who would become major figures of rock writing, like Leslie “Lester” Bangs, who sent in reviews from his mother’s house near San Diego, and Jerry Hopkins, the future biographer of Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison. Hopkins was a sometime publicist and head-shop owner who sold Rolling Stone in L.A. He sent Wenner a story on seeing the Doors at the Cheetah club in Santa Monica, and Wenner wrote him a check for $15. Soon after, Wenner showed up in L.A. wearing a suit and tie and asking to sleep on his couch while he went hustling for ad dollars from the record companies.
As advertising trickled in from Elektra and A&M, Wenner kept his paper glued together through Tom Sawyeresque exploitation. Kingsbury built his own drafting table and drawers for the lead type and was responsible for buying new desks and chairs every time an employee joined the newspaper. He also collected the reader mail and served as Wenner’s personal handyman. When Jann and Jane complained that their power had gone out at home, Kingsbury came over and “changed the lightbulb and the lights went on,” recalled Linda Kingsbury.
The Wenners now lived Rolling Stone twenty-four hours a day. They took the bus to Brannan Street in the afternoon and worked into the night, Wenner whacking away on an IBM Selectric, soliciting Dylan and Lennon for interviews and sending blue-sky letters to A&M and Columbia, trying to get distribution for Rolling Stone in record stores. Jane, in pigtails and overalls, tabulated the day’s subscriptions, then went home to idle around the apartment or go shopping for furniture. If they got a dozen subscriptions in a day, it was cause for celebration, the uncorking of a bottle of wine or the smoking of a joint. The Springsteens of the world began writing letters to the editor. “At first it would be six or seven or eight [letters],” said Bob Kingsbury. “Then ten, fifteen, twenty, and pretty soon there’s half a bag full of letters. And it just kept growing and growing. I couldn’t do it anymore; I had to have someone else take over.”
In April 1968, Wenner offered a weed dealer named Charlie Perry a job copyediting and managing the work flow at Rolling Stone. A Berkeley graduate, Perry was an eccentric drug adventurer, experimental cook, aspiring Arabic scholar, and former roommate of Augustus Owsley Stanley III’s who heard about Rolling Stone through Jerrold Greenberg, a poet and junkie who wrote for the paper. Perry knew Wenner’s byline from Ramparts, thinking this Jann person was “a pretty shrewd rock critic for a girl.” He took the job because he figured “John Lennon knew something about LSD that he isn’t putting in his songs and I thought if I met him I could ask him.”
Perry, like everyone else, was excited by Wenner’s creation, convinced it was something “brand new,” though he still figured it would probably be dead in six months like every other fly-by-night paper that popped up at the Psychedelic Shop in the Haight. Wenner managed not to pay him for several months, which was fine with Perry until his dope trade dried up and he announced he was taking a job at the zoo. Wenner agreed to give him $40 a week. He would stay for ten years.
•
ON HIS FIRST TRIP to New York in 1968, Wenner slept on a couch in the West Twentieth Street apartment of Danny Fields, the A&R man for Elektra Records. Ironic and frank, Fields was the consummate scene maker and gossip of New York, one foot in the world of Andy Warhol, the other in teen pop magazines like Hullabaloo and Datebook. He followed with delight the young male quartets who pranced on stage and sang to the big beats. “Monks! Mark! Stones! Spoons!” went a typical headline on the cover of 16, where Fields regularly published interviews. Fields joined Elektra in 1967 as a publicist and, after discovering the MC5 and Iggy Pop on the same weekend, became the “house freak,” an after-hours talent scout. Most nights, Fields worked the back room at Max’s Kansas City, Mickey Ruskin’s nightclub, where rock and rollers began mingling with the Warhol crowd after Beatles manager Brian Epstein held a press conference there. Fields had hosted Pete Townshend of the Who in his apartment before Wenner showed up, plying him with drugs and groping him. “I enjoyed what he did, though I didn’t let him actually fuck me,” Townshend said in his 2012 memoir.
Fields was the Virgil to Wenner’s Dante on a grand tour of the New York underground, which teemed with drugs and sexual adventure, groupies and bohemians. In Fields’s orbit were a gaggle of the like-minded, including a beautiful blond photographer named Linda Eastman, daughter of an entertainment lawyer, who used her access to both photograph and pursue romantic tête-à-têtes with Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison. Eastman’s best friend was Lillian Roxon, an Australian rock writer who published the Rock Encyclopedia in 1969 and whom Rolling Stone would later call “the Dorothy Parker of Max’s Kansas City.” In May 1968, Wenner put Eastman’s portrait of Eric Clapton on the cover for an interview with Clapton that Wenner had conducted the previous summer—the first female photographer whose work appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. From there, Wenner would regularly visit her apartment on East Eighty-Third Street to go through her portfolio for images. “That was how I came to hear of Jann,” said Paul McCartney, whom Eastman met while on assignment in London for Rolling Stone and would marry in 1969, “as the sort of guy who was doing Rolling Stone and who picked photos from her little apartment.”
Fields also introduced Wenner to Gloria Stavers, the forty-one-year-old editor of 16 magazine, a former model who looked like Katharine Hepburn and commanded four million teenage readers in America. When Wenner sent her a copy of Rolling Stone, Stavers welcomed the magazine as a “soul-brother in the fourth estate” and urged her readers to send a quarter to Brannan Street for a copy of Rolling Stone. (The Wenners used the coins that poured in to buy groceries.) Stavers received Wenner like a squire from the groovy West Coast kingdom. “They were excited to meet me,” recalled Wenner. Over dinner with Fields, Stavers taught Wenner how to eat a lobster while wondering at his naïveté. As she would later recount to a friend, Wenner sat at her feet, looked around at the guests, and asked, “Is this a good party?”
Fields and Stavers taught Wenner some of the tricks of their trade. For one, Fields explained to him, he needed to treat the cover of his newspaper as the sales pitch—bold, eye-popping images of superstars were how magazines sold the wares. “I never, ever thought of that; it didn’t occur to me,” said Wenner. “If you’re hip about media, it’s obvious.”
Stavers also pressed on him the importance of sexing up photos of young rockers by unbuttoning the top button of their pants before photographing them. These were experienced starfuckers, groupies, admirers, and they recognized Wenner as a fellow traveler, attuned to the provocative pleasures of boy rockers. “That’s how you love the stars,” observed Art Garfunkel, a staple of Tiger Beat and 16 at the time, along with Paul Simon. “You have to get under the pedestal and look up their pants, to praise the height of the star.” (He called Wenner’s lust for celebrity “erotic slavery.”)
Wenner said he was not yet clued in to Fields’s homosexuality or the gay culture hiding in plain sight at Max’s. Instead, he chased whatever he could get. One night, he tried taking Linda Eastman home, but Lillian Roxon intervened. “Roxon was a nice girl, very witty, but dumpy looking,” said Wenner. “She didn’t want me to be with Linda, because Linda was hers.”
Wenner said they went back to Eastman’s apartment, but Roxon had skunked the mood. “Then, after failing to consummate what I thought was going to be a situation, we got along because she was a stone cold rock-and-roll fan,” Wenner said of Eastman.
Wenner returned from his New York sojourns with an expansive sense of victory. He wrote to Baron Wolman that “Rolling Stone is distributed on every fucking newsstand in New York. I saw every important person in the music business, and they were most eager to see the man from Rolling Stone.
“When you get home,” he said, “we’ll just have to sit down and flatter the shit out of ourselves.”
Afterward, Roxon wrote a short profile of Wenner for Eye, the hippie exploitation magazine published by Hearst and presided over
