Ben Fong-Torres is an innovator in rock journalism. Perhaps more than any other, he has forged a punk rock ethic in creating journalistic direction and approach that deliberately belies the mainstream. In their day, Rolling Stone Magazine, along with very few other publications, and depending on who you ask, was the definitive and final word on rock and roll.

The magazine held the rare position as the one place where you could rely on for impartial reporting on artists that you loved, great coverage of emerging artists, charts and social commentary. There was no internet, and no email to share information, the printed word was the only way that kids got their news about Led Zeppelin, Sex Pistols or Jimi Hendrix, without which, there might not be any Green Day, Avenged Sevenfold or MCR.

After having worked with Rolling Stone Magazine during the seminal years of 1969 to 1981, it's easy to say that his influence has been great and wide spread. Ben enlisted and influenced what would become an army of millions of would be writers and reporters starting with no less than Hunter S. Thompson, Cameron Crowe, Joe Esterhas, and Lester Bangs.

Ben has interviewed Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Elton John, the Jackson 5, Linda Ronstadt, Neil Diamond, Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, the Grateful Dead, Steve Martin and countless more. Perhaps most importantly, Ben inked the final interview ever for Jim Morrison of The Doors. In 2006, perhaps appropriately, Ben Fong-Torres sat down with the remaining members of The Doors to create the ultimate Doors book, and considering the beautifully bound tome they have delivered.

Ben graced PunkTV.ca with a lengthy interview in support of the 2006 book release, The Doors by the Doors With Ben Fong-Torres.

by Dixon Christie

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Dixon: I think that your contribution to rock journalism and what you've done for so many people as a writer and obviously Jann Warner and all of the Cameron Crowe's and everyone else to follow has been both inspiring and wonderful.

Ben: Oh thank you. Glad to do it.

Well I bet and I suspect that there was no other path for you.

Well I don't know. It was just a lucky accident to have Rolling Stone start up at the time it did in the place it did. So in San Francisco I had just gone to college and been part of the scene that had been building around us on campus and off campus with the music and all the changes going on and all the politics and culture and music and arts. So I just happened to be in the midst of it as a newspaper editor and writer on campus and I just sort of followed the wind wherever it took me. There was Rolling Stone and I was very fortunate to get in there with a short story and then just stayed there pretty much filing stories and ideas until I finally got a full time job there.

And you were kind of a part of that blossoming scene back then. Do you have a lot of the clothes from back then?

I think I saved a tie dyed shirt and a pair of jeans that were embroidered by a girlfriend, but of course nothing fits anymore.

It was wonderful to be able to see the writing and see your life through the eyes of your old time friend Cameron Crowe in Almost Famous. We reach a lot of 12 to 17 year olds that love the Doors and love this book of yours that we're going to talk about, but for kids that wanted to know what it was like when music was blossoming and where punk rock and metal evolved out of this music of the 60's and 70's when you were a part of Rolling Stone that's kind of a good snap shot of that period isn't it?

Well it's a romantic vision of a young person beginning to love music. So it tells that kind of romance story nicely but the details are totally wrong, which is fine because it's a movie. The idea is to entertain and to keep a story line going but the main topic is about a young person falling in love with rock and roll and the people who make the music and the people who support it, like the band-aids, the groupies. Then to be able to find a job where you are able to be part of the scene on stage, writing about it and chronicling about it and giving your own opinions and expressing your passion for the music, I think that movie does a great job illuminating all those kinds of feelings.

How much of it did Cameron Crowe contact you on? Did he say, "Listen I'm going to portray you prominently in this movie and I want to make sure that this is actually true to character"?

He had written a foreword for a book of mine called Not Fade Away which is a collection of my Rolling Stone stuff and when he turned it in he said, hey I'm making this movie that's kind of autobiographical and I'd like to use your name and character since you were the person who got me into Rolling Stone in the first place and edited me for the first year or 2 of my career there. So I just gave him permission and he just did whatever he wanted to. I didn't have to ask for script approval, I never saw what was being done until the movie was already being made in Los Angeles and then I went down there to check it out on the set and that's about my only participation.

