There was a moment during the Woodstock Music Festival of ’69, when its founder, the 24-year-old Michael Lang, was confronted with a generation-defining decision. People had started to climb the fences surrounding the stage and audience parameters in an attempt to gain entry. Lang had to make a call. Rather than tightening a hold on admittance, he decided in the moment to make Woodstock the free festival it was ultimately meant to be. Nearly half a million people was the ultimate headcount. Lang’s decision was an example of the greater good of enlightened ideas surpassing monetary interest and potential gain, something the hippie counterculture of the 1960s was all about. It is a spiritual-success story in an instance.
Then there is Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone, the publication created in 1967 that gave voice to the youth culture, the hippies, and leant them a stake in the Real World. The magazine invented a pre-internet meeting place where rock ‘n’ roll was given the reverence that it deserved, in which once could connect with likeminded music-mad people. Last month Jann published his memoir Like a Rolling Stone, a weighty tome surpassing five hundred pages. It came somewhat on the heels of the well-received and somewhat character-damning Sticky Fingers by Joe Hagan, Wenner’s biographer who he eventually parted ways with mid-project. Like a Rolling Stone is Wenner by Wenner, period.
One of the most immediately identifiable characteristics in his book is his huge ego. In many ways it’s deserved. He was present through the second half of the twentieth century, lived with eyes wide open through the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and from a privileged seat and ideal point-of-view. But solely and uniquely, he saw the need to give voice to this collective perspective, that it was worth a try to build a seat of power, and to garner recognition for it from the straight world at large. Rebellion against The Establishment is fantastic, and valid, and provides ample opportunity for creating a new world order—but what better way to rebel than by meeting the enemy on his own ground and forcing him to recognize a worthy adversary.
It was theoretically easy for mainstream media and culture in the 1960s to laugh at the world of the Young, to brush the hippies aside in one fell swoop, to see only temporality and a glaring expiration date—a passing fad, a trend bound to lose momentum sooner or later. But stick a circulated magazine in front of it, a publication by the hippies and for the hippies, with intellectual, well-informed writers and creatives at the helm, and with like-minded subscribers increasing by the day, suddenly there is power, might. Jann Wenner—with help from others—did this and for it he deserves a standing O.
It is utterly fascinating to read about Wenner’s interactions, and in certain instances full-blown friendships, with some of contemporary history’s best-known, and most-respected, nonfiction writers like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, both of whom wrote for Rolling Stone. Jann didn’t only befriend these artists, but encouraged them, believed in their talents enough to continually egg them on and provide fertile and reliable ground for them. Of course, it was not only his relationships with major writers like these (and photographers like Annie Liebowitz) that Wenner covers in his memoir, but his friendships with rock ‘n’ rollers and politicians too. Mick Jagger, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Boz Scaggs (whose album Wenner produced), the Kennedys, and the Clintons are just some of the heavies to make appearances.
Jann’s own personal journey and sexuality is a complex and interesting one too, and to his credit Wenner is extremely revealing and candid here. Where he could have used the benefit of hindsight to coat his memories in a sheen of knowing and control, he forfeits that and lays bare the uncomfortable foothold of uncertainty in the moment.
Throughout the memoir Wenner’s deep love for the 1960s and all that it wrought on the counterculture, of human spirit and advancement, is poignantly clear. He has an ardent love for rock ‘n’ roll, for the real-thing—the music that thrived in the 1960s and ’70s and ’80s—and he believes in the story of the 1960s. He helped to create it, and most assuredly played a crucial role in documenting it. Through the telling of his life story, Jann Wenner does seem to be aware of his role in influencing the M.O. and ideology of the youth culture of the ’60s and ’70s, and straight on through to today. And he is ultimately responsible, arguably, for providing the 1960s’ counterculture world of rock ‘n’ roll with an identity that was something recognized by the mainstream universe.
But Jann Wenner is not solely a creative co-founder, editor, and writer. He is a businessman too, and Rolling Stone needed him to be to succeed in any kind of a way past a couple of weeks in existence. He was not afraid to cut certain people off and remove them from his life, he was not afraid to sever friendships when his ideology was at stake, he was never frightened to take a stand on an issue or set of beliefs—something that came up quite often during the first couple of decades that Rolling Stone was publishing.
He admits in his memoir that he wanted his magazine to take a strong stance on what was cool, what was hip, and what was accepted and tolerated in the world of popular music. And he succeeded, further than he even initially intended to, when considering how his somewhat controversial Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame still assumes a grand footprint in the collective memory in which popular music is to be remembered, recognized, and lauded. In no other realm it seems than that of the late 1960s, would this even become an issue to be discussed, another testament to the era’s authentic heart of gold. It is complicated however because, like the Hall of Fame itself, Rolling Stone as an enterprise brought hippie-era anti-materialism into question, leading it toward a world of commerce and price tags, the material world, the “real” world to some. Could the hippie creed survive there? Wenner tested this out.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
