179 - Dr. Peter Richardson, Brand New Beat: The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine

Historian Peter Richardson joins Jordan Mattox to discuss his new book, Brand New Beat: The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine, and to situate the magazine within the broader cultural and political history of the San Francisco Bay Area. Dr. Richardson — whose previous work includes a biography of Carey McWilliams and studies of Ramparts Magazine and the Grateful Dead — argues that Rolling Stone's founding in November 1967 cannot be understood apart from the counterculture it both chronicled and drew its sustenance from, nor apart from the failures of a mainstream media that created the opening for it in the first place.

The conversation traces Richardson's own intellectual trajectory from medieval English literature to California cultural history; revisits McWilliams's argument that California is less a "great exception" than a national avatar; takes up Hunter S. Thompson's ambivalent relationship to the Haight-Ashbury counterculture; and considers Kevin Starr's conspicuous reluctance to address the 1960s in his otherwise comprehensive survey of the state. The episode closes with Richardson's reflections on Theodore Roszak, on whether the conditions for a new counterculture now exist in the shadow of Silicon Valley, and with a set of book and film recommendations for listeners wishing to pursue these threads further.