The elder Mr. Wenner, these people said, has declined to pursue lines of business, including festivals and conferences, that might have provided new revenue streams. He was skeptical about the web as others were embracing it. And he has been reluctant to shift the magazine’s focus away from baby boomer rockers — U2, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones — some of whom he considers friends. (One of the best-selling recent covers featured the band Rush, which came to fame in the ’70s and ’80s.)

Jann Wenner said that he had listened to the business suggestions but decided they were not the wisest path. He feels that others leapt for the web too quickly, and that now was the correct time for an Internet push. And he said he disagreed with the notion that his thinking was dated. “Obviously the culture has evolved, but most of the same rules still apply,” he said. “Is it news? Is it interesting to a lot of people or not?”

The solution, both Mr. Wenners said in interviews, is to stick with the magazine’s original values. “From Day 1, the mission was to cover rock ’n’ roll music and all the ideas and stories that rock ’n’ roll embraces,” Gus Wenner said. “I don’t think it has changed in the last 50 years, and I don’t think that will ever change.”

The plan in the magazine’s 1970s heyday, said Joe Armstrong, its publisher and president during that period, “was to build Time-Life, do what Henry Luce did, but for a younger generation.” Rolling Stone was breaking new ground, and printing things others would not print, he said. “We were covering rock ’n’ roll music when your parents liked orchestra music,” he said. “We were against the war in Vietnam, and everybody over 30 was for it. We were covering the drug culture. Nobody else was doing it.”

Tom Wolfe published his novel “The Bonfire of the Vanities” in installments in the magazine. The photographer Annie Leibovitz became a star there. Richard Avedon traveled the country to shoot dozens of portraits of the people he felt ran America, a collection now with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And Mr. Thompson made his own style of gonzo journalism.