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Summer of Love in San Francisco: How Hippies, LSD, and Rolling Stone Transformed America · Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show

• 0:00
  Welcome to Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show.
• 0:02
  I'm Ted Bonnitt and my partner in crime, Phil Proctor, may join us at some point.
• 0:08
  He's in the process of fleeing the country.
• 0:10
  He's trying to get over the border into Canada and Nova Scotia.
• 0:13
  And I can't say I blame him.
• 0:15
  We have a great show today.
• 0:17
  Our guest, Peter Richardson.
• 0:19
  We're gonna be talking about a book he wrote about the first 10 years of rolling Stone magazine in San Francisco and the whole San Francisco scene.
• 0:28
  Peter Richardson, welcome to the show.
• 0:30
  Thank you very much.
• 0:31
  Thank you.
• 0:31
  Thanks for having me.
• 0:32
  You are the author of Brand New Beat, the new history of Rolling Stone's early years in San Francisco.
• 0:38
  You've also written Savage Journey, Hunter S.
• 0:41
  Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo.
• 0:43
  You've also written acclaimed books of Ungrateful Dead, Ramparts magazine.
• 0:47
  Your essays have appeared in the Nation, the New Republic and LA Times.
• 0:51
  You are a Berkeley trained scholar.
• 0:53
  You taught California culture at San Francisco State for 17 years.
• 0:58
  And you're up in Sonoma County.
• 0:59
  That's right.
• 1:00
  Hello, Glen Ellen.
• 1:01
  Which is actually one of the little spots where Hunter Thompson used to live.
• 1:06
  The book is how Rolling Stone started and influenced culture in so many ways.
• 1:11
  What I found fascinating was in your first chapter called Roots, you were talking about what brought about the countercultural movement, which Rolling Stone eventually reflected.
• 1:21
  We'll talk about how Jan Winter started it all, but I'd like to start with the very origins.
• 1:27
  Theodore Roszak gave the countercultural movement its name in 1967.
• 1:32
  And another character, Ralph Gleason.
• 1:34
  Can you just set up what created the hippie movement that came out of the Beats?
• 1:38
  What made San Francisco so special at that time?
• 1:42
  Yeah, that's a great question.
• 1:43
  Very important.
• 1:44
  So, you know, in the post war period, after the Second World War, the San Francisco Bay Area was.
• 1:50
  Was really transformed largely by the war.
• 1:54
  You know, the economy changed, the population changed.
• 1:58
  There were a ton of young people.
• 2:00
  Of course, that was the national phenomenon, the baby boom.
• 2:04
  I think in 1965, something like 50% of the US population was under the age of 25.
• 2:11
  So there was a kind of power that went along with youth culture.
• 2:16
  And there were various youthful forms of resistance that were coming up as a result of that.
• 2:22
  I mean, many young people looked at the mainstream culture and really had grave misgivings about it.
• 2:29
  Some of that was prompted by the Vietnam War.
• 2:32
  Some of it had to do with the civil rights movement.
• 2:35
  Others were looking for forms of police reform.
• 2:40
  Other people just wanted to do their own thing and live the way they wanted to live.
• 2:44
  They had a kind of artistic outlook, kind of bohemian.
• 2:47
  Politics largely revolved around kind of political, artistic and sexual freedom.
• 2:54
  And all of that was coming into a kind of fine flash in the San Francisco Bay area during the mid-60s.
• 3:02
  San Francisco at that time wasn't really much of a rock and roll town.
• 3:07
  You know, there had been some jazz and some folk music, but all of a sudden people were transitioning from folk and other kinds of American music genres and really focusing on rock and roll.
• 3:19
  All of a sudden San Francisco becomes a kind of global rock capital.
• 3:24
  And the media figured that out very quickly in the so called Summer of Love, which was the summer of 1967,.
• 3:32
  The naive, innocent phase.
• 3:34
  Yes.
• 3:35
  Almost every national news outlet and a lot of local ones sent somebody to the San Francisco Bay area, usually San Francisco, usually Haight Ashbury, figure out what was going on.
• 3:45
  San Francisco itself is such a unique place.
• 3:49
  If you go all the way to the beginning.
• 3:50
  The lore is that Randolph Hearst had spent all his money in Virginia City looking for silver and he had $10,000 left and he put it into one hole and he hit the motherlode.
• 4:01
  And folklore is that that's what built out San Francisco.
• 4:04
  Ken Kesey and the acid trips.
• 4:06
  And they evidently came out of Virginia City before they came to San Francisco.
• 4:10
  This is very interesting history of that whole area.
• 4:13
  San Francisco is essentially a very young city, unrecognizable by today's standards.
• 4:19
  Right.
• 4:19
  Well, one thing was it was a cheap place to live.
