The impact of the first issue of Rolling Stone was immediate and profound, like a rock through a window of the establishment media: shocking at first, then revealing flashes of a beautiful storm on the cultural horizon. Dated November 9, 1967, it appeared in a distinctive quarter‑fold tabloid format on oversize newsprint stock with a black‑and‑white photo of John Lennon in a World War I army helmet from the antiwar film How I Won the War.
Carefully designed into 24 pages were a report on the police raid of the Grateful Dead house in Haight-Ashbury, coverage of the Death of Hippie funeral (marking the end of the Summer of Love and condemning commercialization for corrupting the counterculture’s ideals), cofounder Ralph Gleason’s column on racial double standards, a report on the London rock scene, a fashion feature on the Beatles’ wives, sharp record reviews, gossipy updates on major rock artists including Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger, and part one of an exclusive interview with Scottish folk-rocker Donovan. With skeletal distribution, the 40,000 pressrun sold on newsstands from Whelan’s Smoke Shop across from the Berkeley campus to the head shop in Laguna Beach, where I found my copy. It cost 25 cents. Something was happening here…
Brand New Beat: The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine is a bouncy, almost academic history by Peter Richardson, a PhD and Northern Calfornia–based writer who marches the story from the magazine’s Bay Area free speech and psychedelic roots—shot through with very specific details of Northern California’s wild‑ass, utopian, self‑indulgent counterculture of the mid-’60s—to its 1977 move to New York City, embedding that history with reporting that mirrors the spirit of those particularly chaotic years. Rolling Stone couldn’t have happened anywhere else—or without Jann Wenner, a handsome rich kid who cofounded the magazine in San Francisco as a 21‑year‑old University of California dropout. And what a long, strange trip it was: Over those five decades (Jann sold the title in 2017), there was never any doubt it was Jann’s magazine; his notoriety twined so tightly with Rolling Stone’s success that, by the time I became managing editor in 1981, it felt almost stilted to call him anything but the mononymous Jann.
Jann defined Rolling Stone’s mission—at first mostly in conversations with record‑label executives, selling ad pages—by calling out a demo of 10 million between 16 and 25 who listened to rock and roll and were interested in rock and roll as a lifestyle, whether they knew it or not and had no publication to help them figure that out. He would sometimes add that “being ‘hip’ or young does not involve going around telling everyone that you are hip or young.” The subtext, where Jann’s genius lived, was simple: Rock and roll was about a lot more than the music.
Ben Fong‑Torres, a pillar of the early staff, rightly called Rolling Stone “the most effectively targeted new publication since Hugh Hefner founded Playboy in 1955” and described the aesthetic as “Victorian chic—hip, but clean and orderly.” Much of the magazine’s early identity revolved around its look, and, as another early editor, Jon Carroll, put it, Rolling Stone never looked as though it was “thrown together in the back of a station wagon”—like the San Francisco Oracle and the rest of the so-called underground press. The brilliant critic Greil Marcus, who then edited record reviews, explained: “[Jann] didn’t like the prose. He didn’t like the look. He didn’t like the people. He didn’t like the way it was done. So he never for a minute wanted to be considered part of the underground press. And Rolling Stone never was.”
Jann’s ambition was so obvious that he sometimes self‑mocked, suggesting his goal was to become “the Henry Luce of the counterculture.” Outside, US Weekly, and Men’s Journal notwithstanding, he didn’t build a sprawling Time Inc.–style empire, but he woke up a monolithic East Coast journalism establishment whose coverage of, say, what was happening at the Fillmore Auditorium when Stephen Stills opened a Buffalo Springfield set with “There's a man with a gun over there” was laughably clueless.
Just getting that right put Rolling Stone on the road to becoming the most innovative and successful magazine in the loosely defined half century of the “golden age of magazines”—however suspect that label may be now. To grasp how shocking it was, consider Rolling Stone’s first‑anniversary issue, with nude photographs of Lennon and Yoko Ono from behind on the cover and full frontal inside the fold; it made national news, sold out on newsstands—the lesson sarcastically articulated by Jann in the subsequent issue: “The point is this, print a famous foreskin and the world will beat a path to your door.”
