over Wenner’s expensive studio time, and Wexler told him to shut the session down. Wenner ignored him and kept recording. “I said, we’re nearly done, I’m going to finish this up, I don’t care what he has to say,” said Wenner. “I think Jerry was more pissed off that we had made a really good record in a studio that he had failed to make a successful record in.”
Consequently, Wexler didn’t promote the record, it sold fewer than twenty thousand copies, and Atlantic dropped Scaggs from the label. It was a deep disappointment for Scaggs, who later told Rolling Stone, “I was kind of countin’ on the album to sell or do somethin’ big.” Glyn Johns, who produced Scaggs’s next album for Columbia, felt Wenner’s arrogance nearly tanked Scaggs’s career. “That might have been why Jann and I fell out in the end,” he said. “He should never have risked Scaggs’s career by presuming to produce.”
Though Rolling Stone gave the album a perfectly nice review (assigned by Greil Marcus), it was buried at the bottom of page 33, wedged between reviews for the Beatles’ Abbey Road and Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way, and didn’t mention that the editor and publisher of Rolling Stone was the producer. Wenner told The Village Voice that he and Scaggs had a falling-out (“artistic temperament, all that stuff”), but the Scaggs/Wenner split was only a temporary hiccup. Scaggs had more to gain from Wenner than not, and Carmella was spending endless hours with Jane, shopping and decorating the Wenners’ new apartment in the posh Ord Court neighborhood. For a while, the two women planned an interior decorating business, but Jane mainly curled up on the couch, stoned on downers, and complained to Carmella that Jann Wenner never paid attention to her. During one chat, Jane idly mentioned that Wenner was gay—as if it were only the third or fourth most depressing thing about her life.
The friendship with the Wenners would prove a thorny business. While Carmella was between houses and temporarily living in the Wenners’ basement in 1971, Rolling Stone produced a feature on the All-man Brothers that revealed the story behind the band’s instrumental jam “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed”: While Scaggs was living in Macon with the band, Carmella was having an affair with Allmans’ guitarist Dickey Betts. “Fuck,” Duane Allman told Rolling Stone while snorting a pile of cocaine. “He wrote that fuckin’ song after he fucked this chick on a fuckin’ tombstone in a fuckin’ cemetery in Macon. On a fuckin’ tombstone, my man!” (The tombstone was Elizabeth Reed’s.)
As Jane Wenner recalled, Carmella “always told Boz she was going there to look at the flowers, and whatever.”
But it was too late; the story had already gone to press.
Wenner was the best man in Boz and Carmella’s 1973 wedding in Aspen, Colorado—which made the Random Notes column and was attended by Hunter Thompson—but by then Scaggs had come to prefer the company of Jane over Jann. “Exquisite taste,” he observed of her. “Jann’s interest brought people in, but it was Jane who fascinated people. Always there, and funny, and sort of kept the party going when Jann’s off on tangents. His is a frenetic energy; hers is more solid.”
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