Читать книгу Sticky Fingers - Joe Hagan - Страница 9
ОглавлениеPrologue: Get Back
John Lennon was in a movie theater, crying.
The image of Paul, singing from the rooftop in the final ten minutes, had set him off. Jann Wenner shifted in his seat. In the darkness of a tiny movie house in San Francisco, the Beatle, Wenner’s hero, whose iconic spectacles and nose adorned the first issue of his rock-and-roll newspaper, Rolling Stone, had tears running down his cheeks as light flickered off his glasses. And next to him was Yoko Ono, the bête noire of Beatledom, raven hair shrouding her porcelain face, also weeping.
It was a Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1970, and John and Yoko and Jann and his wife, Jane Wenner, were watching the final scenes of Let It Be, the documentary about the Beatles’ acrimonious recording session for their last album. John and Yoko were deep into primal scream therapy, their emotions raw and close to the surface, and the image of a bearded Paul McCartney singing from the rooftop of Apple Records, against a cold London wind, was too much to bear.
Get back to where you once belonged . . .
For Wenner, the twenty-four-year-old boy wonder of the new rock press, who worshipped the Beatles as passionately as any kid in America, this was a dream, sitting here in the dark, wiping away his own tears at the twilight of the greatest band of all time, elbow to elbow with “the most famous person in the world, for God’s sake.”
“And it’s just the four of us in the center of an empty theater,” marveled Wenner, “all kind of huddled together, and John is crying his eyes out.”
Lennon and Ono had driven up from Los Angeles to meet the San Francisco fanboy who had bottled the counterculture and now commanded 200,000 readers. Wenner received the couple like visiting royalty to his spanking-new offices on Third Street, the clatter of typewriters going silent as they walked through the cubbies of writers and editors, bushy-haired men in ties and Levi’s who paused from parsing Captain Beefheart and Pete Townshend to gawk. Wenner’s unabashed idol worship had so often embarrassed them—starfucker, they grumbled behind his back—but now here he was with an actual Beatle. And Yoko! Who could deny this? The hirsute supercouple were smaller than anybody imagined, but John Lennon still towered over Jann Wenner, who at five six so often found himself gazing up at his heroes like a boy vampire.
“I mean, it’s everything you ever worshipped or cherished from afar,” said Wenner. “You try and be as natural as possible because I don’t think people want the worship and the ‘gee whiz.’ And you’re just mainly curious and fascinated and hanging on to every word but also trying to be sociable, entertaining, and good company and not be groupie-ish and slavish.”
Wenner guided them to his back office, past the plastic marijuana plant and the picture of Mickey Mouse shooting heroin, laboring to project the air of a self-possessed press baron inured to celebrity. He looked every bit the modish publisher, plump in his button-down oxford and blue jeans, shoulder-length hair fashionably styled, a True cigarette smoking in his fingers. Wenner personally moved the couple from the Hilton to the more upscale Huntington Hotel, in Nob Hill, and then took them sightseeing in Wenner’s convertible Porsche, hoping to impress. “People like John Lennon,” Wenner would say, “want to feel they are dealing with somebody important.”
It worked, but maybe not for the reason he imagined: Yoko Ono’s memory of the weekend would be Jane Wenner, Jann’s wife, a chicly dressed waif with sculpted cheekbones and an insolent gaze. “I thought, how lucky is this man!” said Ono. “What did he do to get her?”
