon as he said we said, you know, we both agreed it was a hell of an idea.
When Rolling Stone first came out in late 1967,
all of us roommates would jump at it.
You know, it was like a long-awaited drug shipment had finally hit the dock
and we were down there grabbing it.
And we would pass it around to each other, and we would devour it.
But having just done journalism and written for the newspaper
and covering some of the scene,
because a lot of it was taking place at San Francisco State.
So it was natural for me to want to write for Rolling Stone.
By the time Rolling Stone started,
that was around the time of the Summer of Love.
It was a full cultural dropout revolution.
Jann started the magazine straight from being on the Berkeley campus,
so he knew what was happening.
All through college, even in a leadership position,
running the school paper, being city editor
and assigning the stories to our staff of 25 reporters.
I still felt like, "Yeah, you're your Chinese guy,
and these people mostly aren't."
I just felt like, I don't know if I can do this professionally.
Get a job doing this outside of school, because there is nobody out there like me.
And that's the way it is, Friday, March 6th…
There was nobody who was Chinese American or Asian American
doing anything in broadcast
or in printed media except the Chinese press.
I wanted to be out there, and how to get out there,
I would pretty much take any means necessary.
I had a job at the time at the phone company
as an editor and writer for the employee magazine.
Could not be a straighter job.
I met Jann and got my first feature assignment,
and that was an interview with Dino Valenti,
who was a singer/songwriter.
Wrote what became known as a hippie anthem. "Get Together."
I started at Rolling Stone as a proofreader.
I was the earliest editorial employee to last more than a couple of weeks.
I had no qualifications whatever. I was just a freak off the street.
I saw all the copy and I remember thinking,
"Ben Fong-Torres, this guy is a real writer."
I mean, we were dealing with whatever kind of flakes off the street
wanted to write about rock and roll.
And Ben was a serious journalist, and he was he was a skilled writer, too.
I was encouraging Jann, like, "We gotta get this guy," you know.
When he was first starting out with Rolling Stone,
we were the punk of our generation.
And we hung together.
And so if Ben was writing something,
I was inclined to go with it
just because he was coming from where we were coming from.
I was such a music nerd, because I loved the radio.
I listen to Top 40 religiously.
I collected surveys.
The top 40 or top 30 of every week.
And so it got to the point where a song comes on the radio,
I can remember the color of the label.
Roulette is red, Motown is purple and gold,
Columbia is bright orange.
To have that kind of knowledge instead of useful knowledge,
that is pretty scary.
That probably appealed to Jann, that he has someone who
was a walking encyclopedia of music.
And he offered me a job.
So it was a choice of Rolling Stone versus a phone company.
Duh! So I just jumped.
It wasn't even a magazine then. It was like a two-color newspaper.
Quarter folded, it was totally different from any publication out there.
It was just what we had been dreaming of.
I had to go to Goodwill Industries and buy a desk and a chair.
It was just such a rush to see your name, your byline,
to see how the pages were laid out, the photography.
Jann had high standards from the very beginning
with very little funding, and he just went to the limits
of his own ability to create Rolling Stone
and to be given a chance to join the crew there.
It was out of this world, and it wasn't even Rolling Stone yet.
But it was Rolling Stone enough for me.
If you were a reader of Rolling Stone,
you knew pretty much what the magazine was all about
from the opening editorial in Issue One.
Jann didn't talk about music. He talked about bullshit.
You know, they talk about telling the truth.
And people who are part of a new movement think they're telling the truth.
And they are. They're telling a truth that hasn't been told before.
And you find that in Dylan's songs.
"You don't know what's happening, do you, Mr. Jones?"
There was a sense that we knew what was happening,
and the rest of you didn't get it.
Look at the audience that subscribe to Time Magazine.
It's a class of people that take the magazine seriously.
But I don't take it seriously.
If I want to find out anything, I'm not going to read Time Magazine.
We had a core commitment to good journalism,
honesty and reporting, telling the truth.
But if we had to say something was bad music,
we said something that was bad.
Rolling Stone was a very strong voice in the music community.
Rolling Stone also had a very strong political voice,
and you couldn't separate those in those days,
really, because the politics were-- and the music were both changing,
and really intertwined very much.
Just like the music of the Beatles, the Stones,
and Dylan spoke for our generation,
well, we had to have a newspaper that chronicled what we were doing,
and that was Rolling Stone.
Ben personified it.
We were covering the revolution, the Free Speech Movement,
the Civil Rights Movement, sexual liberation,
and, finally, the liberation of music.
And Ben was covering the music,
so he was really at the center of everything.
We were in it, we were close to it, we were in the thick of it.
And we felt the impulse in the beginning that we are on some kind of mission,
or some kind of crusade, and to tell the truth about the music,
and about the generation,
and the people doing that were really young.
Not with a lot of experience.
What happened in 1970
was that we were really knocking ourselves out,
putting out this publication.
We'd be spending money and hiring people.
Then they'd have to retract.
It was like saving paper clips and, you know, that sort of thing.
And he would pass out egg timers
so you wouldn't have a phone call longer than three minutes.
A journalist doing an interview in three minutes?
On top of all the work, from time to time, there would be these financial crises
that we would have to deal with, and people would be laid off,
or there'd be the threat of it.
Laurel Gonsalves and I, Laurel was in charge of advertising.
I was in charge of music.
We talked about it in the hallway, and then said, "Okay, let's do that."
And we went into the Jann's office and volunteered for pay cuts.
And he accepted them.
Dumb us.
Hmm. Wow.
So you haven't been here in years.
Yeah. It's been quite a few years, actually.
