Description
Collector's Note – Why This Issue Matters
The August 13, 1987 issue of Rolling Stone featuring Mötley Crüe and Whitney Houston documents American popular music at one of its most commercially diverse and culturally revealing moments. By the summer of 1987, both acts had reached extraordinary commercial peaks operating from opposite ends of the mainstream music spectrum. Mötley Crüe's Girls, Girls, Girls, released in May 1987, had debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 — a commercial resurgence that demonstrated the band had survived the near-catastrophic personal and legal troubles of the preceding years. Whitney Houston's Whitney, released in June 1987, had debuted at number one and was generating its own string of chart-topping singles, extending the commercial dominance she had established with her historic 1985 debut. A Rolling Stone that housed both acts simultaneously was documenting the remarkable breadth of what "popular music" encompassed in the summer of 1987 — glam metal arena spectacle and polished R&B perfection coexisting at the top of the same charts, in the same publication, in the same week. For collectors building archives of vintage Rolling Stone magazines, issues that capture this kind of cross-genre commercial diversity are among the most historically interesting in the publication's 1980s run.
The broader context of August 1987 American music gives this issue additional documentary significance. The late eighties were the commercial peak of both the MTV era and the CD format's adoption, and the music industry was generating revenue at levels that would not be surpassed for decades. Mötley Crüe and Whitney Houston represented opposite poles of the era's commercial landscape — the first appealing primarily to a white male rock audience, the second to a broad crossover audience whose support had made her the best-selling female artist of the decade — yet both were products of the same maximalist production values and promotional machinery that defined the era at its most commercially concentrated. A Rolling Stone that documented both within its pages was functioning as a primary record of that shared commercial moment rather than an aesthetic endorsement of either. Collectors of 1987 magazines focused on music history will find this issue captures the late-eighties commercial music landscape with unusual representational breadth at one of its most commercially and stylistically distinctive moments.
Both subjects' subsequent histories give this August 1987 documentation additional retrospective weight. Whitney Houston's trajectory — from the commercial dominance of 1985–1987 through her later personal struggles and 2012 death — makes her peak-period Rolling Stone features primary documents of her career at its most artistically and commercially unambiguous. Mötley Crüe's survival from near-dissolution to a Girls, Girls, Girls-era commercial resurgence is one of the more dramatic comeback narratives in rock history. This issue captures both acts at a specific and well-defined high point.
About the Publication
Rolling Stone, founded by Jann Wenner in San Francisco in 1967, was by August 1987 the dominant music and culture magazine in the United States, with a circulation in the millions and a readership that had evolved well beyond its counterculture origins into a broad mainstream audience that consumed it as the authoritative voice on American popular music and culture. Its biweekly format combined major artist cover profiles and interviews with music criticism, cultural journalism, and political reporting, directed at an educated, rock-literate readership that treated the magazine as a primary source of both music news and cultural context. By 1987 its coverage of acts as stylistically diverse as Mötley Crüe and Whitney Houston reflected the breadth of what American popular music had become under the homogenizing commercial influence of MTV and the album-oriented radio format.
Key Highlights Inside
- Mötley Crüe feature — Coverage of the band during the Girls, Girls, Girls album and tour cycle, documenting their commercial resurgence after the near-dissolution of the band's previous years — one of rock's more dramatic comeback stories captured in real time.
- Whitney Houston feature — Coverage during the Whitney album promotional period of June–August 1987, documenting Houston at the peak of her commercial dominance as the best-selling female artist of the decade.
- August 1987 commercial music landscape — The cross-genre pairing of glam metal and polished pop in a single issue documents the remarkable commercial diversity of the late-eighties American music market at its most simultaneously productive moment for both genres.
- No subscription label — confirmed newsstand copy — The absence of a label preserves the full cover image without address obstruction, confirming retail newsstand origin.
- Marks noted — confirmed condition factor — The listing specifically identifies visible marks that should be assessed from available photographs before any collector evaluation is finalized.
Condition & Rarity
Acceptable condition with wear, visible marks, no label, and plastic protective covering represents an honest assessment for a nearly forty-year-old biweekly music magazine. Acceptable is a lower condition grade than good, and the specific marks noted in this listing are a permanent surface condition factor whose location and extent should be confirmed from available photographs — marks on the cover surface near the primary imagery carry more weight in collector evaluation than marks on margins or the back cover. The no-label newsstand origin confirms the complete cover image is fully visible. The plastic protective covering indicates deliberate preservation. For an issue with the cross-genre historical significance of this Mötley Crüe and Whitney Houston pairing, research and documentary value remain meaningful at this grade, with display quality dependent on the specific nature and placement of the noted marks.
Looking for More Issues Like This?
Late-eighties Rolling Stone issues capturing the era's commercial music landscape at this level of cross-genre breadth are worth searching for carefully, and this August 1987 number documents two of the decade's most commercially dominant acts simultaneously at their respective peaks. The broader Rolling Stone magazine archive at OriginalMagazines.com spans many decades of the publication's run and regularly surfaces landmark music cover issues from the 1980s worth examining closely. For collectors focused on the specific late-eighties music moment this issue captures, the full 1987 magazine collection documents one of the commercial music industry's most productive years across a range of titles and genres.