Once British Rolling Stone launched in June 1969, with Pete Townshend on the cover, each new issue arrived in San Francisco like a fresh offense, a mutant version of Wenner’s own Rolling Stone, trussed up with political diatribes, overly groovy prose, and egregious misspellings of rock star names on the cover. “There were two appalling incidents where we spelled Ray Davies’s name wrong, and we called him ‘Ray Davis’ in a big headline,” recalled Marcuson, “and then we spelled Bob Dylan’s name wrong, ‘Dillon’ as I remember. As bad as it can fucking get, really. Wenner hit the roof, rightly so.”
Wenner flew to London to try bringing order to the unruly staff, whose priority seemed to be enjoying Mick Jagger’s wine as well as copious amounts of marijuana. “Wenner came over, and we had a very fractious, uncomfortable meeting with him,” said Marcuson. “And he very quickly became the enemy of London Rolling Stone.”
Jagger gave the staff carte blanche to ignore Wenner, which they were all too happy to do. “We said, ‘Fuck it, the Stones are paying for this, we’ll do whatever we like, he’s not our boss,’ ” said Marcuson. After two months of frustration, Wenner sent a twelve-page letter to Jagger calling the British Rolling Stone “mediocre” and run with “unbelievable incompetence,” reporting that he had fired one of Jagger’s employees, Alan Reid, “Great Britain’s leading male groupie.” Citing his friend Pete Townshend, Wenner told Jagger that Reid had offended the members of the Small Faces (“or Humble Pie or whatever they’re called”) while interviewing them at their country cottage. Wenner insisted to Jagger that the British magazine come under the boot of the American Rolling Stone.
By this time, however, Jagger had lost interest entirely and flown to Australia to film an art-house outlaw movie called Ned Kelly (which Rolling Stone would later describe as “one of the most plodding, dull and pointless films in recent memory”). Meanwhile, Jagger’s British Rolling Stone staff threw a record industry party in which the punch bowl was spiked with LSD and several attendees were hospitalized. One victim was Marc Bolan of T. Rex, who freaked out and locked himself in the bathroom until he was talked out by a gynecologist (and aspiring country music singer) who happened to be present. “I think that party was one of the big nails in the coffin,” said Marcuson.
Wenner was desperate to pull the plug on British Rolling Stone but frightened by the prospect of letting Jagger down. “It took me a while to screw my courage up to do it, to write him a letter or call him,” said Wenner. “I said this thing is awful, it’s not working, they’re spending your money at an incredible rate, and you’re going to have nothing to show for it.”
When Wenner announced to the British staff that the magazine was finished, his letter was immediately leaked to The International Times, an underground paper started out of the Indica Gallery in London, supported by Paul McCartney, which detailed the eviction of the “Stones staff” from their offices. For Wenner, it was a grand embarrassment, undermining the credibility of his paper and leaving a taste of bitter disappointment over Jagger’s failure to uphold his end of the bargain. “I was upset and I said that to him,” said Wenner. “There was never any reaction from Mick.”
For Jagger, it was an expensive boondoggle, nothing more. “I didn’t have that much money at that point,” said Jagger, “because I was in all these disputes with Allen Klein.” ( Jagger felt Klein had ripped off the Stones.) Mick Jagger’s staff implored the Stones’ singer to reconsider shutting down British Rolling Stone and spent the next two weeks trying to commandeer the magazine from Wenner. The drama culminated in a long and heated telegram to Jagger explaining that it was the rock star’s God-given right to use the name Rolling Stone, regardless of what Jann Wenner said. Marcuson remembered the precise date of the telegram they sent to Mick Jagger. It was the weekend of December 6, 1969, the eve of a free concert an hour south of the Rolling Stone offices: the Rolling Stones at Altamont Speedway.
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GRINNING EAR TO EAR, Jann Wenner ogled the six naked men as they threw off their blue jeans and jumped into a cold creek in Macon, Georgia.
The Allman Brothers had just completed their first album under the guidance of Phil Walden, the onetime manager of Otis Redding and founder of Capricorn Records, who suggested an au naturel portrait for their first LP cover and maybe some Rolling Stone publicity shots. Wenner loved the idea. “Yeah, yeah! Do it! Do it! Do it!” he exclaimed. They all plopped into the water. “The guys weren’t really into it,” said photographer Stephen Paley, “but at that point they would do pretty much anything to get famous.”
Paley took his clothes off in solidarity with the band while a fully clothed Wenner stood on the bank of the creek to snap photos of them all. One of the Paley images—Duane Allman, holding his hands over his crotch—would appear inside Boz Scaggs’s first LP for Atlantic Records. Scaggs had just finished recording his solo album in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with Allman on slide guitar and a rookie record producer in the booth: Jann Wenner.
By this time, the Wenners had become close friends with Scaggs, the laconic bluesman from Plano, Texas, and his new girlfriend, a stylish and beautiful socialite named Carmella Storniola from Seattle. Scaggs showed up in San Francisco after kicking around Europe playing blues covers. He was known as the “Bob Dylan of Sweden.” After Scaggs’s acrimonious split with Steve Miller, and Carmella’s breakup with Dan Hicks (of the Hot Licks), the couple had moved next door to the Wenners and befriended Jane. As Scaggs would write in a draft of his liner notes, it happened “over Christmas and between neighborly exchanges of the odd cup of sugar and the even cup of scotch.” This was the period of the record producer as auteur, the secret masterminds behind all the great albums. Jon Landau had temporarily left Rolling Stone to produce the next album by the MC5 for Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records (“My first gig right now is learning how to be a producer,” Landau would tell Wenner). Not to be outdone, Wenner sent Scaggs’s demo tape to Wexler and suggested himself as producer. For Wexler, this was a fine trade: He had just started a new studio in Muscle Shoals and was getting reverent ink from Rolling Stone. “He loved Jon and he loved me and he really wanted to cultivate us and of course we were enamored of Jerry,” said Wenner. “He had a Talmudic knowledge of music, and we didn’t know what a shady character he was on the other side, how tough and poisonous.”
Scaggs was eager to make an R&B album that sounded like Wexler’s recordings of Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin, but he first wanted to investigate Wexler’s new venture, Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, so Wenner gave Scaggs a Rolling Stone press card to pose as a reporter. “I was welcomed as a man of the press and given a grand tour and treated very nicely,” Scaggs would recall. Wenner and Scaggs flew to Memphis in May 1969 and holed up in a motel, taking six days to record Scaggs’s LP while Jane and Carmella flew to Acapulco on vacation. Scaggs wanted Duane Allman on his album, but Allman had moved to Georgia to start the Allman Brothers, so Wenner convinced Wexler to bring him back for one last Atlantic date. Wenner, of course, knew nothing about producing records. “But I’m just very confident,” he said. “I knew what I liked. I said, ‘Play it like this,’ and I could reference a familiar record that everybody knew and I just knew how to manage things. And crazy enough, a little bit of dictating the girl singing parts to them.”
Wenner said he conceived the twelve-minute blues jam, “Loan Me a Dime,” with Allman on a long stretch of slide guitar. When the record was finished, Wenner promoted the track on San Francisco FM radio. “I called up the local DJs in San Francisco and brought them to Trident Studios and I got them all stoned,” he said.
After the recording, Boz and Carmella moved to Macon, Georgia, to hang out with Walden and the Allmans. When the Wenners showed up for a visit, Scaggs’s drinking was out of control, and they went on a terrifying drive down a country road until Jane Wenner insisted Carmella drive. She was also drunk, and the terror continued. The
