Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Peter Richardson joins Inkwell for a two week discussio of his book
BRAND NEW BEAT: THE WILD RISE OF ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE. The book
takes us inside the chaotic, improvisational early years of Rolling
Stone magazine, when rock music, radical politics, and a new kind of
journalism collided to reshape American culture. Charting the
magazine's origins in 1967 San Francisco and its evolution into a
national force, Peter shows how it both reflected and helped define
counterculture voices like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe while
pushing the boundaries of what reporting could be. At the same time,
he offers a clear-eyed look at its contradictions and blind spots,
raising enduring questions about media power, cultural influence,
and who gets to tell the story of a generation.
  

    
Pete has written critically acclaimed books about Hunter S.
Thompson, the Grateful Dead, Ramparts magazine, and radical author
and editor Carey McWilliams. His essays have appeared in The Nation,
The New Republic, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and
many other outlets. His commentary has been featured in major
newspapers and magazines in North America and abroad, and he has
appeared in many documentary films, radio programs, and podcasts. A
busy book reviewer, Richardson received the National Entertainment
Journalism Award for Online Criticism in 2013. From 2006 to 2023, he
taught courses on California culture at San Francisco State
University. Before that, he earned a Ph.D. in English from the
University of California, Berkeley. Born and raised in the East Bay,
he now lives in Sonoma County.
  

    
Welcome, Pete! To get the conversation rolling, can you way what
drew you to the story of Rolling Stone, and why do you think its
early history still matters today?
  

    
Thanks, Jon. Great to be here. I've been circling this topic for
some time. I wanted to write about it because I taught this material
at San Francisco State University. But I was drawn to that material
in the first place because I grew up reading--and being influenced
by--the magazine during this period. Joel Selvin called Rolling
Stone "the journalistic voice of its generation." That formulation
doesn't quite land for me, but I regard the magazine as one of the
most important ones of the 1970s. 

Rolling Stone's early history sheds light on lots of things I'm
interested in, especially what was happening in the San Francisco
Bay Area between 1967 and 1977. When the hippies got their hands on
rock and roll, they completely transformed how the music was made,
staged, promoted, marketed, and consumed. And for a while, at least,
those changes made San Francisco a global rock capital. The magazine
moved to New York the year I graduated from high school, which is
when many people are trying to figure out who they are. 

But I don't see this as a personal or regional story. My goal in the
book is to show how the magazine illuminates the counterculture--not
the cartoon version, but the movement that Theodore Roszak, who
popularized the term "counterculture," wrote about in the late
1960s. To understand Rolling Stone's remarkable success, I think we
need a working knowledge of the counterculture at that time.

The other thing we need to consider is the media ecology of the late
1960s. The San Francisco counterculture received a lot of media
coverage, especially during the so-called Summer of Love. But as I
show in the book, most of that coverage was negative, even
disparaging. A parade example is Joan Didion's piece for the
Saturday Evening Post. Lots of young people--and this is when half
the U.S. population was under the age of 25--didn't think the
mainstream outlets were telling the truth about the issues they
cared about: namely, Vietnam, drugs, and themselves. That created an
opportunity for a different kind of magazine.

Jumping ahead a bit, I think a good way to misunderstand Rolling
Stone is to undervalue its main topic. The magazine's cofounders
thought the counterculture and its music was the animating spirit of
a social revolution already in progress. That revolution would
ultimately bring political change as well because politics was
downstream from culture. 

The strong version of that prophecy was obviously wrong, but a
modest version is just as obviously correct. If you walk around an
American city today, you'll see many signs of the counterculture's
enduring influence: Whole Foods markets, Apple stores, yoga studios,
farmers markets, cannabis dispensaries, recycling centers, etc. As
Peter Coyote said, the counterculture won all of the cultural issues
and lost all the political ones.    
  

    
When Jann Wenner and Ralph Gleason founded Rolling Stone, to what
extent were they focused on the emerging counterculture - or were
they just thinking to include writing about new music?
  

    
They were very focused on the emerging counterculture. Gleason
recalled an exchange with Wenner about that very question, and once
they said it out loud, they knew that was the way to go. They wanted
something like Melody Maker or New Musical Express in the U.K., but
with a focus on the whole culture, not just the music. That formula
distinguished them from most of the magazines in that general space.