• 4:21
  I mean, very unlike the sit artists could live in San Francisco, and a lot of them did.
• 4:28
  Poets, writers, sculptors, painters.
• 4:31
  Many were connected with what's now the San Francisco Art Institute.
• 4:35
  There was a bohemian culture in San Francisco, and it wasn't the first one in San Francisco.
• 4:41
  It was just the most recent one.
• 4:42
  And it kind of made the most noise, especially when the Beats arrived.
• 4:45
  You mentioned them earlier.
• 4:47
  Many, many people that we associate with the 60s were really steeped in the, in the beats in the 50s.
• 4:55
  People like Ken Kesey or people like Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead, they were beatniks basically, you know, and then when the 60s rolled around, they were ready for their moment, you know, they were ready for their close
• 5:07
  up.
• 5:08
  And you know, the hippies, you know, were quite separate from the Beats, but they were deeply influenced by the Beats.
• 5:15
  And the other thing we haven't mentioned yet is the drug culture.
• 5:19
  I mean, the arrival of LSD really made a huge difference.
• 5:23
  I mean, you can really see the, see the difference between the Beats and what's going on in their kind of subterranean, kind of coffeehouse culture, kind of low key in the social margins compared to the hippies who were,
• 5:37
  you know, flamboyant and colorful and in, you know, very visible in San Francisco and especially around Haight Ashbury and Golden Gate Park.
• 5:49
  And so they sort of colonized Golden Gate park and held some huge events.
• 5:55
  One of them, In January of 1967, the human being really astonished, even the hippies, who had no idea that there were so many of them and they were all there together.
• 6:09
  This was before social media, so it must have really surprised them that there was such a critical mass.
• 6:14
  LSD was still legal, right?
• 6:16
  It was an entirely different mindset.
• 6:19
  Yes, it certainly was.
• 6:21
  And you know, it felt like it should be illegal, but it wasn't outlawed until October of 1966, which is the same month that the Black Panther Party formed in Oakland.
• 6:34
  So, you know, you've got campus activism, you've got black nationalism, you've got hippie culture.
• 6:41
  They're not exactly the same, but people recognize them as parts of a larger kind of youth rebellion.
• 6:48
  And that's what Theodore Roszak, who was a Bay Area professor, called the counterculture.
• 6:55
  Popularized the term the counterculture.
• 6:57
  And he wasn't against it.
• 6:58
  I mean, in some ways Roszak was critical of it, but he thought that hippies had healthy instincts, largely because he had long been dedicated to the peace movement and peace activism.
• 7:12
  And he thought that the hippies and their outlook were kind of allies, you know, not perfect ones, but, you know, had had the potential to really push, push back on what Roszak called the technocracy, which was a kind
• 7:28
  of form of managerial liberalism that was very much at the center of power.
• 7:34
  You know, this form of Cold war liberalism that Roszak had deep misgivings about.
• 7:41
  He realized that the hippies were not always politically active or even that politically engaged, but that there was something about their message and their concerns and their values that he thought were healthy.
• 7:55
  I mean, for someone like Roszak, he looked at the mainstream culture and thought the mainstream culture was off its rocker.
• 8:03
  Of course, that's exactly what the mainstream media thought about the hippies in San Francisco.
• 8:09
  We were peak of empire in the early to mid-60s, post World War II, prosperity, world dominance, healthy, robust, middle class kids had good educations, they were living in luxury in that respect.
• 8:22
  And the hippie movement in a way spawned from that.
• 8:25
  And there was some blowback that these were spoiled kids and the ideal of Haight Ashberry and all the hippies and then what it ended up becoming.
• 8:33
  Tell us about that.
• 8:34
  You're exactly right.
• 8:35
  It was an age of affluence.
• 8:37
  If you're a white middle class kid, you were, you probably had a lot more opportunities without really even lifting a finger than you would have today.
• 8:45
  Right.
• 8:46
  So, you know, basically free universities.
• 8:50
  And of course there was a war going on.
• 8:52
  And if you weren't, if you weren't studying and you were, you were very likely to be drafted.
• 8:57
  So one of the things that the hippies had misgivings about, I mean, looking around at the culture, yes, the GDP is going great.
• 9:06
  Guns and people are working and people have money and, you know, so on and so forth.
• 9:12
  But there are deep public investments happening during this time.
• 9:16
  But there were problems that more money weren't going to solve.
• 9:19
  And I think the hippies were right about that.
• 9:22
  So, you know, there was a form of militarism, obviously the Vietnam War was a symbol of that.
• 9:28
  I think young people thought it turned out correctly that they were being lied to about the war by the government.
• 9:34
  So that, that led to a kind of rapture.
• 9:37
  There was also a sense that there was this kind of environmental rapacity, that we weren't really taking care of the planet very well.
