Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
Jann Wenner discussing his new memoir at the 92nd Street Y on September 13, 2022, in New York
Let’s take a post-election break from politics and take a look, instead, at Jann Wenner’s recent memoir, Like a Rolling Stone. First, allow me to stake my claim as the only person in history to compare its author to the famous mid-century New York intellectual Lionel Trilling. How is such a comparison possible, you ask? It works in only one category: name-dropping. By page four of the first essay in Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination—likely the best-selling collection of literary criticism ever published—Trilling found reason, as Stefan Collini has noted, to mention Diderot, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Shaw, Rousseau, Blake, Wordsworth, Burke, Coleridge, Arnold and Schiller, Mill, Shelley, Schlegel, Sand, Ibsen, Tieck, and Stendhal, to be followed shortly thereafter by Dostoyevsky, Poe, Baudelaire, Nerval, Rimbaud, Proust, Eliot, Kafka, Mann, and Joyce.
True, he wasn’t doing blow or having orgies in hot tubs with them, but still, as a pure power play, it may outdo Wenner. You be the judge. I made a couple of lists as I read his book.
List 1: People who called to advise or console Wenner when the news of his divorce (and sexual preference) made the news
Mick Jagger
David Geffen
John Kennedy Jr.
Calvin Klein
Edgar Bronfman
Robbie Robertson
Diane von Furstenberg
Michael Douglas
Jay Leno
Barry Diller
Bette Midler
Camilla and Earl McGrath
David Bowie and Iman
List 2: People who spoke or played at Wenner’s 60th birthday party
Spoke:
John Kerry
Al Gore
Ahmet Ertegun
Robin Williams
Played:
Paul Shaffer
John Mayer
Robbie Robertson
John Mellencamp
Peter Wolf
Bette Midler
Darlene Love
Spoke and played (and even wrote Wenner a special song):
Bruce Springsteen
(Wenner would also be eligible for the Nobel Prize for chutzpah, were such an award to be founded, for mocking Bono for his name-dropping.)
I should mention up front that for two years, I covered politics for Rolling Stone—a position that had opened when Bill Greider went on book leave. I had little direct contact with Wenner except, working through two layers of editors, he sometimes demanded that I change my reporting to fit his political priorities, especially on gun control. I have experienced some political interference almost everywhere I have worked, but nothing ever came close to Wenner’s heavy-handedness. I left the magazine when Greider returned to claim his spot back (though he, too, left not long afterward, also for The Nation, where Bill ended his career).
I should also say that I grew up reading Rolling Stone from the time I was 12 and dreamed of working there for most of my (extended) adolescence. My first issue was the infamous David Cassidy “Naked Lunchbox” issue, which I took to camp with me, and I can still recall the excitement of the world it opened up in my imagination. While the magazine was nowhere near as politically influential as Wenner would have his readers believe, it was really important as an expression of a sensibility, an embrace of rock music’s cultural significance. Wenner’s willingness to fund and publish some of the best investigative journalism published anywhere, ever, also made it a must read.
A great deal of his book takes place on various luxury island retreats, Montauk mansions, hot tubs belonging to the rich and famous, and private jets, with Wenner customarily checked out on some Hunter S. Thompsonish combination of booze, coke and/or acid. Even so, the world is a much better place for his having founded Rolling Stone. I’ve often noticed that famous magazine editors act capriciously—much like Stalin did—because they want people to think they are geniuses and appear to believe that if nobody can find a rhyme or reason to their decisions, their myth will remain protected. Wenner really was a genius magazine editor, but like many of them, he was also a deeply insecure person who needed to take credit for everyone and everything around him—as he does in this book.
Wenner wrote this book because he was angry about the results of the authorized biography, by Joe Hagan, that he had previously engineered. I don’t blame him being pissed off that Hagan thought his sex life to be so central to his story. But I also have no doubt that Hagan’s version is more reliable. Here’s one story that I happened to see firsthand and says something about both the man and memoir:
In a story that appears like many in his book, entirely without context, Wenner brags: “I took my ten year old son, Theo, G.E. Smith, and George Stephanopoulos to watch the band rehearse the full show for the first time on the Voodoo Lounge stage [in July, 1994] to an empty stadium, sitting with the Stones’ wives and their kids on blankets around the pitcher’s mound. The all-time private show.”