It seems like a perfectly reasonable concept now, but they were
placing a big bet on the counterculture, which most media outlets
were treating like a fad or social pathology. I'm thinking of the
media blitz that accompanied the Summer of Love in 1967. Very
dismissive and disparaging, but that coverage landed very
differently with young people, many of whom decided to come to San
Francisco for the party. 

Many music labels at the time, including the largest one (Columbia),
were slow to sign rock acts for the same reason. That changed after
Clive Davis attended the Monterey Pop Festival, which happened only
months before the first issue of Rolling Stone appeared. 

It helped that Jann and Ralph had a front row seat in the Bay Area.
Paul Williams, who founded Crawdaddy back east, came out to San
Francisco and described its music venues as "induction centers." He
meant an induction into the whole scene. He moved out here himself.
Ironically, he was a full-blown hippy in a way that Jann never was,
but he recognized that Rolling Stone was going to be very popular. 
  

    
What was Gleason's role in founding the magazine, and in it's
ongoing operation? How did it differ from Wenner's role? To what
extent did they, as individuals and through their interaction, shape
Rolling Stone's identity and approach to culture?
  

    
Very important question. 

Ralph was the adult supervision. He and Jann cooked up the magazine
in his living room. With his decades of experience as a syndicated
columnist, he had standing with the music labels, who were also the
magazine's major advertisers. His column ran in every issue in the
early years. He suggested they ask the printer for free office space
above the presses. He also suggested they run the nude photos of
John & Yoko, the same ones Capitol Records refused to run on their
album. That was the first time Rolling Stone sold a lot of newsstand
copies. Ralph strongly urged Jann to hire John Burks as the first
managing editor. In my view, that hire was more important than Jann
would acknowledge. Ralph also had an ownership piece. 

Jann was the engine. He had tremendous drive and ambition, and he
didn't have another job, as Ralph did. He wooed the labels,
recruited most of the writers and staff, cut the deals, ran the
shop, and did whatever it took to put out the magazine. Together
with his wife Jane, Jann kept the majority stake of the company.
Sometimes with the advice of others, he hired Jon Landau, Ben
Fong-Torres, Annie Leibovitz, Hunter Thompson, etc. He was the
principal figure at the magazine for fifty years. 

The book mentions their written agreement, which I found in the
archive. Ralph was the consulting editor. He shared veto power with
Jann on every policy and editorial matter. In cases where they
didn't agree, both would have the option of writing about the
disputed issue in the magazine. 

They had their spats, and Jann was easing Ralph out of his role well
before Gleason's major heart attack in 1975. But I don't think the
magazine would have succeeded without Ralph. 

Neither was a hippie, but Jann had more in common with the younger
staff writers. Ralph was much more interested in black artists than
Jann was, a carryover from his jazz days, but Jon Landau and Vince
Aletti reviewed those artists regularly and thoughtfully.
Nevertheless, Ralph often said that the counterculture's music was
animating a social revolution. Jann believed that, too, but I always
thought Ralph believed it in his bones, whereas Jann saw the
advantage of that asserting that claim. In any case, the magazine
insisted on the importance of their topic, and that conviction
underwrote a lot of good journalism. 
  

    
One more thing: Ralph said they should cover Altamont like it was
World War II. That was an important turning point. 
  

    
I remember thinking of Rolling Stone as a Bible during my last years
of high school (early '70s) and into catching it infrequently when I
lived overseas.

By the time I moved back in 1978, it seemed to be much less
important. I read it pretty seriously for a few months and gradually
realized that it was no longer talking about music I cared about.

Of course, by then I had changed, too.
  

    
I started buying Rolling Stone at a Novato bookstore and listening
to KPFA, impatient to start my freshman year at Berkeley. I read the
paper cover to cover and listened breathlessly to reports of Patty
Hearst's abduction on the radio. I was also reading the Whole Earth
Catalog.

They were perfect introductions to a world I considered much more
exciting than my suburban town. 
  

    
We hear a lot about the men who wrote or edited or contributed to
Rolling Stone but what did uncovered about the women who were
involved?  It wasn't until 2025 that the magazine had a female EIC.

