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Jann Wenner really hates the new biography about him and, well, it’s easy to see why. Joe Hagan’s explosive, exhaustively reported Sticky Fingers (Knopf, 511 pp., eeeg out of four) is an admiring, often affectionate but ultimately unflattering portrait of the brash Rolling Stone co-founder with the chutzpah to appropriate the Bob Dylan song and the Rolling Stones’ name, then bypass them both for the rock ’n’ roll magazine’s first cover in 1967.
The book’s dishy back story is already media legend: Wenner,
71, handpicked Hagan, a former Rolling Stone contributor, to write his life story, opening up access that would make any biographer salivate. Rock legends Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Bruce Springsteen, Bono and more sat down for interviews with Hagan at Wenner’s behest — and with his encouragement to share everything. From all evidence, Hagan got quite an earful: The two are no longer on speaking terms, and Wenner has sniffily dismissed the remarkably well-written finished product as something “deeply flawed and tawdry.” It’s an uncomfortably abrupt parting of ways that has played out again and again throughout Wenner’s
50-year career.
Sticky Fingers opens with one of those jaw-dropping, casually recounted moments of rock history that are sprinkled throughout. The journalist and his wife at the time, Jane, find themselves in a San Francisco movie theater in 1970, taking in Let It Be with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who are seeing it for the first time.
With the enormity of the band’s breakup weighing heavily on Lennon, he begins weeping as The Beatles’ Apple Records rooftop concert unspools. It’s an astonishing scene, one that’s completely undercut nine months later when Wenner coolly publishes Lennon’s two-part Rolling Stone interview as a book — despite the former Beatle’s objections.
They would never talk again, but Wenner would make it up to him (or, more specifically, to Ono) a decade later after Lennon’s murder, colluding on a revisionist history that would position Lennon as The Most Important Beatle. It did not sit well with McCartney. And Wenner would again find himself on the wrong side of the rock gods he courted favor with.
In between the fanboying and the betrayals, Sticky Fingers dabbles heavily in the salacious, though seemingly without a whiff of exaggeration. Wenner’s conflicted and obsessive relationship with Jane is examined intently, as are his efforts to reconcile his bisexuality while chasing after group sex.
Star photographer Annie Leibovitz plays a prominent, drug-fueled supporting role, tumbling in and out of bed with her subjects and, the book suggests, the Wenners. “If you had Mick Jagger coming on to you or something, you just … whatever,” Leibovitz tells Hagan.
Wenner leads Rolling Stone to passionate journalistic highs, handing out packets of cocaine as bonuses to sustain the momentum. It’s all wildly entertaining, in a voyeuristic way, though Wenner’s most aggressive and heartless power plays go over quite differently in the post-Harvey Weinstein era.
Wenner misses the boat on MTV (shrugging it off as another American Bandstand) and later the Internet, belittling AOL cofounder Steve Case’s effort to forge a content deal with a nonchalant “How about this: When it gets to be big, I’ll hire your people.”
In the end, it’s impossible to chew through Hagan’s delicious and meticulous retelling of the magnate’s life and come away unimpressed by Wenner’s sheer ambition or unmoved by his devotion to rock ’n’ roll. It’s a shame Wenner couldn’t read it the same way.