said Jerry Hopkins, “I was constantly saying to people, ‘No, not the group, the newspaper.’ ”
Wenner once said he had no trouble getting the phone company to install his business lines on Brannan Street because they “thought we were the Rolling Stones.” He benefited from the confusion, a fact not lost on Allen Klein, the band’s manager, who immediately sent Wenner a cease-and-desist letter. “Your wrongful conduct constitutes, at the very least, a misappropriation of my clients’ property rights in the name Rolling Stones for your own commercial benefit,” wrote Klein’s lawyer. “It is also a violation of my clients’ copyright to the name ‘Rolling Stones.’ ”
The lawyer demanded Wenner retract and destroy all copies of Rolling Stone or suffer “immediate legal action including an injunction and a suit for treble damages.”
Wenner, whose friendship with Stones press secretary Jo Bergman had emboldened him to promise “an interview with Mick Jagger” in a Rolling Stone press release, began living in quiet terror. In November 1967, he wrote to Jagger directly, hoping to circumvent a lawsuit. “Greetings from San Francisco!” began the letter. “My feeling is that you haven’t got any idea that this action has been taken on your behalf,” he wrote. “ ’Cause it just doesn’t seem like it’s where you and the Stones are at.”
Wenner asked Jagger to call him for an interview so Rolling Stone could publish something positive about the Rolling Stones. “That would be a groove,” he said, “ ’cause we’re all very interested in what’s happening with everybody.”
“It just looks like a great mistake,” he concluded. “We love you.”
Silence followed and Wenner squirmed, telling Bergman he was “very edgy” waiting for Jagger to exculpate him from legal action, which was “essential” if he were going to forge an advertising deal with Columbia Records. “We have to get this settled before it becomes out of sight,” he wrote to her.
Stroking his chin from afar, Mick Jagger could not help but observe how the Beatles were using Rolling Stone as a handy promotional vehicle, with Wenner writing about them in the most reverent of terms. Indeed, Jagger could use a guy like Jann Wenner in America, especially after his last album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, was so poorly received. Jon Landau ripped it in Rolling Stone as an insecure Sgt. Pepper’s knockoff and declared the production and Jagger’s lyrics “embarrassing.” A full nine months and fourteen issues into the existence of Rolling Stone and the Rolling Stones had yet to appear on the cover, while their archrivals, the Beatles, had already appeared three times. If the lawsuit threat was a “great mistake,” it was also a convenient bit of leverage, and if nothing else Mick Jagger liked leverage. “I don’t think Mick lets anyone off the hook for anything,” said Keith Richards. “He’s never let anyone off the hook, once he’s got one in.”
That summer, Jagger learned that Wenner was hoping to start a British version of Rolling Stone in London. Jonathan Cott wrote to Wenner to report rumblings of legal hassles from the Stones if he attempted to publish in England. Bergman, the Stones’ secretary, warned Cott that “the Stones might bring the legal thing out in the open here, since there is a Rolling Stone Magazine for the group, already here.” It looked to Cott like a “bad scene.”
Wenner had met Rolling Stones producer Glyn Johns through his neighbor Boz Scaggs, late of the Steve Miller Band, and over dinner one night in San Francisco asked him to invest in Rolling Stone. Johns declined but offered to broker a meeting with Jagger. The moment arrived when the Stones were mixing Beggars Banquet at Sunset Sound studios in Hollywood in the summer of 1968. Wenner arrived bristling with bonhomie, eager to win Jagger over for an interview and to broach the sticky issue of the Rolling Stone trademark. After Wenner scribbled detailed notes about the new album, Jagger invited him back to his rented house in Beverly Hills, where they listened to an acetate of the first album by the Band, Music from Big Pink, ate pizza, and talked business. Wenner was in heaven, basking in Jagger’s luminous stardom. Jagger proposed that Wenner come to London to discuss the possibility of publishing the British version of Rolling Stone, with Mick Jagger as half owner.
Everything was falling into place: Jagger had already been toying with the idea of starting a magazine and now here was Jann Wenner, who already had a successful one named Rolling Stone, and was thereby poised under Jagger’s thumb. “Jann and I thought it would be good to make one that was partly the same thing but would be localized in some way,” Jagger said.
To show his appreciation, Wenner went back to San Francisco and wrote up a song-by-song preview of Beggars Banquet for Rolling Stone, comparing Jagger’s lyrics to those of Bob Dylan and declaring it “the Stones’ best record, without a doubt.” Wenner’s studious annotation of the album included the story behind the iconic “Sympathy for the Devil,” the album’s most “significant” song, with its famous reference to the Kennedys:
The first version of the song—then called “The Devil Is My Name”—contained the lyric, “I shouted out, who killed Kennedy? After all it was you and me.” The next day Bobby was shot. The second version of the song, the one which will be on the album, recorded the next day, had this line instead: “I shouted out, ‘Who killed the Kennedys? After all it was you and me.’ ”
Wenner described Jagger as “a thin, modish Oscar Wilde figure” trailed by “bizarre” groupies whose “reaction to the famous—and in this case, almost what one could call the ‘spiritually famous’—was as intense as ever.” His presence, Wenner wrote, “caused wave-like spreading of recognition. He is still Mick Jagger.”
What separated Jann Wenner from the other groupies, of course, was Rolling Stone. And the week of August 10, 1968, Wenner put Mick Jagger on the cover for the first time, the singer pouting and slithery in a tank top, a pair of headphones on his head. “The Return of the Rolling Stones,” declared the headline.
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THERE WAS A NARCOTIC FREEDOM to Rolling Stone as it charted the late 1960s, the primitive newsprint pages opening like a lotus flower, petal by petal, with revelations. The Beatles denounced the Maharishi. Dylan made a bunch of bootlegs in a basement. A blues-rock group called Fleetwood Mac was coming to America. And white people were finally learning how to be black. “They don’t clap as well as a James Brown audience in the ghetto areas,” wrote Ralph Gleason in June 1968, “but they clap a thousand times better than their parents did.”
Wenner delighted in provocative photography celebrating liberated and alternative sexuality (mainly lesbianism) and published whole guides to buying and smoking marijuana, a habit so ubiquitous that a page 3 image of a boy smoking a joint shocked no one. There were poems by Richard Brautigan and Allen Ginsberg; stories on comic artist R. Crumb and pop artist Roy Lichtenstein; interviews with Miles Davis and Tiny Tim; premier LPs by new artists like Joni Mitchell (“A penny-yellow blonde with a vanilla voice”) and Sly Stone (“The most adventurous soul music of 1968”). Rolling Stone recorded every tossed-off “um” and “uh” of Frank Zappa and Jim Morrison (including a long and pretentious poem Wenner reluctantly agreed to publish), every hiccup of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which Jonathan Cott grokked for readers with the sensitivity of the Oxford scholar he had once hoped to be until Rolling Stone took over his life. Reviewing Lennon’s first art show in London, Cott even transcribed the contents of the guest book, which included an insightful critique by the pioneering psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich: “This armoring of the character is the basis of loneliness, helplessness, craving for authority, fear of responsibility, mystic longing, sexual misery, of impotent rebelliousness as well as of resignation of an unnatural and pathological type.”
Even the advertisements were windows into the exotic
