Stone and drew up elaborate proposals envisioning a “multimedia entertainment/leisure operation,” including a portfolio of magazines and an FM radio station. In truth, it was all an excuse for Fracchia to dabble in the earthly delights he was reading about in Rolling Stone. Wenner was happy to oblige: For their first “board meeting,” Wenner invited him for breakfast on Rhode Island Street, and Jane scrambled marijuana into the eggs. “At end of meeting, I’m feeling really woozy,” Fracchia recalled. “[Jann] starts laughing, ‘Don’t you know what she put in the scrambled egg?’ That was my first drug hit.”
Fracchia and Wenner agreed they needed to acquire more properties and expand the business, with Fracchia eager to take the company public and make a mint on the growing youth boom. In the spring of 1969, on his way back from London, Wenner met with the owner of New York Scenes, a somewhat seedy underground newspaper that covered drugs and orgies and that Fracchia saw as a natural property for Straight Arrow and bought the paper in exchange for 10 percent of Rolling Stone stock. In a matter of two months, Jann Wenner went from cash poor to operating three magazines—Rolling Stone, British Rolling Stone, and New York Scenes. Maybe this rock-and-roll empire thing would work out after all.
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IN FEBRUARY 1969, Jann Wenner and Ralph Gleason went to San Quentin State Prison to see Johnny Cash perform for the inmates, a program recorded for an album on Columbia Records as Johnny Cash at San Quentin. Bob Dylan was embracing country music with the stripped-down John Wesley Harding, and Cash was performing Bob Dylan songs in concert, telling Wenner in May 1968 that country musicians “have been affected greatly by the sound of the Beatles and the lyric of Dylan.”
On the next page was a full-page ad by Columbia Records, the label of both Dylan and Cash. Rolling Stone’s relationship to the “Columbia Rock Machine” had grown increasingly tight, starting with its first advertisement in issue No. 8. Clive Davis, having ascended to president of CBS Records, a subsidiary of Columbia, on the success of Janis Joplin and Blood, Sweat, and Tears, made Rolling Stone required reading for his staff as he moved the label past the square Sing Along with Mitch era. He viewed Wenner as an ally in building a new industry out of rock and roll, and he gave Rolling Stone its first steady advertising contract to keep the newspaper afloat. Wenner advertised the Columbia connection, sending out a PR letter to acquaint potential advertisers and distributors with “the approach and style with which we and Columbia Records feel reflects the changes in popular music of the last three years.” Davis put Rolling Stone into record stores through Columbia’s distribution system, which now accounted for 15 percent of the newspaper’s single-copy sales. “It was no question that Jann had a vision,” said Davis. “This was a whole new world for me that had opened up, post-Monterey.”
In addition, Jann Wenner was using Columbia’s offices in New York as a virtual bureau of Rolling Stone. In a letter to Bob Altshuler, the publicist for Columbia, Wenner thanked him for the “favors, the lunchs [sic], the tickets, and the use of your secretaries and offices. Someday we’ll be buying the whold [sic] building, so keep it clean and in good shape.”
The same month as the San Quentin concert, Wenner and Baron Wolman set up camp at Columbia to lay out a promotional ad for a story Wenner was sure would be a big hit: the “Groupies” issue, an exposé that featured snapshots of women Baron Wolman met backstage at the Fillmore. A few were nudes, with a provocative photo of two women kissing, tongues touching, which made Wenner sit up. The idea was far from novel—Cheetah had published a groupies issue in 1967—but timing was everything. When Time magazine tried to beat Rolling Stone with a groupies feature of its own, Wenner borrowed a play from the old carnival barker Warren Hinckle: He preempted Time with a full-page ad in The New York Times, asking, “When we tell what a Groupie is, will you really understand? This is the story only Rolling Stone can tell, because we are the musicians, we are the music, we are writing about ourselves.” (Indeed, afterward a former Rolling Stone secretary named Henri Napier wrote in to point out that Wenner was the biggest groupie of them all. “Any reason he was left out?” she wrote.)
The ad cost Rolling Stone $7,000, but with Fracchia on the hook money was no object. The night before the ad appeared in the Times, Wenner and Wolman ordered a bottle of champagne to their room at the five-star Warwick hotel and got drunk. “He was really excited,” said Wolman. “I think the first issue [of the Times] comes out at, like, midnight, and we raced down to get the issue.”
They taped up copies of the ad all over their hotel walls.
On the same trip, Wenner had dinner with Alan Rinzler, the “house hippie” at Macmillan Publishing, to discuss starting a Rolling Stone book division. Rinzler’s wife was shocked when she looked out the apartment window and saw Wenner’s ride: “There’s a limousine out there! A black limousine!”
“We didn’t know anyone who had a limousine at that time,” said Rinzler. “A kid, with a limousine.”
Fracchia was irked by Wenner’s profligate spending. “I think Jann liked to live well,” said Fracchia. “He had no other source of income other than what he could take out of the company.” But for Wenner, the arrival of serious money was an inevitability—he was in Time magazine for Christ’s sake—so whatever problems his personal spending created he believed to be temporary.
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THE DAY NEIL ARMSTRONG SET FOOT on the moon, July 20, 1969, Jann Wenner was in London watching it on TV in a suite at the Londonderry Hotel, with his lover, Robin Gracey, by his side.
On his last trip to London, after hearing the Stones record, Wenner hired a large black Mercedes (like Pete Townshend’s) to drive through the country to Gracey’s school at Oxford, where the two caught the tail end of a Fairport Convention concert. At Gracey’s house, they crawled up into the attic space where he kept their love letters in a bundle and made love. Perhaps Wenner could have not only what he needed but what he wanted, too. “There clearly was, from his point of view, sort of a possibility of a future together,” Gracey said.
“He was my lover and mate,” mused Wenner, though he said he felt pangs of guilt about Jane: “I felt bad and was sneaking around, and she kept wanting to come [to London] and I’d say no.”
This time Wenner was in London to announce the launch of British Rolling Stone in a small press conference with Jagger. To crown the occasion, Wenner showed up wearing a blue velveteen suit and white Louis XVI shirt with ruffles that exploded from the sleeves, looking not unlike Brian Jones, who had been found dead in a swimming pool three weeks earlier (and eulogized by Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone, who said “Sympathy for the Devil” was his epitaph). Wenner had also grown a semi-handlebar mustache that wormed down both sides of his mouth. Having staked some of his own money on British Rolling Stone, Jagger insisted on hiring the editor, a young woman named Jane Nicholson, whose awe of Jagger tended to render her stammering and shaking with nerves. They set up an office in Hanover Square, where Wenner reminded the rambunctious staff during their first meeting that “we’re not here to drink Mick’s wine,” prompting Jagger to correct him: “Hold it, that’s exactly why we’re here. To drink my wine.”
Wenner could hardly argue. But it wasn’t just the British edition over which Jagger now appeared to have control. David Dalton, Wenner’s correspondent in London, reported to Wenner that Rolling Stone was, for all practical purposes, the same as the Rolling Stones Organization in England. Interviews with rock stars attached to big managers like Robert Stigwood, whose clients included the Bee Gees and Cream, could be arranged “only through the kind cooperation of Jane Nicholson,” Jagger’s chosen editor. Dalton described to Wenner how a Rolling Stone reporter had been barred from a recording session pending approval by Jagger’s people.
