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Sticky Fingers. Joe Hagan
Читать онлайн.Название Sticky Fingers
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781782115922
Автор произведения Joe Hagan
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
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 whose “reaction to the famous—and in this case, almost what one could call the ‘spiritually famous’—was as intense as ever.” His presence, Wenner wrote, “caused wave-like spreading of recognition. He is still Mick Jagger.”
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.
•
THERE WAS A NARCOTIC FREEDOM to Rolling Stone as it charted the late 1960s, the primitive newsprint pages opening like a lotus flower, petal by petal, with revelations. The Beatles denounced the Maharishi. Dylan made a bunch of bootlegs in a basement. A blues-rock group called Fleetwood Mac was coming to America. And white people were finally learning how to be black. “They don’t clap as well as a James Brown audience in the ghetto areas,” wrote Ralph Gleason in June 1968, “but they clap a thousand times better than their parents did.”
Wenner delighted in provocative photography celebrating liberated and alternative sexuality (mainly lesbianism) and published whole guides to buying and smoking marijuana, a habit so ubiquitous that a page 3 image of a boy smoking a joint shocked no one. There were poems by Richard Brautigan and Allen Ginsberg; stories on comic artist R. Crumb and pop artist Roy Lichtenstein; interviews with Miles Davis and Tiny Tim; premier LPs by new artists like Joni Mitchell (“A penny-yellow blonde with a vanilla voice”) and Sly Stone (“The most adventurous soul music of 1968”). Rolling Stone recorded every tossed-off “um” and “uh” of Frank Zappa and Jim Morrison (including a long and pretentious poem Wenner reluctantly agreed to publish), every hiccup of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which Jonathan Cott grokked for readers with the sensitivity of the Oxford scholar he had once hoped to be until Rolling Stone took over his life. Reviewing Lennon’s first art show in London, Cott even transcribed the contents of the guest book, which included an insightful critique by the pioneering psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich: “This armoring of the character is the basis of loneliness, helplessness, craving for authority, fear of responsibility, mystic longing, sexual misery, of impotent rebelliousness as well as of resignation of an unnatural and pathological type.”
Even the advertisements were windows into the exotic American underworld of head shops, rock festivals, and free-form radio stations—Middle Eastern hookahs, a book by Carlos Castaneda, a three-day “Aquarian Exposition” in Woodstock, New York—all of it burbling up from the streets to be framed in Wenner’s Oxford borders, made righteous by the Rolling Stone banner. “The moment I saw the logo and the layout, it just had this magnetism,” recalled writer Timothy Crouse, who saw it at a kiosk in Harvard Square before coming to work at Rolling Stone in 1970. “That frame had a magic to it. That frame had a life to it.”
The contrast between Rolling Stone’s straight design and the pottinged content inside was like “a circus,” said David Dalton, who began at Rolling Stone in 1968 after writing for teen magazines in New York. “All the clowns and monkeys could jump around, but it was all contained in these Oxford lines.”
Where else could you read, in a well-prepared newspaper, that a bunch of hippies climbed Mount Tamalpais, north of San Francisco, and had a pretty good time on acid? “No structure,” wrote Mike Goodwin, who became Rolling Stone’s first film critic. “Never was any structure. Stephen said, ‘Let’s make it up to the mountain,’ and The Class made it. Nothing to do but make it. Nothing to say but it’s OK. Smoking dope and dropping acid in the sun. A hundred people singing to a guitar, ‘I Shall Be Released,’ softly. An energy bash at Mt. Tamalpais.”
The newspaper was anchored by the loud sniffs and harrumphs of its bracing record reviews, written by college graduates who chin stroked and sneered as if they were parsing Picasso and not albums by the Steve Miller Band. Langdon Winner, a friend of Greil Marcus’s from Berkeley, ripped the first album by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and Jon Landau reveled in casually ponderous dismissal, proclaiming Aretha Franklin’s “Think” tied with “Chain of Fools” for “worst single” with “virtually no melody.” But the actual opinions were not the most important thing; this was all the fine print of a movement, proof to readers that they were participating in a secret counterpower to the mass media. In Rolling Stone, they could finally hear themselves think aloud: Among Wenner’s best ideas was to print highly opinionated reader letters, kids from Omaha and Miami sounding off with sarcasm and arch humor under the banner of “Correspondence, Love Letters & Advice.”
• Let’s face it: John and Yoko are embarrassing bores.
• Sitting up watching the chick across the street doing some nude exercises and trying to jerk off—but I didn’t come until I read Paul Williams’ review of the new Kinks album.
• I enjoyed your pipe article but was disappointed by your treatment of the bong.
• Many times I have seen your paper kill someone with paper and ink; it is always a very efficient job. And it is always justifiable homicide.
• You piss me off.
The readers were people who knew every Dylan lyric, could give chapter and verse on every Stones controversy, needed things from the Beatles to get to the next day, had feelings as powerful as Landau or Greil Marcus, if not more powerful, and goddamn if they were going to stand by while Rolling Stone trashed John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Jann Wenner had a tiger by the tail.
Even the problems could seem proof of the righteousness of Rolling Stone. When Columbia Records field-tested the sales power of Rolling Stone in record stores, it noted “consumer complaints with reference to their ‘teeny-boppers’ picking up the newspaper and being exposed to ‘hard’ language.” The teenyboppers didn’t mind. Indeed, they subscribed and got their free roach clip or free copy of the Grateful Dead’s Anthem of the Sun (part of a deal Wenner struck with Warner Bros.) while their parents wrote in to demand, like Mrs. Marsha Ann Booth of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, that they “do not, and I mean do not, send Rolling Stone to my daughter . . . Keep it under ground and bury it. Never and I mean never send that thing to this address again. Trash! Trash! Trash!”—which Wenner published in full.
Inside the warehouse,