• 9:45
  The hippies were very tuned into that.
• 9:47
  There was a feeling of spiritual emptiness in the mainstream, in the mainstream culture, you know, that hippies were willing to explore all these other kind of spiritual alternatives.
• 9:57
  So.
• 9:58
  And also a kind of rampant materialism.
• 10:00
  I mean, with the affluence goes this sense that it's all about, it's all about income.
• 10:06
  And I think the hippies thought, you know what?
• 10:08
  My friends and I are going to try to figure out if there's actually a better way to live, you know, that, that, that feels more righteous to us, you know, and that that was a big part of what
• 10:19
  was behind the counterculture.
• 10:21
  It's hard to fault them for that though.
• 10:23
  There were many unforced errors.
• 10:26
  There were media failures.
• 10:29
  Certainly the media was not really on the counterculture side, far from it.
• 10:35
  I mean, usually when the media looked at hippies, the mainstream media, and they got a lot of attention, the attention was usually disparaging.
• 10:44
  There was political duality too.
• 10:46
  1966 is when Ronald Reagan became governor and he was proactively opposed to this movement and disparaged it and then ran operations to disrupt them.
• 10:58
  They did face a lot of resistance at the time.
• 11:00
  It was still a very conservative state, especially back then.
• 11:04
  This is a backdrop that's created this opportunity for Rolling Stone magazine.
• 11:09
  There were counterpoints in the media there, Berkeley's free speech movement, Ramparts magazine, but they didn't break through into the mainstream culture.
• 11:18
  And Jan Wenner, a college dropout from the area, seized on this opportunity.
• 11:24
  And Ralph Gleason was really a mentor of his.
• 11:27
  Yeah, that's exactly right.
• 11:28
  They were the co founders of Rolling Stone magazine.
• 11:31
  The first issue came out in November of 1967, so a few months after the so called Summer of Love in San Francisco.
• 11:39
  And both of those co founders, Jan and Ralph, had been in Berkeley.
• 11:44
  Ralph lived in Berkeley, wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle.
• 11:47
  He was a music critic.
• 11:49
  He was the only music journalist to land on President Nixon's enemies list.
• 11:54
  So he was politically engaged, but he was also sort of well respected in the music industry.
• 12:03
  He was in his 40s at this point.
• 12:05
  He was no hippie.
• 12:06
  No, he wasn't.
• 12:07
  But he was sympathetic to many of the things that were happening in the Bay Area especially.
• 12:11
  So he, he and Jan both covered or wrote about the free speech movement at Berkeley.
• 12:18
  All the anti war stuff have it going on at Berkeley.
• 12:21
  They were inside of that.
• 12:23
  They had a front row seat, if you will, to, to the counterculture.
• 12:28
  Neither was himself really kind of a classic, you know, member of the counterculture, Ralph, partly because he was older, Jan, because just temperamentally he wasn't, he wasn't a hippie, but he understood the significance of the counterculture.
• 12:43
  Both of them did.
• 12:44
  And one of the things, I mean, maybe this is the key thing about Rolling Stone magazine and its success is while the rest of the media was disparaging the counterculture, you know, and sort of distorting it in the
• 12:58
  media, Jan and Ralph and Rolling Stone magazine bet everything on the importance and the long term significance of the counterculture.
• 13:09
  So they thought this is not a fad, it's not a pathology.
• 13:13
  You know, this is something, this is the counterculture and its music.
• 13:17
  And the music, of course, was their focus, but the magazine was really about the counterculture and its music.
• 13:25
  And they thought, you know, that this was going to change America in a very deep way and in very short order, you know, although it would also be there, would have a kind of lasting significance.
• 13:35
  So they made a very, at the time, audacious bat, you know, that rock and roll now rock had been covered, right?
• 13:44
  You know, people knew about Elvis Presley and people knew about the Beatles and so on, but the counterculture and its music was something quite different.
• 13:56
  And that's what Jan and Ralph put all their chips on.
• 14:00
  Ralph made it clear that it was not a Fad.
• 14:03
  There was a standing joke that Ralph, because he was older, that he really was 224 year olds, 316 year olds or 412 year olds.
• 14:12
  Yeah, they said he couldn't make up his mind.
• 14:15
  He did have a kind of exuberance, I thought, you know, I think he was quite sophisticated.
• 14:22
  But in his idea that the counterculture was going to change American culture by changing heads, that it wasn't going to come to some sort of big political showdown between young people and the establishment, that basically the culture would
• 14:41
  change and then politics would inevitably change because of that.
• 14:44
  That politics was always downstream from culture.
• 14:48
  So if you change the culture with rock music, which they regarded as the animating spirit of a social revolution, if you did that.
• 14:57
  And of course, a lot of this is predicated on Ralph's experience with jazz and the civil rights movement.
