Like a Rolling Stone: The Life and Times of Ben Fong-Torres

 

Director Suzanne Kai loves and respects the subject of her bio-doc Like a Rolling Stone: The Life and Times of Ben Fong-Torres (2021) now streaming on Netflix.

Having been a reader of Rolling Stone since it's early days as a newsprint quarter-fold, I was familiar wth Fong-Torres' probing stories about popular music celebrities and their often inscrutable worlds.

His was a distinctive style, both removed and intimate, disciplined, trustworthy, not at all like the verbal pyrotechnics of Hunter S. Thompson, who often became the central point of his stories, or the epic abrasiveness of music critic Lester Bangs, probably both adored and despised by his subjects and readers.

Though he has written many probing portraits of recording artists, Fong-Torres, who grew up in the Bay Area of California, is more circumspect about himself, a quality he came to in childhood when he often found himself isolated as the only Chinese student in his school and social circles. He tells the viewer he learned to recede and listen.

According to the film, Fong-Torres, who attended San Francisco State, was universally loved by the musicians coming into their own in the '60s and '70s in his native Bay Area (The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane) and beyond (The Doors, The Rolling Stones).

Fong-Torres, principal music writer and editor, diversified the magazine with long-form features on towering Black artists like Marvin Gaye and Ray Charles, who talked candidly not only about their music but their relationships to audiences and industries that often showed little understanding about them. In the film, Quincy Jones says Fong-Torres had an endearing chameleonic quality, adapting his manner and speech to fit any situation.

Writer / director Cameron Crowe was hired by Fong-Torres when he, Crowe, was only 16 years old. That event was the basis for Crowe's celebrated film Almost Famous (2000), his affectionate description of the world Fong-Torres explored for America's premiere music magazine. In the documentary, Crowe gushes unapologetically when meeting with Fong-Torres, still that fanboy from his youth. It's an utterly charming moment in a film that is loaded with warmth.

At 77, Fong-Torres, the son of Chinese immigrants by-way-of the Philippines (thus the Torres add-on to his surname), proves a fascinating subject for a documentary about the man himself, music journalism as craft and enterprise, youth culture and America's racial history. Though he left Rolling Stone many years ago for other ventures, Fong-Torres is still a major presence in the San Francisco / Oakland area as writer / broadcaster / fundraiser.