Summer of Love in San Francisco: How Hippies, LSD, and Rolling Stone Transformed America

How did one foggy city end up with the Beats, the hippies, the biggest gay community and the loudest rock scene of the 60s and 70s? Follow the trail back to the Gold Rush, where the lights came on all at once and nobody ever turned them off.

Peter Richardson, author of Brand New Beat: A New History of Rolling Stone’s Early Years in San Francisco, takes us back to the city where it all caught fire. Think the Beats, LSD (legal until October 1966), the Human Be-In, the Summer of Love, and a few hundred hippies who just wanted to dance and accidentally rewired American culture.

Then came Rolling Stone. Jann Wenner was a 21-year-old college dropout with big ambition and bigger moxie. Ralph Gleason was the grown-up in the room, a Chronicle jazz critic who ended up on Nixon’s enemies list. Together they bet the farm that rock and the counterculture were no fad, and they were right. The mainstream press called hippies candidates for “a very sound spanking.” Rolling Stone called them readers.

We dig into how a scrappy magazine in a town that was never a media capital landed Hunter S. Thompson, Annie Leibovitz, Greil Marcus, and broke national stories like Altamont and Karen Silkwood.

We also get into how Jann sweet-talked record labels into buying ads and then ran the bad reviews anyway. Plus the Reagan and Nixon years, the dark turn of the 70s, and Rolling Stone's move to New York, where, Peter says, the real reason was that the parties were better.

Peter is a Berkeley-trained scholar who taught California culture at San Francisco State for 17 years. He also wrote Savage Journey and No Simple Highway. He explains exactly how a city, a drug, a soundtrack, and a masthead made history.

Links referenced in this episode:

sexyboomershow.comBrand New Beat- The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine