Читать книгу Sticky Fingers - Joe Hagan - Страница 15
Оглавление5
Born to Run
An eighteen-year-old kid with a modified Beatles haircut and cuffed blue jeans was standing on the corner of Main Street in Freehold, New Jersey, dropping dimes in a pay phone. He was a guitarist in a rock-and-roll group that wore matching shirts and vests and played covers of “Twist and Shout” at the local drive-in and high school gymnasium. The kid’s father was underemployed, and the family had no telephone in the house, forcing him to amble up to the newsstand to use the pay phone on the corner. In November 1967, he noticed a broadsheet folded in half and stamped with a druggy logo. On the front was a black-and-white photo of John Lennon wearing an army helmet, spectacles on his nose, lips set in a whistle.
Bruce Springsteen slapped twenty-five cents on the counter.
“I used to spend hours and hours on the phone outside the newsstand calling my girlfriends,” he said. “You went in, and there it was. It reached out to my little town and said, ‘You’re not alone.’ ”
In the working-class town of Freehold, population 9,140, Springsteen could count on one hand the number of local teens involved with rock and roll—most of them were in his band. “Maybe there was one or two other people you could talk to if you had something in common,” he said. “At that time, basically the rest of the world was against who you were becoming. You were young; you couldn’t travel to San Francisco. The most you could do was go to the [West] Village on the weekend, which Steve [Van Zandt] and I did, where we initially discovered this form of rock-and-roll writing. It initially came out in the form of Crawdaddy! magazine, which was sheetlike, this small printed sheet, and then Rolling Stone. These were your lifelines.
“You can’t explain to someone today how unique and essential those things were to the fiber of your being in those days,” he continued. “They were the only validating pieces of writing that somebody else out there was thinking about rock music the way you were. That was comforting.”
The pages of Rolling Stone shaped Springsteen’s idea of what a rock-and-roll star did, how to behave. Springsteen himself wouldn’t appear in its pages for another four years—ironically, he would receive a rave review in Hearst’s Examiner before that—but he would never forget that first issue. Rolling Stone opened to a full-page publicity shot of the wives of the Beatles, including Cynthia Lennon in a gold lamé dress, then flipped to a gossip column called Flashes, which reported that David Crosby had left the Byrds and A Hard Day’s Night would be televised on NBC. Further on, Ralph Gleason opined on race in the record business, pointing out that Otis Redding sold more records than Frank Sinatra, and three pages later was “The Rolling Stone Interview” with Donovan, Wenner’s homage to the Playboy interview, conducted by a friend of Gleason’s in L.A. (Slotted into the bottom corner of page 11 was a little trade story reporting that Philco-Ford was spending $1 million to advertise a portable 45 player just as the full-length album renaissance was starting.)
Everything was in charmless black-and-white columns, blocked off with clean Oxford lines, stiff and workmanlike except for the rock-and-roll content—a no-frills Daily Worker for stoned rock fans. The whole thing had been begged, borrowed, recycled, and stolen: Chet Helms’s idea and contestant list; Ralph Gleason’s title and editorial philosophy; the newsprint and layout of The Sunday Ramparts; Jon Landau from Crawdaddy!; several stories from the Melody Maker, rewritten by Susan Lydon. Ramparts magazine had even published a cover image of John Lennon from How I Won the War the month before. But the seams of Wenner’s Frankenstein’s monster were fused together by his obsessive mania and the newspaper’s bold statement of purpose. The table of contents directed the reader to page 20, where “Jann Wenner reviews the new records.” He panned two out of the three albums, including Chuck Berry’s Live at the Fillmore: “If you judge the album by what’s happening today, the judgment isn’t very favorable.” For his own opening gambit, Jon Landau dismissed the breakout Jimi Hendrix as having “inane” lyrics and a “violent” artistic vision, which ran alongside a blurry photograph of Hendrix by Jann Wenner. In the arc of rock-and-roll history, many of these opinions would seem arbitrary and even wrong. But who else was treating these strange records—the new Sopwith Camel album—as matters of consequence?
As important, the clean look of Rolling Stone—the packaging—was a revelation to rock fans used to squinting at the soupy, under-edited prose of Crawdaddy! for the latest Bob Dylan exegesis. Newsprint, which Wenner saw as merely pragmatic until he could afford to become a “slick,” gave Rolling Stone a street feel that made it more authentic than a rock exploitation magazine like Cheetah. As Wenner told Time magazine in 1969, “A lot of people ask why we’re not psychedelic. But that’s the whole point. Psychedelic language and so-called hip language is what the over-thirties think the kids want to see and hear. It’s not. What they respond to is somebody talking to them straight.”
