Riding along on Peter Richardson's Brand New Beat: The Wild Ride of Rolling Stone Magazine

Read the new book by Peter Richardson, "Brand New Beat: The Wild Ride of Rolling Stone Magazine." It's published by the University of California Press. Early reviews say the book does a credible job tracing the influence of Rolling Stone with its "new journalism" or, as Hunter S. Thompson fans and critics called it, "gonzo journalism." Thompson influenced many of us but in different ways. He was criticized for his unorthodox style of reporting the 1972 U.S. presidential campaign. The establishment press had its way of covering campaigns and Thompson had his own glorious approach.

Others viewed it differently. Said novelist Nelson Algren in a 1979 review of "The Great Shark Hunt" in the Chicago Tribune: "Now that the dust of the '60s has settled, his [Thompson's] hallucinated vision strikes one as having been. after all, the sanest." 

The book's original 1973 cover has
a secret to reveal.

Thompson and Algren are both long gone. Both of these rowdy writers documented brutal eras: Thompson the 1960s and '70s; Algren the Great Depression through the 1970s. We may never see their like again. We need them now. Wouldn't it be thrilling to see Dr. Gonzo clash with Trump's oily apparatchiks?

Thompson's writing in RS influenced my writing but not my lifestyle. Both would have considered me a square. That said, I read everything Hunter S. Thompson wrote. I read every feature in Rolling Stone of the '70s and it shaped my attitude and my writing.  Once I unlocked the secret of reading at five, I absorbed everything: cereal boxes, billboards, all the books the librarians let me check out. The three important books in my life: "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller,  "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey, and "Slaughterhouse-Five," by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I was so wild about "Catch-22" that I forced it upon my Catholic high school friends and we were as impressed it as they were surfing and girls. It was funny. It had something to tell us. Heller was a messenger and, in 1968, we really had to listen. One of the book's suggested titles was "Snowden's Secret." Heller teases the secret throughout the book; its revelation toward the end is almost too much for Yossarian to bear. 

Every book I read told a secret. I loved the act of reading but was blissfully unaware that I also was unlocking life's secrets. 

Richardson spills plenty of Rolling Stone's secrets along the way. The magazine's biggest secret is that is existed at all. It spilled the secrets of my generation, the good (music coverage), the bad (Manson), the ugly (Altamont). It was fun. It was cool to be in the circle of readers. It shaped me into a different person than the one expected by me as a young man and those around me. 

The last five years of the 1970s were, according to the author, the magazine's golden era. The '70s were a golden era for many of us Boomers, locked into our 20s and early 30s. The mag helped us through those years, helped us get a handle on being young in America. Mischief was afoot. Cults were big. Rock grew into a giant industry. Right-wingers plotted their takeover of America which fizzled with Nixon but they wouldn't let that happen under Reagan and the cons who followed. Jann Wenner moved the Stone to New York where da big money was an it gradually grew into something much larger but also smaller. I read it only occasionally now. I like the political coverage and introduction to new music styles and new bands. 

The thing I love about Rolling Stone is that it taught me to write. It was a writer's workshop if you were paying attention. Hunter Thompson and Joe Eszterhas. I also was learning how to write like a traditional journalist while learning about "new journalism." I was too much of a straight arrow to be gonzo but the techniques are in me and enter into my fiction. Woodward and Bernstein caused a rise in J-School students while Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Tim O'Brien, Joni Mitchell, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Harry Crews, and Toni Morrison taught us to by-God write like we meant every damn word. This is a short list of my writing heroes/heroines, one befitting a blogger who keeps on truckin'.

Celebrate Free Speech Week by taking illegal Wyoming photos

WyoFile is celebrating Free Speech Week by staging an intriguing photo contest for potential lawbreakers. Let's let the WyoFile folks tell the story -- they're great at that:

Did you get a great picture of a bison in front of the mountains this summer?

What about wildflowers? Do you have some landscapes or sunsets from your trips on public land?

Did you ask the Forest Service, BLM or Park Service for permission to take your photograph first? Believe it or not, Wyoming’s new data trespass laws say if you collect such “resource data” from “open land” without permission, and it could be submitted to someone who works for the government, you’re a lawbreaker. 

