Ephesians 2:1-9 (Easter sunday)

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If you leave your email address at the end of the survey, there'll be entered to win a $100 gift card to Bookshop.org, a chance to stock up on books while supporting independent bookstores at the same time. The survey takes just five minutes. Your answers are confidential, and your email will never be shared. Head to newbooksnetwork.com to take the survey today. You really appreciate your support. Now go take the survey. Welcome to the new BookSnetwork. Hello, and welcome to another episode on the new Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher. And I'm very pleased today because we get to talk about an interesting book published by the University of California Press in 2026, titled "Brand New Beat, The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine." Which pretty much does exactly what it says, helps us understand how Rolling Stone Magazine started, and also how it became such a big deal. Which, I mean, it's still around. So the origin story is fascinating, but also the kind of way it went from being an upstart to then maintaining. Right? Starting as one thing, maintaining as another, and this book covers both of those things to help us understand sort of the place it has in culture, and how it got to that point. So clearly a lot for us to discuss. The author is with me today, Peter Richardson. Peter, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Miranda. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? The short answer is I was teaching this material at San Francisco State University, and some of the books that I had written before this were sort of pointing in this direction. So it felt like a good topic to take on, especially the fact that it was focused here in San Francisco and San Francisco Bay Area, where I'm sitting right now. And it's always been very interesting to me, both as a subject to teach my students, but also I was sort of born into this and away I was born in Berkeley in 1959. And by the time I was aware of anything, I was aware of Rolling Stone magazine, not really thinking about it very much, but I was certainly aware of its role, especially here in the San Francisco Bay Area, kind of tastemaking role. Kind of an arbiter of what was cool and what was worth doing. And so it was a magazine that I read when I was a teenager, for example. So it's very much in the middle of this period. And for me, exploring Rolling Stone and its history was kind of a way of understanding the world that I was born into. Well, that gives us a hint then at least of where the magazine may have started, but can you tell us more about the how and when and the sort of origin story here? Yes. In many ways, it's, you could say it started in Berkeley, even though its headquarters were never there. The two co-founders, Ralph J. Gleason and Jan Wanner were both living in Berkeley when they decided to start the magazine. Wanner was a student at the University of California in Berkeley and was working for the campus newspaper. He had a column, it was a music column, and it was modeled on the column that Ralph Gleason wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle. So San Francisco is obviously the major metropolitan area, but Ralph Gleason decided to live in Berkeley, which was more Bohemian and intellectual. I think it was a little bit more like the part in New York where he went as an undergraduate student at Columbia University when jazz was the order of the day. So Gleason was quite a bit older. He was in his 40s and Wanner was his kind of protege when they decided to start the magazine. Both had been working for a magazine called Ramparts Magazine, which was a political muck raker based in San Francisco. Actually Jan Wanner was working for the Spinoff Weekly newspaper, which is a job that Ralph J. Gleason arranged for him. So, and both for various reasons were kind of dissatisfied with Ramparts Magazine. Gleason for its coverage of the account of the local counterculture in San Francisco. He didn't care for a cover story that the editor of Ramparts Magazine ran in the run up to the so-called Summer of Love in 1967. So he resigned pretty much in a towering rage. Jan was actually laid off because the editor of the Ramparts Magazine decided to shut down the Spinoff newspaper. So they both had some time on their hands and they had an idea for a new publication that was going to be a little bit more suitable for them, a little bit more, much more emphasis on music and the counterculture, which were in heakled the editor of Ramparts really didn't have that much use for. Even though he was a rebel and he was born and raised in San Francisco, he was no flower child. And so Ralph and Jan sent something, sensed an opportunity and started Rolling Stone Magazine in November of 1967. Got it. Okay, that makes sense. So they have a some experience of kind of magazines in the local area, but there's also sort of something distinct that they're looking for. And how much was kind of what they were looking for in that counterculture, sort of why was initially successful? I mean, was it just the two of them kind of going, hey, there's something here, or are they tapping into something? Oh, I think they were tapping into something that was playing out right in front of their eyes in a way that it wasn't playing out for national media outlets, for example, who sort of descended on San Francisco during the summer of love and wrote about Hey, Ashbury and the emergent counterculture hadn't yet been named the counterculture. But let's you know, hippie culture in San