Ralph Gleason, the resident expert on the young, to write an essay on the hippies for Ramparts magazine. But without consulting Gleason, Hinckle decided to write and publish his own feature called “The Social History of the Hippies,” which argued that they were lotus-eaters who avoided the difficult work of stewarding political change. (He later wrote in his memoir that he was sorry that he “dumped on [Gleason’s] flower children without giving him a chance to defend the little fascists.”)
Wenner might have agreed with Hinckle about hippies, but Gleason was so furious at the betrayal that he immediately resigned from the board of Ramparts and refused to set foot in the offices again. Wenner wasn’t getting much love from Hinckle either: “Wenner was considerably frustrated by my oafish refusal to print his dope and rock stories in the magazine,” Hinckle later wrote, “as I considered rock reporting as a state of the journalistic art on a level with Bengay ads.”
And just as Hinckle and Ramparts pivoted away from Gleason and the counterculture, the magazine pulled the plug on its Sunday newspaper, leaving Jann Wenner without a job. Wenner and Gleason watched in dismay as the best outlet for journalism on the local counterculture disappeared. “Had it lasted a little longer,” Gleason later said, “it would have been the biggest of all the underground papers.”
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“THE SUMMER OF LOVE” began as a marketing slogan, coined in the spring of 1967 by a consortium of San Francisco heads calling themselves the Council for the Summer of Love. The group - cofounded by Chet Helms, an impresario and band manager who was central to the San Francisco Sound (among other accomplishments, he'd helped discover Janis Joplin) - promised a utopian reboot of the Haight-Ashbury, but they quickly lost control of the phrase when it was adopted by the eastern media as it prepared to descend on the Bay Area for a rock-and-roll event: the Monterey International Pop Festival.
The festival was planned, essentially, as a loss leader, fusing the values of the emergent counterculture with the marketing needs of the big record companies by creating a rock version of the Human Be-In, San Francisco’s “gathering of the tribes” that telegraphed the concept of the hippie around the world. The architect Lou Adler, whose Dunhill Records was enriched by the success of the Mamas and the Papas, saw a chance for a major media event to showcase rock bands for the nascent industry. He struck a $400,000 deal with ABC-TV to finance and film the festival and he conscripted D. A. Pennebaker, who shot the vérité Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back in 1965, to film it. To promote the event, Adler produced a song written by John Phillips called “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” Sung by Scott McKenzie, it became a No. 1 hit for Columbia Records on the eve of the festival. (“We all hated that song,” said Wenner. “Hated it, hated it, hated it.”)
While not altogether opposed to being sold, the San Francisco crowd was suspicious of those who were doing the selling. Ralph Gleason was the resident gatekeeper. To gain his support, the L.A. consortium needed to prove it wasn’t out to exploit the psychedelic Eden for money and promise to showcase homegrown stars, especially Big Brother and the Holding Company, led by singer Janis Joplin. “I think we felt we were all in the center of something special,” said Wenner. “As casual and informal and irresponsible as it was, it had a higher purpose. The LSD thing, the power of music. It was evangelical, in many ways. And I think that same impulse was there throughout the rock community. The Beatles felt it; the L.A. groups felt it. We were kind of purists. But San Francisco was seen as the epicenter of it all.”
To broker peace, Adler and his business partner dispatched Derek Taylor, a waggish Brit who worked on and off as the press secretary for the Beatles. He argued that people would intuitively respect any event they paid money to get into. “Had it been free,” recalled Bob Neuwirth, a friend of Bob Dylan’s who was a consultant on the Pennebaker film, “you would have had every meatball in the Western Hemisphere.” Here was a novel idea: putting up a fence and charging money for entrance to the great rock-and-roll love-in to give it credibility.
Wenner himself was a kind of junior broker of the deal. In a memoir published by Wenner in 1973, Derek Taylor would recall that most of the San Francisco people were skeptical of Adler and the hustlers from “the land of tinsel, false idols and broken promises”—except Jann Wenner, “who was most encouraging and quite (for him) honest.”
Taylor conscripted Wenner as an informal consultant for the Monterey festival, soliciting his advice on converting Gleason and commissioning him to write an essay for the full-color catalog they intended to sell at the County Fairgrounds in Monterey. To overcome Gleason’s resistance, Wenner recommended the festival promoters donate the profits to a well-selected charity. When Taylor suggested a rock-and-roll scholarship, Wenner unleashed a kind of manifesto about the meaning of the new culture. “It is a feeling, not skill, that makes the musician or writer,” he wrote in a letter, “and the genesis of rock and roll is being young in the twentieth century.
“You have to think about what rock and roll is all about and decide from there,” he continued, suggesting the “most obvious” cause was the legalization of marijuana. “The next best thing is aid to Vietnam,” he wrote. (They didn’t take his advice.)
As a postscript, Wenner threw in a little request: Could Taylor please send him free copies of all the Beach Boys records?
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THE FIRST AMERICAN rock-and-roll magazine was invented in 1966 by an earnest Swarthmore College freshman named Paul Williams. Crawdaddy! was named for the club where the Rolling Stones first played, and the magazine—a mimeographed, collated sheet—billed itself as a nofrills publication of “rock and roll criticism” featuring “intelligent writing about pop music.” From his perch on Broadway in San Francisco, Wenner noticed Crawdaddy! right away—and attacked it. In The Sunday Ramparts, he said the danger to the purity of rock and roll was “academics,” citing a pretentious review of a Supremes record in Crawdaddy! as “completely contrary to the spirit of rock and roll. Unfortunately, some people take it seriously.”
“Don’t believe anything you read about rock and roll,” Wenner wrote, “only what you see coming out of amplifiers.”
But the idea for a West Coast rock magazine was already in the air, and Wenner was paying close attention. In San Francisco, two high school friends started a paper called the Mojo Navigator Rock & Roll News in August 1966. Wenner invited the editor, Greg Shaw, to the Ramparts offices to rap about rock music. That same spring, Wenner was approached by Chet Helms, who told Wenner he was germinating a hippie music magazine for distribution in record stores. To get started, Helms had a few hundred names and addresses for contestants in a radio contest put on by KFRC-FM, which would be the initial mailing list for the magazine. Helms also had a clever name for it: Straight Arrow. He asked Jann Wenner to be the editor.
While Helms went looking for money to launch Straight Arrow—he calculated a $200,000 budget—Wenner spent his afternoons looking for work, taking the civil service exam to apply to be a postal carrier, a popular hippie job, while writing a review of Sgt. Pepper’s for High Fidelity. At one point, he was offered a position at Rogers & Cowan, the publicity firm, but turned it down, hoping for something related to rock and roll. He rummaged through Ralph Gleason’s filing cabinets of newspaper and magazine clippings to put together proposals for both an anthology of rock criticism and a rock-and-roll encyclopedia. “It had to be something he would endorse,” recalled Wenner. His pitch for a rock anthology was rejected by an editor in New York.
Maybe the best job was right under Jann Wenner’s nose. He went to meetings with Chet Helms and drew up a prospectus and an organizational chart for Straight Arrow, which included the art director from the Oracle, Gabe Katz. At one point, the group talked of making a magazine shaped like an LP cover. “Since I was the guy who wrote for Ramparts,