While Springsteen thumbed through his copy in Freehold, Jann Wenner had no idea who was reading the forty thousand copies he printed. As it later turned out, the distributor Miller Freeman left most of the issues moldering in the warehouse and only six thousand copies were sold. But a few reader letters trickled in, the first one from Sharon Miller of Los Angeles, who said, “We all dig Rolling Stone.” By issue No. 3, they heard from a representative of Stax Records in Memphis, who declared, “Amen.” By April 1968, Charlie Watts, the Stones’ drummer, was writing to thank Jon Landau for the “nice things he said about me personally,” a coy reference to a critical slam of Their Satanic Majesties Request (“The rest of us, I’m sure, will try for the next one,” said Watts).
Wenner had one of his volunteers type up a survey to send out to the KFRC contestant list, which generated a murky view into the nascent “youth market” Rolling Stone was hitting—young men who bought and listened to records, smoked pot, and avoided the Vietnam draft and regular work. One reader, for whom music was “the expression of the soul and mind,” said his goal was to “drop out and distribute posters.” Another described himself as “fanatically devoted to rock because it is the truth for a change,” and another made an ornate psychedelic doodle to prove his point. “If I had to fill out the same questionnaire, it would probably sound the same,” said Wenner. “I remember from our first surveys, the average reader was twenty-one, which is the age I was.”
Wenner molded the results into a dubious report for advertisers, claiming that “seventy-three percent” of his readers were men and “95% of the total readership” bought six records a month. After Rolling Stone debuted, Wenner got a letter from Jerry Wexler, the genius producer of Atlantic Records who recorded the soul albums of Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding. “First issue was strong,” he wrote to Wenner, saying he admired Jon Landau but “believe[d] Rolling Stone needs a more specific orientation and point of view. For god’s sake, avoid the groupie syndrome, and let’s not be wide-eyed about the hashcapades or pot busts of the venerated. Need professionalism and detachment. Need identity.”
Was Rolling Stone a trade paper, a critical journal, a teen rag like 16?
“What?” Wexler asked.
But Jann Wenner knew better than this fifty-year-old man did: It was all of the above.
•
WHEN GARRETT PRESS SPAT OUT the first issue of Rolling Stone, Jane Schindelheim’s name was printed inside as the head of subscriptions. “BRAVO JANN WENNER!” she wrote to him. “ROLLING STONE LOOKS SMASHING!”
They were planning to move to a new apartment on Rhode Island Street in Potrero Hill, across the street from Jim Peterman of the Steve Miller Band. Jane was ready to become Jann’s full-time partner in their ascendant enterprise. “Is there enough room in the kitchen for a table?” she asked, “and space for you and Rolling Stone and Chessai [her Lhasa apso] and me?
“I shall make it beautiful,” she promised. “I will touch you soon my darlingest.”
If she could catch him. If Wenner seemed manic before, the demands of his biweekly paper now spun him like a 45. Bands were forming and breaking up weekly, record deals getting made, albums recorded, drugs consumed, musicians busted, rock festivals mushrooming from Colorado to New Jersey. Stories and gossip bubbled to the surface: In the space of two weeks, Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney dreamed up a record label together, a new 50,000-watt FM station was coming to Los Angeles, members of the Lovin’ Spoonful were cooperating with the police following a drug bust, and Jim Morrison was arrested for indecency in New Haven.
From the vantage of the loft on Brannan Street, Wenner looked out over a countercultural mecca that was quickly becoming a company town. Wenner, in his early column called Rock and Roll Music, defined and defended the local scene, which consisted of seven “indigenous” bands (the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape, Country Joe and the Fish, the Steven Miller Band, and Quicksilver Messenger Service) and was defined by long live shows with liquid light displays. A young economist named Michael Phillips, who was involved in inventing the MasterCard at Bank of California, predicted in the summer of 1968 that “the San Francisco Sound” would become a $6 million market by year’s end and “increase the wealth of the city by $8 to $15 million.” The Youngbloods, singers of the ubiquitous hit “Get Together,” moved to San Francisco from New York and saw themselves as part of a crucial industry. “You feel like you’re fulfilling a need,” singer Jesse Colin Young told Rolling Stone, “like a garage mechanic.”
