"Rolling Stone: Stories From The Edge... a bizarre documentary... immediately devolves into gratuitous naked-groupie footage..."

"... (although at least now we know exactly how those famous plaster-casts are made). Ostensibly because this was Rolling Stone’s first significant story? It’s not really clear. It’s actually less clear when we go from Jefferson Airplane’s San Fran mansion to Ike and Tina Turner’s living room, to delve into a RS feature story on the couple. We’re left with a troubling quote by Tina that she has to do what Ike says, and then we’re on to the first of many John Lennon interviews. Sure, we know how Ike and Tina turn out, but the cuts are discordant enough to be jarring.... Even more frustrating are the brief glimpses of the offices filled with overflowing ashtrays, and the typewriters, and the galleys, laid out using rubber cement and X-Acto knives; since today’s publishing world is a far cry from all that, a closer look would have been welcome...."

From "HBO’s Rolling Stone: Stories From The Edge is a hell of a puff piece" in the AV Club.

I got about an hour into the show before pausing, perhaps never to go back. I could not believe how they plunged into the groupie material. And there was absolutely no critique, no perspective on groupies. Just these young women, presenting themselves as culture heroes, charting their own course, which is, supposedly, having sex with as many rock stars as possible and — in the case of the Plaster Casters — doing their own art project and taking home trophies.

What could go wrong? Who's still alive and in any condition to speak of the aftermath? Nobody shows up to say the women's point of view presented in Rolling Stone was fake (like the recent Rolling Stone article about the UVa gang rape). And in the background — as if we're still living in 1969 and not in the days of The Reckoning — the music that plays is The Rolling Stones, "Stray Cat Blues." The lyric jumped out at me:

I can see that you're fifteen years old
No I don't want your I.D.
You look so restless and you're so far from home
But it's no hanging matter
It's no capital crime...

We're still adulating the Rolling Stones, despite their raucous celebration of sex with a 15 year old.

I'm happy to watch a documentary about Rolling Stone and the people it covered over the years, but can't we get some edge? It's all a soppy love fest — ironically the opposite of the style of journalism that made it worth doing a documentary about in the first place.