Peter Richardson joins Plutopia to discuss Brand New Beat, his history of Rolling Stone’s first decade and its roots in San Francisco counterculture, Ramparts, and the Bay Area music scene. The conversation covers Richardson’s access to Rolling Stone’s private archives, the magazine’s founding by Jann Wenner and Ralph J. Gleason, its early tension between rock journalism and radical politics, its male-dominated “boys’ club” culture, and the roles of writers and editors such as Hunter S. Thompson, Ellen Willis, Ben Fong-Torres, Greil Marcus, Ed Ward, and Cameron Crowe. Richardson also explains how Rolling Stone evolved from a countercultural rock magazine into a broader entertainment and political publication, shaped by celebrity journalism, changing music economics, Annie Leibovitz’s photography, and the magazine’s eventual move away from its original revolutionary hopes.

Peter Richardson:

Jann Wenner came through town to promote his memoir, and I met him, and at the same event, I met Ben Fong-Torres. And I asked him if I had his support for this book, and that I didn’t want to do it if I didn’t have that support. And he said, well, what do you mean by that? And I said, I want you to talk to me. I don’t want you to tell other people not to talk to me. And I also want to make sure that I get to those papers that his biographer had access to and were not publicly available. It’s not in an archive somewhere that everybody can access. Those papers, they’re all the Rolling Stone papers going back to the origin of the magazine. Those papers, by the time I got to them, were in deep storage, secure storage, in a New Jersey warehouse. So I asked for access to those papers, too. And he said, okay, and that was it. That was actually a difficult thing to arrange because they’re not used to people coming in and pulling things out of a working warehouse to look at them for weeks at a time. So that was a big break.