Undated letter from HST to JSW
Jann . . .
Tonight I went into a huge 24-hr drugstore—one of a big chain around the DC area (“Drug Fair”)—and when I asked the bearded clerk if they carried RS he said, “No, unfortunately.”
“Why not?” I said.
He shrugged. “I get mine in the mail,” he replied. “Who handles it? We could probably sell a lot of them here, but nobody’s pushing it.”
So . . . that’s FYI. DRUG FAIR, a chain of big all day & nite general store supermarkets that cater to a hell of a lot of potential RS readers. We have to break out of this widespread assumption that RS is an Underground, special interest “music rag.” If RS is such a powerful goddamn “capitalist” operation (inre: Your Editorial), we might as well act like capitalists, instead of just talking about it . . . which means that if you want to sell something, you first have to make it available.
I’ve been here about 10 days now, constantly checking newsstands, & I’ve yet to find a single copy for sale. This is a definite bummer. I got thrown out of a fucking rock club tonight, despite Dan Greene’s angry shouting about “What kind of asshole would keep an editor of Rolling Stone out of a music club just because he’s wearing Levi’s?” The doorman thought Greene was saying I was one of the Rolling Stones. “Look, fella,” he said. “The rule here is No Levi’s; I wouldn’t give a damn if you were Mick Jaegger [sic]—you couldn’t come in here wearing denims.”
I’m thinking of taking the fucker to court, on grounds of financial discrimination . . . but in the meantime, we have to consider the fact that this doorman at one of the main downtown rock clubs (Ventura 21) has never even heard of Rolling Stone, much less seen it. And that’s more your fault than his.
OK . . . that’s it for now. I don’t know what that useless fucking distributor does with those “2500 copies” he claims to be putting out for sale here, but he’s sure as hell keeping them out of all the places where I go . . . and all of these places carry Penthouse. It’s everywhere . . . along with the National Enquirer, the Sporting News, Midnight, Sexology, etc. Whoever distributes Rolling Stone in the Washington DC area should have his scrotum torn off. (Savage Henry said that, & you should probably warn the fucker that Mr. Henry might be stopping by to see him one of these nights unless he gets the goddamn book on the racks.) I’ll load pro football player Dave Meggessey up on chemicals and send him over to check the books. A monster like that, full of mescaline, makes “My Attorney” seem like a bloodless cipher. He even scares me.
Selah . . .
HST
Undated ’71 letter from JSW to HST
Hunter:
Re: Washington D.C. Gig
One thing I hate about political columns, etc., is that they are totally depersonalized; you never have a sense of the author, his point of view as a human being, who he is, etc., etc. [Washington Post writer Nicholas] von Hoffman and [New York Herald Tribune columnist Joseph] Alsop come closest to being real, but still not enough. That’s why the first arrival/coming/D.C.-the-city-and-what-it’s-like-joining-the-press-corps are excellent introductory things.
On the problem of D.C. distribution, apparently it’s the next issue that the big push starts with, which is why you haven’t seen much of it around. Rolling Stone staffer Peter Howard is coming down there himself on Dec 14 or so to personally supervise the fixing it up, and also he is under instructions to fucking lose money if necessary to get the goddamned thing out. Or, Savage Henry comes a-knocking.
Third column should be the Youth Vote. Let’s presume the fucker exists; to question the matter at all would be foolish. To convince them, naturally we use RS in several ways, one of which is by excellent political coverage & reassembling certain facts. Also, when you start making your calls on Larry O’Brien, et al., they’ll start to get the idea. Anyway, this column should explore the candidates’ attitudes toward the youth vote, what the press and the columnists and professionals have been saying, how the press (a la that [Nat] Hentoff piece & apparently there was a good long NYT piece a few weeks ago and a National Observer piece, too) has been treating it, & you should talk to Lowenstein, etc. [Thomas] Braden once did a column on Lowenstein which was good and had good math in it. We don’t need 23,000,000 votes, only a million or so as swing voters . . . then you’ve got all those facts being gathered by that girl at that Election news or something. There’s also an outfit called the Youth Citizenship League that gathers this stuff . . . all registration by kids is heavily Democratic, and then we can throw in some of our philosophy—we’ll talk about this.