When you finally get to tell your story and you're writing or hopefully co-directing or something and you feature him, I'm sure you can take your own creative licenses with him eh?

Oh I'll get back at him. Nah, he's a real sweet guy. I really like Cameron Crowe a lot so I have no problems with him at all.

You've interviewed Paul McCartney, the Jacksons, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones; the list goes on and on. You've always included Jim Morrison as one of your favorites. You've spoken of your infamous meeting with him and the last interview you did with him as the last writer to ever interview Jim Morrison. You've spoken of that with great reverence, can you tell us about that?

Well it was an accident. I was just hanging out in an apartment in West Hollywood which happened to, coincidentally, be lived in by a woman who was a publicist of the doors and Jefferson Airplane and other bands and I knew her from that work. She also happened to be living right down stairs from Pam Corson who was the most steady of Jim Morrison's girlfriends. So one afternoon we were hanging out there with some other people and Jim came by looking for Pam who was not around so he just decided to hang out with us. So I had a tape recorder, I had never met him before, and just asked if I could talk to him for Rolling Stone. We proceeded to talk for about an hour and a quarter or so. It was not really an interview because I had nothing planned of course, so it was just really more conversation but as time went on we discussed things like the future of the Doors, the future of rock and roll. He turned the tables and asked me how things were going in San Francisco and with Rolling Stone and the Fillmore and the club scene. He was very accepting about the passing of time and the passage of a time for a band. Any band, no matter had its moment and he thought that the Doors moment had pretty much wrapped itself up and it was a time for young people and rock fans to move on to the next big thing and of course he was right. There are very very few bands that really endure of it because that's the nature of it. Rock and roll in a way is fashion and trend. So people dig you for a while then they look for the next thing because its an attention deficit disorder among all of us who love pop culture and music. He understood that from the beginning and that's why he, near the end, was looking for something else to do whether it is poetry or making films or travel or whatever and that's why he was making plans to go to Paris and that's what he did.

We all ask this question about Elvis Presley and often about John Lennon, tell us where you were when you heard about Jim Morrison's death.

Well I was most likely at Rolling Stone. I think so because I remembered that we just received news flashes from Europe, from Paris, that there were rumors of his death. Then we got word from Los Angeles once Bill Sittons, the manager of the band, released his statement then we got phone calls in the office. So that's pretty much where we heard it because it had happened days before anybody knew. It was kept so secret in Paris and so although there were rumors, we could not confirm until the wire services and all the newspapers began calling to let us know. At that point we sent our London correspondent over to Paris to work on the story and I want to Los Angeles immediately and began rounding up people and making phone calls to write the obituary. So there was really almost no time for emotion. When you're in the business, whether it was Janis Joplin or Jimmy Hendrix or Brian Jones, Bobby Darren, so many pop figures, it got to the point where we almost got used to it sad to say. I think the first one or two were shocks that a person so young and vital could suddenly perish whether it was in a plane crash like Otis Redding or through drugs as with more and more people in the early 70's. I had to just kind of say ok that's terrible news and now we have a story to write and get into the next issue and off I got to Los Angeles.

Well it's a good thing at the time that Rolling Stone had the success and the market that it did that could afford the luxuries of being able to pick up and being able to provide that direct reporting by being able to go to Los Angeles.

That was pretty much our business, to offer the best coverage of the most important events in rock and roll whether it was just covering a tour or a recording session or a fight among band members or the breakup of a group or the coming to stardom of a new sensation. Whatever it was, that was pretty much our job to be on top of things and you can't be on top of things without having a good staff of reporters and writers and giving them the tools necessary to do their job.

