Читать книгу Sticky Fingers - Joe Hagan - Страница 12

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Are You Experienced?

Coincidences, trappings, costumes & climbing. These made me rich. –fragment from “Now These Days Are Gone,”

an unpublished novel by Jann Wenner, 1966

When Jann Wenner emerged from the closet, he was crying. “His eyes were soft, and he had been weeping, and he just was beautiful,” recounted Denise Kaufman, describing the day Wenner first tried LSD in the spring of 1965. Arms wrapped around his knees, Wenner asked her to put the Sandy Bull record back on. “And he just sat and listened,” she said. “It was beautiful, and we listened and put the Beatles on. He was in the most beautiful state.”

She said the moment marked a deep and abiding bond between her and Wenner, a cosmic understanding. Wenner would tell a version of the story in his lightly fictionalized memoir, “Now These Days Are Gone,” which features a Berkeley student named Jim Whitman and his elusive muse Vicki (Denise Kaufman’s middle name). The LSD scene includes the kitten, the LPs, and even the closet. The moment before he stepped inside, Wenner wrote, he had had a terrible vision:

I was fighting my father, hitting him, and then tearing him apart, ripping his flesh and pulling out his guts, but his guts were machinery, cogs and wheels, and pipes, and he lay there bloodied without blood, fleshy with metal.

It was a vision of Oedipal rage, prompting Wenner to climb into the womb of the closet.

Wenner was infatuated with his acid guide, Denise, the woman Ken Kesey later dubbed Mary Microgram. “Maybe it was the way Vicki did things, things girls weren’t supposed to do,” Wenner wrote in his novel. “Ride motorcycles, invite anyone on the street to parties, doing all those things and not just sitting around smoking cigarettes. She didn’t even smoke.”

She was also a distant cousin of Jann Wenner’s through the Simmons family line, both of them tracing their roots to a Russian Jew named Isaac Szymonovsky. More important, she was, in the parlance of the times, “happening,” the spirit of 1960s San Francisco made flesh. Jerry Garcia and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, future members of the Grateful Dead, played at her high school graduation party in Palo Alto; she met Ken Kesey on a beach in Monterey and joined the Merry Pranksters, Ken Kesey’s LSD explorers, riding alongside beat legend Neal Cassady on the painted school bus; she would form an all-female rock group called the Ace of Cups, who opened for both Jimi Hendrix and the Band. As important to Wenner, Kaufman was from a wealthy family who made their money in real estate. “She combined those two worlds so perfectly for me,” said Wenner. “She was from a straight background, wealthy background, the proper background. The good Jewish girl, and the wild child thing. And that was perfect for me.”

While acid transformed Kaufman from a folkie communist to a free-range child of the cosmos, Wenner’s transformation was less clear. To Kaufman, his mother, Sim, seemed more turned on than he did. After moving to Hawaii, Sim morphed into a middle-aged bohemian who wore floor-length muumuus, usually nude underneath, and took up pot smoking and rediscovered her “homosexual gene.” “I’m thinking, how did she get this straight son? She is so out there!” said Kaufman. “We ended up going to the Matrix together, the club in the Marina area, where Jefferson Airplane first played. Sim was kind of more in the groove of it than he was.”

Wenner was embarrassed by his mother’s libertine life, especially her pursuit of men his own age. She sashayed into the room and said whatever came to mind, usually something insulting or sexually provocative. When a friend brought her football player boyfriend to a party at Sim’s apartment, Sim looked the guy up and down and said, “You’re fucking him?” Wenner also recoiled at her increasingly “hip” lingo. “I had a terribly difficult time relating to that,” he later said. “To have your mother say something like ‘hey, man,’ you know. It drives me nuts, her language.”

In the summer of 1965, Sim’s latest boyfriend convinced her to let Wenner use her house in Hawaii while she was stateside visiting Kate. Before he left, Wenner traded two tickets to see the Beatles for thirty hits of acid from Kaufman. (Wenner never saw the Beatles.) He spent a month in Kailua Kona, Hawaii, plucking out folk songs on an acoustic guitar that his sister Kate gave him for his birthday and exploring the effects of LSD while snorkeling over a local reef. When he returned to San Francisco, Wenner decided that Denise Kaufman was the answer to all his problems. Kaufman said she felt a “heart connection” with Wenner but no sexual spark, and she bristled at his relentless attempts to sleep with her. In a letter written from Esalen, the spiritual retreat in Big Sur, she told Wenner he was not “at ease” with himself. She wrote a garage-rock song about him called “Boy, What’ll You Do Then,” a feminist kiss-off to a jealous suitor.

