Can you just set up what created the hippie movement that came out of the Beats? What made San Francisco so special at that time?

Yeah, that's a great question.

Very important.

So, you know, in the post-war period, after the Second World War, um, the San Francisco Bay Area was, was really transformed, um, largely by the war.

You know, the economy changed, the population changed.

Um, there were a ton of young people, of course, that was a national phenomenon, the baby boom.

Uh, I think in 1965, something like 50% of the pop- US population was under the age of 25.

Mm-hmm

And sometimes people don't know about Ralph.

Ralph's a really important part of the story.

Indispensable, really, when you look at the early history of Rolling Stone magazine.

So Ralph came out of New York, went to Columbia for college, started writing about jazz in the 1930s, moved out to the San Francisco Bay Area after the war.

He served in the army during the Second World War.

and was still writing about jazz and becoming more and more of a high profile jazz writer.

Co-founded the Monterey Jazz Festival.

You know,

So how do you balance lack of regard for yourself when there's not, in many respects, a need to be fully responsible for your own behavior? Because this plays out in the AFL all the time.

I think there's a whole lot going on there, and I, I've always worried about, um, professional sport, uh, because you've got a whole lot of young men with a lot of time on their hands and a lot of money.

Um, so I think that's part of what's gone on there.

And I've got to say- Not that I know these, these men, and they're not that young.

Most of those players were well into their 20s, uh, so they're not boys.

Um, and what I would say about that situation is I don't know enough about what happened in that hotel room, but they were taking drugs, and drugs take away the inhibitions.

So what they did, um, was almost certainly drug-fueled.

... men's advocate.

Why would Ralph Gleason spend any time with Jan Wanner?

That's a good question.

You know, Ralph was Jan's idol.

Jan was studying at University of California, Berkeley.

He had a column in the campus newspaper that was modeled very much along the lines of Ralph's column because Ralph was his idol.

And the two met, and it became clear that...

Jan held Ralph in high esteem.

Do you think that was intentional on his part, or was it a slippage that he was maybe surprised to learn about it?

Is it fair to say that we have a society that is all about legal systems and, uh, statutory arrangements from, through government, but we don't have lawfulness in the country?

Definitely.

I, I don't like to use the term the justice system, because I don't think there's a lot of justice in our legal system.

Um, going back to what you said about prisons, something that, uh, that I was told.

I was doing a job, uh, in my work, uh, where I was going into a, a particular prison and, um, so I'd have to go all through to the screen.

I had to take a vehicle in, et cetera.

And then on the way out, um, one of the, the blokes, one of the guards that had to check over my vehicle, et cetera, he told me, um, how it worked in the prison system, why there was so much access to drugs, et cetera.

Is that correct?

How did the left and the counterculture see each other?

I think there was a lot of overlap and points of contact.

Um, I think though, for my purposes, I always like to keep the San Francisco counterculture a little bit detached from what's going on with the campus activism and, um, Black Panthers, for example.

Partly because the-- a lot of people, not all of-- not everyone in the counterculture thought this, but a lot of people were like: "Listen, we don't wanna change the world." We're-- Their politics were kind of bohemian politics.

They were the politics of, you know, freedom.

They, they, they wanted, um, you know, political freedom, they wanted artistic freedom, they wanted sexual freedom.

But a lot of them didn't register to vote.

How did Rolling Stone magazine come to terms with those fractures within the counterculture, and how did they write about them?