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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
To placate Gleason, Wenner agreed to hire a new editor to run the newspaper—to “readjust” their relationship, said Wenner—while Wenner focused on expanding the business and procuring the big interviews. Gleason suggested a writer and editor he had met at San Francisco State named John Burks, a tall and prematurely crusty reporter who was now working for Newsweek. Burks told Gleason he thought Rolling Stone, while full of potential, “sucked,” which Gleason relayed to Wenner with a certain relish. “I’m Jann Wenner from Rolling Stone,” Wenner said when he called Burks, “and I understand you think our magazine sucks.” (He would hire critic Greil Marcus in the summer of 1969 with the same kind of come-on: “Hi, Greil? If you think the record review section is so terrible, why don’t you edit it?”)
Wenner quickly offered Burks a job as managing editor and asked when he could start, all before Burks had a chance to respond. “And I think my first words were ‘What do you pay?’ ” said Burks. When he arrived at the Garrett Press offices, he saw the sunlight pouring through the large industrial windows and said to himself, “This beats the shit out of any underground paper I’ve ever seen.” Burks hovered a foot higher than Wenner and had more interest in jazz than rock (he would be responsible for putting Miles Davis, Captain Beefheart, and Sun Ra on the cover of Rolling Stone), but he had a sturdy sense of newspapering protocol and a steady stream of story memos that he produced to the chug, chug, chug of the presses. “The whole place was rocking,” said Burks. “It’s not that you’re hearing it; you’re feeling it under your feet and in your seat. Can you beat this? I thought that was just wonderful.”
Satisfied that Gleason was off his back, Jann Wenner flew to London to forge the deal with Mick Jagger.
•
“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.”
In August of 1968, the Who had come to San Francisco to play the Fillmore, and afterward Wenner invited Townshend back to his apartment for an interview, which started at 2:00 a.m. and lasted until dawn. “There were no barriers,” said Wenner. “There were no PR people, there were no security, there were no managers.”
Townshend was trying to reposition the Who in the post-Monterey rock scene, because the mod incarnation of the band had been going out of vogue. He used Wenner as a kind of therapist and adviser—all on the record. “It was a tricky time for me, and I was surprised that Jann seemed to understand exactly where the Who would fit and would—if we were successful—prevail in a new self-created order,” said Townshend. “I described my plan to complete Tommy, at that time a project around two-thirds completed.”
Wenner asked him deceptively guileless questions, like “What is your life like today?” but as the conversation warmed, Townshend waxed philosophic on the power of rock and roll to upend society—and waxed and waxed and waxed. This would become a hallmark of Wenner’s interview style, evincing naïveté to draw a subject out, and it often yielded results. Soon Wenner was asking him about the “tremendous sensuality” of rock, mentioning, among others, Mick Jagger, who Wenner noted was “tremendously involved in sexual things.” Townshend described a Who concert as sex with the audience: “You’ve come your lot and the show’s over.”
The interview spanned two issues, with Townshend on the cover of Rolling Stone in September 1968, his patented guitar windmill gesture captured by Baron Wolman against a spotlight. Wenner noted that “nobody quite remembers exactly under what circumstances the interview concluded.” The next day, Wenner drove him to the airport, and Townshend asked Wenner if he had spiked his drink with LSD. “I said no, not at all, why?” recalled Wenner. “He said he had some kind of experience, some kind of transcendent experience.”
Townshend told writer David Dalton that Wenner had “completely taken me apart.” (In the year-end wrap-up for 1969, Rolling Stone named Tommy the most overrated record of the year.)
A few months later, Wenner flew to London to meet with Jagger but first had dinner with Townshend. 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 seemed so much more worldly and grand than I remembered him,” he said. “He assumed I would be comfortable with the scale of his business ambitions, 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 like feverish groupies. “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.)
With a broad agreement from Jagger, Wenner returned to San Francisco and dove into the details of the joint venture, writing Jagger a series of excited letters and telegrams outlining his ideas for a British Rolling Stone. They would be fifty-fifty owners, he suggested, with Wenner in editorial control. He helpfully included a waiver for Jagger to sign absolving him of legal trouble from trademark infringement.
Not so fast, said Jagger. “For my part, I assumed that I would more or less have control of the [editorial] policy on this side of the Atlantic,” Jagger wrote back, adding that the waiver “is not in any way valid, and even if I signed it, it means nothing. You can’t expect me to waive all past or future rights to the name Rolling Stone—and waive to whom anyway.”
They put the questions off to when Wenner returned to London in the spring. For now, Wenner would have to be satisfied that he was in business with Mick Jagger—wasn’t that enough? Clearly, Jagger held the cards. For Jagger’s first Rolling Stone interview in October 1968, Jonathan Cott shared a byline with an employee of the Rolling Stones, Sue Cox, who worked out of the band’s Maddox Street office in London, where the interview was conducted (“It is not the most thorough and complete set of questions and answers,” conceded the Rolling Stone introduction).
When he returned to London in March 1969, Jann Wenner was becoming a figure of notoriety in the underground press, in part because of his impending deal with Jagger. The Guardian called him the Hugh Hefner of pop, and Wenner boldly told Oz, the British counterculture magazine edited by Richard Neville, “we’re out to replace the Melody Maker and all these shitty music publications.” (Oz described Wenner as looking “for all the world like an unusually hairy rugby player” with the “cat-that-got-away-with-the-cream smile.”)
That week, Wenner met with Prince Rupert Loewenstein, the Bavarian aristocrat known as “Rupie the Groupie,” who had taken over management of the Stones’ finances during Jagger’s acrimonious split with Allen Klein. Loewenstein was no less concerned about the trademark issue, telling Wenner he wanted him to sign a waiver giving