Well, 50. But who's counting?
I think I can see where Jann's office was.
Maybe here?
Well, I have a photo.
-Do you want to--? -Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty close.
Yeah. This is it.
It's obviously a different space,
and yet so much of it is what we came to work at.
It seems like a lot longer now.
No, it's just ridiculous to be here again.
Wow.
It really is a flashback to half a century ago.
Half a century since working here. And what a different time it was.
At Rolling Stone, what are the people really like?
You've been taping them for two weeks now, Al.
What's the big story there?
It's real sick, Mick. It's real sick up there.
It's serious business.
It was stressful.
I think it's probably the most stressful period of my life.
That constant pressure.
And something has to be done to correct that, and do that,
and do that, and do this.
After the big staff fight, we went down to a bare bones operation.
The only editors left were me and Ben and Jann.
People had no idea how small we were.
It was just this little tiny handful of guys,
and we were doing everything.
That was when we really had to rely on Ben.
Ben has a real way about him of rallying the troops.
You know, in the early days, small staff and having to get out
these major, major stories on insane deadlines,
doing the work of three people yourself.
I used to spend a lot of time out in Oakland with Ralph Gleason
at the infancy stage of Rolling Stone,
and that's all I ever heard, was Ben Fong-Torres.
Ben is what I admire the most, you know. He is a 360-degree person.
That's what I like, because he's got, without question,
the intellectual, you know.
But he can get ghetto in the New York minute.
And he gets it quick.
And that was where we confounded everybody's expectations.
Everybody thought Rolling Stone was doomed, but in fact, it rebounded
and became bigger and more successful.
The music coverage, that's what made us survive.
And, of course, that was Ben's gig. He really was our music maestro.
First of all,
in order for that guy to copy me,
he gotta wait 'til I do it first.
When you're first starting out, you…
you can't just sign up for a couple of records.
I'm concerned about what the audience is hearing, you know?
Although they never hear these little misses and goofs and things.
Linda Ronstadt.
It was kind of like lightning in a bottle.
It was just an unexpected thing that really resonated with a lot of people,
and it just drew writers like magic.
You know, everybody wanted to write at Rolling Stone.
Ben, in a lot of ways, is sort of the lodestar.
Kind of like the guiding light kind of a thing,
because he could write these long profiles on people that really delivered.
A lot of the people on our staff had never done it before at all.
They didn't know the right or the wrong way to do it.
When I was 22 or 23,
Ben gave me assignments,
and eventually they were published in Rolling Stone.
So Ben believed in me enough, and that helped me believe in myself.
He would take a manuscript, you know,
to show people how to do a better job.
Some of the longer pieces we would do
became the model for the other people to…
This is what a Rolling Stone major piece looks like.
Ben showed us how to do that.
You ever allowed yourself to get to the point
where you say, "I'm just not gonna fall in love for a while?"
Oh, I've said that plenty of times.
It never works.
Ben taught me so much about being a biographer
and how hard you have to work, really, as a detective during the research phase
to try to talk to as many people as possible who knew your subject.
He taught me about persistence, and how even if you've done, you know,
90 interviews,
if you still can get that one more interview with someone
that you think can really bring a unique perspective,
don't give up, keep going for it.
Ben was always very thoughtful, and very professional, and very focused,
and very fatherly, and almost paternal, in a way.
Ben had a very low threshold for any kind of unprofessionalism,
incompetence, inefficiency.
That was unacceptable.
There weren't that many women doing what I was doing as a writer,
a wannabe biographer at the time.
But his encouragement to me kept me going
when sometimes I really felt like I was going up against a brick wall.
Ben introduced me to Bob Dylan.
You can't underestimate the the kind of support and friendship
that you get from people when you're just starting out.
It was extremely important.
Now…
Ben was a core member
of the three or four people who made all decisions
about what was going to go in the magazine and not going to magazine.
Not only did he and I and three or two other people share the decision,
we shared the responsibility for writing as well.
Ben was a double threat.
The people in the outside world had no way of realizing that,
because an editor is an editor,
and he's kind of the behind-the-scenes sort of guy.
But Ben was molding and shaping all the music coverage
and making Rolling Stone what it was:
the premium rock and roll magazine in the country.
Although I don't think he knew it,
he was certainly the focus of the magazine.
Jann was the boss, but Ben was the heart and the soul of it.
Whenever a story would come out in Rolling Stone,
I don't care who it was about, I would read it because Ben wrote it.
They weren't fluff interviews. They were they were tough interviews.
It could have only been Ben Fong-Torres ho could have written that story.
I have a list of stuff to ask you about. Marvin Gaye--
-All right. -We know this is a great
kind of gift, when you get an assignment where you're seeing the person
at a key point in their life, and they haven't done a lot of interviews
and so it just comes tumbling out.
-Yes. -And Marvin really gave you
an amazing interview, one of his very best interviews
Right. You're sitting there saying,
"Well, what a tremendous piece of work you came up with with 'What's Going On.'"
It's just a masterpiece. Your fans are saying it.
Your critics are saying it. Your fellow musicians are saying it.
And then the--the lyrical content, you're covering ecology
you're covering your own sense of religion,
you're covering, uh, Saving the Children,
and, um, and simply talking
to brothers and--and returning from war.
Did all of this
seem to flow together,
or did you have these particular tunes in your mind, or
particular subjects, or, or, uh…
was that conceived also, as you said.
Well…um…
Well, what you're trying to find out, I imagine, is, uh,
am I really a genius or a fake?
-Oh, no! -And I think I'm a fake.
That's already been established.
