described showing up at a debutante party after the news broke, disgusted by garish displays of sympathy from the socialites he felt didn’t really know Pike. Wenner felt pangs of guilt for having shamed Pike about his sexuality. According to Wenner’s Berkeley friend Robbie Leeds, Wenner confessed to him after Pike’s death that he was a “latent homosexual.” (Leeds said he kissed Wenner on the cheek and never told.) Wenner’s mother, Sim, said she knew for sure that her son was gay when she saw his reaction to Pike’s death. “I just saw Jann being broken up by it,” she said.
Afterward, Pike’s distraught father became unhinged, describing communiqués from poltergeists he believed were his son’s ghost reaching out from the dead. In 1967, he tried summoning his son through a séance taped for TV and expanded on the phenomenon in a 1968 memoir called The Other Side. The book described his son’s descent into drug experimentation but never mentioned his sexual confusion. Bishop Pike died the following year when he became lost in the Judaean Desert in Israel while trying to reexperience the life of Jesus Christ. In her essay on James Pike in The White Album, Joan Didion would write of Pike’s restless pursuit of reinvention—his essential California-ness—as part of a time, the 1960s, when “no one at all seemed to have any memory or mooring, and in a way the Sixties were the years for which James Albert Pike was born.”
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ON THE WEEKEND of May 7, 1966, Jann Wenner was listening to the Grateful Dead perform “Midnight Hour” at the Harmon Gym at Berkeley when he noticed a man who looked like a Scotland Yard detective: deerstalker cap, curled mustache, pipe clenched in his teeth, and horn-rimmed glasses on his nose. It was Ralph Gleason, the music writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Wenner introduced himself. “He said I know exactly who you are,” Wenner recounted. “I’ve been reading your column.”
Wenner was thrilled. Gleason was the patron saint of all that interested him, the senior statesman of the rock-and-roll scene, and a mentor to Kaufman, whose blues harmonica Gleason once heralded after witnessing her jam on the street in Berkeley. She spoke to Gleason almost daily and even told him about Wenner’s acid trip in the closet. As the Dead played, Wenner and Gleason walked up to the loudspeakers on the stage and stuck their heads close to better hear Jerry Garcia’s spidery guitar playing.
Gleason was the consummate hipster of San Francisco, a storied record collector and jazz writer who once published a magazine called Jazz: A Quarterly of American Music and helped co-found the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1958. His columns were syndicated in newspapers across the country, and his liner notes adorned the backs of classic jazz LPs. He first heard jazz on the radio in Chappaqua, New York, during a bout of the measles in the 1930s. He became obsessed and traveled the clubs of Fifty-Second Street with fellow record collectors who converged at the Commodore Music Shop and the Hot Record Society. “He knew Leonard Feather, Nat Hentoff, Jerry Wexler, John Hammond,” said Wenner, “and after the war, he told me, he and [Gleason’s wife] Jeanie brought ten pounds of pot in the trunk with them and moved out to San Francisco.”
Gleason’s eclectic passion, including New Orleans jazz at a time when it was deeply unhip, made him an outlier in the universe of jazz critics. But in San Francisco, his catholic taste was an advantage, and he became the city’s quintessential music writer, interviewing Elvis Presley and Ray Charles on their swings through town. By 1966, he was a tie-wearing diabetic, forty-nine years old, who showed up at concerts with a chocolate bar in his coat pocket and hosted a local TV show called Jazz Casual. (The oft-told joke was that Gleason couldn’t decide if he was composed of two twenty-four-year-olds, three sixteen-year-olds, or four twelve-year-olds.) Gleason was initially skeptical of Bob Dylan, panning his performance at the Monterey Folk Festival in 1963 (“I was deaf,” he later said), but when he came around, he came around hard. In 1965, he arranged a press conference for Dylan on public television and invited the local press and bohemia, including Allen Ginsberg and Bill Graham. (Rolling Stone would later publish a transcript of the press conference as “The Rolling Stone Interview.”)
