Brand New Beat: The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine

How Bay Area Culture Shaped Rolling Stone

Come celebrate the publication of Brand New Beat, an incisive look at the origins and evolution of Rolling Stone magazine during its formative, early years in San Francisco. Founded in1967 by a 21-year old UC Berkeley college dropout, Rolling Stone and its editors were steeped in the Bay Area counterculture and viewed rock and roll as the animating spirit of a social revolution. Reaching beyond music, the magazine also delved into the swirling culture and politics of the time and helped shape a new form of journalism that's been with us ever since.

Please join acclaimed Bay Area author Peter Richardson and author, scholar, and musician David Gans as they discuss the magazine's San Francisco origins and the community it helped build through independent journalism during a period of legendary events, major cultural figures, and unforgettable music. Learn how Rolling Stone became a journalist's juggernaut—nurturing music-focused writers like Cameron Crowe, Lester Bangs, and Greil Marcus as well as new journalism giants Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe—as it developed into both a critical part of the counterculture and a critic of it. Richardson and Gans will also discuss the departure of the legendary magazine and what it meant to the publication and its legacy in the Bay Area.

Peter Richardson is the author of Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo as well as critically acclaimed books about the Grateful Dead, Ramparts magazine, and radical author and editor Carey McWilliams. His essays appear in The Nation, The New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere.

David Gans is an author, scholar, musician, and radio producer. He has published several books on the Grateful Dead. He is the producer and host of the nationally syndicated Grateful Dead Hour, is cohost of SiriusXM's Tales from the Golden Road, and is a working musician who has incorporated Grateful Dead songs and improvisation into his own work.