• 15:04
  If you did that, rock was gonna.
• 15:07
  This.
• 15:07
  This rock.
• 15:08
  And the counterculture was going to change, change American culture fundamentally.
• 15:13
  And I mean, there was a little bit of magical thinking there.
• 15:16
  More sophisticated political observers, including Theodore Roszak, looked at this and thought, yeah, I don't think so.
• 15:22
  I don't think that's how it works.
• 15:23
  I don't think power yields anything without a demand, you know, that there was going to have to be some organizing and some determination and some political will before we would see the kinds of changes that Ralph and Jan
• 15:38
  really truly believed in.
• 15:39
  That was a kind of core conviction.
• 15:41
  Nevertheless, they were right that in many ways the counterculture and its music did change American culture.
• 15:49
  And I get to that a little later in the book.
• 15:53
  In January of 67, the human be in it drew 20,000 people.
• 15:58
  And the press turned that into the Summer of Love.
• 16:00
  And that focused this countercultural movement on this neighborhood.
• 16:04
  The hate.
• 16:04
  Yeah, it made a very deep impression on the hate, that's for sure.
• 16:08
  I mean, in some ways, I think you're quite right that the human being was the thing that alerted the media to this big story.
• 16:16
  Here's all these kids fantastically dressed, high, you know, tripping, dressed oddly, you know, hearing all these strange messages from Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg and Jerry Rubin and listening to the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane and so on.
• 16:36
  So that was the media's cue, that something big was happening.
• 16:40
  Not only big, but kind of spectacular.
• 16:43
  Time magazine called hippies candidates for, quote, a very sound spanking.
• 16:48
  That's what I mean.
• 16:49
  You know, it's kind of dismissive, right?
• 16:51
  They're kids, okay?
• 16:53
  You know, we just have to put up for the.
• 16:55
  Put up with this for a little Bit longer.
• 16:57
  And so that the human being was the thing.
• 17:00
  And it also convinced the people living in Haight Ashbury, the young people in Haight Ashbury, hey, now what?
• 17:07
  Now what do we do?
• 17:08
  And then there was some organizing for this Summer of Love, where 100,000 young people came to California.
• 17:16
  Of course, what helped that effort was that the city was saying, don't come.
• 17:20
  You know, the city officials, of course, that was the best way to get all these kids, everybody to come.
• 17:26
  Now, that's where the party was gonna be this summer.
• 17:28
  After that huge gathering, it sort of collapsed, and the hippies scattered and communes began.
• 17:36
  And with that was the birth of Rolling Stone and Progressive fm, Tom Donahue.
• 17:42
  There was some real trailblazing where for the first time, it was not top 40, which we had all grown up on in the 60s, but it was now album rock.
• 17:52
  You could play an entire album on the air with no interruptions, Anything goes.
• 17:56
  And it was very exciting at the time.
• 17:58
  Yeah.
• 17:59
  And Jan and Ralph saw that.
• 18:00
  I mean, they saw the changes that were happening in radio, and those were quite connected to the changes that were happening with live musical performances.
• 18:09
  So, you know, Bill Graham showed that.
• 18:12
  Bill Graham started hosting shows at these underused ballrooms and auditoriums in San Francisco.
• 18:19
  And then that led to, you know, a lot of these people just wanted to dance, you know, and they weren't allowed to do that.
• 18:28
  There were laws against it, actually, that prohibited minors from getting together, listening to music and dancing in these.
• 18:35
  In these auditoriums.
• 18:36
  So that had to be overcome.
• 18:39
  And then, you know, different ways of promoting those shows were also part of this.
• 18:45
  So you started getting these psychedelic posters that changed radically with the arrival of LSD on the streets of San Francisco.
• 18:54
  And that becomes the kind of visual signature for these.
• 18:57
  For San Francisco and its music.
• 18:59
  The light shows.
• 19:00
  Light shows, right.
• 19:01
  I mean, you know, that.
• 19:02
  That.
• 19:02
  That was a local art form in the Bay Area.
• 19:05
  Pioneered in the Bay Area.
• 19:07
  All of a sudden, you combine these light shows with this music, and, you know, it's not at all what was happening in Candlestick park when the Beatles arrived In August of 1966, you know, they were the best, obviously,
• 19:20
  and there was nothing typical about their shows.
• 19:23
  But in many ways, that was the end of an era in the sense that you had four guys in identical suits running out and playing 11 songs in 33 minutes and then running away.
• 19:35
  You know, something very different is happening at the Fillmore Auditorium or Winterland or Avalon Ballroom.
• 19:42
  I mean, you've got light shows, you've got dancing, you've Got some psychoactivity.
• 19:47
  You know, you've got all these things that are still, especially the light show, still associated with the conventions of a rock concert.