You mentioned Jane, Jann's wife and Annie Leibovitz but who are some
of the others we ought to know more about?  What about Robin Green
(whose memoir "the Only Girl" is worth finding), Marianne Partridge,
Ellen Willis?
  

    
The book pays a lot of attention to that question. The writers were
overwhelmingly male, perhaps not unusual considering the magazine's
demographic. But other publications (The Village Voice and Creem)
were hiring women in key roles before Rolling Stone did. 

Jane Wenner played an important if largely informal role, especially
when it came to hiring. Annie's contribution was immense. 

Susan Lydon and her husband Michael were the first employees. Susan,
who was listed as an editorial assistant, edited Jon Landau and
wrote film reviews for a while, then became a freelancer for
Ramparts and other outlets. If memory serves, she dated Big Brother
drummer Dave Getz after splitting from Michael. Like Robin Green,
she wrote a fine memoir. 

Robin was the first female staff writer; she and Annie were
responsible for the David Cassidy piece when he was riding high. (We
should probably come back to that piece.) Judith Sims was the Los
Angeles editor after running TeenSet magazine. Sheila Weller
contributed some pieces but was never on the staff. She later wrote
a book called Girls Like Us about Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and
Carly Simon.

Marianne Partridge's arrival was an important turning point. She ran
the copy desk and gave the overqualified female staffers (mostly
editorial assistants) more challenging assignments. Then Marianne
became a senior editor and reached out to Ellen Willis, who was
writing about rock for The New Yorker. Ellen had declined to write
for Rolling Stone in 1970, in part because Jann hadn't hired any
women. She also didn't like the way the magazine referred to women
as "chicks" and cited a famous piece about groupies as another
shortcoming. Her 1970 letter to Ralph is a banger. But when Marianne
came on, Willis agreed to write a piece about rape. She then wrote
almost two dozen other articles over the next three years. 

Sarah Lazin, who worked for Marianne, ended up running the book
division after Jann shut down the Straight Arrow Books. Sarah then
became a literary agent and represented many writers who were
connected to the magazine. 

I asked Marianne, Robin, Sarah, and Sheila about their experiences
at the magazine. They had few complaints, despite the male culture
that was often on display. I also talked to two women who were
connected to the magazine in New York--that is, after the period I
wrote about. They were still livid about the treatment they
received. One contributed articles but could never land a staff
position. The editors suggested she write for US Weekly, Jann's
gossip magazine. She's a journalism professor now. The other was an
intern who was hit on openly, repeatedly, and disparagingly. She
decided to work for Sarah and later became an accomplished
journalist. 
  

    
About 9 and 10: I wish I could remember how I first learned about
the magazine. I suspect my oldest brother brought it home. We moved
from El Cerrito to Walnut Creek before I started high school. This
was in the mid-1970s, so Rolling Stone was well established. I liked
Hunter Thompson and the Hollywood stuff in addition to the music
coverage. 

My older brothers also brought home most of the music we listened
to: the Dead, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Taj Mahal, Dylan, The
Who, Crosby Stills & Nash, Neil Young, Rod Stewart, Dave Mason, Leon
Russell, Jesse Colin Young, Tower of Power, etc. I recall 8-track
tapes in the car: Willie Nelson, Linda Ronstadt, and the Eagles. 

I also listened to the radio: KSAN at home, Top 40 in the car. KSAN
was a revelation. Again, can't remember how I first learned about
KPFA. 
  

    
Being the oldest I had to depend on friends who had older siblings.
  

    
For me, that music was the sonic wallpaper in our home. I never
chose it or thought about it until much later. Same with the reading
material. I think my father brought home The Godfather by Mario
Puzo. He probably bought it in a drugstore. That really landed with
me. Corruption in high places was very much in the news, and Rolling
Stone's political coverage and commentary fed my iconoclasm and
irreverence. 
  

    

Hi, Pete! I look forward to reading your book, as is the case with any
project of yours.

