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The Stone’s US tours in 1969 and 1972 confronted the anarchic social and political forces unleashed by the counterculture. In the first, Gimme Shelter (1970), Charlotte Zwerin edited Albert and David Maysles’s footage of the 1969 tour to make a parable of the Stones’ culpability: the film focused on the tragic free concert where the Hells Angels killed a black man. The next tour produced two documentaries. The first, Robert Frank’s Cocksucker Blues (1972), gave full expression to the drug taking, sexual promiscuity, and privilege of the Stones’ entourage that insulated them from any contact with their fans. The second, Ladies and Gentlemen the Rolling Stones (Rollin Binzer, 1974) contained only the spectacle of performance. It thus supplanted the “concert film,” which had joined the musicians with the fans in the same commonality, with the purely financial undertakings that would replace them: the filmed concert.

This chapter focuses on the work of Jean-Luc Godard during 1968, and examines his interest in the radical potential of a new alliance or cultural front involving cinema and other contemporary visual art forms. Godard's projects during this period – especially, his film maudit, One Plus One – are characterised by a series of investigations into, and subversions of, the conventions of the documentary, especially in relation to television journalism and news coverage, where an increasingly stylised form of reportage-realism articulated the mass media's antagonism towards the cause of the students, strikers, and activists.

The link between alternative film production and rock culture continued in the subgenre of the music festival documentary, which came into being through the direct cinema documentary movement. The transition from the recording studio to the live stage was a defining one for rock culture at the end of the 1960s, and the aesthetics of presenting dynamic concert performances—communicated widely by audio and moving image representations of concerts—displayed ideals of rock authenticity. Exploring four feature documentary projects organized around the countercultural space of the rock festival, my third chapter demonstrates how emergent means of nonfiction film production shaped the onscreen spectacle of a rock musician performing live onstage. Through concert documentaries, a rock star no longer had to go to the studio lot to appear onscreen; instead, their stage labor could be preserved and extended through new camera and sound recording technologies. However, while the technologies (and filmmakers’ philosophies) that informed direct cinema seemed to offer a uniquely uncompromised means for representing rock culture onscreen, the production histories of concert documentaries also reveal how rock stars’ control over their own representation was not distributed equally, ranging from the option of refusing to be filmed to the power to determine whether a film project even saw the light of day. Produced in the absence of major film studios, arrangements of power between filmmakers, rock stars, and festival organizers existed on a case-by-case basis, and rock stars operated on a spectrum between observed subjects and controlling gatekeepers of moving image depictions of their performances.

The antithesis of the Beatle’s naughty cheerfulness, the Rolling Stones exemplified the mature form of the musical and social delinquencies that had haunted early rock 'n' roll. They thus became the most powerful musical equivalent, not only for the counterculture’s vitality, but also for the disillusion and right-wing violence of the turn of the decade. Their combined musical and social significance attracted the most important avant-garde and documentary filmmakers of the time, including Peter Whitehead, Jean-Luc Godard, Albert and David Maysles, Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, Kenneth Anger, and Robert Frank, many of whose films reproduced within their own form some equivalents of the Stones’ innovations. In place of the counterculture’s ethic of love, the Stones represented misogyny and violence, and early documentaries about them (e.g. Sympathy for the Devil, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus), featuring the chaos their concerts often aroused, were similarly controversial.

This chapter investigates the account in the Rolling Stone article of the alleged gang rape of “Jackie” at a University of Virginia (UVA) fraternity. It describes how the Rolling Stone story began to unravel as other news organizations began their own investigations of the alleged events and could not replicate Rolling Stone's findings. It also looks into the claims of Rolling Stone's reporter, Sabrina Erdely about Jackie's inconsistent account of the incident, stating that it was common among rape victims. The chapter talks about the missing identities of the alleged nine rapists and inexistent record of any social event on the night of the rape incident at the Phi Psi fraternity house. It highlights the Charlottesville Police Department's investigation that concluded that the events described in the Rolling Stone article was fabricated.

The final chapter focuses on official and unofficial cultural diplomacy efforts that have been organized to celebrate the United States and Cuba restoring diplomatic relations. Spring 2016 included a visit to Cuba by Barack Obama and free concerts by Major Lazer and the Rolling Stones in Havana. The following month, the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities led a delegation to Havana with various federal agencies represented. Unofficial musical diplomacy initiatives continued as well, such as a trip with Musicians Across the Straits, a program that brought performers from St. Augustine, Florida to Havana for a residency at the Fábrica de Arte Cubano.

