Brand New Beat: The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone by Peter Richardson (University of California Press)
A close look at Rolling Stone’s first ten years.
By Michael Goldberg
Author/ university professor Peter Richardson is on my wavelength. In years past he’s written books about Rampartsmagazine, Hunter S. Thompson and the Grateful Dead. When I was a teenager, I subscribed to Ramparts, read most of what Thompson wrote for Rolling Stone and his books, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 and Hells Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, and dug the Grateful Dead in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
Now Richardson is back with a new book, Brand New Beat: The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine, and it’s a good one. I was a senior writer at Rolling Stone for nearly a decade, between January 1984 and the summer of 1993, and I read every issue of Rolling Stone, from the first in November 1967 until long after I was no longer there.
There have been four previous books about the magazine. The late great journalist Robert Sam Anson wrote Gone Crazy and Back Again: The Rise and Fall of the Rolling Stone Generation, which was published in 1981. Journalist Robert Draper wrote Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History, published in 1990, Journalist Joe Hagan wrote Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, published in 2017 and Jann Wenner’s Like A Rolling Stone: A Memoir, was published in 2022.
Although I’m briefly mentioned in Richardson’s book, he limits himself to the first decade of Rolling Stone, the magazine’s heyday (long before I worked there), when Wenner and others on staff managed to interview rock’s biggest stars, including the Beatles, Rolling Stones and the then elusive Bob Dylan. During the early years the magazine became increasingly well-known after Wenner published “The Groupies and Other Girls” issue, and after separate and ground-breaking issues on the apocalyptic Altamont rock festival and Charles Manson.
In his introduction, Richardson explains that he wants to answer a key question with his book: “How did an under-capitalized San Francisco rock publication, edited by a 21-year-old college dropout, become one of that era’s [the ‘60s] most important magazines?
He further notes that there are four themes he will explore: 1) Rolling Stone’s complex relationship with the counterculture; 2) Rolling Stone’s conception of rock music and its significance; 3) The magazine’s primary influences; and 4), the nature of Rolling Stone’s political coverage.
The first issue of Rolling Stone was published on November 9, 1967. I found a pile of that issue, featuring John Lennon on the cover, near the front of The Tides Book Store in Sausalito and I stood there reading nearly the entire issue. At the time, there was nothing else like it as far as I knew, as I hadn’t seen Crawdaddy nor Mojo-Navigator Rock & Roll News, two fairly primitive rock magazines already being published. But Rolling Stone had the edge. With the help of Ramparts designer Dugald Stermer, and rock poster artist Rick Griffin who drew the logo, Rolling Stone looked like a hip version of the New York Times. Wenner hired photographer Baron Wolman who insured that the magazine had distinct photos of rock stars – ranging from Frank Zappa to Janis Joplin — from the start.
There was a new generation of rock music fans, pre-teen kids who saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. I was 14 in 1967, the perfect age to start subscribing to a quality music/pop culture magazine, and that’s just what I did.
Richardson seriously researched the history of both Jann Wenner and the magazine, and he does a great job telling their story. Before starting Rolling Stone, Wenner, who grew up in Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, wrote a weekly music column for The Daily Californian, the University of California, Berkeley school paper. San Francisco Chronicle music columnist Ralph J. Gleason, well known in the Bay Area and elsewhere, read Wenner’s column and got to know him. Soon Gleason helped Wenner get a job at Sunday Ramparts, a newspaper published every two weeks by Ramparts magazine. When Sunday Ramparts folded, Wenner dreamed up Rolling Stone. Gleason loved the idea and the two men got to work.
At the time, the mid-60s, the Bay Area was a center of the counterculture and home to dozens of underground rock bands including the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Quicksilver Messenger Service and many more. It was the perfect environment for a music/counterculture magazine. Wenner gathered $7500 from members of his and his girlfriend’s families and some friends, and he and Gleason started Rolling Stone.
The first issue of Rolling Stone included an investigative news story by former Newsweek reporter Michael Lydon on what had happened to the money raised at the Monterey Pop Festival that was supposed to go to charity, a column by Gleason, record reviews and part 1 of an interview with Donovan.
The magazine was published every two weeks, frequent enough to stay on top of what was going on in the world of rock ‘n’ roll. Wenner quickly got Jonathan Cott, who was based in Essex, England, to cover the British scene, and signed on writers in LA and New York. Wenner contacted Jon Landau, who he’d read in Crawdaddy, and offered him $25 per record review; Landau, who would become Bruce Springsteen’s manager and producer years later, signed on.
Right from the start Wenner hit up record company presidents to run ads in the magazine and was successful. It was clear that a magazine mostly focused on rock music would benefit the record companies, so it made financial sense for them to advertise. Not only did Clive Davis, president of Columbia Records, start advertising from the 8th issue, but when Wenner was short of money, Davis fronted him $20,000 dollars.
Constantly looking to increase the circulation, for Rolling Stone’s first anniversary issue, Wenner published an interview by Johnathan Cott with John Lennon, but more importantly, featured a naked photo on the cover of Lennon and his artist girlfriend Yoko Ono.
Hunter S. Thompson was impressed with Rolling Stone’s coverage of Altamont. He contacted Wenner and first started writing for Rolling Stone in 1970. A year later Wenner serialized Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and in 1972 a series of pieces that turned into Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72. Thompson’s writing greatly increased the magazine’s readership.
Wenner kept getting more writers and editors to contribute, but he also lost or fired numerous good writers including Greil Marcus, Ed Ward, Michael Lydon, Susan Lydon, Jon Landau, Jonathan Cott, Langdon Winner and on and on. At the end of 1970, Rolling Stone received a National Magazine Award for Specialized Journalism (and the Altamont and Manson issues were singled out, but as Ed Ward noted later, by the time the magazine got the award, no one who worked on the Altamont story was still employed by there.
In 2023, a book of rock star interviews by Wenner, The Masters, was published. Wenner was interviewed by the New York Times about his book. Why, the Times wondered, were there no black nor women rockers included? Wenner made some inappropriate comments about women and black musicians not being as articulate as the white male rock stars he included. His comments were, as Richardson notes here, “swiftly and universally denounced,” and Wenner was quickly removed from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation board. I think it’s unfortunate that a lifetime of work running what has for six decades been the most important pop culture magazine should end up discounted in the media at large because of the comments Wenner made to the Times. But certainly, Wenner should have known better.
That aside, Richardson does an excellent job answering the question he wrote his book to answer. Richardson is an excellent writer and reporter; for his research he talked to many former Rolling Stone staff and contributors including Jann Wenner, who gave Richardson access to the Rolling Stone archives, known as the Straight Arrow Papers. All of Richardson’s reporting and his smart analysis pay off here.
As a former staff writer, I’m certainly biased, but I do think anyone with a serious interest in Rolling Stone will want to read this superb book.