The women were crammed in the back of the Porsche, while Wenner and Lennon talked up front and Wenner drove through the hills where Ono once lived as a child in the 1930s with her Japanese immigrant parents, scions of imperial wealth. While he casually offered advice on promoting Lennon’s promised “primal” album and inquired about their lifestyle in Los Angeles ( Wenner recalled John and Yoko living in the mansion featured in The Beverly Hillbillies), Wenner found the proximity to John Fucking Lennon as intoxicating as a drug. Here was the selfsame Beatle who’d cracked open Wenner’s world in 1964 when, on summer break from UC Berkeley, he first saw A Hard Day’s Night in a Pasadena movie theater. The sly smile and scabrous wit had seemed to wink across the screen directly at him. Wenner even named his aborted novel for a Beatles lyric—“Now These Days Are Gone,” a nostalgic, Holden Caulfield– at– Berkeley roman à clef. From the very first issue of Rolling Stone, Lennon was the lodestar: In his first editorial on November 9, 1967, Wenner declared that Rolling Stone was “not just about music, but also about the things and attitudes that the music embraces,” proving his point with a cover image of Lennon from his role as Musketeer Gripweed in Richard Lester’s absurdist antiwar comedy, How I Won the War. “Since 1965,” wrote Wenner for an issue naming Lennon Rolling Stone’s “Man of the Year,” a few months before John and Yoko’s visit, “the Beatles have been the single dominant force in the new social thought and style for which the Sixties will forever be remembered, just as Charlie Chaplin was the public figure of the Twenties.”
And so every moment with John Lennon felt like a story Wenner would tell for the rest of his life, a page of history he’d stepped into—indeed, that he would publish. Every detail of the weekend seemed charged with significance: the white sneakers dangling from Lennon’s flight bag, the look of shock on the bellboy’s face at the snobbish hotel when Lennon casually tossed him the bag. Over lunch, Wenner watched with awe and a certain satisfaction as Lennon savaged fans who approached him. “People would come up and ask him for an autograph, and he would just snarl, ‘Go away!’ ” Wenner said.
When they got out to stretch their legs on Polk Street at four in the afternoon—the skies overcast, not a soul on the sidewalk—they chanced upon a little movie house showing a matinee of the Beatles film Let It Be. Wenner figured John Lennon of all people had seen it, but he hadn’t seen the final cut. Just as surprising, the woman selling tickets didn’t recognize Lennon—another bearded hippie who looked like John Lennon—and none of the half a dozen people in the theater noticed that John and Yoko themselves had ducked in. “It was so emotional to see Paul up on the roof and singing,” recounted Jane Wenner. “First of all, it was hard to believe John had never seen it before. And he was so taken aback.”
An hour later, blinking in the evening light, Jann and Jane Wenner were crying, too. They began to hug, all four of them, on the sidewalk. “He’s crying, she’s crying, and we’re just trying to hold on to ourselves,” Wenner said. “You’re there helping come to the emotional rescue of the Beatles.”
But if this was the end of the Beatles, it was only the beginning for Jann Wenner. He was, after all, courting John Lennon for an exclusive interview in Rolling Stone. And before the weekend was over, Lennon would give Wenner a kind of promissory note in the form of an inscription inside a copy of Arthur Janov’s book The Primal Scream: Primal Therapy, the Cure for Neurosis:
Dear Jann,
After many years of “searching”—tobacco, pot, acid, meditation, brown rice, you name it—I am finally on the road to freedom, i.e., being REAL + STRAIGHT.
I hope this book helps you as much as [it did] for Yoko + me. I’ll tell you the “True Story” when we’re finished.
Love, John + Yoko
•
ROLLING STONE CAUGHT FIRE as soon as it first appeared in November 1967. The fertile crescent of psychedelia, the Bay Area, was a firmament of names and places that were already becoming touchstones for a generation: Haight-Ashbury, the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Bill Graham and the Fillmore, the Hells Angels and the Black Panthers. Music was at the center of much of it, but it was bigger than music. It was an entire worldview in which young people had cornered the market on Truth with a capital T. As John Lennon would articulate it for Wenner in Rolling Stone: “Rock and roll then was real, everything else was unreal.” The original rock and roll that Elvis Presley built out of rural black blues had already been reduced and refined to (quite unreal) teen idols like Frankie Avalon and Ricky Nelson. Even the British Invasion, three years earlier, seemed brittle against the hammer blows of civil rights and the Vietnam War. The psychedelic counterculture of San Francisco promised a revolution, one immune to capitalist forces.
In those first days, Wenner was the star of his own magazine. For people who first got their hands on Rolling Stone, the editor with the Swedish-sounding name—or was Jann a girl? Not many knew (it was pronounced Yahn)—was their avatar in print, their gate-crasher at the Fillmore, a superfan as attuned to pot humor and art school nudity as they were, as versed in antiwar rhetoric, as hot to get his sticky fingers on a new Stones LP. Rolling Stone arrived on newsstands like a secret handshake: In a canny bit of salesmanship, Wenner offered a complimentary roach clip with every subscription, the “handy little device,” each one lathed by his future brother-in-law, sculptor Bob Kingsbury.