Francisco. Ralph was very attuned to, you know, the musical possibilities, but he also approved of this sort of spirit of of impertinence, if you will. And Yann saw it's its importance as well, but the national media outlets were mostly covering it very intensively, but mostly negatively and often disparagingly. So when Time Magazine looked at the counterculture, it was a very mixed review when Joan Didian wrote about, wrote about Hey, Ashbury for the Saturday evening post. It was quite negative. So most journalists, even though they covered the San Francisco counterculture, were not really in sync with its virtues, let's say, but Yann and Ralph very much thought very much that the counterculture and its music were important. And I think that was kind of part of their, part of their genius was that they understood that it wasn't just the music that they wanted to cover. You know, Rolling Sun was always more than a rock magazine. It was the whole culture around the music, which they thought had all kinds of, you know, redeeming features. So they weren't alone. Other people saw those things too. And in fact, there was a whole birchening, you know, underground press, both in the Bay Area and elsewhere. But this was a, this was a chance to do a kind of professional, professionally produced, nationally distributed magazine that focused on the counterculture and its music. And they were pretty sure at that time that the counterculture was kind of the animating spirit of a social revolution that was already in progress. It wasn't something to be poo-pooed. It wasn't a fad. It wasn't, you know, a symptom of some pathology. It wasn't a punchline. This was something that they thought was very important and would be even more important in the future. Got it. Okay. So that's a very clear sort of perspective. Is that what made it sort of more than a flash in the pan sort of magazine? What were the things that made the magazine viable to achieve those sorts of goals? Like it's a big deal sort of saying you're going to cover it in a very different way from other people and do it nationally. Like what was it that made the magazine kind of enough of an enduring success that it was sort of stable enough to go, okay, now what? Well, they did a couple of things right. I mean, they did know how to break big stories and that they got from Randparts magazine, I think. They were always set up to do stories that went beyond rock, rock music. And so that was an important part. even of their early success, but it becomes even more prominent in the first five years and ten years. The number one thing I think on the practical side was they always had advertisers. I think the music labels, most of them based in Los Angeles, understood that rolling stone magazine was reaching the exact people that they wanted to reach and some early polling showed that and surveys showed that the average rolling stone reader, mostly young, mostly male, often connected to the music business, was buying five or six albums a month and that's who these labels wanted to reach. So right out of the gate, they didn't have trouble attracting advertisers. And you know, political magazines left, right, and center always have trouble attracting advertising. That's a long story, but the point is that because they had, they could lock down an advertising base, it allowed them to do stories, they could leverage that to do other kinds of stories. I mean, they were always, you know, very early on established themselves as the best rock magazine. That wasn't such a big deal in 1968 or 1969. In 1975, it was. So I would say that the advertising part of it was very important. And one of the things I found in my research was all this correspondence between Jan winner and these studio, I mean, these studio executives really revealing, they really spoke the same language. They really understood how they could help each other. And that got rolling stone through some kind of scratchy times, early on when they had some cash crunches and so on. So the advertising was was was a big part of it. And the other thing was that they were looking for for big stories and they got them. And one of the early stories was they had this idea when John Lennon and Yoko Ono weren't allowed to put pictures of them nude on their album in the United States. They were able to land those photographs and run them in the magazine. One of them on the cover of the magazine. And that was, you know, just boosted news dance sales dramatically. And they were always sort of, they were very true to about that kind of thing. And then a little bit later, they realized that they could cover stories that the mainstream media either couldn't or wouldn't cover. And those, some of those stories led to their first national magazine awards. Jumping ahead a little bit to December of 1969. For example, the Altamot concert here in the San Francisco Bay Area, which was, of course, the last concert in the Rolling Stones, the US tour that year, and it led to violence, bloodshed, and one murder. Actually, it was, it was a due to KVL not to be self-defense. But the Meredith Hunter, a young black man for Berkeley, was killed. Vile hell's angels right in front of the stage, kind of famously. But for some reason, the mainstream media wasn't really attuned to that story. They missed the violence at Altamot, and Rolling Stone picked up on it, ran 11,000 word piece. And when they won their first national magazine award the following year, the awards committee kind of commended them for doing a story that had to do with the dark side of the counterculture. That is for telling the truth about