which is the age I was.”
Wenner molded the results into a dubious report for advertisers, claiming that “seventy-three percent” of his readers were men and “95% of the total readership” bought six records a month. After Rolling Stone debuted, Wenner got a letter from Jerry Wexler, the genius producer of Atlantic Records who recorded the soul albums of Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding. “First issue was strong,” he wrote to Wenner, saying he admired Jon Landau but “believe[d] Rolling Stone needs a more specific orientation and point of view. For god’s sake, avoid the groupie syndrome, and let’s not be wide-eyed about the hashcapades or pot busts of the venerated. Need professionalism and detachment. Need identity.”
Was Rolling Stone a trade paper, a critical journal, a teen rag like 16?
“What?” Wexler asked.
But Jann Wenner knew better than this fifty-year-old man did: It was all of the above.
•
WHEN GARRETT PRESS SPAT OUT the first issue of Rolling Stone, Jane Schindelheim’s name was printed inside as the head of subscriptions. “BRAVO JANN WENNER!” she wrote to him. “ROLLING STONE LOOKS SMASHING!”
They were planning to move to a new apartment on Rhode Island Street in Potrero Hill, across the street from Jim Peterman of the Steve Miller Band. Jane was ready to become Jann’s full-time partner in their ascendant enterprise. “Is there enough room in the kitchen for a table?” she asked, “and space for you and Rolling Stone and Chessai [her Lhasa apso] and me?
“I shall make it beautiful,” she promised. “I will touch you soon my darlingest.”
If she could catch him. If Wenner seemed manic before, the demands of his biweekly paper now spun him like a 45. Bands were forming and breaking up weekly, record deals getting made, albums recorded, drugs consumed, musicians busted, rock festivals mushrooming from Colorado to New Jersey. Stories and gossip bubbled to the surface: In the space of two weeks, Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney dreamed up a record label together, a new 50,000-watt FM station was coming to Los Angeles, members of the Lovin’ Spoonful were cooperating with the police following a drug bust, and Jim Morrison was arrested for indecency in New Haven.
From the vantage of the loft on Brannan Street, Wenner looked out over a countercultural mecca that was quickly becoming a company town. Wenner, in his early column called Rock and Roll Music, defined and defended the local scene, which consisted of seven “indigenous” bands (the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape, Country Joe and the Fish, the Steven Miller Band, and Quicksilver Messenger Service) and was defined by long live shows with liquid light displays. A young economist named Michael Phillips, who was involved in inventing the MasterCard at Bank of California, predicted in the summer of 1968 that “the San Francisco Sound” would become a $6 million market by year’s end and “increase the wealth of the city by $8 to $15 million.” The Youngbloods, singers of the ubiquitous hit “Get Together,” moved to San Francisco from New York and saw themselves as part of a crucial industry. “You feel like you’re fulfilling a need,” singer Jesse Colin Young told Rolling Stone, “like a garage mechanic.”
Most of the record-selling business was elsewhere, a fact that actually gave Wenner a distinct advantage. Bands came through town on their tours and Wenner was their turnstile, giving them ink. “There was nothing else to do in San Francisco,” Wenner said. “There were no record companies there. There was nothing else to do but shop and hang out, or hang out with me.”
Steve Winwood of Traffic was the first rock star to visit the offices. “I showed him where all the lead type was,” said Wenner, who called Winwood, in April 1968, “probably the major blues voice of his generation.” To interview Hendrix, Wenner simply drove to his motel in Fisherman’s Wharf and hit record on the tape machine. “Baron and I went out to his motel room and shot the shit,” recalled Wenner. “We published it entirely as a quote.”
It was Hendrix at his loopy best: “The Axis of the earth turns around and changes the face of the world and completely different civilizations come about or another age comes about. In other words, it changes the face of the earth and it only takes about T of a day. Well, the same with love; if a cat falls in love, it might change his whole scene. Axis, Bold as Love . . . 1-2-3 rock around the clock.”
Through people like Derek Taylor, who was training the Byrds and the Beach Boys about the media, Wenner tapped into a network of advocates who put his newspaper in all the right hands. “I used to read every word of every page of every issue,” said David Crosby, who would soon form Crosby, Stills, and Nash. “It was the first one that wasn’t a Teen Scream boy thing. It was the first one that was about us, that was about actual music, and we dug the shit out of it.”
The artists came looking for him. Local heroes Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs took assignments to write stories and reviews for Rolling Stone (“Miller on the British Groups: Queer Bits in Underwear”). The manager of the Stooges in Detroit wrote asking for help booking gigs in San Francisco (Wenner suggested posting a free ad in his back pages). After Blood, Sweat, and Tears signed a lucrative contract with Columbia, Wenner assigned keyboardist Al Kooper to review the D. A. Pennebaker film of Monterey Pop, and two months later Wenner profiled Blood, Sweat, and Tears, calling them “the best thing to happen in rock and roll so far in 1968.” When Lou Adler and John Phillips tried organizing a second Monterey Pop Festival and were met by local opposition, Wenner put them on the cover of Rolling Stone and called their opponents a “vicious” and “ugly collection of voyeuristic ‘taxpayers.’ ” “They were going to the city council and the local swells to get a permit,” he said. “I met them at the airport and I was with them as they stepped off the Lear jet.” (The festival never happened, and Rolling Stone again turned on Adler, reporting that his accountant had embezzled $37,000 from the first festival. “[Wenner] was obsessed with the funds, and it went on for years,” said Adler. “Truly years, almost every time he mentioned Monterey, ‘Where’s the money?’ That’s how I always thought of him. ‘Where’s the money?’ He was definitely a pain in the ass.” Adler insisted that all the money went to charity.)
Wenner seemed preternaturally certain in all things but his own writing powers. His failure to become a novelist still haunted him (he continued to rewrite and edit versions of “Now These Days Are Gone”), and at first his writing style had the generic feel of a student term paper. When in doubt, Wenner resorted to hippie patois, starting his cover story in issue No. 2, “Tina Turner is an incredible chick.” When Otis Redding died in a plane crash in December 1967, Wenner asked Michael Lydon to write the obituary, but Lydon declined, saying Wenner needed to write it to establish his authority. “I said, no, Jann, you’ve got to do this,” he said. “He wasn’t confident in himself as a writer.” (“Otis was the Crown Prince of Soul,” wrote Wenner, “and now the Crown Prince is dead.”)
Wenner improvised as he went. When John Williams left town for the holidays, Wenner was left to lay out the year-end issue for 1967 by himself—prompting a panicked call to Linda Schindelheim’s boyfriend, Bob Kingsbury a forty-three-year-old sculptor. “We’re on deadline and I need you to help me put something together,” he told Kingsbury, who was skiing in Tahoe. A graduate of the Swedish State School of Arts, Crafts, and Design in Stockholm, class of 1950, Kingsbury was a middle-aged bohemian and gifted artist with no experience in newspapers but a few novel ideas about arranging text and images. “He asked me if I thought I could be an art director,” Kingsbury would later recount. “I went over to Ramparts one night to watch John Williams paste up ’til the wee hours of the morning. I watched him a couple of times. I figured it would just take me three days, every two weeks.”
Wenner knew so little, even the most obvious