I don't think that-- the concept
has to do with genius or--or--or fakery or--
No. What--what it is-- But a lot of people
ask me that same question.
Will say, "Listen, tell me this,
How did you put that damn album together?"
-You know, I-- -Mm-hmm.
a nut like you. I mean, really explain that.
And I tell 'em.
I listen to 'em, and it kinda bugs me
a little bit sometimes.
And then I'd say, "Well, I dunno. I just-- It just happened."
And it really did.
It happened through divinity.
For a moment there, I think the enormity of the success
and what he expected to be the expectations of him
had him in a stir.
He was already worried that it wasn't for real.
I want to be liked so well,
and I've got such a tremendous ego until--
if it's inflated--
I mean deflated or
punctured or hurt at all.
-Mm-hmm. -I'll withdraw
-Mm-hmm. -Into my own little thing,
and that's what's-- probably basically what's happened to me.
-Mm-hmm. -And I'll fight
from inside my shell.
So he took little enough credit that he was uncertain about what might be next.
-Wow. -As it turned out,
given time, he came up with--
-"Let's Get It On." -Yeah. "Let's Get It On."
-And "Here, My Dear." -"Sexual Healing."
And all of that stuff.
Ben was probably as famous as some of the people he was interviewing.
Here we have a picture of Ben.
He had a certain stature.
Plus, he represented Rolling Stone, so people wanted to cooperate with him.
Musicians saw him as a celebrity, whether he knows that or not.
When I would call and say "This is Cynthia from Rolling Stone magazine."
"We want to talk to the Grateful Dead."
"Well, is it going to be Ben Fong-Torres that's going to be doing the interview?"
"Because if it's not Ben, you know, we're not going to do it."
The Airplane, The Grateful Dead,
absolutely would not talk to anybody but Ben.
We were all peas in a pod.
We were issuing forth and sallying forth into the world.
He knew them all. They all liked him.
So Ben was more like one of them than a journalist
they weren't really interested in talking to.
He was more like a human being that dug the music,
and that's what gave us the access that we needed
to make that magazine what it was.
Ben seems to have a pretty good handle on all kinds of music.
And if he trashed us, I felt we probably had it coming.
I thought that Ben was the publicist's biggest nightmare.
We were getting interviewed for our big cover of Rolling Stone article
when I was playing in Jefferson Starship.
And he interviewed everybody and listened to it,
and then just told the truth.
But there we were on the cover of Rolling Stone.
But it was said "Starship Wars."
He told all the inner conflicts that were happening.
Of course, it was just nothing but good journalism, you know.
So, yeah, it didn't bother me, but it probably bothered our publicist.
Upper record company management
knew the M.O. of going in to Rolling Stone.
This was a very prestigious national magazine.
So to get on the cover meant the world to the artist,
and it meant the world to program directors across the country.
And it just opened up doors, and all of a sudden he is on a skyrocket.
He's a spaceman on the way to the moon.
Do record companies put pressure on you in any way?
-Yeah, they try. -How do they try?
Oh, just letters.
Letters and offers of extravagant expenses.
We'll fly you to New York to see this group,
or down south, or whatever.
There's just no way that I can respond to that by saying,
you know, "I'm-- I'll do the best I can."
That's just not the way it's done.
All of the record label executives,
they were happy if we, you know, did two out of 12.
If we're lucky.
But he was not afraid to tell me that he didn't like the record.
Ben was pretty straightforward about his feelings about music,
and I couldn't mess with his opinions.
Ben Fong-Torres had ethics.
The most memorable critical response to one of my stories
has to be George Harrison.
You understand your feelings about what you want to present
and being yourself.
And what you are now. It's just that there
there have been this talk have been the criticism.
You know I didn't force
you or anybody with
at gunpoint to come to see me.
He put himself into a difficult situation,
starting a tour, not feeling well, sore throat, over-rehearsed,
adamant that he was no longer a Beatle and therefore wouldn't do Beatles songs.
And if he did a couple of Beatles songs, he'd change them around.
A lot of the fans who still were wedded to their Beatles memories
would show up and be kind of disappointed.
He got a lot of criticism.
I reflected that criticism, and therefore got lambasted with criticism
for daring to be so negative about George.
Well, it wasn't me being negative.
I was there to chronicle the negativity.
That's what I was doing.
People talk about how romantic it must have been,
how fun it must have been, how wild it must have been.
Well, all of that was true to a certain extent.
There was a lot of bonding, and after work there was a lot
of going across the street to Jerry's and having a drink,
or later on going out to a concert together,
or meeting up at one of our homes and having a party.
We tested drug paraphernalia
under the collective editorial name Unwired Labs Limited.
We used to do this, I think, Unwired Laboratories,
where people would send in all kinds of paraphernalia, you know.
Bongs and roach holders.
And then we would take an evening off at probably Jann's house and test it all.
And Ben was there. So we were all testing that stuff.
So nobody was really straight.
Felton is full of bullshit.
Drugs was not Ben's thing.
Just not--and not part of the drug culture that existed in that office,
But didn't in any way feel like a stranger to that, or look down on it, or,
you know, felt any divide, just…
I don't do it, but I'm as cool as everybody else, you know?
And so it was not 24/7,
but lots of friendships grew within the Rolling Stone staff.
Annie Leibovitz began right out of the Art Institute in San Francisco
studying photography, and got a gig with Rolling Stone.
And then I began to work with her on the road and elsewhere.
-Hi. Hi, this is Ben. -Hello.
-Hi. Paula. -Hi, Paula.
-Hi. Hi. Annie's sister. -Yeah.
-Hi. -I will be Annie substitute.