the counterculture. So, one of the things in the book is I sort of track this relationship, that Rolling Stone magazine had with the counterculture. In some ways they were a creature of the counterculture. They wouldn't have succeeded as they did if it hadn't been for the size and power of the counterculture. And don't forget, half of the US population at that time was under 25 years old. And, you know, there was a kind of ripeness for the kind of approach that Rolling Stone was bringing. So, you know, between the demographics and the advertising and the kind of unique editorial formula, they would never be mistaken for an underground newspaper. They would never be mistaken for a team magazine. They would never be mistaken for a trade magazine. But they sort of included elements of all those in their editorial formula. Yeah, those are a lot of key elements there. But of course, there's also the kind of how it works internally to keep all of that up. So, as it's getting successful and growing, obviously it's no longer just two people, right? Like, how is it working internally to keep all of this going? Well, they staffed up pretty quickly. They made some good hires among their early editors. One of them was Charles Barry, who stayed with the magazine for the first 10 years, while it was in San Francisco. Another one was a fellow named John Birx, who helped get them into politics and current affairs more than they were. Another one was Ben Fontores, who eventually would take over, you know, most of the musical assignments, most of the musical coverage, which was a big part of the magazine. Not the only part, as we've said, but, you know, it was something that Yan Wanner could delegate to Ben Fontores successfully. And, you know, so, and they were going bigger in terms of, you know, developing features like the Rolling Stone interview, which was modeled on, you know, similar kinds of interviews that you could see in the New Yorker or Playboy or the Paris Review. So, they were setting their sights pretty high, and they wanted to be taken seriously by the mainstream. And so, they're hiring kind of reflected that. John Birx, the fellow who they hired to be the first managing editor, actually came from the San Francisco Office of Newsweek magazine. And his, he would later say that what he really wanted to do was de-trivialize the magazine. He didn't want it to be a rock magazine. He wanted it to be commenting on what was in the headlines at that time, because there was so much going on around, you know, around them, around everyone. I mean, you know, politically, the Vietnam War was raging. There was a huge anti-war movement, you know, four students were killed at Kent State University. So, these were the kinds of things that John Birx wanted to see in the magazine. And eventually, it led to a falling out with Yon who wanted to stick closer to the original formulation. But there's no doubt that they were strengthening their position and strengthening their ability to do stories not only about music, but about politics and current affairs as well. And then later about film and other features, but that comes a little bit later. They ran film reviews from the beginning from the very first issue. And the first issue too, I should point out that Ralph Gleason, who had a column for the first many years, the first column that he wrote was on racial double standards in the US media. So from the beginning, they were marking out some territory that would never be mistaken for, you know, what was being run in a typical rock magazine of that time or a teen magazine. Yeah, that's definitely different in terms of kind of what stories are being covered. There's also a style element in terms of how those stories are being covered too. Can we talk about Gonzo journalism and when and how that became such a big part of this? Yes. So Gonzo journalism is strongly associated, almost identified with Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson, for a short time, lived in San Francisco and he was friends with the people at Ramparts magazine, especially Warren Hinkle. And this is around, this is during the time that Ralph Gleason and John Wiener are in the Ramparts office. So John Wiener knew who Hunter Thompson was largely for the reporting that he did on the Hells Angels. So he did a story for the Mason magazine and then parlayed that into a bestselling book that John was very aware of. So, but Warren, I mean, rather Hunter Thompson was was actually publishing his first Gonzo piece was actually published in a magazine called Scanlan's, which was edited by Warren Hinkle, the former editor of Ramparts. But Scanlan's went out of business after only eight issues. So Hunter S. Thompson was sort of available and looking for another outlet that he could write for. So when he sees the rolling stone coverage of the Altamont debacle, especially at the hands of the Hells Angels, you know, he sees the journalist most strongly associated with the Hells Angels. He writes to John Wiener in January of 1970 and compliments him on the Altamont story. That leads to a correspondence over the course of the year trying to figure out what he can write for Rolling Stone magazine. And he writes a couple stories, but not in the the Gonzo style, the first couple of pieces that he does for Rolling Stone don't have those kinds of pyrotechnics, you know, the obvious kind of over-the-top sort of blend of, you know, invective and satire and hallucination and so on. That comes in November of 1971 when he publishes a piece called Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It's actually two articles that