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4

Like a Rolling Stone

Here’s something for you to turn the Beatles on with.

—letter from Jann Wenner to Derek Taylor, November 1967

Art Garfunkel, of Simon and Garfunkel, offered an impersonation of the Jann Wenner he met in the early years of Rolling Stone. Standing up, he hunched his body forward, arms arched like a gunslinger. “I’m a business crab; my body is a little bent over,” he said, curling forward in demonstration. “I am so full of content I have no time for elegance of the spine—that’s for gentiles. I am all content, I got my envelopes in my hand, my sleeves are worked up—this is a workshop, man! This is not Hollywood; it’s a workshop. I am content. I got my envelopes; I come out with a tempo. Thanks for the applause, but let’s get right to it—

“And that’s Jann. That’s the Jann I first knew in San Francisco, always hunched over because the issues are too compelling, and too much fun, and there is stuff to be done.”

His eagerness—Garfunkel called it “joy”—overflowed, seemed nearly to drown him. There was a Yiddish word for it: shpilkes—ants in the pants. If Jann Wenner had a tail, said writer Dotson Rader, it would always be wagging. Ralph Gleason would say Wenner’s all-consuming devotion to his enterprise was like “some cat who had discovered a new way to split the atom.”

With the name, the vision snapped into focus: Rolling Stone, the first mainstream paper for the rock-and-roll generation. Now everything that was ambiguous about Wenner’s life was made clear: to become an editor and publisher, as big and important as Hugh Hefner—no, bigger than that. Henry Luce! William Randolph Hearst! Keeping such company made sense to Wenner, even if others rolled their eyes.

Who did this guy think he was? “Motherless, fatherless, sisterless, in the closet, starting a newspaper that nobody thought was going to go anywhere,” said Jerry Hopkins, one of the first writers for Rolling Stone. “He was out there.”

Wenner reportedly said he started Rolling Stone to meet John Lennon. But it was just as true that he wanted to be John Lennon—as famous, as important, as talented in his sphere. After all, the best and the brightest of the baby-boom generation (a term not yet in common use in 1967) weren’t necessarily going to Harvard or Yale anymore. They were dropping out and inventing a new generational order with the Beatles as their soundtrack. This was Jann Wenner’s story line. “Jerry Garcia was as smart as anybody, as smart as a guy from Yale who was a clerk for a Supreme Court judge,” Michael Lydon, the first staff employee of Rolling Stone, once explained. “That’s really what created the opportunity for Rolling Stone magazine . . . the magazine caught on very fast because Jann had grasped the new vibration just when the old vibration was fading.”

This was not obvious. “Professionalism”—a word Wenner now used with increasing frequency to describe his vision of Rolling Stone—was anathema to the average Levi’s-wearing freek. It was an eastern establishment trope reeking of Eisenhower and the marketers of “pimply hyperbole” whom the Beatles mocked in A Hard Day’s Night. It was “Moloch,” as Allen Ginsberg wrote in his 1955 epic poem Howl—electricity and industry, the lifeblood of Wall Street and war profiteers. As Wenner assembled his newspaper in the fall of 1967, the Diggers of Haight-Ashbury, a group of communitarian radicals, were burning money on the streets and holding a funeral march for “the Death of [the] Hippie,” whose demise they blamed on the media barbarians lured to San Francisco by the likes of Chet Helms and Derek Taylor. The Diggers attacked the merchants of the new hipsterism—record stores and head shops—as “prettified monsters of moneylust.”

But the barbarian had already found its way inside the gate. There was money to be made attacking Moloch, and after Monterey Pop, rock and roll was awash in it. The Jefferson Airplane, among the most passionate rock revolutionists, were already spending their advances from RCA Victor on fancy cars and swimming pools in L.A., a story Wenner put right on the cover of the first issue of Rolling Stone. “When they’re not in the studios, they stay at a fabulous pink mansion which rents for $5,000 a month,” Wenner reported. “The house has two swimming pools and a variety of recreational facilities.”

The magazine was carefully positioned to be accessible to the American mainstream. “We didn’t want to be a part of that hippie way of life,” said Wenner. “We didn’t want to be communal. We didn’t want to have a hippie design. Our values were more traditional reporting. We wanted to be recognized by the establishment. Part of it was our own mission; part of it was what we were looking for, music. We wanted the music to be taken seriously. We wanted to be heard, we wanted the music to be heard, we wanted to change things.”

But what did a twenty-year-old Berkeley dropout know about starting a business? Not much. Jane’s sister, Linda, recalled seeing business books piled in Wenner’s room on Potrero Hill that summer. But mainly he turned to Ralph Gleason, whose Rolodex overflowed with names of lawyers and press agents, record executives and music writers. Wise in the ways of newspapers, Gleason would point his finger and Wenner would go running: Here’s a law firm who can help you incorporate. Here’s a writer from the Melody Maker in London. What about my friend in L.A.? He can write. Here’s a record agent at A&M and a publicist at Columbia. Maybe this guy at Vanguard can help you get a few ads.