You saw me out with your best friend

And you can bet I’m gonna do it again

But if I leave you

Boy what will you do then?

You say I must be true to you

That’s what you tell me

Well, I say take me as I am, boy

Or we’re through—yeah, through!

She printed a hundred copies of a 45 single, but they were stolen from a car, and the song never surfaced beyond San Francisco.

Wenner also tried forming a rock group, called the Helping Hand-Outs, with a spaced-out hippie named Scratch who lived on a mattress in North Beach. They disbanded after playing some strip clubs. Music was not exactly the focus. “With my hair as long as it is, if you didn’t listen to my singing or playing, I look like a Beatle,” he wrote to his grandmother.

Kaufman rebuffed Wenner’s romantic entreaties but brought him along on her adventures, including a road trip to L.A. with Neal Cassady (who kept calling him “Jan,” to Wenner’s irritation) and the seminal event of the San Francisco rock boom, a psychedelic dance at the Longshoreman’s Hall near the wharf featuring the Jefferson Airplane, the Charlatans, and the Great Society. “A Tribute to Dr. Strange,” named for the Marvel Comics character, was conceived by a group of hippies who convinced Ralph Gleason, the aging Chronicle critic, to help promote the event in his column, On the Town. That night Wenner witnessed poet Allen Ginsberg lead a line of beaded dancers through colored lights that pulsed to clanging, psychotropic guitar playing and caterwauling vocals. Denise Kaufman, in a dress made from an American flag, briefly introduced Wenner to Gleason, who was hanging out with a record man from Capitol Records. The next day, Wenner flipped through the paper and reexperienced the event through the eyes of a veteran culture writer. Gleason would say he saw the 1960s come to life that night, documenting the costumed youths like butterflies pinned on a spreading board. “They all seemed to be cued into Frontier Days,” he wrote in his 1969 book, The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound, “and ranged from velvet Lotta Crabtree to Mining Camp Desperado, Jean Laffite leotards, I. Magnin Beatnik, Riverboat Gambler, India Import Exotic and Modified Motorcycle Rider Black Leather-and-Zippers alongside Buckskin Brown.”

A personal friend and devotee of Duke Ellington’s, Gleason nonetheless called the Jefferson Airplane “one of the best bands ever.” His advocacy got them an advance from RCA Victor for $25,000, an astonishing sum for a psychedelic rock group.

Turned on by Kaufman, Wenner now spent his weekends flopped out on the floor of John Warnecke’s garden apartment on Telegraph Hill, along with Ned Topham, listening to Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home and the Byrds’ Mr. Tambourine Man while tripping on Owsley Stanley’s high-powered blotter acid. “We had costumes and toys,” wrote Wenner in “Now These Days Are Gone.” “Life was like a little kid. Instead of skip rope we played with pieces of cut glass from chandeliers. Eye orgies.” (One evening, Wenner had a druggy sexual encounter with Warnecke, which he recorded in an outline for his novel: “[Told] him I was thinking of a girl,” he wrote, “a lie.”) In his book, Wenner described dressing up in his own frontier costume—an Annapolis naval jacket, a cowboy hat, and a gold-handled walking stick—to see the Lovin’ Spoonful with Denise Kaufman. While she mingled easily with “the sandaled spades and boys with funny glasses,” Wenner felt awkward and out of place around the hippies. “The navy jacket was too hot,” he wrote. “The collar rubbed on the back of my neck. People were standing around looking at each other. We danced to a few songs, but then she found other friends and danced with them without thought of tomorrow, like she was playing the drums. They stood and watched her and I was glad they saw me with her, but then they knew, they always knew.”