-Hi. -She's over there.
Hi. Look at you.
-There is no substitute.
I guess you got your makeup on.
-I don't need it. -Hey, you look very handsome.
We met around 1969, 1970.
-Mm-hmm. -And we had
some of each other's best stories together.
Right? Because your first cover story, you have written in your books
was Grace and Paul.
Oh my God, yeah.
Every single one of those stories was a big learning experience
for being a young kid and being out there, and being with you guys.
You kind of like a season's experience.
-How old were you then? -What? No.
-We were all young and faking it. -That's not true.
Because I did a lot of the profiles
of rock and R&B and other stars,
Annie Leibovitz was often assigned to go with me.
She was 20 years old, I think,
And I wasn't much older, but she was right in there with me.
And so she became a kind of a partner.
The Rolling Stones, and Roberta Flack, and Ray Charles. I believe she shot.
Marvin Gaye. And it got to the point where we were so comfortable,
I with her and she with me,
that sometimes I would defer to her for a question or two.
I think she just knew when to put herself into the picture
and when to withdraw and help the story along.
So she was much more than just a photographer.
She was a participant.
One of my favorite that I did with you was really Ike and Tina Turner.
] Someone once called Tina the female Mick Jagger.
In fact, to be more accurate, one should call Mick the male Tina Turner.
Um…the Stones…
You toured with them in '66
as well as in '69.
How did that first one come about?
Mick was a friend of Phil,
and during the time we cut "River Deep, Mountain High,"
Mick caught our act a couple of times--
And Mick wasn't dancing at the time. He always said he liked
to see girls dance.
And then when he came to see our show he was excited about, like, the show.
And I'd always see Mick in the wings.
And I'd wonder why he was always standin' there.
I thought well wow, he must really be a fan.
And then I'd come out and watch him occasionally,
and I remember he was jus-- they were just playing music,
and Mick would be beatin' the-- just beat the tambourine
like really, 'till there was no more.
-But he wasn't dancing. -Uh-huh..
An' lo and behold, when he came to America
he was doing everything.
I said, "Ah, I know what he was doing in the wings, now."
So, he learned a lot of steps.
And I tried to teach him, like, the Popcorn and other steps
that we were doing, but…
He can't do them like that. He--He has to do them…
his way, like--like--
In other words, like his interpretation of what he see us do.
Though there seems to be a mutual admiration
between these two icons of rock royalty,
Tina's harshest criticisms are aimed at what she considers her own shortcomings.
What do you mean by you don't like your own sound?
I don't sound pretty, uh good. I say I sound
arregh. Naggy to me.
Ah…
but you have sounded pretty.
I can sound pretty but nobody likes me
like that. Like I read in the, um…
some article in the paper that…
Tina Turner's never been captured on records
she purrs like a kitten on record, and she
she's wild on stage.
Ah…
And when I'm wild, you know they don't like
like a record I put out, Working Together?
I love that record!
That's how I like to sound
like the River Deep, Mountain High album.
But, like, nobody accepts me. They want me
sounding all raspy.
To hear that song for the first time in 1967,
in the first year of acid rock and Memphis soul,
to hear that wall falling towards you with Tina teasing it along,
was to understand all the power of rock and roll.
My hair is getting longer and longer.
And at one point, my father said, "You look like a girl."
In my view, of course, this is the way of the world.
This is how my friends are dressing and looking.
And he is insulting me.
So I was very upset by that.
People of our generation were on the forefront
of making social change, and Chinatown was no different.
The community was coming from a position where, for over 100 years,
it had been silent.
It had been left out of the mainstream, been denied political electoral rights.
We're Americans, goddamn it. We got a voice. We've had a voice.
We got a history. We got a story to tell.
And we're going to tell it.
And Ben was one of the first to do it.
Around when Jann formed Rolling Stone,
Gordon Lew created East West,
a small and bilingual newspaper in Chinatown.
And I just thought, this could be a fun adventure with a newspaper.
And I sign on pretty much right away.
I had a multi-tasking world of working at Rolling Stone by day
and working at East West by night on a volunteer basis.
So he help us to do the layouts.
But his writing was very, very good,
and he wrote very fast.
We was always amazed to watch him on a typewriter.
It was if the typewriter is on fire.
When he went to work for East West,
he did it out of a love of journalism,
but he also did it out of a love for community,
because what he was writing about
was about the life of the community and the future of the community.
We were not even aware
that how important a job he had
at the Rolling Stones.
And he's very, very humble.
Chinatown was in a social upheaval.
The community had a lot of problems.
Social problems, economic problems.
It was a pressure cooker.
People, out of desperation, trying to find a hold on on life,
turned to crime.
The Sai-yon Restaurant is a favorite haunt for many of the street kids.
The restaurant's owner, Kim Ng, said in a telephone conversation
that he and members of the Chinatown Restaurant Association
are being extorted in one form or another by the street gangs.
There's a story, and we're reporting it,
and we're talking to people.
We're trying to be balanced about it
and bring it to a wider group of our community.
One evening, there was some kind of an explosive
that shattered the front door of the East West office,
and apparently that was kind of a warning to stay away from coverage
of the youth and gang problems.
But Gordon was a man of principle.
A couple of weeks after that, I was covering a meeting of a youth group.
I was just leaving that meeting and walking down the street,
and two or three guys approached me and then just began to to work me over.
There was no accusation, there was no warning.
It was just beat-up time.
It was disheartening, because you're saying,
"Hey, we want to do-- we want to accomplish this."
And then they're saying,
"Well, you're exposing us to attention that we don't want."
Who knows what their reasoning is?
And it was just clashing forces.
