and Wenner even recycled the design and layout, a parody of stuffy British newspapers like The Times of London. The first issues had a primitive simplicity, but the clean lines and functional columns looked audacious next to underground papers like Crawdaddy! or the San Francisco Oracle, which defied convention with willfully amateurish layouts. By contrast, Rolling Stone was thoroughly commercial: The Fleet Street fonts and pin-striped lines of the original Sunday Ramparts were created by an advertising agency founded by Howard Gossage, a pal of Tom Wolfe and Marshall McLuhan who produced print ads for the Sierra Club and Rover cars. (The designer was a woman named Marget Larsen.)
It was this—the radical conventionality of Rolling Stone—that was Jann Wenner’s most important innovation. When he stamped the whole package with a psychedelic logo designed by poster artist Rick Griffin—the curled ligatures and looping serifs unmistakable signifiers of dope-peddling head shops on Haight-Ashbury—he instantly legitimized and mainstreamed the underground.
From the vantage of a swivel chair in a warehouse loft on Brannan Street, Wenner and his “little rock & roll newspaper from San Francisco” brought first-name intimacy to the scene. For the first issue, he simply drove across town to the Haight-Ashbury to interview the Grateful Dead in their living room and help publicize their arrest for pot possession. Keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan hoisted a rifle for the photo op—a triumph, a gleeful dare. “All the news that fits,” Wenner put above his title, tweaking the East Coast’s central journalistic institution. And his headlines declared it so: “A New Beatles Movie!”; “Eric Burdon Quits the Animals!”; “Jim Morrison Exposed!”; “John and Yoko Rock Toronto”; “Chicago 7: Youth on Trial”; “Paul McCartney Gets Back”; “Bob’s Back!”
In 1967, it was still a radical idea to publish college-educated intellectuals like Jon Landau and Greil Marcus opining on James Brown or the Jefferson Airplane as if it were serious art, like jazz. “Though he didn’t invent serious pop criticism, Jann was the one who popularized it,” observed Mick Jagger, whose band had been playing to teenage girls for five years when Rolling Stone began. “There were magazines before, and criticism before, but the magazines were a bit fly-by-night and they weren’t taken seriously. But this was a whole magazine about it that was dedicated to semi-serious criticism.”
As far away as London, mods and rockers alike started passing Rolling Stone around. Suddenly Jagger knew Jann Wenner’s name—the San Francisco kid with the chutzpah to name a magazine after his band and then trash his latest record. Bob Dylan was sent a letter from Wenner asking him to write a story for a new magazine named after his six-minute radio hit. Wenner printed every last utterance of Pete Townshend of the Who—an interview recorded at Wenner’s apartment on Potrero Hill in the spring of 1968—as if it were an exclusive with God on the second day of creation. Twelve pages over two issues, some sixteen thousand words. Townshend loved it. And for eighteen-year-olds fretting over the draft and blowing pot smoke out their bedroom windows between sides of The Who Sell Out, Townshend’s words were the news.
“Rock and roll is enormous,” Townshend told Wenner. “It’s one of the biggest musical events in history. It’s equal to the classical music . . . You don’t care what periods [the songs] were written in, what they mean, what they’re about. It’s the bloody explosion they create when you let the gun off. It’s the event. That’s what rock and roll is. That is why rock and roll is powerful.”
The next week, Time magazine featured Spiro Agnew on the cover.
That somebody had dared—bothered, in the sentiment of the mainstream—to apply straight journalism to rock culture was a revelation. Eager for fame and legitimacy, the rockers were flattered. “I’ll tell you what Jann did,” said Keith Richards. “He put together a really good gang of writers, nice kids. Not afraid to go and ask questions. And turned something that could have just been a fan magazine into a real piece of journalism. That’s what I think Jann did.”
Five months after the Townshend interview, Wenner beat Time magazine on a story about the phenomenon of rock groupies, waving for the mainstream press to come have a peek at his collection of titillating nudes by taking out a full-page promotional ad in The New York Times.
It shouldn’t be surprising that Wenner himself, roiling with unfiltered ambition, needed an editor. His girlfriend, Jane Schindelheim, a petite and neurotic creature of Manhattan, rolled her eyes at the dumpy San Francisco hippies living in squalor on the Haight. But when she met Jann Wenner while working as a receptionist at Ramparts, she had to marvel at his white-hot ambition, the naive charm and vulgarity of it, his brusque arrogance and childish whims, his casual betrayals and bullying force, the unembarrassed yen for work and excess. Somebody would surely have to look after this little barbarian whose lust for money, drugs, and sex threatened to outpace his razor intellect and turn him into Augustus Gloop falling into the chocolate river of the 1960s. She would become his wife and co-owner but also his compass and custodian, his style counselor and resident paranoid who fretted and plotted from behind the drapes. Her seductive beauty and chic tastes hedged against Wenner’s extroversion and frequent obnoxiousness and became part of the formula for Rolling Stone, which was partly a social institution, a private club. She manicured Wenner’s social life, offered succor to his biggest talents, and repaired relationships with people who felt burned by Wenner and his sometimes ruthless magazine. “She’s the only one standing still in all these speedy lives,” said photographer Annie Leibovitz, for whom Jane Wenner was a muse and steward in her early career. “I think [the Wenners] kind of understood that they were both attractive. Some people would be more attracted to Jane, and her personality, than to Jann and his.”
The two were only intermittently attracted to each other, at least sexually. While Jann explored his sexuality with both men and women, Jane consoled herself with her own affairs—including dalliances with Leibovitz, whose intimacy with both Wenners completed a triangle of ambition and pleasure that lay at the creative heart of Rolling Stone in the 1970s. For all their ceaseless drift and constant coming apart, Jann and Jane always remained loyal to their cause, Rolling Stone, never tiring of each other, and it was a remarkably successful marriage, one that seemed to chart the culture as it shifted.
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AFTER THE IDEALISM of Woodstock Nation was snuffed out at the infamous Altamont concert in December 1969, Rolling Stone, which had always had one foot in the world of commerce, was uniquely positioned to dominate the 1970s. With the record industry at his back, Wenner could annex new social worlds through journalism, fanning the ambitions of major American writers like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson by offering their exploding-sandwich journalism as epic feasts for his stoned readers. Thompson, the single most important writer in the history of Rolling Stone, injected Wenner’s magazine with a crucial piece of DNA—“gonzo” journalism, a form of performance-art writing, both uproarious and informed by deep reporting—that the Brahmins of the mainstream press could not ignore. Nor could they ignore the Rolling Stone readership who adored it. On the cult success of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” in 1971, Wenner aimed his new star directly at the 1972 presidential campaign and hitched his magazine to quintessential youth candidate Senator George McGovern of South Dakota. Thompson’s book on the election—Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72—made Rolling Stone the undisputed voice of the rock-and-roll generation.
As Tom Wolfe told Rolling Stone in 1987, youth culture was the most important thing to emerge from the 1960s, including Vietnam or civil rights. “Any of the big historical events of the Sixties are overshadowed by what young people did,” he said. “And they did it because they had money. For the first time in the history of man, young people had the money, the personal freedom and the free time to build monuments and pleasure palaces to their own tastes.”
Wenner, by birthright and inclination, was the ideal tastemaker to build those monuments.