Most of the record-selling business was elsewhere, a fact that actually gave Wenner a distinct advantage. Bands came through town on their tours and Wenner was their turnstile, giving them ink. “There was nothing else to do in San Francisco,” Wenner said. “There were no record companies there. There was nothing else to do but shop and hang out, or hang out with me.”
Steve Winwood of Traffic was the first rock star to visit the offices. “I showed him where all the lead type was,” said Wenner, who called Winwood, in April 1968, “probably the major blues voice of his generation.” To interview Hendrix, Wenner simply drove to his motel in Fisherman’s Wharf and hit record on the tape machine. “Baron and I went out to his motel room and shot the shit,” recalled Wenner. “We published it entirely as a quote.”
It was Hendrix at his loopy best: “The Axis of the earth turns around and changes the face of the world and completely different civilizations come about or another age comes about. In other words, it changes the face of the earth and it only takes about T of a day. Well, the same with love; if a cat falls in love, it might change his whole scene. Axis, Bold as Love . . . 1-2-3 rock around the clock.”
Through people like Derek Taylor, who was training the Byrds and the Beach Boys about the media, Wenner tapped into a network of advocates who put his newspaper in all the right hands. “I used to read every word of every page of every issue,” said David Crosby, who would soon form Crosby, Stills, and Nash. “It was the first one that wasn’t a Teen Scream boy thing. It was the first one that was about us, that was about actual music, and we dug the shit out of it.”
The artists came looking for him. Local heroes Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs took assignments to write stories and reviews for Rolling Stone (“Miller on the British Groups: Queer Bits in Underwear”). The manager of the Stooges in Detroit wrote asking for help booking gigs in San Francisco (Wenner suggested posting a free ad in his back pages). After Blood, Sweat, and Tears signed a lucrative contract with Columbia, Wenner assigned keyboardist Al Kooper to review the D. A. Pennebaker film of Monterey Pop, and two months later Wenner profiled Blood, Sweat, and Tears, calling them “the best thing to happen in rock and roll so far in 1968.” When Lou Adler and John Phillips tried organizing a second Monterey Pop Festival and were met by local opposition, Wenner put them on the cover of Rolling Stone and called their opponents a “vicious” and “ugly collection of voyeuristic ‘taxpayers.’ ” “They were going to the city council and the local swells to get a permit,” he said. “I met them at the airport and I was with them as they stepped off the Lear jet.” (The festival never happened, and Rolling Stone again turned on Adler, reporting that his accountant had embezzled $37,000 from the first festival. “[Wenner] was obsessed with the funds, and it went on for years,” said Adler. “Truly years, almost every time he mentioned Monterey, ‘Where’s the money?’ That’s how I always thought of him. ‘Where’s the money?’ He was definitely a pain in the ass.” Adler insisted that all the money went to charity.)
Wenner seemed preternaturally certain in all things but his own writing powers. His failure to become a novelist still haunted him (he continued to rewrite and edit versions of “Now These Days Are Gone”), and at first his writing style had the generic feel of a student term paper. When in doubt, Wenner resorted to hippie patois, starting his cover story in issue No. 2, “Tina Turner is an incredible chick.” When Otis Redding died in a plane crash in December 1967, Wenner asked Michael Lydon to write the obituary, but Lydon declined, saying Wenner needed to write it to establish his authority. “I said, no, Jann, you’ve got to do this,” he said. “He wasn’t confident in himself as a writer.” (“Otis was the Crown Prince of Soul,” wrote Wenner, “and now the Crown Prince is dead.”)
Wenner improvised as he went. When John Williams left town for the holidays, Wenner was left to lay out the year-end issue for 1967 by himself—prompting a panicked call to Linda Schindelheim’s boyfriend, Bob Kingsbury a forty-three-year-old sculptor. “We’re on deadline and I need you to help me put something together,” he told Kingsbury, who was skiing in Tahoe. A graduate of the Swedish State School of Arts, Crafts, and Design in Stockholm, class of 1950, Kingsbury was a middle-aged bohemian and gifted artist with no experience in newspapers but a few novel ideas about arranging text and images. “He asked me if I thought I could be an art director,” Kingsbury would later recount. “I went over to Ramparts one night to watch John Williams paste up ’til the wee hours of the morning. I watched him a couple of times. I figured it would just take me three days, every two weeks.”