From the start they discussed using the defunct Sunday Ramparts as the bones of the enterprise. The paper had been printed by Garrett Press, a union shop that produced newsletters like The Hillsdale Merchandiser and a union rag called The Daily Worker. “I was a veteran of the newspaper and magazine business at the point,” recounted Gleason in 1973, “and Jann was not, and I suggested to him that many times a printer will give you free office space in his loft or storage area for you to put out your publication—if you’re gonna print it at his press. And we talked Garrett Press into letting us do that and that’s how we started off at Brannan Street. Upstairs in Garrett Press, in the corner.”

It was located near a slaughterhouse. Most of the loft space was swallowed up by huge rolls of newsprint, Linotype machines, and a furnace that melted lead type and blew off an acrid stench. The walls were painted pink. The employees of Garrett Press were bemused by the hippie clientele who showed up that fall, long-haired, glassy-eyed, and snickering with private jokes. When Jane casually used the word “fuck” in mixed conversation, the burly union men were horrified. “My knee almost collapsed,” said Dan Parker, a foreman at Garrett Press who wore a tie to work and would become an office manager at Rolling Stone for a decade. “I never heard a woman use the word ‘fuck.’ It was such an irrational thing for a woman to be saying.”

He viewed Jann and Jane as typical hippies, their paper no different from the radical Berkeley Barb. But Wenner, he observed, “always walked like he was climbing a telephone pole. He was always walking like he was climbing.”

Gleason sent Wenner a check for $300 to print a prototype of Rolling Stone and help sell advertising, including with it a postcard for Jazz, the defunct quarterly he once edited, wishing Wenner better luck than he had.

Wenner needed actual professionals to help build the professional enterprise he had in mind. At Monterey, he had run into Michael Lydon, a Yale graduate who worked for Newsweek but whose interests were increasingly countercultural. Over coffee at Enrico’s, a North Beach café, Wenner asked him to help shepherd the first issue, offering him the job as his No. 2. Lydon agreed to work for him, in exchange for 200 shares in the company, while maintaining his Newsweek gig. Michael brought along his wife, Susan, who recalled in her 1993 memoir, Take the Long Way Home, that Wenner told them that his ambition “was to become the ‘Henry Luce of the counterculture.’ ”

“He stood out in a crowd,” recalled Michael Lydon, “for the drive and for the ambition and for [having] more going on than you might know right away—the wheels within wheels. You could look at the guy and [see] gears were moving in his head. He was thinking all the time.”

Wenner assigned Lydon a story that Gleason suggested: an exposé on how the promoters of the Monterey Pop Festival, in particular Lou Adler, might have misappropriated the money.

A few months before, Wenner had met a freelance photographer named Baron Wolman at a panel discussion on rock and roll at Mills College featuring Ralph Gleason, Phil Spector, and Tom Donahue, the latter about to invent free-form FM radio in San Francisco at KMPX. Wenner told the impossibly old photographer, aged twenty-nine, about a new rock magazine he was cooking up, at the time the Chet Helms version. “I said, ‘Wow, man, that sounds like a really good idea,’ ” recalled Wolman, who after a stint in the army had moved to California, married a ballet dancer, and ended up in Haight-Ashbury.

Savvy enough to understand the value of his own work, Wolman agreed to be the photographer of what was now Rolling Stone if he could own all his own negatives. Wenner agreed but also asked him if he had $10,000 to invest. “Baron, we are not countercultural,” went Wenner’s pitch. “We are not hippie. I’m in this to make a success and to make a lot of money. I know we can, and everything we do is gonna be professional; it won’t be confused as something that isn’t professional.”

“That was when I began to realize he was very, very focused,” said Wolman.

•

IF JANN WENNER WAS GOING to distinguish his paper from the corpus of The Sunday Ramparts, he needed a distinctive logo. He commissioned one by a psychedelic poster artist named Rick Griffin, who grew up down the hill from Chadwick in Palos Verdes and illustrated for Surfer magazine. The quasi-Victorian lettering that Griffin sketched out had the druggy wink of rolling-paper brands found in head shops. That same summer, Griffin illustrated a poster for an art show featuring a package of marijuana cigarettes and the words “Joint Show: A Rare Blend.” As he was refashioning the fonts for Rolling Stone—with an R strikingly similar to the one in the Ramparts logo—Wenner became so impatient to get his hands on the drawing he went to Griffin’s apartment and took the unfinished draft. “It was the second sketch,” said Wenner. (Griffin later complained he was not paid for it, and Wenner wrote him a check for $5,000 in the early 1970s.)

