framed in Wenner’s Oxford borders, made righteous by the Rolling Stone banner. “The moment I saw the logo and the layout, it just had this magnetism,” recalled writer Timothy Crouse, who saw it at a kiosk in Harvard Square before coming to work at Rolling Stone in 1970. “That frame had a magic to it. That frame had a life to it.”
The contrast between Rolling Stone’s straight design and the pottinged content inside was like “a circus,” said David Dalton, who began at Rolling Stone in 1968 after writing for teen magazines in New York. “All the clowns and monkeys could jump around, but it was all contained in these Oxford lines.”
Where else could you read, in a well-prepared newspaper, that a bunch of hippies climbed Mount Tamalpais, north of San Francisco, and had a pretty good time on acid? “No structure,” wrote Mike Goodwin, who became Rolling Stone’s first film critic. “Never was any structure. Stephen said, ‘Let’s make it up to the mountain,’ and The Class made it. Nothing to do but make it. Nothing to say but it’s OK. Smoking dope and dropping acid in the sun. A hundred people singing to a guitar, ‘I Shall Be Released,’ softly. An energy bash at Mt. Tamalpais.”
The newspaper was anchored by the loud sniffs and harrumphs of its bracing record reviews, written by college graduates who chin stroked and sneered as if they were parsing Picasso and not albums by the Steve Miller Band. Langdon Winner, a friend of Greil Marcus’s from Berkeley, ripped the first album by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and Jon Landau reveled in casually ponderous dismissal, proclaiming Aretha Franklin’s “Think” tied with “Chain of Fools” for “worst single” with “virtually no melody.” But the actual opinions were not the most important thing; this was all the fine print of a movement, proof to readers that they were participating in a secret counterpower to the mass media. In Rolling Stone, they could finally hear themselves think aloud: Among Wenner’s best ideas was to print highly opinionated reader letters, kids from Omaha and Miami sounding off with sarcasm and arch humor under the banner of “Correspondence, Love Letters & Advice.”
• Let’s face it: John and Yoko are embarrassing bores.
• Sitting up watching the chick across the street doing some nude exercises and trying to jerk off—but I didn’t come until I read Paul Williams’ review of the new Kinks album.
• I enjoyed your pipe article but was disappointed by your treatment of the bong.
• Many times I have seen your paper kill someone with paper and ink; it is always a very efficient job. And it is always justifiable homicide.
• You piss me off.
The readers were people who knew every Dylan lyric, could give chapter and verse on every Stones controversy, needed things from the Beatles to get to the next day, had feelings as powerful as Landau or Greil Marcus, if not more powerful, and goddamn if they were going to stand by while Rolling Stone trashed John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Jann Wenner had a tiger by the tail.
Even the problems could seem proof of the righteousness of Rolling Stone. When Columbia Records field-tested the sales power of Rolling Stone in record stores, it noted “consumer complaints with reference to their ‘teeny-boppers’ picking up the newspaper and being exposed to ‘hard’ language.” The teenyboppers didn’t mind. Indeed, they subscribed and got their free roach clip or free copy of the Grateful Dead’s Anthem of the Sun (part of a deal Wenner struck with Warner Bros.) while their parents wrote in to demand, like Mrs. Marsha Ann Booth of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, that they “do not, and I mean do not, send Rolling Stone to my daughter . . . Keep it under ground and bury it. Never and I mean never send that thing to this address again. Trash! Trash! Trash!”—which Wenner published in full.
Inside the warehouse, as well, success had not bred happiness. There was a growing dissatisfaction with Wenner. Ralph Gleason was furious at him for letting Rolling Stone come out late and littered with errors (“We should never be in the situation, as we do in the Monkees story, discussing a facility like the Coliseum as being ‘24,000 or 30,000’ when it is in fact around 16,000”) and leaving behind a trail of angry and unpaid writers—including himself. In September 1968, Gleason tendered his resignation as vice president of Straight Arrow, saying he felt “seriously exploited” by Wenner, who had only paid him $35 since Rolling Stone began. He was further offended when Wenner offered to buy him out of his Rolling Stone stock for an offensively low sum. “Let’s stop this charade,” wrote Gleason. “I am totally out of sympathy with 1) the way you handle business affairs and 2) the way you handle personnel relations.”
To placate Gleason, Wenner agreed to hire a new editor to run the newspaper—to “readjust” their relationship, said Wenner—while Wenner focused on expanding the business and procuring the big interviews. Gleason suggested a writer and editor he had met at San Francisco State named John Burks, a tall and prematurely crusty reporter who was now working for Newsweek. Burks told Gleason he thought Rolling Stone, while full of potential, “sucked,” which Gleason relayed to Wenner with a certain relish. “I’m Jann Wenner from Rolling Stone,” Wenner said when he called Burks, “and I understand you think our magazine sucks.” (He would hire critic Greil Marcus in the summer of 1969 with the same kind of come-on: “Hi, Greil? If you think the record review section is so terrible, why don’t you edit it?”)
Wenner quickly offered Burks a job as managing editor and asked when he could start, all before Burks had a chance to respond. “And I think my first words were ‘What do you pay?’ ” said Burks. When he arrived at the Garrett Press offices, he saw the sunlight pouring through the large industrial windows and said to himself, “This beats the shit out of any underground paper I’ve ever seen.” Burks hovered a foot higher than Wenner and had more interest in jazz than rock (he would be responsible for putting Miles Davis, Captain Beefheart, and Sun Ra on the cover of Rolling Stone), but he had a sturdy sense of newspapering protocol and a steady stream of story memos that he produced to the chug, chug, chug of the presses. “The whole place was rocking,” said Burks. “It’s not that you’re hearing it; you’re feeling it under your feet and in your seat. Can you beat this? I thought that was just wonderful.”
Satisfied that Gleason was off his back, Jann Wenner flew to London to forge the deal with Mick Jagger.
•
“THE FIRST SIGN for me that Jann had audaciously grand ambitions,” said Pete Townshend of the Who, “was his desire to create a U.K. version of Rolling Stone. He came to London on his first fact-finding mission, and we hung out together a couple of times.”
In August of 1968, the Who had come to San Francisco to play the Fillmore, and afterward Wenner invited Townshend back to his apartment for an interview, which started at 2:00 a.m. and lasted until dawn. “There were no barriers,” said Wenner. “There were no PR people, there were no security, there were no managers.”
Townshend was trying to reposition the Who in the post-Monterey rock scene, because the mod incarnation of the band had been going out of vogue. He used Wenner as a kind of therapist and adviser—all on the record. “It was a tricky time for me, and I was surprised that Jann seemed to understand exactly where the Who would fit and would—if we were successful—prevail in a new self-created order,” said Townshend. “I described my plan to complete Tommy, at that time a project around two-thirds completed.”
Wenner asked him deceptively guileless questions, like “What is your life like today?” but as the conversation warmed, Townshend waxed philosophic on the power of rock and roll to upend society—and waxed and waxed and waxed. This would become a hallmark of Wenner’s interview style, evincing naïveté to draw a subject out, and it often yielded results. Soon Wenner was
