West Coast Beat: The SF Roots of Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone was at the vanguard of West Coast counterculture, launching journalists’ careers and setting new music writing standards
About this Event

$15 (includes museum admission)

Sponsored by Reed Schmidt

Co-presented with Counterculture Museum

Today’s shiny exteriors and inscrutable billboards can’t entirely obliterate San Francisco’s defining role in literature, activism, visual arts, and, yes, music. That storied history includes the 1967 founding of Rolling Stone. As both Peter Richardson and Charles Ponce de Leon relate in recent books, for a decade (before decamping for NYC), the magazine was at the vanguard of West Coast counterculture, launching dozens of journalists’ careers and setting new standards for writing about music and culture. Where better, then, to reunite folks with first-hand knowledge of those SF roots, including Ben Fong-Torres and Marianne Partridge, than at the new Counterculture Museum? Music journalist James Sullivan will take us back in time, as together we compile a scrapbook of the music, writing, and memories that defined the magazine—and the moment. Doors at 6:30pm.