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A black limousine!”

      “We didn’t know anyone who had a limousine at that time,” said Rinzler. “A kid, with a limousine.”

      Fracchia was irked by Wenner’s profligate spending. “I think Jann liked to live well,” said Fracchia. “He had no other source of income other than what he could take out of the company.” But for Wenner, the arrival of serious money was an inevitability—he was in Time magazine for Christ’s sake—so whatever problems his personal spending created he believed to be temporary.

      •

      THE DAY NEIL ARMSTRONG SET FOOT on the moon, July 20, 1969, Jann Wenner was in London watching it on TV in a suite at the Londonderry Hotel, with his lover, Robin Gracey, by his side.

      On his last trip to London, after hearing the Stones record, Wenner hired a large black Mercedes (like Pete Townshend’s) to drive through the country to Gracey’s school at Oxford, where the two caught the tail end of a Fairport Convention concert. At Gracey’s house, they crawled up into the attic space where he kept their love letters in a bundle and made love. Perhaps Wenner could have not only what he needed but what he wanted, too. “There clearly was, from his point of view, sort of a possibility of a future together,” Gracey said.

      “He was my lover and mate,” mused Wenner, though he said he felt pangs of guilt about Jane: “I felt bad and was sneaking around, and she kept wanting to come [to London] and I’d say no.”

      This time Wenner was in London to announce the launch of British Rolling Stone in a small press conference with Jagger. To crown the occasion, Wenner showed up wearing a blue velveteen suit and white Louis XVI shirt with ruffles that exploded from the sleeves, looking not unlike Brian Jones, who had been found dead in a swimming pool three weeks earlier (and eulogized by Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone, who said “Sympathy for the Devil” was his epitaph). Wenner had also grown a semi-handlebar mustache that wormed down both sides of his mouth. Having staked some of his own money on British Rolling Stone, Jagger insisted on hiring the editor, a young woman named Jane Nicholson, whose awe of Jagger tended to render her stammering and shaking with nerves. They set up an office in Hanover Square, where Wenner reminded the rambunctious staff during their first meeting that “we’re not here to drink Mick’s wine,” prompting Jagger to correct him: “Hold it, that’s exactly why we’re here. To drink my wine.”

      Wenner could hardly argue. But it wasn’t just the British edition over which Jagger now appeared to have control. David Dalton, Wenner’s correspondent in London, reported to Wenner that Rolling Stone was, for all practical purposes, the same as the Rolling Stones Organization in England. Interviews with rock stars attached to big managers like Robert Stigwood, whose clients included the Bee Gees and Cream, could be arranged “only through the kind cooperation of Jane Nicholson,” Jagger’s chosen editor. Dalton described to Wenner how a Rolling Stone reporter had been barred from a recording session pending approval by Jagger’s people. “We gathered very quickly that Jagger and Wenner had not really sorted out the terms of engagement too clearly,” said Alan Marcuson, who was hired as the advertising manager and later became an editor.

      Once British Rolling Stone launched in June 1969, with Pete Townshend on the cover, each new issue arrived in San Francisco like a fresh offense, a mutant version of Wenner’s own Rolling Stone, trussed up with political diatribes, overly groovy prose, and egregious misspellings of rock star names on the cover. “There were two appalling incidents where we spelled Ray Davies’s name wrong, and we called him ‘Ray Davis’ in a big headline,” recalled Marcuson, “and then we spelled Bob Dylan’s name wrong, ‘Dillon’ as I remember. As bad as it can fucking get, really. Wenner hit the roof, rightly so.”

      Wenner flew to London to try bringing order to the unruly staff, whose priority seemed to be enjoying Mick Jagger’s wine as well as copious amounts of marijuana. “Wenner came over, and we had a very fractious, uncomfortable meeting with him,” said Marcuson. “And he very quickly became the enemy of London Rolling Stone.”

      Jagger gave the staff carte blanche to ignore Wenner, which they were all too happy to do. “We said, ‘Fuck it, the Stones are paying for this, we’ll do whatever we like, he’s not our boss,’ ” said Marcuson. After two months of frustration, Wenner sent a twelve-page letter to Jagger calling the British Rolling Stone “mediocre” and run with “unbelievable incompetence,” reporting that he had fired one of Jagger’s employees, Alan Reid, “Great Britain’s leading male groupie.” Citing his friend Pete Townshend, Wenner told Jagger that Reid had offended the members of the Small Faces (“or Humble Pie or whatever they’re called”) while interviewing them at their country cottage. Wenner insisted to Jagger that the British magazine come under the boot of the American Rolling Stone.

      By this time, however, Jagger had lost interest entirely and flown to Australia to film an art-house outlaw movie called Ned Kelly (which Rolling Stone would later describe as “one of the most plodding, dull and pointless films in recent memory”). Meanwhile, Jagger’s British Rolling Stone staff threw a record industry party in which the punch bowl was spiked with LSD and several attendees were hospitalized. One victim was Marc Bolan of T. Rex, who freaked out and locked himself in the bathroom until he was talked out by a gynecologist (and aspiring country music singer) who happened to be present. “I think that party was one of the big nails in the coffin,” said Marcuson.

      Wenner was desperate to pull the plug on British Rolling Stone but frightened by the prospect of letting Jagger down. “It took me a while to screw my courage up to do it, to write him a letter or call him,” said Wenner. “I said this thing is awful, it’s not working, they’re spending your money at an incredible rate, and you’re going to have nothing to show for it.”

      When Wenner announced to the British staff that the magazine was finished, his letter was immediately leaked to The International Times, an underground paper started out of the Indica Gallery in London, supported by Paul McCartney, which detailed the eviction of the “Stones staff” from their offices. For Wenner, it was a grand embarrassment, undermining the credibility of his paper and leaving a taste of bitter disappointment over Jagger’s failure to uphold his end of the bargain. “I was upset and I said that to him,” said Wenner. “There was never any reaction from Mick.”

      For Jagger, it was an expensive boondoggle, nothing more. “I didn’t have that much money at that point,” said Jagger, “because I was in all these disputes with Allen Klein.” ( Jagger felt Klein had ripped off the Stones.) Mick Jagger’s staff implored the Stones’ singer to reconsider shutting down British Rolling Stone and spent the next two weeks trying to commandeer the magazine from Wenner. The drama culminated in a long and heated telegram to Jagger explaining that it was the rock star’s God-given right to use the name Rolling Stone, regardless of what Jann Wenner said. Marcuson remembered the precise date of the telegram they sent to Mick Jagger. It was the weekend of December 6, 1969, the eve of a free concert an hour south of the Rolling Stone offices: the Rolling Stones at Altamont Speedway.

      •

      GRINNING EAR TO EAR, Jann Wenner ogled the six naked men as they threw off their blue jeans and jumped into a cold creek in Macon, Georgia.

      The Allman Brothers had just completed their first album under the guidance of Phil Walden, the onetime manager of Otis Redding and founder of Capricorn Records, who suggested an au naturel portrait for their first LP cover and maybe some Rolling Stone publicity shots. Wenner loved the idea. “Yeah, yeah! Do it! Do it! Do it!” he exclaimed. They all plopped into the water. “The guys weren’t really into it,” said photographer Stephen Paley, “but at that point they would do pretty much anything to get famous.”

      Paley took his clothes off in solidarity with the band while a fully clothed Wenner stood on the bank of the creek to snap photos of them all. One of the Paley images—Duane Allman, holding his hands over his crotch—would appear inside Boz Scaggs’s first LP for Atlantic Records. Scaggs had just finished recording his solo album in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with Allman on slide guitar and a rookie record producer in the booth: Jann Wenner.

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