Peter Richardson has written critically acclaimed books about Hunter S. Thompson, the Grateful Dead, Ramparts magazine, and radical author/editor Carey McWilliams. A longtime lecturer at San Francisco State University, Richardson has also written for The Nation, The New Republic, Los Angeles Times Book Review, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is currently working on a book about the early years of Rolling Stone magazine. He'll be teaching "Brand New Beat: Rolling Stone Magazine and the San Francisco Counterculture, 1967-77" with us this summer.
Could Rolling Stone have been founded anywhere other than San Francisco?
I don’t think so. The Bay Area had the secret sauce, not only because of the music that flourished here, but also because of the counterculture and broader cultural movements from student activism at Berkeley, to the Black Panther Party in Oakland, to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on the peninsula. Plus there were elders like Bill Graham and radio pioneer Tom Donahue who were also shaping the scene.
All of that energy fed Rolling Stone’s unique editorial mix, and the magazine, in turn, helped make San Francisco a global rock capital. The relationship between the magazine and music was totally reciprocal.
I view the magazine’s San Francisco years, 1967 to 1977, as the most interesting decade in its history. When it moved its offices to New York in 1977, the magazine continued to thrive, but for many Bay Area people, it felt like the end of an era.
How did a rock magazine with little funding and edited by a 21-year-old college dropout become one of the most important publications of the 1970s?
It was founded in 1967 by Jann Wenner, who dropped out of Cal, and his mentor Ralph Gleason, a music critic and San Francisco Chronicle columnist who lived in Berkeley. Most magazines need time to attract readers, if they ever do, but straight out of the chute, Rolling Stone reached a large audience—mostly young, mostly male, and about a quarter of them connected in some way to the music industry.
The magazine also attracted strong writers. Many would eventually shape our understanding of rock history. There were people like Jon Landau, who was based in Boston. He covered acts from Motown and Stax Records and wasn’t a huge fan of the San Francisco counterculture. He eventually became Bruce Springsteen’s manager. Others were Greil Marcus, Charles Perry, Ben Fong-Torres, and David Felton. Cal produced a steady supply of rock journalists, and so did San Francisco State.
Rolling Stone started with music, but didn’t end there, right?
Music was the big draw, but Rolling Stone was always more than a rock magazine. It was covering the whole counterculture. There were lots of stories about drugs, protests, politics, and current affairs. There was also a lot of media criticism and satire, especially after Hunter S. Thompson came along. It also interviewed Tom Hayden, Eldridge Cleaver, Timothy Leary, and Dan Ellsberg along with Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, and many other musicians.
Starting in 1970, the magazine started doing hard-hitting investigative stories—one on the disastrous Altamont concert and another on the Manson Family murders, both of which looked at the dark side of the counterculture. So the magazine’s main focus was the counterculture and its music, but it wasn’t a cheerleader. It actually had a pretty tangled relationship with the counterculture.
When Rolling Stone received its first National Magazine Award, the awards committee mentioned those two stories and commended the magazine for its critical distance from the counterculture. That enhanced its reputation for telling the truth when many outlets were misleading young readers about stories that affected them directly. Those included the conflict in Vietnam, of course, but also the dangers of marijuana.
Later on, the magazine ran a two-part story on Patty Hearst’s time as a fugitive. The FBI was furious that the magazine knew more about her time underground than the government did.
All that said, the music coverage was key because it drew readers and advertisers. The record labels were the magazine’s major advertisers, and that revenue helped the magazine pay the bills, do other kinds of stories, and grow its audience.
So from the get-go, they challenged the status quo.
In the very first issue, Ralph Gleason wrote about racist double standards in the media. He was coming out of the jazz world and had been chronicling the importance of race and civil rights as well as free speech. He was the only music journalist to land on President Nixon's Enemies List. From the start, Rolling Stone signaled that it wasn’t a fanzine, or a teen magazine, or a trade magazine. It had elements of all of those, but it was also a professional magazine that addressed important issues.
Going back to your earlier point about the readership being mostly male, and, I’m guessing, mostly white. Was that true of the contributors, too?
They had women on the masthead early on, including Annie Leibovitz. And Ben Fong-Torres was essentially in charge of all the music coverage after 1970 or so. But yes, it was mostly male and mostly white. In 1970, Ralph Gleason tried to recruit Ellen Willis, who wrote about rock and roll for the New Yorker. She declined, saying “You're the top rock magazine, but I don't like your sexism, and you don’t run anything by women.” She also had political differences with them.
What kind of differences?
Ralph and Jann believed that politics was downstream from culture—that if you really want to change the culture, you start with things like music, which would then trigger the social revolution, and then politics would inevitably change. That was their theory. Ralph couldn’t imagine that hippies, or anyone else, could win all the cultural battles and lose all the political ones. That idea finally died a quiet death, but in the meantime, that conviction underwrote a lot of significant journalism. From the outset, Rolling Stone insisted on the significance of its topic. Before that, few outlets took the music or the counterculture seriously.
Ellen Willis didn't agree with Ralph about the social revolution. She told him that the women's movement had done more for her in a couple years than their so-called social revolution. She declined to write for Rolling Stone at that point, but a few years later, the magazine hired Marianne Partridge, who became the first female senior editor at Rolling Stone. She brought Ellen in to write a very important article about rape. Nobody talked about rape back then, and the word “rape” wasn’t used in most stories. They broke ground with that story, and Ellen Willis eventually wrote a couple dozen stories for the magazine. Marianne also hired and promoted many very capable women at Rolling Stone.
Can you talk briefly about the iconic design of the magazine?
Jann didn’t want Rolling Stone to be mistaken for an underground magazine. It had a hippie logo, which was designed by a psychedelic poster artist named Rick Griffin. But Jann also borrowed (with permission) a design from Ramparts magazine, whose art director was a very talented guy named Dugald Stermer. Both Jann and Ralph worked at Ramparts before they started Rolling Stone.
Jann hired Annie Leibovitz in 1970 and promoted her to chief photographer in 1973. Eventually she shot more than 140 covers and had a huge effect on the magazine’s look. Around the same time, he started running articles by Hunter S. Thompson, and Ralph Steadman’s illustrations were an important part of Gonzo journalism.
In short, Rolling Stone put a lot of effort into looking professional, and that showed. As Jon Carroll told me, Rolling Stone didn’t look like it was thrown together in the back of a station wagon.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about Jann’s interview last year in the New York Times.
We absolutely need to talk about it. Last year, Jann gave an interview to David Marchese in which he made absolutely indefensible comments about women and Black artists. His remarks were immediately and universally denounced and, as you know, he was kicked off the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation board even before he could apologize publicly.
I thought I noticed some shortcuts in the media coverage. There was the strong suggestion that Rolling Stone ignored female and Black artists, which wasn’t the case. On social media, too, there was a tendency to sweep Jann, his remarks, and the magazine into the same trashcan.
After about a week, some of the people associated with the magazine began to quietly defend it. Not Jann or his remarks, but the magazine’s record. There was a feeling among the people who had written for Rolling Stone in those early years that they had covered Black and female artists pretty well. The staff wasn’t diverse at that time, for sure, but neither were most magazines, or newspapers, or most professions.
Lastly, what do you hope OLLI members take away from your course knowing that a good percentage will have probably been Rolling Stone fans for decades?
I’d love for us to situate the magazine in its place and time. It was an amazing period of creative expression and surprising twists with a cast of great writers and editors, some of whom I’m invited to visit the class.
Really? Wow.
No promises, but we’re working on it.