New York ? Rolling Stone magazine celebrates its 1,000th issue this week with a burst of rock ‘n’ roll excess: a glitzy Manhattan party with the Strokes as house band and a 3-D cover that mimics the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s” sleeve and cost nearly $1 million to produce.

It’s an audacious sign of how Rolling Stone, which has numbered its issues since Jann Wenner put out No. 1 in 1967, remains dominant even with changing times and music.

Rolling Stone loves to mark special occasions with special issues; this time, it’s focusing on its covers. Dr. Hook once sang of the thrill musicians get when they’re “On the Cover of Rolling Stone.” At Wenner Media’s office in New York, all the covers are lined up on hallway walls, starting with John Lennon on RS No. 1.

“The cover is iconic,” Wenner said. “The cover, more than any other thing we do, resonates in people’s minds. By and large the greatest things we’ve done, the greatest stories, have had the greatest covers.”

The 3-D cover is pure Wenner. Much like Beatles fans pored over the pastiche of faces on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” he wants readers to study his cover for their own cultural reference points. There’s Chuck Berry duck-walking, Madonna grabbing her crotch, Bono with a microphone and even – upon very close inspection – Waldo.

Wenner believes it’s the costliest magazine cover ever. He denies reports that the magazine’s publisher, Steve DeLuca, left in February because his boss was pinching pennies on the party.

Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner poses for a portrait with a reproduction of the cover of the magazine's 1000th issue, Tuesday, May 2, 2006 in his New York office.

The issue is clogged with details like Wenner’s favorite cover (Annie Leibovitz’s portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono taken hours before Lennon was shot) and the most memorable cover headline (“He’s Hot, He’s Sexy and He’s Dead” about Jim Morrison). Mostly, it’s a nostalgic look at a time when the magazine spoke for a generation and an art form.

Getting on Rolling Stone’s cover “wasn’t just publicity, the way all magazine covers have become,” comic Steve Martin writes in RS 1000. “It was in itself an artistic achievement.”

When he first saw his face upfront, Tom Petty said, “I felt I had arrived.”

Although Rolling Stone’s circulation has been flat the past few years at slightly more than 1.3 million, it still comfortably leads other music-oriented magazines such as Vibe (836,000) and Blender (693,000), according to the Capell Circulation Report.

“Rolling Stone is so clearly the big dog,” said Alan Light, former editor of Vibe, Spin and the late Tracks magazines who did freelance work for this most recent RS issue. “They’re the biggest player on the table and you can’t go into that space without defining yourself in some way in relation to Rolling Stone – it’s an urban Rolling Stone, or a younger Rolling Stone or it’s not Rolling Stone.”

The magazine tries to walk the tightrope of appealing to its original subscribers yet also attracting readers born two decades after “Sgt. Pepper’s” was released.

“The average age of our audience is 28 years old,” Wenner said. “When I started it was 21. In 40 years, it’s aged like seven years. We keep bringing in new readers and holding the old readers.”