Wenner was the fan he purported to be, but that was only one side of him. Though he walked in step with the counterculture, he was also a Kennedy-worshipping preppy whose thwarted ambition to attend Harvard had diverted him to Berkeley, a locus of left-wing radicalism where Wenner spent half his time with his nose pressed against the glass of high society. An inveterate social climber whom friends found so cocky as to be overbearing, Wenner crashed debutante balls and went on ski weekends to private resorts with rich and handsome friends who knew Kennedys and Hearsts. Keen to obscure his Jewishness, and his latent homosexuality, he chased after the sons and daughters of Old San Francisco—the children of local industry—as they migrated from the stolid precincts of Pacific Heights to pot-smogged Haight-Ashbury. Here was a breathtaking new freedom and opportunity, a world unhinged and made boundless by reality-smashing chemicals. “The freest generation this country has ever seen,” marveled Ralph Gleason, the music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and Wenner’s mentor and co-founder in Rolling Stone. “No makeup, no bouffant hairdos, no button-down shirts and ties and no Brooks Brothers suits.”
Wenner imbibed the new values—sex and drugs and rock and roll—but they were folded into a larger pattern of aspiration. He understood that along with the drugs and freedom there was fame, and also money. As a teenager, he attended a boarding school in Los Angeles that housed the offspring of Hollywood royalty, including Liza Minnelli, with whom he waltzed at a school dance. Their sparkling pedigrees offered Wenner solace from his broken home life. To fit in, he carefully monitored and organized his classmates in the school yearbook and won their allegiance with a rogue newspaper he invented to advertise his popularity and antagonize the faculty. Journalism was his VIP pass to everything he could hope to be.
To speak to the kids who understood that the revolution had arrived in 1967—to speak to the kids who got it—required a voice in the same register and cryptography as Bob Dylan’s stoned telegrams, which Jann Wenner absorbed in lysergic waves with his head between two KLH speakers lying on his apartment floor in Berkeley. Wenner would later say he related to the Miss Lonely character in the seminal Dylan song “Like a Rolling Stone”—the female dilettante and object of scorn to whom Dylan is laying down his bitter education.
But Wenner was a quick study. He had an intuitive grasp of the most significant quality of the new rock audience: Unlike the one that fueled the British Invasion, it was largely male. For marketers, this new youth culture was uncharted territory, and Wenner was the pioneer. Until 1966, the primary outlets in America for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were 16 and Tiger Beat, New York– based magazines for teenage girls who fetishized Paul and John and Mick and Keith as objects of romance and trivia. Wenner made it safe for boys to ogle their male idols as rapturously as any girl might by adding a healthy dose of intellectual pretense—a phenomenon that kicked into high gear with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released five months before Rolling Stone appeared. “If James Joyce played the electric guitar he would probably have made an album like Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” wrote Wenner in a review pitched to High Fidelity magazine (and rejected as “pretentious guff”).
In one sense, Rolling Stone was a natural reaction to Sgt. Pepper’s, which signaled the emergence of full-length 33 ⅓ rpm albums as public statements to be fetishized and reckoned with—in effect, news from the youth front. The turning point was the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967, the convergence of new rock groups from London, New York, and Los Angeles for a media spectacle covered by every news outlet in America. It was arranged and produced by record men from Los Angeles and promoted by the erstwhile press secretary for the Beatles, who conscripted Jann Wenner to write publicity material. By courting the record men who knew next to nothing about what the San Francisco kids were doing and saying in private, Wenner was perfectly positioned as a go-between, connecting the counterculture of Haight-Ashbury—which every head in America now looked to for cues on LPs, politics, dope, and sexuality—and what was then known as the straight world. The two were already on a collision course, but Wenner, more than anyone else, catalyzed the process. “The business world, which was represented by the record companies, was just so old-fashioned and foreign,” said Wenner. “They reluctantly came to rock and roll.”
