Susan Brenneman is a contributing editor of Golden State.
It was my second job out of college: a temporary gig at Rolling Stone in the mid-1970s. The magazine’s book division needed help finishing the fact-checking for its “Illustrated History of Rock & Roll.” As it turned out, I worked for Jann Wenner’s outfit for the next few years, which means I was semi-adjacent to the tail end of what Peter Richardson calls “the wild rise of Rolling Stone.”
I’m not sure the world needs another book about Rolling Stone and the Long ’60s, but Richardson’s “Brand New Beat” is, at the least, a fact-checker’s delight.
The American Studies approach in “Brand New Beat” is itself a wild ride — 12 roughly chronological chapters crammed with cultural, historical, critical and first-hand facts and anecdotes gathered from San Francisco to New York City, from the 1950s to last year.
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The book asks a “deceptively simple” question: How could an under-capitalized rock and roll magazine started by Wenner, a 21-year-old UC Berkeley dropout, and Ralph J. Gleason, his 50-year-old Bay Area music-critic mentor, become one of the most important publications of its time, challenging the “hypocrisy and mendacity” of the establishment and setting “new journalistic standards”?
The answer, it seems, is all about the niche.
Rolling Stone’s fundamental superpower, writes Richardson, was the way it exemplified and critiqued the counterculture that exploded in San Francisco in the mid-1960s, in contrast to traditional media that largely trivialized and denigrated Flower Power.
It was also unwavering in the belief that rock and roll — and the “things and attitudes that the music embrace[d]” — mattered.
Paul Thornton
To create a publication one former staffer called “hipper than anything better and better than anything hipper,” its editors honed a masthead packed with talent (and tensions), and elevated the iconoclastic hiss and pop of New Journalism.
Readers of Rolling Stone back in the day, or those who’ve since dipped into, say, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” might find Richardson’s analysis obvious. But his rendition of what it took to create and sustain Rolling Stone in its first decade, and its depiction of the forces that formed it, is often revelatory.
“Brand New Beat” brims with dishy details – from the pay scale early on ($12.50 for an album review) to rock impresario Bill Graham’s invective-laced rants and East Coast critics attacking Rolling Stone’s San Francisco “pompousness.” Richardson leans on earlier assessments and memoirs, but he also did fresh digging in Rolling Stone’s archives, interviewed or corresponded with dozens of its original staffers and compiled a multitude of other sources, from academic studies to the underground press.
Darrell Kunitomi
A lot of Rolling Stone lore revolves around the cocky, capricious Wenner and his star writer Hunter S. Thompson. “Brand New Beat” pointedly works as a corrective. Wenner isn’t slighted, nor is Thompson, but neither are Gleason and loads of other editors and contributors who were crucial in shaping the magazine: Ben Fong-Torres, Charles Perry, Greil Marcus, Marianne Partridge, Tim Cahill, Howard Kohn and many more. Music industry executives, assorted media competitors, 1960s gurus and even a few rock stars also play a role.
For a book about Rolling Stone’s success, Richardson isn’t particularly keen on business-side data. Instead, we see Wenner at work: cannily and sometimes abjectly trolling for ad dollars and investors, sinking thousands into a soon-defunct Washington bureau and troping inevitably toward what sells. The magazine’s basic business model was obvious: Tap a built-in advertising base (record companies) and serve up “generous portions of sex, drugs and rock and roll to the fattest demographic in American history.”
Richardson continually segues from outside events to Rolling Stone’s inner workings and back again. The opening chapters establish the magazine’s San Francisco set and setting – the bands, Berkeley’s free speech movement, freaks vs. activists, Acid Tests that turned into overdoses. The rest tracks “national affairs” that paralleled the magazine’s evolution; the book delivers less on the musical front than a reader might expect from the title.
If you never knew or long ago forgot the details of the Manson murders, or how the Weather Underground broke Timothy Leary out of drug jail, or what possessed Patty Hearst to pick up an M1 rifle, or John Lennon’s unexpurgated thoughts about Paul McCartney circa 1969, “Brand New Beat” delivers a crash course in all that and more, much of it courtesy Rolling Stone’s reporting.
Paul Thornton
As tuned in as Rolling Stone was, Richardson throws shade on the claim that it was “the journalistic voice of a generation.” In particular, he is acutely aware of the magazine’s straight white male overload – on staff, in its coverage and its readership. (That bias was shockingly underlined, as Richardson points out, when Wenner dismissed such artists as Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell as inarticulate in a 2023 interview.)
“Brand New Beat” examines the magazine’s biases with telling bits — newsstand sales “dropped significantly” when Black artists were on the cover; Wenner wrote a blinkered assessment of the impact of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination; the office decor included a sign outside the editor’s office: “Boys’ Club.”
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But the book also cites “exceptions to the pattern”: a 1969 post-Woodstock Sheila Weller interview of Jimi Hendrix, for example; “vital information” about Sam & Dave and Stax Records in issue No. 1; the ascension, finally, of a brigade of over-qualified female editorial assistants up the masthead.
Such “all the news that fits” completeness is a large part of the appeal of “Brand New Beat.” At the same time, one could wish for more of some things and less of others.
Some of the pop-up history lessons, ancillary biographies and densely overlapping chronologies border on TMI. Meanwhile, the magazine’s aesthetics, though not ignored, deserve deeper consideration. Worse, despite a welcome flood of references to Rolling Stone’s content, readers get little of the articles’ texture and voice – very few pieces are directly quoted.
I know: Less than 300 pages of media history can’t do it all.
It’s discomfiting when what you live through and participate in — even tangentially — gets turned into “history.” It’s less weird if the result rings true. “Brand New Beat” more than makes the grade, at least for this former fact-checker.
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Mariel Garza
Jim Newton
Paul Thornton
