wrote to Roxon to say he had received “nasty” letters about the profile, including one from a reader who asked, “What kind of man would publish pop stars in the nude?”
•
BOB KINGSBURY, twice the age of his boss, described the twenty-two-year-old Jann Wenner as standing with hands on his hips, chest puffed out, athwart his kingdom like a tyrannical king. “I’d bring a layout and he’d look at it and throw it back at me and say, ‘Do it over,’ ” said Kingsbury. “Well, I spent a long time on it, you know. And so I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Because I said so.’ ”
“I was pushing fifty and he was pushing twenty-two,” he said. “These are all kids. Twenty-three-year-olds. And if you’ve ever worked with a bunch of twenty-three-year-olds, you’ll understand. But if you haven’t, it’s one of the most horrible—listen, every single one of them: ‘I’m an editor of Rolling Stone!’ ”
Wenner wrote long letters to Jon Landau and spent hours running up phone bills as they schemed and bragged about their newfound influence. (“What did Jon have to say?” Jane would ask Wenner after a marathon phone call. “Not much,” he’d reply.) Landau was educating young Wenner about music, a subject that Wenner, as big a fan as he was, knew very little about. He took him to see the Four Tops in Boston and inspired him to interview Booker T. and the MGs. “I never had been exposed to the rhythm and blues until Jon turned me on to all that,” he said. “I really learned at his knees. I was a San Francisco guy, just the basics.”
In turn, Wenner was dropping Landau’s name to recruit writers from rival publications, including Robert Christgau, a writer for Esquire who had cited Wenner in a feature on college dropouts shaping the rock world. In a May 1968 letter, Wenner ripped up a review Christgau submitted (for Judy in Disguise with Glasses, by John Fred and His Playboy Band), declaring himself the “EDITOR of Rolling Stone” and calling Christgau “Bobby Baby” as he attempted to school him on the finer points of rock reviewing. “The first page is all about Bob Christgau, Esquire reviewer, late of a college education, a man of renaissance tastes, elegant opinion, and high tone critic of ‘secular music,’ ” scoffed Wenner. “I mean, baby, who cares? And is it true anyway?”
To rub it in, he declared Jon Landau “smarter than anybody.” “Did you know he is majoring in medieavil [sic] history?” he asked. “You may think you don’t have to know anything about music, but you are wrong. I can’t tell you why. That’s how wrong you are.”
In a concluding twist, he granted that Christgau “could turn into one of the top rock and roll critics. I sincerely hope you do.”
Indeed he would. The “Dean of American Rock Critics,” as Christgau later called himself, told Wenner that he had the “worst case of San Francisco pompousness I’ve ever observed” and asked whether Wenner wrote all of his letters “while high.” Christgau didn’t write another review for Rolling Stone for decades. “I took out my animosity toward New York– based critics and intellectualizers on him,” said Wenner, “and alienated him early on and he never forgave.”
Wenner had a fair-weather relationship to the “straight journalism” he aspired to. When Susan Lydon filed a film review that used the first person, Wenner tore it to pieces and stomped on it like a “crazed Rumpelstiltskin,” she later recounted, telling her that the first person undermined journalistic objectivity. Meanwhile, Al Aronowitz, the rock journalist famous for introducing Dylan to the Beatles, excoriated Wenner for pasting whole paragraphs from a press release into his story on the Band. “Such use of press releases indicates that you are more interested in record company advertising than you are in honest reportage,” he wrote.
Was Rolling Stone a newspaper, wondered Aronowitz, or “just your own personal ego trip”?
Wenner, for all his chutzpah, tended to avoid personal confrontation. In 1968, he published a fake letter to the editor disparaging a Landau review under the pseudonym “Kevin Altman.” “I was disagreeing with something Jon Landau said, but I wouldn’t say it to his face,” he said.
But with Rolling Stone as his sword and shield, Wenner delighted in biting the hands that fed him. In the same issue he published his Clapton interview, and he tested his influence by running Jon Landau’s critical assassination of Cream—“Clapton is a master of the blues clichés”—which Eric Clapton later said made him pass out and then disband the group. “The ring of truth just knocked me backward,” Clapton would recount. “I was in a restaurant and I fainted. After I woke up, I immediately decided that it was the end of the band.”
Not to be outdone, Wenner followed up with a slashing review of their album Wheels of Fire, saying, “Cream is good at a number of things; unfortunately, songwriting and recording are not among them.” “Cream Breaks Up!” went the headline in the very next issue.
When the inevitable blowback from a record label came, Wenner would blame a writer or simply shrug. It was a cycle he was destined to repeat, fomenting controversy and then whistling past the ensuing storm: “I wrote a headline, ‘Pig Pen to Meet Pope?’ ”—about a rock festival in Rome—“Bill Graham thought this was sensationalist. I just thought it was funny. But he thought it was terrible. Then he tried to ban me from the Fillmore.” (Graham later caught Jann and Jane Wenner attending an Allman Brothers show.)
Some of Wenner’s biases were merely petty and personal. After the song “Mrs. Robinson,” from the soundtrack of The Graduate, made the success of Simon and Garfunkel too conspicuous to ignore, Wenner reported in his gossip column that they had made “an amazing comeback.” Gleason, well aware of the personal history, called up Denise Kaufman to share a laugh about it. “Did you see Rolling Stone?” he asked and then read her the quote. “He had to say something,” recalled Denise Kaufman, “but he had to justify why he hadn’t written about them in all that time.”
That spring, Rolling Stone panned Simon and Garfunkel’s next album, Bookends, which also featured “Mrs. Robinson.”
•
JANE SCHINDELHEIM WAS NOT FOND of work, preferring long afternoons on the couch or a languorous stroll through a department store, running her finger across an expensive Eames chair or pondering the appeal of an Oriental rug. And by the summer of 1968, she was tired of taking the public bus to work. She asked Jann to buy a car and not just any car but a Porsche. So Wenner borrowed $200 from Jane’s sister, Linda, who figured they would use it to buy a sensible VW Bug. Instead, Wenner was raising money so he could buy a 1963 powder-blue Porsche 1600-N Cabriolet. “At first I was like, ‘Well, that’s outrageous,’ ” said Linda. “But then I thought, ‘Well, why not? Why do you have to be stuck with a geeky car?’ ” Wenner said it would barely climb the hills of San Francisco, but he did pay to have it painted burgundy.
At the start, Rolling Stone was a family affair, with Linda briefly living with Jann and Jane, but the couple was moving up fast, relocating to an apartment on Rhode Island Street in Potrero Hill, an A-frame triplex with a rattan chair hanging from the ceiling, a sleeping loft, a Balinese-style bathroom, and a bowl of hash on the dining room table (the apartment belonged to David Buschman, co-founder of the outdoor equipment company Sierra Designs). For people their age, most of whom were still living on mattresses in communal circumstances, Jann and Jane were veritable sophisticates entertaining like upstart Medici. “Jann and Janie were closer to adults than the rest of us,” said Ben Sidran, a jazz writer who met Wenner in London in 1968. “They were more plugged into society and the social scene.”
Wenner regularly courted potential investors, offering Steve Miller a quarter of the company for $4,000 one night over
