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Sympathy for the Devil
When he first saw it, Mick Jagger was startled by the audacity of Rolling Stone—to name a newspaper after his band and not even put the Rolling Stones on the cover of the first issue? It was an affront that would stick with Jagger for the next fifty years. “Why did Jann call it that, when there was a band called that?” asked Jagger. “You could have thought something else, to be honest. I mean, I know it arised from a song name, but that’s not really the point.”
He continued, trying to discern Wenner’s logic:
The song name, I wouldn’t say, is very obscure, but it wasn’t like the name of a thing. It was a song. Of course, there’s no copyright for all these things—“Rolling Stone Ice Cream,” go ahead. But it was a magazine about rock music. It wasn’t quite the same as calling something ice cream. There’s obviously a closer connection than that. It was obviously a very close connection. You could have called it Beatles, or spelled it slightly wrong, or something like that. Now, you think about it, it sounds ridiculous. But he could have done it. It’s a back-handed compliment in one way, but it’s also a very unoriginal title.
Keith Richards put it more succinctly: “We thought, ‘What a thief!’ ”
From the start, there was confusion over the name. “Because Rolling Stone was brand-new,” said Jerry Hopkins, “I was constantly saying to people, ‘No, not the group, the newspaper.’ ”
Wenner once said he had no trouble getting the phone company to install his business lines on Brannan Street because they “thought we were the Rolling Stones.” He benefited from the confusion, a fact not lost on Allen Klein, the band’s manager, who immediately sent Wenner a cease-and-desist letter. “Your wrongful conduct constitutes, at the very least, a misappropriation of my clients’ property rights in the name Rolling Stones for your own commercial benefit,” wrote Klein’s lawyer. “It is also a violation of my clients’ copyright to the name ‘Rolling Stones.’ ”
The lawyer demanded Wenner retract and destroy all copies of Rolling Stone or suffer “immediate legal action including an injunction and a suit for treble damages.”
Wenner, whose friendship with Stones press secretary Jo Bergman had emboldened him to promise “an interview with Mick Jagger” in a Rolling Stone press release, began living in quiet terror. In November 1967, he wrote to Jagger directly, hoping to circumvent a lawsuit. “Greetings from San Francisco!” began the letter. “My feeling is that you haven’t got any idea that this action has been taken on your behalf,” he wrote. “ ’Cause it just doesn’t seem like it’s where you and the Stones are at.”
Wenner asked Jagger to call him for an interview so Rolling Stone could publish something positive about the Rolling Stones. “That would be a groove,” he said, “ ’cause we’re all very interested in what’s happening with everybody.”
“It just looks like a great mistake,” he concluded. “We love you.”
Silence followed and Wenner squirmed, telling Bergman he was “very edgy” waiting for Jagger to exculpate him from legal action, which was “essential” if he were going to forge an advertising deal with Columbia Records. “We have to get this settled before it becomes out of sight,” he wrote to her.
Stroking his chin from afar, Mick Jagger could not help but observe how the Beatles were using Rolling Stone as a handy promotional vehicle, with Wenner writing about them in the most reverent of terms. Indeed, Jagger could use a guy like Jann Wenner in America, especially after his last album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, was so poorly received. Jon Landau ripped it in Rolling Stone as an insecure Sgt. Pepper’s knockoff and declared the production and Jagger’s lyrics “embarrassing.” A full nine months and fourteen issues into the existence of Rolling Stone and the Rolling Stones had yet to appear on the cover, while their archrivals, the Beatles, had already appeared three times. If the lawsuit threat was a “great mistake,” it was also a convenient bit of leverage, and if nothing else Mick Jagger liked leverage. “I don’t think Mick lets anyone off the hook for anything,” said Keith Richards. “He’s never let anyone off the hook, once he’s got one in.”
That summer, Jagger learned that Wenner was hoping to start a British version of Rolling Stone in London. Jonathan Cott wrote to Wenner to report rumblings of legal hassles from the Stones if he attempted to publish in England. Bergman, the Stones’ secretary, warned Cott that “the Stones might bring the legal thing out in the open here, since there is a Rolling Stone Magazine for the group, already here.” It looked to Cott like a “bad scene.”
Wenner had met Rolling Stones producer Glyn Johns through his neighbor Boz Scaggs, late of the Steve Miller Band, and over dinner one night in San Francisco asked him to invest in Rolling Stone. Johns declined but offered to broker a meeting with Jagger. The moment arrived when the Stones were mixing Beggars Banquet at Sunset Sound studios in Hollywood in the summer of 1968. Wenner arrived bristling with bonhomie, eager to win Jagger over for an interview and to broach the sticky issue of the Rolling Stone trademark. After Wenner scribbled detailed notes about the new album, Jagger invited him back to his rented house in Beverly Hills, where they listened to an acetate of the first album by the Band, Music from Big Pink, ate pizza, and talked business. Wenner was in heaven, basking in Jagger’s luminous stardom. Jagger proposed that Wenner come to London to discuss the possibility of publishing the British version of Rolling Stone, with Mick Jagger as half owner.