• 19:54
  That was the pinnacle at the time.
• 19:56
  I watched the Led Zeppelin documentary, and when they first started touring, they just were not doing well at all.
• 20:03
  And they finally got out to California and they played la, but really, they couldn't wait to get to San Francisco.
• 20:10
  That was their goal.
• 20:11
  That's when they connected that.
• 20:13
  Yeah, because the setting was ready for that kind of a thing.
• 20:16
  Yeah, it was a total cultural transformation, as you say.
• 20:20
  The media was transformed.
• 20:21
  Radio, magazines, the way the music was made, the way it was produced, the way it was disseminated, the way it was marketed.
• 20:30
  All of those things were changing at the same time.
• 20:33
  And they were connected.
• 20:34
  The San Francisco community wasn't a huge community.
• 20:37
  I mean, we're talking about two or 300 hippies who kind of kicked off most of these changes because they wanted to get together and dance.
• 20:45
  And the bands were also very cooperative and collaborative.
• 20:48
  It wasn't a cutthroat situation or even that commercial.
• 20:53
  Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, they were all in the neighborhood.
• 20:56
  Right.
• 20:56
  They played on each other's albums.
• 20:58
  They, you know, they appeared together.
• 21:00
  They did the same benefits.
• 21:02
  They went to the same restaurants, and they went to the same restaurants as their fans.
• 21:07
  You portrayed Jerry Garcia as solid to the core, the real deal.
• 21:11
  I think so.
• 21:12
  I think he's a kind of.
• 21:13
  I think he's kind of the face of the San Francisco counterculture during this period.
• 21:18
  One of the better faces, let's say, you know, in the sense that he sort of embodied so many of its.
• 21:24
  Of its virtues.
• 21:25
  He was hip, he was funny, he was creative.
• 21:28
  Endlessly people looked to him.
• 21:30
  And he was a pretty good judge of what was cool, you know, and what.
• 21:34
  What was righteous.
• 21:36
  And so he led his band, but he was also.
• 21:39
  He was the.
• 21:40
  He and the Grateful Dead were sort of the mayors of.
• 21:43
  The unofficial mayors of Haidash Re.
• 21:46
  Now, you mentioned that it didn't last forever.
• 21:48
  I mean, by the end of 1967, a lot of the artists and Bill Graham and a lot of other people were leaving San Francisco.
• 21:57
  A lot of that had to do with the very, very predictable drug crackdown that happened with all the media attention.
• 22:04
  This was not an advertisement for the San Francisco Police Department.
• 22:08
  So some arrests were made.
• 22:10
  And pretty soon the artist thought, you know what?
• 22:12
  We're probably a little bit better off in Marin county or a little bit north of here, where things are a little cooler.
• 22:19
  And then of Course, people were moving out to the communes, as you mentioned, they were somewhere in Marin or even farther north up the coast.
• 22:27
  They started growing their own cannabis.
• 22:29
  So it led to a lot of other kinds of changes.
• 22:33
  The Back to the Land movement, which was a national movement.
• 22:37
  But the Bay Area episode was very interesting.
• 22:39
  1.
• 22:40
  One other thing before we get into the history of Rolling Stone magazine, which is what your book is about, but really, for me, the takeaway was just how you encapsulated the culture of a city.
• 22:51
  That's always been fascinating to me.
• 22:53
  And at that time, you wrote that there was an estimated 100,000 people in the gay community out of 700,000 total residents.
• 23:01
  Right, right, right.
• 23:02
  And that added to counterculture, but there was a joy to it.
• 23:07
  It was funny, it was absurd.
• 23:09
  There was a lot of self referential and outrageous behavior.
• 23:14
  It's hard to relate to the spirit of that town at the time.
• 23:17
  Yeah, you really have to cast your mind back.
• 23:19
  I mean, and you also have to remember that it wasn't.
• 23:22
  There was nothing predetermined about it.
• 23:24
  There's nothing inevitable about this.
• 23:26
  It didn't have to happen.
• 23:28
  You know, it could have been otherwise.
• 23:29
  But it just so happened that all of these different forces came together and produced a form of bohemian culture that was later became known as the counterculture.
• 23:41
  And that that was part of a larger kind of all these other forms of creative expression and also youthful rebellion.
• 23:50
  In the book, you asked the question, why was San Francisco headquarters for the gay community, culturally the genesis of the gay community, and the fact that there were so many men in the frontier and not a lot of
• 24:03
  women.
• 24:04
  Right.
• 24:04
  That's amazing.
• 24:06
  Yeah.
• 24:06
  I mean, women were incredibly outnumbered from the outset in San Francisco and the Bay Area, largely because of the Gold Rush.
• 24:15
  I mean, the Gold Rush just kind of shot the whole region out of a cannon.