are published in late 1971 and that combination, those two articles and that style is returned to Gonzo, if you will, sort of takes the magazine to another level and Hunter Thompson becomes the number one writer at Rolling Stone shortly after November of 1971 and he never writes about music. That's the interesting thing. By this time, the number one writer at Rolling Stone is actually looking out over the political horizon writing, political commentary and the next thing that he does almost immediately after the success of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is he reports on the 1972 presidential campaign and then he takes those dispatches and turns those into a book as he did with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which those articles were also released as a book. The books become best sellers critically acclaimed. So all of a sudden this kind of upstart fledgling, you know, rock magazine from San Francisco which is not the center of the American publishing universe by any means, you know, this all of a sudden out of nowhere really, this magazine is suddenly, you know, established as a kind of political voice. That's really interesting to think about this sort of transformation and it becomes, it causes the magazine to become really important to politics, right? Like not just kind of, oh, we tried to get into the mainstream and now some people are paying attention to us but like quite central to politics in many ways, is that right? Yes. And the story of how they did that is really interesting because when they when they start following the 1972 presidential campaign and by day I mean a hunter as Thompson and his colleague, junior colleague Timothy Krauss. They can barely get press passes. No one's heard of them. No one cares what a rock magazine from San Francisco has to say. But Thompson figures out a way to use all of those liabilities and turn them into assets because in some ways he has more freedom than the press, you know, that are covering the story, the presidential campaign for, you know, the television networks or the the major magazines or the newspapers. They have to worry about their sources that, you know, Hunter Thompson doesn't. He's not he's not planning to return. He can tell the unvarnished truth as he understands it, which is exactly what he sets about to do. And that includes writing about, you know, basically kind of pulling the curtain back on the campaign and writing about all the stuff that the other reporters know to be true but can't smuggle into their stories, you know. And so there's a kind of act of media criticism at the same time that he's reporting on the campaign. And then Tim Krauss also does something like that. writes an article called The Boys on the Bus. It's about the reporters, mostly men, but not only in fact some of the women on the these on the campaign trail, we're doing some of the best work journalistically in 1972. But the but the upshot was that, you know, all of a sudden this, you know, people get a better picture of what's going on. I'm talking about the readers of Rolling Stone in particular are saying, okay, that makes sense. That's how it works when you cover the Nixon campaign or the Macaubern campaign. And it really changes the way American elections are presidential elections are covered after that. You know, we probably don't have time to go into how they were covered before that, but they were they were not very revealing. They were highly polished some of these stories from the campaign trail. I'm thinking of a man named Theodore White who basically created a kind of franchise of writing what amounted to kind of novels about each campaign season and the protagonist is the person who ends up winning, you know. And you know, that's okay, but but you never get the feeling that anything was really a miss in American politics. And in in 1968, there was a lot that was a miss. And in 1972, there was a lot that was a miss in presidential politics, which we saw almost immediately after the election, which Richard Nixon won in a landslide. But then he's shortly after that, his entire administration was consumed by the Watergate scandal, right, which did not surprise anybody that was reading 100 Thompson at that time. But it probably would have surprised everybody who was reading Theodore White. Yeah, that's a very big change indeed. Given then that the impact the magazine was having, was this the golden age? That's what young Wender would call it. You know, after this, you know, there was a there was the usual amount of kind of sifting and so on. But but what happens after the the departure of John Birx is is what Yon would call the golden age. And you know, the Gonzo, he, Yon was very quick to lash Gonzo journalism to his mastod. I mean, he really saw the upside of this kind of this kind of writing. And he he went about trying to get other people who were associated with what was then called new journalism. Thompson was one of those people when he was writing about Rolling Stone. Gonzo becomes the adjective after fear and loathing in Las Vegas. But he goes about, you know, he recruits people like Truman Capote or Tom Wolf. And he's working very hard to get major magazine feature writers into the magazine during this time. And he had a very strong kind of bench to the people who were the staff writers were also very strong. And in many ways it, I think, you know, they had they had strong editors. I've seen the memos that they were sending to each other where they were evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the of the articles that they were thinking about