A couple of questions, one regarding the magazine's attitude toward
women in music: I will always consider one of the low points in RS
history, the snide and condescending act - in the context of a survey of
rock events of 1970 - of awarding Joni Mitchell the title of "Old Lady
of the Year," as if her primary identifying characteristic was as an
alleged accessory to a progression of celebrated musicians - this
despite the fact that Joni was already creating work that was the equal
of, or superior to, that of any of her famous boyfriends. As I recall,
the person who thought handing out that dubious "honor" was a clever
idea was Jann Wenner himself. Wondering if you looked into any pushback
that might have received within the magazine, or how seriously
complaints from without were taken.

Secondly - my recollection is that Wenner, as he courted more of a
mainstream readership, quickly grew impatient with efforts among his
writers and editors to call attention to artists at the outer fringes of
music, and was especially displeased when the likes of Sun Ra, Miles
Davis and Captain Beefheart would not only garner respectful
consideration but actually wound up on the cover. I think I also
remember accounts of some tension between Wenner and Ralph Gleason
whenever Ralph would devote his column "Perspectives" to something like
a moving obit for Johnny Hodges, the great alto saxophonist whose
gorgeous sound informed the music of Duke Ellington for decades. Was
there a sense of discontent among the staff at what could be perceived
as a dumbing down of RS from a haven for intelligent music journalism
into more of a general-audience pop culture magazine?
  

    
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This conversation will continue for at least two weeks, through May
4. Thanks for being part of it!
  

    
Thanks, Gary. Nobody I talked to mentioned the Joni Mitchell
episode. It wasn't in Ellen Willis's letter to Ralph, which was
written in Feb. 1970, but it's exactly the sort of thing that kept
her from writing for the magazine until Marianne Partridge arrived.
Willis was trying to tell Jann that describing Tina Turner as an
"incredible chick" was counterproductive. In her postscript, Willis
compared "chick" to a racial epithet, then asked (rhetorically) if
RS would ever use that epithet.

The magazine ran Sun Ra and Miles Davis on the cover. If memory
serves, it also ran four other black artists on the cover that year
(1969). Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix were on that list. Maybe Ike
and Tina Turner, but I haven't checked. I was told that the
editorial committee (Jann, Ralph, Greil Marcus, John Burks) wrestled
with the fact that newsstand sales tended to drop when black artists
appeared on the cover. The magazine ran Sly and the Family Stone on
the cover in 1970, but overall, it featured fewer black artists that
way. 

Landau and Aletti reviewed the work of black artists, and Jann made
an effort to recruit black reviewers (including Julius Lester). Also
women, for that matter. Jann went back and forth with Eve Babitz,
who lived with staff writer Grover Lewis for a few months in San
Francisco and later had a relationship with Annie Leibovitz. But
Marianne Partridge's arrival was the more significant benchmark for
women at the magazine. 

As for Ralph, I think the sentiment ran in the other direction. The
younger writers were getting impatient with him. I saw some letters
from Jann to Ralph about what, exactly, he should focus on. Not
politics, for example, even though Ralph was the only music
journalist to appear on President Nixon's Enemies List. 

As the 1970s wore on, some writers noticed that the magazine was
going for the "general-audience pop culture" angle that you mention.
Some of this was probably influenced by the astonishing success of
People magazine, which appeared in 1974. Jann had no problem with
celebrity journalism, but others did. As Jann would say later, the
thing about popular culture is that it's supposed to be popular.
That said, he never cared about US Weekly the way he cared about
Rolling Stone.   
  

    
About Captain Beefheart: Langdon Winner was a big fan, but he left
the magazine to teach at MIT. As for Sun Ra, I believe John Burks
wrote that story. He left the magazine in 1970, but his relatively
brief stint as managing editor was very important. 

One more thing about women artists: Janis Joplin was very unhappy
with the treatment she got from Rolling Stone. One review compared
her onstage persona to an "imperious whore." No questions asked, of
course, when Jimi Hendrix humped his amplifier onstage. A negative
review from Ralph Gleason also brought Janis down.  
  

    

Yeah, I remember a RS issue in early 1969 with Janis on the cover,
accompanied by the headline "The Judy Garland of Rock?" That the
comparison was not meant to be flattering was borne out by what was
inside the magazine - a blistering pan of Janis's much-touted Fillmore
East debut with her first band after leaving Big Brother and the Holding
Company (I was at one of those shows, and reluctantly had to agree that
the new group was not ready for public scrutiny). A few weeks later when
she played with the same lineup at Winterland, she suffered the
indignity of not being called back for an encore by the hometown crowd.
It was in response to that appearance that Ralph Gleason, who had been
one of Janis's earliest champions, delivered the devastating judgement
that she should go back to Big Brother "...if they'll have her."
  

