The vitriolic bust-up between Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner and his appointed biographer, Joe Hagan, has already generated headlines, with Wenner denouncing Sticky Fingers as “tawdry” and Hagan, an investigative reporter, replying that a man used to getting his way won’t like a portrait that includes both darkness and light.
A deep ambiguity runs through Hagan’s exhaustively researched (and sometimes exhausting) account of a man who can justly claim to have changed popular culture. Rolling Stone, which Wenner, mentored by the eminent jazz critic Ralph Gleason, founded as a Berkeley dropout in 1967, brought intelligence and visual grace to what was previously a squall of fan mags – establishing a canon of writers that included Greil Marcus, Jerry Hopkins, Nick Tosches, Jon Landau, and, most notoriously, Hunter S Thompson.
Wenner’s magazine surfed the waves of 60s idealism, psychedelia and political counterculture, though unlike the underground press it was no visual freak-out – its restrained black and white format was part of its gravitas. Wenner was a keen advocate of LSD and pot, yet he was also an ambitious social climber, inveigling himself with rock stars and imagining his future as a press baron, a rock’n’roll Citizen Kane.
As the 1960s crashed and burned, Rolling Stone chronicled their demise, analysing the grim carnage of the Altamont festival, winning a National Magazine award for its coverage of the Manson murders, and exposing the police riot at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention and the murder of four students by the National Guard at Kent State University in 1970.
Yet, as Hagan puts it: “Wenner recognised that rock’n’roll and the counterculture were getting a divorce – rock on one side, revolution on the other.” While Wenner chose the former, many of his staff took the opposite view and left. Thereafter, argues Hagan, Wenner “reformed rock’n’roll as a celebrity culture”, and while the musicians were the prime celebrities, Wenner and his wife Jane weren’t far behind.
Their marriage was the source of speculation. Jane, a former receptionist, was a beautiful, waif-like figure – “a Siamese cat of a woman” – yet some observers already knew that Jann preferred men. Hagan writes that the two Wenners formed “a triangle of ambition” with Annie Leibovitz, the gifted, wayward photographer whose intimate portraits would help define Rolling Stone in the 1970s and 80s. The wealthy Wenners kept a “rolling drug salon” that pulled in music biz luminaries, Hollywood stars and the scions of America’s upper classes. By the end of the 1970s Rolling Stone was covering the Princess of Monaco alongside Springsteen and Jagger. The Sex Pistols got a look-in, though Wenner loathed punk, while disco went largely ignored.
Some of the old idealism remained. In the 70s the magazine exposed the nuclear industry’s careless treatment of Karen Silkwood, and championed Democratic presidential nominees George McGovern and Jimmy Carter. Thompson’s gonzo rants, along with Ralph Steadman’s artwork, were celebrated, as was Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. Yet for all its commercial success – the car and cigarette advertising for which Wenner had long pined became a fixture – the magazine dwindled into cultural irrelevance after 1980, its musical credibility usurped by Spin, MTV and latterly, the internet. Increasingly, Wenner’s obsession has been the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which he created with Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, and over which he has presided like a pop pope.
When Wenner came out as gay in 1993, after falling in love with young fashionista Matt Nye (they are now married), there was widespread surprise (“I could have mentored him,” said Elton John), and the need to stay in the closet to be taken seriously in the business world is one strand of a perceptive account that also details the bruised feelings, grudges, feuds and stitch-ups left in Wenner’s wake. “He seems immune to guilt,” remarks Tom Wolfe. A terrific, sometimes comic portrait of a music biz mogul.
• Sticky Fingers by Joe Hagan is published by Canongate (£25). To order a copy for £21.25 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