Barry Fong-Torres, like his brother Ben,
felt that as a Chinese American, he should pitch in and help,
because Chinatown had been very much neglected for decades.
Barry, he was one of the few people who genuinely was looking
to try to help the young people.
When I was asked to do the documentary on Chinatown youth,
he was one of the people I sought out.
Speaking as a newcomer to Chinatown
and speaking from experience gathered outside of Chinatown,
I feel the potential for a rip-off of the program
is generated like money being taken for services not rendered,
like equipment being stolen.
Things of this nature.
It was late at night,
and we were playing Scrabble and drinking champagne together,
just kind of chilling out and relaxing at his apartment.
But in any case, we were startled when the doorbell rang.
And he picked up this big antique Chinese sword.
Looked at me and he said, "I'd better bring this with me."
"You never know."
And he kind of grinned
that mischievous grin of his.
And went out to answer the doorbell.
I heard some pops, and I…
I thought, "Maybe it's firecrackers."
"Somebody playing a joke."
But then there was just silence.
And I was overcome with dread,
because I… I think at that point, I knew what had happened.
So I went out to the gates.
Found Barry there.
And, uh…
I did have a chance to say goodbye.
I don't think he heard me, but, um…
it was our last moment together.
It was a real tragedy to his family
and to the whole community,
that this happened.
Barry was, I think, suspected of being a representative
of law enforcement when he really wasn't.
Yeah, he worked for the system,
but he was there to try to provide services to the community.
And so he was victimized by being a little too close,
by being an outsider, and by--
by the paranoia that pervaded a lot of the groups.
Social, cultural, political going on.
His murderer has never been found.
There's been speculation about who it could be,
but his murderer has never been found, never been caught,
never been brought to justice.
It's hard for Ben to even mention Barry without tearing up.
So I was on the tour with Bob Dylan in 1974,
the one with The Band.
It was his first time out after his motorcycle accident in Woodstock.
So it was a big deal.
I assigned myself to cover the beginning of the tour.
And in one of the first shows I saw in Chicago,
I was in the audience
as he was doing "It's Alright, Ma ."
As the tour continued, Dylan shifted the performance of his classic songs.
He reinvented them by emphasizing different words
or just strumming his guitar a little faster,
which could be heard on the live album recorded later on the tour.
But the version I heard that evening was closer to the song's original form.
Just sort of came back to me, because he was saying those lines.
"It's alright, Ma."
Still, it just resonated for me, took me back to those horrible times,
and then catapulted back forward to being part of a large group of people,
all probably getting something different out of that song at that moment.
I know that even though I'm in the audience with a notebook,
just writing down stuff about the concert,
and observing the audience listening to The Band,
and watching Dylan's moves when he sang those lines--
because he also sang in a very emotional way,
that there was no way for it not to get to me.
And so I think that I allowed myself in that story
to remark about Barry, and make that connection.
That's what music can do.
Just like Dylan's earlier performances,
his song I heard that evening spoke to my loss.
"Samba Pa Ti."
It's a song that it talks about being free from fear,
from issues, from luggage, baggage,
from situations of pain and despair,
because everyone is searching for eternal peace and it's here, there.
All you have to do is share.
-Carlos. -Hey!
-Got to get a hug. -Thank you.
-So good to see you again. -Good to see you too.
-We'll have fun tonight. -Okay.
-All right, okay. -Why don't you walk in.
Ben always has a very, very high consciousness,
you know, and as a journalist or whatever he sees himself as,
I'm very honored that we've been intertwining
and transmitting this consciousness for a long, long time.
We grew up here in the Bay Area.
We were, like, funky-looking kids from the Mission, but we all had a dream.
Ben, like, Ralph J. Gleason or--
everyone was very important, and is still very important
in the way they opened doors for me.
I mean, I'm just a kid who was washing dishes
and living here in Mission High School.
The next thing I know, I'm in the front cover of the Rolling Stone
with this story about resurrection.
I'm very honored and very grateful the way the story was done and everything.
Ben, like myself, we share words that have power.
When people read them, they have a choice
to either embrace nothing and make it everything and be miserable,
or they can embrace everything
and make every day the best day of their lives.
Ben Fong-Torres is here. We're going to talk about Paul McCartney.
Ben, are you looking at his set? At McCartney's set?
-I have here in my hand… -Whoa!
…the McCartney setlist for the current tour.
You've written books on The Eagles, on Grateful Dead
on The Doors, on Top 40.
And he said, "You know, I was at Candlestick
when the Beatles played their final concert."
And that was, what, 1960…?
-'6, August 29th. -'6.
-Okay, -The last show of the tour.
The Beatles did not know it would be their last concert.
They were embroiled in controversy.
John Lennon had talked about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus,
and that didn't sit well with some folks.
And there was even some talk about tension within the band.
For us, though, it was still kind of Beatlemania.
The girls were screaming to the point
where the Beatles couldn't hear themselves.
They just raced through these nine or ten songs, got done,
escaped into an armored car and fled.
-Candlestick! -The 'Stick, man.
This is history.
Yeah. All right.
-Are you Ben Fong? -Hi, I'm Ben Fong-Torres.
-I know! -Hi.
-Rolling Stone. -Yeah.
-And you are? -Nice to meet you. Carol.
-Hi, Carol. -I came down from the San Juan Islands.
-Oh, wow! -Nice to meet you.
-Is this the first show you're seeing? -No.
Oh, man. A real fan.
-Yes. -Well, good to see you, Carol.
Have a good time.