Wenner knew so little, even the most obvious suggestions were revelations—like Gleason’s advice that he put an ad in Rolling Stone asking for record review submissions. It not only worked, it attracted writers who would become major figures of rock writing, like Leslie “Lester” Bangs, who sent in reviews from his mother’s house near San Diego, and Jerry Hopkins, the future biographer of Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison. Hopkins was a sometime publicist and head-shop owner who sold Rolling Stone in L.A. He sent Wenner a story on seeing the Doors at the Cheetah club in Santa Monica, and Wenner wrote him a check for $15. Soon after, Wenner showed up in L.A. wearing a suit and tie and asking to sleep on his couch while he went hustling for ad dollars from the record companies.
As advertising trickled in from Elektra and A&M, Wenner kept his paper glued together through Tom Sawyeresque exploitation. Kingsbury built his own drafting table and drawers for the lead type and was responsible for buying new desks and chairs every time an employee joined the newspaper. He also collected the reader mail and served as Wenner’s personal handyman. When Jann and Jane complained that their power had gone out at home, Kingsbury came over and “changed the lightbulb and the lights went on,” recalled Linda Kingsbury.
The Wenners now lived Rolling Stone twenty-four hours a day. They took the bus to Brannan Street in the afternoon and worked into the night, Wenner whacking away on an IBM Selectric, soliciting Dylan and Lennon for interviews and sending blue-sky letters to A&M and Columbia, trying to get distribution for Rolling Stone in record stores. Jane, in pigtails and overalls, tabulated the day’s subscriptions, then went home to idle around the apartment or go shopping for furniture. If they got a dozen subscriptions in a day, it was cause for celebration, the uncorking of a bottle of wine or the smoking of a joint. The Springsteens of the world began writing letters to the editor. “At first it would be six or seven or eight [letters],” said Bob Kingsbury. “Then ten, fifteen, twenty, and pretty soon there’s half a bag full of letters. And it just kept growing and growing. I couldn’t do it anymore; I had to have someone else take over.”
In April 1968, Wenner offered a weed dealer named Charlie Perry a job copyediting and managing the work flow at Rolling Stone. A Berkeley graduate, Perry was an eccentric drug adventurer, experimental cook, aspiring Arabic scholar, and former roommate of Augustus Owsley Stanley III’s who heard about Rolling Stone through Jerrold Greenberg, a poet and junkie who wrote for the paper. Perry knew Wenner’s byline from Ramparts, thinking this Jann person was “a pretty shrewd rock critic for a girl.” He took the job because he figured “John Lennon knew something about LSD that he isn’t putting in his songs and I thought if I met him I could ask him.”
Perry, like everyone else, was excited by Wenner’s creation, convinced it was something “brand new,” though he still figured it would probably be dead in six months like every other fly-by-night paper that popped up at the Psychedelic Shop in the Haight. Wenner managed not to pay him for several months, which was fine with Perry until his dope trade dried up and he announced he was taking a job at the zoo. Wenner agreed to give him $40 a week. He would stay for ten years.
•
ON HIS FIRST TRIP to New York in 1968, Wenner slept on a couch in the West Twentieth Street apartment of Danny Fields, the A&R man for Elektra Records. Ironic and frank, Fields was the consummate scene maker and gossip of New York, one foot in the world of Andy Warhol, the other in teen pop magazines like Hullabaloo and Datebook. He followed with delight the young male quartets who pranced on stage and sang to the big beats. “Monks! Mark! Stones! Spoons!” went a typical headline on the cover of 16, where Fields regularly published interviews. Fields joined Elektra in 1967 as a publicist and, after discovering the MC5 and Iggy Pop on the same weekend, became the “house freak,” an after-hours talent scout. Most nights, Fields worked the back room at Max’s Kansas City, Mickey Ruskin’s nightclub, where rock and rollers began mingling with the Warhol crowd after Beatles manager Brian Epstein held a press conference there. Fields had hosted Pete Townshend of the Who in his apartment before Wenner showed up, plying him with drugs and groping him. “I enjoyed what he did, though I didn’t let him actually fuck me,” Townshend said in his 2012 memoir.
