Contemporary Authors

• Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2017

1. Sticky fingers : the life and times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone magazine Joe Hagan. https://lccn.loc.gov/2017018102 Hagan, Joe, 1971- author. Sticky fingers : the life and times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone magazine / Joe Hagan. First edition. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. x, 547 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm Z473.W46 H34 2017 ISBN: 9781101874370 (hardcover)

• Joe Hagan - https://www.joehagan.net/

  About

  JOE HAGAN is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair. He has written for New York, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. His work includes long-form profiles and investigative exposés of some of the most significant figures and subjects of our time, including Hillary Clinton (her first post–secretary of state interview), Karl Rove, the Bush family, Henry Kissinger, Dan Rather, Goldman Sachs, The New York Times, and Twitter. He lives with his family in Tivoli, New York.
  Photo by Celeste Sloman

  Photo by Celeste Sloman

Gathering moss
Julie Burchill
Spectator.
335.9873 (Nov. 18, 2017): p37+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK) http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine by Joe Hagan
Canongate, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 547
Many moons ago, I worked at the New Musical Express magazine, which transformed me from virgin schoolgirl to the fabulous creature I've been for the past four decades. It's hard to describe how influential the NME was at its 1970s peak. I've met people who waited in exquisite teenage agonies for two-week-old copies to arrive in the Antipodes, while my colleagues were regularly flown to the USA and supplied with groupies and cocaine as if they themselves were rock stars.
And then punk came along and rocked the gravy boat--and the internet finished the job. Last time I saw a copy, it was lying wanly in a bin marked FREE--PLEASE TAKE ONE.
What happened to Rolling Stone magazine is, in the American way, a far more epic tale than the descent of my alma mater--though it certainly isn't given away, and indeed has seen a rise in circulation in recent times. But it has fallen further from the giddy heights it enjoyed when the editor, Jann Wenner, was a confidant of Bob Dylan, the Beatles and--yes!--the Rolling Stones. It was started as a music comic for addled hippies, with a modest loan from Jann's parents and in- laws in 1967. (The rags-to-riches thing really does lose oodles of glamour when you find out that it was the Bank of Mom and Pop that got an empire-builder started--even more so an outlaw bankrolled by in-laws.)
But Rolling Stone soon became a serious political magazine for consipracy theorists, as personified by its chief 'reporter', Hunter S. Thompson. Now it's up for sale, and I'd hazard a guess that this is in part because it has served its purpose, and the people Wenner used to cuddle
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up with are dead, doolally or doddering their way to a quiet grave.
At the NME we had a writer who worshipped Keith Richards and thus never washed and always wore the jacket on which the guitarist had done him the honour of vomiting copiously. My young eyes were opened to the extent to which many male colleagues had entered their profession not wanting to be writers but groupies. And it was Rolling Stone which made the pursuit of bromance more important than the art of criticism; you could easily have cut Penny Lane from the film Almost Famous and just had the RS cub reporter 'servicing' the bands instead. 'Girls aren't the only ones who adore Mick Jagger,' pants a young Wenner; 'when he gets married, there will probably be more disappointed males than females.'
The Rolling Stones themselves were not flattered, initially, by the magazine's title -'Could have called it Beatles!' Mick Jagger griped, before getting his manager to write a cease-and-desist letter. Still, it was nothing that a healthy dose of sucking up on Wenner's part--comparing Jagger to Oscar Wilde--couldn't cure, until they fell out over the 1969 Altamont festival. 'Is Mick responsible for the killing?' ran a typically nuanced photo caption.
Wenner's desire to be best buds with every dribbling troubador ever to bag a platinum disc--'at five foot six he often found himself gazing up at his heroes like a boy vampire'--cannot fail to wring a snigger from the softest heart. He was actually reported as saying he started Rolling Stone in order to meet John Lennon. But a weekend in which Wenner tried to impress him and Yoko ends comically (we get the miserable measure of both men as Joe Hagan writes: 'Wenner watched with awe and a certain satisfaction as Lennon savaged fans who approached him'). Yoko wonders how the unimpressive Wenner managed to bag his exceptionally attractive wife, Jane-- who was useful in securing the services of the photographer Annie Leibowitz.
No doormat, Mrs Wenner in turn got her kicks by calling her husband 'Chubby Checker', putting him on a diet containing sheep's urine and drawing party guests' attention to his psoriasis.
The real story here is not about a magazine or music but about homosexuality's changing level of hipness. Wenner's own mother 'came out' in the 1960s, but he himself had no such nerve. At the age of 12, Jann was arrested in a library for molesting the son of a local sheriff but he didn't actually follow his heart until Christmas Eve 1994, when he announced to his wife that he was running off with a younger man.
His gayness was at constant odds with his desire to succeed at a time when homosexuality was seen as not quite the thing. In 1976, even Elton John was still referring to himself as bisexual in an interview with Rolling Stone, and it wasn't till 1988 that he told them he was gay. Wenner, the old romantic, slept with more women than men because, though 'it may not have been what I preferred, that's what was available'.
By the 1970s, Wenner's pearl-clutching in the face of the social unrest sweeping America saw him denounced as a dilettante by the latest lot of rebels, and he threw himself into the role with some enthusiasm, amping up the shmoozing to Herculean heights and indulging his taste for many-hued male members in the clubs of Manhattan. Regrettably, this sexual flexibility did not extend to his professional judgment: though Wenner privately 'championed' the flamboyant singer Sylvester, he still baulked at putting black musicians on the cover of Rolling Stone. Moving the
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office from laid-back California to hyperactive New York didn't help; the writer Christian Kerr told me: 'Even when I was writing for it, I wouldn't have been seen dead reading it--it was a dad- on-the-dancefloor magazine.'
I must confess that I became so hooked on the scurrilousness of Sticky Fingers that I remained glued to it for a whole week. Coming in at over 500 pages, with testaments to Wenner's ocean- going awfulness cropping up on every other page, you could have knocked me down with a plectrum when I read in the afterword that this book--though 'independent, not authorised'--was actually commissioned by Wenner. He gave Hagan 'endless hours of interview time' and access to 500 boxes of correspondence, documents and recorded conversations.
Why would a lifelong rotter suddenly come clean? It could be an egomaniac's version of that thing alcoholics have to do when they apologise to everyone they've wronged. But given Wenner's track record, it's just as likely that he feels there is only one thing in life worse than being written about, and that is not being written about--as that famous wit Mick Jagger almost wrote.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Burchill, Julie. "Gathering moss." Spectator, 18 Nov. 2017, p. 37+. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A524738431/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=5c0c09a2. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A524738431
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Hit and myth
Jon Savage
New Statesman.
147.5402 (Jan. 19, 2018): p43. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 New Statesman, Ltd. http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine Joe Hagan
Canongate, 560pp. 25 [pounds sterling]
A long lead into press time can cause severe problems when events come thick and fast. The Rolling Stone issue dated 27 December 1969 had a front cover picture of Mick Jagger headlined: "The Stones' Grand Finale". The lead story inside--"Free Rolling Stones: It's Going To Happen"-- detailed the scramble to find a venue for the western Woodstock: San Francisco's chance to show the world how free festivals were really done.
By the time the issue hit the stands the concert had been and gone. The disaster at Altamont--a vicious murder in plain sight, many injuries, drug-saturated chaos--presented Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner with a serious dilemma. His relationship with Jagger was already fraught: the group had threatened to sue for the magazine's use of their name, and a peacemaking agreement to publish a Jagger-sponsored UK edition had dissolved in acrimony.
The fact that Altamont had happened on the magazine's San Francisco patch was also painful. But Wenner could not ignore the calls from his colleagues who had attended the debacle, Greil Marcus and John Burks. He cleared the decks for the next issue: reportage from 11 different writers was pulled together in a 14-page story--published on 21 January 1970--that put the blame firmly on the Rolling Stones' arrogance and greed.
Jagger was extremely displeased but in the end, it was business. Wenner was too fascinated by the rock star not to feature him in the magazine, and in turn the band needed publicity. Relations were re-established in September 1970 when Jagger made the cover of Rolling Stone to promote the film Performance-, he would ultimately appear on the cover 31 times.
Joe Hagan's biography of Jann Wenner presents a man of contradictions: a cheap skate who undercut writers' fees yet paid the hospital bills of an editor with Aids; a man who was casually cruel yet on occasion capable of unexpected kindness. He was both groupie and editor: fascinated by the cultural cachet of rock stars, he became their friend but inevitably betrayed them --managing at various points to infuriate three Beatles and Dylan, as well as Jagger because the magazine always came first.
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Published on Rolling Stone's 50th anniversary, Sticky Fingers is a rollicking read, with plentiful sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, gossip and riotous behaviour--often involving star writer Hunter S Thompson. Hagan is an experienced feature writer and the biography --undertaken with access to Wenner and his prodigious archive--appears thorough in the American journalistic tradition. Until you begin to look a little closer.
Hagan presents Wenner--born January 1946--as an archetypal baby boomer: self-absorbed and pleasure seeking, a towering egotist who reneged on his beliefs to become a Manhattan monster. Yet this feels reductive. The problem in this account is that the past is always retrospectively tainted by later events. So Wenner's move into celebrity obsession and the naked acquisition of wealth in the 1980s inevitably stains his actions during the 1960s. The radicalism is portrayed as only ever window dressing.
This is just more anti-Sixties hoo-ha. Exposed to the first flush of hippie culture in San Francisco, Wenner campaigned for the legalisation of LSD and, at the height of the counterculture, put his name to a radical political programme in the famous "American Revolution" issue of April 1969. He began as an ambitious pragmatist with a strong idealistic streak: like many others at the time he really did believe that the world was being made anew.
That very powerful feeling was Rolling Stone's rocket fuel. Like his readers, Wenner was a fan and a believer. He saw a gap in the market: there was no regular magazine in America for the breadth of music that was being made in 1967. For ten years, Rolling Stone was a must-read: there was nothing like its mixture of politics, design, and serious, informed and passionate writing about popular music by Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Jon Landau and the like. To the English reader especially it was a biweekly revelation, costing 2/6.
It was a man's world, of course, and Hagan tackles this in sections about women writers and a serious appraisal of Jann's wife Jane's input into the magazine. There are also discussions of gay topics and the magazine's lack of black music coverage, which served Rolling Stone ill in the late 1970s. It couldn't cope with disco and punk and rarely retrieved its mojo thereafter. After John Lennon's murder--which affected him deeply--Wenner reinvented himself as the gatekeeper of Sixties rock culture by helping to found the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame.
The book tails off around this time into business, celebrity, drink/drugs binges and Wenner's
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confused private life: established early on as attracted to men, he finally comes out 456 pages in. Hagan makes much of his subject's homosexuality and fraught relationship with his mother, resulting in dreadful cod-psychological sentences such as: "Wenner was only the boy his mother had made him, the wounded thirteen-year-old with the preposterous confidence and bottomless need for affirmation."
Hagan clumsily touches upon something here but doesn't develop it into a dramatic portrait. Wenner could be difficult, but his vulnerability was always there, detectable by the more astute of his editors and employees --some of whom remember their tenure at Rolling Stone or other Wenner Media magazines with affection and gratitude.
In the 21st century, Rolling Stone has been a shadow of its former self. It has maintained its position largely due to good journalism --by writers such as David Fricke and Matt Taibbi--but in 2014 it was rocked by an expensive court case concerning the poorly researched and libellous story "A Rape on Campus". Like much of the print media, it is dissolving in the face of the third- wave digital revolution. In the magazine's 50th year, Wenner put Rolling Stone up for sale.
Nevertheless, his achievement is substantial. His skill as an editor has been to nurture great talent and to grasp the importance of cultural shifts as they happen. His commercial knack has been to then turn himself and his magazine, at various points, into the embodiment of those moments. No doubt the Sixties myth can seem oppressive to younger generations, but Hagan's irritation at this hegemony is as understandable as it is unenlightening: Sticky Fingers is a flawed book about a fascinating subject who ultimately eludes his biographer.
Caption: Wenner in the Rolling Stone office, 1968
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Savage, Jon. "Hit and myth." New Statesman, 19 Jan. 2018, p. 43. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526117149/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=25a2973a. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526117149
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Hagan, Joe: STICKY FINGERS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Hagan, Joe STICKY FINGERS Knopf (Adult Nonfiction) $29.95 10, 24 ISBN: 978-1-101-87437-0