Since you mentioned that, just before we get into talking about this great book of yours, is it possible to create this kind of publication today? I know that Rolling Stone now is really a shadow of what it was in the past because there are guys like us and if you throw a stick you're going to hit somebody who has their own web zine and blogs and everything. With the proliferation of information and being available in so many formats through technology and on the web, is it possible to have a single magazine that really has the entire industry and the entire community of music lovers depend on so much, could you re-create a Rolling Stone nowadays?

No. The world has changed, music has changed, the audiences have changed and so there could not be a Rolling Stone like the way it was before that would be able to speak to a general music audience. There will always be attempts but music is so fragmented now and also, as you say, on so many different levels of technology and platforms and forums that there is no way for one outlet to do it all. But I do disagree with you in your passing remark about Rolling Stone being a shadow of itself. I think Rolling Stone has just adapted to the times and just like the world has changed and the industry has changed and the readership has changed, so has Rolling Stone had to change to continue to maintain and to grow an audience and somehow they have succeeded. They have in a time of much more competition with other magazines and mainstream newspapers and now zines and online sites and different things that pull people who love music away from reading a magazine, that is they go online, they go on YouTube, they got to MySpace, they have games to play, they have their own newsletters to create, whatever it is somehow Rolling Stone has maintained an upward trajectory of readership and circulation and so you got to give them some credit that somehow they're doing something right. They have somehow managed to remain vital.

I respectfully stand corrected and I should adjust that statement to say that for me it just was when I was in the 70's and 80's and buying that magazine how vital it was for me to buy it and then that I could relate to all the artists from front to back and have a single and concise issue that could represent all of my interests. I guess what I meant to allude to is that experience. Perhaps it is the fact that I'm older now, perhaps it's the fact that my musical interests have changed but that experience is just not the same consumer experience for me than it was back then I guess.

Everybody, even Jann Wenner,(the Rolling Stone publisher) probably feels the same way. As a magazine there are certain parts of it and this has been going on for maybe 15, 20 years where he has looked at it and said I don't know who these guys are but I have to trust my editors and this is what's happening and this is the language and these are the kinds of photos we need to run and so you do it. Again, it's just a response to changes in yourself and in the magazine.

Cause if Jann had his way, let's face it, it would be all Rolling Stones and Van Morrison and even bands like U2.

Not at all. Above everything else Jann is a savvy business operator and he knows that to get a young audience he has to go young. He will still throw in the occasional Dylan and the occasional John Lennon when there's a story, some new exclusive thing or Jim Morrison or whatever but when you look at the covers he is hands on with every issue and he is still active at age 60 running the magazine. Everyday he's there checking the covers, conducting the meetings, listening to ideas, all that stuff.

So this 280 plus pages book of yours is simply beautiful. In a world full of books about the Doors tell us why you took on this task to create another Doors book and why was it so important to you to create a seminal volume that exceeded all others.

Thank you for saying that, but first of all I was hired by the Doors to do this at the last minute, they had another plan that didn't work out. So I had a very short amount of time, I think you'll appreciate this as a writer, I had less than 3 months from the beginning to the end including research which meant going through all those other books you were referring to. Many of those books though tend to focus on Jim Morrison and only a couple are really about the Doors and so this was a chance for the 3 surviving Doors too all participate in a volume in which they spoke in first person. This is their experience from their point of view not some reporter, narrator, chronicler, critic, applying his or her own view on everything and then just using their quotes or the stories they choose to tell. Here the Doors finally tell their own stories as best as they can all in the same volume and they also unearthed from the archives some of the unseen photos of their childhoods and their younger days in the clubs when they first started playing at the Whiskey and London Fog in LA. So it's different in that way and this is the one that really allows them to talk about the music as much as they talk about the mystique of Jim Morrison and all the problems and craziness, the high and low moments they had together.

Obviously you've got Ray and Robby and John as well as some of their families and their closest friends, tell us about some of the challenges that you had in assembling this and how does one actually map out a book? You've got 100 interviews, 300 photos and only 3 months to do it.