Everything was falling into place: Jagger had already been toying with the idea of starting a magazine and now here was Jann Wenner, who already had a successful one named Rolling Stone, and was thereby poised under Jagger’s thumb. “Jann and I thought it would be good to make one that was partly the same thing but would be localized in some way,” Jagger said.
To show his appreciation, Wenner went back to San Francisco and wrote up a song-by-song preview of Beggars Banquet for Rolling Stone, comparing Jagger’s lyrics to those of Bob Dylan and declaring it “the Stones’ best record, without a doubt.” Wenner’s studious annotation of the album included the story behind the iconic “Sympathy for the Devil,” the album’s most “significant” song, with its famous reference to the Kennedys:
The first version of the song—then called “The Devil Is My Name”—contained the lyric, “I shouted out, who killed Kennedy? After all it was you and me.” The next day Bobby was shot. The second version of the song, the one which will be on the album, recorded the next day, had this line instead: “I shouted out, ‘Who killed the Kennedys? After all it was you and me.’ ”
Wenner described Jagger as “a thin, modish Oscar Wilde figure” trailed by “bizarre” groupies whose “reaction to the famous—and in this case, almost what one could call the ‘spiritually famous’—was as intense as ever.” His presence, Wenner wrote, “caused wave-like spreading of recognition. He is still Mick Jagger.”
What separated Jann Wenner from the other groupies, of course, was Rolling Stone. And the week of August 10, 1968, Wenner put Mick Jagger on the cover for the first time, the singer pouting and slithery in a tank top, a pair of headphones on his head. “The Return of the Rolling Stones,” declared the headline.
•
THERE WAS A NARCOTIC FREEDOM to Rolling Stone as it charted the late 1960s, the primitive newsprint pages opening like a lotus flower, petal by petal, with revelations. The Beatles denounced the Maharishi. Dylan made a bunch of bootlegs in a basement. A blues-rock group called Fleetwood Mac was coming to America. And white people were finally learning how to be black. “They don’t clap as well as a James Brown audience in the ghetto areas,” wrote Ralph Gleason in June 1968, “but they clap a thousand times better than their parents did.”
Wenner delighted in provocative photography celebrating liberated and alternative sexuality (mainly lesbianism) and published whole guides to buying and smoking marijuana, a habit so ubiquitous that a page 3 image of a boy smoking a joint shocked no one. There were poems by Richard Brautigan and Allen Ginsberg; stories on comic artist R. Crumb and pop artist Roy Lichtenstein; interviews with Miles Davis and Tiny Tim; premier LPs by new artists like Joni Mitchell (“A penny-yellow blonde with a vanilla voice”) and Sly Stone (“The most adventurous soul music of 1968”). Rolling Stone recorded every tossed-off “um” and “uh” of Frank Zappa and Jim Morrison (including a long and pretentious poem Wenner reluctantly agreed to publish), every hiccup of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which Jonathan Cott grokked for readers with the sensitivity of the Oxford scholar he had once hoped to be until Rolling Stone took over his life. Reviewing Lennon’s first art show in London, Cott even transcribed the contents of the guest book, which included an insightful critique by the pioneering psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich: “This armoring of the character is the basis of loneliness, helplessness, craving for authority, fear of responsibility, mystic longing, sexual misery, of impotent rebelliousness as well as of resignation of an unnatural and pathological type.”
Even the advertisements were windows into the exotic American underworld of head shops, rock festivals, and free-form radio stations—Middle Eastern hookahs, a book by Carlos Castaneda, a three-day “Aquarian Exposition” in Woodstock, New York—all of it burbling up from the streets to be framed in Wenner’s Oxford borders, made righteous by the Rolling Stone banner. “The moment I saw the logo and the layout, it just had this magnetism,” recalled writer Timothy Crouse, who saw it at a kiosk in Harvard Square before coming to work at Rolling Stone in 1970. “That frame had a magic to it. That frame had a life to it.”
The contrast between Rolling Stone’s straight design and the pottinged content inside was like “a circus,” said David Dalton, who began at Rolling Stone in 1968 after writing for teen magazines in New York. “All the clowns and monkeys could jump around, but it was all contained in these Oxford lines.”
Where else could you read, in a well-prepared newspaper, that a bunch of hippies climbed Mount Tamalpais, north of San Francisco, and had a pretty good time on acid? “No structure,” wrote Mike Goodwin, who became Rolling Stone’s first film critic. “Never was any structure. Stephen said, ‘Let’s make it up to the mountain,’ and The Class made it. Nothing to do but make it. Nothing to say but it’s OK. Smoking dope and dropping acid in the sun. A hundred people singing to a guitar, ‘I Shall Be Released,’ softly. An energy bash at Mt. Tamalpais.”
The newspaper was anchored by the loud sniffs and harrumphs of its bracing record reviews, written by college graduates who chin stroked and sneered as if they were parsing Picasso and not albums by the Steve Miller Band. Langdon Winner, a friend of Greil Marcus’s from Berkeley, ripped the first album by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and Jon Landau reveled in casually ponderous dismissal, proclaiming Aretha Franklin’s “Think” tied with “Chain of Fools” for “worst single” with “virtually no melody.” But the actual opinions were not the most important thing; this was all the fine print of a movement, proof to readers that they were participating in a secret counterpower to the mass media. In Rolling Stone, they could finally hear themselves think aloud: Among Wenner’s best ideas was to print highly opinionated reader letters, kids from Omaha and Miami sounding off with sarcasm and arch humor under the banner of “Correspondence, Love Letters & Advice.”