The definitive biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner (b. 1946).Much like its spiritual cousin Saturday Night Live, Rolling Stone magazine has been a murderers' row of talent for decades, from the groundbreaking Lester Bangs to the gonzo engine of Hunter S. Thompson to political wunderkind Matt Taibbi. Here, former Rolling Stone contributing editor Hagan provides the most complete portrait ever of the man who has firmly gripped the magazine's helm the whole time, a man whose thumbprint on the American culture was matched only by a vacillating stew of ego and insecurity. For fans, newbies, and journalism junkies alike, the iconic stories are here-- e.g., Patti Hearst's Stockholm syndrome, the assassination of John Lennon, and the combative, brotherly bond between Wenner and Thompson in the latter's heyday (Wenner's response to his first meeting with Hunter is priceless: "I know I'm supposed to be the youth representative in the culture, but what the fuck is that?"). The author also explores the heavily drug-fueled work ethic among Wenner and contemporaries like Annie Leibovitz, Wenner's infamously combative marriage, and his long, painful struggle with his sexuality. To his credit, Hagan doesn't trade on his access to his subject's celebrity friends; when Mick Jagger or Michael Douglas pop up in the narrative, it's because they're substantive eyewitnesses to the scene at the time. Working with his subject's full consent and participation, the author manages to create a far deeper portrait than many readers will expect. In capturing Wenner's legend, Hagan creates a moving portrayal of a complicated, brilliant, flawed man who genuinely moved the needle on American culture. "He was the fame maker but also the flame keeper," Hagan writes of Wenner's evolution after Lennon's death. "The success and power of Rolling Stone made him the de facto architect of rock's cosmology, but it was his attention to the legends that made him the indispensable man." An engaging doorstop of a biography and a lasting legacy for the keeper of rock-'n'-roll's watchtower.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Hagan, Joe: STICKY FINGERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2017. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504217635/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=7cefb9b1. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A504217635
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Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of
Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone
Magazine
June Sawyers
Booklist.
114.2 (Sept. 15, 2017): p4. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine. By Joe Hagan.
Oct. 2017. 560p. Knopf, $29.95 (9781101874370); e-book (97811018743871.070.5.
The first issue of Rolling Stone appeared in November 1967. Its founder was an ambitious kid whose goal in life was to become bigger and more important than Hugh Hefner: specifically, to become the Henry Luce (the founder of Time) for the counterculture. Wenner dared to take rock seriously (Rolling Stone popularized rock criticism) while also reinventing the idea of celebrity and fame around youth culture. He built up a network of important writers and photographers and published articles that covered the movers and shakers of pop culture and politics. It was a potent and popular mix, and it made "Wenner, according to Hagan, "the most important magazine editor in America" in the 1970s. Anecdotes about musicians, including Lennon, Springsteen, and Jagger, among others, abound as well as stories involving some of the magazine's finest writers and photographers, including Hunter S. Thompson, Ben Fong-Torres, Cameron Crowe, Tom Wolfe, Richard Avedon, and Annie Leibovitz. Drawing from more than 100 hours of conversation with Wenner as well as interviews with musicians, writers, publishers, friends, lovers, and past and present employees of the magazine, Hagan has fashioned a fascinating biography of a controversial figure and the iconic publication he started.--June Sawyers
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sawyers, June. "Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone
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Magazine." Booklist, 15 Sept. 2017, p. 4. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com /apps/doc/A507359749/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=821e4df2. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A507359749
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Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of
Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone
Magazine
Joe Hagan
Library Journal.
142.11 (June 15, 2017): p17a. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
The first and only biography of Jann Wenner, the iconic founder of Rolling Stone magazine, and a romp through the hothouses of rock and roll, politics, media, and Hollywood, from the Summer of Love to the Internet age.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
978-1-101-87437-0 | $29.95/$39.95C | 200,000 Knopf | HC | October 978-0-345-81505-7 | $35.00C | Knopf Canada
* 978-1-101-87438-7 | * AD: 978-1-101-88868-1 | * CD: 978-1-101-88867-4 MUSIC/BIOGRAPHY RI: Author lives in New York, NY
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hagan, Joe. "Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine."
Library Journal, 15 June 2017, p. 17a. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com /apps/doc/A495668257/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6dfc28e0. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495668257
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This month's required reading
Ash Carter and Adrienne Westenfeld
Esquire.
168.4 (Nov. 2017): p26. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Hearst Communications. Reprinted with permission of Hearst. http://www.hearst.com
Full Text:
* Sticky Fingers By Joe Hagan
Everybody from Mick Jagger to Paul McCartney to David Geffen to Bruce Springsteen talks in Hagan's sex-drug-and-rock-'n'-roll-filled story of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone, which reads like a picaresque novel of the baby-boom era. Knopf, $30
* It's All Relative
By A. J. Jacobs
The Esquire contributor and serial obsessive embarks on a quixotic quest to the furthest reaches of his own genealogy--and discovers, among other things, that he's related to both George H. W. Bush and (more distantly) Jeffrey Dahmer. Funnier than Finding Your Roots! Simon & Schuster, $27
* Heather, the Totality By Matthew Weiner
The creator of Mod Men applies the storytelling skills that won him nine Emmys to another medium; the novel. Binge-read this nail-biting noir about a family of haves and a menacing have-
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not in an age of bitter class anxiety. Little, Brown & Co., $25
* Calder:The Conquest of Time
By Jed Perl
Perl, a serious critic with an allergy to academic jargon, has delivered a majoramazingly, the first--biography of Alexander Calder, a giant of American sculpture who made his mark in four dimensions. Profusely illustrated. Knopf, $55
--Ash Carter and Adrienne Westenfeld
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Carter, Ash, and Adrienne Westenfeld. "This month's required reading." Esquire, Nov. 2017, p.
26. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A511510044 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=521090f6. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A511510044
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Book World: Jann Wenner doesn't
like the new book about him. But you
just might
Margaret Sullivan
The Washington Post.
(Oct. 19, 2017): News: From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Margaret Sullivan
Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine
By Joe Hagan
Knopf. 560 pp. $29.95
---
Jann Wenner doesn't like the way a new biography of him turned out. He's called the book "deeply flawed and tawdry."
Maybe that's because that's a pretty good description of Wenner's life, which the author, Joe Hagan, explores in great (sometimes too great) detail, and with apparent honesty and allegiance to the truth. That's quite a bit more than Wenner's magazine did when it committed egregious journalistic sins in 2014's "A Rape on Campus," the debunked story of a gang rape at the University of Virginia.
In "Sticky Fingers," Hagan, once a Rolling Stone intern, portrays Wenner - who co-founded Rolling Stone in 1967 - as a driven visionary: wildly ambitious, conflicted, arrogant and insecure. Although he is sometimes tough on Wenner, Hagan is more than fair. Ultimately, he seems to agree with former Rolling Stone editor Will Dana that Wenner, though torn between the virtues and vices of his generation, is "51 percent good."
He tells, for example, of Wenner's journalistic leadership in covering that nightmare of craven stupidity and violent death that was the Altamont Free Concert in northern California.
On Dec. 6, 1969 (less than four months after Woodstock's peace, love and hallucinogens in bucolic Upstate New York), the Rolling Stones played a set including "Sympathy for the Devil" as a Hells Angels member fatally stabbed a fan who approached the stage with a gun. (By some
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accounts, the Stones had hired the bikers as security and paid them with $500 worth of beer.) It was one of four deaths that night, the others accidental.
For Wenner, then 23, this was a make-or-break moment.
"If Rolling Stone was a professional newspaper about rock'n'roll, the moment of truth was nigh," as Hagan tells it. Until that point, Wenner had been something of a dilettante publisher, and the publication he had started with music critic Ralph Gleason was mostly a worshipful fanzine. He glorified the icons of rock, especially the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, profited from exalting them in his pages and lived to rub elbows with them in person.
Wenner had no wish to cross Mick Jagger, whose reputation was at stake in the Altamont disaster. But under pressure from more journalistically minded colleagues, Wenner rose to the occasion. He summoned his editors: "We're gonna cover this story from top to bottom and we're going to lay the blame."
A high point - one of many. There would be low points, too, none worse than the journalistic debacle of the U-Va. rape expose. The story disintegrated (after Washington Post reporting found it largely baseless), and three libel suits followed.
The great Wenner, though, was clueless, both before and after publication - he had "read the story and thought it was great," as Hagan tells it. In fact, the way the magazine handled it represented an utter failure of journalistic standards and practices. And when U-Va. associate dean Nicole Eramo's suit came to trial, Wenner made things even worse as he addressed her directly: "I'm very, very sorry. Believe me, I've suffered as much as you have."
"It turned out to be a costly line," writes Hagan. A federal jury awarded $3 million in damages.
The shameful chapter was especially painful because the magazine had done so much daring and much-imitated journalism - not only Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo adventures on the campaign trail but also Michael Hastings' unveiling of U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal's demeaning comments about then-Vice President Joe Biden, and Matt Taibbi's blistering takedowns of the banking industry after the financial meltdown a decade ago.
Just last month, Wenner, 71, said he would sell his controlling share of Rolling Stone, thus ending the era that began in a San Francisco loft in the fall of 1967 when the first issue came off the presses - the brainchild of this precocious 21-year-old Berkeley dropout with bell-bottom pants and a big idea. And an unparalleled sense of what the 1960s meant to a generation.
Hagan, now a contributing editor of New York magazine, had Wenner's full cooperation - and had in fact been invited to take on the project. But Hagan, to his credit, approached the book not as a rose-tinted "authorized biography" but as a serious work of narrative journalism. As such, it largely succeeds, wending its way through the decades, the music and the personalities - from singer Marianne Faithfull and photographer Annie Leibovitz to Bruce Springsteen and, of course, the Beatles and the Stones.
Along the way, Wenner's character - ever self-interested, ever calculating - comes under the
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microscope. So does his personal life, as he struggled to hide his homosexuality for many years, partly through a lengthy marriage to a woman. His own drug use, and that of Rolling Stone's contributors, is part of the story, hardly a surprise given the era.
Yet earlier this month, Hagan's invitation to appear on stage with Wenner at a November event in Manhattan was withdrawn, and the New York Post described the mogul as "fuming" over what he read, saying that the book dwelled too much on drug use and his sexuality.
Whatever his flaws, Wenner emerges here as major cultural influence because of his brilliant creation: a publication that changed journalism and captured the zeitgeist.
"At one time," Hagan writes, picking up a copy of Rolling Stone was "like holding a piece of hot shrapnel from the cultural explosion of the 1960s while it still glowed with feeling and meaning."
The Age of Aquarius has long passed, and Rolling Stone is no longer revolutionary - or nearly as relevant as in its heyday. But Hagan not only helps us understand how terribly much it seemed to matter, once upon a time. He also, through his nuanced portrait of Wenner, shows us how thoroughly the publication reflected its founder, warts and all.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sullivan, Margaret. "Book World: Jann Wenner doesn't like the new book about him. But you just
might." Washington Post, 19 Oct. 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com /apps/doc/A510397591/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6ab980f7. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A510397591
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Burchill, Julie. "Gathering moss." Spectator, 18 Nov. 2017, p. 37+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A524738431/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=5c0c09a2. Accessed 20 May 2018. Savage, Jon. "Hit and myth." New Statesman, 19 Jan. 2018, p. 43. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526117149/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=25a2973a. Accessed 20 May 2018. "Hagan, Joe: STICKY FINGERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504217635/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=7cefb9b1. Accessed 20 May 2018. Sawyers, June. "Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine." Booklist, 15 Sept. 2017, p. 4. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A507359749/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=821e4df2. Accessed 20 May 2018. Hagan, Joe. "Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine." Library Journal, 15 June 2017, p. 17a. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495668257/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6dfc28e0. Accessed 20 May 2018. Carter, Ash, and Adrienne Westenfeld. "This month's required reading." Esquire, Nov. 2017, p. 26. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A511510044/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=521090f6. Accessed 20 May 2018. Sullivan, Margaret. "Book World: Jann Wenner doesn't like the new book about him. But you just might." Washington Post, 19 Oct. 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A510397591/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6ab980f7. Accessed 20 May 2018.