How do you respond to the fact
that Wings is thought of as a family unit
or that the leaders of Wings
-are husband and wife. -Yeah.
so that you're not on the loose like Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin
-Yeah…yeah. -How does that affect you?
Uh, I used to think of that, you know and
when we first got together and I
had Linda in the group, that kind of thing
I really used to think, uh oh, you know
we've had it with the groupies now
and they're never gonna turn up and, uh
everyone's gonna think we're real old squares…
blimey, married!
I was a Beatles fan, and I attended the last Beatles concert.
I probably screamed at my TV set when they were on Ed Sullivan.
And so to sit with him, to tour with him, to travel with him.
This photo of Paul McCartney and me has been shown here and there.
I had pretty much done an interview with him already,
gotten to know him, and so neither of us was posing for a picture.
We just happened to be hanging out.
That was the culture at the time, that you had access,
you are not one of a hundred people asking for an interview.
You were one of one.
Things change, you know
I mean I, I kissed Linda on stage the other night.
And that's the… for me, that's kind of
wow, you know
I must be getting real relaxed up there
cuz you know, I'm not
I can't to that in public, normally.
I'm a bit kinda shy.
And so now to be sitting there asking him questions and being one on one…
On the surface, you're being a professional reporter,
but inside you're saying, "Oh my God, it's Paul McCartney. Marry me!"
Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Ben Fong-Torres.
Thank you, Paul.
Ben and I met when we were both students
at San Francisco State University.
I was chairman of Homecoming.
So I would go into the newspaper office and plead for publicity.
She was a member of the Homecoming Queen committee.
She was in the sorority thing.
She was the other side of the world, in my view,
because I was a journalist covering civil rights, war protest.
He looked like he was about 15 or 16 years old.
He had big black glasses, short haircut, a white shirt,
which I later found out was because he had to report to the family restaurant
every day after work.
I was able to keep up with Ben over the years
because he had a radio show on a radio station
that everyone listened to: KSAN.
The station used to do all kinds of personals.
It's close to 1:30 from KSAN in San Francisco,
the Jive 95 with Ben Fong-Torres.
Time for listener's personals.
Need someone to take care of my dog while I'm in jail. John.
When you call, remember, you can only have one call, all right?
I lost my dog.
And so I decided to call him
and ask him if he'd make that announcement on the radio.
So Dianne was calling in a lost dog classified on my shift.
So she said, "Do you remember me? Dianne Sweet from S.F. State?"
And my eyes went boing!
Of course I do.
She's a very pretty woman.
We said, hi, and that was about it. You know, no big deal.
This was, like, 1972, I believe it was.
Then my brother was killed, so she called and, uh…
And just said, um…
Never fails.
…and just said, "I'm here."
"And if you want to come over and have a glass of wine or whatever,
and it helps, then do that."
So I did. And so we saw each other for the first time in probably six years.
And so our friendship began at that point.
I lived in this little Victorian house, and I can just picture him
walking up the stairs, and my jaw dropped.
This was not anyone I recognized.
This wasn't the 16-year-old guy anymore.
We had that glass of wine, and that was the beginning.
I hadn't seen you in…
-six years? -At least.
But it was kind of a shock to see you
with long hair, and John Lennon glasses, and stacked heels.
Olive oil.
Ben's parents didn't find out that I existed
until a couple of months before we got married.
After we'd been together for four years.
My parents were like, I think, many Chinese adults,
parents of that generation.
Our grounding was to get married to a Chinese girl.
It'd be best for family and everything else.
This was very, very tough for Ben to have to tell his parents
that he was going to marry out of the Chinese community.
It was traumatic to me to have to accept the fact
that I would be someone's disappointment.
Fortunately for us, they did their best.
They did come to the wedding.
And, of course, the famous picture of Ben's father.
-So happily celebrating… -Yeah.
-…that I was getting married to Dianne. -Yeah.
-Yes.
When Dianne and I got married, Annie volunteered herself
as our wedding photographer.
That was an offer you do not say no to, that's for sure.
She has a picture of me in my little office writing the vows,
writing my personal vows on deadline, as always
At the end of her 12 hours of work,
she just handed over 21, 22 rolls of film.
These were just a gift to us.
-Come take a trip through time… -Oh boy.
And look at some of your assignments and inventory sheets.
Ah!
I remember getting some of these and just going,
"Holy shit."
It's like from from going to the Speckels Theatre head shop
to get Rolling Stone to, like, actually getting the assignment inventory sheets.
-You were a keeper, weren't you? -I kept everything, baby.
Because you opened the door.
Voice of God, howling dogs, the spirit of rock and roll.
This is good, solid stuff, man.
Thanks.
Thanks. Thanks.
Listen, I think you should be writing for us.
I've heard that you don't remember saying "crazy,"
which we put in Almost Famous.
But you did say "crazy."
Crazy.
-Crazy. -Crazy.
-Crazy? -Yeah.
Well, actually…
It's like hearing Bruce Springsteen sing "Born in the USA."
-Ben says "crazy," and there it is.
-I'll have to record one on MP3 for you. -Oh my God!
I just loved it because it was, like, sadness.
-"Crazy."
Happiness. "Crazy."
-Uh-huh. Yeah. -Contemplative.
Crazy.
You know, so I just felt it applied in so many ways in…
-Classic country song, "Crazy." -Classic country!
I got a ticket to go to the Rolling Stones show
at the Forum in 1973,
and Bobby Cowan, the great publicist, said to me,
"Ben Fong-Torres is down there, like, in those great seats on the floor…"
"…and do you want to meet him?"
And I'm like, "Yes, I want to meet him."
But I was 15, and I I didn't think you knew from my voice how old I was.