• Let’s face it: John and Yoko are embarrassing bores.
• Sitting up watching the chick across the street doing some nude exercises and trying to jerk off—but I didn’t come until I read Paul Williams’ review of the new Kinks album.
• I enjoyed your pipe article but was disappointed by your treatment of the bong.
• Many times I have seen your paper kill someone with paper and ink; it is always a very efficient job. And it is always justifiable homicide.
• You piss me off.
The readers were people who knew every Dylan lyric, could give chapter and verse on every Stones controversy, needed things from the Beatles to get to the next day, had feelings as powerful as Landau or Greil Marcus, if not more powerful, and goddamn if they were going to stand by while Rolling Stone trashed John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Jann Wenner had a tiger by the tail.
Even the problems could seem proof of the righteousness of Rolling Stone. When Columbia Records field-tested the sales power of Rolling Stone in record stores, it noted “consumer complaints with reference to their ‘teeny-boppers’ picking up the newspaper and being exposed to ‘hard’ language.” The teenyboppers didn’t mind. Indeed, they subscribed and got their free roach clip or free copy of the Grateful Dead’s Anthem of the Sun (part of a deal Wenner struck with Warner Bros.) while their parents wrote in to demand, like Mrs. Marsha Ann Booth of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, that they “do not, and I mean do not, send Rolling Stone to my daughter . . . Keep it under ground and bury it. Never and I mean never send that thing to this address again. Trash! Trash! Trash!”—which Wenner published in full.
Inside the warehouse, as well, success had not bred happiness. There was a growing dissatisfaction with Wenner. Ralph Gleason was furious at him for letting Rolling Stone come out late and littered with errors (“We should never be in the situation, as we do in the Monkees story, discussing a facility like the Coliseum as being ‘24,000 or 30,000’ when it is in fact around 16,000”) and leaving behind a trail of angry and unpaid writers—including himself. In September 1968, Gleason tendered his resignation as vice president of Straight Arrow, saying he felt “seriously exploited” by Wenner, who had only paid him $35 since Rolling Stone began. He was further offended when Wenner offered to buy him out of his Rolling Stone stock for an offensively low sum. “Let’s stop this charade,” wrote Gleason. “I am totally out of sympathy with 1) the way you handle business affairs and 2) the way you handle personnel relations.”
To placate Gleason, Wenner agreed to hire a new editor to run the newspaper—to “readjust” their relationship, said Wenner—while Wenner focused on expanding the business and procuring the big interviews. Gleason suggested a writer and editor he had met at San Francisco State named John Burks, a tall and prematurely crusty reporter who was now working for Newsweek. Burks told Gleason he thought Rolling Stone, while full of potential, “sucked,” which Gleason relayed to Wenner with a certain relish. “I’m Jann Wenner from Rolling Stone,” Wenner said when he called Burks, “and I understand you think our magazine sucks.” (He would hire critic Greil Marcus in the summer of 1969 with the same kind of come-on: “Hi, Greil? If you think the record review section is so terrible, why don’t you edit it?”)
Wenner quickly offered Burks a job as managing editor and asked when he could start, all before Burks had a chance to respond. “And I think my first words were ‘What do you pay?’ ” said Burks. When he arrived at the Garrett Press offices, he saw the sunlight pouring through the large industrial windows and said to himself, “This beats the shit out of any underground paper I’ve ever seen.” Burks hovered a foot higher than Wenner and had more interest in jazz than rock (he would be responsible for putting Miles Davis, Captain Beefheart, and Sun Ra on the cover of Rolling Stone), but he had a sturdy sense of newspapering protocol and a steady stream of story memos that he produced to the chug, chug, chug of the presses. “The whole place was rocking,” said Burks. “It’s not that you’re hearing it; you’re feeling it under your feet and in your seat. Can you beat this? I thought that was just wonderful.”
Satisfied that Gleason was off his back, Jann Wenner flew to London to forge the deal with Mick Jagger.
•
“THE FIRST SIGN for me that Jann had audaciously grand ambitions,” said Pete Townshend of the Who, “was his desire to create a U.K. version of Rolling Stone. He came to London on his first fact-finding mission, and we hung out together a couple of times.”
In August of 1968, the Who had come to San Francisco to play the Fillmore, and afterward Wenner invited Townshend back to his apartment for an interview, which started at 2:00 a.m. and lasted until dawn. “There were no barriers,” said Wenner. “There were no PR people, there were no security, there were no managers.”
Townshend was trying to reposition the Who in the post-Monterey rock scene, because the mod incarnation of the band had been going out of vogue. He used Wenner as a kind of therapist and adviser—all on the record. “It was a tricky time for me, and I was surprised that Jann seemed to understand exactly where the Who would fit and would—if we were successful—prevail in a new self-created order,” said Townshend. “I described my plan to complete Tommy, at that time a project around two-thirds completed.”