In creating Rolling Stone, Wenner borrowed heavily from a short-lived biweekly newspaper called The Sunday Ramparts, where Wenner worked until it ceased publication in June 1967. After Monterey, Wenner hustled up $7,500—the largest chunk from Jane’s father, a Manhattan dentist—and simply recycled the defunct paper, an adjunct of Ramparts magazine, as his own. The printer didn’t have to change the settings on the Goss Suburban press machine to spit out Rolling Stone, and Wenner even recycled the design and layout, a parody of stuffy British newspapers like The Times of London. The first issues had a primitive simplicity, but the clean lines and functional columns looked audacious next to underground papers like Crawdaddy! or the San Francisco Oracle, which defied convention with willfully amateurish layouts. By contrast, Rolling Stone was thoroughly commercial: The Fleet Street fonts and pin-striped lines of the original Sunday Ramparts were created by an advertising agency founded by Howard Gossage, a pal of Tom Wolfe and Marshall McLuhan who produced print ads for the Sierra Club and Rover cars. (The designer was a woman named Marget Larsen.)
It was this—the radical conventionality of Rolling Stone—that was Jann Wenner’s most important innovation. When he stamped the whole package with a psychedelic logo designed by poster artist Rick Griffin—the curled ligatures and looping serifs unmistakable signifiers of dope-peddling head shops on Haight-Ashbury—he instantly legitimized and mainstreamed the underground.
From the vantage of a swivel chair in a warehouse loft on Brannan Street, Wenner and his “little rock & roll newspaper from San Francisco” brought first-name intimacy to the scene. For the first issue, he simply drove across town to the Haight-Ashbury to interview the Grateful Dead in their living room and help publicize their arrest for pot possession. Keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan hoisted a rifle for the photo op—a triumph, a gleeful dare. “All the news that fits,” Wenner put above his title, tweaking the East Coast’s central journalistic institution. And his headlines declared it so: “A New Beatles Movie!”; “Eric Burdon Quits the Animals!”; “Jim Morrison Exposed!”; “John and Yoko Rock Toronto”; “Chicago 7: Youth on Trial”; “Paul McCartney Gets Back”; “Bob’s Back!”
In 1967, it was still a radical idea to publish college-educated intellectuals like Jon Landau and Greil Marcus opining on James Brown or the Jefferson Airplane as if it were serious art, like jazz. “Though he didn’t invent serious pop criticism, Jann was the one who popularized it,” observed Mick Jagger, whose band had been playing to teenage girls for five years when Rolling Stone began. “There were magazines before, and criticism before, but the magazines were a bit fly-by-night and they weren’t taken seriously. But this was a whole magazine about it that was dedicated to semi-serious criticism.”
As far away as London, mods and rockers alike started passing Rolling Stone around. Suddenly Jagger knew Jann Wenner’s name—the San Francisco kid with the chutzpah to name a magazine after his band and then trash his latest record. Bob Dylan was sent a letter from Wenner asking him to write a story for a new magazine named after his six-minute radio hit. Wenner printed every last utterance of Pete Townshend of the Who—an interview recorded at Wenner’s apartment on Potrero Hill in the spring of 1968—as if it were an exclusive with God on the second day of creation. Twelve pages over two issues, some sixteen thousand words. Townshend loved it. And for eighteen-year-olds fretting over the draft and blowing pot smoke out their bedroom windows between sides of The Who Sell Out, Townshend’s words were the news.
“Rock and roll is enormous,” Townshend told Wenner. “It’s one of the biggest musical events in history. It’s equal to the classical music . . . You don’t care what periods [the songs] were written in, what they mean, what they’re about. It’s the bloody explosion they create when you let the gun off. It’s the event. That’s what rock and roll is. That is why rock and roll is powerful.”
The next week, Time magazine featured Spiro Agnew on the cover.
That somebody had dared—bothered, in the sentiment of the mainstream—to apply straight journalism to rock culture was a revelation. Eager for fame and legitimacy, the rockers were flattered. “I’ll tell you what Jann did,” said Keith Richards. “He put together a really good gang of writers, nice kids. Not afraid to go and ask questions. And turned something that could have just been a fan magazine into a real piece of journalism. That’s what I think Jann did.”