-So you were in the kids section? -I was in the kids section.
You and Annie Leibowitz were on tour with the band for that great cover story,
the one with Mick in the Hawaiian shirt.
You didn't see that I was 15 years old.
Because of your name, like many others,
I built up this exotic and Salinger-esque persona in my mind.
But then there you were, affable, utterly professional.
We spoke briefly.
I told you I was a freelance writer from San Diego.
I suggested the group Poco.
You said to send you 750 words.
I knew it had to be good.
And we shook hands again.
The Rolling Stones were now taking the stage.
Mick Jagger ripped into "Oh Carol",
but all I was thinking about was, I just got an assignment for Rolling Stone
from Ben Fong-Torres.
It was that simple.
My first story for Rolling Stone.
But you didn't know how old I was until you called a couple of weeks later,
and my sister answered the phone, and couldn't wait to tell you
-that I was then 16. -Mm.
-And I was mortified. -Mm-hmm.
I had already done another story for you.
And you put it into the magazine that I was 16.
That's right. We added it as a gleeful footnote.
-As a little footnote. -Right.
That started everything.
But you brought to it though, yourself, tremendous love of music and writing.
-That was the first thing. -I'm having a huge flashback right now.
I feel like I'm back in San Francisco in your office,
and I got some time with Ben.
-This is awesome!
The whole point about Rolling Stone magazine
is that it was a business, and still is.
Jann Wenner did not try to start a commune that published a newsletter.
And from the beginning, he wanted to expand that business
into other media properties.
And so in 1977,
the magazine moved out to New York.
Rock and roll was the background beat of rebellion.
Today, rock and roll is the music of Madison Avenue,
and Rolling Stone has moved to New York.
Are you going to be left behind or are you going to go?
And I chose to go, and I still don't know if that was the right decision,
you know, basically.
It was a big decision for everybody to make.
You know, some people wanted to go. So people didn't.
But I narrowed it down to only, like,
25 people I thought I really should take with me.
Ben was always, from the beginning, a key player,
and as it grew and grew, he stayed in that key slot
as one of the key most important editors at Rolling Stone,
until such time as we moved to New York, when I had to ask Ben to come with us.
And he said, no, he wouldn't come.
Jann announced that the magazine was moving to New York,
and I decided, ultimately, not to do that.
Not an easy decision, but we had just bought a house.
Dianne and I had just been married.
And after Barry's death, I was the de facto number one son,
and that meant a lot to me.
And so for me to leave my parents still in the grieving process,
that would have been very difficult, very difficult.
So…
Ben's parents, because their English was very limited,
they really needed Ben to help them navigate life,
because occasionally life takes one out of Chinatown.
Ben felt a great responsibility and a great willingness
to assist his family.
So when things came up that they needed help with, Ben was there.
You know, I wish, uh…
I could have stayed here.
I wish Rolling Stone didn't move to New York.
It was like--it was--you know, it was so great here.
-It was, I think, the… -You and me both, yeah.
the beginning of some kind of end, for sure,
-when Rolling Stone moved to New York. -It was a pivotal point.
-Come here.
So good to see you again.
Nice to see you too, Ben.
Luckily, I was able to carve out a position
as senior editor West Coast, and carried on for about three years.
Then it became clear that I was just no longer part of the core.
You can't be when you're 3000 miles away.
And so it was time to move on.
When I think about Ben,
I can't imagine, what does he do without Rolling Stone?
San Francisco was not what it is now.
You know, it was a sleepy backwater town.
There was no book publishing there.
There was local kinds of publications, and nothing on the national scale at all.
It was a little daunting to say,
"Oh boy, I'm going to put myself out in the marketplace."
Would they think of me as,
Oh, that's that guy from Rolling Stone, he can't write for us?
So it was definitely a challenge.
How long did that take for you to get back into the swing of things?
I think it took me…
a month, sorry.
Parade was the first one to come along.
And they happened to be, in terms of circulation,
the biggest magazine in the country.
So not a bad place to land from Rolling Stone.
You did a lot of fundraisers over the years, haven't you?
Well, yeah, when you do community events,
quite often they are for galas to raise funds for worthy causes.
Millions of dollars.
Oh yes.
Definitely.
At least millions.
Maybe millions of cents.
That's more like it.
Ben has really given himself to a lot of community events.
He makes appearances several times a month for nonprofit organizations,
and he's raised millions of dollars over the years for these organizations.
He's extremely generous, he's extremely giving.
You know, he's just good at it. He's been as good at everything he does.
I can't believe it's, like, 30 years.
How can it be that long ago that Ben took me under his wing?
Let me be his assistant as he started researching the Gram Parsons story,
and just brought me into the process so that I learned a lot by osmosis
working with him.
And now, three decades later, I'm off to the Grammy Museum.
I'm going to be giving a talk about my new Janis Joplin biography.
And Ben will be there right by my side introducing me this week.
So it's really a dream come true for me.
Sarah Lazin books.
Hey, Ben.
Did you get my email from earlier?
Okay.
Yeah. Yeah. You have several options. So, yeah, we can talk later about that.
My big passion is to take seriously this story of American popular music,
and that's what I've devoted my career to,
is working with writers to develop really serious, good biographies.
And Ben had such a great story.
The turning point in my life, there's just no question about it.
Aside from the happiness that I found with Dianne,
was the sadness that came with the loss of Barry.
And so that is the turning point.
That's where you are suddenly catapulted into a sobering up and growing up.
After he died, I had his books
and began to look at them, and began to really get a sense
of the country from which we all, in a sense, came.
And so I became interested, suddenly.
