Customer Reviews

Rolling Stone Cover to Cover: The First 40 Years

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Length:: 5:35 Mins

When I first heard about this, I was ecstatic. It's nearly impossible to try to gather this amount of information, and to do so would cost you thousands of dollars and countless hours tracking it all down. And now it lives on my desktop.

After just playing with the software for a few hours, I had multiple "oh cool" moments - the review of R.E.M.'s Murmur, interviews with post-beatles John & Yoko, ads for the Rolling Stones just-released Let it Bleed, and the death of Johnny Cash.

It's a perfect time capsule of 40 years of pop culture. I honestly couldn't recommend it enough.

Dynamite packaging. Easy-to-use interface. Wonderful book. From head to toe, this is an awesome thing! To have so much information easily at my fingertips is amazing. I didn't think it would be possible, but great strides have been made in design that actually make this feel akin to browsing through a magazine. I'm an old dog and have always been skeptical of reading books or magazines on my computer. True, if I had the room, I'd prob. prefer to have all of these magazines in front of me, but, again, I'm very impressed at how easily information and articles were accessible to me and, most importantly, NOT a headache to read.

As for the content, well, who's to say. 40 years of anything has highs and lows, and Rolling Stone is no different. After 2 decades of hearing my uncle say, "It's not as good as it used to be," it's great to see how right (and wrong!) he is. Firsthand.

Highly recommended.

When I was a preteen at the begining of the mid 1970's, I was just starting to get into my lifelong obsession with music. I had a tiny record album collection (remember those??) which was a mixture of mostly classic rock. One day my older teenage brother stopped by my room carrying a big ol' cardboard box. Inside was huge pile of magazines with the enigmatic title "Rolling Stone". "I'll swap you these for some of your records" he said. He gathered up a handful of records (including a now rare version of the Dead's "Blues For Allah") and off he went.

To this day I have no ideal, why I took him up on his offer. Maybe it was the fear of being beat up, maybe it was just my own curiosity. But over the years, I would spend hours and hours just poring over those old issues (mostly from the late 60's to the mid 70's) learning all about the music, culture & events of the previous generation, which just fascinated me. I learned about events such as Woodstock, Watergate, even the Patty Hearst kidnapping. It gave me musical heroes such as John Lennon, George Harrison, CSNY, Lou Reed The Band, David Bowie, Joni Mitchell & Dylan. In addition, I was exposed to literary & artistic heroes such as Hunter S. Thompson, Cameron Crowe, Ben Fong-Torres, Annie Leibovitz and Ralph Steadman. Those were just a few among many. It might sound odd but those old magazines were one of the best educational experiences I ever had.

So now it is almost 30 years later. I have subscribed to Rolling Stone magazine for a good portion of my life. I have always pretty much considered it my 'musical bible' of whats going on. Every once in a while I would collect and keep an issue of historical importance or special meaning to me. So, imagine my surprise, when during a visit to my local bookstore, I came apon "Rolling Stone Cover to Cover: The First 40 Years". Here it was on 4 little DVD discs, my access to every single issue of Rolling Stone from its inception in 1967 to the latest 2007 issue thats' still sitting next to my john. All the classic articles, reviews, all the photos, illustrations even the freak'n nostalgic advertising! This is one amazing find!

The software is pretty easy to load. It is very user friendly in catagorizng magazine issues and it is super easy to do searches on any particular subject matter, that crosses your mind. Say you want to see all the articles about "The Grateful Dead". Just plug in the words and it gives you cross indexed listings on every Rolling Stone article to mention the group. The listings even tell you how relevent the article is to your your search. From there you just pop into your computer's drive the DVD discs that correspond to the date of the article you want to look up! And Viola! Instant Garcia! Instant rock n' roll history is at your finger tips!

To this day, I still have that big old box of "Rolling Stone" sitting in the back of my bedroom closet. I'll still have a special place for it in my heart and memories. But I just might be going back to it a drop less now that I have "Rolling Stone Cover to Cover:The First 40 Years". This product is an amazing archive for anyone who's a fan of "Rolling Stone" or rock n' roll in general! Highly recommended!

This is the best gift I have recieved in years! I found it at Costco before Christmas, and my wife new well enough to buy it for me. I suggest you download all 20+ gigs tou your computer, it is seemless and astounding. If you have rhapsody you can peruse album reviews from 40 years, and listen to what you are reading about at the same time. The scans are so cool, you can see minor imperfections in the older issues, sometimes hand written marks.The advertisments alone are worth the cost. My wife complains I use the computer too much. This ain't gonna make things better.

As a fan of Rolling Stone, I was thrilled when I heard the back issues would be released on DVD. I've collected the magazine on and off for a number of years and was excited that I could have a complete run of the magazine without having to buy every single issue (and find the space to store all of them).