Wenner’s first expenditure was personalized stationery with Griffin’s Rolling Stone logo on top. Gleason was furious. What a waste! But Wenner loved it, dreamed into it. A real newspaper! Jann Wenner’s newspaper. Soon after, Wenner printed a hundred copies of a four-page dummy in the shape and layout of The Sunday Ramparts, with Griffin’s logo hovering over a film still of John Lennon from How I Won the War. “Ralph and I have done it,” he wrote to Jonathan Cott in London, “started a rock and roll newspaper called Rolling Stone. I hereby authorize you to be our feature writer in Merry Olde. Don’t bother with the newsstand gossip as we already have Melody Maker. Instead, give us your impression of the scene and profiles or extensive interviews with the Beatles, the Stones, Andrew Loog Oldham, Peter Townshend, Donovan and such like that you can get to.”

He offered him $25 a feature. Wenner didn’t have the money to pay Cott, but he was hustling day and night, hitting up friends, relatives, friends of relatives, friends of friends. He went back to the old socialite crowd—Richard Black, Andy Harmon, Susan Andrews—with a rambling pitch about youth culture and rock and roll. A cross between the Mojo Navigator and Seventeen magazine, he told Harmon. “The Mojo Navigator sounded cool to me,” said Harmon, “but Seventeen? Even then Jann had a sense of how to make a commercial enterprise.”

Most people said no. But Joan Roos, the matriarch of SLATE, put in $1,000, and Wenner’s mother wrote him a check, as did Wenner’s stepmother, Dorothy, who gave him $500 under his father’s name. (Wenner promised her she would make a million dollars and told her she now owned “page 18 and 23.”) Gleason put up $1,500 for the first issue and agreed to write a column for Rolling Stone, which he titled Perspectives. In a contract Wenner formulated, he gave Gleason “50/50 veto power” over what went into the paper, making him his editorial equal. If they couldn’t agree on a matter, Wenner proposed, “either party has the option of having the disputed matter printed in Rolling Stone under his byline.”

Using Gleason’s name as a reference, Wenner combed the Haight and North Beach asking for money from record stores and head shops to advertise in his new magazine, $100 for a full page. Tom Donahue’s new free-form radio station signed up; promoter Bill Graham declined Wenner’s offer to invest but bought ads for the first several issues at a discounted $25 a page. Wenner personally flew to Los Angeles to meet with record executives at A&M and Capitol, boldly promising he would displace Billboard magazine. (“Rolling Stone loves you,” he ended his letter to A&M.) In person, his rambling spiel geysered forth as if it were all too exciting and self-evident to explain. But the thrust of it was the basis of his first editorial, wherein he described a newspaper “not just about music, but also about the things and attitudes that the music embraces.” It was about “the magic that can set you free.”

“To describe it any further would be difficult without sounding like bullshit,” he concluded, “and bullshit is like gathering moss.”

Jane Schindelheim never liked the name Rolling Stone, but she liked what Rolling Stone was doing to Jann Wenner. When he moved into the Garrett Press warehouse, he hired contractors to erect Sheetrock partitions for his own office and assigned Jane to decorate the headquarters for her little would-be press baron, a court from which Wenner could command his empire—seven tables manned by unpaid volunteers and some rented typewriters next to a loud and foul-smelling machine burning hot lead all day. By October, Wenner was still short the money he needed to get Rolling Stone off the ground. The Schindelheims of Manhattan had not yet met Jane’s boyfriend, but received a letter describing how they could become a “limited liability partner” in his newspaper for the minimum investment of $2,000. There was, said Wenner, almost no chance of failure:

The very least that can happen for any investor is approximately a 15% return on his or her money per year as well as equity in a going concern. The best that can happen is too fantastic to really talk about, but is roughly comparable to owning a very big and successful magazine on the financial order of Playboy.

Her parents liked the cut of this young man’s jib. A nice Jewish boy with a business mind. They wrote the check, plus a little extra, and gave Rolling Stone the financial push it needed. The money Dr. Schindelheim earned from yanking teeth and capping molars also gave their daughter an ownership stake in Rolling Stone, making her “secretary and director” of the start-up, which, in early October 1967, Wenner incorporated in the state of California under a name he liked quite a lot: Straight Arrow Publishers Inc.

Hey, it was their baby now. Unlike the do-nothing Chet Helms, with his long hair down to his Levi’s, the clever and industrious Jann Wenner, who styled his hair in a pageboy, had managed to raise $7,500 in capital and make it all legal with lawyers. Clearly they were destined to be millionaires and Chet Helms was not. Many years later, while sitting in her vast estate in the Hamptons, on Long Island, Jane Wenner would recall walking into a little San Francisco shop to order an ice cream cone in the 1970s and behind the counter was Chet Helms taking her order. “He was smart enough to be at the right place at the right time, and he just couldn’t do anything,” she said. “There was something so sad to me about that moment for him.”