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THE IMAGE WAS TAKEN from the back of the $1 bill: a human eye inside a pyramid. It was a flyer posted around the Berkeley campus with the tantalizing question, “Can you pass the acid test?” Ken Kesey wanted to recruit local students for his LSD experiments with a large “happening” inside a Victorian mansion in downtown San Jose following a Rolling Stones concert at the Civic Auditorium in early December 1965. It was the first time Wenner saw the Stones. Mick Jagger swung a blue checkered jacket over his head, singing “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Afterward, Wenner drove his VW downtown to press into the throng of acid-zonked students who vibrated to a very different rock band that chimed with involved psychedelic jams. Wenner approached the handsome guitar player in blue corduroy pants and velvet shirt to ask the name of the group. “The Grateful Dead,” Bob Weir told him. Jerry Garcia later said it was their first show.

Early the next year, Jann Wenner walked into the offices of The Daily Californian, Berkeley’s student paper, and pitched a weekly column on the rock and drug scene, which he wanted to write anonymously. A month before, Wenner had been roused from his bed at four in the morning by police officers searching for drugs and was arrested for possession of marijuana. Wenner spent the night in jail. “They missed the acid and the DMT, which I kept in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator,” he said. Wenner believed he was fingered by a Berkeley student seeking revenge on Wenner for sleeping with his girlfriend. Wenner’s lawyer got the charges dropped, arguing that the police had an improper search warrant. (The lawyer, Malcolm Burnstein, later employed a young Hillary Clinton as an intern.)

Wenner called his column Something’s Happening and wrote under the pseudonym “Mr. Jones,” the clueless, vaguely journalistic personage of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” who walks into a room with a pencil in his hand and sees something happening but doesn’t know what it is. But then again, who did? Across the Bay Area, student firebrands and stoned philosophers, biker outlaws and self-styled mystics, hipsters and poseurs alike commingled in a druggy renaissance of free expression that was remaking youth lifestyle, from the head shops of Haight Street to the bonfires of Stinson Beach. “The fact of the matter,” Gleason wrote, “is that we are in a new age with a new religion and with new standards.” In La Honda, an hour south of San Francisco, Ken Kesey was saying the same thing in country-cosmic aphorisms and into a microphone held by Tom Wolfe, who was documenting the lysergic bandwagoneers for a book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. “Everybody is going to be what they are,” Kesey told him, “and whatever they are, there’s not going to be anything to apologize about.”

With Something’s Happening, Wenner made himself the ultimate acid insider, Berkeley’s window into the insular psychedelic rock scene. He judged the Trips Festival, a psychedelic rock happening inspired by Ken Kesey and organized by Bill Graham, a “flop,” with “too many cops and too many undercover narcos.” It was nonetheless significant, he said, because it rated reviews from “Time, Life, Newsweek, etc., and camera crews.” (He blamed Graham for his “extreme uptightness,” establishing a negative posture toward the rock promoter destined to last for years. In another column, he called Graham “a little man” who turned the dances into “money making schemes.”)

Wenner also used his column to praise the Beatles and Bob Dylan and defend Mick Jagger against accusations that he was a “fag.” “Girls aren’t the only ones who adore Mick,” he wrote. “When he gets married there will probably be more disappointed males than females.”

In each column, Wenner turned his own friends into characters in an ongoing psychedelic serial that borrowed nonsense language from Dylan and the Beatles. Warnecke and Topham became Nowhere Man and Blue Nedd. “Nowhere Man and a bit of bored imagination,” he wrote, “both at once, Nowhere, Neverwas, Notnow, Nottobe, World without End; People without names; Friends without Friendship.”

The column ran alongside a photograph of “Mr. Jones”: Jann Wenner in a fake beard and granny glasses and a harmonica around his neck. Another benefit of anonymity was that Wenner wanted to start an LSD business. He wrote a friend to say he had an investor on the hook—probably John Warnecke—who could front him $1,500, which they could earn back with sales of eighty-five thousand milligrams of LSD. “Since you would be doing the production work,” he wrote to the friend, presumably a chemist, “and I would be distributing, which entails legal consequences, a fifty-fifty split seems thoroughly equitable.”

The business didn’t pan out, but Wenner advocated for legalization of LSD in his May 19, 1966, column, calling the drug “the closest we have come to a feasible manner in which men may reorient themselves around new pursuits and meanings.” Unlike Mario Savio, who called Timothy Leary’s “Turn on, tune in, drop out” motto an irresponsible slogan, Wenner saw LSD culture as virtuous precisely because it bypassed politics for an alternate reality. “Hippies, heads and other users of LSD are beyond any politics, let alone radical politics. Acid transcends politics,” he wrote. “LSD users want no part of today’s social structure. It’s not just Vietnam and Alabama. These things are manifestations of a culture for which we don’t care and don’t support.”