Wenner asked him deceptively guileless questions, like “What is your life like today?” but as the conversation warmed, Townshend waxed philosophic on the power of rock and roll to upend society—and waxed and waxed and waxed. This would become a hallmark of Wenner’s interview style, evincing naïveté to draw a subject out, and it often yielded results. Soon Wenner was asking him about the “tremendous sensuality” of rock, mentioning, among others, Mick Jagger, who Wenner noted was “tremendously involved in sexual things.” Townshend described a Who concert as sex with the audience: “You’ve come your lot and the show’s over.”
The interview spanned two issues, with Townshend on the cover of Rolling Stone in September 1968, his patented guitar windmill gesture captured by Baron Wolman against a spotlight. Wenner noted that “nobody quite remembers exactly under what circumstances the interview concluded.” The next day, Wenner drove him to the airport, and Townshend asked Wenner if he had spiked his drink with LSD. “I said no, not at all, why?” recalled Wenner. “He said he had some kind of experience, some kind of transcendent experience.”
Townshend told writer David Dalton that Wenner had “completely taken me apart.” (In the year-end wrap-up for 1969, Rolling Stone named Tommy the most overrated record of the year.)
A few months later, Wenner flew to London to meet with Jagger but first had dinner with Townshend. The guitarist picked him up in his gigantic Mercedes 600 and squired him to his Georgian house near the Thames. Townshend was struck with how quickly Wenner had embraced the role of press baron. “He seemed so much more worldly and grand than I remembered him,” he said. “He assumed I would be comfortable with the scale of his business ambitions, and I suppose I was, but I remember feeling that he must have amassed a relative fortune fairly quickly.”
He hadn’t quite yet, but why wait? The next day, Townshend said, he and Wenner went to Olympic Studios to see the Rolling Stones record songs for a forthcoming album, Let It Bleed. They sat in the booth while the Stones played, both ogling Mick Jagger like feverish groupies. “It turned out that he, like me, harbored an adoration of Mick Jagger that was not entirely heterosexual,” said Townshend.
Afterward, Wenner accompanied Jagger to his apartment in Chelsea, and they sat by a fireplace with a moose head over the mantel to discuss their joint venture. They hadn’t gotten very far when Marianne Faithfull, Jagger’s then lover, showed up after a bad day on the set of a film production of Hamlet, in which she played Ophelia. “She came home, hysterical and histrionic, and he had to comfort her and I left,” recalled Wenner. (She would overdose on sleeping pills not long after.)
With a broad agreement from Jagger, Wenner returned to San Francisco and dove into the details of the joint venture, writing Jagger a series of excited letters and telegrams outlining his ideas for a British Rolling Stone. They would be fifty-fifty owners, he suggested, with Wenner in editorial control. He helpfully included a waiver for Jagger to sign absolving him of legal trouble from trademark infringement.
Not so fast, said Jagger. “For my part, I assumed that I would more or less have control of the [editorial] policy on this side of the Atlantic,” Jagger wrote back, adding that the waiver “is not in any way valid, and even if I signed it, it means nothing. You can’t expect me to waive all past or future rights to the name Rolling Stone—and waive to whom anyway.”
They put the questions off to when Wenner returned to London in the spring. For now, Wenner would have to be satisfied that he was in business with Mick Jagger—wasn’t that enough? Clearly, Jagger held the cards. For Jagger’s first Rolling Stone interview in October 1968, Jonathan Cott shared a byline with an employee of the Rolling Stones, Sue Cox, who worked out of the band’s Maddox Street office in London, where the interview was conducted (“It is not the most thorough and complete set of questions and answers,” conceded the Rolling Stone introduction).
When he returned to London in March 1969, Jann Wenner was becoming a figure of notoriety in the underground press, in part because of his impending deal with Jagger. The Guardian called him the Hugh Hefner of pop, and Wenner boldly told Oz, the British counterculture magazine edited by Richard Neville, “we’re out to replace the Melody Maker and all these shitty music publications.” (Oz described Wenner as looking “for all the world like an unusually hairy rugby player” with the “cat-that-got-away-with-the-cream smile.”)
That week, Wenner met with Prince Rupert Loewenstein, the Bavarian aristocrat known as “Rupie the Groupie,” who had taken over management of the Stones’ finances during Jagger’s acrimonious split with Allen Klein. Loewenstein was no less concerned about the trademark issue, telling Wenner he wanted him to sign a waiver giving Jagger the rights to the name Rolling Stone. “I said, ‘No, you can’t own the name Rolling Stone,’ ” recalled Wenner.
Regardless, Loewenstein said they were happy to go into business with Wenner, with Jagger as “chairman” of the joint venture they decided to call the Trans-oceanic Comic Company Limited. Now Jann Wenner was business partners with Mick Jagger. And the one person Wenner thought to impress with his proximity to Jagger’s “spiritual fame” was his lost love from the summer of 1967, Robin Gracey. Married to Jane for less than eight months, Wenner continued to fantasize about being with Gracey, who was now studying at the Oxford College of Technology. So he invited him to Olympic Studios in suburban London, where the Stones were recording Let It Bleed. At nine o’clock at night, Wenner and Gracey sat in the control booth with producer Jimmy Miller and Stones bassist Bill Wyman, eating canapés and watching a stoned-senseless Brian Jones fiddle about in a lonely corner of the cavernous studio. Jagger stood in a recording booth under a microphone to sing to a backing track of the London Bach Choir as Wenner and Gracey watched and listened in awe:
You can’t always get what you wa-ant . . .