Fields was the Virgil to Wenner’s Dante on a grand tour of the New York underground, which teemed with drugs and sexual adventure, groupies and bohemians. In Fields’s orbit were a gaggle of the like-minded, including a beautiful blond photographer named Linda Eastman, daughter of an entertainment lawyer, who used her access to both photograph and pursue romantic tête-à-têtes with Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison. Eastman’s best friend was Lillian Roxon, an Australian rock writer who published the Rock Encyclopedia in 1969 and whom Rolling Stone would later call “the Dorothy Parker of Max’s Kansas City.” In May 1968, Wenner put Eastman’s portrait of Eric Clapton on the cover for an interview with Clapton that Wenner had conducted the previous summer—the first female photographer whose work appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. From there, Wenner would regularly visit her apartment on East Eighty-Third Street to go through her portfolio for images. “That was how I came to hear of Jann,” said Paul McCartney, whom Eastman met while on assignment in London for Rolling Stone and would marry in 1969, “as the sort of guy who was doing Rolling Stone and who picked photos from her little apartment.”
Fields also introduced Wenner to Gloria Stavers, the forty-one-year-old editor of 16 magazine, a former model who looked like Katharine Hepburn and commanded four million teenage readers in America. When Wenner sent her a copy of Rolling Stone, Stavers welcomed the magazine as a “soul-brother in the fourth estate” and urged her readers to send a quarter to Brannan Street for a copy of Rolling Stone. (The Wenners used the coins that poured in to buy groceries.) Stavers received Wenner like a squire from the groovy West Coast kingdom. “They were excited to meet me,” recalled Wenner. Over dinner with Fields, Stavers taught Wenner how to eat a lobster while wondering at his naïveté. As she would later recount to a friend, Wenner sat at her feet, looked around at the guests, and asked, “Is this a good party?”
Fields and Stavers taught Wenner some of the tricks of their trade. For one, Fields explained to him, he needed to treat the cover of his newspaper as the sales pitch—bold, eye-popping images of superstars were how magazines sold the wares. “I never, ever thought of that; it didn’t occur to me,” said Wenner. “If you’re hip about media, it’s obvious.”
Stavers also pressed on him the importance of sexing up photos of young rockers by unbuttoning the top button of their pants before photographing them. These were experienced starfuckers, groupies, admirers, and they recognized Wenner as a fellow traveler, attuned to the provocative pleasures of boy rockers. “That’s how you love the stars,” observed Art Garfunkel, a staple of Tiger Beat and 16 at the time, along with Paul Simon. “You have to get under the pedestal and look up their pants, to praise the height of the star.” (He called Wenner’s lust for celebrity “erotic slavery.”)
Wenner said he was not yet clued in to Fields’s homosexuality or the gay culture hiding in plain sight at Max’s. Instead, he chased whatever he could get. One night, he tried taking Linda Eastman home, but Lillian Roxon intervened. “Roxon was a nice girl, very witty, but dumpy looking,” said Wenner. “She didn’t want me to be with Linda, because Linda was hers.”
Wenner said they went back to Eastman’s apartment, but Roxon had skunked the mood. “Then, after failing to consummate what I thought was going to be a situation, we got along because she was a stone cold rock-and-roll fan,” Wenner said of Eastman.
Wenner returned from his New York sojourns with an expansive sense of victory. He wrote to Baron Wolman that “Rolling Stone is distributed on every fucking newsstand in New York. I saw every important person in the music business, and they were most eager to see the man from Rolling Stone.
“When you get home,” he said, “we’ll just have to sit down and flatter the shit out of ourselves.”
Afterward, Roxon wrote a short profile of Wenner for Eye, the hippie exploitation magazine published by Hearst and presided over by editorial director Helen Gurley Brown. In the article, Wenner told Roxon he was considering publishing naked pictures of rock stars. “I am giving the project serious consideration,” he told Roxon. “After all, rock and roll is inescapably tied to sex.”
Wenner wrote to Roxon to say he had received “nasty” letters about the profile, including one from a reader who asked, “What kind of man would publish pop stars in the nude?”