Over at NBC, Wenner was reporting stories about the fault line between the counterculture and the mainstream. “UC doctor says LSD is not harmful” went one of his reports. “Police arrest Bill Graham and kids at Fillmore auditorium” went another. And, “Long-haired boys banned at UC swimming pool.”

Part of Wenner’s job was driving a friend’s motorcycle to the station at 2:00 a.m. to receive the dispatches from Asia and the East Coast. One night he was taking in the feed when he read an AP report from New York: James Pike Jr. had “shot himself to death in a drab, $5-a-day hotel room. Police said the 21-year-old youth fired two shots from the 30-30 range rifle. The first missed. The second ripped away the right side of his face and head.”

Pike left a long and rambling note for loved ones, ending with “goodbye, goodbye.” “There was no explanation for what motivated the youth,” the report said, but Wenner knew better. He was crushed. Wenner mentioned Pike’s death in his Daily Californian column with the glib remark that Pike had taken “a trip on the Suicide Express.” In his veiled memoir, however, he described showing up at a debutante party after the news broke, disgusted by garish displays of sympathy from the socialites he felt didn’t really know Pike. Wenner felt pangs of guilt for having shamed Pike about his sexuality. According to Wenner’s Berkeley friend Robbie Leeds, Wenner confessed to him after Pike’s death that he was a “latent homosexual.” (Leeds said he kissed Wenner on the cheek and never told.) Wenner’s mother, Sim, said she knew for sure that her son was gay when she saw his reaction to Pike’s death. “I just saw Jann being broken up by it,” she said.

Afterward, Pike’s distraught father became unhinged, describing communiqués from poltergeists he believed were his son’s ghost reaching out from the dead. In 1967, he tried summoning his son through a séance taped for TV and expanded on the phenomenon in a 1968 memoir called The Other Side. The book described his son’s descent into drug experimentation but never mentioned his sexual confusion. Bishop Pike died the following year when he became lost in the Judaean Desert in Israel while trying to reexperience the life of Jesus Christ. In her essay on James Pike in The White Album, Joan Didion would write of Pike’s restless pursuit of reinvention—his essential California-ness—as part of a time, the 1960s, when “no one at all seemed to have any memory or mooring, and in a way the Sixties were the years for which James Albert Pike was born.”

•

ON THE WEEKEND of May 7, 1966, Jann Wenner was listening to the Grateful Dead perform “Midnight Hour” at the Harmon Gym at Berkeley when he noticed a man who looked like a Scotland Yard detective: deerstalker cap, curled mustache, pipe clenched in his teeth, and horn-rimmed glasses on his nose. It was Ralph Gleason, the music writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Wenner introduced himself. “He said I know exactly who you are,” Wenner recounted. “I’ve been reading your column.”

Wenner was thrilled. Gleason was the patron saint of all that interested him, the senior statesman of the rock-and-roll scene, and a mentor to Kaufman, whose blues harmonica Gleason once heralded after witnessing her jam on the street in Berkeley. She spoke to Gleason almost daily and even told him about Wenner’s acid trip in the closet. As the Dead played, Wenner and Gleason walked up to the loudspeakers on the stage and stuck their heads close to better hear Jerry Garcia’s spidery guitar playing.

Gleason was the consummate hipster of San Francisco, a storied record collector and jazz writer who once published a magazine called Jazz: A Quarterly of American Music and helped co-found the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1958. His columns were syndicated in newspapers across the country, and his liner notes adorned the backs of classic jazz LPs. He first heard jazz on the radio in Chappaqua, New York, during a bout of the measles in the 1930s. He became obsessed and traveled the clubs of Fifty-Second Street with fellow record collectors who converged at the Commodore Music Shop and the Hot Record Society. “He knew Leonard Feather, Nat Hentoff, Jerry Wexler, John Hammond,” said Wenner, “and after the war, he told me, he and [Gleason’s wife] Jeanie brought ten pounds of pot in the trunk with them and moved out to San Francisco.”