Here’s the thing. I was there, too. Wenner was all over Stephanopoulos, then (as a top aide to President Clinton) a big political celebrity, to go to the show with him. I was then the Washington correspondent for Mother Jones, but I had been waiting for what felt like forever to find out if I was going to get the Rolling Stone gig. I also really (really) wanted to see the Stones rehearse. George didn’t care about the Stones, but he agreed to tell Jann that he could only go if I could come along. After much back-and-forth, Jann said he had “spoken to Mick” and gotten permission for me to come too.
So, we get to RFK Stadium and immediately, Jann ditches us. G.E. Smith and George and I sit in the stands while the really cool people sit on the field. There were at most 250 people in the 54,000-person stadium, and there was still a VIP section. (I recall seeing Jann, from afar, sitting with Dan Aykroyd.) I sat next to Smith, who was genuinely nice and said interesting things about Keith and Ronnie Wood’s guitar playing (but they were not interesting enough, in retrospect, to make up for the fact that he has now led the band repeatedly for recent Republican conventions, even under Trump). Another thing: The show sucked. Seeing a band play in an empty stadium does not work. You are just as far away as ever but the sound is terrible because of the constant echo that comes from the distance it travels without anything to soak it up. I don’t understand the physics, but you could actually see the sound travel from the stage to the back of the stadium where it hit the scoreboard and then traveled back to collide with the music that had just left the stage to make a big acoustic mess. Third, George and I had worried about what we were going to do at the likely after-party. He could not afford, politically, to appear at a typical Stones/Wenner gathering, and yet we had to be polite. Plus, it sounded really cool. This problem turned out to be moot. After the show, Wenner showed up just long enough to inform us that he and his friends were flying back to East Hampton on his jet. We were stuck outside the stadium after public transportation had shut down for the night and had to walk through some pretty iffy neighborhoods to get back to Dupont Circle, where we both lived. I made fun of George for getting caught in a mess that David Gergen would surely have known enough to avoid.
(Speaking of private planes, I coined the term “Gulfstream liberal” in The Atlantic to apply to Laurie David in 2004. There is nothing more hypocritical—and likely more infuriating to “real” people—than some rich phony who claims to be an environmentalist but also insists on flying “private,” since it is pretty much the most wasteful use of fossil fuels known to humankind.)
Wenner also paints himself and his magazine as a paragon of journalistic virtue. Again, it was great in many ways, but adhering to the recognized rules of journalism was not among them. Wenner was always demanding that his friends get good reviews, occasionally writing them himself when the hired help proved insufficiently enthusiastic. Wenner pretends not to know this today. For instance, when discussing his firing of movie critic Peter Travers, he refers to him as “Mr. Integrity,” and “one of the important American film critics. I introduced him once to a singer who said, ‘Oh you’re the guy with four names: Peter Travers, Rolling Stone.’” Well, yes, that was because virtually every Travers review contained a “smash-bang rock-you-off-your-seat” sort of quote that fit perfectly in a newspaper advertisement. This was free publicity for the magazine as well as a valentine to potential advertisers. Wenner could have saved some cash by not bothering to publish the reviews at all and just sending them to the studios. I doubt anyone would have noticed the difference.
Also, Wenner slags his mom an awful lot in this book. That’s just fucked up.
But I want to end on a positive note, so this: While I’m sure Wenner does not get his phone calls returned the way he did when he could make or break a career, Bruce Springsteen seems to genuinely like him. He not only generously blurbed the book but also conducted an interview with Wenner at the 92nd Street Y upon its release. Moreover, one of the only two times Bruce ever had to talk to me without it being set up in advance was when he was staying with Wenner in the Hamptons, and they came to a movie screening after-party together.
Upshot: Read this book if you cannot help it—as I could not—for its gossip. But if you want the same story with more context, go with Hagan and skip the dirty parts.
Today’s music is this obvious choice along with this wonderful (and inevitable) cover. Oh, and here’s Bruce doing it, and here’s a video that Bob’s people put out for the song in 2017, just 52 years after its initial release.