•
BOB KINGSBURY, twice the age of his boss, described the twenty-two-year-old Jann Wenner as standing with hands on his hips, chest puffed out, athwart his kingdom like a tyrannical king. “I’d bring a layout and he’d look at it and throw it back at me and say, ‘Do it over,’ ” said Kingsbury. “Well, I spent a long time on it, you know. And so I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Because I said so.’ ”
“I was pushing fifty and he was pushing twenty-two,” he said. “These are all kids. Twenty-three-year-olds. And if you’ve ever worked with a bunch of twenty-three-year-olds, you’ll understand. But if you haven’t, it’s one of the most horrible—listen, every single one of them: ‘I’m an editor of Rolling Stone!’ ”
Wenner wrote long letters to Jon Landau and spent hours running up phone bills as they schemed and bragged about their newfound influence. (“What did Jon have to say?” Jane would ask Wenner after a marathon phone call. “Not much,” he’d reply.) Landau was educating young Wenner about music, a subject that Wenner, as big a fan as he was, knew very little about. He took him to see the Four Tops in Boston and inspired him to interview Booker T. and the MGs. “I never had been exposed to the rhythm and blues until Jon turned me on to all that,” he said. “I really learned at his knees. I was a San Francisco guy, just the basics.”
In turn, Wenner was dropping Landau’s name to recruit writers from rival publications, including Robert Christgau, a writer for Esquire who had cited Wenner in a feature on college dropouts shaping the rock world. In a May 1968 letter, Wenner ripped up a review Christgau submitted (for Judy in Disguise with Glasses, by John Fred and His Playboy Band), declaring himself the “EDITOR of Rolling Stone” and calling Christgau “Bobby Baby” as he attempted to school him on the finer points of rock reviewing. “The first page is all about Bob Christgau, Esquire reviewer, late of a college education, a man of renaissance tastes, elegant opinion, and high tone critic of ‘secular music,’ ” scoffed Wenner. “I mean, baby, who cares? And is it true anyway?”
To rub it in, he declared Jon Landau “smarter than anybody.” “Did you know he is majoring in medieavil [sic] history?” he asked. “You may think you don’t have to know anything about music, but you are wrong. I can’t tell you why. That’s how wrong you are.”
In a concluding twist, he granted that Christgau “could turn into one of the top rock and roll critics. I sincerely hope you do.”
Indeed he would. The “Dean of American Rock Critics,” as Christgau later called himself, told Wenner that he had the “worst case of San Francisco pompousness I’ve ever observed” and asked whether Wenner wrote all of his letters “while high.” Christgau didn’t write another review for Rolling Stone for decades. “I took out my animosity toward New York– based critics and intellectualizers on him,” said Wenner, “and alienated him early on and he never forgave.”
Wenner had a fair-weather relationship to the “straight journalism” he aspired to. When Susan Lydon filed a film review that used the first person, Wenner tore it to pieces and stomped on it like a “crazed Rumpelstiltskin,” she later recounted, telling her that the first person undermined journalistic objectivity. Meanwhile, Al Aronowitz, the rock journalist famous for introducing Dylan to the Beatles, excoriated Wenner for pasting whole paragraphs from a press release into his story on the Band. “Such use of press releases indicates that you are more interested in record company advertising than you are in honest reportage,” he wrote.
Was Rolling Stone a newspaper, wondered Aronowitz, or “just your own personal ego trip”?
Wenner, for all his chutzpah, tended to avoid personal confrontation. In 1968, he published a fake letter to the editor disparaging a Landau review under the pseudonym “Kevin Altman.” “I was disagreeing with something Jon Landau said, but I wouldn’t say it to his face,” he said.
But with Rolling Stone as his sword and shield, Wenner delighted in biting the hands that fed him. In the same issue he published his Clapton interview, and he tested his influence by running Jon Landau’s critical assassination of Cream—“Clapton is a master of the blues clichés”—which Eric Clapton later said made him pass out and then disband the group. “The ring of truth just knocked me backward,” Clapton would recount. “I was in a restaurant and I fainted. After I woke up, I immediately decided that it was the end of the band.”
Not to be outdone, Wenner followed up with a slashing review of their album Wheels of Fire, saying, “Cream is good at a number of things; unfortunately, songwriting and recording are not among them.” “Cream Breaks Up!” went the headline in the very next issue.
When the inevitable blowback from a record label came, Wenner would blame a writer or simply shrug. It was a cycle he was destined to repeat, fomenting controversy and then whistling past the ensuing storm: “I wrote a headline, ‘Pig Pen to Meet Pope?’ ”—about a rock festival in Rome—“Bill Graham thought this was sensationalist. I just thought it was funny. But he thought it was terrible. Then he tried to ban me from the Fillmore.” (Graham later caught Jann and Jane Wenner attending an Allman Brothers show.)
