San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Wenner on power of music, love of S.F. and a wild ride
Jann Wenner logged into a recent video call with The Chronicle from his home office in Montauk, N.Y., and quickly apologized for needing to turn down his music. A Dire Straits song was still blasting in the background. And of course it was. Wenner, now 76, has made a remarkable career out of his love for music. He’s been listening to, celebrating and championing the enduring, subversive meaning in rock and roll ever since he launched Rolling Stone magazine in San Francisco in 1967.
He was a 21-year-old UC Berkeley dropout from San Rafael who was bewitched by the Beatles and Bob Dylan, and everything they stood for — and Wenner wanted to be the first magazine to take their music seriously as “the glue holding a generation together.”
That inaugural issue with John Lennon on the cover, crafted in the living room of then-Chronicle music critic Ralph Gleason, launched a style and voice that would reflect and sometimes even steer the culture in new directions for the next five decades. (Wenner sold his stake in the magazine in 2017 and his son, Gus, is now CEO.)
Wenner’s new memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone,” is a reflective as well as dishy — and druggy — entertaining ride-along through all those years, and the countless concerts, relationships, successes and dustups he experienced along that wild ride.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: You’ve had plenty of occasions to reflect on your accomplishments with Rolling Stone, like the magazine’s 50th anniversary in 2017, but this book is much more personal. How did it feel to write your own story, and to be so revealing about everything including your sexuality and drug use, relationships and regrets?
A: My original idea for the book was that if I could tell an accurate story of Rolling Stone
and of my own life, if done correctly it could really tell the whole story of this period in American history, of the ’60s and much more. And if I could tell it in a way that was authentic, honest, full of color and from a perspective that’s emotional and personal, I could give a real sense of what it was like to be there.
I’ve seen so many books about the ’60s, or this or that generation, that make my blood boil because they’re thin and one-sided. But I just looked back at my own life. I’ve been to so many of the key places at key times, starting with the fact that I was born in the essential postwar suburb that was Marin.
Q: Did you keep diaries? How did you reconstruct all of these vivid memories?
A: I didn’t really keep diaries, but I had my appointment books from day one — calendars of who was coming to see me, who I had dinner with every night, parties, trips, Rolling Stone events. So I had a record of nearly everything I’ve done and so many interesting people. It was such a massive amount of research. My original manuscript would have been a 1,500-page book.
Q: You describe having an epiphany during a free speech protest when you were a student at UC Berkeley. Was it about becoming more politically engaged?
A: It was that you’ve got to stand for something. You’ve got to be passionate. Here I was with all these people infused with purpose, listening to Joan Baez and feeling something extraordinary was happening. I didn’t want to just drift around, maybe join a fraternity, do this, do that. And then I met Ralph Gleason!
Q: He was The Chronicle’s jazz critic for years, and his essay about Bob Dylan being a kind of prophet became Rolling Stone’s founding mission statement. It seems like his importance to you and the magazine can’t be
overstated.
A: I don’t think you would’ve had Bill Graham or even a rock scene without Ralph. Ralph was the only person writing about the rock and roll culture in anything I could read, and about the free speech movement and the Beatles, and it was in The Chronicle. No other newspaper in the country or national magazine. Nobody else was doing it, and it was riveting. I sort of modeled my ideas and my own writing on his, and then we finally came to do the magazine.
Q: You both saw early on that rock stars were much more than entertainers. You saw them as poets and truthseekers.
A: People at that point still thought the Beatles were teenybopper idols and that Dylan was whiny. They missed it all.
Q: Writing this book, did you feel nostalgic for the ’60s and ’70s in San Francisco?
A: Of course. Just thinking back on those times and how innocent and naïve, and how much fun it was. I love San Francisco. I was lucky to grow up there and start Rolling Stone there. I don’t think it could have started anywhere else because of the whole environment, the lack of pressure, the access to people.
Q: But you write that you could see what you called the “fun haters” coming, and having fun was a huge part of the Rolling Stone vibe and why you loved rock and roll, right?
A: Yeah, and it should be still for people. I still use it as a guide. Is something fun? Why should I do it if it’s not fun? I mean, for money? That’s not it. I’d rather have fun than money.