The big, fat extra-special 1,000th issue of Rolling Stone just arrived at the door complete with a psychedelic, 3-D cover featuring just about every rocker imaginable. The theme of this special edition is a cover art retrospective (which could double as an early Annie Leibovitz gallery showing) and it’s a must-flip-through if you happen to be in the bookstore and browsing.

Featured covers that stood out most memorably?

Rolling Stone Issue #22 from November 23rd, 1968, featuring an in-the-buff couples shot of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, with a photo caption that reads, “And they were both naked, the man and this wife, and were not ashamed.”

The Rolling Stone Issues that make me cringe: #701, #729, #793, and perhaps most cringe-inducing of all, #909 and #932, featuring Demi Moore, Jennifer Aniston, Laetitia Casta, Christina Aguilera, and Britney Spears respectively (yet not so respecfully), all virtually naked in some sexed-up pose, and displayed across a centerfold spread. Ugh, ugh, ugh! Why, oh why, do women (girls even!) have to take off all their clothes to don the cover of Rolling Stone? (Readers should note: Almost all covers featuring male artists have them fully clothed and almost all those of female artists are partially or fully unclothed. Interesting, isn’t it?)

Rolling Stone #993 from February 9th of this year, memorably features Kanya West as a thorn-crowned Christ figure and blogged about here by my fellow writer Ellen Leventry in her entry, “Kanye West’s God Complex.”

My overall take-away from this restrospective’s perspective–religious artists, at least ones that haven’t made it mainstream, seem virtually absent from this mega-magazine’s eye.