The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine

Brand New Beat

written by Peter Richardson, published by University of California Press

In 1967, Jann Wenner, a twenty-one-year-old who had abandoned his formal education, started a magazine. He set up shop in San Francisco, surrounded by the specific, humid idealism of the Bay Area counterculture. The premise was straightforward: rock and roll was the engine for a broader social shift.

Peter Richardson’s Brand New Beat documents the decade that followed. It tracks how a scrappy, chaotic operation became a fixture of the American media landscape. Richardson doesn't treat the magazine as a holy relic. He examines the mechanics of how it grew, pulling in writers like Cameron Crowe, Lester Bangs, and Greil Marcus, while simultaneously playing host to the prose-heavy eccentricities of Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe.

The book maps the magazine’s dual function: it acted as both the primary megaphone for the counterculture and its most diligent critic. It utilized the reach of popular music to underwrite coverage of the era’s political and cultural volatility. Richardson details how the publication eventually codified a new style of journalism, transforming a music sheet into a persistent, national force.

University of California Press website