I went through this set this weekend and checked out a number of issues throughout the run. The issues are completely scanned, even the advertisements. One plus with this set is some of the inserts were scanned as well, some of which were smaller than the magazine itself (for example, there's a booklet for XM satellite radio that was scanned with the magazine it was included in). The one negative with the scans is it seems the early covers (before the magazine used glossy covers in the mid 80s) are a bit hazy colorwise. Don't know if it's due to the scanning process or what, but I was a little put off by that.

In terms of content, the magazine itself is very far left, there's a lot of Bush bashing and such. People who are conservative (such as myself) may be put off by that.

The search interface seems pretty good. I was doing some keyword searches and it worked pretty well, although it doesn't tell you exactly what page the term appears on (it just contains the link to the article) so if you're searching for some obscure word you have to scan through the whole article to find it. Browsing through issues is pretty intuitive and I was able to get the hang of it.

I recommend this if you're a fan of the magazine, and I hope to see Bondi produce similar sets for other magazines (such as TV Guide, Time, and Life) in the future.

This Rolling Stone box set comes with 3 discs' worth of content spanning 40 years. It took me a few days of playing with this product and switching out discs to figure out that you can copy each disc to your hard drive, which is awesome. Now I can read an article from 1972 and then read another article from 2002 without having to eject and then insert a new disc every time. This feature really speeds up the process! And even though I have two computers I can still copy the CDs on both. The fact that I don't have to hunt down the discs again makes me love this product that much more.

For the price, you can not beat this product. 40 years of the magazine including ads. I spent a few hours when I first got it and I already feel like I have my money's worth.
Just to comment on three of the reviews I read here.
1. If you can not read all the discs or the program works slowly, it is your system. PERIOD.
2. If you can't find the way to copy the DVDs to your hard drive, you may want to give up on using a computer. Here's how you do it. Click on FILE and then select COPY DISC TO HARD DRIVE. Wow, that is SO COMPLICATED. Sorry for being so negative, but I am really disturbed by people who sit down to write a negative review when they didn't take the time to look into the problem, or when they are too "challanged" to understand it.
3. If you are printing 2 pages on one 8/5" by 11" page, of course you can't read it. Change to "Read Mode" or "Page Mode" before you print and print one page on a page and you will be able to read it.

This is without a doubt,one of the best things that I have ever bought.
Think about it? 1.it would cost you thousands of dollars to buy every issue of rolling stone.2.you probialy could not do it because the early issues were printed on newsprint and are deteriorating or have deteriorated.
3.if you could get every issue of the magazine,it would take up an entire room .To have every issue on just 3 dvd's is amazing!
I collect old rolling stone magazenes and they are getting harder and harder to find.now my search is over.to have 40 years of music,popculture,
film,and history is unbelieveable research material.It's like having a time capsule in a box!

Full disclosure: I'm the kind of person who gets really excited about musty old magazines at tag sales, and I've been known to pore over article on microfilm at the library. So when I saw that all of the back issues of Rolling Stone were on DVD, I told myself that I NEEDED this collection. Though I cringed a little at the fact that I could have bought half a dozen books for the price of the box set, I decided it was worth it--and I am so glad I did! I have never had such easy access to an entire collected history of magazines in my life--there's no shuffling through issues, trying to remember when something might have run (did that album come out in '78 or '79? how long has britney spears been around?). You can just look something up. So when I first opened this, I had just read an article in the New Yorker by Steve Martin, and I wondered if RS had ever written about him. Sure enough--they had written about him a few times. Which brings me to another cool thing (sorry I'm going on, but I'm really obsessed...I'm not kidding about it being addictive). I know RS is a music mag, and I like music, but so many of the articles are about popular culture, politics, and other major figures of the time, so that you really get a feel for the month/year that each issue was published. It also comes with a book--for those of us who need a little solidity--which has a timeline for each year and talks about some of the big goings on, but I've already put it on the shelf, whereas the DVDs haven't been put away yet.

I guess the only draw back to the whole thing is that sometimes searching feels a little harder than it should be. If you know exactly what you're looking for--subject/topic--it's fine, but if you want to search by year, you have to pick a cover, which can be a little slow. Also, I get the sense that the whole format is more intuitive for a mac user than for someone who's using a PC (me)--it took me a little longer than usual to get comfortable.

But all in all, this couldn't be more worth it. Plus, now I know what I'm getting my brother for Christmas this year. A great product!!

I heard from a friend about this set getting released, and I knew it'd be something I would be into. The packaging on the set is very classy looking, and I love the additional book that came with it. It also comes with a free year's subscription to Rolling Stone, which is a nice touch.

Installation was a breeze, and when I opened the program, I was greeted with the Jan 22, 1981 issue with the iconic Anne Lebovitz shot of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Browsing through the magazines are a breeze and searching for specific articles was easy as well. I liked that you can search by either artist or contributors.

If you're a music history buff, there's not a better resource to have at your fingertips.