Five months after the Townshend interview, Wenner beat Time magazine on a story about the phenomenon of rock groupies, waving for the mainstream press to come have a peek at his collection of titillating nudes by taking out a full-page promotional ad in The New York Times.
It shouldn’t be surprising that Wenner himself, roiling with unfiltered ambition, needed an editor. His girlfriend, Jane Schindelheim, a petite and neurotic creature of Manhattan, rolled her eyes at the dumpy San Francisco hippies living in squalor on the Haight. But when she met Jann Wenner while working as a receptionist at Ramparts, she had to marvel at his white-hot ambition, the naive charm and vulgarity of it, his brusque arrogance and childish whims, his casual betrayals and bullying force, the unembarrassed yen for work and excess. Somebody would surely have to look after this little barbarian whose lust for money, drugs, and sex threatened to outpace his razor intellect and turn him into Augustus Gloop falling into the chocolate river of the 1960s. She would become his wife and co-owner but also his compass and custodian, his style counselor and resident paranoid who fretted and plotted from behind the drapes. Her seductive beauty and chic tastes hedged against Wenner’s extroversion and frequent obnoxiousness and became part of the formula for Rolling Stone, which was partly a social institution, a private club. She manicured Wenner’s social life, offered succor to his biggest talents, and repaired relationships with people who felt burned by Wenner and his sometimes ruthless magazine. “She’s the only one standing still in all these speedy lives,” said photographer Annie Leibovitz, for whom Jane Wenner was a muse and steward in her early career. “I think [the Wenners] kind of understood that they were both attractive. Some people would be more attracted to Jane, and her personality, than to Jann and his.”
The two were only intermittently attracted to each other, at least sexually. While Jann explored his sexuality with both men and women, Jane consoled herself with her own affairs—including dalliances with Leibovitz, whose intimacy with both Wenners completed a triangle of ambition and pleasure that lay at the creative heart of Rolling Stone in the 1970s. For all their ceaseless drift and constant coming apart, Jann and Jane always remained loyal to their cause, Rolling Stone, never tiring of each other, and it was a remarkably successful marriage, one that seemed to chart the culture as it shifted.
•
AFTER THE IDEALISM of Woodstock Nation was snuffed out at the infamous Altamont concert in December 1969, Rolling Stone, which had always had one foot in the world of commerce, was uniquely positioned to dominate the 1970s. With the record industry at his back, Wenner could annex new social worlds through journalism, fanning the ambitions of major American writers like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson by offering their exploding-sandwich journalism as epic feasts for his stoned readers. Thompson, the single most important writer in the history of Rolling Stone, injected Wenner’s magazine with a crucial piece of DNA—“gonzo” journalism, a form of performance-art writing, both uproarious and informed by deep reporting—that the Brahmins of the mainstream press could not ignore. Nor could they ignore the Rolling Stone readership who adored it. On the cult success of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” in 1971, Wenner aimed his new star directly at the 1972 presidential campaign and hitched his magazine to quintessential youth candidate Senator George McGovern of South Dakota. Thompson’s book on the election—Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72—made Rolling Stone the undisputed voice of the rock-and-roll generation.
As Tom Wolfe told Rolling Stone in 1987, youth culture was the most important thing to emerge from the 1960s, including Vietnam or civil rights. “Any of the big historical events of the Sixties are overshadowed by what young people did,” he said. “And they did it because they had money. For the first time in the history of man, young people had the money, the personal freedom and the free time to build monuments and pleasure palaces to their own tastes.”
Wenner, by birthright and inclination, was the ideal tastemaker to build those monuments. The raw material was rock and roll, but the primary building block was celebrity. And at its base, Rolling Stone was an expression of Wenner’s pursuit of fame and power. He reinvented celebrity around youth culture, which equated confession and frank sexuality with integrity and authenticity. The post-1960s vision of celebrity meant that every printed word of John Lennon’s unhappiness and anything Bob Dylan said or did now had the news primacy of a State of the Union address. It meant that Hunter Thompson could make every story he ever wrote, in essence, about himself. It also meant that climbing into bed with Mick Jagger was only worth doing if you had a Nikon handy. Self-image was the new aphrodisiac.
