Yes, you SHOULD track down the Sept 2, 1982 issue of Rolling Stone and buy it!

1. Elvis Costello Repents - this after the Ray Charles incident. Cover featured in Romancing the Stone in downed plane with skeleton in it, and mentioned in Less Than Zero! Also, vis a vis the Ray Charles thing: "While we were recording Imperial Bedroom...Paul McCartney was [in the same studio] and Michael Jackson came in to do a vocal - everything was very nice...and suddenly - there was a freeze-out. Michael Jackson was - "Oh, God, I don't dig that guy...I don't dig that guy." Sir Paul didn't like him so much he then wrote a dozen songs with him and Michael didn't dig EC so much that he eventually DIED!

2. an article on the tragedy that was the 60's generation's cessation of pot-smoking, cos IT WAS 1982! "WHY??" Subhed:

The latest statistics from the National Institute on Drug Abuse confirm what we
have suspected all along. Most of the people who started smoking marijuana
in the Sixties won't touch the stuff anymore. It makes them stupid, they
say, or bored, or scared. Why?

Ha!

3. Interview with Nicholas Meyer of Star Trek II directorhood. Next project: a TV movie called The Day After! "The message is very simple: we cannot survive a nuclear war."

4. Roxy/Bryan Ferry profile wherein BF is just married to Lucy (now split up, she's a famous sot) with a baby on the way (Otis, or one of his other scions who turn up frequently now in UK gossip rags for getting in poncey shit kind of trouble) and he's on his way (in the article) to New York to work on a Roxy single called "Time After Time". Where is this? I demand its release! Plus Mr Ferry and Mr Meyer seem to share a closet, in their dapper 1982ness.

5. Record store rentals booming in the US: A bonus for consumers or a blow to the industry?

Ha! One record store owner describes record rental as the Maxell Medfly!

John Kurczewksi of Rock Garden Records in Alpena, Michigan [!], rents a record
once, then marks it down from 7.79 to 6.49 Cindy Gamble of Rena's
Rent-a-Record [!!] in Baton Rouge, Louisiana says, "It's a real fine line.
You want to sell the record before it starts to pop and crackle, so we
usually mark it down after five or six rentals."

6. The piece de all resistances! Haircut One Hundred: A squeaky clean hit

• "It was a real autumn afternoon," says Heyward, a dreamy look of put-on in his eyes. "My mum and dad had just popped out and the Sunday roast was in the oven. Graham, Les and I were just sitting around thinking up names like Blatant Beavers, Marine Boy, Captain Pennyworth, but then we said 'Haircut One Hundred' and it just seemed to fit the seriousness of it all."

All this and a poem called "Dawn on the Planet of the Singles Bars!"

Get this! Kill if you must!