Gleason’s eclectic passion, including New Orleans jazz at a time when it was deeply unhip, made him an outlier in the universe of jazz critics. But in San Francisco, his catholic taste was an advantage, and he became the city’s quintessential music writer, interviewing Elvis Presley and Ray Charles on their swings through town. By 1966, he was a tie-wearing diabetic, forty-nine years old, who showed up at concerts with a chocolate bar in his coat pocket and hosted a local TV show called Jazz Casual. (The oft-told joke was that Gleason couldn’t decide if he was composed of two twenty-four-year-olds, three sixteen-year-olds, or four twelve-year-olds.) Gleason was initially skeptical of Bob Dylan, panning his performance at the Monterey Folk Festival in 1963 (“I was deaf,” he later said), but when he came around, he came around hard. In 1965, he arranged a press conference for Dylan on public television and invited the local press and bohemia, including Allen Ginsberg and Bill Graham. (Rolling Stone would later publish a transcript of the press conference as “The Rolling Stone Interview.”)

Dylan was flattered by Gleason’s attention. “I had heard that he had interviewed Hank Williams, which was impressive,” said Dylan. “So there was a bit of a mystery to him. He wore a trench coat and horn-rimmed glasses and was the type of reporter you’d see around the Broadway area in New York. He wrote about jazz and folk music in the mainstream newspaper, so he was responsible for introducing me to a wider crowd, and his approval meant a lot.”

Jann Wenner had grown up reading the Chronicle in San Rafael. The editor, Scott Newhall, was a jazz buff and confidant of Gleason’s who called the Chronicle the country’s only mainstream underground newspaper, turning against the Vietnam War and covering the beat and jazz culture of North Beach (Newhall and Gleason once interviewed Louis Armstrong while the jazz great sat on the toilet, part of his laxative-based health regimen). Gleason’s column became the must-read report of the youth scene at Berkeley, and he was the rare public figure who advocated for the Free Speech Movement. But he also demanded obeisance from his acolytes, a hipster Socrates lording his knowledge of jazz over enthusiastic know-nothings. Wide-eyed Berkeley kids would gather in his study, surrounded by his piles of books and LPs, to listen to Gleason wax philosophic about the virtues of Duke Ellington or Lenny Bruce (who name checked Gleason in his routines). When Wenner told him he hated jazz, Gleason frog-marched him to a Wes Montgomery concert. “There was life before Jerry Garcia!” he would say.

“He wanted a newcomer on the scene to bow low to Ralph,” recalled Michael Lydon, a Newsweek reporter who would go on to write for Rolling Stone. The potentate had new clothes, which some noticed. Greil Marcus said Gleason “wrote the same three columns, over and over again. I, like many people, got absolutely sick of reading these columns. First of all, it was all promotion. Promotion of the scene.”

But Wenner followed Gleason around like a would-be son looking for an adoptive father. “I hadn’t been in touch with my family for about three years,” said Wenner, “and he and his wife and three kids, they had a house on Ashby Avenue, it was kind of an open scene to anybody looking for advice.” Wenner became Gleason’s most ardent devotee, reading his columns religiously and accompanying him to concerts. “We’d be reviewing the same things,” said Wenner. “In far different ways; mine through the primrose glasses. We just kind of fell into a friendship. He became my mentor.”

Gleason admired Wenner’s zealous energy. He called him Janno and treated him like a precocious student in need of special guidance. And Wenner’s devotion flattered Gleason. “Jann was the first writer (journalist) I had met who saw this whole mad world of pop music the way I did,” Gleason wrote in Rolling Stone in 1972, “and who felt it had the kind of importance to all of our lives that, in the event, it turned out it did.”

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IN THE SPRING OF 1966, Wenner was hanging out with a handsome pal of John Warnecke’s named Richard Black, a socialite turned bohemian who had just returned from traveling the world, including a three-month stint in London. To Wenner, Black seemed impossibly hip—well dressed, an LSD enthusiast, aspirations to work in television. They dropped acid together and lay in the middle of the street at the top of Telegraph Hill experiencing visions of “the explorers coming through the bay, and the moon is a giant lightbulb,” Wenner recalled. Black planned on returning to London, along with his roommate, a sensitive and intensely intellectual writer named Jonathan Cott, who studied English literature at Berkeley. Wenner wanted to go. His grades at Berkeley were on an inverse trajectory with his drug taking, so Wenner dropped out to join them. “We did have the provision that we had things we were going to do, Jon and I, and we weren’t going to babysit him,” said Black.

