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Delivered by Grace Yee, AsianConnections.com calls our keynote speaker "our Renaissance guy." And that pretty much sums up Ben Fong-Torres. This native of Oakland is the author of four books, including a music biography, Hickory Wind; a memoirs, The Rice Room: Growing Up in Chinatown; a history of Top 40 radio called The Hits Just Keep on Coming, and his latest, Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll. But long before writing his first book in 1991, he'd established himself as a writer and editor at Rolling Stone magazine, which he joined in 1969. There, his interview subjects included Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Bonnie Raitt, the Jackson 5, Linda Ronstadt, Santana, Marvin Gaye, Ike & Tina Turner, Diane Keaton, and Steve Martin. The Ray Charles interview won the Deems Taylor Award for Magazine Writing in 1974. But while working at the magazine, Ben was also editing and writing for a Chinatown paper, spending Sundays on the air as a DJ on the rock station KSAN, and, in the late Seventies, doing on-air interviews for Evening magazine on KPIX. This was actually not surprising, since he'd majored in radio-TV-film at San Francisco State while also editing the campus daily. After leaving Rolling Stone, Fong-Torres wrote for such magazines as Esquire, GQ (where he was pop music columnist for three years), Parade, and TV Guide. In 1983, he joined the San Francisco Chronicle, where he was a feature writer and radio columnist until 1992, when he left to write The Rice Room.
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