with the audience: “You’ve come your lot and the show’s over.”
The interview spanned two issues, with Townshend on the cover of Rolling Stone in September 1968, his patented guitar windmill gesture captured by Baron Wolman against a spotlight. Wenner noted that “nobody quite remembers exactly under what circumstances the interview concluded.” The next day, Wenner drove him to the airport, and Townshend asked Wenner if he had spiked his drink with LSD. “I said no, not at all, why?” recalled Wenner. “He said he had some kind of experience, some kind of transcendent experience.”
Townshend told writer David Dalton that Wenner had “completely taken me apart.” (In the year-end wrap-up for 1969, Rolling Stone named Tommy the most overrated record of the year.)
A few months later, Wenner flew to London to meet with Jagger but first had dinner with Townshend. The guitarist picked him up in his gigantic Mercedes 600 and squired him to his Georgian house near the Thames. Townshend was struck with how quickly Wenner had embraced the role of press baron. “He seemed so much more worldly and grand than I remembered him,” he said. “He assumed I would be comfortable with the scale of his business ambitions, and I suppose I was, but I remember feeling that he must have amassed a relative fortune fairly quickly.”
He hadn’t quite yet, but why wait? The next day, Townshend said, he and Wenner went to Olympic Studios to see the Rolling Stones record songs for a forthcoming album, Let It Bleed. They sat in the booth while the Stones played, both ogling Mick Jagger like feverish groupies. “It turned out that he, like me, harbored an adoration of Mick Jagger that was not entirely heterosexual,” said Townshend.
Afterward, Wenner accompanied Jagger to his apartment in Chelsea, and they sat by a fireplace with a moose head over the mantel to discuss their joint venture. They hadn’t gotten very far when Marianne Faithfull, Jagger’s then lover, showed up after a bad day on the set of a film production of Hamlet, in which she played Ophelia. “She came home, hysterical and histrionic, and he had to comfort her and I left,” recalled Wenner. (She would overdose on sleeping pills not long after.)
With a broad agreement from Jagger, Wenner returned to San Francisco and dove into the details of the joint venture, writing Jagger a series of excited letters and telegrams outlining his ideas for a British Rolling Stone. They would be fifty-fifty owners, he suggested, with Wenner in editorial control. He helpfully included a waiver for Jagger to sign absolving him of legal trouble from trademark infringement.
Not so fast, said Jagger. “For my part, I assumed that I would more or less have control of the [editorial] policy on this side of the Atlantic,” Jagger wrote back, adding that the waiver “is not in any way valid, and even if I signed it, it means nothing. You can’t expect me to waive all past or future rights to the name Rolling Stone—and waive to whom anyway.”
They put the questions off to when Wenner returned to London in the spring. For now, Wenner would have to be satisfied that he was in business with Mick Jagger—wasn’t that enough? Clearly, Jagger held the cards. For Jagger’s first Rolling Stone interview in October 1968, Jonathan Cott shared a byline with an employee of the Rolling Stones, Sue Cox, who worked out of the band’s Maddox Street office in London, where the interview was conducted (“It is not the most thorough and complete set of questions and answers,” conceded the Rolling Stone introduction).
When he returned to London in March 1969, Jann Wenner was becoming a figure of notoriety in the underground press, in part because of his impending deal with Jagger. The Guardian called him the Hugh Hefner of pop, and Wenner boldly told Oz, the British counterculture magazine edited by Richard Neville, “we’re out to replace the Melody Maker and all these shitty music publications.” (Oz described Wenner as looking “for all the world like an unusually hairy rugby player” with the “cat-that-got-away-with-the-cream smile.”)
That week, Wenner met with Prince Rupert Loewenstein, the Bavarian aristocrat known as “Rupie the Groupie,” who had taken over management of the Stones’ finances during Jagger’s acrimonious split with Allen Klein. Loewenstein was no less concerned about the trademark issue, telling Wenner he wanted him to sign a waiver giving Jagger the rights to the name Rolling Stone. “I said, ‘No, you can’t own the name Rolling Stone,’ ” recalled Wenner.
Regardless, Loewenstein said they were happy to go into business with Wenner, with Jagger as “chairman” of the joint venture they decided to call the Trans-oceanic Comic Company Limited. Now Jann Wenner was business partners with Mick Jagger. And the one person Wenner thought to impress with his proximity to Jagger’s “spiritual fame” was his lost love from the summer of 1967, Robin Gracey. Married to Jane for less than eight months, Wenner continued to fantasize about being with Gracey, who was now studying at the Oxford College of Technology. So he invited him to Olympic Studios in suburban London, where the Stones were recording Let It Bleed. At nine o’clock at night, Wenner and Gracey sat in the control booth with producer Jimmy Miller and Stones bassist Bill Wyman, eating canapés and watching a stoned-senseless Brian Jones fiddle about in a lonely corner of the cavernous studio. Jagger stood in a recording booth under a microphone to sing to a backing track of the London Bach Choir as Wenner and Gracey watched and listened in awe:
You can’t always get what you wa-ant . . .
As the choir rose to a crescendo, Jagger started his famous howling, “That scream was utterly riveting,” Gracey said. “He was able to replicate it many times.”
When the session ended at 4:00 a.m., the lovers filed into the back of Jagger’s Rolls-Royce, a sleepy Jagger up front with his driver. The car dropped the couple off at the Londonderry House Hotel, and Wenner and Gracey walked into the glow of the lobby and up the elevator to Wenner’s suite overlooking Hyde Park, Jagger’s voice echoing in the night.
But if you try sometimes, you just might find—you get what you nee-eed!
•
WHEN JANN WENNER GOT BACK from London, Time magazine published a profile of his rising rock publication, noting the eight-by-ten glossy of Mick Jagger on Wenner’s wall and a book on his shelf titled “The Jann Wenner Method for Effective Operation of a Cool Newspaper,” “which is blank, a gift from the bookbinder.” What made Rolling Stone unique, Wenner told a Time reporter, was that it was authentic. “We never thought of filling a market,” he said, “and we never created Rolling Stone toward anyone in particular.”
That same month, The Washington Post published a story on Rolling Stone in which Wenner predicted the death of Time magazine—“because it’s not going to make the change when the culture change comes.”
But while Wenner plumped for his own cultural relevance, he had a little problem: He was broke. Wenner’s trips to London and New York had sapped the company’s meager coffers. Said Baron Wolman, “He had a credit card, and he stayed at the fanciest hotel, spent a fortune on clothes, custom-made clothes, came back, and we had no money. I said, ‘Jann, we can’t do this. We can’t run a publication like that if you’re not looking at a budget.’ And he said, ‘I’ll do what I want, Baron.’
“If that’s the case,” continued Wolman, “I don’t even want to be on the board of directors, because he’s gonna do what he wants anyhow! It’s just kind of fallen into a black hole.”
When Wenner conceded he needed help, Wolman connected him with a local stockbroker named Charles Fracchia, who was married into an Old San Francisco family involved in the luxury department store
I. Magnin & Company. Fracchia was a thirty-two-year-old
