Welcome to Face Time, a series of one-on-one conversations with notable San Franciscans. First up, journalist, DJ, and author Ben Fong-Torres.
About an hour into my conversation with Ben Fong-Torres on a recent Friday at Starbelly in the Castro, we’re interrupted.
“Are you Ben Fong-Torres?” a stranger asks.
“Yeah…,” Fong-Torres says. His eyebrows wiggle as he tries to recall the man’s name.
“It’s Brian Freeman! You interviewed me here just about 30 years ago,” the stranger says, pointing at our table.
“What was our interview about? You, I guess. Had to be!” Ben replies with a joking shrug.
Let it be known: Ben Fong-Torres has forgotten more interviews than most writers have conducted.
In this case, the mystery subject is Brian Freeman, a San Francisco artist and playwright who co-founded the radical queer theater troupe Pomo Afro Homos. They take a minute to reminisce about Josie’s, the cabaret and comedy club that once stood where Starbelly is today. “It was much funkier. No decent food,” Freeman muses, and Fong-Torres nods.
Everything in San Francisco eventually disappears. Everything except Fong-Torres.
Now 80, Fong-Torres is a Bay Area lifer. He grew up in the kitchen of his immigrant parents’ Chinese restaurant in Oakland, attended San Francisco State University during the turbulent 1960s, molded Rolling Stone from its earliest days in an office borrowed from its printer in SoMa, and interviewed everyone from Sly Stone to the Grateful Dead. He was even depicted in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, his ‘70s look and voice perfectly captured by actor Terry Chen.
That voice, honed during hours as a local DJ for KSAN and other venues, is as warm and resonant as ever, his crisp enunciation easily volleying my sometimes rambling questions with witty retorts and decades-old anecdotes that feel fresh in the telling.
Many of his best stories are recounted in the 2022 documentary, Like a Rolling Stone: The Life & Times of Ben Fong-Torres (directed by a friend, Suzanne Joe Kai). I wanted to know if he ever thought he’d become famous as a journalist at Rolling Stone.
“No, not at all. And who knows what was in the minds of the early editors who signed on? Especially those who came over from the establishment press. Joe Eszterhas from the Cleveland Press. David Felton from the LA Times. Hunter Thompson from… wherever Hunter came from,” Fong-Torres said. “Maybe they thought, ‘Well, let’s ride this little rocket ship that this young, crazy man named Jann Wenner started.’”
Wenner, the magazine’s mercurial co-founder (along with the San Francisco Chronicle’s Ralph J. Gleason) transformed pop culture coverage at a time when mainstream outlets found little value in rock music. By writing and editing for Rolling Stone, Fong-Torres basically stumbled into being an Asian American pioneer in the field.
Growing up in Oakland, he struggled to understand why his parents were critical of his friendships with Black and brown neighbors. They held onto negative stereotypes about other people of color in America, and were afraid he’d somehow lose touch with his own culture. As a journalist, however, Fong-Torres would find that his Asian American identity and early exposure to Bay Area diversity was a major asset.
“I think I had an easier time attaining an affinity with my interview subjects because I am Asian American. I can’t remember exactly what it felt like when I met Marvin Gaye or Gladys Knight, but I feel there had to be a different camaraderie,” Fong-Torres says after a sip of sparkling wine. “They opened their door and saw a person of color, when they were just expecting a typical white guy.”
In the ‘70s, Fong-Torres frequently joined artists on tour, spending time with them backstage, in the studio, and on private planes — the sort of access few journalists could imagine in our era of ever-present publicists and media-trained celebrities. But as music media matured, the dynamic shifted in an irreversible way.
“Before, everything was kind of loose and free and the bands insisted on opening the doors for us. Suddenly, the rules changed,” he says. “There wasn’t just Rolling Stone, but 20 others interested in the story. The artist could just pick and choose. And they started being on ‘good behavior’ — policing themselves and what they say. They learned to play the game.”
As the game changed, so, too did the players. Fong-Torres was there for the rise of the rock managers and promoters, the flamboyant businessmen who helped push rock to the center of the culture for a few decades.
One such power broker was San Francisco’s Bill Graham, who professionalized what had been a much shaggier, laid-back scene.
“It wasn’t as if Bill saw the concert scene and said, ‘I can do this better.’ He kind of lucked out while planning a benefit show for the San Francisco Mime Troupe as their accountant,” Fong-Torres says. “He saw all the young people who were lining up to see Jefferson Airplane, and a lightbulb went off in his head.”
Over many meetings and stories, Fong-Torres came to know Graham well, witnessing his ambition and generosity as well as pettiness over perceived slights. In Graham, Fong-Torres saw an artist’s instincts filtered through a businessman’s mind.
“If he was going to produce a show and charge people money for a ticket, it was going to be a damn good show, and one that runs on time. It wasn’t going to be a drug-taking bullshit acid test. He had that New York mindset of putting on a production,” he recalled.
“A lot of artists didn’t care for that. ‘Come on, Bill, just relax.’ But he wouldn’t have it.”
It was a “badge of honor” for music journalists to grapple with Graham. One time in 1972, Fong-Torres told me, a pissed-off Graham stormed into the Rolling Stone office on Brannan Street, demanding a line-by-line review of a profile of him.
“Tim Cahill wrote it, and it got Bill’s goat. He demanded to see Jann and Tim and me, for what turned out to be a day-long meeting. I don’t want to compare him to any, uh, current presidents, but you know… Bill got maniacal sometimes,” Fong-Torres said, chuckling.
He takes a breath and scrunches his face in a caricature of Graham: “Now here, look here, how do you know that I talked to that balloon seller?”
In typical fashion, Graham forgot about the fracas after two weeks and invited Rolling Stone back to his shows with open arms, Fong-Torres said.
As he tells these stories, it’s clear that Fong-Torres misses the old days when bullheaded individuals like Graham transformed the city’s culture with genuine love for the music and its fans. (Graham was killed in a helicopter crash near Vallejo in 1991.)
It’s a very different scene now, as the city saw with the recent run of Dead & Company shows that served more as a delivery system for insanely high-priced VIP tickets and merch than vibes. Rolling Stone left San Francisco for New York in 1977; Wenner sold his share to Penske Media in 2019. When I ask Fong-Torres about his former boss, he has little to say. They talked while Wenner researched his 2022 memoir, also titled Like a Rolling Stone.
He doesn’t read the magazine much now, either. Much of his energy these days is spent on a medley of tours, talks, and radio work. He directs programming for Moonalice Radio, a tiny streaming station where Fong-Torres works as a “lonely warrior” attempting to capture the spontaneous energy of his 1970s free-form radio days for a new generation.
Through a deal with Airbnb, Fong-Torres also leads groups around the city, talking about his career from the Summer of Love through to the present, playing snippets of his old interviews with people like Jerry Garcia and Jim Morrison. Some ask for selfies or autographs, “And that’s just fine,” Fong-Torres said, as if resigned to a lifetime of minor celebrity. Sometimes people shout out his name as he walks by.
“I don’t know why it is, but people all refer to me by my full name. Strangers as well as friends. It’s partly because that’s what Cameron Crowe wrote it as in Almost Famous,” he said with a sheepish look. “It wasn’t just, ‘Hey, this is your editor’ in the script. It was Ben Fong-Torres.”
The sarcastic way he repeats his own name makes me laugh. But the movie was right. He’s not just an editor — he’s Ben Fong-Torres.