I had gotten to the point where I thought,
how stupid that here I am, a journalist and a reporter.
I'm supposed to get stories.
I'm supposed to learn the truth about people.
And the one group of people I had not done that with
was my mother and father.
And so I decided just to do it.
And it was the first time that I was able to ask my parents questions
about their lives,
coming to America, raising a family, what their ambitions had been,
what they thought of their kids.
You know, do you like us, by the way? We're just wondering here.
And so I gave them a chance to ask me questions.
And so that was probably the first time they learned about what Rolling Stone was.
And then, not too long after that,
I had a chance to go to China.
Be the first person from my generation from our family,
to go into the home village.
I was able to visit an uncle that I didn't even know I had.
I met a cousin and her parents, and others,
and they were in this pretty okay house that they said, you know,
"We are able to have this house because of your family,
that they sent the money."
And so it turns out, again, that my parents were not lying.
And the decor included the framed collages
of photographs from us in Oakland
back in the day, including high school pictures,
junior high pictures, wedding photos,
as much as my parents hated some of our weddings.
They shipped off the wedding photos anyway to share the news with their family.
It was obviously a stunning experience for me.
And the frustration, the…
Some of the anger of losing out on life in my youth
has really balanced out by an appreciation
of exactly what my parents went through growing up,
what they sacrificed,
and what they gave when they left their country for this one.
Ben?
Oh, Uncle Ben.
That's great. I like it.
You wrote a book that was one of a kind.
A story about our family that made it all clear.
Now I finally understood how the heck we got here.
You married family and friends.
You sang at my wedding.
You were just on CNN.
Where else are you heading?
On top of all I've said and all you've done,
all the success and all we've won
the most important thing has nothing to do with the above.
What matters most is it came with all your love.
Aw!
I'm old!
-And so
family remains loyal.
Family remains cyclical and circular.
hat's a lesson that I learned back in the '80s
and stays with me today.
-There you go. Okay.
-Adiós. -Thank you, thank you.
-Aloha. -Baby.
Yo! Yo!
Even though the music changes, and the business changes,
and the audience changes,
and the ways that music is carried or sold or delivered or stolen changes…
-Jann's ready for you. -Ah.
Okay.
Here comes Ben.
…there will always be those who are going to say
music is more than music.
-How are you? -Good.
-You're looking well. -Oh, thank you.
Look how skinny Ben is. Look at that. And look at that wild and hairy…
How funny.
Music is also communication,
it is also a message, it is also a way to change people's minds,
expand people's minds.
Whatever it is, music will always have more of a function
than just entertainment…
-Wow. -You remember when this was made.
This is my first cover.
…and that will never end.
Oh, I just turned my phone off.
Oh!
-Yeah. -Good to see you.
Yeah.
You look fantastic for an older guy.
Thank you for being part of this.
My pleasure. You were an important part of my career.
-I want to thank you for it. -Oh. How so?
Uh, I'll make up something. Just keep going.
No, actually,
you did a very significant article on me in Rolling Stone.
When I think back to it, I go back to when you were at the Boarding House.
And I dug you so much,
because you were so different, so radical, so ridiculous.
Go away!
Steve, we're here for the interview.
I don't do interview--
Oh. TV.
Come on in.
Thought you'd notice.
I think you understand what I'm trying to say when I say…
And I remember coming to you after a show
and inviting you to my show on KSAN Jive 95.
And you came and did sight gags on the radio.
That's a good idea.
I really appreciate everything you've done.
Oh, thank you, Steve.
Welcome back to the Southwest Airlines Chinese New Year parade.
-I'm Ben Fong-Torres. -And I'm Julie Haener.
Also, welcome back to Geary Street for us.
We're back to our original vantage point, where…
All of experiences in which you are connected to your family
one way or another.
Now we realize that it's all part of the greater fabric of Chinese culture.
As a cook and a chef,
my father could go out and eat something,
and come home and recreate it without a recipe.
He enjoyed doing his own version of Chinese opera around the restaurant
when there were downtimes, when there were no customers around.
He would just yodel and sing, and he was really a pretty amazing guy.
We no more escaped our past than our parents escaped China.
They stay tied to their old ways, and now we begin to see those ways.
Those things that used to strike us as so odd and embarrassing,
so Chinese, in a new light.
And so you learn why now the weddings are the way they are,
or why funerals are the way they are, and it all ties together.
That you never really do escape the full circle of life.
It's seeped into us that it was to our advantage
to do the stuff, or most of it, that our parents asked of us.
And I think that, for the most part, it worked out pretty well.
-Hi. -Ah, Sir Elton.
-How are you? -Oh, wow.
-My God. Long time no see, really. -Oh!
Only 45 years.
-Really? -But who's counting?
It's not just a story. It's a story with Elton John or Bob Dylan.
It's just all these people whose music you love.
And can you tell me what the role of your being a father and a family man
on this farewell tour?
It's great. The boys are actually with us.
They're in Los Angeles. They're coming up…
So it's kind of hard to define that as a job.
I know that I was working hard,
but even before that concept of having a job that you thoroughly like,
I just knew that that's what I had.
-Nice to see you. -Good to see you. Fond memories.
-Hey, hang in there. All right. -Hey, hang in there.
Thank you so much, Sir Elton.
Nice jacket. I want that jacket.
He's keeping the music alive, and he's made a tremendous influence.
He was a Renaissance man, and still is to this day.
People back then that believed in the music, who dug the music,
it changed your life, it was your life,
and you don't give that up.
Yeah, he's still driven by the music. It does keep you young.
Crazy.
Subtitle translation by: Nick Lombardi