Dylan was flattered by Gleason’s attention. “I had heard that he had interviewed Hank Williams, which was impressive,” said Dylan. “So there was a bit of a mystery to him. He wore a trench coat and horn-rimmed glasses and was the type of reporter you’d see around the Broadway area in New York. He wrote about jazz and folk music in the mainstream newspaper, so he was responsible for introducing me to a wider crowd, and his approval meant a lot.”
Jann Wenner had grown up reading the Chronicle in San Rafael. The editor, Scott Newhall, was a jazz buff and confidant of Gleason’s who called the Chronicle the country’s only mainstream underground newspaper, turning against the Vietnam War and covering the beat and jazz culture of North Beach (Newhall and Gleason once interviewed Louis Armstrong while the jazz great sat on the toilet, part of his laxative-based health regimen). Gleason’s column became the must-read report of the youth scene at Berkeley, and he was the rare public figure who advocated for the Free Speech Movement. But he also demanded obeisance from his acolytes, a hipster Socrates lording his knowledge of jazz over enthusiastic know-nothings. Wide-eyed Berkeley kids would gather in his study, surrounded by his piles of books and LPs, to listen to Gleason wax philosophic about the virtues of Duke Ellington or Lenny Bruce (who name checked Gleason in his routines). When Wenner told him he hated jazz, Gleason frog-marched him to a Wes Montgomery concert. “There was life before Jerry Garcia!” he would say.
“He wanted a newcomer on the scene to bow low to Ralph,” recalled Michael Lydon, a Newsweek reporter who would go on to write for Rolling Stone. The potentate had new clothes, which some noticed. Greil Marcus said Gleason “wrote the same three columns, over and over again. I, like many people, got absolutely sick of reading these columns. First of all, it was all promotion. Promotion of the scene.”
But Wenner followed Gleason around like a would-be son looking for an adoptive father. “I hadn’t been in touch with my family for about three years,” said Wenner, “and he and his wife and three kids, they had a house on Ashby Avenue, it was kind of an open scene to anybody looking for advice.” Wenner became Gleason’s most ardent devotee, reading his columns religiously and accompanying him to concerts. “We’d be reviewing the same things,” said Wenner. “In far different ways; mine through the primrose glasses. We just kind of fell into a friendship. He became my mentor.”
Gleason admired Wenner’s zealous energy. He called him Janno and treated him like a precocious student in need of special guidance. And Wenner’s devotion flattered Gleason. “Jann was the first writer (journalist) I had met who saw this whole mad world of pop music the way I did,” Gleason wrote in Rolling Stone in 1972, “and who felt it had the kind of importance to all of our lives that, in the event, it turned out it did.”
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IN THE SPRING OF 1966, Wenner was hanging out with a handsome pal of John Warnecke’s named Richard Black, a socialite turned bohemian who had just returned from traveling the world, including a three-month stint in London. To Wenner, Black seemed impossibly hip—well dressed, an LSD enthusiast, aspirations to work in television. They dropped acid together and lay in the middle of the street at the top of Telegraph Hill experiencing visions of “the explorers coming through the bay, and the moon is a giant lightbulb,” Wenner recalled. Black planned on returning to London, along with his roommate, a sensitive and intensely intellectual writer named Jonathan Cott, who studied English literature at Berkeley. Wenner wanted to go. His grades at Berkeley were on an inverse trajectory with his drug taking, so Wenner dropped out to join them. “We did have the provision that we had things we were going to do, Jon and I, and we weren’t going to babysit him,” said Black.
Wenner arrived at Heathrow Airport in June 1966 with a guitar in one hand and a portable Olivetti in the other. He wore a porkpie hat. In his pocket was the phone number of Max Jones, editor of the Melody Maker and a friend of Ralph Gleason’s to whom Wenner hoped to sell a story. Flush with excitement,
