logo hovering over a film still of John Lennon from How I Won the War. “Ralph and I have done it,” he wrote to Jonathan Cott in London, “started a rock and roll newspaper called Rolling Stone. I hereby authorize you to be our feature writer in Merry Olde. Don’t bother with the newsstand gossip as we already have Melody Maker. Instead, give us your impression of the scene and profiles or extensive interviews with the Beatles, the Stones, Andrew Loog Oldham, Peter Townshend, Donovan and such like that you can get to.”
He offered him $25 a feature. Wenner didn’t have the money to pay Cott, but he was hustling day and night, hitting up friends, relatives, friends of relatives, friends of friends. He went back to the old socialite crowd—Richard Black, Andy Harmon, Susan Andrews—with a rambling pitch about youth culture and rock and roll. A cross between the Mojo Navigator and Seventeen magazine, he told Harmon. “The Mojo Navigator sounded cool to me,” said Harmon, “but Seventeen? Even then Jann had a sense of how to make a commercial enterprise.”
Most people said no. But Joan Roos, the matriarch of SLATE, put in $1,000, and Wenner’s mother wrote him a check, as did Wenner’s stepmother, Dorothy, who gave him $500 under his father’s name. (Wenner promised her she would make a million dollars and told her she now owned “page 18 and 23.”) Gleason put up $1,500 for the first issue and agreed to write a column for Rolling Stone, which he titled Perspectives. In a contract Wenner formulated, he gave Gleason “50/50 veto power” over what went into the paper, making him his editorial equal. If they couldn’t agree on a matter, Wenner proposed, “either party has the option of having the disputed matter printed in Rolling Stone under his byline.”
Using Gleason’s name as a reference, Wenner combed the Haight and North Beach asking for money from record stores and head shops to advertise in his new magazine, $100 for a full page. Tom Donahue’s new free-form radio station signed up; promoter Bill Graham declined Wenner’s offer to invest but bought ads for the first several issues at a discounted $25 a page. Wenner personally flew to Los Angeles to meet with record executives at A&M and Capitol, boldly promising he would displace Billboard magazine. (“Rolling Stone loves you,” he ended his letter to A&M.) In person, his rambling spiel geysered forth as if it were all too exciting and self-evident to explain. But the thrust of it was the basis of his first editorial, wherein he described a newspaper “not just about music, but also about the things and attitudes that the music embraces.” It was about “the magic that can set you free.”
“To describe it any further would be difficult without sounding like bullshit,” he concluded, “and bullshit is like gathering moss.”
Jane Schindelheim never liked the name Rolling Stone, but she liked what Rolling Stone was doing to Jann Wenner. When he moved into the Garrett Press warehouse, he hired contractors to erect Sheetrock partitions for his own office and assigned Jane to decorate the headquarters for her little would-be press baron, a court from which Wenner could command his empire—seven tables manned by unpaid volunteers and some rented typewriters next to a loud and foul-smelling machine burning hot lead all day. By October, Wenner was still short the money he needed to get Rolling Stone off the ground. The Schindelheims of Manhattan had not yet met Jane’s boyfriend, but received a letter describing how they could become a “limited liability partner” in his newspaper for the minimum investment of $2,000. There was, said Wenner, almost no chance of failure:
The very least that can happen for any investor is approximately a 15% return on his or her money per year as well as equity in a going concern. The best that can happen is too fantastic to really talk about, but is roughly comparable to owning a very big and successful magazine on the financial order of Playboy.
Her parents liked the cut of this young man’s jib. A nice Jewish boy with a business mind. They wrote the check, plus a little extra, and gave Rolling Stone the financial push it needed. The money Dr. Schindelheim earned from yanking teeth and capping molars also gave their daughter an ownership stake in Rolling Stone, making her “secretary and director” of the start-up, which, in early October 1967, Wenner incorporated in the state of California under a name he liked quite a lot: Straight Arrow Publishers Inc.
Hey, it was their baby now. Unlike the do-nothing Chet Helms, with his long hair down to his Levi’s, the clever and industrious Jann Wenner, who styled his hair in a pageboy, had managed to raise $7,500 in capital and make it all legal with lawyers. Clearly they were destined to be millionaires and Chet Helms was not. Many years later, while sitting in her vast estate in the Hamptons, on Long Island, Jane Wenner would recall walking into a little San Francisco shop to order an ice cream cone in the 1970s and behind the counter was Chet Helms taking her order. “He was smart enough to be at the right place at the right time, and he just couldn’t do anything,” she said. “There was something so sad to me about that moment for him.”
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JANN WENNER KNEW EXACTLY what he wanted: When the Rolling Stone telephone lines were installed at Garrett Press, he insisted they be answered by a woman because a woman’s voice was “classy.”
That fall, Jann Wenner and his girlfriend, Jane, and her sister, Linda, along with Michael and Susan Lydon and some volunteer hippies Wenner knew (“groupies,” he called them), toiled to cobble together the first issue of Rolling Stone. Michael Lydon would show up after his shift at Newsweek and work into the night alongside Wenner, who worried every detail. It was hot in San Francisco, and Susan Lydon, pregnant and pouring sweat next to the furnace, wore a slip hiked up over her belly as she watched Wenner bound in and out. “Jann was maniacally driven, a natural speed freak,” Susan Lydon wrote. “And to my great despair, he managed to involve Michael in most of his manic schemes, so that I had to be practically fainting or in tears before we could break for a meal.”
Wenner spent as little money as possible, using Newsweek’s offices for long-distance phone calls and the offices of Ramparts to make Xeroxes and lay out pages, courtesy of Ramparts’ production director John Williams, whom Wenner listed on Rolling Stone’s masthead as the art director. “He was just so energetic and so enthusiastic and knew what he wanted and could talk anybody into doing anything,” said Williams. “You just sort of wanted to help him.
“He offered me a hundred shares of stock for each issue. I was pasting up on some old flats that we had from another project, staying up until three in the morning, in between the Ramparts stuff . . . I didn’t know if it was going to go anywhere or not. I didn’t see how you could start a rock-and-roll magazine on newsprint and get anywhere.”
If Wenner harbored any doubts, they were about his credibility as a rock critic. He loved the music, but he was realistic about his own ignorance, how it worked, what made it good or mediocre. What he needed was the authority of a brand-name critic to rival the bylines at Crawdaddy!, but the person he needed already worked for Crawdaddy! A student of history at Brandeis near Boston, Jon Landau was a twenty-year-old college hermit who was homebound with a painful intestinal disorder and spent his days listening to records and writing crisply pedantic essays on soul and R&B, which he typed up and sent to Paul Williams. Among the small pool of people who wrote rock criticism in 1967, he made a splash for a dissertation-like analysis of Motown and the Supremes called “A Whiter Shade of Black.” Landau detested the San Francisco Sound, but Wenner didn’t care about his R&B bias, only his respected byline, which was being followed with great interest by record executives at Atlantic and Elektra scrambling to discover new acts to replace the fading folk and jazz artists on their rosters. As it happened, Landau was a classmate of Andy Harmon’s at Brandeis. In a pitch letter, Wenner shared his dream of turning Rolling Stone into a “very slick” magazine, describing the “youth market” he aimed to exploit and the competitors he aimed to vanquish, including the new full-color Cheetah, created by the publisher of Weight Watchers; the slickly turned-out Eye magazine,