This essay reviews the book The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (2000), by Stanley Booth. The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones is a detailed account of the rock band, which culminates with their final concert at Altamont Speedway in California. The Altamont concert ends in tragedy: as the Stones play the next night, the Hell's Angels, acting as security, will kill a black man and beat others. Altamont is considered by many to be the calamity that began the eclipse of the Age of Aquarius. One of the perils of participatory journalism is exposure to a subject's vices—drugs, in the case of the Rolling Stones. Drug use was part of the ethic of the times. If you take Booth's explanation at face value, his time with the Stones becomes a kind of parable about participatory journalism.

This chapter examines Hal Ashby's directorial job for the Let's Spend the Night Together, a live concert film documenting the 1981 North American tour of the rock band The Rolling Stones. It discusses the occupational hazards of this project for Ashby who overdosed before a show in Arizona. Though the film was completed it had limited box office success. This chapter also mentions Ashby's decision to edit the films Second Hand Hearts and Lookin' to Get Out himself.

This chapter addresses the critical reception of progressive rock. To address this topic adequately, though, a brief outline of the history of rock journalism is necessary. Prior to the mid-1960s, pop music journals were essentially fanzines, issued under the auspices of record companies. However, the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s created a group of readers who frankly despised the values of the traditional entertainment industry. They wanted journals that would provide historical and cultural perspectives of the music that was covered, that would develop critical positions and standards, and that would tie the music in with the ideological struggles of the counterculture. As a result, the late 1960s witnessed the rise of an underground press devoted to psychedelic music and the hippie lifestyle, including American publications such as Rolling Stone (founded 1967), Crawdaddy, Creem, and Circus, and the British Zig-Zag.

This chapter examines the fusion of blues and rock in the 1960s heyday of what has variously been termed “blues rock,” “British blues,” or “R&B.” Describing the ways in which bands such as the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and the Animals adopted style and lyrics from the recorded music of Chicago blues performances such as Broonzy and others, it demonstrates the revolutionary impact of the fusions that were the result of the British exposure to American blues.

This detailed account of James Marshall Hendrix’s life before he transformed into “Jimi” Hendrix covers his hardscrabble childhood in Seattle, his early musical inspirations, first instruments and bands, and stint in the U.S. Army. Following his discharge, Hendrix embarks on his professional career, playing the chitlin circuit and making his first recordings as a studio musician. He then lands in New York City, where he lives in abject poverty until his “discovery” by Linda Keith and Bryan “Chas” Chandler. Chandler sees him perform “Hey Joe” and Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” in a Greenwich Village club and arranges his passage to London. In a move that will come back to haunt him, Hendrix agrees to let Chandler and Michael Jeffery manage his career.

In this chapter, the author comments on the appearance of seventeen climate change deniers on the cover of Rolling Stone in January 2010—what the magazine calls its list of the planet's seventeen “worst enemies” that included James Inhofe, Marc Morano, and Fred Singer. He also mentions an article by Antonio Regalado, published on February 14, 2005, in the Wall Street Journal, which reported the latest attacks on the hockey stick by Stephen McIntyre. The article featured the likeness of McIntyre and that of the author on the front page. The author considers the assertions made by McIntyre against the hockey stick, the use of principal component analysis (PCA) by McIntyre and Ross McKitrick in their 2005 paper, and the rebuttals made by a number of groups to McIntyre and McKitrick. Finally, he discusses the use of the Internet by climate change deniers as a means for disseminating climate change disinformation.

Both John Coltrane and Bob Dylan followed their own musical desires, sometimes alienating their fans. In this year, both of them broke out of their older modes. For Coltrane, always experimental, he took jazz into the realm of the transcendent, seeking spiritual liberation through his music, especially in the recording A Love Supreme. It was excessive in sound and length but brilliant in conception and feeling. Dylan, at the Newport Folk Festival, signaled his break with folk and his embrace of rock. The rock beat of “Like a Rolling Stone” shocked and delighted, while his recording of “Visions of Johanna” would brilliantly blend poetry and rock, in a recording of unusual length and emotion. All of this is discussed within the context of the Great Society and racial conflict in this year.

In November 1990, just a few months after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and in the midst of U.S. preparations for war, an ad for a T-shirt appeared in Rolling Stone magazine. “Americans, Make a Statement”, the ad read; it displayed the image that “Americans” might sport: a U.S. flag appears in the background, partially obscured by a camel; superimposed on the camel's rump — obligingly turned to meet the viewer's gaze — is the face of the Iraqi leader, smiling, slightly open-mouthed, his head swathed in Arab headdress.