• Vogue
  https://www.vogue.com/article/rolling-stone-jann-wenner-sticky-fingers-joe-hagan-biography
  Word count: 1620

  Yeah, Working for Rolling Stone Was Like That—But It Was Also Like This
  October 26, 2017 11:50 AM
  by Corey Seymour
  Joe Hagan's Sticky Fingers
  Photo: Courtesy of Penguin Random House

  If you’ve had an early peek at or read the recent press around Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan’s new and much-discussed biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, you’ll most likely get the impression that life at Rolling Stone was not like life at most other places of employment. That is, unless your company also had more than one in-house drug dealer, a freelancer who introduced himself by popping into the office wearing a bubble wig and drinking from a six-pack while jabbing himself in the stomach with a needle, and an owner–editor in chief who was smoking, snorting, and sleeping with both men and women—oh yeah, and the odd guest appearance from Jerry Lee Lewis, Stevie Nicks, Courtney Love, or Bono.

  I didn’t start at the magazine until 1990—more than two decades after its origins in the San Francisco counterculture. The magazine’s section of drug paraphernalia reviews and advice, “Dope Pages,” was long gone, but there was still a particular, semi-secluded spot on the 20th floor of our offices on Fifth Avenue, across from Bergdorf’s, where you could hang out and wait for a weed dealer to show up. Small envelopes of cocaine were still occasionally doled out as thank-yous, and when I arrived at work one morning an hour or so late but red-eyed and jittery on a combination of Bloody Marys and pharmaceutical-quality cocaine after a 36-hour sleepless stint with Hunter S. Thompson, for whom I served variously as bodyguard, freelance muse, and drug dealer—or, as Jann put it rather more succinctly, “cabana boy”—I was patted on the back and told (with what seemed to be an admixture of sympathy and jealousy) to go home and sleep it off—but to be back ready to power through to the deadline the next morning. The flip side of this: The gauntlet of interviews I had endured—five, plus a typing test and a proofreading test—before I was granted my editorial assistant position was as grueling a test of intelligence, taste, and personality as I’ve had at any company to this day. Underneath all the seeming decadence was a bedrock policy: Have as much fun as you want—as long as you get the job done.

  I was, of course, looking forward to Sticky Fingers, which Hagan spent four years putting together. As you may have heard, so was Jann—until Jann read the book, de-friended Hagan on Instagram (the Judas-like denial rendered in today’s social currency), and cried foul, calling Hagan’s book “deeply flawed and tawdry.”
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  There’s no question it’s tawdry. I’m not sure how anybody could have started what was essentially a hippie newsletter with a ragtag group of true believers and turned it into, variously, a countercultural bible, a cultural lodestar, and a commercial empire without getting their hands dirty. Yes, Jann really does seem to have double-crossed even his boyhood idol, John Lennon, to make a buck on a book, thus severing their relationship. No, Jann’s marriage to his now-ex-wife, Jane, was never really conventional, and his love life is frenetic and multivalent enough to make the rest of the world’s seem not only lazy, but unimaginative. Hagan wisely points out the two sides of Jann’s split personality: the seducer and the betrayer. (In one of those almost-too-perfect details, we learn that his mother named him after Janus, the two-faced god of transitions, passages, beginnings, and endings.) And as anyone who’s worked at all closely with Jann has experienced: The man giveth, and the man taketh away. As my old boss Hunter was (perhaps overly) fond of saying: Buy the ticket, take the ride.
  Jann Wenner 68000-21a

  Jann Wenner in the Rolling Stone office in 1968.
  Photo: Baron Wolman / Getty Images

  There’s a peevish tone, though, that soon seeps into the DNA of the book. Here’s Jann in his office in San Francisco in the early ’70s: “Wenner’s never-ending letter writing, his tireless scheming, sounded like an act of violence echoing down the hallways, a rhythmic clacking of ambition and need.” There is, of course, another way of rendering this: Here was Jann, working his ass off. A few years later, as Hunter S. Thompson’s book Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail ’72 was about to be published, we learn that “Wenner publicized it as a seminal book of American political writing.” Left unsaid: That the rest of the world more or less agreed with Wenner. And while Hagan duly notes Rolling Stone’s high-water marks, from its all-hands-on-deck coverage of Altamont to scooping the world on the Patty Hearst kidnapping story to, 35 years later, forcing the resignation of General Stanley McChrystal, these passages can often seem more like due diligence amidst the rest of the book’s tone of decline and fall.

  I can’t hold up Sticky Fingers to my own time working for Jann—essentially the ’90s, plus a couple later, shorter stints—to see how it’s rendered, though, as there’s virtually nothing from the magazine itself, or its staff, or Jann’s leadership written about this time period (there’s a brief mention of Kurt Cobain on the cover of RS wearing a T-shirt reading, Corporate Magazines Still Suck and dissing baby boomers, but no mention about the balls of a magazine editor actually printing this photo on the cover of their, yes, corporate magazine). Granted, Sticky Fingers is more a book about Jann Wenner than Rolling Stone per se, and the high drama of the ’90s is when Jann came out of the closet—an event Hagan covers with nuance.

  Did Jann’s employees bitch about him? Of course they—sorry, we—did. It’s what you do: Complain about the boss. My own nadir with Jann (which is in the book): At his behest, I spent two years putting together an oral history of Hunter Thompson’s life, only for Jann to read the manuscript and like it so much he made himself my coauthor—with top billing. When I tried to argue my case to him, Jann casually waved his hand and told me it was just “a droit du seigneur thing”—referring, as one does, to the ancient right of kings to have sexual intercourse with the brides of his subjects on their wedding night.
  Jann Wenner and Corey Seymour (center) with President Bill Clinton at the White House.

  Jann Wenner and Corey Seymour (center) with President Bill Clinton at the White House.
  Photo: Courtesy of Corey Seymour / Clinton White House

  The other side of the coin—Janus’s other face, in this case—was this: Fifteen years earlier, Jann had sent me, barely out of college, on a mission to work with my teenage self’s hero, Hunter S. Thompson, telling me to simply meet him at the airport and “see what happens.” When my various missions with Hunter resulted in at least nominal success—he didn’t die on my watch, nor was he arrested—Jann rewarded me by bringing me along with him and Rolling Stone’s then-national affairs editor, William Greider, to the White House for an interview with President Clinton. After watching Mark Seliger execute a cover shoot on the South Lawn of the White House with about five minutes of access, during which a battery of Clinton’s aides tried to convince the president to leave for a NAFTA meeting (Clinton finally silenced them with a kind of Charlie McCarthy technique, not once breaking a smile in front of the camera as he said forcefully, but through clenched teeth, “As long as we’re here, let’s just do the fuckin’ photo shoot!!!”), we lunched in the private dining room off the Oval Office, and were soon treated to an explosive, red-faced, finger-jabbing temper tantrum from the president before he and his entourage stormed off, leaving us abandoned entirely. Jann, Greider, and myself found our way outside to a private patio outside the Oval Office, where we wordlessly lit up unfiltered Camel cigarettes and took in the view of Socks, the presidential cat, tied to a tree with a piece of string. Twenty-six years earlier, Jann had offered free roach clips to new subscribers to Rolling Stone and reveled in the opprobrium of straight society; now, having helped elect the first rock ’n’ roll president—who, of course, didn’t inhale—he’d endured a tongue-lashing from that same president about his responsibility as the leader of the liberal press. The tantrum, of course, was the perfect capstone to the story. Then Jann and I flew back to New York and got to work, on an almost impossible deadline.

  The unspoken question I wish Sticky Fingers would have addressed: If, given the chance, all of us who’ve been wronged by Jann in various ways could have spent our time working somewhere other than Rolling Stone and for someone other than Jann, would we have done it? I’d be willing to bet a large sum of money that very, very few would have had it any other way—we’d just insist on a lot more up front (and in writing) the next time.

• Book Forum Online
  https://www.bookforum.com/inprint/024_04/18800
  Word count: 380

  Dec/Jan 2018
  Wenners and Losers
  A new biography charts the history of Rolling Stone
  Jessica Hopper

  Sticky Fingers raises an overdue question: Is the era of devoting epic tomes to the exploits of mercurial pricks officially over? If so, Joe Hagan’s skilled filleting of Jann Wenner’s history as the publisher of Rolling Stone magazine is one hell of a coffin nail.

  The book was born over lunch at an upstate New York eatery. Wenner, in his egotism, offered Hagan, then a journalist at New York magazine, unfettered access and deep cooperation (he asked to review only details of his sex life, which are nonetheless abundant), without requiring final approval, so sure was he that Hagan’s excavation would evince his greatness. As it turns out, Wenner is furious about Hagan’s final product. After reading a prepublication galley of Sticky Fingers, the New York Post reports, a furious Wenner kicked Hagan off the bill of a panel discussion they were supposed to co-headline. Wenner’s cocksure bargain didn’t go as he’d planned—instead of further enshrining the myth of “Mr. Rolling Stone,” Hagan rightsized his legacy entirely.

  Hagan, quite clearly, is without an agenda, and Sticky Fingers is not posited as a takedown of “Mr. Rolling Stone.” Still, the tenor of the accounting of Wenner’s life after 1967, the year he founded the magazine, is inevitably shaped largely by the fact that everyone who has ever loved or liked him seemingly loathed him in equal measure (the holdouts being Tom Wolfe, Wenner’s son Gus, possibly Bette Midler). Many offer remembrances from the seat of betrayal, often one that’s been steeped in acid resentment for decades.

  Over the course of the book, Wenner’s life …

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• SF Gate
  https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Sticky-Fingers-by-Joe-Hagan-12312189.php
  Word count: 987

  BREAKING NEWS

  Prince Harry and Meghan Markle (cutouts) take part in the 2018 Bay to Breakers on May 20, 2018.
  Bay to Breakers turns SF into a giant street party 3:25 PM

  ‘Sticky Fingers,’ by Joe Hagan

  By James Sullivan Updated 12:34 pm, Friday, October 27, 2017

  "Sticky Fingers" Photo: Knopf

  Photo: Knopf
  Image 1 of 3
  "Sticky Fingers"

  In a recent issue of AARP the Magazine, Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner — the man who bottled the counterculture — was asked about radio in the 21st century. He replied that he’s been digging this new satellite radio station that celebrates the band they call the Beatles.

  It’s been a long, long time since the publisher of the magazine that made rock ’n’ roll the new star machine cared much for the music upon which he built his empire. (His two favorite singers in high school, according to the peppery new biography “Sticky Fingers,” were Paul Anka and Johnny Mathis.)
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  That’s been the knock on his magazine, on and off, for probably four-fifths of its 50-year run. Rolling Stone has covered politics like carnival barkers, Hollywood like high school yearbook editors. In recent years its website has covered an ever-wider universe of spectacle: Hey, get yer Monday Night Raw recap right here. (A disclosure: This reviewer has written and edited for that website.)

  As a self-made newsman with voracious appetites, undying vendettas and a huge ego, Wenner has himself made news nearly as often as his magazine has printed the two words “Bob” and “Dylan.” He goosed the careers of Hunter S. Thompson, Annie Leibovitz, Tom Wolfe and many more; he styled himself after Charles Foster Kane and dreamed of buying Hearst Castle. He interviewed presidents, pissed off John Lennon and carried on a long-term love-hate relationship with Mick Jagger. (“I neither confirm nor deny,” Wenner told his biographer with a laugh when asked to respond to old rumors about his friendship with the singer.)

  With so much sticky material to sort through, handpicked Boswell Joe Hagan was probably bound for a falling-out with his subject. True to form, Wenner made news recently when he renounced the book to the New York Times, accusing Hagan of producing “something deeply flawed and tawdry, rather than substantial.” (An earlier book-length history of the magazine, published in 1990 by Robert Draper, was supposedly banned from Wenner’s newsroom.)