As the choir rose to a crescendo, Jagger started his famous howling, “That scream was utterly riveting,” Gracey said. “He was able to replicate it many times.”
When the session ended at 4:00 a.m., the lovers filed into the back of Jagger’s Rolls-Royce, a sleepy Jagger up front with his driver. The car dropped the couple off at the Londonderry House Hotel, and Wenner and Gracey walked into the glow of the lobby and up the elevator to Wenner’s suite overlooking Hyde Park, Jagger’s voice echoing in the night.
But if you try sometimes, you just might find—you get what you nee-eed!
•
WHEN JANN WENNER GOT BACK from London, Time magazine published a profile of his rising rock publication, noting the eight-by-ten glossy of Mick Jagger on Wenner’s wall and a book on his shelf titled “The Jann Wenner Method for Effective Operation of a Cool Newspaper,” “which is blank, a gift from the bookbinder.” What made Rolling Stone unique, Wenner told a Time reporter, was that it was authentic. “We never thought of filling a market,” he said, “and we never created Rolling Stone toward anyone in particular.”
That same month, The Washington Post published a story on Rolling Stone in which Wenner predicted the death of Time magazine—“because it’s not going to make the change when the culture change comes.”
But while Wenner plumped for his own cultural relevance, he had a little problem: He was broke. Wenner’s trips to London and New York had sapped the company’s meager coffers. Said Baron Wolman, “He had a credit card, and he stayed at the fanciest hotel, spent a fortune on clothes, custom-made clothes, came back, and we had no money. I said, ‘Jann, we can’t do this. We can’t run a publication like that if you’re not looking at a budget.’ And he said, ‘I’ll do what I want, Baron.’
“If that’s the case,” continued Wolman, “I don’t even want to be on the board of directors, because he’s gonna do what he wants anyhow! It’s just kind of fallen into a black hole.”
When Wenner conceded he needed help, Wolman connected him with a local stockbroker named Charles Fracchia, who was married into an Old San Francisco family involved in the luxury department store
I. Magnin & Company. Fracchia was a thirty-two-year-old father of three but fascinated with the counterculture buzzing around him. He put together a group of investors who forked over $10,000 in exchange for shares of Rolling Stone and drew up elaborate proposals envisioning a “multimedia entertainment/leisure operation,” including a portfolio of magazines and an FM radio station. In truth, it was all an excuse for Fracchia to dabble in the earthly delights he was reading about in Rolling Stone. Wenner was happy to oblige: For their first “board meeting,” Wenner invited him for breakfast on Rhode Island Street, and Jane scrambled marijuana into the eggs. “At end of meeting, I’m feeling really woozy,” Fracchia recalled. “[Jann] starts laughing, ‘Don’t you know what she put in the scrambled egg?’ That was my first drug hit.”
Fracchia and Wenner agreed they needed to acquire more properties and expand the business, with Fracchia eager to take the company public and make a mint on the growing youth boom. In the spring of 1969, on his way back from London, Wenner met with the owner of New York Scenes, a somewhat seedy underground newspaper that covered drugs and orgies and that Fracchia saw as a natural property for Straight Arrow and bought the paper in exchange for 10 percent of Rolling Stone stock. In a matter of two months, Jann Wenner went from cash poor to operating three magazines—Rolling Stone, British Rolling Stone, and New York Scenes. Maybe this rock-and-roll empire thing would work out after all.
•
IN FEBRUARY 1969, Jann Wenner and Ralph Gleason went to San Quentin State Prison to see Johnny Cash perform for the inmates, a program recorded for an album on Columbia Records as Johnny Cash at San Quentin. Bob Dylan was embracing country music with the stripped-down John Wesley Harding, and Cash was performing Bob Dylan songs in concert, telling Wenner in May 1968 that country musicians “have been affected greatly by the sound of the Beatles and the lyric of Dylan.”
On the next page was a full-page ad by Columbia Records, the label of both Dylan and Cash. Rolling Stone’s relationship to the “Columbia Rock Machine” had grown increasingly tight, starting with its first advertisement in issue No. 8. Clive Davis, having ascended to president of CBS Records, a subsidiary of Columbia, on the success of Janis Joplin and Blood, Sweat, and Tears, made Rolling Stone required reading for his staff as he moved the label past the square Sing Along with Mitch era. He viewed Wenner as an ally in building a new industry out of rock and roll, and he gave Rolling Stone its first steady advertising contract to keep the newspaper afloat. Wenner advertised the Columbia connection, sending out a PR letter to acquaint potential advertisers and distributors with “the approach and style with which we and Columbia Records feel reflects the changes in popular music of the last three years.” Davis put Rolling Stone into record stores through Columbia’s distribution system, which now accounted for 15 percent of the newspaper’s single-copy sales. “It was no question that Jann had a vision,” said Davis. “This was a whole new world for me that had opened up, post-Monterey.”