The author reflects on the revolutionary posturing that he and many other draft resisters adopted during the late 1960s. He describes himself as anti-Leninist and a pacifist, even as his commitment to nonviolence was starting to waver. Here he talks about what New Left authors Barbara and John Ehrenreich called the “new specter of revolutionary students” that was emerging worldwide in 1968; the involvement of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones in the 1968 discussions and debates about revolution; the conflicts within the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its sentiments against the Progressive Labor Party; Cornell SDS’s efforts during the summer; the rise of a renewed feminist movement throughout the United States and within the New Left; and the antiwar demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Finally, he recounts the Budapest conference between American radicals and Vietnamese revolutionaries.

After the first wave of rock ’n’ roll, for a few years popular music was dominated by folk. Prizing its resistance to corporate capital and US imperialism, the music was broadly cognate with developments in documentary filmmaking, whose technological developments made possible an unprecedented informality in the relation between filmmaker and subject: cinema vérité or Direct Cinema. Around the same time and continuing with the popularity of British music in the United States, independently produced concert documentary films replaced the Hollywood jukebox musicals as the dominant form of rock ’n’ roll cinema: Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1960), The T.A.M.I. Show (1964), and The Big T.N.T. Show (Larry Peerce, 1966). Of these, Steve Binder’s T.A.M.I. Show recorded spellbinding performances by James Brown and the Rolling Stones, creating beautiful images of a black/white, US/UK musical commonality.

The author recalls his first year at Cornell University, where his involvement with the draft resistance and antiwar movements began. He arrived at Cornell in September 1965, but during his first year he engaged in the usual collegiate pursuits, such as joining a sports team (the freshman cross-country team) and the Folk Music Club. He also attended live concerts on campus by the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. The author recounts two events in early November 1965 that had a profound impact on him: one involved a Baltimore Quaker named Norman Morrison, the other a Catholic pacifist named Roger LaPorte. He also talks about his role in starting a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society; his involvement with the War Resisters League; and the emergence of a draft resistance movement at Cornell. Finally, he discusses his participation in a sit-in in the office of Cornell President James Perkins on May 17, 1966.

In the future humans will live forever. Bodies will be optional. Brains will be networked, and the whole universe will be sentient. All of this is an inevitable consequence of the singularity, the moment at which computers surpass human intelligence. And the singularity will inevitably occur by the year 2045. These are the predictions of Ray Kurzweil, one of the most successful and respected technologists alive, the father of speech- and optical-character-recognition software, fundamental advances in artificial intelligence that have tapped computers into the two primary modes of human communication: oral and written. Both breakthroughs, conduits of machine learning, were achieved by imbuing computers with basic pattern recognition, such that voices with different accents and alphabets in different typefaces could be deciphered. Key to our knowledge and understanding, pattern recognition is something that humans are very good at, and Ray Kurzweil is better than most people at recognizing patterns. Perceiving subtle connections between varied technologies, he has foreseen the victory of a computer over the world’s leading chess player as well as the proliferation of seminal technologies, including the world wide web. These are reasons that prominent figures from Bill Gates to Marvin Minsky take Kurzweil seriously. Kurzweil’s prediction of the singularity follows his pattern of pattern recognition, enlarged to the scale of all history. He claims that he first recognized it while plotting human advances from the wheel to the web, discovering a curve of technological advancement that was not linear but exponential. He dubbed this the Law of Accelerating Returns and hired a team of researchers to trace it back to the Big Bang. Then he began ploddingly to move forward in time, until he reached “a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability,” circa 2045. At that point, he writes in The Singularity Is Near, his best-selling 2005 book on the subject, “the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence. This is the destiny of the universe.” Kurzweil was not the first to make this observation.

Richard Bushman’s 2005 biography of Joseph Smith incorporated the findings of the New Mormon history. Bushman saw changes over time in Smith’s vision accounts and granted the critics that point, just not their interpretation that it meant Smith did not experience what he claimed. Bushman did not question whether Smith told the truth about his vision, only what truth he told he time he recorded it. Bushman’s Joseph Smith is therefore not the deceived or deceiving one of Fawn Brodie or Wesley Walters, but neither is he the simplified teenage prophet of the movies and manuals. Though initially barred from use in LDS religious education curriculum, provided the standard interpretation of Smith’s first vision adopted by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by 2018. This was most evident in “First Vision Accounts” and Saints: The Standard of Truth, volume 1—products espoused and promoted by LDS leaders.