James Wolcott
Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and ‘Rolling Stone’ Magazine by Joe Hagan
Sticky Fingers:
The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine by Joe Hagan.
Knopf, 547 pp., $29.95
The first issue of Rolling Stone to bop me between the eyes at the newsstand bore a black border on the cover. It framed an obituary portrait of the guitarist Jimi Hendrix, the quantum mechanic of psychedelic rock, who had died of an overdose of barbiturates or sleeping pills at the age of twentyseven, an early extinguishing more befitting a Romantic poet. The next issue of Rolling Stone also carried a black border, this one memorializing the blues rocker Janis Joplin, the queen of husky catarrh, whose death mirrored Hendrix’s: overdose at age twentyseven. It was 1970, and a scant three years after the Summer of Love the counterculture was filling the coffins. Founded in 1967, based in San Francisco, Rolling Stone was in the hairy thick of the tribal youth tumult, reporting on hippie hedonism, radical protest, and, in a notorious cover story, the floating seraglio of rock groupies whose thrift-shop splendor and Twiggy eyelashes made them style icons for those seeking backstage passes. But other publications were also bumming it to Haight-Ashbury and rolling around in “dope, sex, and cheap thrills.” It was in its formal expressions of generational mourning, its neo-Victorian decorum in honoring its fallen heroes, that Rolling Stone found stature and distinguished itself from the kaleidoscopic collage of underground papers and New Left organs on the news racks. Addressing a national audience instead of just a fervent sect, Rolling Stone made itself the designated mourner of rock royalty, the grief counselor of Woodstock Nation, and keeper of the tablets. A year later, Jim Morrison of the Doors would be framed in a black border on the cover, the Lizard King having reached the fatal cut-off age of twenty-seven.
My freshman impression of Rolling Stone may have been unduly inked in grim tidings, yet it’s remarkable how often in Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan’s gossipy, rackety, roller-coaster history of Rolling Stone and its founder, Jann Wenner, death rouses the magazine from its fortnightly routine to a reckoning moment. When John Lennon was murdered in December 1980 in front of the Dakota, where he lived with wife, Yoko Ono, Wenner, who had featured Lennon on the cover of Rolling Stone’s debut issue (and later, to spectacular effect, put a nude John and Yoko on the cover, an instant sellout), was as distraught and unstrung as anyone—“up all night making phone calls to friends, trying to make sense of it like everyone else,” and attending the impromptu vigil in Central Park with other fans, then pulling himself and his staff together to assemble a tribute issue that would be a fitting burial shroud.
“For the first issue of the Reagan presidency, Wenner put [photographer Annie Leibovitz’s] image of John Lennon wrapped around Yoko Ono on the cover without any text other than the logo. Every page was dedicated to John Lennon,” including inside the seam of the magazine’s binding, where Wenner published a private message to Lennon that, as Hagan notes, could be read only with a magnifying glass. “The January 22, 1981, issue of Rolling Stone was Jann Wenner’s single greatest triumph as a magazine editor and a sculptor of rock legend,” Hagan writes. “It was an homage to a man but also to a time and to a generation.” Under such crisis conditions the two jostling journalistic modules of Wenner’s personality—the idealistic fanboy who wanted to swing with the stars and the kingpin whose ambition, he once confided to an associate, “was to become the Henry Luce of the counterculture,” the print tsar of the enlightened rabble—joined together to produce greatness. A complicated character without being inherently interesting, Wenner, a Berkeley dropout who found a spot on the iconoclastic radical monthly Ramparts and worked on the spinoff Sunday edition that would become the prototype for Rolling Stone, was fundamentally a hustler who knew when to pounce, a Machiavellian intriguer with the ravenous munchies, an opportunist whose antennae told him when something was about to break big in the mainstream (such as Saturday Night Live in 1975).
Hagan’s biography is a tireless account of a velociraptor appetite. Wenner’s was omnivorous—for fame, glory, sex, drugs, food (in a ravenous frenzy, he once ate frozen food straight out of the icebox and was sped to the hospital when it expanded in his stomach, like some David Cronenberg beast), social status, cultural recognition, political clout, and luxury furnishings—and in its chewy path of creative destruction there was a notable absence of what the cultural theorist Irving Babbitt called the “inner check.” Wenner was capable of great strokes of generosity, such as footing the hospital bills for a Rolling Stone editor sick with AIDS, but primarily he put himself first at the feeding trough. In the advertising-plush heyday of Rolling Stone, Wenner, discarding his scruffy origins, “intended to live like a sultan.” That meant a full-time driver, a Downton Abbey staff of servants and nannies, a $4.2 million brownstone in Manhattan, a Georgian manor in the Hamptons, and a private jet (a Gulfstream II, eventually upgraded to a Gulfstream IV).