    

Oy!

(BTW, you can hear Ralph J Gleason's voice in this  1969 radio documentary
about the Grateful Dead: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69bKYJdjEaQ> )
  

    

I am another boomer for whom Rolling Stone was vital. I was writing songs and
doing very little else with my life in the fall of '69.  I read EYE Magazine
(about which I knew very little until I saw it mentioned in your book, Peter)
and other publications, but when RS arrived it became the most trusted
source.

I became a journalist in 1976 and worked for a RS subsidiary, RECORD, for its
entire lifespan (1981-1986). (I met Jann once, in the NY office, just long
enough to shake his hand.)

I have learned so much from this book!
  

    
Thanks for the great answer in post <12>, Pete!

I'd also love to hear more about how the West coast was woven into
the DNA of the magazine.  As a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s, I
always felt that literary journalism was an east coast thing but
Rolling Stone and Joan Didion punched a hole in that for me. I
always thought it was a shame that RS moved to NYC. 

When I graduated from college on 1991, the options for working at
West Coast magazines wasn't all that big.  Sunset Magazine, Mother
Jones and the computer mags (I ended up at Macworld) and eventually
Wired.   But it was an uphill battle to find writing work that
wasn't in NY.
  

    
Fall of 1969
As a freshman at Menlo College in Menlo Park, California who had
just driven with three other cats from St. Louis to California, I
started reading RS religiously, at the time..it was fascinating to
me as someone who had never been to the Bay Area as an adult..when
we were kids and living in Seattle and Portland, we traveled to
Disneyland but that was it..
so RS was a fixture in my dorm room, meaning I accumulated a stack
of them as I read each RS cover to cover..wish those issues survived
my moves back and forth but when I returned to the Bay Area in 1971,
I picked RS back up straightaway as soon as I returned and continued
my piling up of issues in my room in Montara and then transferred
this pile to my apartment in El Grenada, South of the City..
it was a staple and a constant in my life and a way for me to keep
up with everything going on in the Bay Area and then some from
Southern California..RS became for me a touchstone and a window that
allowed me see the wider world of music and culture as it evolved
during those times, all available at 25 cents per copy which was a
bargain for what I was getting out of each and every copy of RS..
jest my two cents, FWIW and YMMV
  

    
Thank you David, Matthew, and Alex. Yes, the magazine was a
touchstone for thousands of young people across the country. 

During the 1960s, the West Coast served as a hunting ground for New
Journalists like Tom Wolfe. He would come out to the Bay Area, take
a reading, and write it up for his New York audience. The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test is the parade example, but there were others.
Hunter Thompson, who was inspired by Wolfe, also turned that trick
when he wrote about Big Sur (for Rogue magazine in Chicago), the
Hell Angels (for The Nation), and Haight-Ashbury (for the New York
Times magazine) well before he became Rolling Stone's top writer. 

Unlike Tom Wolfe's regular outlets, Rolling Stone was a San
Francisco magazine that championed the local scene. That drew
complaints from its own contributors in Boston (Jon Landau) and Los
Angeles (Jerry Hopkins), who thought Jann was overdoing the SF
stuff. But there was a great deal of curiosity about what was
happening here, especially after the national media descended on
Haight-Ashbury in 1967. Even John Lennon and George Harrison were
checking in to see what the psychedelic future might look like.
Music industry people quickly noted how many Bay Area acts were
producing successful albums. 

So the magazine's location was an important part of its early
success. It was essentially a creature of the SF counterculture, but
as it turned out, many of its biggest stories were about the
counterculture's disasters and setbacks. 

Yes, quite right that there were relatively few Bay Area magazines
to work for at that time. Nor were the newspapers well regarded. You
mention Mother Jones, which was another magazine founded by former
Ramparts people. Early on, Wired was described as the Rolling Stone
of technology. There was a genealogy there that I've tried to trace
over the years, with Ramparts as the point of origin. Sunset was
also very successful, but I don't think any of these magazines was
more influential than Rolling Stone.