Widely considered a San Francisco rag, Rolling Stone’s roots are, in fact, in Berkeley and the Cal campus.
The magazine got its name from Berkeley resident and San Francisco Chronicle jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason. One day in 1967, Gleason was visited by a young Cal dropout named Jann Wenner who envisioned a publication that took rock music seriously and stirred radical politics into the mix. Gleason, then working on an essay about rock ‘n’ roll called “Like a Rolling Stone,” dug the idea and suggested a title. The two cofounded Rolling Stone magazine that same year.
Wenner, who would go on to publish Us Weekly, Outside, and Men’s Journal, was a go-getter from the get-go. At Cal, he wrote for the Daily Californian and also covered the Free Speech Movement as a campus stringer for NBC. He was onstage at the Greek, tape recorder slung over his shoulder, when Mario Savio was frog-marched off by the cops.
The magazine pulled from a network of Cal writers. Early staffers included Charles Perry ’64, Jon Carroll, and Greil Marcus ’67, M.A. ’68. But it was the Berkeley spirit that made the magazine what it was. For an article in this magazine, Marcus told Peter Richardson, Ph.D. ’91, (who has a new book on the subject from UC Press called Brand New Beat) that Rolling Stone wouldn’t exist without Berkeley’s influence. “Everything that I had learned at Berkeley, that I had learned to care about, there was room for that at Rolling Stone.”