Some of Wenner’s biases were merely petty and personal. After the song “Mrs. Robinson,” from the soundtrack of The Graduate, made the success of Simon and Garfunkel too conspicuous to ignore, Wenner reported in his gossip column that they had made “an amazing comeback.” Gleason, well aware of the personal history, called up Denise Kaufman to share a laugh about it. “Did you see Rolling Stone?” he asked and then read her the quote. “He had to say something,” recalled Denise Kaufman, “but he had to justify why he hadn’t written about them in all that time.”
That spring, Rolling Stone panned Simon and Garfunkel’s next album, Bookends, which also featured “Mrs. Robinson.”
•
JANE SCHINDELHEIM WAS NOT FOND of work, preferring long afternoons on the couch or a languorous stroll through a department store, running her finger across an expensive Eames chair or pondering the appeal of an Oriental rug. And by the summer of 1968, she was tired of taking the public bus to work. She asked Jann to buy a car and not just any car but a Porsche. So Wenner borrowed $200 from Jane’s sister, Linda, who figured they would use it to buy a sensible VW Bug. Instead, Wenner was raising money so he could buy a 1963 powder-blue Porsche 1600-N Cabriolet. “At first I was like, ‘Well, that’s outrageous,’ ” said Linda. “But then I thought, ‘Well, why not? Why do you have to be stuck with a geeky car?’ ” Wenner said it would barely climb the hills of San Francisco, but he did pay to have it painted burgundy.
At the start, Rolling Stone was a family affair, with Linda briefly living with Jann and Jane, but the couple was moving up fast, relocating to an apartment on Rhode Island Street in Potrero Hill, an A-frame triplex with a rattan chair hanging from the ceiling, a sleeping loft, a Balinese-style bathroom, and a bowl of hash on the dining room table (the apartment belonged to David Buschman, co-founder of the outdoor equipment company Sierra Designs). For people their age, most of whom were still living on mattresses in communal circumstances, Jann and Jane were veritable sophisticates entertaining like upstart Medici. “Jann and Janie were closer to adults than the rest of us,” said Ben Sidran, a jazz writer who met Wenner in London in 1968. “They were more plugged into society and the social scene.”
Wenner regularly courted potential investors, offering Steve Miller a quarter of the company for $4,000 one night over dinner. Miller didn’t bite. “I remember being really amazed when I got to his place because I was living in a funky old house in the Haight and driving around in an economy VW bus,” Miller said. “Jann was driving a Porsche and living in this beautiful house, hip and zen, beautiful sound system . . . I thought he was smart as can be but too ambitious. I got the feeling he would sell me out in a second.”
One day, two letters arrived from an old friend in London: Robin Gracey. One was for Linda Schindelheim and the other for Jann Wenner. Evidently suspicious, Jane asked Linda to boil a pot of water and steam open the seal on Wenner’s letter, which revealed their secret love affair. “Jane discovered it one day in my files while I was away,” recalled Wenner.
Wenner’s gay affair was a bruising revelation for Jane, “terrifying and destroying,” as Wenner described it later. He swore to her that his dalliance with Gracey was a one-off and proclaimed his commitment to her. “Once Jane [found out],” said Wenner, “I said, ‘Look, I will stop. I will put an end to this.’ And I did.”
With his star rising in every other way, Wenner could not afford to lose Jane. There was her beauty and allure, of course, but also her calming effect on Wenner, the witty way she called Jann “Ya Ya” and casually punctured his ego at parties. Jane made Wenner palatable to people otherwise put off by his hyperactivity and forceful personality. She had a keen judgment, but she was not judgmental. Her feline presence, coy and ironic, invited confession and gave an impression of intimacy that Jann Wenner could not offer. There was also her caretaking eye. “Jann was always, in hiring, trying to bring in these people who were just horrible,” said Laurel Gonsalves, a former secretary for the Steve Miller Band who went to work at Rolling Stone in 1969. “Just losers. Kind of like a bad judge of character. Jane was always spot-on.”
One of her standards, it seemed, was whether a candidate was attracted to her. “When somebody was applying for a job there,” recalled Charlie Perry, “she would flirt with them. On the basis of his reaction, she’d tell Jann whether to hire him or not. If they didn’t react, she thought that was suspicious. If they reacted the wrong way, that was a no-no.”