running. They were very insightful. And they also knew their audience very well. I mean, they, they're targeting was very, very strong. And they didn't rely on things like, you know, focus groups or surveys or anything like that. They kind of felt this in their bones, especially Yon. You know, Yon had a strong feeling for what would work with the with the Rolling Stone audience. So, you know, any, any, many hired good people. And they, you know, they struggled. They had some setbacks, especially with Hunter Thompson, whose lifestyle was kind of catching up with him. And they needed to give him a lot of editorial support, which they did. And, you know, the Gonzo franchise continued to roll through the 70s and long after that, really, but not so much at Rolling Stone after the move to New York City for reasons that had to do with some conflicts between Yon and Hunter Thompson. And also with Thompson's kind of inability to sometimes get the story that could, you know, the original story that could be edited into a Gonzo masterpiece. But really, maybe the peak period for their influence, especially their political influence was 1976. Thompson declined to follow the 1976 presidential campaign due to a kind of dispute with Yon Winner. But he did write about Jimmy Carter. And, you know, his, his endorsement, Thompson had claimed that he never actually endorsed Jimmy Carter. But it was presented as a kind of endorsement. Led to some real influence, really. And this is only four years after they could barely get press passes. In 1976, they throw the big party the night before Jimmy Carter receives the the nomination from the Democrat party to run for president, which he does successfully. So, you know, there's, they come a long way. You know, this is only nine years after they were, you know, invented with, with a budget of $7,500. And so, you know, it's an extraordinary rise. No doubt about it. And they did have some things that were still sort of keeping them back. But they were working on those as well. One of them was that they weren't really hiring any women. And for a long time, that, that was a kind of, that was a kind of, you know, not a black mark exactly, because not all the other, a lot of the other magazines weren't doing that either. But there was just a sense that they were a little late to the game there. And, but finally, they corrected that by hiring a woman named Mary Ann Partridge. She became a senior editor. She recruited a very strong writer named Ellen Willis, who had, had been writing about rock news. for the New York or magazine. And then they began developing their in-house talent, too. That's a very talented, smart, hardworking women on the staff who were given more responsibility. And that was happening during this time as well. So a lot of things were kind of falling into place. Yeah, which makes it in some ways kind of more surprising that they would take such a big decision of moving from California, which so much kind of was coming from, to New York, where there's rather a lot of competition. That seems like it could have been a decision that sort of disrupted all of this that was being built. But you talk in the book that they were still able to be part of the counterculture even from far away. So can you tell us about that transition? Yeah, well, I mean, one thing about the counterculture was that people kind of, it wasn't quite the urgent issue. It was in 1969 when the book came out that name, the counterculture appeared, called the Making of a Counterculture by a social critic named Theorara Rosa. In 1969, that was something you needed to know, right? In 1976 or '77 when the magazine moved to New York City, a lot of people were talking about the death of the counterculture that it wasn't surviving, that the conclusion of the Vietnam War sort of took some energy out of that movement, which was always a very agitated movement. It wasn't a single coherent movement with a strong, single message. It was always sort of, I mean, a Rosa compared it to a medieval crusade, you know, people kind of joining and falling off and, you know, parts falling off and combining with other social formations, if you will. That happened, for example, in Silicon Valley when, you know, these people who were hippies basically started Apple Computer, for example. And they were very important in other Silicon Valley firms as well. But for the most part, the counterculture was not the powerhouse, the thing that people needed to know. And rock music was also well-established and quite welcome in various established parts of the culture, especially the entertainment industry, right? So rock was not kind of the success to Skondal that it had been in 1967. So that the magazine needed to think about different ways to kind of pivot and tweak its editorial formula. And the counterculture part is slightly downplayed. They stopped talking about, you know, the social revolution. Partly because politically, the country was moving into the age of Reagan. I mean, this is only a few years before Reagan is elected president. So the political prophecy didn't really work out. I mean, socially, there were many, many aspects of the counterculture be continued to be very important in shaped American culture, in American society. But it was kind of the quiet river that ran through the second half of the 20th century the counterculture was. So, I mean, the move to New York, you're right, it really did sort of, it might be seen to have been threatened by this move. But it was the center of publishing by that time. Obviously, New York was. I mean, the San Francisco energy had begun to subside