Wenner arrived at Heathrow Airport in June 1966 with a guitar in one hand and a portable Olivetti in the other. He wore a porkpie hat. In his pocket was the phone number of Max Jones, editor of the Melody Maker and a friend of Ralph Gleason’s to whom Wenner hoped to sell a story. Flush with excitement, Wenner took a taxi directly to Carnaby Street, where he gaped at the carnival of mods and rockers in velveteen coats and bell-bottoms wandering in and out of clothing shops. He wrote to Gleason that he saw Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones get out of a silver Rolls-Royce. He bought a pair of striped bell-bottoms and a flowered belt and rented a flat in Earl’s Court. He hooked up with Black and went from party to party introducing himself as a rock writer from San Francisco, which lent him an aura of considerable cool. To earn spending money, he tried working as a wedding photographer and a folksinger in a café. “I played one solo gig at some restaurant, sitting in a corner for the evening,” said Wenner, “and I’m sure I was boring; made 15 quid or so; that was the end of the professional career.”

Wenner could not help but observe the open sensuality between men in London, a cultural femininity baked into British manners. “That was the period when homosexuality in England was not legalized, but it was decriminalized,” Mick Jagger told Wenner in an interview in 1995. “It was part of a new freedom for men. It wasn’t to do strictly with homosexuality, so much only, or androgynous, or whatever the noun is, but there was a freedom for men to dress as you please and act as you please and not conform to just one type.”

The freedom was attractive to Wenner. “I had peace for my long hair,” he wrote in his novel. “No men threatening me on the street, no crew-cut football players staring at me so frighteningly. The sexuality of it was intense.” Richard Black picked up on Wenner’s intensity during parties. “If there were gay people, I think he felt free to put his arm around me now and then,” recalled Black. “We were at a party with Marianne Faithfull and a bunch of people. Somebody was under the impression that he was not only my friend but my lover. And I just was very totally heterosexual and trying to get laid every chance I could. So, he felt the dissonance.”

At one point, Black was invited to a dinner party with Paul McCartney. Wenner, an unabashed devotee of mod in the mods-versus-rockers debate, implored Black to bring him. But the dinner was an intimate affair for couples, and Black’s girlfriend had invited him. Wenner was wounded; afterward, he soured on both Black and London. Carnaby Street, “once so groovy,” he wrote, was “commercialized to dreariness . . . a teenage scene.”

Wenner looked up Max Jones, of the Melody Maker, and visited the offices on Fleet Street with a review of the new Beach Boys record. Though it was never published, Wenner was astonished to see a working newsroom populated with reporters smoking cigarettes and talking shop—a vision of order and professionalism amid the decadence of Carnaby. After a month of partying and interpersonal tumult—including an affair with a girl named Mandy who lived next door to him—he realized “the transient, ambiguous, do-little bohemian lifestyle wasn’t for me.” He feared he was wasting his life. The obvious solution, said Wenner, was “a conventional marriage with a good Jewish girl.”

•

WHEN SIMON AND GARFUNKEL came to San Francisco to play the Community Theatre in Berkeley in May 1966, they made a special trip to Berkeley to meet Ralph Gleason, whose collection of Lenny Bruce recordings, bequeathed to him by Bruce himself, was highly prized samizdat. While Simon eagerly sampled the tapes, he met Denise Kaufman, Gleason’s acolyte and Jann Wenner’s “good Jewish girl” of choice. She offered to tour Simon around San Francisco and took him to an open mic at a folk café called Coffee and Confusion (where he played “The Sound of Silence”) and then to meet the Grateful Dead in their communal three-story Victorian on Ashbury Street. Kaufman and Simon slept together at the apartment of Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, and Simon invited her to Anaheim to see him play the next weekend.

When Wenner heard about the affair, he seethed with jealousy, generating an animus against Paul Simon that lasted for years to come. In his pursuit of Kaufman, Wenner often told her parents that he intended to marry her, but Kaufman would roll her eyes. “I don’t think so!” she moaned. “She loved me, but not like that,” said Wenner. “Her mind was on these acid cowboys, and Hells Angels. She wanted the real authentic guys, the real deal. I thought I could get her.”