But there was also the little matter of her financial stake in Rolling Stone, the Schindelheim ownership of nearly half the company. Were Jane to leave Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone might fall into ownership dispute, threatening his control.
That summer, Jann and Jane stayed with Rolling Stone’s L.A. correspondent Jerry Hopkins, who was living in Laurel Canyon with his new wife and seemed to Wenner blissful and content. “When I came back from that trip, I was like, ‘They are very happily married,’ ” said Wenner. “And all of my friends had said how much they liked Jane. People would come up to me and say, ‘She’s terrific, you should marry her.’ I saw how happily married these two were, and I discussed that with Jane, and I said, ‘Let’s get married.’ ” (Hopkins would later divorce, move to Honolulu, and take up with a transsexual prostitute.)
After meeting him, Jane’s parents were impressed by Wenner’s ambition, especially her father, whose approval was important to Jane. Plagued by self-doubt, she clung to Wenner’s promise of fidelity, even as she worried over the “un-ease that mocks at our relationship.”In Rolling Stone, their mutual desires for wealth and status and the finer things in life came together. They saw themselves in each other, like a twin gazing into a gilt-framed mirror and experiencing an affectionate familiarity. Jane’s devotion to Wenner could be seen as a kind of vicarious grandiosity. And wasn’t that love? And so Jane agreed to marry Jann, but not without trepidation. “She said later she was really doubtful and dubious about that,” recalled Wenner.
Wenner had his own apprehensions. By this time, Denise Kaufman had become close friends with Wenner’s sister Martha, who had changed her name to Merlyn and was running a hippie day school in Marin County, living in teepees and teaching astrology and the I Ching. In the days leading up to his marriage, Wenner took Kaufman on a drive in his Porsche, and they parked in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. “It was pretty emotional,” she said. “I was like, ‘Are you really gonna do this?’ and he was like, ‘I don’t know.’ It was poignant.”
On their wedding day, Jane cut Wenner’s hair with a bowl, making him look like a little prince. He wore a bow tie, Jane a white linen dress. It was so casual that on the way to the ceremony at a synagogue next to the Fillmore, the Wenners ran into Bill Graham and invited him to attend. John Warnecke was the best man, and the piano player was Jim Peterman from the Steve Miller Band (whose playing Wenner characterized in Rolling Stone as “precise and heavy”). It was a quick ceremony before a rabbi, and afterward they went back to the Wenners’ house and got stoned. None of their parents attended. Because Wenner’s parents hated each other, Jane didn’t invite her own parents, which she later regretted. Wenner’s mother, who came out to her kids as a lesbian in the late 1960s, also made it clear she disliked Jane. For their wedding present, Sim gave them back her modest stock in Rolling Stone, “the cheapest thing she could get away with,” said Wenner.
Nonetheless, Jane changed her last name to Wenner and removed her name from the Rolling Stone masthead so she could devote her time to being a homemaker, decorating their apartment on Rhode Island Street. Afterward, Jann wrote a four-page letter to Robin Gracey saying he was closing the book on their friendship, as painful as it was to him. According to Gracey, the letter ranged through Wenner’s private desires and guilt as he tried justifying his decision. “He’s kind of manufacturing his own security,” Gracey recounted. “I think he was trying to say, ‘Now I have a relationship with Janie, at another time I would have had one with you, and da-dee-da.’ ”
Wenner, said Gracey, told him that “he now has to put the letter in an envelope, seal it up, and get on with the life that he’s really leading, which is a married life. But there’s plenty else in the letter which suggests that things are not so secure as that.”
“He was unsure whether he was gay or bisexual or which way he was,” Gracey added.
(Gracey still possessed the letter, but Wenner asked him to keep it private because the contents would be “damaging,” he said.)
For a honeymoon, the Wenners motored the Porsche to Tomales Bay, fifty miles north of San Francisco, but when they arrived, they decided it was boring and returned to town. As it happened, British record producer Glyn Johns was in Los Angeles recording the second Steve Miller Band album, Sailor, and had invited Wenner to hang out. In a studio down the street, Johns would be helping the Rolling Stones mix a new record called Beggars Banquet. It would be Jann Wenner’s first chance to meet Mick Jagger. Jann Wenner got on a plane and left Jane Wenner at home.