a little bit. It wasn't in 1977. It wasn't sort of the global rock capital that it was in 1967 when the magazine started. So, but mostly I think, Yon and his wife, Jane, just wanted to be in New York. And there were good business reasons to be in New York. But none of the reasons offered had anything to do with the counterculture. They didn't make sense in terms of countercultural values. They made a lot of sense in terms of corporate values. But so there was definitely a little bit of a change. And the move represented that change. There was a pivot. They needed to do some things differently. At one point, I think they initiated a new design. And Yon wrote in the magazine. I mean, no, I guess it was in his memoir. He said, we needed to get the last bits of betuelly out of the magazine's look. Betuelly, of course, being strongly associated with kind of hippie culture. So, you know, they knew that they were sort of leaving some things behind when they laughed for San Francisco. No doubt about that. And that transition also makes sort of a useful point for you to include your analysis of the magazine. Is that right? Yeah. For me, the interesting part was the first decade. I mean, some of the changes that would become more clear once they got to New York were already underway, even when they were here in San Francisco. And one of the things I talk about in the book is the arrival of people magazine and the power of celebrity journalism that it demonstrated. I mean, people magazine, the circulation and the advertising just skyrocketed immediately when it was launched in 1974. That was at lost on Yon. Yon likes celebrity journalism. You know, a lot of people at Rolling Sun at that time didn't like it so much. You know, they still had some misgivings about that kind of journalism. But there was no denying, you know, the power of that trend. And you begin to see more celebrity stuff in Rolling Stone during that time. For example, it covered film in a much bigger way in the 1970s. And for good reason, I mean, the so-called New Hollywood was going, you know, strong at that time. You were getting films from people like, you know, Francis Ford Coppola and Stephen Spielberg and Martin Scrocezi and Robert Altman and, you know, all the way down the line. And, you know, film was hot. It came a little bit later. The changes to film, the new generation, let's say, came a little bit later than they did to music. Maybe there was a kind of five-year lag. And television was also showing some of those changes. And that was embraced by Rolling Stone magazine. You know, once they moved to New York and even a little bit before, they loved this new television show, "Saturday Night Live," which was launched during this time. So, you know, Yann saw the connections between what was happening across these media platforms. And he pursued them, you know? And then that built a broader, stronger magazine. The magazine, once it moved to New York, continued to win awards, it continued to make money. But the link with the counter-culture was definitely weakened. Yeah, it's interesting to see that transformation. Given then how much was happening in this period that you investigate, was there anything you found especially surprising, piecing all of it together? A couple things. I mean, there was this one letter that I found by Ellen Willis. Ralph Gleason had written to, in an effort to get her contribute to the magazine. And it was in 1970, early 1970. And I didn't see Ralph's communication to her, but I saw her reply. You know, basically she said, there's no doubt that Rolling Stone is the best rock magazine. But I don't think I'm going to write for it because I don't like the way you depict women. You're always calling them chicks. There was a story in which, you know, it was a complimentary story, but they ran a story on Tina Turner, for example, that called her an incredible chick. And that really irked Ellen Willis. And also she didn't like the fact that Rolling Stone hadn't really hired any women. And she said, I don't want to be the token woman at this at your magazine. That change, of course, as I said earlier, when Mary Ann Partridge was hired as a senior editor and recruited Ellen Willis, who then wrote a couple dozen articles over the next three years or so. But the letter is just so on point and it's so, you know, elucid. And she's right in everything that she's saying about the magazine in it and it's hiring. And also it's politics. She didn't really believe in this whole social revolution. She wanted to see a women's movement. And she said, you know, I've benefited more from the women's movement in two years than I will in 10 years of your so-called social revolution. So that letter was just a jewel. You know, every time you find something like that, it's stunning. It's also a little time capsule. It's from 1970 and really gives you a feeling for what's going on, at least among a shrewd observer, you know, like Ellen Willis. So that was one thing. The other thing that almost never gets talked about in books about "Rong Some Magazine" and its history is its coverage of gay culture, you know, especially in San Francisco and New York. And also in the music industry. Some of that is music-oriented, but a lot of it had to do with our own, the bath houses and other things that were happening in gay culture at the time. And they're very hard hitting, you know. These are not topics that are pursued delicately. And so I was surprised by that and also by the fact that it has never really been given much attention in previous histories of the magazine. So I think those are the two things that