  But Rolling Stone has managed to chronicle both — the substantial and the tawdry — consistently over its bumpy half-century journey. Likewise, Hagan’s book, said to have been sold in a bidding war for seven figures, manages both with a rich bounty of lively anecdotes.

  After attending UC Berkeley in the ’60s, Wenner took the best parts of existing publications such as Warren Hinckle’s Ramparts and Paul Williams’ Crawdaddy!, leaned on the legendary Chronicle jazz and rock critic Ralph Gleason for guidance, and launched his hippie rag with $7,500 of borrowed money and a black-and-white photo of Lennon in a combat helmet. (The Chronicle played at least a bit part in Wenner’s decision to move the magazine to New York a decade later, slighting him by repeatedly identifying a stock photo of an Andy Warhol associate as Wenner.)

  It’s easy to see why Wenner might not be thrilled with the book. One of the first descriptive phrases Hagan trots out for the publisher is “boy vampire.” Wenner’s sheer mania often got the best of him; of one of his burnt-out phases, Hagan writes that it seemed he’d been “wagged to death by his own tail.” From the beginning, Wenner was “a little barbarian whose lust for money, drugs, and sex threatened to outpace his razor intellect and turn him into Augustus Gloop falling into the chocolate river of the 1960s.”

  Like the earlier book, there’s plenty here that Wenner would admire were he not the man in the viewfinder. Rolling Stone has been at the center of many of the defining moments of its time, from Altamont and the Kent State shootings to Afghanistan and the Boston Marathon bombing. It also created the lionization of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-caliber musicians (Wenner is a co-founder of the institution).

  Wenner’s main innovation, Hagan writes, is his magazine’s “radical conventionality.” The magazine, which Wenner put on the block just last month, helped define “the framework of American narcissism,” Hagan writes, “from the permission to unload personal demons in public to the rise of the selfie.”

  All true. But Rolling Stone also made millions of readers feel like a part of the conversations that mattered.

  Former Chronicle critic James Sullivan is a regular contributor to the Boston Globe and the author of four books, including “The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved the Soul of America.” Email: books@sfchronicle.com

  Sticky Fingers

  The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine

  By Joe Hagan

  (Knopf; 547 pages; $29.95)

• Vulture
  http://www.vulture.com/2017/10/jann-wenner-biography-sticky-fingers-excerpt.html
  Word count: 5969

  The Long, Bizarre Relationship Between Jann Wenner and Mick Jagger
  By
  Joe Hagan
  Mick Jagger and Jann Wenner. Photo: Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Atlantic Records

  In those early days, Jann Wenner was the star of his own magazine. For people who first got their hands on Rolling Stone, in 1967, the editor with the Swedish-sounding name — or was Jann a girl? Not many knew (it was pronounced Yahn) — was their avatar in print, their gate-crasher at the Fillmore, a superfan as attuned to pot humor and art school nudity as they were, as versed in antiwar rhetoric, as hot to get his sticky fingers on a new Stones LP. Rolling Stone arrived on newsstands like a secret handshake: In a canny bit of salesmanship, Wenner offered a complimentary roach clip with every subscription, the “handy little device,” each one lathed by his future brother-in-law, sculptor Bob Kingsbury.

  With the name, the vision had snapped into focus: Rolling Stone, the first mainstream paper for the rock-and-roll generation. Now everything that was ambiguous about Jann Wenner’s life — his hidden sexuality, his contradictory interests in both hippie culture and high society — was made clear: to become an editor and publisher, as big and important as Hugh Hefner — no, bigger than that. Henry Luce! William Randolph Hearst! Keeping such company made sense to Wenner, even if others rolled their eyes.

  Who did this guy think he was? “Motherless, fatherless, sisterless, in the closet, starting a newspaper that nobody thought was going to go anywhere,” said Jerry Hopkins, one of the first writers for Rolling Stone. “He was out there.”
  Adapted from Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine by Joe Hagan, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf, on October 24. Photo: Penguin Random House

  What Wenner understood clearly from the start was that rock and roll was about sex. “All of rock and roll is sex, defined,” said Wenner. And no one proved this point more than rock’s foremost provocateur, Mick Jagger, the ur-Rolling Stone. Jagger and Wenner would become fellow travelers in the rock revolution — both of them pragmatists and opportunists — but the shared name, Rolling Stone, put them in a kind of uneasy shotgun marriage from the start. 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. “Why did Jann call it that, when there was a band called that?” asked Jagger. “You could have thought something else, to be honest. I mean, I know it arised from a song name, but that’s not really the point.”

  Keith Richards put it more succinctly: “We thought, ‘What a thief!’ ”

  From the start, there was confusion over the name. “Because Rolling Stone was brand-new,” said Jerry Hopkins, “I was constantly saying to people, ‘No, not the group, the newspaper.’ ”

  Wenner benefited from the confusion, a fact not lost on Allen Klein, the band’s manager, who immediately sent Wenner a cease-and-desist letter. “Your wrongful conduct constitutes, at the very least, a misappropriation of my clients’ property rights in the name Rolling Stones for your own commercial benefit,” wrote Klein’s lawyer. “It is also a violation of my clients’ copyright to the name ‘Rolling Stones.’ ”

  The lawyer demanded Wenner retract and destroy all copies of Rolling Stone or suffer “immediate legal action including an injunction and a suit for treble damages.”

  Wenner, whose friendship with Stones press secretary Jo Bergman had emboldened him to promise “an interview with Mick Jagger” in a Rolling Stone press release, began living in quiet terror. In November 1967, he wrote to Jagger directly, hoping to circumvent a lawsuit. “Greetings from San Francisco!” began the letter. “My feeling is that you haven’t got any idea that this action has been taken on your behalf,” he wrote. “ ’Cause it just doesn’t seem like it’s where you and the Stones are at.”

  Wenner asked Jagger to call him for an interview so Rolling Stone could publish something positive about the Rolling Stones. “That would be a groove,” he said.

  “It just looks like a great mistake,” he concluded. “We love you.”

  Silence followed and Wenner squirmed, telling Bergman he was “very edgy” waiting for Jagger to exculpate him from legal action. Meanwhile, Mick Jagger could not help but observe how the Beatles were using Rolling Stone as a handy promotional vehicle. Indeed, Jagger could use a guy like Jann Wenner in America, especially after his last album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, was so poorly received. Jon Landau ripped it in Rolling Stone as an insecure Sgt. Pepper’s knockoff and declared the production and Jagger’s lyrics “embarrassing.” A full nine months and fourteen issues into the existence of Rolling Stone and the Rolling Stones had yet to appear on the cover, while their archrivals, the Beatles, had already appeared three times. If the lawsuit threat was a “great mistake,” it was also a convenient bit of leverage, and Mick Jagger liked leverage. “I don’t think Mick lets anyone off the hook for anything,” said Keith Richards. “He’s never let anyone off the hook, once he’s got one in.” That summer, Jagger learned that Wenner was hoping to start a British version of Rolling Stone in London. Jonathan Cott, Rolling Stone’s London correspondent, wrote to Wenner to report rumblings of legal hassles from the Stones if he attempted to publish in England.

  Wenner had met Rolling Stones producer Glyn Johns through his neighbor Boz Scaggs, late of the Steve Miller Band, and over dinner one night in San Francisco asked him to invest in Rolling Stone. Johns declined but offered to broker a meeting with Jagger. The moment arrived when the Stones were mixing Beggars Banquet at Sunset Sound studios in Hollywood in the summer of 1968. 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 Mick Jagger as half owner.

  Everything was falling into place: Jagger had already been toying with the idea of starting a magazine and now here was Jann Wenner, who already had a successful one named Rolling Stone, and was thereby poised under Jagger’s thumb. “Jann and I thought it would be good to make one that was partly the same thing but would be localized in some way,” Jagger said.

  To show his appreciation, Wenner went back to San Francisco and wrote up a song-by-song preview of Beggars Banquet for Rolling Stone, comparing Jagger’s lyrics to those of Bob Dylan and declaring it “the Stones’ best record, without a doubt.” Wenner’s studious annotation of the album included the story behind the iconic “Sympathy for the Devil,” the album’s most “significant” song, with its famous reference to the Kennedys:

  The first version of the song — then called “The Devil Is My Name” — contained the lyric, “I shouted out, who killed Kennedy? After all it was you and me.” The next day Bobby was shot. The second version of the song, the one which will be on the album, recorded the next day, had this line instead: “I shouted out, ‘Who killed the Kennedys? After all it was you and me.’ ”

  Wenner described Jagger as “a thin, modish Oscar Wilde figure” trailed by “bizarre” groupies. What separated Jann Wenner from the other groupies, of course, was Rolling Stone. And the week of August 10, 1968, Wenner put Mick Jagger on the cover for the first time, the singer pouting and slithery in a tank top, a pair of headphones on his head. “The Return of the Rolling Stones,” declared the headline.

  “The first sign for me that Jann had audaciously grand ambitions,” said Pete Townshend of the Who, “was his desire to create a U.K. version of Rolling Stone. He came to London on his first fact-finding mission, and we hung out together a couple of times.” On his first visit, the guitarist picked him up in his gigantic Mercedes 600 and squired him to his Georgian house near the Thames. Townshend was struck with how quickly Wenner had embraced the role of press baron. “He assumed I would be comfortable with the scale of his business ambitions,” he said, “and I suppose I was, but I remember feeling that he must have amassed a relative fortune fairly quickly.”

  He hadn’t quite yet, but why wait? The next day, Townshend said, he and Wenner went to Olympic Studios to see the Rolling Stones record songs for a forthcoming album, Let It Bleed. They sat in the booth while the Stones played, both ogling Mick Jagger. “It turned out that he, like me, harbored an adoration of Mick Jagger that was not entirely heterosexual,” said Townshend.

  Afterward, Wenner accompanied Jagger to his apartment in Chelsea, and they sat by a fireplace with a moose head over the mantel to discuss their joint venture. They hadn’t gotten very far when Marianne Faithfull, Jagger’s then lover, showed up after a bad day on the set of a film production of Hamlet, in which she played Ophelia. “She came home, hysterical and histrionic, and he had to comfort her and I left,” recalled Wenner. (She would overdose on sleeping pills not long after.)

  By the spring of 1969, Rolling Stone and Mick Jagger were officially in business together, with Jagger as “chairman” of the joint venture they decided to call the Trans-oceanic Comic Company Limited. Having staked some of his own money on British Rolling Stone, Jagger insisted on hiring the editor, a young woman named Jane Nicholson, whose awe of Jagger tended to render her stammering and shaking with nerves. They set up an office in Hanover Square, where Wenner reminded the rambunctious staff during their first meeting that “we’re not here to drink Mick’s wine,” prompting Jagger to correct him: “Hold it, that’s exactly why we’re here. To drink my wine.”

  Wenner could hardly argue. Once British Rolling Stone launched in June 1969, with Pete Townshend on the cover, each new issue arrived in San Francisco like a fresh offense, a mutant version of Wenner’s own Rolling Stone, trussed up with political diatribes, overly groovy prose, and egregious misspellings of rock star names on the cover. “There were two appalling incidents where we spelled Ray Davies’s name wrong, and we called him ‘Ray Davis’ in a big headline,” recalled Alan Marcuson, who was hired as the advertising manager and later became an editor, “and then we spelled Bob Dylan’s name wrong, ‘Dillon’ as I remember. As bad as it can fucking get, really. Wenner hit the roof, rightly so.”

  Wenner flew to London to try bringing order to the unruly staff, whose priority seemed to be enjoying Jagger’s wine as well as copious amounts of marijuana. “Wenner came over, and we had a very fractious, uncomfortable meeting with him,” said Marcuson. “And he very quickly became the enemy of London Rolling Stone.”