In addition, Jann Wenner was using Columbia’s offices in New York as a virtual bureau of Rolling Stone. In a letter to Bob Altshuler, the publicist for Columbia, Wenner thanked him for the “favors, the lunchs [sic], the tickets, and the use of your secretaries and offices. Someday we’ll be buying the whold [sic] building, so keep it clean and in good shape.”
The same month as the San Quentin concert, Wenner and Baron Wolman set up camp at Columbia to lay out a promotional ad for a story Wenner was sure would be a big hit: the “Groupies” issue, an exposé that featured snapshots of women Baron Wolman met backstage at the Fillmore. A few were nudes, with a provocative photo of two women kissing, tongues touching, which made Wenner sit up. The idea was far from novel—Cheetah had published a groupies issue in 1967—but timing was everything. When Time magazine tried to beat Rolling Stone with a groupies feature of its own, Wenner borrowed a play from the old carnival barker Warren Hinckle: He preempted Time with a full-page ad in The New York Times, asking, “When we tell what a Groupie is, will you really understand? This is the story only Rolling Stone can tell, because we are the musicians, we are the music, we are writing about ourselves.” (Indeed, afterward a former Rolling Stone secretary named Henri Napier wrote in to point out that Wenner was the biggest groupie of them all. “Any reason he was left out?” she wrote.)
The ad cost Rolling Stone $7,000, but with Fracchia on the hook money was no object. The night before the ad appeared in the Times, Wenner and Wolman ordered a bottle of champagne to their room at the five-star Warwick hotel and got drunk. “He was really excited,” said Wolman. “I think the first issue [of the Times] comes out at, like, midnight, and we raced down to get the issue.”
They taped up copies of the ad all over their hotel walls.
On the same trip, Wenner had dinner with Alan Rinzler, the “house hippie” at Macmillan Publishing, to discuss starting a Rolling Stone book division. Rinzler’s wife was shocked when she looked out the apartment window and saw Wenner’s ride: “There’s a limousine out there! A black limousine!”
“We didn’t know anyone who had a limousine at that time,” said Rinzler. “A kid, with a limousine.”
Fracchia was irked by Wenner’s profligate spending. “I think Jann liked to live well,” said Fracchia. “He had no other source of income other than what he could take out of the company.” But for Wenner, the arrival of serious money was an inevitability—he was in Time magazine for Christ’s sake—so whatever problems his personal spending created he believed to be temporary.
•
THE DAY NEIL ARMSTRONG SET FOOT on the moon, July 20, 1969, Jann Wenner was in London watching it on TV in a suite at the Londonderry Hotel, with his lover, Robin Gracey, by his side.
On his last trip to London, after hearing the Stones record, Wenner hired a large black Mercedes (like Pete Townshend’s) to drive through the country to Gracey’s school at Oxford, where the two caught the tail end of a Fairport Convention concert. At Gracey’s house, they crawled up into the attic space where he kept their love letters in a bundle and made love. Perhaps Wenner could have not only what he needed but what he wanted, too. “There clearly was, from his point of view, sort of a possibility of a future together,” Gracey said.
“He was my lover and mate,” mused Wenner, though he said he felt pangs of guilt about Jane: “I felt bad and was sneaking around, and she kept wanting to come [to London] and I’d say no.”
This time Wenner was in London to announce the launch of British Rolling Stone in a small press conference with Jagger. To crown the occasion, Wenner showed up wearing a blue velveteen suit and white Louis XVI shirt with ruffles that exploded from the sleeves, looking not unlike Brian Jones, who had been found dead in a swimming pool three weeks earlier (and eulogized by Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone, who said “Sympathy for the Devil” was his epitaph). Wenner had also grown a semi-handlebar mustache that wormed down both sides of his mouth. Having staked some of his own money on British Rolling Stone, Jagger insisted on hiring the editor, a young woman named Jane Nicholson, whose awe of Jagger tended to render her stammering and shaking with nerves. They set up an office in Hanover Square, where Wenner reminded the rambunctious staff during their first meeting that “we’re not here to drink Mick’s wine,” prompting Jagger to correct him: “Hold it, that’s exactly why we’re here. To drink my wine.”
Wenner could hardly argue. But it wasn’t just the British edition over which Jagger now appeared to have control. David Dalton, Wenner’s correspondent in London, reported to Wenner that Rolling Stone was, for all practical purposes, the same as the Rolling Stones Organization in England. Interviews with rock stars attached to big managers like Robert Stigwood, whose clients included the Bee Gees and Cream, could be arranged “only through the kind cooperation of Jane Nicholson,” Jagger’s chosen editor. Dalton described to Wenner how a Rolling Stone reporter had been barred from a recording session pending approval by Jagger’s people. “We gathered very quickly that Jagger and Wenner had not really sorted out the terms of engagement too clearly,” said Alan Marcuson, who was hired as the advertising manager and later became an editor.
Once British Rolling Stone launched in June 1969, with Pete Townshend on the cover, each new issue arrived in San Francisco like a fresh offense, a mutant version of Wenner’s own Rolling Stone, trussed up with political diatribes, overly groovy prose, and egregious misspellings of rock star names on the cover. “There were two appalling incidents where we spelled Ray Davies’s name wrong, and we called him ‘Ray Davis’ in a big headline,” recalled Marcuson, “and then we spelled Bob Dylan’s name wrong, ‘Dillon’ as I remember. As bad as it can fucking get, really. Wenner hit the roof, rightly so.”