stick out the most for me. Yeah, no, that's very interesting. Thank you for telling us about both of those aspects. In fact, what do you most hope then that readers take away from all of this? Well, one thing I'm worried about, I talk about this in the book a little bit, is that due to some publicity that surrounded the release of one of John Wenners' books called The Masters, I think it came out in 2023. That's when I was in the warehouse kind of going through all these documents. John had set that up, very thankful for him, to him, for doing that. But he had a really rough interview with the New York Times. And I saw that he just got skewered in the media. And deservedly so, I think most people would say. But my concern was that John and his remarks and the magazine would all be sort of swept into the same trash can. We have a media culture now that tends to make very strong judgments very quickly without going back and kind of looking at the, you know, with a fresh eye at the material. There was really no time to go back and look and see, gosh, did Rolling Stone cover female artists and black artists intelligently and thoughtfully and respectfully during this time. And of course, I interviewed a lot of people who wrote for the magazine during this time. I really kind of felt like they're a achievement, they're collective achievement with John at the head was kind of, you know, it's just one of those things where people just think, oh, well, that's just another thing I don't have to read about that, you know, because the people don't have the right, haven't said the right things about the artists that I care about. And that was one concern. The other is really that I don't think the counter culture has a whole, everyone's aware of what it is or people of my generation are for sure. But over the years, it's turned into kind of, it's become a kind of very two dimensional kind of stereotype, frankly, and people haven't really thought about what the counter culture was, what it was dealing with. And in this sense, you know, Rolling Stone had to overcome a lot of media complacency and stereotypes about the counter culture. So they were a real breath of fresh air when they came on the scene. And to really understand that, you have to understand what the counter culture was. And so I spent a little bit of time going into that and talking about its importance and talking about the centrality of it to the magazines editorial formula. And without that understanding and that, you know, are sort of familiarity with the counter culture kind of dims with each passing year, you really can't understand what the magazine was trying to do. And if you don't understand what it was trying to do, you can't really gauge its success. Well, there's certainly a lot there to think about, especially as the magazine continues. So what might you be working on then going forward? Anything related to this or not? Anything you want to give us a sneak preview off? Well, I'm still, I'm looking at a few things. The only one that's really related to this is more on this fellow theater, Rosak, who I mentioned at the top of the program. He's the person who named the counter culture or at least popularized that term. And he's such a shrewd observer. And you know, toward the end of the book, I talk a little bit about the counter culture and its, you know, afterlife in Silicon Valley. And Rosak was also a very shrewd observer of Silicon Valley culture. In 1984, I think it is. He writes a book that says, you know, keep an eye on these guys. You know, now they seem like, you know, friendly hippies, you know, in the future they might, he didn't see any way that the, that big tech was not going to be put to service in the national security state, you know, ever more intensive surveillance and control, which is another aspect of his prophecy, I think. Now Rolling Stone had been great at, they ran an article in December of 1972 predicting the arrival of the personal computer and robotics and the internet and artificial intelligence and, you know, natural language processing and on and on. That was an article written by a guy named Stuart Brand, which turned out to be incredibly prophetic, you know, considering that it would be another five years before Apple would be formed and they would, they would put their first personal computer out on the market. So, you know, Rolling Stone has a role to play in all this, but there's something about Rosak too that I, that I'm attracted to. So I feature him in the book as well. And I think, I just think he had a lot of shrewd insights about the counterculture and then also about Silicon Valley, which really kind of replaces the counterculture in the San Francisco Bay area in terms of its kind of global identity. You know, we used to be famous for being, you know, Bohemian outpost and, you know, a global rock capital, a game, Meka, and so on. And then some, you know, somewhere along the line in there, I think people around the globe begin to think, actually what that place really is is a tech capital. And that's, that's kind of been our identity now for at least a generation. But there's a whole story there about how those two cultures are related. And I'd like to get at that a little bit too. Well, that certainly sounds interesting and relevant. So best of luck with that investigation. And of course, while you're doing it, listeners can read the book we've been discussing, titled "Brand New Beeps, The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone" magazine, published by the University of California Press in 2026. Thank you so much for having me Miranda. [Music]