The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘We saw what the adults could not’
Soon after Rolling Stone magazine was founded, as a “rock and roll newspaper” inspired by the Summer of Love, its 21-year-old editor, a Berkeley dropout, began a long correspondence with the Beatles. “I used to have a telex machine in my office, and we used to send messages back and forth to where they lived in Ascot,” Jann Wenner remembers, over the phone from his office in New York.
The newspaper – now an eminent 50-year-old glossy magazine – was invented in order to reflect the preoccupations of a historic generation of musicians, and those to whom they spoke. At the time, if mainstream publications covered pop music at all, it was as a teen phenomenon – the curious fever that was “Beatlemania”. “And our thought,” says Wenner, “was: no, the Beatles, the Stones – these were people to be taken seriously on their own terms, which were different terms. And beyond that, they’re speaking for a new generation – the post-war baby boom, more or less.
“They were defining an attitude, and their feeling about society and their fellow men was new and different from our parents’ generation. This was a generation that didn’t have the Second World War in its background, and it was the biggest generation in our history, and the wealthiest and the best educated. And they were bursting at the seams. And we saw that, and that’s what we covered, and what everybody else was missing. The adults were kind of dismissing the young people.”ple.
The Beatles saw the magazinegazine as an outlet for them, and they ey in turn helped to build it, Wenner r says, “more than any other musician”. He is thinking, specifically, of John Lennon. A photo of Lennon in the Richard Lester film How I Won the War graced Rolling Stone’s s first front page. For its firstst anniversary edition, Wenner ran the nude self-portraits of John and Yoko that featured on the cover of their Two Virginss album. Then in February 1971, Lennon gave a long interview to Wenner, which Wenner remembers now as “the big classic”. “He really wanted to talk, really wanted to get a bunch of stuff off his chest. Angry. Kind of bitter. Looking back, I was surprised how angry he really was. I think at that time he was 30 and I was 25. We were young guys. It was remarkable – this was the first time any of the Beatles had spoken, beyond a quickie press conference. He told the story with incredible frankness and a lot of edge.”
“We sold out,” Lennon said. “The music was dead before we even went on the theatre tour of Britain.” He talked about drugs, he talked about whores, he described himself and his bandmates as “b-------”, and confessed he’d thought of himself as a “genius” since he was 12. The interview was a revelation, and made the front page, in Wenner’s estimation, “of every paper around the world”.
Nine years later, on the very day he and Yoko Ono posed for the famous curled-up naked portrait by Annie Leibovitz, Lennon was shot. Wenner ran the portrait on the cover, without headlines or words, and, he reflects, “that cover would become an inextricable part of the tragedy”.
It is perhaps hard to argue that the magazine’s relationship with Lennon was emblematic, when he himself was unique. Yet the case of Lennon set Rolling Stone on its peculiar trajectory – a trajectory that’s hard to discern now that the mainstream has caught up. As it celebrates its jubilee, Wenner says he’s “surprised at the breadth and the depth and the extent” of what the magazinemag covered – music, poli politics, pop culture and j journalism. Apart from exclusives with stars, Rolling Stone has produced groundbreaking reportage. In 1979, when S Sharon Tate and others w were murdered by the Manson family, two Rolling S Stone reporters posing as lawyers landed an interview with Charles Manson in jail. It wasn’t the straightforward coup it sounds: the reason they had an “in” with Manson was that one of the writers was a hippie, and a friend of a friend of Manson’s. In fact, David
Fifty years after he founded ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine, Jann Wenner talks to Gaby Wood ‘Lennon really wanted to talk. He had a bunch of stuff to get off his chest’