The 1970s was “the Me Decade,” in Wolfe’s famous coinage, defined by endless “remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self.” This was a fundamentally Californian mandate, sprung from the halls of Berkeley and the hills of Hollywood, where a devotion to hedonism was baked into the West’s culture of escapism and reinvention. That made Jann Wenner a walking bellwether, his own curiosities and desires a perfect editorial template for Rolling Stone. “He leads with his appetites—I take, I see, I have,” said Art Garfunkel, a close friend in the 1970s.
From a lavishly appointed Victorian on California Street in San Francisco, Wenner and his wife hosted a rolling drug salon during the 1970s, mixing pleasure with Rolling Stone business with the stars of the moment, whether Michael Douglas or Jackson Browne or John Belushi. A core irony of Rolling Stone was that its founder celebrated every kind of personal liberty imaginable but his own. But his hidden homosexuality—and that of his chief photographer—nonetheless opened Rolling Stone to the currents of the decade, when androgyny and ambiguous sexuality were in vogue. Wenner understood innately the longing of young men who papered their bedrooms with posters of a shirtless Robert Plant. Being gay, said Wenner, “gave me a good and finer appreciation of the sexuality of the guys up there on the stage, and I could understand that in a way that other people didn’t, to understand how sexual this whole thing was. All of rock and roll is sex, defined. I got it more. And I could see it; I was open to it. I was enjoying it. Much like the girls, and much like the guys who may not admit it, but it was really sexual.”
Exploiting the talents of Annie Leibovitz, who was in love with his wife, Wenner could divine the homosexual subtext of a hetero rock culture through acts of image making, personally manning the turnstile to his distinct American moment—Rolling Stone’s cover. Leibovitz’s nude photograph of teen idol David Cassidy on the cover in 1972—with a Playboy-inspired centerfold inside—was a signal moment, selling thousands of copies of Rolling Stone and establishing a new standard for self-exposure (and self-reinvention). It was also something Jann Wenner enjoyed looking at. Wenner turned the cover of Rolling Stone into a rock-and-roll confession box, with Paul Simon, George Harrison, Fleetwood Mac, James Taylor, Carly Simon, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young all eager to climb inside the Oxford border and expose their dramas, and very often their flesh, so as to be sanctified by the essential self-seriousness of Rolling Stone. And as the cover became the prime sales pitch for selling records, and the prime sales pitch of Wenner’s magazine, Wenner made Rolling Stone into a cultural event, adding vibrant colors (a rainbow border around a fedora-wearing Truman Capote), moody studio portraiture (Kris Kristofferson in shadow), winking humor (a Vargas girl riding a silver dildo for a Steely Dan profile), adventurous illustration (Daniel Ellsberg as a Roman bust), and liberal doses of insouciant sexuality whenever possible (Wenner commanded Annie Leibovitz to make Linda Ronstadt look like a “Tijuana whore”).
None of this was exactly unique to Rolling Stone—art director George Lois pioneered pop irony at Esquire; Hugh Hefner liberated sexuality in Playboy—but Rolling Stone authenticated celebrity in a new way. Under Rick Griffin’s banner, Wenner could place Dustin Hoffman, Jane Fonda, Bette Midler, Richard Pryor, George McGovern, and even John Denver in the same continuum as the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones. It was all prefigured by the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s—a cavalcade of personalities and icons, seemingly disconnected but all flowing forth from a single fountain of youth.
And as the youth culture took over, Wenner built up a network of powerful co-conspirators: important writers and photographers (Tom Wolfe and Dick Avedon), ambitious record men and talent agents (David Geffen, Ahmet Ertegun), Hollywood executives and movie stars (Barry Diller, Richard Gere), Washington power brokers and politicians (Richard Goodwin, Ted Kennedy), and, his very favorites, the social matrons and celebrity icons in whose rarefied spheres gay men were welcome (Diane von Furstenberg and Jackie Onassis). This was a formula for Wenner’s success. “The friendships I made with people, plus their desire to have publicity, plus the demonstrated integrity and value of Rolling Stone, it all was easy to do,” said Wenner, hastening to add a last ingredient: “And my own charm.”