It's like doing a term paper in college; you just kind of stay up for about 3 months and do it. We went chronological first of all, so the main challenge was simply a lack of time. I had to wade through a lot of research material in all media nowadays including the Doors fan club stuff, and there's a lot of great material in the magazine that they put out. So I read through all that stuff and existing interviews of the guys I've done and the books that John and Ray had written for themselves and pull the quotes I wanted the most and then had to do fresh interviews with all 3 guys in Los Angeles and here in Northern California for Ray and then had it all transcribed and of course I also went through my own Jim Morrison interview from back in the day. Then I just decided to go chronological because otherwise it just would have been too crazy to try to jump back and forth with the guys. So I introduced each one in turn and then pretty much went from the beginning of the Doors to current days that with Ray and Robby on guitar are still playing with Ian Asbury of Creed as lead vocalist. So it comes right up to current day as well as beyond. We have appreciations of the Doors by Chester Bennington of Linkin Park, Perry Farrell and Henry Rollins talking about how the Doors resonate today and how they impacted younger musicians and will continue to do so. It's not just history but it's also some kind of reminder that the best rock, the most innovative rock, the rock that breaks the rules, the kind of rock that didn't understand that there were rules often times is the kind of music that lasts the longest.

That was actually my next question; your choice in Henry Rollins and Chester Bennignton (Linkin Park), it really could have been Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney and with your clout practically anyone in the world. You chose those more youthful representations of 90's and beyond bands that have really made a profound statement in a younger generation.

That was Doors management. They too decided, I'm sure the publisher agreed, that would be a smart thing to do. Yes, we could have gotten people who are peers of the Doors to do that but I think the point was to remind people that the music is vital today and that there's a reason that they still sell a million copies of recordings of theirs every year. So it's a really ongoing business and not just when there's an anniversary or a special boxed set or something like that where sales hype up. Apparently somewhere around the world at any moment, someone is discovering Doors music and saying hey this is great and I want more of it or I need to refresh my collection or whatever and so the Doors records do continue to sell. Now with the 40th anniversary and the boxed set and the book and more stuff coming up next year being the 40th anniversary of really getting into stardom with "Light My Fire" in July of 67. So there are still more anniversary events and projects underway right now that you will be seeing and hearing in the coming months.

What did you learn in preparing this book that you didn't know about the Doors?

I think I learned from this book and talking to the guys and them looking back at what they did, how the music really was front and center. How they really really did enjoy those moments where Jim was coherent and productive and they were able to create music in the studio and do music the way they wanted to. It wasn't all about Jim, it wasn't all about drugs and alcohol, it was really about the music. They really were a strong unit when they were together in more than one sense of the word and when they look back to the music even though it had its up and downs and they had their ups and downs that ultimately the music was the central focus of their careers together and that's why that music survives today.

Well I just want to say that if ever there was a Doors book that was definitive, this would be absolutely it and Ben Fong Torres, this is the greatest honor of mine. Where can kids learn more about you?

Oh I have a little website, I never keep it up but it's there anyways. It's benfongtorres.com. I also have a spot on MySpace so I guess it's myspace.com/fongtorres but again I only pop in there on occasion and I don't really blog. I'm on deadline for a couple of projects right now and getting involved with a museum about Woodstock so that's going to keep me busy through the early part of this coming year but I would try to get back to MySpace and refresh it once in a while.

What would surprise kids most to learn about Ben Fong Torres?

That I sing. I don't know. But that's the weirdest thing that people find out about me is that I do Elvis and that I can do other voices. There are a couple things on my MySpace site including a parody of a Johnny Cash song about Dick Cheney shooting his friend in the face.

Well thanks for your time.

Thanks so much. I really appreciate all your comments and your taking time to talk to me.

My honor.

Good luck to you.

Interview by: Dixon Christie, PunkTV.ca
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