Satchel
Paige’s evergreen piece of advice—“Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain’t restful”—is one to which Wenner paid no nevermind in his pursuit of more-more-more. Sticky Fingers offers a comprehensive record of personal and business betrayals, double-dealing, excursions into the polyamorous (Wenner and his wife Jane, a major influence on him and the magazine, both detoured into same-sex dalliances), showboating, and bingeing that leaves former friends and associates for roadkill and takes a toll on Wenner’s beanbag constitution. After attending the funeral of one of comedy’s most ballistic talents and overindulgers, John Belushi, who had died of an overdose after a night of hard partying at the Chateau Marmont, Wenner was hospitalized with a gallbladder infection: “He had grown fat and unhealthy, bloated from alcohol and cocaine abuse, which exacerbated his psoriasis.” No, the social ramble ain’t restful, and Wenner’s accelerated dissipation was proof that the rock star lifestyle is best left to the pros, who learn how to pace themselves between tailspins with carcasses intact. Keith Richards, take a crooked bow.
The cult of the male rock star as Dionysian codpiece, vaunted oracle, or guitar-wielding thunder god has fizzled out in this century, thank goddess, but it was formative in forging Wenner’s ideal of the perfect make of stardom he aspired to hang with and cultivate. Rock chicks need not apply. (Hagan notes how Joplin, Joni Mitchell, and other female artists were sexistly slagged off in Rolling Stone’s columns.) Wenner courted the crafty, misanthropic Bob Dylan, befriended U2’s Bono, the Who’s Pete Townshend, and Bruce Springsteen, and won over John Lennon, scoring the coup of the revelatory “Lennon Remembers” interview of 1970, in which the former Beatle, having recently undergone Arthur Janov’s “Primal Scream” treatment, torched his former bandmates (“the biggest bastards on earth”), their fans (“idiots”), and the con job that was Sixties idealism (“nothing happened except that we all dressed up”). Lennon, however verbally candid he might be, maintained an ascetic aloofness that Yoko tended with an iron touch. Not so the elusive yet attainable butterfly who flutters most tantalizingly through these pages—that eternal tease, Mick Jagger. (Hagan’s book takes its title from the 1971 Rolling Stones album whose original cover, designed by Andy Warhol, fronted a tight pair of jeans with a working zipper that housed a prominent bulge that, erroneous rumor had it, belonged to Jagger.) As in so many rom-coms, the Jannand-Mick relationship was initially sparked by an irritable spat: “When he first saw it, Mick Jagger was startled by the audacity of Rolling Stone—to name a newspaper after his band and not even put the Rolling Stones on the cover of the first issue? It was an affront that would stick with Jagger for the next fifty years.” Adding insult to affrontery was Jon Landau’s scornful pan of the Stones’s wobbly magic-carpet-ride LP Their Satanic Majesties Request and the complete dearth of cover stories on the band while the Beatles were given darling preference. A former student of the London School of Economics, Jagger knew how to exploit an opening to maximum advantage and hung a threatened lawsuit for copyright infringement over Wenner’s woolly head, an excellent way to hold someone’s attention. In 1968 the Stones were mixing their next album, Beggars Banquet, in Hollywood:
Wenner arrived bristling with bonhomie, eager to win Jagger over for an interview and to broach the sticky issue of the Rolling Stone trademark. After Wenner scribbled detailed notes about the new album, Jagger invited him back to his rented house in Beverly Hills, where they listened to an acetate of the first album by the Band, Music from Big Pink, ate pizza and talked business. Wenner was in heaven, basking in Jagger’s luminous stardom.
Jagger proposed that Wenner come to London to discuss the possibility of publishing the British version of Rolling Stone, with Jagger as half owner. In business with Mick! What could be more loverly?
The British cousin of Rolling Stone was a ham-fisted botch, a rack rag heaved into the printing presses with an almost contemptuous lack of oversight. Not only did Jagger’s editorial staff manage to misspell the name of the Kinks’ Ray Davies in a headline— sacrilege!—but it bungled the spelling of Bob Dylan’s name too. Wenner flew over to London to instill some professional rigor in the enterprise, but was basically given the piss-off by Jagger’s pirate crew, whose antics escalated from