• 24:19
  It just got everything going as one.
• 24:20
  As Carrie McWilliams wrote later, the lights came on all at once in San Francisco.
• 24:25
  All of a sudden, it's the biggest city on the West Coast.
• 24:28
  It becomes the place that the transcontinental railroad's gonna go.
• 24:33
  And then wave after wave of bohemian culture on top of that.
• 24:37
  Not really A.
• 24:38
  It never had a kind of strong big C culture.
• 24:42
  Right.
• 24:43
  Some sort of official culture, if you will.
• 24:46
  And so you always had these bohemian groups, and this included a complete battery of gay arts.
• 24:56
  And some of it had to do with the war.
• 24:59
  A lot of service members went through San Francisco or shipped out or came back from the Pacific theater of the war.
• 25:06
  If you were drummed out of the military for being gay.
• 25:10
  That happened in San Francisco.
• 25:12
  It became a kind of place, like, why would I go back to Scranton, Pennsylvania, or Savannah, Georgia, if I'm gay and I get drummed out of the military?
• 25:21
  Why wouldn't I stay right here?
• 25:23
  And you have to keep in mind that during the Gold Rush, Los Angeles really didn't exist.
• 25:27
  It was all about Northern California.
• 25:29
  We're speaking with Peter Richardson, author of Brand New Beat, a new history of Rolling Stone's early years in San Francisco.
• 25:36
  How did Rolling Stone magazine capitalize?
• 25:39
  Was not Jan Wenner's goal to create a sex, drugs, rock and roll underground paper?
• 25:44
  Far from it.
• 25:45
  Yeah, anybody could have done it if it were just about sex, drugs and rock and roll.
• 25:49
  Of course, a lot of it was about sex, drugs and rock and roll.
• 25:52
  The question was, what else was it going to be about?
• 25:55
  And that's where I think Rolling Stone really distinguished itself from the other sometimes excellent rock magazines that were out there.
• 26:02
  I mean, they were the best rock magazine widely, widely considered the best rock magazine.
• 26:08
  They had the best writers.
• 26:09
  You know, Ben Fontores was very important in overseeing the musical coverage.
• 26:14
  Ralph and Jan were very smart about recruiting great music writers.
• 26:18
  Grill Marcus was another one.
• 26:20
  They had Annie Lebovitz as their chief photographer.
• 26:24
  So they.
• 26:25
  They had an eye for talent.
• 26:27
  But the main thing was they were the best rock magazine.
• 26:31
  But they were always more than that.
• 26:33
  You know, they were.
• 26:34
  They.
• 26:34
  In other words, they were set up to do stories that other rock magazines couldn't really land, could, didn't seek out, and didn't know how to handle.
• 26:43
  Why was that?
• 26:44
  Well, I think it had to do with the experience that both Ralph Gleason and Jan Wenner had at Ramparts magazine.
• 26:50
  They saw that this place where they had both worked earlier, had reached a lot of people against the odds.
• 26:57
  These were young people in San Francisco, which was not then and is not now a big media capital.
• 27:04
  You know, it's not like it's the center of the media universe.
• 27:08
  So they had to come up with something else.
• 27:10
  But it also was kind of liberating that they could try new things.
• 27:14
  And Ramparts did that.
• 27:16
  And they were quite.
• 27:18
  There was a fair amount of showmanship.
• 27:21
  You know, they were tuned into younger readers.
• 27:23
  There were a lot of them because of the baby boom, and they were pitched a little bit higher.
• 27:29
  Both Ramparts and Rolling Stone, most of their readers had some college, for example.
• 27:34
  In Rolling Stone's case, 25% were connected somehow to the music business.
• 27:40
  So, you know, they could afford to.
• 27:43
  They didn't have to cater to the lowest common denominator in every case.
• 27:48
  So they had standards, they had journalistic standards.
• 27:51
  They were not an alternative or underground paper that often seemed like one or looked like one.
• 27:57
  They had a better design, they had better editing, better writing, better photography.
• 28:03
  But they could not be totally distinguished from the underground newspapers, which are also very popular during this time.
• 28:12
  You know, the Free Press in LA and the Barb in Berkeley and the Oracle and many, many Village Voice, of course.
• 28:20
  So in other words, they were ready to do bigger stories.
• 28:25
  They did not shy away from bigger stories and they found some very quickly, like Altamont.
• 28:31
  They emerged just as this idealistic hippie movement turned dark and some really bad stuff was going on, including Weather Underground bombings, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, eventually cointelpro.
• 28:47
  There was some really dark stuff happening.
• 28:50
  And they embraced that as well.
• 28:53
  They did.
• 28:53
  I mean, you know, like ramparts.
• 28:55
  There was always some whimsy and some humor.
• 28:57
  I mean, one of the things about having Hunter S.