  Jagger gave the staff carte blanche to ignore Wenner, which they were all too happy to do. “We said, ‘Fuck it, the Stones are paying for this, we’ll do whatever we like, he’s not our boss,’ ” said Marcuson. After two months of frustration, Wenner sent a twelve-page letter to Jagger calling the British Rolling Stone “mediocre” and run with “unbelievable incompetence.” Wenner insisted to Jagger that the British magazine come under the boot of the American Rolling Stone.

  By this time, however, Jagger had lost interest entirely and flown to Australia to film an art-house outlaw movie called Ned Kelly (which Rolling Stone would later describe as “one of the most plodding, dull and pointless films in recent memory”). Meanwhile, Jagger’s British Rolling Stone staff threw a record industry party in which the punch bowl was spiked with LSD and several attendees were hospitalized. One victim was Marc Bolan of T. Rex, who freaked out and locked himself in the bathroom until he was talked out by a gynecologist (and aspiring country music singer) who happened to be present. “I think that party was one of the big nails in the coffin,” said Marcuson.

  Wenner was desperate to pull the plug on British Rolling Stone but frightened by the prospect of letting Jagger down. “It took me a while to screw my courage up to do it, to write him a letter or call him,” said Wenner. “I said this thing is awful, it’s not working, they’re spending your money at an incredible rate, and you’re going to have nothing to show for it.” For Wenner, it was a grand embarrassment, undermining the credibility of his paper and leaving a taste of bitter disappointment over Jagger’s failure to uphold his end of the bargain. “I was upset and I said that to him,” said Wenner. “There was never any reaction from Mick.”

  For Jagger, it was an expensive boondoggle, nothing more. “I didn’t have that much money at that point,” said Jagger, “because I was in all these disputes with Allen Klein.” (Jagger felt Klein had ripped off the Stones.) Mick Jagger’s staff implored the Stones’ singer to reconsider shutting down British Rolling Stone, writing a long and heated telegram to Jagger explaining that it was the rock star’s God-given right to use the name Rolling Stone, regardless of what Jann Wenner said. Marcuson remembered the precise date of the telegram. It was the weekend of December 6, 1969, the eve of a free concert an hour south of the Rolling Stone offices: the Rolling Stones at Altamont Speedway.

  Altamont would end up being a gigantic mistake. That it represented the sudden and untimely death of Woodstock Nation is a truism that happens to be true: a precisely crafted Hieronymus Bosch mirror image of the heaven at Max Yasgur’s farm, Altamont was a botched festival overrun by “every meatball in the Western Hemisphere,” as Bob Neuwirth had warned of free concerts, and marred by violent fisticuffs and bad acid trips, including a man who declared he was pregnant and jumped off a nearby highway overpass. While drug-addled and seminude hippies desperately groped for pleasure, members of the Hells Angels, the hired “security” in wolf pelts and leather, swilled the $500 worth of beer the Stones gave them, beat concert goers with pool sticks, and, finally, stabbed an eighteen-year-old black fan named Meredith Hunter to death while the Stones played “Under My Thumb” fifteen yards away.

  The concert was to be the big finale to the Stones’ first American tour in almost three years, which started in September 1969. The band had been barred from working in the States because of drug busts, and they were returning to a brave new rock scene defined by the mammoth Woodstock festival, a media extravaganza that was filmed for a documentary and recorded for a triple LP. The Stones were feeling insecure, and competitive. So Jagger cooked up a sequel, a West Coast answer to Woodstock, this time in the hometown of his business partner Jann Wenner and featuring local heroes the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane. The first thing they did was hire a documentary film crew, Albert and David Maysles, to create a movie and promote their next album, Let It Bleed, in hopes of beating the Woodstock movie to the theaters in the spring of 1970. News of a free festival first leaked in November 1969, at the precise moment that British Rolling Stone was dissolving. “Yeah, there is going to be one,” Richards told the Los Angeles Free Press. “But I don’t want to say where or when right now. We’ve still got to get ’round the country and get things together. At the end, we’ll get it all together and do the free show.”

  By December, the plans for a Stones movie were in place, but the festival itself was still in shambles. Jagger had called Wenner for help, desperate to secure a venue. “That’s why Altamont became so charged,” said Wenner. “Mick calls me and he wants to do this big concert.”

  Wenner gave Jagger the number of a local lawyer, Melvin Belli, who after a false start with the Sears Point Raceway (the owners demanded the film profits go toward Vietnamese orphans) arranged for the Stones to take over the Altamont Speedway and gamely posed for the Maysles brothers’ cameras as he worked the phones, outfitted in a three-piece suit and garish tie. This was twenty-four hours before showtime.

  Privately, Wenner was still smarting from the failed venture with Jagger only a month before. When Wenner arrived at Brannan Street one afternoon to discover employees of the Stones using his private office to make phone calls, he yelled at his secretary for allowing them in. (The Rolling Stones ran up $140 in long-distance phone calls, and Wenner promptly forwarded them the bill.)

  Even after the dissolution of British Rolling Stone, Jagger expected Wenner to remain his loyal scribe. Wenner put Jagger on the cover of Rolling Stone the month of the festival, headlined “The Stones Grand Finale.” But there were signs of a creeping skepticism. Ralph Gleason, the jazz critic and Wenner’s co-founder in Rolling Stone, excoriated the Stones in the Chronicle, complaining that their ticket prices were extortionary (“Can the Rolling Stones actually need all that money?”). This “free” concert looked to Gleason like a cynical ploy to make money off a movie, with San Francisco as the Stones’ picturesque set. And indeed, Jagger was hard up for cash on the brink of the Stones’ divorce from manager Allen Klein, not to mention the $40,000 Jagger had blown on British Rolling Stone. When Rolling Stone buttonholed him about why he wanted to spend $100,000 on a free concert, his flip reply was “Well, I wanted to do the whole tour for free, because, you know, I’m richer than the other fellas, and I can afford it.

  “I’m just joking,” he added.

  Wenner had nearly joined the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh on a helicopter to the festival but opted out while still standing on the landing pad. “The helicopter was crowded, and I had no plan to get home,” he said. “I was a Stones fan, but I’d seen enough of them.”

  During the show, Jagger blithely advertised his diabolical reputation by performing “Sympathy for the Devil,” in front of 300,000 shivering fans in an unlit and sprawling field at night. It immediately set off a violent melee in front of the stage. “We always have something very funny happen when we start that number,” he told the crowd, as if part of a script.

  Fifteen minutes later, there was a dead man in front of him, which was not part of the script.

  Over the weekend of the concert, Wenner began hearing from his staff. The writers Greil Marcus and John Burks were both sickened by the depravity they’d witnessed, and even more so after they read the headline in a San Francisco paper the following day, “300,000 Say It with Music,” clearly pre-written without any eyewitness accounts. “Those of us who had been there were so dispirited,” said Marcus, “both by what had happened — it was so awful, in so many ways — and then by the press coverage.”

  Before the murder took place, Marcus and Burks considered burying the story along with the rest of the press because the festival was so bleak. “I remember John [Burks] saying, ‘This is so awful. Maybe we should not even cover it,’ ” said Marcus. “I said, ‘Well, we have to cover it.’ He said, ‘Well, what if we just ran a column saying, “Stones Play Free Concert,” and ran a couple of paragraphs.’ I said, ‘Yeah, that would probably be good.’ ”

  But after the murder, there could be no denial. Burks called Wenner over the weekend demanding they “tell people what these fuckers did,” but Wenner remained skeptical until Gleason called him from Berkeley and urged Wenner to face Jagger down. If Rolling Stone was a professional newspaper about rock and roll, the moment of truth was nigh. What did Jann Wenner really stand for? Was he a groupie or a fucking journalist? He told him to cover the Altamont disaster “like it was World War II.”

  The following week, Wenner, according to Marcus, sat before his editors over lunch and declared, “We’re gonna cover this story from top to bottom, and we’re going to lay the blame.”

  “Everybody knew I was friends with Mick,” said Wenner, “and everybody was walking around on tender toes, wondering is Jann going to let this happen. All our integrity was on the line with that. Me, in front of my staff, and me, in front of the world. And I just said, do it.”

  For Wenner, deciding to confront Altamont head-on was a moment of bravery, tinged though it was by the contretemps over British Rolling Stone, and not without Wenner’s characteristic calculation. It was a risk worth taking. “I remember explicitly thinking this thought, that whatever we did, my relationship with Mick would survive,” Wenner continued. “If it took a year or two to repair, it would take a year or two to repair… I had to be true to this.”

  Wenner deputized Burks to stitch together the reportage of eleven different writers into a master story in the style of a Newsweek presidential campaign exposé. Even the record critics, like Lester Bangs and Marcus, were conscripted into service. Marcus was tasked with the most difficult assignment of all: interviewing the family of the murder victim, Meredith Hunter. “So I did it,” said Marcus. “I knocked on the door. I sat and talked for two hours with his sister. His mother was in the hospital. That was just a complete revelation for me.”

  Hunter’s distraught sister told Marcus that the Stones were “responsible” for her brother’s death: “They don’t care, they don’t care.”

  Wenner treated the events of Altamont like a personal betrayal. When he discovered that Hunter’s family had never even been contacted by the Rolling Stones Organization, he wrote a personal check to the family for $500.

  The conclusion of witnesses and local scenesters was that the Stones had hired the Hells Angels as extras in their grand cinematic homage to themselves and their expanding bank accounts. (After learning that the murder was captured on film, Universal Studios bid more than $1 million to release it, Rolling Stone later reported.) David Crosby, a staunch defender of the Hells Angels, told Rolling Stone he considered the concert “a grotesque ego trip” for the Stones. Burks, in his reporting, channeled the wrath of the Angels: “What an enormous thrill it would be for an Angel to kick Mick Jagger’s teeth down his throat.”

  “Is Mick responsible for the killing?” ran a caption under a photo of Jagger, who was described in the story as a smug dandy in “a red velvet cape and red velvet cap,” demanding “the best of hotels, limousines, cuisine.”

  As his story went to press, Wenner did try getting Jagger to respond, sending a telegram to Maddox Street in London. “There is no attempt to fix blame,” he wrote to Jagger. “It was a cosmically preordained celebration for the end of the 60s.”

  But that was Wennerian obfuscation. Laying the blame was the point. With a dozen reporters at his back, notebooks bristling with incendiary quotations from every boldfaced rock name in San Francisco and L.A., Wenner had to know he was baiting the hook for the former chairman of the Trans-oceanic Comic Company when he said, “We certainly don’t blame you but your continued silence is making other people uptight and suspicious and I think if you will make a statement in Rolling Stone it will go a long way towards straightening matters up and putting people at ease.”

  Jagger didn’t reply. But when the story was finished, it left zero doubt that Rolling Stone was “attempting to fix blame.” “Altamont,” said the story, “was the product of a diabolical egotism, high ineptitude, money manipulation, and, at base, a fundamental lack of concern for humanity.”

  Wenner had never betrayed his heroes quite like this before. He had slammed a record or two, angered a few record executives, made Eric Clapton faint. But through an alchemical mix of petty business grievance and self-preservation, Wenner nailed Jagger’s hide to the wall with vindictive aplomb. For a generation of readers, the story of Altamont was the one printed in Rolling Stone, seared into history like a cattle brand held in Jann Wenner’s grip.

  Forty-five years after Altamont, Mick Jagger was still aggrieved by Rolling Stone’s virtual crucifixion.

  “The problem with having relationships with people in the press, it’s like politicians in a way,” he mused. “They name their magazine after you. And they become friends with you. But then when something happens and goes wrong, you feel that they should be more sympathetic. Sympathetic, meaning evenhanded. You don’t expect them to take your side against the world, and stick up for you when you’re wrong, but you expect to get a fair crack at the whip. And I’d obviously felt at that point that that didn’t happen in this case.”

  For Jagger, the Altamont story was a betrayal; for everyone else, it was an inflection point for the youth culture. Afterward, Jerry Rubin, the antiwar radical of the Yippies (Youth International Party), wrote a letter to Gleason warning that Rolling Stone had a choice to make, lest it be lumped in with the capitalist record companies that, in addition to selling records, sold “electronic equipment to help kill Vietnamese kids.” “The connection between the company’s advertising and the way Jann Wenner feeds his kids and keeps a roof over his head is not just ‘incidental’!” he wrote. “Rolling Stone magazine has a vested interest in the business of rock music.” He urged Rolling Stone to acknowledge that “the trip is over.” (Rubin also admitted he was angry that Rolling Stone didn’t print his writings.)