The result was that from 1971 to 1977, Jann Wenner was the most important magazine editor in America, shepherding the generational plotlines of the 1960s into a rambling biweekly serial of rock-and-roll news, hard and outrageous (and impossibly long) journalism, left-wing political opinion, sexual liberation, and drugs—always drugs. It was a man’s magazine, though women read it; it was a white magazine, though African Americans were fetishized in it; it was a left-wing magazine, though it was tempered by Wenner’s devotion to the establishment. And the success of Rolling Stone would eventually make Wenner a full-blooded figure of that establishment. Time magazine named him one of the Top 200 “Faces for the Future” in America in 1974, among the youngest on the list at twenty-eight (“a brilliant, brash autocrat with an eye for lucrative markets and talented writers”).
By the time Wenner moved his magazine to New York from San Francisco in 1977, rock and roll had become so mainstream—and profitable—it had already begun producing its own rebellion: punk. But with his lock hold on the music establishment, Wenner could navigate through cultural storms. Rolling Stone was a formula Wenner could recalibrate from year to year, absorbing, and exploiting, any new trend. While he recruited feisty new talents like Charles M. Young—a tall, lanky punk devotee they dubbed “the Reverend”—to cover the Sex Pistols, a band Wenner despised, Wenner could test his influence elsewhere, first in Washington, D.C., where he used his readership as a kind of youth lobby to expand his political influence, and then in Hollywood, where he tried mightily to reinvent himself as a movie producer while funneling favored movie stars to the cover of Rolling Stone. Indeed, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the definitive youth movie of the 1980s, was launched partly because Wenner realized he knew nothing about what modern young people were doing and so sent reporter Cameron Crowe to find out.
When California Republican Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, Wenner had so thoroughly stamped his times with the Rolling Stone worldview that he would arrive at the preppy green lawns of the new decade like a late Roman emperor, haloed by glittering friends and plump with self-satisfaction. His unembarrassed appetite for stardom and excess had made him an object of scorn and parody but also a rich man—and right on cue as his generation was embracing the “greed is good” ethos, wealth and power as their natural birthright. And he had proven that his original insight of 1967 was an abiding one: that the 1960s were, at bottom, a business. This didn’t mean the original idealism was bogus—only that it was a thing you could stay tethered to through commerce, and specifically a subscription to Rolling Stone. For Wenner, idealism was never the enemy of money. “It was a false dichotomy,” said Wenner. “Well, it’s America! Rock and roll is America.”
In the 1980s, rock and roll became an all-powerful institution—the opposite of revolutionary, except in the sense that Jann Wenner had turned the youth revolution into a spectacularly profitable enterprise. From there, Wenner went through all the baby-boomer stations of the cross, and made journalism out of them. He launched a parenting magazine when he had children (Family Life) and a men’s magazine for his midlife crisis ( Men’s Journal). He would come out of the closet as a gay man in the spring of 1995, leaving Jane for a fashion designer named Matt Nye, when the vogue for coming out was in. By then, Wenner himself was interviewing sitting presidents, starting with Bill Clinton in 1993 and shuttling Bob Dylan in his private jet to the televised stage of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an institution he helped found with Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records and operated like his personal fiefdom. Jann Wenner cast himself as—and indeed was—the gatekeeper of the rock-and-roll story. That story was underwritten by the same market forces that produced classic rock radio stations, rock-and-roll-themed restaurants, and endless television and film revivals about the 1960s. Rock and roll sold beer and cars and clothes and watches and piles and piles of Rolling Stone magazines. At one point, Rolling Stone was throwing off $30 million a year in pure profit, making Jann Wenner a bona fide media baron of Manhattan.
It didn’t necessarily make him beloved. In years to come, Jann Wenner’s bold-faced contradictions would drive nearly everyone who knew him mad. But it was his schizophrenic nature—a polarity of vulnerability and rageful ambition—that drove the magazine. He was an antiwar liberal and a rapacious capitalist, naive and crafty, friend and enemy, straight and gay, editor and publisher. His mother would say of him, “I’ve always felt Jann was twelve years old going on seventy-five. He’s certainly the most conservative member of our family.”