Wenner flew to London to try bringing order to the unruly staff, whose priority seemed to be enjoying Mick Jagger’s wine as well as copious amounts of marijuana. “Wenner came over, and we had a very fractious, uncomfortable meeting with him,” said Marcuson. “And he very quickly became the enemy of London Rolling Stone.”
Jagger gave the staff carte blanche to ignore Wenner, which they were all too happy to do. “We said, ‘Fuck it, the Stones are paying for this, we’ll do whatever we like, he’s not our boss,’ ” said Marcuson. After two months of frustration, Wenner sent a twelve-page letter to Jagger calling the British Rolling Stone “mediocre” and run with “unbelievable incompetence,” reporting that he had fired one of Jagger’s employees, Alan Reid, “Great Britain’s leading male groupie.” Citing his friend Pete Townshend, Wenner told Jagger that Reid had offended the members of the Small Faces (“or Humble Pie or whatever they’re called”) while interviewing them at their country cottage. Wenner insisted to Jagger that the British magazine come under the boot of the American Rolling Stone.
By this time, however, Jagger had lost interest entirely and flown to Australia to film an art-house outlaw movie called Ned Kelly (which Rolling Stone would later describe as “one of the most plodding, dull and pointless films in recent memory”). Meanwhile, Jagger’s British Rolling Stone staff threw a record industry party in which the punch bowl was spiked with LSD and several attendees were hospitalized. One victim was Marc Bolan of T. Rex, who freaked out and locked himself in the bathroom until he was talked out by a gynecologist (and aspiring country music singer) who happened to be present. “I think that party was one of the big nails in the coffin,” said Marcuson.
Wenner was desperate to pull the plug on British Rolling Stone but frightened by the prospect of letting Jagger down. “It took me a while to screw my courage up to do it, to write him a letter or call him,” said Wenner. “I said this thing is awful, it’s not working, they’re spending your money at an incredible rate, and you’re going to have nothing to show for it.”
When Wenner announced to the British staff that the magazine was finished, his letter was immediately leaked to The International Times, an underground paper started out of the Indica Gallery in London, supported by Paul McCartney, which detailed the eviction of the “Stones staff” from their offices. For Wenner, it was a grand embarrassment, undermining the credibility of his paper and leaving a taste of bitter disappointment over Jagger’s failure to uphold his end of the bargain. “I was upset and I said that to him,” said Wenner. “There was never any reaction from Mick.”
For Jagger, it was an expensive boondoggle, nothing more. “I didn’t have that much money at that point,” said Jagger, “because I was in all these disputes with Allen Klein.” ( Jagger felt Klein had ripped off the Stones.) Mick Jagger’s staff implored the Stones’ singer to reconsider shutting down British Rolling Stone and spent the next two weeks trying to commandeer the magazine from Wenner. The drama culminated in a long and heated telegram to Jagger explaining that it was the rock star’s God-given right to use the name Rolling Stone, regardless of what Jann Wenner said. Marcuson remembered the precise date of the telegram they sent to Mick Jagger. It was the weekend of December 6, 1969, the eve of a free concert an hour south of the Rolling Stone offices: the Rolling Stones at Altamont Speedway.
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GRINNING EAR TO EAR, Jann Wenner ogled the six naked men as they threw off their blue jeans and jumped into a cold creek in Macon, Georgia.
The Allman Brothers had just completed their first album under the guidance of Phil Walden, the onetime manager of Otis Redding and founder of Capricorn Records, who suggested an au naturel portrait for their first LP cover and maybe some Rolling Stone publicity shots. Wenner loved the idea. “Yeah, yeah! Do it! Do it! Do it!” he exclaimed. They all plopped into the water. “The guys weren’t really into it,” said photographer Stephen Paley, “but at that point they would do pretty much anything to get famous.”
Paley took his clothes off in solidarity with the band while a fully clothed Wenner stood on the bank of the creek to snap photos of them all. One of the Paley images—Duane Allman, holding his hands over his crotch—would appear inside Boz Scaggs’s first LP for Atlantic Records. Scaggs had just finished recording his solo album in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with Allman on slide guitar and a rookie record producer in the booth: Jann Wenner.
By this time, the Wenners had become close friends with Scaggs, the laconic bluesman from Plano, Texas, and his new girlfriend, a stylish and beautiful socialite named Carmella Storniola from Seattle. Scaggs showed up in San Francisco after kicking around Europe playing blues covers. He was known as the “Bob Dylan of Sweden.” After Scaggs’s acrimonious split with Steve Miller, and Carmella’s breakup with Dan Hicks (of the Hot Licks), the couple had moved next door to the Wenners and befriended Jane. As Scaggs would write in a draft of his liner notes, it happened “over Christmas and between neighborly exchanges of the odd cup of sugar and the even cup of scotch.” This was the period of the record producer as auteur, the secret masterminds behind all the great albums. Jon Landau had temporarily left Rolling Stone to produce the next album by the MC5 for Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records (“My first gig right now is learning how to be a producer,” Landau would tell Wenner). Not to be outdone, Wenner sent Scaggs’s demo tape to Wexler and suggested himself as producer. For Wexler, this was a fine trade: He had just started a new studio in Muscle Shoals and was getting reverent ink from Rolling Stone. “He loved Jon and he loved me and he really wanted to cultivate us and of course we were enamored of Jerry,” said Wenner. “He had a Talmudic knowledge of music, and we didn’t know what a shady character he was on the other side, how tough and poisonous.”
