explained. “That’s really what created the opportunity for Rolling Stone magazine . . . the magazine caught on very fast because Jann had grasped the new vibration just when the old vibration was fading.”
This was not obvious. “Professionalism”—a word Wenner now used with increasing frequency to describe his vision of Rolling Stone—was anathema to the average Levi’s-wearing freek. It was an eastern establishment trope reeking of Eisenhower and the marketers of “pimply hyperbole” whom the Beatles mocked in A Hard Day’s Night. It was “Moloch,” as Allen Ginsberg wrote in his 1955 epic poem Howl—electricity and industry, the lifeblood of Wall Street and war profiteers. As Wenner assembled his newspaper in the fall of 1967, the Diggers of Haight-Ashbury, a group of communitarian radicals, were burning money on the streets and holding a funeral march for “the Death of [the] Hippie,” whose demise they blamed on the media barbarians lured to San Francisco by the likes of Chet Helms and Derek Taylor. The Diggers attacked the merchants of the new hipsterism—record stores and head shops—as “prettified monsters of moneylust.”
But the barbarian had already found its way inside the gate. There was money to be made attacking Moloch, and after Monterey Pop, rock and roll was awash in it. The Jefferson Airplane, among the most passionate rock revolutionists, were already spending their advances from RCA Victor on fancy cars and swimming pools in L.A., a story Wenner put right on the cover of the first issue of Rolling Stone. “When they’re not in the studios, they stay at a fabulous pink mansion which rents for $5,000 a month,” Wenner reported. “The house has two swimming pools and a variety of recreational facilities.”
The magazine was carefully positioned to be accessible to the American mainstream. “We didn’t want to be a part of that hippie way of life,” said Wenner. “We didn’t want to be communal. We didn’t want to have a hippie design. Our values were more traditional reporting. We wanted to be recognized by the establishment. Part of it was our own mission; part of it was what we were looking for, music. We wanted the music to be taken seriously. We wanted to be heard, we wanted the music to be heard, we wanted to change things.”
But what did a twenty-year-old Berkeley dropout know about starting a business? Not much. Jane’s sister, Linda, recalled seeing business books piled in Wenner’s room on Potrero Hill that summer. But mainly he turned to Ralph Gleason, whose Rolodex overflowed with names of lawyers and press agents, record executives and music writers. Wise in the ways of newspapers, Gleason would point his finger and Wenner would go running: Here’s a law firm who can help you incorporate. Here’s a writer from the Melody Maker in London. What about my friend in L.A.? He can write. Here’s a record agent at A&M and a publicist at Columbia. Maybe this guy at Vanguard can help you get a few ads.
From the start they discussed using the defunct Sunday Ramparts as the bones of the enterprise. The paper had been printed by Garrett Press, a union shop that produced newsletters like The Hillsdale Merchandiser and a union rag called The Daily Worker. “I was a veteran of the newspaper and magazine business at the point,” recounted Gleason in 1973, “and Jann was not, and I suggested to him that many times a printer will give you free office space in his loft or storage area for you to put out your publication—if you’re gonna print it at his press. And we talked Garrett Press into letting us do that and that’s how we started off at Brannan Street. Upstairs in Garrett Press, in the corner.”
It was located near a slaughterhouse. Most of the loft space was swallowed up by huge rolls of newsprint, Linotype machines, and a furnace that melted lead type and blew off an acrid stench. The walls were painted pink. The employees of Garrett Press were bemused by the hippie clientele who showed up that fall, long-haired, glassy-eyed, and snickering with private jokes. When Jane casually used the word “fuck” in mixed conversation, the burly union men were horrified. “My knee almost collapsed,” said Dan Parker, a foreman at Garrett Press who wore a tie to work and would become an office manager at Rolling Stone for a decade. “I never heard a woman use the word ‘fuck.’ It was such an irrational thing for a woman to be saying.”
He viewed Jann and Jane as typical hippies, their paper no different from the radical Berkeley Barb. But Wenner, he observed, “always walked like he was climbing a telephone pole. He was always walking like he was climbing.”
Gleason sent Wenner a check for $300 to print a prototype of Rolling Stone and help sell advertising, including with it a postcard for Jazz, the defunct quarterly he once edited, wishing Wenner better luck than he had.
Wenner needed actual professionals to help build the professional enterprise he had in mind. At Monterey, he had run into Michael Lydon, a Yale graduate who worked for Newsweek but whose interests were increasingly countercultural. Over coffee at Enrico’s, a North Beach café, Wenner asked him to help shepherd the first issue, offering him the job as his No. 2. Lydon agreed to work for him, in exchange for 200 shares in the company, while maintaining his Newsweek gig. Michael brought along his wife, Susan, who recalled in her 1993 memoir, Take the Long Way Home, that Wenner told them that his ambition “was to become the ‘Henry Luce of the counterculture.’ ”
“He stood out in a crowd,” recalled Michael Lydon, “for the drive and for the ambition and for [having] more going on than you might know right away—the wheels within wheels. You could look at the guy and [see] gears were moving in his head. He was thinking all the time.”
Wenner assigned Lydon a story that Gleason suggested: an exposé on how the promoters of the Monterey Pop Festival, in particular Lou Adler, might have misappropriated the money.
A few months before, Wenner had met a freelance photographer named Baron Wolman at a panel discussion on rock and roll at Mills College featuring Ralph Gleason, Phil Spector, and Tom Donahue, the latter about to invent free-form FM radio in San Francisco at KMPX. Wenner told the impossibly old photographer, aged twenty-nine, about a new rock magazine he was cooking up, at the time the Chet Helms version. “I said, ‘Wow, man, that sounds like a really good idea,’ ” recalled Wolman, who after a stint in the army had moved to California, married a ballet dancer, and ended up in Haight-Ashbury.
Savvy enough to understand the value of his own work, Wolman agreed to be the photographer of what was now Rolling Stone if he could own all his own negatives. Wenner agreed but also asked him if he had $10,000 to invest. “Baron, we are not countercultural,” went Wenner’s pitch. “We are not hippie. I’m in this to make a success and to make a lot of money. I know we can, and everything we do is gonna be professional; it won’t be confused as something that isn’t professional.”
“That was when I began to realize he was very, very focused,” said Wolman.
•
IF JANN WENNER WAS GOING to distinguish his paper from the corpus of The Sunday Ramparts, he needed a distinctive logo. He commissioned one by a psychedelic poster artist named Rick Griffin, who grew up down the hill from Chadwick in Palos Verdes and illustrated for Surfer magazine. The quasi-Victorian lettering that Griffin sketched out had the druggy wink of rolling-paper brands found in head shops. That same summer, Griffin illustrated a poster for an art show featuring a package of marijuana cigarettes and the words “Joint Show: A Rare Blend.” As he was refashioning the fonts for Rolling Stone—with an R strikingly similar to the one in the Ramparts logo—Wenner became so impatient to get his hands on the drawing he went to Griffin’s apartment and took the unfinished draft. “It was the second sketch,” said Wenner. (Griffin later complained he was not paid for it, and Wenner wrote him a check for $5,000 in the early 1970s.)
Wenner’s first expenditure was personalized stationery with Griffin’s Rolling Stone logo on top. Gleason was furious. What a waste! But Wenner loved it, dreamed into it. A real newspaper! Jann Wenner’s