  As the media narrative calcified around the idea of Altamont as the death of the 1960s — with the murder weapon in Jagger’s hand — the “visibly shaken” singer told Gleason, who was reporting on Altamont for Esquire, “If Jesus had been there, he would have been crucified.”

  Rolling Stone continued to chew over the story for months on end. By spring, the Stones’ own tour manager, Sam Cutler, was pointing the finger at Jagger, his barbed quotation printed big and bold on the inside cover of Rolling Stone: “The Stones Have Not Acted Honorably.”

  On February 25, 1970, Jagger finally responded to Wenner’s queries with a civil if curt retort:

  DEAR JANN YOU WANT TO ASK ME MANY QUESTIONS ABOUT ALTAMONT WHICH I WOULD NORMALLY BE ONLY TOO PLEASED TO ANSWER AND HAVE INDEED ANSWERED TO MANY OTHER PEOPLE STOP HOWEVER UNFORTUNATELY RIGHTLY OR WRONGLY WE NO LONGER TRUST YOU TO QUOTE US FULLY OR IN CONTEXT STOP I HOPE OUR FRIENDSHIP CAN FLOURISH AGAIN SOME DAY.

  M

  Almost immediately, Wenner began secretly campaigning to repair the relationship. After all, he couldn’t very well publish a newspaper called Rolling Stone and not have the Rolling Stones in it. There was also the matter of the unresolved trademark issue. Wenner’s reading of Jagger was accurate: He was nothing if not pragmatic. Asked why he trusted Wenner again after the Altamont story, Jagger said, “It’s not the trust, or distrust. They have an agenda and you have an agenda. It might not meet.” Their agendas, of course, were destined to meet again and again. Jagger was a budding film star and entrepreneur. While Rolling Stone flogged him over Altamont, Jagger was dreaming up ideas like selling Rolling Stones albums on magazine newsstands, starting with the soundtrack to Altamont.

  The truce finally came in the late summer of 1970 with the arrival of Jagger’s film acting debut in Performance, in which he played a bisexual former rock star named Turner, his hair slicked back like a mobster. In a memo, Burks reported to Wenner the “big news” from Rolling Stone’s New York bureau: “Mick’s extending a token of reconciliation in your direction. Namely, he wants you, of all people, to see Performance before anyone else in the Western world.”

  Wenner promptly put Jagger on the cover of Rolling Stone in September 1970, a black-and-white film still from Performance, Jagger’s lips hand-painted pink by Bob Kingsbury. Wenner’s staff was outraged that he bent his knee to the man Rolling Stone virtually implicated in a local murder. The rapprochement was especially upsetting because Wenner had canceled plans for an ambitious book on Altamont by Burks and Marcus (which Burks had hoped to title Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself and which was later translated and published as a paperback in Germany). Instead, Wenner was proposing to Stones publicist Marshall Chess that they publish a Rolling Stones lyrics book.

  However hypocritical he appeared, Wenner wasn’t interested in further alienating Jagger. It was an astute business decision. Jagger would be the most important and iconic face in Rolling Stone’s history, appearing on more Rolling Stone covers than any other artist (thirty-one times), always a consistently high seller. Jagger benefited, of course — years of being mythologized and glamorized by the best writers and photographers in the country, with Wenner’s personal guarantee of editorial control over his own image in a magazine conveniently named Rolling Stone. Chess, who spent much of the 1970s with the Stones, said Wenner fawned over Jagger like any female groupie he’d ever known. Jagger “knew he had him wrapped around his finger,” said Chess, who speculated, as many would, that the two slept together. (Asked about this, Wenner laughed and said, “I neither confirm nor deny.”) When Jagger brought up Wenner’s name, said Chess, it was always with a dismissive wave of the royal hand: “He’ll do whatever I want.”

  But as Wenner became more successful, it would become less clear who was getting the better of whom, the star or the starfucker, the rocker or his groupie. Their symbiotic relationship even came to include the talents of Annie Leibovitz. Leibovitz had badly wanted to cover the 1975 Rolling Stones tour, just like Robert Frank in 1972, but Wenner was reluctant to send her, fearing she would get sucked into the notorious drug vortex of the Stones caravan.

  Keith was a full-blown heroin addict, but even Jagger was overdoing it, once falling unconscious on a couch in Marshall Chess’s apartment at East Sixty-Ninth Street in New York in 1975. Recalled Diane Chess, “I was upstairs in the bedroom when I heard this slapping and Marshall yelling, ‘Mick! Mick!’ enough times for me to go see what was going on. He was blue, lips purple. And the poor, helpless, heavyset chauffeur just standing there almost made the whole thing comical.” (While a panicked Marshall Chess tried giving Jagger mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, Ahmet Ertegun showed up with Peter Wolf and wife Faye Dunaway, who tried bringing order to the chaotic scene until Jagger could be rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. Jane Wenner called the next morning, fishing for details, but the whole thing was kept out of the press.)

  Wenner believed Leibovitz was susceptible to this sort of excess. “And I was right, of course,” he said. But he was overruled by Mick Jagger, who hired Leibovitz as the official Rolling Stones tour photographer for a few hundred dollars a week. As Richards recalled, “She was in our pay. Only because we liked the work that she had done with Jann and said, ‘We need a really good photographer. You got a free pass to take any picture you like.’ ”

  During the ’75 tour, Leibovitz captured Jagger alone in an elevator after a concert, a white towel on his head and creviced face fallen in exhaustion. The intimacy of the image wasn’t accidental: Annie and Mick had become lovers, an affair that began in Montauk and allegedly inspired the song “Memory Motel” from Black and Blue. Leibovitz listened to Jagger work on the song every night in hotels. And Jagger later told Rolling Stone the girl in the song was “actually a real, independent American girl.” According to Jann Wenner, Jagger confessed to him that the girl whose “eyes were hazel” and nose was “slightly curved” was Annie Leibovitz.

  After a time, Jagger came to feel exploited by Wenner. “They liked each other; they didn’t like each other,” recalled Diane von Furstenberg, the fashion designer and entrepreneur who befriended both men in the early 1970s. “Mick always thought that Jann took advantage of him.”

  When the Stones returned to San Francisco in 1972, Jagger and Wenner could share a laugh and some dope and rarely mention the little Altamont debacle. Why make things unpleasant? They could even put off the trademark issue — for now. In the cosseted back rooms of the rock-and-roll business, where ambition and self-interest casually tangled in stoned grins and idle flattery, this sort of thing was simply called being “friends.” “They’re very similar people,” observed Keith Richards. “They’re both very guarded creatures. You wonder if there’s anything worth guarding.”
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• USA Today
  https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2017/10/24/sticky-fingers-gets-brutally-honest-about-jann-wenner-and-rolling-stone/793413001/
  Word count: 892

  Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll fuel new bio on Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner
  Kim Willis, USA TODAY Published 1:05 p.m. ET Oct. 24, 2017

  If you've always wanted to own a magazine, now might be your chance. Buzz60's Angeli Kakade (@angelikakade) has the story. Buzz60
  636444433474432734-Sticky-Fingers-rd6.jpg

  (Photo: Knopf)

  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., ★★★½ 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. 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’s played out again and again throughout Wenner’s 50-year career.
  Jann Wenner in 2000. He is the subject of a new biography.

  Jann Wenner in 2000. He is the subject of a new biography. (Photo: Janet Durrans)

  Sticky Fingers opens with one of those jaw-dropping, casually recounted moments of rock history that are sprinkled throughout. The journalist and his then-wife 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’s mind, 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 John’s objections.

  They would never talk again, but Wenner would make it up to him (or, more specifically, to Ono) a decade later after John’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.
  Author Joe Hagan.

  Author Joe Hagan. (Photo: Samantha Hunt)

  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 co-founder 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.
  Jackson Browne (left) and Jann Wenner attend the 29th

  Jackson Browne (left) and Jann Wenner attend the 29th annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony at Barclays Center in Brooklyn in 2014. (Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris, WireImage)

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• Spin
  https://www.spin.com/2017/10/sticky-fingers-jann-wenner-rolling-stone-review/
  Word count: 1563

  Culture \
  Sticky Fingers Is the Definitive Account of Why Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Mattered
  Jeremy Gordon // October 26, 2017
  Sticky_Fingers_rd6-1508945061

  Jann Wenner doesn’t want you to read Sticky Fingers, a new biography about the life of Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone. That’s too bad, because the book deserves to be devoured by anyone interested in the history of Rolling Stone, and more broadly, how it shaped and tilted cultural attitudes over the last half-century. Meticulously researched and filled with fascinating anecdotes and gossip items, Sticky Fingers is a definitive account of the man who possibly more than any musician impacted the way America consumes and thinks of rock n’ roll.

  Wenner was just 21 years old when in 1967 he decided there was a burgeoning desire to see rock n’ roll, which was up until then a genre of music easily dismissed as a teen fad, covered respectfully and enthusiastically, without lapsing into pretentious academic speak. Named for the Bob Dylan song (and not the band), Rolling Stone crystallized the feelings of ’60s youths who knew this music mattered, no matter what the adults said. “You can’t explain to someone today how unique and essential those things were to the fiber of your being in those days,” Bruce Springsteen tells Joe Hagen, the author. “They were the only validating pieces of writing that [showed] somebody else out there was thinking about rock music the way you were. That was comforting.”

  Born to modest wealth to parents who quickly divorced, Wenner was less a proponent of the counterculture than a man who sought power. (He hid his homosexuality for his entire youth because his marriage to the stylish and smart Jane Schindelheim, a key component in the magazine’s formative days, allowed him entrée into increasingly fancy circles of social influence.) When it launched, Rolling Stone’s only competitors were teen magazines and quasi-underground publications like Crawdaddy. Rolling Stone’s innovation was to professionalize its approach, aping its clean design from the existing Sunday Ramparts magazine (which Wenner edited before it folded) and grounding its writing with a more technical approach. It was not a bastion of journalistic integrity: Big artists were often afforded final approval of their interviews, and lesser artists were permanently snubbed because of Wenner’s private pettiness. (Paul Simon, who had a fling with Wenner’s ex, was minimized for years in the magazine.) But it had access, energy, and beautiful photographs—enough to make it a leading document of youth culture.

  Rolling Stone’s best ideas often came at someone else’s behest. Co-founder Ralph Gleason suggested putting out an open call for reviews, which produced writers like Lester Bangs; editor-in-chief John Burks forced the magazine’s interest in politics following the Kent State and Jackson State shootings, spearheading a landmark issue that Wenner nonetheless tried to take credit for. Wenner’s real genius was for leveraging his power to push Rolling Stone as the establishment, and with it, Rolling Stone’s idea of rock n’ roll. Very quickly, Wenner showed he had no real allegiance to the radical politics that accommodated the music, despite the whims of his employees. (He feuded with notorious revolutionary activist Abbie Hoffman, who Rolling Stone had accused of being a fraud.) But he did care about saying what was important. Hagan argues that the way Wenner protected John Lennon’s image following the Beatle’s tragic death calcified the musical canon where the Beatles were permanently on top, as did his heavy involvement with creating the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The counterculture may have rolled its eyes, as did the staffers, but they couldn’t afford the cars displayed in the magazine’s increasingly ritzy advertisements.

  Rolling Stone’s first epochal shift came at the end of the ’70s, when disco and punk weren’t selling magazines, and the magazine made a pointed effort to validate the ongoing work of the previous decade’s stars, as a way to insist on the value of its own critical judgment. Who else but Jann Wenner would’ve written, at the time, that Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming was possibly his greatest record? A juicy item comes when Hagan reports U2 topped the year-end albums list in 2014 with the anemic Songs of Innocence because of Bono’s friendship with Wenner, and Wenner’s need to wield Rolling Stone as a cudgel against those who would poke fun at his friends. “My dictate,” he says. “By fiat, buddy. That’s that.”

