Rolling Stone magazine No 172 October 24 1974

IN THIS ISSUE
Evel Knievel reminded Joe Eszterhas of a kid he grew up with, the
neighborhood palooka who liked to skin cats. When Knievel assaulted
a photographer at the Snake River jumpsite, Joes remembrance was
affirmed. He confronted the hero about the beating at a press confer-
ence. Kiss my ass! Knievel told him. From then on the promoters
and the press treated him as a social leper.

In King of the Goons: Deliver Us from Evel Joe Eszterhas
views the making and unmaking of the Snake River Canyon jump as
a kind of red-white-and-blue allegory. He follows the hero from his
hometown to the jumpsitefrom the Richest Hill on Earth to the
Magic Valleyalong a trail of broken promises where few things are
as they seem. In the course of his journey, he finds stars, goiters, dwarf
photographers, mudmen and madmen. More than that, though, we
suspect he discovers a subterranean part of America itself: violent,
sexual, stoned and god-hungry.

When Joe got back from the abyss, he was acting rather strange.
We knew by the surliness of his manner (Joe always gets surly when
he gets excited) that his account would be very long. We also knew
it would be so straightforward we'd need a battery of lawyers and
researchers to examine it for libel line by line. We were right on
both counts.

Joe wrote the piece in three weeks, during which time, he says: I
lost eight pounds, poisoned myself with hundreds of cigarettes and
babbled to my dog a lot at five o'clock in the morning.

The ROLLING STONE Washington office has a more-or-less perma-
nent staff of five and serves as a haven for countless exotic transients,
one of whom walked off with the color TV last week. On a good day,
the office looks like a Leningrad luxury apartment just after the Revo-
-lution. Working amidst this asphyxiant squalor, seated on a stack of
D.C. phone books and using an orange crate for a desk, Timothy
Crouse valiantly produced his first dispatch on the Watergate trial.
Provided he gets a desk of his own, Crouse will be filing a letter
about the trial for each issue until the proceedings end.

Evel Knievel By Joe Eszterhas 22

DEPARTMENTS 
Letters 4
Music 6
Singles 12
Random Notes  16
Records 40

Founded in California, by Jann Wenner back in 1967 Rolling Stone Magazine delved deep into the music world and frequently tackled political issues. In the first edition 11/9/1967 Wenner wrote that Rolling Stone "is not just about music, but about things & attitudes that the music scene embraces. However it quickly distanced itself from the underground newspapers of the time embracing traditional journalism & avoiding the radical politics championed by the underground press.