The 1000th issue of Rolling Stone magazine is out, with a laminated 3-D cover featuring pictures of the biggest pop icons of the rock & roll era—reminiscent of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s album cover. [See it here.] The only problem: Where are the Beatles? It took me several minutes to locate them, buried behind the front line of Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Chuck Berry, and Jimi Hendrix. The latter artists (of whom I’m a huge admirer) deserve their eternal props, but not at the expense of the former. The Liverpool Lads single-handedly resurrected and reinvented rock & roll in 1964 after its demise five years earlier. Simply put, no Beatles = no rock revolution = no Rolling Stone magazine. (Also no Joplin or Hendrix.) As Newsweek once put it: “What the Beatles did in the 60s remains the most thrilling surge of creativity in the history of pop culture.” Shouldn’t game-changing innovation get a LITTLE more respect?