• 29:00
  Thompson as your, as your top writer that is the most popular writer never wrote about music.
• 29:06
  You know, that's interesting in and of itself.
• 29:09
  But he brought a kind of, he wasn't just giving you the political news.
• 29:14
  There was a kind of, there was a lot of satire, there was a lot of humor.
• 29:18
  You know, he was kind of pulling back the curtain on the American political scene, showing things that were happening behind the scenes on the campaign trail, presidential campaign trail.
• 29:29
  So you were, you were getting more than just information.
• 29:31
  You know, there was a kind of posture or attitude that was very appealing to young people that, and express these kind of countercultural values.
• 29:43
  And so there was much more than just sex, drugs and rock and roll and much more than music.
• 29:49
  One more thing about the music so important because that's what locked down their advertising, because it was the best way to reach the readers who were buying like averaging something like six album purchases per month.
• 30:02
  Jan kept it alive by begging and pleading with record executives to buy ad space.
• 30:09
  He would go down.
• 30:10
  Yeah.
• 30:10
  Especially early.
• 30:11
  Yeah.
• 30:11
  And of course he was helped because he had Ralph, Ralph, you know, Ralph had a kind of credibility and a kind of gravity.
• 30:17
  Toss that no 21 year old dropout like Yan, you know, could have, could have mustered.
• 30:23
  He had a lot of moxie, he had a big engine, he had a lot of ambition.
• 30:27
  But you know, Ralph was, Ralph was kind of the adult supervision during this period at, at, at the magazine.
• 30:34
  But they did get those ads and pretty soon, you know, they could charge a pretty penny for those ads.
• 30:40
  I happened to See, during the course of my research, I was able to see correspondence between the music executives and Jan.
• 30:48
  And they're just howling about the price for the ads, you know, and then.
• 30:53
  And then grumbling about the negative reviews in the back of the magazine.
• 30:57
  But they all realized that this was part of the special sauce that was Rolling Stone magazine.
• 31:03
  That if they lost their reputation for integrity in the review section, then the reviews would be less meaningful and it would make it less worthwhile for the labels to advertise in the magazine.
• 31:16
  Jan Wenner met Denise Kaufman.
• 31:18
  She was a big influence on Wenner, on his education.
• 31:21
  She introduced him to Gleason, but she also guided his first acid trip, which changed his life, he said.
• 31:29
  But at the same time, Wenner kept the countercultural movement at arm's length.
• 31:35
  He didn't really embrace it.
• 31:37
  Obviously, they covered it all.
• 31:39
  But you wrote about his takedown of the Yippies as a shuck.
• 31:43
  You said that Wenner's approach was both genius and cunning.
• 31:47
  Can you explain that?
• 31:48
  Yeah.
• 31:49
  Well, I mean, he understood the significance of the counterculture, but he was not himself.
• 31:54
  Kind of a classic hippie.
• 31:56
  And the magazine was by no means a hippie operation.
• 31:59
  This wasn't a commune that was putting out a newsletter.
• 32:02
  This was a professional magazine.
• 32:05
  People got paid, you know, ambitious people worked there from all over the.
• 32:11
  All over the country.
• 32:13
  And they were hip, but they weren't hippies.
• 32:16
  They understood that.
• 32:17
  That what they were seeing around them in San Francisco is very important.
• 32:23
  They didn't limit their coverage to that.
• 32:26
  But for about 10 years there, San Francisco became a kind of global rock capital.
• 32:31
  You know, kind of.
• 32:32
  It came and went pretty quickly, too.
• 32:34
  But let's say from 1967-77 or 66 to 76, San Francisco was an important rock capital, along with Los Angeles and New York and London.
• 32:45
  A lot of that had to do with the culture, this kind of distinctive culture that was there that we've been talking about.
• 32:53
  Jan understood that there was something very important afoot that was going on around him.
• 32:59
  But he was not living on a commune.
• 33:02
  You know, he was living quite well in San Francisco in larger and larger places.
• 33:08
  Larger, more comfortable.
• 33:10
  It was a money making operation.
• 33:12
  He made no bones about that.
• 33:13
  But the Karen Silkwood story, for example, he went out on a limb with that and broke the story.
• 33:19
  If you don't recall the specifics of Karen Silkwood's story, which was made into a movie.
• 33:24
  She was basically murdered as a whistleblower from this nuclear plant she worked in.
• 33:29
  Yeah.
• 33:30
  And also they were Going up against a Nixon White House that was actively trying to suppress the countercultural movement.
• 33:36
  And Reagan joking that hippies had haircuts like Tarzan, walked like Jane and smelled like Cheetah.
• 33:42
  John Erkman's admission that the drug war was meant to disrupt the anti war left and black communities.
• 33:47
  And they were assassinating black leaders.