  Rolling Stone was rock music’s first truly important publication. It wouldn’t be the last: Spin, which pops up toward the end, leapfrogged to a place of influence by featuring the alternative artists that Rolling Stone wouldn’t (U2, L7, Pixies); Pitchfork, which isn’t mentioned, rose to power by establishing a firm online presence when many publications thought the internet was a fad, and by publishing honest, critical reviews that a new generation of young readers could trust over the hagiography found in Rolling Stone. (Wenner’s tone deaf concept of the internet is covered in the final section, which mostly discusses how Rolling Stone’s influence began to wane.) The compromise was simple: To stick with the times, Rolling Stone constantly abandoned its original tenets. It pursued corporate advertising; it stuck lame artists on the cover; it wholly protected the stars because of the access they gave, rather than puncturing holes in their image the way the earlier, more rambunctious issues might have.

  Wenner’s reticence over the biography relates to the tonnage of testimony from former friends and co-workers explaining what a jerk he could be. He shared gossip that wasn’t his to share; he underpaid people because he knew he could; he sold out artists by betting they’d eventually forgive him, because of his position. A telling story comes when we learn a crew of former Rolling Stone staffers decide not to invite Wenner to a forty-year reunion. The trade off is explicitly delineated. Wenner may have interviewed heads of state, befriended rock stars, flown in private jets, become a media mogul, and lived as enjoyable a life as could be found under late capitalism. But he inspires bromides from people who once loved him, and displays little capacity for grasping the depths of why anyone would have an issue with a formerly insurgent institution that exploited the counterculture.

  I finished the book impressed by Wenner’s accomplishments and force of will, but wary of how he made an active choice to hollow out his humanity, flipping on confidantes once they were no longer of use and always picking the route that would give him the most money. (An exception is when a proposed sale to Hearst in the early 21st century would’ve made him a billionaire; he turns it down because he would’ve had to give up control of Rolling Stone.) This kind of hunger passes down through generations: Toward the end, Wenner’s son Gus is introduced to us as a mini-Jann, one who has absorbed his father’s capacity for ambition from a young age. His first act, after being installed as the head of Rolling Stone’s website at the tender age of 25, is to fire a dozen staffers. “I believe so much in the cause,” Gus says when asked if firing experienced staffers is weird. “And there’s so much on the line between what the brand represents, myself, and my family. The well-being of my family.”

  A cynical read of Rolling Stone says this is its true goal, as a vehicle for the Wenner genius. But 2017 is different from 1967, and the younger Wenner’s confidence only counts for so much. The book’s story was still being written up until the present; just a month ago, Rolling Stone put itself up for sale, with the expectation that the business will drastically change. (Like everyone else, they will be pivoting to video.) It is easy to see Wenner as a depleted giant, a man who bet all he had on richness and relevance and may retire without either. Yet Hagan’s conclusion is gentle. If it takes an asshole to change the world, then it takes an asshole. For better or worse, we can definitively say the history of modern music and music journalism would be different without Wenner.

  “When you held it in your hands, you held Jann Wenner’s love letter to the culture, to himself,” Hagan writes. “Every other week for fifty years. And now it was all but buried, part of the vast American archive. But nobody couldn’t say Jann Wenner hadn’t given himself to it completely. He was an incorrigible egotist, but he had made up for it with a life of impact. He had mattered. He broke things; he made things. A nude John Lennon curled around Yoko Ono—nobody would ever forget. An entire American cosmology of superstars and superstar journalists, stories, and myths, all fired in the kiln of his appetites and ambition. Millions had dreamed on his pages.” I did, and perhaps you did, too.
  Jeremy Gordon

  jgordon@spin.com

  Tags: rolling stone

• The Current
  https://www.thecurrent.org/feature/2017/12/12/sticky-fingers-joe-hagan
  Word count: 1231

  Rock and Roll Book Club: 'Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine'

  by Jay Gabler
  December 13, 2017
  rock and roll book club
  'Sticky Fingers' by Joe Hagan.
  'Sticky Fingers' by Joe Hagan. (Jay Gabler/MPR)

  "Jann Wenner did what Jann Wenner, at his very best, was known to do," writes Joe Hagan. "He took a gamble on a writer."

  Wenner, the co-founder of Rolling Stone, asked Hagan to be his biographer. He granted the author "endless hours of interview time," writes Hagan in an afterword to the resulting volume, Sticky Fingers. Wenner also made 500 boxes of documents and recordings available to Hagan. Also, at Hagan's insistence, Wenner agreed to allow the book to be independent, not "authorized": Wenner would not be able to review or approve the manuscript before publication.

  When Wenner saw a pre-publication galley, he hit the roof. He stopped speaking to Hagan, issued a statement calling the book "deeply flawed and tawdry," and refused to help promote the book. Hagan stood by his work, and reviewers are standing by him: Sticky Fingers holds a positive rating on Book Marks (a Rotten Tomatoes for books), with raves outnumbering positive or mixed reviews, and not a single pan.

  "He's used to having control," Hagan told the New York Times, "and that's a difficult thing."

  The book certainly makes for a fascinating read, and inescapably a juicy one. Wenner has built his success on being, as he's often described by his own staff, a "starf---er": a man who maintains relationships with the biggest names in the music world and beyond.

  What's remarkable is that he's managed, for so long, to keep those relationships in balance. He'll pull a string to make a friend happy (one of the book's most recent revelations is that Wenner personally insisted that his magazine designate U2's tepidly received 2014 release Songs of Innocence as best album of the year), but then he'll allow something that will infuriate the same friend.

  Joni Mitchell, for example, boycotted Rolling Stone for much of the '70s after the magazine ran a gossipy diagram of her lovers. She eventually came back to the magazine, though — and so did John Lennon, who was irate when Wenner published their lengthy 1970 interview in book form. Hagan argues that it was the posthumous Lennon cover — Annie Liebovitz's iconic photograph of the nude Beatle wrapped around Yoko Ono — that cemented Rolling Stone’s status as the paramount media institution of rock and roll.

  The other rock star who looms largest in Hagan's account is Mick Jagger. A longtime, if inconsistent, member of Wenner's inner circle, Jagger emerges as a paramount example of Wenner's editorial compromises. The magazine's name was inspired by Bob Dylan's song "Like a Rolling Stone," but the Rolling Stones took umbrage and threatened legal action.

  The fledgling magazine both feared a lawsuit and coveted the cooperation of stars like the Stones, and Jagger saw an opportunity greater than a one-time cash payout.

  Everything was falling into place: Jagger had already been toying with the idea of starting a magazine and now here was Jann Wenner, who already had a successful one named Rolling Stone, and was thereby poised under Jagger's thumb.

  Jagger soon appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone, and helped bankroll a British version that eventually proved to be an "expensive boondoggle."

  Musicians weren't the only parties exerting influence on Rolling Stone: the magazine also took money from record labels for advertising and investments. When Greil Marcus published his now-legendary takedown of Bob Dylan's Self Portrait ("What is this s--t?"), writes Hagan, "Wenner was so furious he had a more positive review drawn up and printed in a subsequent issue. Didn't Marcus understand that Clive Davis of Columbia had just forked over thirty grand to save Rolling Stone from dissolution?"

  And yet, Rolling Stone has published some of the most important journalism of its era. It legitimized pop music criticism, it pioneered the "new journalism" through writing by Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, and it has continued to publish hard-hitting reportage — although in a seriously, perhaps critically, crippled manner since its refuted 2014 story "A Rape on Campus."

  Hagan is articulate in describing the larger significance of Rolling Stone. In a manner it could not have done as a more academic enterprise, he argues, Rolling Stone codified the 1960s as a signal moment in cultural history. In maintaining itself as the keeper of the flame with what Hagan calls "radical conventionality," Rolling Stone (and ancillary projects, like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) institutionalized the idea of the rock era as a cultural watershed, with the Lennons and Jaggers and Dylans as its gods. That idea, needless to say, was both gratifying and remunerative for both Wenner and the stars he put on his cover.

  In Hagan's accounting, that seminal Lennon cover was a peak moment for Rolling Stone. Each succeeding decade saw the magazine slipping farther away from the pulse of pop music, although the profits and prestige continued to roll in as the publication became a must for everyone from movie stars to potential presidents. A photo of Wenner and his writers — including Thompson — interviewing then-presidential-candidate Bill Clinton in Little Rock now looks significant. A sax-playing baby boomer was headed to the White House, and the counterculture had simply become the culture.

  What of Wenner's personal life? What does he have to be so mad about? Although there's certainly plenty of unflattering material, it's nothing particularly shocking. Wenner came out as gay in 1995 ("when the vogue for coming out was in," notes Hagan), and it had long been an open secret that his marriage was, well, sort of open. The constant flow of drugs, the betrayal of friends, the harassment of his staff...none of it really surprises you, does it?

  His wife, Jane Wenner, is perhaps the book's most fascinating character. Serving Wenner and Rolling Stone in capacities ranging from financial to editorial to emotional, she herself may be the most important revelation of this book about her husband. Writing in Bookforum, rock critic Jessica Hopper asks, "When do we get a Jane Wenner book? When will we see the lives of rock's founding women without having them lensed through the lives of the men around them?"

  The sum of Hopper's review is praise for Hagan's book — in large part because Hagan makes room for the voices of Jane and the many other people Wenner screwed over. Hopper calls Sticky Fingers "an epitaph for an industry rather than a shrine to a man who shaped it."

  In other words, though Hagan celebrates his subject's professional glory days, he doesn't leave the reader longing to return to them. Maybe that's what made Jann Wenner so mad.
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  https://www.thecurrent.org/feature/2017/12/12/sticky-fingers-joe-hagan

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/25/sticky-fingers-by-joe-hagan-review-rolling-stone-magazine
  Word count: 1883

  Sticky Fingers by Joe Hagan review – Rolling Stone’s testicular journalism
  An excellent biography of Jann Wenner 50 years after he founded the pop culture magazine makes evident the distance between then and now

  Emily Witt

  Sat 25 Nov 2017 04.00 EST
  Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 10.00 EST
  In the 1960s business … Jann Wenner in 1970.
  Uniquely positioned to succeed … Jann Wenner in 1970. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

  Rolling Stone began in November 1967, with a photo of John Lennon on the first page and a subscription offer that included a roach clip. In his biography of its founder, Jann Wenner, Joe Hagan writes that the first issue “arrived on newsstands like a handshake”. Fifty years later, as the magazine industry continues to shrink, this excellent biography arrives like a eulogy – not for Wenner, who is 71 and still at it – but for the days when magazine journalism was adventurous and irreverent, muscular and confident rather than plagued by evidence of its own doom.
  Jann Wenner: ‘Hunter S Thompson let his talent slip’
  Read more

  It had been teenage girls who made the Beatles and the Rolling Stones famous in the US, and until 1966, Tiger Beat and 16 magazine were the primary purveyors of rock fandom. Rolling Stone packaged and marketed a different worldview: that rock music was an art form, a cultural movement, and the artistic expression of a generation’s experimentation with sex and drugs, worthy of analysis from college-educated critics such as Greil Marcus and Jon Landau. In its early years, the new magazine’s audience was young, white, male and intellectually pretentious. Hagan quotes Bruce Springsteen, who recalls buying the first issue from a newsstand in Freehold, New Jersey: “They were the only validating pieces of writing that somebody else out there was thinking about rock music the way you were.” Still, it was Gloria Stavers, the 41-year-old editor of 16 magazine, which had 4 million subscribers in 1968, who advised Wenner to photograph rock stars with the top button of their trousers undone, and when she encouraged her readers to subscribe the quarters rolled in.

