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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
You can’t always get what you wa-ant . . .
As the choir rose to a crescendo, Jagger started his famous howling, “That scream was utterly riveting,” Gracey said. “He was able to replicate it many times.”
When the session ended at 4:00 a.m., the lovers filed into the back of Jagger’s Rolls-Royce, a sleepy Jagger up front with his driver. The car dropped the couple off at the Londonderry House Hotel, and Wenner and Gracey walked into the glow of the lobby and up the elevator to Wenner’s suite overlooking Hyde Park, Jagger’s voice echoing in the night.
But if you try sometimes, you just might find—you get what you nee-eed!
•
WHEN JANN WENNER GOT BACK from London, Time magazine published a profile of his rising rock publication, noting the eight-by-ten glossy of Mick Jagger on Wenner’s wall and a book on his shelf titled “The Jann Wenner Method for Effective Operation of a Cool Newspaper,” “which is blank, a gift from the bookbinder.” What made Rolling Stone unique, Wenner told a Time reporter, was that it was authentic. “We never thought of filling a market,” he said, “and we never created Rolling Stone toward anyone in particular.”
That same month, The Washington Post published a story on Rolling Stone in which Wenner predicted the death of Time magazine—“because it’s not going to make the change when the culture change comes.”
But while Wenner plumped for his own cultural relevance, he had a little problem: He was broke. Wenner’s trips to London and New York had sapped the company’s meager coffers. Said Baron Wolman, “He had a credit card, and he stayed at the fanciest hotel, spent a fortune on clothes, custom-made clothes, came back, and we had no money. I said, ‘Jann, we can’t do this. We can’t run a publication like that if you’re not looking at a budget.’ And he said, ‘I’ll do what I want, Baron.’
“If that’s the case,” continued Wolman, “I don’t even want to be on the board of directors, because he’s gonna do what he wants anyhow! It’s just kind of fallen into a black hole.”
When Wenner conceded he needed help, Wolman connected him with a local stockbroker named Charles Fracchia, who was married into an Old San Francisco family involved in the luxury department store
I. Magnin & Company. Fracchia was a thirty-two-year-old father of three but fascinated with the counterculture buzzing around him. He put together a group of investors who forked over $10,000 in exchange for shares of Rolling Stone and drew up elaborate proposals envisioning a “multimedia entertainment/leisure operation,” including a portfolio of magazines and an FM radio station. In truth, it was all an excuse for Fracchia to dabble in the earthly delights he was reading about in Rolling Stone. Wenner was happy to oblige: For their first “board meeting,” Wenner invited him for breakfast on Rhode Island Street, and Jane scrambled marijuana into the eggs. “At end of meeting, I’m feeling really woozy,” Fracchia recalled. “[Jann] starts laughing, ‘Don’t you know what she put in the scrambled egg?’ That was my first drug hit.”
Fracchia and Wenner agreed they needed to acquire more properties and expand the business, with Fracchia eager to take the company public and make a mint on the growing youth boom. In the spring of 1969, on his way back from London, Wenner met with the owner of New York Scenes, a somewhat seedy underground newspaper that covered drugs and orgies and that Fracchia saw as a natural property for Straight Arrow and bought the paper in exchange for 10 percent of Rolling Stone stock. In a matter of two months, Jann Wenner went from cash poor to operating three magazines—Rolling Stone, British Rolling Stone, and New York Scenes. Maybe this rock-and-roll empire thing would work out after all.
•
IN FEBRUARY 1969, Jann Wenner and Ralph Gleason went to San Quentin State Prison to see Johnny Cash perform for the inmates, a program recorded for an album on Columbia Records as Johnny Cash at San Quentin. Bob Dylan was embracing country music with the stripped-down John Wesley Harding, and Cash was performing Bob Dylan songs in concert, telling Wenner in May 1968 that country musicians “have been affected greatly by the sound of the Beatles and the lyric of Dylan.”
On the next page was a full-page ad by Columbia Records, the label of both Dylan and Cash. Rolling Stone’s relationship to the “Columbia Rock Machine” had grown increasingly tight, starting with its first advertisement in issue No. 8. Clive Davis, having ascended to president of CBS Records, a subsidiary of Columbia, on the success of Janis Joplin and Blood, Sweat, and Tears, made Rolling Stone required reading for his staff as he moved the label past the square Sing Along with Mitch era. He viewed Wenner as an ally in building a new industry out of rock and roll, and he gave Rolling Stone its first steady advertising contract to keep the newspaper afloat. Wenner advertised the Columbia connection, sending out a PR letter to acquaint potential advertisers and distributors with “the approach and style with which we and Columbia Records feel reflects the changes in popular music of the last three years.” Davis put Rolling Stone into record stores through Columbia’s distribution system, which now accounted for 15 percent of the newspaper’s single-copy sales. “It was no question that Jann had a vision,” said Davis. “This was a whole new world for me that had opened up, post-Monterey.”
In addition, Jann Wenner was using Columbia’s offices in New York as a virtual bureau of Rolling Stone. In a letter to Bob Altshuler, the publicist for Columbia, Wenner thanked him for the “favors, the lunchs [sic], the tickets, and the use of your secretaries and offices. Someday we’ll be buying the whold [sic] building, so keep it clean and in good shape.”
The same month as the San Quentin concert, Wenner and Baron Wolman set up camp at Columbia to lay out a promotional ad for a story Wenner was sure would be a big hit: the “Groupies” issue, an exposé that featured snapshots of women Baron Wolman met backstage at the Fillmore. A few were nudes, with a provocative photo of two women kissing, tongues touching, which made Wenner sit up. The idea was far from novel—Cheetah had published a groupies issue in 1967—but timing was everything. When Time magazine tried to beat Rolling Stone with a groupies feature of its own, Wenner borrowed a play from the old carnival barker Warren Hinckle: He preempted Time with a full-page ad in The New York Times, asking, “When we tell what a Groupie is, will you really understand? This is the story only Rolling Stone can tell, because we are the musicians, we are the music, we are writing about ourselves.” (Indeed, afterward a former Rolling Stone secretary named Henri Napier wrote in to point out that Wenner was the biggest groupie of them all. “Any reason he was left out?” she wrote.)
The ad cost Rolling Stone $7,000, but with Fracchia on the hook money was no object. The night before the ad appeared in the Times, Wenner and Wolman ordered a bottle of champagne to their room at the five-star Warwick hotel and got drunk. “He was really excited,” said Wolman. “I think the first issue [of the Times] comes out at, like, midnight, and we raced down to get the issue.”
They taped up copies of the ad all over their hotel walls.
On the same trip, Wenner had dinner with Alan