Scaggs was eager to make an R&B album that sounded like Wexler’s recordings of Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin, but he first wanted to investigate Wexler’s new venture, Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, so Wenner gave Scaggs a Rolling Stone press card to pose as a reporter. “I was welcomed as a man of the press and given a grand tour and treated very nicely,” Scaggs would recall. Wenner and Scaggs flew to Memphis in May 1969 and holed up in a motel, taking six days to record Scaggs’s LP while Jane and Carmella flew to Acapulco on vacation. Scaggs wanted Duane Allman on his album, but Allman had moved to Georgia to start the Allman Brothers, so Wenner convinced Wexler to bring him back for one last Atlantic date. Wenner, of course, knew nothing about producing records. “But I’m just very confident,” he said. “I knew what I liked. I said, ‘Play it like this,’ and I could reference a familiar record that everybody knew and I just knew how to manage things. And crazy enough, a little bit of dictating the girl singing parts to them.”
Wenner said he conceived the twelve-minute blues jam, “Loan Me a Dime,” with Allman on a long stretch of slide guitar. When the record was finished, Wenner promoted the track on San Francisco FM radio. “I called up the local DJs in San Francisco and brought them to Trident Studios and I got them all stoned,” he said.
After the recording, Boz and Carmella moved to Macon, Georgia, to hang out with Walden and the Allmans. When the Wenners showed up for a visit, Scaggs’s drinking was out of control, and they went on a terrifying drive down a country road until Jane Wenner insisted Carmella drive. She was also drunk, and the terror continued. The visit wasn’t a total loss: In a letter to writer Stanley Booth, Wenner said he scored some coke from Duane Allman.
The Scaggs album, with a cover design by Bob Kingsbury, was a fine if langorous affair but not destined for success. The day after “Loan Me a Dime” was recorded, Wexler and Wenner had a screaming match on the phone over Wenner’s expensive studio time, and Wexler told him to shut the session down. Wenner ignored him and kept recording. “I said, we’re nearly done, I’m going to finish this up, I don’t care what he has to say,” said Wenner. “I think Jerry was more pissed off that we had made a really good record in a studio that he had failed to make a successful record in.”
Consequently, Wexler didn’t promote the record, it sold fewer than twenty thousand copies, and Atlantic dropped Scaggs from the label. It was a deep disappointment for Scaggs, who later told Rolling Stone, “I was kind of countin’ on the album to sell or do somethin’ big.” Glyn Johns, who produced Scaggs’s next album for Columbia, felt Wenner’s arrogance nearly tanked Scaggs’s career. “That might have been why Jann and I fell out in the end,” he said. “He should never have risked Scaggs’s career by presuming to produce.”
Though Rolling Stone gave the album a perfectly nice review (assigned by Greil Marcus), it was buried at the bottom of page 33, wedged between reviews for the Beatles’ Abbey Road and Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way, and didn’t mention that the editor and publisher of Rolling Stone was the producer. Wenner told The Village Voice that he and Scaggs had a falling-out (“artistic temperament, all that stuff”), but the Scaggs/Wenner split was only a temporary hiccup. Scaggs had more to gain from Wenner than not, and Carmella was spending endless hours with Jane, shopping and decorating the Wenners’ new apartment in the posh Ord Court neighborhood. For a while, the two women planned an interior decorating business, but Jane mainly curled up on the couch, stoned on downers, and complained to Carmella that Jann Wenner never paid attention to her. During one chat, Jane idly mentioned that Wenner was gay—as if it were only the third or fourth most depressing thing about her life.
The friendship with the Wenners would prove a thorny business. While Carmella was between houses and temporarily living in the Wenners’ basement in 1971, Rolling Stone produced a feature on the All-man Brothers that revealed the story behind the band’s instrumental jam “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed”: While Scaggs was living in Macon with the band, Carmella was having an affair with Allmans’ guitarist Dickey Betts. “Fuck,” Duane Allman told Rolling Stone while snorting a pile of cocaine. “He wrote that fuckin’ song after he fucked this chick on a fuckin’ tombstone in a fuckin’ cemetery in Macon. On a fuckin’ tombstone, my man!” (The tombstone was Elizabeth Reed’s.)
As Jane Wenner recalled, Carmella “always told Boz she was going there to look at the flowers, and whatever.”
But it was too late; the story had already gone to press.
Wenner was the best man in Boz and Carmella’s 1973 wedding in Aspen, Colorado—which made the Random Notes column and was attended by Hunter Thompson—but by then Scaggs had come to prefer the company of Jane over Jann. “Exquisite taste,” he observed of her. “Jann’s interest brought people in, but it was Jane who fascinated people. Always there, and funny, and sort of kept the party going when Jann’s off on tangents. His is a frenetic energy; hers is more solid.”
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