cast himself as—and indeed was—the gatekeeper of the rock-and-roll story. That story was underwritten by the same market forces that produced classic rock radio stations, rock-and-roll-themed restaurants, and endless television and film revivals about the 1960s. Rock and roll sold beer and cars and clothes and watches and piles and piles of Rolling Stone magazines. At one point, Rolling Stone was throwing off $30 million a year in pure profit, making Jann Wenner a bona fide media baron of Manhattan.
It didn’t necessarily make him beloved. In years to come, Jann Wenner’s bold-faced contradictions would drive nearly everyone who knew him mad. But it was his schizophrenic nature—a polarity of vulnerability and rageful ambition—that drove the magazine. He was an antiwar liberal and a rapacious capitalist, naive and crafty, friend and enemy, straight and gay, editor and publisher. His mother would say of him, “I’ve always felt Jann was twelve years old going on seventy-five. He’s certainly the most conservative member of our family.”
Success would blunt Wenner’s feel for the culture and sow the seeds of his decline. He missed the rise of MTV and hip-hop, and later the Internet, cultural revolutions he experienced like a well-heeled uncle squinting toward Manhattan from a ski slope in Sun Valley, where he began wintering in the 1990s. It was the prickly celebrity tabloid Us Weekly—his last successful invention, highly lucrative but culturally toxic—that would barricade his flagging rock magazine against the collapse of both the record and the print industries, and later the entire economy in 2008. The war-ravaged presidency of George W. Bush reanimated Rolling Stone’s once-righteous reputation as a left-wing voice, and the market crash of 2008 inspired one last star for Wenner’s journalistic firmament: Matt Taibbi, the heir to Hunter S. Thompson, whose attacks on the banking industry almost single-handedly revived the reputation of late-period Rolling Stone.
This book is drawn from over a hundred hours of conversation with Jann Wenner, from the contents of his voluminous archive of letters, documents, recordings, and photography, and from 240 interviews with musicians, writers, publishers, friends, lovers, and current and former employees of Rolling Stone. Jann Wenner’s life tells the story of a man and his generation. It is also a parable of the age of narcissism. Through image and word, Wenner was a principal architect of the rules of modern self-celebration—the “Me” in the Me Decade. The self-involvement of rock stars and celebrities became, eventually, something everyone could emulate. His advocacy of boundary-pushing journalism and the liberal verities of the Democratic Party was fundamental to the Rolling Stone formula, but above all he was a fame maker. Today the signifiers of fame—confession, preening self-regard, and blunt sexuality—are so built into modern media manners that few can even recall a time when they were novel. But the framework of American narcissism—from the permission to unload personal demons in public to the rise of the selfie—has its roots in Jann Wenner’s pioneering magazine making. In the age of social media, calculated authenticity is the coin of the realm. And Rolling Stone helped define what authenticity meant, and well after it became decoupled from the 1960s idealisms that birthed it. That Wenner is the same age as President Donald J. Trump, whose ascent to power was built on celebrity, is perhaps no coincidence. Indeed, Wenner’s oldest friends saw in Trump’s personality, if not his politics, a striking likeness to the Rolling Stone founder—deeply narcissistic men for whom celebrity is the ultimate confirmation of existence. At one time, Jann S. Wenner wanted to be president, too.
His ex-wife, Jane, would say Jann lacked the “what-if” gene. From boyhood, he compulsively hoarded every document of his life, every newspaper clipping, letter, draft of a letter, envelope, postcard, pamphlet, press release, financial record, photograph, and telegram—because he believed he would one day be important. He seemed never to consider the possibility that Rolling Stone might fail. And why should he? If his appetite seemed bottomless, if he was “mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything,” as Jack Kerouac had it in On the Road (a book Kerouac nearly titled Rock and Roll Road), if he regularly spent more money than he had, made enemies of friends in record time, and consumed drugs like a Viking, Wenner figured it would simply work out, as if the bounty of the biggest, richest generation in the history of the planet, converging on Northern California in 1967, was a kind of manifest destiny, an endless wind at his back.
•
WHEN THE JOHN LENNON INTERVIEW APPEARED in Rolling Stone, published over two issues in January and February 1971 with cover portraits by Annie Leibovitz, Lennon’s unvarnished honesty and hostility, and the sheer volume of his words, were the shattering end of the Beatles. But it established Rolling Stone at the center of the culture, making international news. Not incidentally, it also put Wenner’s newspaper, which had been struggling financially, on a sound footing. But Wenner, as was his wont, could not stop there with Lennon. The interview, titled “Lennon Remembers,” was simply too powerful. And so he proposed to publish the interview as a book. And though John Lennon strongly objected, Wenner published it anyway. Lennon was furious. “John took it so badly,” Yoko Ono said. “It’s not what the book says, or the interview, but the fact that Jann betrayed him . . . He took the money and not the friendship.”
It was a signal moment for the young publisher. And it was also completely in character, for better and worse. The two never spoke again.
BOOK I
The Wunderkind
1
Atlantis
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
—Philip Larkin, “This Be the Verse”
Jann Wenner stood inside a closet, tripping on LSD. A kitten purred outside the door. A young woman, sitting cross-legged, stroked the kitten and smiled mystically.
It was the spring of 1965, and Denise Kaufman, a darkhaired free spirit who played blues harmonica and wore tall velvet boots, had met Wenner a few hours before while sitting with friends at the Terrace, the outdoor café on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. The sit-ins and protests of the Free Speech Movement, which pitted students against the university’s administration over civil rights and the First Amendment, had focused the nation’s attention on Berkeley in the preceding months and now dominated the talk. They all seemed to think they were making history, destinies colliding in nearby apartments and along Telegraph Avenue over joints and copies of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.
A couple of Kaufman’s friends had shown up with a grinning preppy in a Brooks Brothers shirt. The brash fireplug of a boy declared he was going to take LSD for the first time and write a psychology paper about it. Kaufman’s eyebrows went up. She’d heard of Jann Wenner before. Her parents, successful Jewish liberals from Presidio Heights, were acquainted with his mother, Sim Wenner, whose racy dime novel Kaufman had furtively thumbed through as a teenager back in 1961. Kaufman also knew a society girl, the daughter of a British diplomat, who told of a notorious Jann Wenner (to whom the society girl lost her virginity). “I was like, ‘This is that guy,’ ” she recalled. “We were sitting next to each other, and he started talking about LSD.”
For his class, Wenner had checked out library books about psychedelics, including The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the “Tibetan Book of the Dead” by Timothy Leary. The chemical compound lysergic acid diethylamide, discovered in 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, was still legal in California, but not for long. In the preceding months, people had been returning with tales of wild experiences with Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, whose playful social experiment in a garishly painted 1939 International Harvester school bus was already taking shape on a ranch in nearby La Honda. LSD-25, Kesey’s acolytes reported, plunged the user into a state of euphoric revelation, the unconscious mind emerging
