chutzpah. He had never been satisfied with the paltry money at Crawdaddy! and, to Wenner’s chagrin, had started writing for Eye. (To supplement his income, Landau also developed a brisk business selling his complimentary review copies of LPs to record stores.) Moreover, Landau didn’t share Williams’s aversion to negative, knives-out record reviews. He was an arrogant young man; he hated more records than he liked. This is precisely what appealed to Wenner, who wanted controversy in his paper. He didn’t care if a review was “wordy or obscene, as long as it says something.”
“Taste is the important thing,” Wenner said, “and that is the premise of what we are doing.”
Landau agreed to join Rolling Stone as Wenner’s Boston correspondent, telling him he looked forward to “a long and mutually profitable relationship.” If Landau was the high-flown critic Wenner needed, Wenner was for Landau a kind of walking, talking consensus of the new rock culture, the fat middle of youth opinion. “At that moment in time, Jann himself was a very pure distillation of the culture,” Landau said. “He could ask himself, ‘What do I like?’ ”
On October 18, 1967, Wenner gathered his exhausted staff of six next to the printing machine on Brannan Street as they watched the first issue of Rolling Stone roll off the conveyor belt of the Goss Suburban. They opened a bottle of champagne and drank from plastic cups. Only an hour before, Wenner had been typing a letter to Jonathan Cott asking him to get a Beatles interview for the next issue. A new Pink Floyd tape sat on Wenner’s desk, awaiting review. Had Wenner breathed since Monterey? There was no time. But as he finally drew a breath, holding the first issue of Rolling Stone in his hands, he could not imagine anything better. “It’s just so good,” he said, and wept with joy.
5
Born to Run
An eighteen-year-old kid with a modified Beatles haircut and cuffed blue jeans was standing on the corner of Main Street in Freehold, New Jersey, dropping dimes in a pay phone. He was a guitarist in a rock-and-roll group that wore matching shirts and vests and played covers of “Twist and Shout” at the local drive-in and high school gymnasium. The kid’s father was underemployed, and the family had no telephone in the house, forcing him to amble up to the newsstand to use the pay phone on the corner. In November 1967, he noticed a broadsheet folded in half and stamped with a druggy logo. On the front was a black-and-white photo of John Lennon wearing an army helmet, spectacles on his nose, lips set in a whistle.
Bruce Springsteen slapped twenty-five cents on the counter.
“I used to spend hours and hours on the phone outside the newsstand calling my girlfriends,” he said. “You went in, and there it was. It reached out to my little town and said, ‘You’re not alone.’ ”
In the working-class town of Freehold, population 9,140, Springsteen could count on one hand the number of local teens involved with rock and roll—most of them were in his band. “Maybe there was one or two other people you could talk to if you had something in common,” he said. “At that time, basically the rest of the world was against who you were becoming. You were young; you couldn’t travel to San Francisco. The most you could do was go to the [West] Village on the weekend, which Steve [Van Zandt] and I did, where we initially discovered this form of rock-and-roll writing. It initially came out in the form of Crawdaddy! magazine, which was sheetlike, this small printed sheet, and then Rolling Stone. These were your lifelines.
“You can’t explain to someone today how unique and essential those things were to the fiber of your being in those days,” he continued. “They were the only validating pieces of writing that somebody else out there was thinking about rock music the way you were. That was comforting.”
The pages of Rolling Stone shaped Springsteen’s idea of what a rock-and-roll star did, how to behave. Springsteen himself wouldn’t appear in its pages for another four years—ironically, he would receive a rave review in Hearst’s Examiner before that—but he would never forget that first issue. Rolling Stone opened to a full-page publicity shot of the wives of the Beatles, including Cynthia Lennon in a gold lamé dress, then flipped to a gossip column called Flashes, which reported that David Crosby had left the Byrds and A Hard Day’s Night would be televised on NBC. Further on, Ralph Gleason opined on race in the record business, pointing out that Otis Redding sold more records than Frank Sinatra, and three pages later was “The Rolling Stone Interview” with Donovan, Wenner’s homage to the Playboy interview, conducted by a friend of Gleason’s in L.A. (Slotted into the bottom corner of page 11 was a little trade story reporting that Philco-Ford was spending $1 million to advertise a portable 45 player just as the full-length album renaissance was starting.)
Everything was in charmless black-and-white columns, blocked off with clean Oxford lines, stiff and workmanlike except for the rock-and-roll content—a no-frills Daily Worker for stoned rock fans. The whole thing had been begged, borrowed, recycled, and stolen: Chet Helms’s idea and contestant list; Ralph Gleason’s title and editorial philosophy; the newsprint and layout of The Sunday Ramparts; Jon Landau from Crawdaddy!; several stories from the Melody Maker, rewritten by Susan Lydon. Ramparts magazine had even published a cover image of John Lennon from How I Won the War the month before. But the seams of Wenner’s Frankenstein’s monster were fused together by his obsessive mania and the newspaper’s bold statement of purpose. The table of contents directed the reader to page 20, where “Jann Wenner reviews the new records.” He panned two out of the three albums, including Chuck Berry’s Live at the Fillmore: “If you judge the album by what’s happening today, the judgment isn’t very favorable.” For his own opening gambit, Jon Landau dismissed the breakout Jimi Hendrix as having “inane” lyrics and a “violent” artistic vision, which ran alongside a blurry photograph of Hendrix by Jann Wenner. In the arc of rock-and-roll history, many of these opinions would seem arbitrary and even wrong. But who else was treating these strange records—the new Sopwith Camel album—as matters of consequence?
As important, the clean look of Rolling Stone—the packaging—was a revelation to rock fans used to squinting at the soupy, under-edited prose of Crawdaddy! for the latest Bob Dylan exegesis. Newsprint, which Wenner saw as merely pragmatic until he could afford to become a “slick,” gave Rolling Stone a street feel that made it more authentic than a rock exploitation magazine like Cheetah. As Wenner told Time magazine in 1969, “A lot of people ask why we’re not psychedelic. But that’s the whole point. Psychedelic language and so-called hip language is what the over-thirties think the kids want to see and hear. It’s not. What they respond to is somebody talking to them straight.”
While Springsteen thumbed through his copy in Freehold, Jann Wenner had no idea who was reading the forty thousand copies he printed. As it later turned out, the distributor Miller Freeman left most of the issues moldering in the warehouse and only six thousand copies were sold. But a few reader letters trickled in, the first one from Sharon Miller of Los Angeles, who said, “We all dig Rolling Stone.” By issue No. 3, they heard from a representative of Stax Records in Memphis, who declared, “Amen.” By April 1968, Charlie Watts, the Stones’ drummer, was writing to thank Jon Landau for the “nice things he said about me personally,” a coy reference to a critical slam of Their Satanic Majesties Request (“The rest of us, I’m sure, will try for the next one,” said Watts).
Wenner had one of his volunteers type up a survey to send out to the KFRC contestant list, which generated a murky view into the nascent “youth market” Rolling Stone was hitting—young men who bought and listened to records, smoked pot, and avoided the Vietnam draft and regular work. One reader, for whom music was “the expression of the soul and mind,” said his goal was to “drop out and distribute posters.” Another described himself as “fanatically devoted to rock because it is the truth for a change,”