The surest sign Kaufman didn’t intend to marry Wenner was when she got pregnant by a member of the New Christy Minstrels. Wenner put her in touch with a doctor in Berkeley “who gave me the name of a doctor in Mexico who would do an abortion,” Kaufman recalled. The procedure (performed on a washing machine in Tijuana) made Kaufman hemorrhage, and she went to an American doctor for help. The police showed up to file a report, and Wenner drove down from Berkeley to be with her. Kaufman was grateful, though later irritated when Wenner used the abortion fiasco to cast her as a troubled soul in need of his guidance. “I really can’t believe your hypocrisy,” she wrote to him. “You—who all year long wanted to sleep with me—trying to put me down for having had an abortion.”

Wenner also accused her of corrupting him. “You say I got you going to the Fillmore on acid,” she wrote. “It was you + John + Ned who did that, Mr. Jones—not me. Do you remember that or have you fantasized your own past[?]”

But in the summer of 1966, Kaufman’s parents became so worried about her LSD use they had her institutionalized in the psychiatric ward at Mount Zion Hospital. Wenner offered a way forward: While in London, he proposed they give up drugs and rock and roll, get married, and move to Spain or Greece. Naturally, Kaufman figured the best way to meditate on the proposal was to take acid. “I was like, am I just ignoring the obvious?” she recalled. “Do I have this radar for attracting people who aren’t truly loving, and here’s someone who is? . . . I was questioning my own choices. When he said, let’s do it, I said, okay.”

Her acid revelation faded, however, when Wenner started planning the wedding ceremony with his mother. Kaufman gently applied the brakes, recommending they get to know each other better. Also, she wanted to come to London to take acid on Carnaby Street and buy some hip clothes before they went straight. In a panic, Wenner got the next flight back to New York and immediately got on a pay phone at Kennedy Airport to pressure Kaufman to marry him. When she said no, Wenner sobbed and fumbled with dimes, begging the operator to keep him connected. He threatened to commit suicide. “He told me he was going to kill himself,” Kaufman recounted. “He was gonna do just what Jim [Pike] did; he got a hotel in New York and was gonna kill himself, unless I came there and married him.”

Kaufman talked him down, after which Wenner’s marriage fantasy collapsed. Plans thwarted, he accepted an invitation from Andy Harmon to stay at his family estate in Rye, New York, north of Manhattan. It was grand property with guesthouses and a tennis court moldering in neglect but still staffed with servants. Wenner brought a copy of the Beatles’ Revolver from England, and they got stoned and listened to it as they mulled over their futures. Between tearful walks through the woods, a bereft Wenner harnessed his ambition for another project: the Great American Novel.

He started writing a book with the wistful title “Now These Days Are Gone,” a story of his youth, which already seemed to Wenner worth enshrining in literature. An awkward blend of On the Road and The Catcher in the Rye, the book was Wenner’s attempt to square the warring sides of his personality, his desire for a straight life with Kaufman with his hidden homosexuality, his love of high society with his love for rock and roll. In one scene, the Jim Pike character stumbles upon Wenner’s open diary, where Wenner discusses their mutual attraction and concludes that “there are certain things that must be left unsaid and not openly recognized.” When Pike confesses to seeing the journal, Wenner feels exposed and angry. “He had looked at Dorian Gray’s portrait,” he says. Alone in his “fortress on the fourth floor” in Berkeley, Wenner assesses his own personality and finds himself wanting:

I knew lots of people but I had no friends. I slept with girls but I loved no one. I had invitations to deb parties. That seemed the most important thing. I was social, I knew debutantes, and I knew rich people. I had worked so hard, I liked so many people I couldn’t stand. A black leather address book with thin blue pages. With names of people with good addresses.

He resolved to move past his internal conflicts, finally be himself. But who was he? The only thing that bound Wenner’s aimless, desperate life together was . . . rock and roll. He created a playlist of songs for citation in each chapter: the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles, the three-legged chair for his troubled soul. The final chapter of Wenner’s book was to be called “The Rock and Roll Generation,” a treatise on the magic that would set him free. But while he typed up the novel, Wenner received a letter from Ralph Gleason. He’d heard from Denise Kaufman about the aborted marriage, the suicide threat. He was worried. And there was a development back home. A job opening in San Francisco. Did Wenner want to write about rock and roll?