A paper for a new audience
The first issue of Rolling Stone is dated 9 November 1967. It was produced in San Francisco by Jann Wenner, then in his early twenties and a former student at the University of California, Berkeley, with the older and better-established music critic Ralph J. Gleason, who wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle and had a background in jazz criticism. Wenner supplied energy and ambition, while Gleason gave the venture credibility, and his name helped attract writers and advertisers.
The timing reflected a gap. Rock and pop were growing quickly as an art form and an industry, but the established press tended to treat them as teenage novelties. Fan magazines focused on celebrity gossip, while trade papers addressed the record business. Wenner and Gleason saw an opening for a publication that took the music seriously, wrote for an audience that was already listening to albums rather than only singles, and covered the surrounding culture.
Money, name and format
Wenner started the magazine with a small amount of capital, reportedly raised from family members and other relatives and friends, along with credit from the printer. The office was a modest space in San Francisco. It was an uncertain business, and for a time it was not obvious that it would survive.
The name is generally linked to the saying about a rolling stone gathering no moss, and to the songs and groups that used the phrase. Accounts of the name usually mention Muddy Waters’ blues song, the band the Rolling Stones, and Dylan’s recording “Like a Rolling Stone” as associations, and the title signalled a link with the blues, rock and the folk-rock revolution without being tied to any one of them.
The paper was printed on newsprint in a folded tabloid newspaper style rather than as a glossy magazine, which kept costs down. In its early years it was closer in feel to the underground press than to mainstream magazines, although it was more organised and commercial than most of that movement.
The first cover
The cover of the first issue showed John Lennon, in a still from Richard Lester’s film How I Won the War, in which he played a supporting part. Using a film still of a Beatle in costume was an odd choice for a music paper, but the picture was arresting, and it connected the paper with the most famous band in the world at a time when they had just released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Inside, the first issue offered a mix of news and reviews. Coverage was reported to include the aftermath of the Monterey Pop Festival, stories about musicians and the business, and record reviews. Beyond that, what is clear is that the paper combined news about bands with commentary and opinion, and that it gave attention to San Francisco’s scene as well as to London and Los Angeles.
What it set out to do
In his opening statement to readers, Wenner said, in substance, that the paper was about more than music, taking in the attitudes and ideas that the music carried with it. That captures the basic aim: to treat rock music as a serious part of a wider culture, including politics, drugs, fashion and ideas.
The editors did not pretend to be neutral. The paper took positions, favoured some artists, and criticised others, and it aimed to speak as part of the community it covered. It sat awkwardly between two worlds. On the one hand, it relied on the record companies for advertising and access. On the other, it wanted to scrutinise the industry and to speak for the audience. That tension shaped the magazine throughout its early life.
Context in 1967
The launch came at the end of a year in which San Francisco had been at the centre of attention. The Haight-Ashbury district had drawn crowds of young people during the Summer of Love, and large parts of the American press had covered the hippie phenomenon with a mix of curiosity and alarm. By the autumn, many of the original participants regarded the scene as spoiled by the publicity. Rolling Stone arrived as a way of continuing the conversation among people who cared about the music, on their own terms.
The growth of FM radio, which played album tracks and long songs, helped to create the audience for such a paper. So did the changing ambitions of the Beatles and Dylan, who treated records as artistic statements. The magazine would later also feature the New Journalism writers, who found in it a home for long, personal reporting.
Afterward
Rolling Stone survived its fragile beginning and grew into a major publication, with a national readership, a reputation for lengthy features and political reporting, and a widely recognised logo. In 1977 it moved its headquarters from San Francisco to New York, a shift that critics saw as marking its move from the counterculture towards the mainstream. Opinions about the later magazine vary, and it has been both praised for its best journalism and criticised for its commercial turn and its place in the music business. What can be said with confidence is that the first issue, dated 9 November 1967, marked the start of a long-running attempt to cover rock as a subject worth serious attention.