I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Pang.

In 1966, Jan Wiener, suburban Jewish son of a businessman, dropped out of Berkeley.

Neither a rebel nor a flower child, he was drawn to rock, the music of generational grievance.

Wiener would become the baby boomers go to analyst of that music, and the culture that produced

it. He just needed his mouthpiece. A year after leaving college from a small apartment on

San Francisco's Petrero Hill, Wiener decided to found a magazine.

I borrowed money from my mother-in-law, my stepmother, and scraped together $7,500.

We just got some free office space in the printer in San Francisco and had no expenses,

no salaries, nothing, just kind of hand him out for a while.

And you published how? We had enough money to pay the printer's bill.

And since it was printed on 24 pages, a really cheap newsprint, the bill was relatively low.

So you have something that resembles what now? What did Rolling Stone then look like?

It looked like a devils voice now.

A cowboy's size, you know, like a village voice size with paper, and with a front page rather than a cover,

which was a later kind of thing that we put on.

And it was 24 pages, and we set up in the corner 25 cents, our price cheap, which I took from Mad Magazine.

Right, right, right.

How does it start to build? What do you attribute that to?

Well, I think that it started to build because of the editorial excellence, because in 1967,

the leading edge of the baby boom was just turning 21, 22.

The beetles were still in their mop-pop face. Dillum was doing a highway 61.

So Rockamall wasn't covered in the newspapers or television or the movie.

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