•

JANN WENNER KNEW EXACTLY what he wanted: When the Rolling Stone telephone lines were installed at Garrett Press, he insisted they be answered by a woman because a woman’s voice was “classy.”

That fall, Jann Wenner and his girlfriend, Jane, and her sister, Linda, along with Michael and Susan Lydon and some volunteer hippies Wenner knew (“groupies,” he called them), toiled to cobble together the first issue of Rolling Stone. Michael Lydon would show up after his shift at Newsweek and work into the night alongside Wenner, who worried every detail. It was hot in San Francisco, and Susan Lydon, pregnant and pouring sweat next to the furnace, wore a slip hiked up over her belly as she watched Wenner bound in and out. “Jann was maniacally driven, a natural speed freak,” Susan Lydon wrote. “And to my great despair, he managed to involve Michael in most of his manic schemes, so that I had to be practically fainting or in tears before we could break for a meal.”

Wenner spent as little money as possible, using Newsweek’s offices for long-distance phone calls and the offices of Ramparts to make Xeroxes and lay out pages, courtesy of Ramparts’ production director John Williams, whom Wenner listed on Rolling Stone’s masthead as the art director. “He was just so energetic and so enthusiastic and knew what he wanted and could talk anybody into doing anything,” said Williams. “You just sort of wanted to help him.

“He offered me a hundred shares of stock for each issue. I was pasting up on some old flats that we had from another project, staying up until three in the morning, in between the Ramparts stuff . . . I didn’t know if it was going to go anywhere or not. I didn’t see how you could start a rock-and-roll magazine on newsprint and get anywhere.”

If Wenner harbored any doubts, they were about his credibility as a rock critic. He loved the music, but he was realistic about his own ignorance, how it worked, what made it good or mediocre. What he needed was the authority of a brand-name critic to rival the bylines at Crawdaddy!, but the person he needed already worked for Crawdaddy! A student of history at Brandeis near Boston, Jon Landau was a twenty-year-old college hermit who was homebound with a painful intestinal disorder and spent his days listening to records and writing crisply pedantic essays on soul and R&B, which he typed up and sent to Paul Williams. Among the small pool of people who wrote rock criticism in 1967, he made a splash for a dissertation-like analysis of Motown and the Supremes called “A Whiter Shade of Black.” Landau detested the San Francisco Sound, but Wenner didn’t care about his R&B bias, only his respected byline, which was being followed with great interest by record executives at Atlantic and Elektra scrambling to discover new acts to replace the fading folk and jazz artists on their rosters. As it happened, Landau was a classmate of Andy Harmon’s at Brandeis. In a pitch letter, Wenner shared his dream of turning Rolling Stone into a “very slick” magazine, describing the “youth market” he aimed to exploit and the competitors he aimed to vanquish, including the new full-color Cheetah, created by the publisher of Weight Watchers; the slickly turned-out Eye magazine, published by Hearst; and various others “proclaiming themselves mind blowing and turned on, hip and with it.”

Landau admired Wenner’s chutzpah. He had never been satisfied with the paltry money at Crawdaddy! and, to Wenner’s chagrin, had started writing for Eye. (To supplement his income, Landau also developed a brisk business selling his complimentary review copies of LPs to record stores.) Moreover, Landau didn’t share Williams’s aversion to negative, knives-out record reviews. He was an arrogant young man; he hated more records than he liked. This is precisely what appealed to Wenner, who wanted controversy in his paper. He didn’t care if a review was “wordy or obscene, as long as it says something.”

“Taste is the important thing,” Wenner said, “and that is the premise of what we are doing.”

Landau agreed to join Rolling Stone as Wenner’s Boston correspondent, telling him he looked forward to “a long and mutually profitable relationship.” If Landau was the high-flown critic Wenner needed, Wenner was for Landau a kind of walking, talking consensus of the new rock culture, the fat middle of youth opinion. “At that moment in time, Jann himself was a very pure distillation of the culture,” Landau said. “He could ask himself, ‘What do I like?’ ”

On October 18, 1967, Wenner gathered his exhausted staff of six next to the printing machine on Brannan Street as they watched the first issue of Rolling Stone roll off the conveyor belt of the Goss Suburban. They opened a bottle of champagne and drank from plastic cups. Only an hour before, Wenner had been typing a letter to Jonathan Cott asking him to get a Beatles interview for the next issue. A new Pink Floyd tape sat on Wenner’s desk, awaiting review. Had Wenner breathed since Monterey? There was no time. But as he finally drew a breath, holding the first issue of Rolling Stone in his hands, he could not imagine anything better. “It’s just so good,” he said, and wept with joy.