In the documentary Like a Rolling Stone: The Life and Times of Ben Fong-Torres, Fong-Torres recounts the feeling of flipping through the jukebox at his father’s restaurant stating, “Inside jukeboxes, there was no segregation…Rock and Roll was an equalizer.” Music gave voice to the disenfranchised as a form of protest. These principles of rock and roll shaped Fong-Torres’s writing sensibilities, making him a rockstar journalist within the music industry.

The influx of rock music and counterculture in the 1960s signaled a new era for music journalism, and Rolling Stone became the venue for documenting this revolution. As counterculture evolved in San Francisco, as well as the rest of the country, Rolling Stone, founded in the Bay Area, became an influential outlet for discovering music that embodied the changing zeitgeist.