• 33:49
  It was just a weird time.
• 33:50
  Elvis offering himself to Nixon as a narcotics agent, you know, and then you had the Kent State shooting.
• 33:57
  It was a rough time.
• 33:58
  There was always something to write about.
• 34:00
  He got the right people like Thompson to tackle these big stories and in that respect really did change the culture.
• 34:08
  Interestingly, Winter eventually got the bug to go to New York.
• 34:13
  He uprooted the Rolling Stone offices in San Francisco to move it to New York.
• 34:17
  And on paper, as you write, made a lot of sense because that was where the publishing business was.
• 34:23
  It's where all the big names were at the same time.
• 34:25
  They moved in 77, I think they.
• 34:28
  Is that when they moved?
• 34:29
  And it was an incredibly exciting time.
• 34:31
  I cannot fault him for wanting to go to New York.
• 34:34
  Yeah, Thought things in San Francisco had played out.
• 34:37
  He was probably right about that.
• 34:39
  The move made a lot of corporate sense, but they had never presented themselves as a kind of establishment style corporation.
• 34:48
  But they rattled off all these reasons for the move.
• 34:51
  But I think the real reason for the move is that Jan and his wife wanted to live in New York and the parties were better.
• 34:56
  Oh, parties were great in New York.
• 34:58
  And as you write, there were small, medium and great big parties.
• 35:01
  And he floated into high society and got to know everybody.
• 35:04
  And so more power to him because he was a great success.
• 35:07
  And then as print phased out, he stayed with it, as you wrote, he turned down investments in emerging electronic media and stuck with print.
• 35:17
  He cashed out.
• 35:18
  He did okay, but he was a print animal.
• 35:21
  Yeah, he was.
• 35:22
  The interesting thing about Jan and his publishing empire wasn't just Rolling Stone magazine.
• 35:28
  He had other magazines as well.
• 35:30
  And he had at least one that had a higher circulation and was more profitable, and that was Us Weekly.
• 35:37
  But the jewel in the crown was always Rolling Stone.
• 35:39
  I think in some ways you could almost see it as having these other people properties was a way to be able to stay at the head of Rolling Stone, which I think he really loved.
• 35:49
  Yeah, yeah.
• 35:50
  It was very meaningful to him.
• 35:52
  He didn't want to sell because I don't think he could really imagine what he was going to do after that.
• 35:57
  You know, like, what's more exciting than being at the head of Rolling Stone magazine?
• 36:02
  Especially when such magazines were kind of rocking like crazy.
• 36:06
  That was the way you sold music at that time.
• 36:08
  Yeah, but the way music was sold, the way the music business changed, the way the magazine business changed, the way the advertising business changed, all of those things were changing at the same time.
• 36:20
  The technology was changing, you know, all of a sudden, you know, good review in Rolling Stone is fine, but if you really want to sell some music, you need a music video.
• 36:30
  Yes.
• 36:30
  Yeah.
• 36:31
  And then later, you'd rather get a tweet from, you know, a top rapper than a good review on Rolling Stone if you're really trying to reach people.
• 36:40
  So things were changing around him, but he stuck it out, and they were still winning awards and, you know, reaching people.
• 36:47
  But the world had changed, changed around it.
• 36:51
  But you know what?
• 36:51
  If that's all he did, which it wasn't all he did.
• 36:54
  He had a charmed life in that he was in San Francisco at the right time, and I think he jumped to New York at the right time.
• 37:00
  And kudos to him because Rolling Stone growing up was essential reading because that was the weekly publication that you stayed hip with.
• 37:09
  Huge tastemaker for a lot of people that may not have even recognized it at the time I read it.
• 37:15
  I mentioned in the book that, you know, I didn't go out and buy all these albums.
• 37:19
  I had two older brothers.
• 37:20
  You know, they were bringing the albums home, and that's what I was listening to.
• 37:24
  And so I was very familiar with the music, but I had never myself gone out and tried to figure it out.
• 37:32
  You know, it was just kind of coming to me just by virtue of the fact that I had these brothers who.
• 37:38
  The oldest, who was really into it.
• 37:40
  You know, it was only later that I realized how formative some of these publications were, and some of this music was for me and all the people I went to school with.
• 37:50
  For example, Peter Richardson, thank you so much for coming on our show.
• 37:55
  Your book is brand new.
• 37:57
  A New History of Rolling Stones early years in San Francisco.
• 38:00
  That's a good account of Rolling Stone.
• 38:02
  But even more interesting to me was how well you encapsulated the historic significance, the roots of the countercultural movement in San Francisco.
• 38:11
  Thanks so much.
• 38:12
  You can hear all our shows@SexyBoomershow.com and Phil will eventually come back to this country, I'm sure of it.
• 38:19
  So long.