Satisfyingly, Richardson recognizes the instant credibility that came with Jann’s cofounder, San Francisco Chronicle music critic Gleason, and the psychic and financial support he got from then-girlfriend Jane Schindelheim. Richardson quotes a college friend of Jane’s, who likens her beauty and poise to “a babe that would have walked off a Godard movie.” Jann and Jane would marry in 1968 at the synagogue next to the Fillmore. Annie Leibovitz, who had left school to work on a kibbutz in Israel in 1969, was given a subscription by her boyfriend—her sole source of U.S. news during that time. She explained to Richardson that after returning to San Francisco and becoming Rolling Stone’s staff photographer in 1973, “I was looking to be adopted, and found Jann and Jane, and it turned into family for me. It was more than a magazine. It was a way of life.”
Richardson is fundamentally objective, with refreshing academic discipline, and the lines of his inquiry sharpen important characters and their stories once lost in the shading of easy cliché and passing time. Early editors and writers, like Marcus, Fong-Torres, Jonathan Cott, and Charles Perry, emerge as fully realized personalities. Perry—“Smokestack El Ropo”—had roomed with the LSD entrepreneur Owsley Stanley at Cal but always wore a tie, covering the counterculture’s fringes, and wrote the magazine’s first nonmusical feature, in 1968, about how “the U.S. military was ‘directly responsible for turning on probably more than a quarter of a million American innocents by sending them to Vietnam,’ where drugs were plentiful and cheap.”
Stewart Brand, who would create the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, was an early contributor, with pieces that plugged new technology into the counterculture’s values—arguing that computers were “good news…maybe the best since psychedelics” and hinting that a coming networked world would be “full of freedom and weirdness.” The explosive critic Jon Landau, who went on to manage Bruce Springsteen, was another major influence on Jann.
In 1973, John Walsh, who would go on to cocreate ESPN, arrived from Newsday as a new managing editor and saw the need for copy and research departments. He immediately hired Marianne Partridge, who had worked for Time and the New York Times, to form the copy department, although she had no experience as a copy editor. Richardson credits Walsh and Partridge with bringing a new level of editorial rigor to the magazine and empowering women on staff (Harriet Fier, Christine Doudna, Sarah Lazin, Barbara Downey), helping them rise to ultimately run the magazine—after cracking what famously had been a toxic boys’ club.
Less than a year after her arrival, Partridge became Rolling Stone’s first female senior editor. Determined to push the magazine on women’s issues, she called her friend Ellen Willis and urged her to tackle rape, a subject almost never covered in print and rarely prosecuted successfully at the time. At her first story meeting—the only woman in the room—Partridge began to pitch Willis’s piece and reporter Joe Eszterhas cracked, “Why don’t you just lie back and enjoy it?!”
“I was looking at Jann, and he was the only person at the table that didn’t laugh,” Partridge remembered. “He was nodding his head, like please continue. I got through, and he said, ‘That sounds great.’” Rolling Stone ran Willis’s groundbreaking “Rape on Trial” in August 1975.
Brand New Beat winds down with peak 1970s, when Rolling Stone flexed its muscles as a cultural and journalistic powerhouse. Richardson reconstructs how Hunter S. Thompson, Joe Klein, Cameron Crowe, and others brought immersive, narrative‑driven reporting, which became a hallmark of the magazine, on subjects ranging from Watergate to the Karen Silkwood case. Joe Armstrong, who joined Rolling Stone as advertising director in 1973 and later became publisher, overcame initial resistance to the magazine’s unruly image and began attracting automotive, liquor, and cigarette pages. Advertising revenue surged, increasing by 50 percent in both 1974 and 1975, solidifying Rolling Stone’s financial stability and aligning it more closely with mainstream media in New York—which influenced Jann’s decision to relocate there in 1977.
In a smart epilogue, Richardson presents Rolling Stone as a lasting cultural force long after that move, even as the magazine’s mix tilted toward celebrity and predictable accusations of selling out grew louder. More important, he argues, is the enduring impact on the tech industry of the countercultural values Rolling Stone championed, suggesting that the easiest way to see that legacy is to walk through a typical American city, where a Whole Foods, Apple Store, yoga studio, cannabis dispensary, farmers’ market, or recycling center mark a long tail. If you “snap a picture with your smartphone and post it on social media,” he writes, “you’re living in [the magazine’s] shadow.” “Rolling Stone didn’t build those enterprises or institutions, but it credited their source when other media outlets were disparaging, trivializing, or stereotyping [them]”—dismissals that, he notes, “are still very much with us.”•
Terry McDonell has published widely as a journalist, top-edited a number of magazines, and was elected to the American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame in 2012. He is president emeritus of the Paris Review Foundation and most recently cofounded Literary Hub.