  When he launched the magazine, Wenner was a 21-year-old striver, a dropout from the University of California, Berkeley. He had grown up the firstborn child of Ed and Sim Wenner, who ran a successful baby formula company until Sim quit to write a proto version of The Feminine Mystique called Back Away from the Stove. By the time Wenner started Rolling Stone, his parents were divorced and his mother was becoming a middle-aged avatar of the counterculture, variously hanging out in a sex commune, swanning around Hawaii in a muu-muu and exploring what she called her “homosexual gene”.
  Cover star … Prince in 2016. Photograph: Alamy
  Cover star … Prince in 2016. Photograph: Alamy

  Wenner, as a young person, was embarrassed by all this, not least because of his own sexual interest in men, which he took pains to disguise. He married a woman, Jane Schindelheim, whose family backed the magazine, but left her in 1995 for Matt Nye, the man who would become his second spouse. Hagan documents the ups and downs of Wenner’s marriages and sex life. These are the details that the book’s subject has dismissed as “tawdry” but that in fact serve as compelling documentation of the sexual politics of the era.

  As a child, Wenner got kicked out of schools but was the kind of bossy kid who took over neighbourhood clubs and edited the yearbook. At a Los Angeles boarding school called Chadwick he honed a talent for cultivating friendships with the children of the rich and famous. The summer before starting Rolling Stone, Wenner was hired to do publicity for the Monterey pop festival, a rock concert packaged by the record companies for the consumption of wayward youth. It was as an intermediary between the out-of-touch music executives and the acid heads that Wenner saw an opportunity.

  In a country where subcultures are either commodified or persecuted, a person who could rally the musicians, artists and writers, and market them as product in an authentic way was uniquely positioned to succeed. As Hagan writes: “If Jann Wenner had only one great idea, it was an idea with staying power: that the 1960s – ‘the Sixties’ – was a mythic time that would be endlessly glorified and fetishised by his generation in records and books, TV shows and films, T-shirts and posters, for years to come, for ever and ever, amen. The 1960s, with all its passion and idealism, was, at its sacred core, a business.”

  Hagan shows little nostalgia for the days when an editor paid his writers with an envelope of cocaine

  Wenner saw all that, but he also had a way with writers and photographers, a talent for taking a risk on the risky and giving them the freedom, money and drugs they needed to work. The book’s mini-biographies of Rolling Stone’s famous contributors – Hunter S Thompson and Annie Leibovitz in particular – are as interesting as the main event. They tell the story of a dysfunctional office family, where staffers had sex with each other and with their subjects and bought drugs from dealers who set up shop in a dark room nicknamed “the Capri Lounge”. Hagan shows little nostalgia for the days when an editor paid his writers with an envelope of cocaine, and makes clear the many downsides – one corner of the newsroom was referred to as “Macho Village”. This is the magazine, after all, that in 1972 wrote off Joni Mitchell as “Old Lady of the Year”, and that called Janis Joplin both “the Judy Garland of rock”, and “an imperious whore”. Hagan refers to it as a “white magazine, though it fetishised African Americans”, and one of Wenner’s early collaborators, Ralph Gleason, eventually chastised him for ignoring black artists.

  As Hagan describes it, Rolling Stone had started to follow a “business formula” as early as 1978, around the time it put John Denver on the cover. By then the magazine had left San Francisco. Thompson, its most original voice, was struggling with a cocaine-induced writer’s block, and Leibovitz had gone freelance. Wenner had become more interested in hanging out with the rich and famous than discovering the cutting edges of youth culture. The magazine started to read more like New Journalism-inflected branded content for already successful artists with albums or movies that needed promotion, with the occasional hard-hitting investigative story.
  Annie Leibovitz’s famous Rolling Stone cover from 22 January 1981 shows John Lennon and Yoko Ono, taken hours before Lennon died.
  Annie Leibovitz’s famous Rolling Stone cover from 22 January 1981 shows John Lennon and Yoko Ono, hours before Lennon died. Photograph: AP

  Wenner’s own take of the late 1970s was: “It was a time of rejection of meaning, during which it is better to be somewhat foolish and famous and fun – rich, if you will – than mope around, bemused or blameful, about the accustomed quietude.” It was this attitude, perhaps, that contributed to Wenner’s failure to pay early attention to punk rock, dance music, hip-hop, MTV and the internet. Which isn’t to say that Rolling Stone did not stay relevant to subsequent generations – teens kept reading it, or at least subsequent generations who still listened to the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and the Beatles kept reading it, for the same reasons you can still buy Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test at the airport bookshop. Wenner continued to nurture the careers of talented magazine writers such as Vanessa Grigoriadis, Michael Hastings and Matt Taibbi. During the Iraq war, and into the financial crisis, Rolling Stone did still feel like one of the only magazines that was making the right accusations and asking the right questions of the people in power.

  But in our roiling autumn of mass shootings, magazine layoffs, investigations into sexual harassment and proposed tax cuts for the wealthiest, a certain fun and rebellious kind of writing, the kind of writing characterised not just by Thompson but a later Rolling Stone protege such as Taibbi, has gone stale. Where a reader like me tolerated a testicular worldview as part of the greater cause of calling out cultural hypocrisy, it only took one former VICE editor to become a white supremacist for a sinister pall to fall over the whole genre. The current national love affair with Joan Didion would indicate some kind of reassessment is afoot, a growing preference for a less showy way to challenge institutional power, and even Taibbi has gone rueful on Facebook.
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  Hagan seems bitter about where greed, patriarchy and celebrity adulation have landed the US. He connects Wenner and Donald Trump: two men born in 1946, two high-functioning narcissists. Fifty years after Rolling Stone first landed on newsstands, Wenner announced this autumn that his family’s controlling stake in the company was up for sale. Rolling Stone may soon be just another defunct symbol of the history it celebrated. If the title dies it will leave a country that is just as violent, just as divided, and significantly more unequal – with an over-65 population that is very much wealthier than those under 35 – than the one in which it first appeared. Hagan’s book shows the balance of idealism and greed in this context of generational inequality. It reads almost as a warning to baby boomers, where Rolling Stone’s decline is one of many signs that the old tricks no longer satisfy the young any more. Put the teenage girls back in charge again; they were right about the music all along.

  • Sticky Fingers is published by Canongate. To order a copy for £21.25 (RRP £25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/23/books/review-sticky-fingers-jann-wenner-rolling-stone-joe-hagan.html
  Word count: 1337

  ‘Sticky Fingers’ Captures Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner and the Culture He Helped Create

  By Dwight Garner
  Oct. 23, 2017
  Image
  CreditSonny Figueroa/The New York Times

  After a career spent editing zeitgeist-tilting writers like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, tapping the journalist Joe Hagan to write his biography “was essentially Jann Wenner’s last great assignment,” Hagan observes in an afterword to “Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine,” and “there was no way in hell I was going to screw it up.”

  Screw it up Hagan did, according to Wenner, who has called the final product “deeply flawed and tawdry.” The Rolling Stone publisher had apparently hoped for a biography that was the equivalent of a marble bust to position in the foyer of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland (another Wenner production) — sanitized, full of kumbaya generational feeling and as uplifting as the chorus of a power ballad.

  Whether Wenner can see it or not, his bet has paid off: Hagan has delivered a supple, confident, dispassionately reported and deeply well-written biography. It’s a big book, one that no one will wish longer, but its chapters move past like a crunching collection of singles and not a thumb-sucking double album. It’s a joy to read and feels built to last.

  Hagan is among those relatively rare biographers who keeps macro and micro in yin-yang balance. He’s in command of the big picture. The critic and intellectual in him understands why a mere rock magazine editor — Wenner founded Rolling Stone in San Francisco in 1967 — matters to the history of the 20th century.

  Here was the egotistical fanboy who had “legitimized and mainstreamed” the counterculture in the 1960s and early ’70s. You might buy a copy of Rolling Stone simply to ogle a superstar or to find out if Jerry Garcia was still dating Mountain Girl. But as the magazine began to filter out across America, it let a lot of lonely people discover that there were other people like them and other ways to live.

  Over the ensuing decades, Hagan writes, Wenner assembled “an entire American cosmology of superstars and superstar journalists, stories, and myths, all fired in the kiln of his appetites and ambition. Millions had dreamed on his pages. Bruce Springsteen said Rolling Stone changed his life. Patti Smith found liberation in Rolling Stone.”

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  “Sticky Fingers” is about promises and promises betrayed, and about how Wenner’s life — his increasing obsession with fame and a plutocratic lifestyle — reflected both.
  Image
  Jann and Jane Wenner, in 1970.CreditRobert Altman

  The visions the rock culture had once delivered “had morphed into the Me Decade,” Hagan writes, “and the Me Decade had turned into Me Decades, and finally the falcon could no longer hear the falconer, not even in the pages of Rolling Stone.”

  Wenner and our current president are the same age, and Hagan draws a straight line between them. “The solar eclipse of Donald Trump signaled the complete triumph of celebrity culture over every aspect of American life,” Hagan writes, and Wenner helped lead us to the state we are in.
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  Come for the essayist in Hagan, stay for the eye-popping details and artful gossip. Wenner has complained about how much of that gossip is focused on his changeful sexual appetites. Wenner has slept for much of his life with men and women and thus, to paraphrase Woody Allen on the upside of bisexuality, has rarely lacked a date for Saturday night.

  Hagan could easily have named-dropped his way through this book, yet he doesn’t drop names so much as pick them up and coolly appraise them in a line or two. Here’s Joni Mitchell, “plucking a dulcimer and ululating.” Or the record executive Ahmet Ertegun, “with the half-lidded ease of a beat poet.” Or Thompson, who “mumble-grumbled like a character actor from a Bogart movie.” Or Keith Richards, “looking as if his face were roasted for a Thanksgiving dinner.”

  Richards has become the Gore Vidal of rock, the elder statesman always armed with an acid quote. He says about Wenner and Mick Jagger (this book floats the possibility that the two slept together): “They’re both very guarded creatures. You wonder if there’s anything worth guarding.”

  Wenner founded Rolling Stone with money borrowed from the family of his soon-to-be wife, Jane Schindelheim, after dropping out of Berkeley. A famous early cover featured a naked John Lennon and Yoko Ono. “Print a famous foreskin,” Wenner wrote in the next issue, “and the world will beat a path to your door.”

  The staffers at Rolling Stone tended to sleep together, and often enough with Wenner, according to Hagan’s account. Wenner developed an outsize cocaine habit; writers and staffers were sometimes paid bonuses with the drug. When the staff stayed en masse in a hotel, the management couldn’t figure out, the next day, why all the mirrors were off the wall and on their backs.
  Image
  Joe HaganCreditSamantha Hunt

  As rock music faded in importance, Rolling Stone got a lift from Wolfe and Thompson and became, in many ways, the beating heart of New Journalism. Annie Leibovitz made the magazine’s images as vital as its writing.

  After Wenner himself, Leibovitz is the most fully realized character in this biography. She comes across as an endearing wild child, sleeping with some of her subjects, abandoning rental cars in haste at airports and becoming, Hagan writes, a “full-blown drug addict whose body was, more than once, unceremoniously dumped in front of a hospital by her dealer.”

  In the decades that followed the ’70s, Rolling Stone made money but largely ceased to matter. Hagan charts the way that Wenner, in some of his employees’ estimation, sold out to record companies, and the way he allowed his favorite artists to control what was written about them.

  Wenner had a heart attack and broke a hip in June. He has put his controlling share of Rolling Stone up for sale. The magazine itself had grown perilously thin, even before it was rocked by a discredited story about a rape at a University of Virginia fraternity.

  Wenner comes off in “Sticky Fingers” as a narcissist, a bully, a seducer and a betrayer, and a troubled soul. Feuds with countless people — Lennon, Paul Simon, Greil Marcus, the promoter Bill Graham — are recounted. He also led a big life that was packed with incident and frequently even joy. “The alchemy of his appetites,” Hagan writes, is what made him a great editor in chief.

  This book lays those appetites bare. In scorning Hagan’s work, Wenner’s editorial antennae have failed him. He had the nerve to select a writer and not a hagiographer, and the decision, at the end of his long career, looks good on him. At times this book will help future generations remember Wenner the way he’d like to be remembered. He told his son Theo, Hagan writes, “Put Hunter’s name on my tombstone, not Brad Pitt’s.”

  Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner.

  STICKY FINGERS
  The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine
  By Joe Hagan
  Illustrated. 547 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $29.95.
  A version of this article appears in print on October 23, 2017, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Power Ballad About A Fanboy. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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