WyoFile is an official partner of Free Speech Week.
In celebration of Free Speech Week, WyoFile is asking citizen photographers to submit their once-innocent, now-potentially illegal pictures to WyoFile. Join us in showing Wyoming some examples of photography that, despite the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, Wyoming says is illegal now.

There are some rules. Check them out here and let the shutterbuggin' begin.

Tale of a Wasted Youth, Part One

News comes from afar (OK, I read it on my laptop) about the demise of the Boston Phoenix. The late great alt-weekly was not alt enough for the 2010s. Its wise-ass editorial attitude was no match for multitudes of snarkmeisters on the blogosphere. Its advertising dollars migrated to Craigslist and a whole roster of Boston area web sites.

As is the case with most alternative newspapers, the Phoenix rose out of the sixties counterculture in 1966. Its rock-and-roll soul made it a must-read for a 21-year-old college dropout like me who was trying my luck in the big city. On my way home from my night-shift hospital job, I would drop a quarter in some longhair's palm to claim my weekly copy. It was fat with articles and music listing and bar ads and personals.I would take it back to my shabby walk-up on the cheap side of Beacon Hill (there was such a thing in 1972) and devour it while sipping a pre-Starbucks coffee and scarfing down a few doughnuts. Articles covered local politics, the antiwar movement, music, drugs, food and a 1,001 other topics.

 I'd read a variety of alternative papers during my cross-country travels: Atlanta's Great Speckled Bird, the Village Voice, the Berkeley Barb, and others whose names I can't remember. They were a refreshing change to the stodgy daily papers with their reliance on the 5 Ws and deference to all sides of an issue. Phoenix writers took a stand on the left (or at least the iconclastic) side of most issues which was just fine with me. After a lifetime of Catholic school and two years of college ROTC, I was fairly new to the counterculture. I wanted to roll around in it. I was openly living in sin with a wild Protestant girl namd Sharon, growing my hair long, smoking pot whenever I felt like it and reading alternative weeklies from cover to cover. I was hauling around bedpans at night at a local hospital, but a guy had to make a living. As soon as Sharon and I saved up enough, we were hitting the road again. At least that was the plan.

I lived in Boston from August through March. I read every issue of the Phoenix and its cousin, the Real Paper. I briefly flirted with the idea of becoming a nurse. My boss thought I was pretty good at hauling bedpans and wondered if I'd like to pursue a higher calling of administering enemas and starting IVs. She said the hospital would pay for it.

Unfortunately, the Phoenix was ruining me. I'd always wanted to be a writer but didn't know how to start. First the nuns and then the U.S. Navy said I should major in something practical, something in the sciences. Medicine, for instance. Or marine biology. But after a steady diet of wise-assery courtesy of the Phoenix and then Rolling Stone, I started writing in a journal. I made pithy observations. I recorded snatches of conversation overhead in local bars. I began to chronicle the break-up of my relationship with a wild Protestant girl who wondered why I was spending so much time scribbling in journals. She finally packed up and went back to school at UConn, leaving no forwarding address. I packed up my journals and Phoenix copies and headed back to Florida. It took me awhile to actually publish something. I then started writing feature stories for the Independent Florida Alligator in Gainesville. I free-lanced for some regional and national mags. I graduated and went on to write sports for both Denver dailies and then manage a weekly alternative newspaper called Up the Creek that got its start as an advertising sheet from suburban softball leagues and saloon-sponsored wet T-shirt contests. I wrote a wise-ass column and features about street gangs and local politics and religious cults and sports. I had a small staff of good writers, although they didn't stay around long. It wasn't the Phoenix but, hey, you take what you can get.

I publish short stories and essays in literary magazines. I've written more than my share of press releases and business articles. I've been prog-blogging since 2005. I can't say I have hordes of devoted readers. But I write what I want. I believe it was A.J. Liebling who said this: "The free press belongs to those who own one."  I don't own Blogger but I do lay claim to my little part of the blogosphere. I provide an alternative voice within the Wyoverse. I could fold at any time. But it won't be due to stodginess or lack of advertising. One day, I may just decide to fold up my tent and go home.

Thanks for the memories, Boston Phoenix. I haven't read you regularly in 40 years. But just knowing that you no longer exist makes a hole in the creative universe.