of San Francisco in 1967. At one point, Wenner stole a kiss behind a bush. “He was wooing me,” said Gracey. “I felt on the one hand beguiled by it, charmed, and also somewhat frightened by it, I think. I think I probably lived under the philosophy that, you know, everything is experience.” One afternoon, Wenner asked Gracey if he wanted to try LSD. “I have no idea how many hours we were actually high,” Gracey said. “And I can remember being reluctant during this time, but knowing that, in a sense, I was actually in the vortex. A whirlpool, basically, and that it was going to happen. And it did.”
They had sex at the Wenners’ apartment in Potrero Hill, after which Wenner, on top of the world, took Gracey on a drive in his blue VW Beetle. “His driving on LSD seems a bit frightening,” said Gracey. “I remember seeing visions of cars turning into sharks.”
To that point, Wenner had had only tentative and unsatisfying flirtations with homosexuality. His tryst with Warnecke had been illicit and unformed, a happy accident on LSD. Despite the new age of freedom and self-expression, gay love was not part of the rock-and-roll menu, where “chicks” were the subject of 99 percent of the music. It was still taboo in the male-dominated hippie culture, too. Kenneth Anger’s film Scorpio Rising featured gay bikers revving to the sound of Martha and the Vandellas and Mick Jagger preened like a drag queen, but it was part of the Shock of the New, theatrical titillation and subversion rather than a license for open liberation. But for Wenner, the Gracey affair was something deeper than a mere fling: He said it was his first bona fide homosexual romance. On the eve of the invention of Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner’s Summer of Love was sanctified by a man.
But then there was Jane, his girlfriend. Her prettiness and sophistication—and her gender—were everything Wenner desired, in theory if not in actuality. She was the nice Jewish girl of his dreams, a cosmopolitan tastemaker to help articulate his ambitions, which, like Jane herself, were directed east. To keep faith with her would require secrets, a conception of truth and loyalty as fungible as Wenner’s own sexuality. But Wenner was a natural at holding two conflicting realities apart, the compartments of his psyche as formalized as between the editor and the publisher of a newspaper. What was it his mother had written? Janus. Two-headed.
In late July, Gracey’s head was still swimming from his LSD trip, his emotional life in turmoil as he prepared to return to England. While in San Francisco, he’d slept with two women and a man—including Jane’s sister, Linda. Before he departed, Wenner drove to Haight-Ashbury to give Gracey a stack of rock LPs and a love letter he’d written. In it, Wenner dubbed them “water brothers,” commemorating their nude swim with a reference to the polyamorous rite in Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 sci-fi book, Stranger in a Strange Land (a rite Wenner described in his rave review in The Sunday Ramparts as an “inter-personal baptism”). Wenner ended the letter with a lyric from a Bob Dylan song. It was a familiar line about a lost illusion—and a theft: “Ain’t it hard when you discover that he really wasn’t where it’s at,” he wrote, “after he took from you everything he could steal—how does it feel?”
•
HE NEEDED A NAME for his newspaper.
Jann Wenner had spent the summer of 1967 tossing around potential titles with Ralph Gleason, and for a while they settled on one: New Times. It was almost right, but not quite. Wenner proposed another: The Electric Newspaper. Gleason eyed his young charge and drew on his pipe.
That summer, Gleason was drafting an essay for The American Scholar that summed up his grandest ideas about the revolutionary impact of rock and roll. He quoted Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and opened with a quotation from Plato: “Forms and rhythms in music are never changed without producing changes in the most important political forms and ways.”
The Beatles, he declared, were the genesis of a new age. Along with Dylan, that “tiny demon of a poet,” the Dionysian energy of rock was destroying the old social forms and inventing a new value system around “the sacred importance of love and truth and beauty and interpersonal relationships.” “They came at the proper moment of a spiritual cusp, as the Martian in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land calls a crisis,” he wrote. “This was, truly, a new generation—the first in America raised with music constantly in its ear, weaned on a transistor radio, involved with songs from its earliest moment of memory.”
After Bob Dylan and the Beatles, he wrote, the record business “took another look at the music of the ponytail and chewing gum set, as Mitch Miller once called the teenage market, and realized there was one helluva lot of bread to be made there.”
He titled the article “Like a Rolling Stone.”
Rolling Stone! The nature of youth, gathering no moss. A Muddy Waters song, an age-old reference from the Bible. There was a popular band with that name and the six-minute radio hit by the generation’s tiny demon. (Inspired by Gleason, Wenner had tried calling his rejected rock anthology “Like a Rolling Stone: Rock and Roll in the Sixties.”)
Gleason blew out a little smoke: “How about Rolling Stone?”
4
Like a Rolling Stone
Here’s something for you to turn the Beatles on with.
—letter from Jann Wenner to Derek Taylor, November 1967
Art Garfunkel, of Simon and Garfunkel, offered an impersonation of the Jann Wenner he met in the early years of Rolling Stone. Standing up, he hunched his body forward, arms arched like a gunslinger. “I’m a business crab; my body is a little bent over,” he said, curling forward in demonstration. “I am so full of content I have no time for elegance of the spine—that’s for gentiles. I am all content, I got my envelopes in my hand, my sleeves are worked up—this is a workshop, man! This is not Hollywood; it’s a workshop. I am content. I got my envelopes; I come out with a tempo. Thanks for the applause, but let’s get right to it—
“And that’s Jann. That’s the Jann I first knew in San Francisco, always hunched over because the issues are too compelling, and too much fun, and there is stuff to be done.”
His eagerness—Garfunkel called it “joy”—overflowed, seemed nearly to drown him. There was a Yiddish word for it: shpilkes—ants in the pants. If Jann Wenner had a tail, said writer Dotson Rader, it would always be wagging. Ralph Gleason would say Wenner’s all-consuming devotion to his enterprise was like “some cat who had discovered a new way to split the atom.”
With the name, the vision snapped into focus: Rolling Stone, the first mainstream paper for the rock-and-roll generation. Now everything that was ambiguous about Wenner’s life was made clear: to become an editor and publisher, as big and important as Hugh Hefner—no, bigger than that. Henry Luce! William Randolph Hearst! Keeping such company made sense to Wenner, even if others rolled their eyes.
Who did this guy think he was? “Motherless, fatherless, sisterless, in the closet, starting a newspaper that nobody thought was going to go anywhere,” said Jerry Hopkins, one of the first writers for Rolling Stone. “He was out there.”
Wenner reportedly said he started Rolling Stone to meet John Lennon. But it was just as true that he wanted to be John Lennon—as famous, as important, as talented in his sphere. After all, the best and the brightest of the baby-boom generation (a term not yet in common use in 1967) weren’t necessarily going to Harvard or Yale anymore. They were dropping out and inventing a new generational order with the Beatles as their soundtrack. This was Jann Wenner’s story line.
