they got out to stretch their legs on Polk Street at four in the afternoon—the skies overcast, not a soul on the sidewalk—they chanced upon a little movie house showing a matinee of the Beatles film Let It Be. Wenner figured John Lennon of all people had seen it, but he hadn’t seen the final cut. Just as surprising, the woman selling tickets didn’t recognize Lennon—another bearded hippie who looked like John Lennon—and none of the half a dozen people in the theater noticed that John and Yoko themselves had ducked in. “It was so emotional to see Paul up on the roof and singing,” recounted Jane Wenner. “First of all, it was hard to believe John had never seen it before. And he was so taken aback.”
An hour later, blinking in the evening light, Jann and Jane Wenner were crying, too. They began to hug, all four of them, on the sidewalk. “He’s crying, she’s crying, and we’re just trying to hold on to ourselves,” Wenner said. “You’re there helping come to the emotional rescue of the Beatles.”
But if this was the end of the Beatles, it was only the beginning for Jann Wenner. He was, after all, courting John Lennon for an exclusive interview in Rolling Stone. And before the weekend was over, Lennon would give Wenner a kind of promissory note in the form of an inscription inside a copy of Arthur Janov’s book The Primal Scream: Primal Therapy, the Cure for Neurosis:
Dear Jann,
After many years of “searching”—tobacco, pot, acid, meditation, brown rice, you name it—I am finally on the road to freedom, i.e., being REAL + STRAIGHT.
I hope this book helps you as much as [it did] for Yoko + me. I’ll tell you the “True Story” when we’re finished.
Love, John + Yoko
•
ROLLING STONE CAUGHT FIRE as soon as it first appeared in November 1967. The fertile crescent of psychedelia, the Bay Area, was a firmament of names and places that were already becoming touchstones for a generation: Haight-Ashbury, the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Bill Graham and the Fillmore, the Hells Angels and the Black Panthers. Music was at the center of much of it, but it was bigger than music. It was an entire worldview in which young people had cornered the market on Truth with a capital T. As John Lennon would articulate it for Wenner in Rolling Stone: “Rock and roll then was real, everything else was unreal.” The original rock and roll that Elvis Presley built out of rural black blues had already been reduced and refined to (quite unreal) teen idols like Frankie Avalon and Ricky Nelson. Even the British Invasion, three years earlier, seemed brittle against the hammer blows of civil rights and the Vietnam War. The psychedelic counterculture of San Francisco promised a revolution, one immune to capitalist forces.
In those first days, Wenner was the star of his own magazine. For people who first got their hands on Rolling Stone, the editor with the Swedish-sounding name—or was Jann a girl? Not many knew (it was pronounced Yahn)—was their avatar in print, their gate-crasher at the Fillmore, a superfan as attuned to pot humor and art school nudity as they were, as versed in antiwar rhetoric, as hot to get his sticky fingers on a new Stones LP. Rolling Stone arrived on newsstands like a secret handshake: In a canny bit of salesmanship, Wenner offered a complimentary roach clip with every subscription, the “handy little device,” each one lathed by his future brother-in-law, sculptor Bob Kingsbury.
Wenner was the fan he purported to be, but that was only one side of him. Though he walked in step with the counterculture, he was also a Kennedy-worshipping preppy whose thwarted ambition to attend Harvard had diverted him to Berkeley, a locus of left-wing radicalism where Wenner spent half his time with his nose pressed against the glass of high society. An inveterate social climber whom friends found so cocky as to be overbearing, Wenner crashed debutante balls and went on ski weekends to private resorts with rich and handsome friends who knew Kennedys and Hearsts. Keen to obscure his Jewishness, and his latent homosexuality, he chased after the sons and daughters of Old San Francisco—the children of local industry—as they migrated from the stolid precincts of Pacific Heights to pot-smogged Haight-Ashbury. Here was a breathtaking new freedom and opportunity, a world unhinged and made boundless by reality-smashing chemicals. “The freest generation this country has ever seen,” marveled Ralph Gleason, the music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and Wenner’s mentor and co-founder in Rolling Stone. “No makeup, no bouffant hairdos, no button-down shirts and ties and no Brooks Brothers suits.”
Wenner imbibed the new values—sex and drugs and rock and roll—but they were folded into a larger pattern of aspiration. He understood that along with the drugs and freedom there was fame, and also money. As a teenager, he attended a boarding school in Los Angeles that housed the offspring of Hollywood royalty, including Liza Minnelli, with whom he waltzed at a school dance. Their sparkling pedigrees offered Wenner solace from his broken home life. To fit in, he carefully monitored and organized his classmates in the school yearbook and won their allegiance with a rogue newspaper he invented to advertise his popularity and antagonize the faculty. Journalism was his VIP pass to everything he could hope to be.
To speak to the kids who understood that the revolution had arrived in 1967—to speak to the kids who got it—required a voice in the same register and cryptography as Bob Dylan’s stoned telegrams, which Jann Wenner absorbed in lysergic waves with his head between two KLH speakers lying on his apartment floor in Berkeley. Wenner would later say he related to the Miss Lonely character in the seminal Dylan song “Like a Rolling Stone”—the female dilettante and object of scorn to whom Dylan is laying down his bitter education.
But Wenner was a quick study. He had an intuitive grasp of the most significant quality of the new rock audience: Unlike the one that fueled the British Invasion, it was largely male. For marketers, this new youth culture was uncharted territory, and Wenner was the pioneer. Until 1966, the primary outlets in America for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were 16 and Tiger Beat, New York– based magazines for teenage girls who fetishized Paul and John and Mick and Keith as objects of romance and trivia. Wenner made it safe for boys to ogle their male idols as rapturously as any girl might by adding a healthy dose of intellectual pretense—a phenomenon that kicked into high gear with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released five months before Rolling Stone appeared. “If James Joyce played the electric guitar he would probably have made an album like Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” wrote Wenner in a review pitched to High Fidelity magazine (and rejected as “pretentious guff”).
In one sense, Rolling Stone was a natural reaction to Sgt. Pepper’s, which signaled the emergence of full-length 33 ⅓ rpm albums as public statements to be fetishized and reckoned with—in effect, news from the youth front. The turning point was the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967, the convergence of new rock groups from London, New York, and Los Angeles for a media spectacle covered by every news outlet in America. It was arranged and produced by record men from Los Angeles and promoted by the erstwhile press secretary for the Beatles, who conscripted Jann Wenner to write publicity material. By courting the record men who knew next to nothing about what the San Francisco kids were doing and saying in private, Wenner was perfectly positioned as a go-between, connecting the counterculture of Haight-Ashbury—which every head in America now looked to for cues on LPs, politics, dope, and sexuality—and what was then known as the straight world. The two were already on a collision course, but Wenner, more than anyone else, catalyzed the process. “The business world, which was represented by the record companies, was just so old-fashioned and foreign,” said Wenner. “They reluctantly came to rock and roll.”
In creating Rolling Stone, Wenner borrowed heavily from a short-lived biweekly newspaper called The Sunday Ramparts, where Wenner worked until it ceased publication in June 1967. After Monterey, Wenner hustled up $7,500—the largest chunk from Jane’s father, a Manhattan dentist—and simply recycled the defunct