Success would blunt Wenner’s feel for the culture and sow the seeds of his decline. He missed the rise of MTV and hip-hop, and later the Internet, cultural revolutions he experienced like a well-heeled uncle squinting toward Manhattan from a ski slope in Sun Valley, where he began wintering in the 1990s. It was the prickly celebrity tabloid Us Weekly—his last successful invention, highly lucrative but culturally toxic—that would barricade his flagging rock magazine against the collapse of both the record and the print industries, and later the entire economy in 2008. The war-ravaged presidency of George W. Bush reanimated Rolling Stone’s once-righteous reputation as a left-wing voice, and the market crash of 2008 inspired one last star for Wenner’s journalistic firmament: Matt Taibbi, the heir to Hunter S. Thompson, whose attacks on the banking industry almost single-handedly revived the reputation of late-period Rolling Stone.
This book is drawn from over a hundred hours of conversation with Jann Wenner, from the contents of his voluminous archive of letters, documents, recordings, and photography, and from 240 interviews with musicians, writers, publishers, friends, lovers, and current and former employees of Rolling Stone. Jann Wenner’s life tells the story of a man and his generation. It is also a parable of the age of narcissism. Through image and word, Wenner was a principal architect of the rules of modern self-celebration—the “Me” in the Me Decade. The self-involvement of rock stars and celebrities became, eventually, something everyone could emulate. His advocacy of boundary-pushing journalism and the liberal verities of the Democratic Party was fundamental to the Rolling Stone formula, but above all he was a fame maker. Today the signifiers of fame—confession, preening self-regard, and blunt sexuality—are so built into modern media manners that few can even recall a time when they were novel. But the framework of American narcissism—from the permission to unload personal demons in public to the rise of the selfie—has its roots in Jann Wenner’s pioneering magazine making. In the age of social media, calculated authenticity is the coin of the realm. And Rolling Stone helped define what authenticity meant, and well after it became decoupled from the 1960s idealisms that birthed it. That Wenner is the same age as President Donald J. Trump, whose ascent to power was built on celebrity, is perhaps no coincidence. Indeed, Wenner’s oldest friends saw in Trump’s personality, if not his politics, a striking likeness to the Rolling Stone founder—deeply narcissistic men for whom celebrity is the ultimate confirmation of existence. At one time, Jann S. Wenner wanted to be president, too.
His ex-wife, Jane, would say Jann lacked the “what-if” gene. From boyhood, he compulsively hoarded every document of his life, every newspaper clipping, letter, draft of a letter, envelope, postcard, pamphlet, press release, financial record, photograph, and telegram—because he believed he would one day be important. He seemed never to consider the possibility that Rolling Stone might fail. And why should he? If his appetite seemed bottomless, if he was “mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything,” as Jack Kerouac had it in On the Road (a book Kerouac nearly titled Rock and Roll Road), if he regularly spent more money than he had, made enemies of friends in record time, and consumed drugs like a Viking, Wenner figured it would simply work out, as if the bounty of the biggest, richest generation in the history of the planet, converging on Northern California in 1967, was a kind of manifest destiny, an endless wind at his back.
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WHEN THE JOHN LENNON INTERVIEW APPEARED in Rolling Stone, published over two issues in January and February 1971 with cover portraits by Annie Leibovitz, Lennon’s unvarnished honesty and hostility, and the sheer volume of his words, were the shattering end of the Beatles. But it established Rolling Stone at the center of the culture, making international news. Not incidentally, it also put Wenner’s newspaper, which had been struggling financially, on a sound footing. But Wenner, as was his wont, could not stop there with Lennon. The interview, titled “Lennon Remembers,” was simply too powerful. And so he proposed to publish the interview as a book. And though John Lennon strongly objected, Wenner published it anyway. Lennon was furious. “John took it so badly,” Yoko Ono said. “It’s not what the book says, or the interview, but the fact that Jann betrayed him . . . He took the money and not the friendship.”
It was a signal moment for the young publisher. And it was also completely in character, for better and worse. The two never spoke again.
