BRAND NEW BEAT

A history of Rolling Stone, the longtime pop-culture magazine.

Rolling Stone, writes author Richardson (Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo, 2022), wasn’t quite a “hippie publication,” its founder Jann Wenner being a more frat-boy type, but it took the counterculture—and especially the counterculture’s favored art forms—seriously. By Richardson’s lights, it also drew on two Bay Area predecessors: the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and, even more important, the convention-flouting Ramparts magazine, which wasn’t afraid to mingle journalism with opinion. In the same spirit, Richardson holds, Rolling Stone “challenged the notion of objectivity and its efficacy,” as witness the work of longtime contributor Thompson. Wenner’s creation debuted as a 25-cent tabloid in late 1967, after the vaunted Summer of Love, and zeroed in on its target audience immediately; as editor and writer Ben Fong-Torres remarks here, Rolling Stone was “the most effectively targeted new publication since Hugh Hefner founded Playboy in 1955.” Wenner—as he admits in his 2022 memoir Like a Rolling Stone—may have been too much a fanboy for comfort (Richardson writes that Wenner ordered a positive review for Bob Dylan’s 1970 album New Morning, one reason noted music writer Ed Ward didn’t last long on the masthead), and as the years went by, he distanced himself increasingly from the real counterculture, finally relocating the magazine, controversially, from San Francisco to New York. Even so, Richardson concludes, the counterculture endures, and so does the magazine, even if the two don’t talk much. For all that, there’s not much news in these pages for anyone familiar with the magazine and its long history; Robert Draper’s Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History (1990) is the better book overall, though dated, and Cameron Crowe gets at most of the main points in a few pages of his memoir The Uncool (2025).

Though with useful insights, ancillary reading on a pop music flagship.