There seems to be only three ways to start a magazine feature story. They all begin the same. And if you combine the first sentences from articles in any issue of Rolling Stone, you can create a weird, nightmarish tale. Here’s an example. Each sentence comes from the first line of an article in the October 13, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone.

It’s near midnight, and I’m holed up in a rickety hotel in Proserpine, a whistle-stop town on the north-east coast of Australia.

On a leafy corner lot in L.A.’s Laurel Canyon, in a three-bedroom house that used to belong to Rob Lowe, Tom Morello is showing off the Marshall amp he’s used for 22 years.

“You have to feel it,” Lou Reed says with a hard look at Metallica singer-guitarist James Hetfield. Five hours before Blink-182 take the stage in Saratoga Springs, New York, drummer Travis Barker is stuffing his face with broccoli and fake meat in his dressing room. A few days before his 85th birthday, Tony Bennett stands next to Lady Gaga in a midtown New York studio, working up a duet on Rodgers and Hart’s “The Lady Is a Tramp.”

Wrapped in a hotel bathrobe and sipping red wine, Leslie Feist brandishes a tiger finger puppet and makes it say, “Hi, I am Fraulein Forever Jet-Lagged!”

In Capitol Records’ giant Studio A in Los Angeles this summer, the surviving members of the Beach Boys – Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, and Bruce Johnston- gathered around a microphone and, for the first time in two decades, harmonized on a track.

Peter Gabriel set a strict rule for his 2010 world tour: no guitars or drums.

The End