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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
The next week, Time magazine featured Spiro Agnew on the cover.
That somebody had dared—bothered, in the sentiment of the mainstream—to apply straight journalism to rock culture was a revelation. Eager for fame and legitimacy, the rockers were flattered. “I’ll tell you what Jann did,” said Keith Richards. “He put together a really good gang of writers, nice kids. Not afraid to go and ask questions. And turned something that could have just been a fan magazine into a real piece of journalism. That’s what I think Jann did.”
Five months after the Townshend interview, Wenner beat Time magazine on a story about the phenomenon of rock groupies, waving for the mainstream press to come have a peek at his collection of titillating nudes by taking out a full-page promotional ad in The New York Times.
It shouldn’t be surprising that Wenner himself, roiling with unfiltered ambition, needed an editor. His girlfriend, Jane Schindelheim, a petite and neurotic creature of Manhattan, rolled her eyes at the dumpy San Francisco hippies living in squalor on the Haight. But when she met Jann Wenner while working as a receptionist at Ramparts, she had to marvel at his white-hot ambition, the naive charm and vulgarity of it, his brusque arrogance and childish whims, his casual betrayals and bullying force, the unembarrassed yen for work and excess. Somebody would surely have to look after this little barbarian whose lust for money, drugs, and sex threatened to outpace his razor intellect and turn him into Augustus Gloop falling into the chocolate river of the 1960s. She would become his wife and co-owner but also his compass and custodian, his style counselor and resident paranoid who fretted and plotted from behind the drapes. Her seductive beauty and chic tastes hedged against Wenner’s extroversion and frequent obnoxiousness and became part of the formula for Rolling Stone, which was partly a social institution, a private club. She manicured Wenner’s social life, offered succor to his biggest talents, and repaired relationships with people who felt burned by Wenner and his sometimes ruthless magazine. “She’s the only one standing still in all these speedy lives,” said photographer Annie Leibovitz, for whom Jane Wenner was a muse and steward in her early career. “I think [the Wenners] kind of understood that they were both attractive. Some people would be more attracted to Jane, and her personality, than to Jann and his.”
The two were only intermittently attracted to each other, at least sexually. While Jann explored his sexuality with both men and women, Jane consoled herself with her own affairs—including dalliances with Leibovitz, whose intimacy with both Wenners completed a triangle of ambition and pleasure that lay at the creative heart of Rolling Stone in the 1970s. For all their ceaseless drift and constant coming apart, Jann and Jane always remained loyal to their cause, Rolling Stone, never tiring of each other, and it was a remarkably successful marriage, one that seemed to chart the culture as it shifted.
•
AFTER THE IDEALISM of Woodstock Nation was snuffed out at the infamous Altamont concert in December 1969, Rolling Stone, which had always had one foot in the world of commerce, was uniquely positioned to dominate the 1970s. With the record industry at his back, Wenner could annex new social worlds through journalism, fanning the ambitions of major American writers like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson by offering their exploding-sandwich journalism as epic feasts for his stoned readers. Thompson, the single most important writer in the history of Rolling Stone, injected Wenner’s magazine with a crucial piece of DNA—“gonzo” journalism, a form of performance-art writing, both uproarious and informed by deep reporting—that the Brahmins of the mainstream press could not ignore. Nor could they ignore the Rolling Stone readership who adored it. On the cult success of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” in 1971, Wenner aimed his new star directly at the 1972 presidential campaign and hitched his magazine to quintessential youth candidate Senator George McGovern of South Dakota. Thompson’s book on the election—Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72—made Rolling Stone the undisputed voice of the rock-and-roll generation.
As Tom Wolfe told Rolling Stone in 1987, youth culture was the most important thing to emerge from the 1960s, including Vietnam or civil rights. “Any of the big historical events of the Sixties are overshadowed by what young people did,” he said. “And they did it because they had money. For the first time in the history of man, young people had the money, the personal freedom and the free time to build monuments and pleasure palaces to their own tastes.”
Wenner, by birthright and inclination, was the ideal tastemaker to build those monuments. The raw material was rock and roll, but the primary building block was celebrity. And at its base, Rolling Stone was an expression of Wenner’s pursuit of fame and power. He reinvented celebrity around youth culture, which equated confession and frank sexuality with integrity and authenticity. The post-1960s vision of celebrity meant that every printed word of John Lennon’s unhappiness and anything Bob Dylan said or did now had the news primacy of a State of the Union address. It meant that Hunter Thompson could make every story he ever wrote, in essence, about himself. It also meant that climbing into bed with Mick Jagger was only worth doing if you had a Nikon handy. Self-image was the new aphrodisiac.
The 1970s was “the Me Decade,” in Wolfe’s famous coinage, defined by endless “remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self.” This was a fundamentally Californian mandate, sprung from the halls of Berkeley and the hills of Hollywood, where a devotion to hedonism was baked into the West’s culture of escapism and reinvention. That made Jann Wenner a walking bellwether, his own curiosities and desires a perfect editorial template for Rolling Stone. “He leads with his appetites—I take, I see, I have,” said Art Garfunkel, a close friend in the 1970s.
From a lavishly appointed Victorian on California Street in San Francisco, Wenner and his wife hosted a rolling drug salon during the 1970s, mixing pleasure with Rolling Stone business with the stars of the moment, whether Michael Douglas or Jackson Browne or John Belushi. A core irony of Rolling Stone was that its founder celebrated every kind of personal liberty imaginable but his own. But his hidden homosexuality—and that of his chief photographer—nonetheless opened Rolling Stone to the currents of the decade, when androgyny and ambiguous sexuality were in vogue. Wenner understood innately the longing of young men who papered their bedrooms with posters of a shirtless Robert Plant. Being gay, said Wenner, “gave me a good and finer appreciation of the sexuality of the guys up there on the stage, and I could understand that in a way that other people didn’t, to understand how sexual this whole thing was. All of rock and roll is sex, defined. I got it more. And I could see it; I was open to it. I was enjoying it. Much like the girls, and much like the guys who may not admit it, but it was really sexual.”
Exploiting the talents of Annie Leibovitz, who was in love with his wife, Wenner could divine the homosexual subtext of a hetero rock culture through acts of image making, personally manning the turnstile to his distinct American moment—Rolling Stone’s cover. Leibovitz’s nude photograph of teen idol David Cassidy on the cover in 1972—with a Playboy-inspired centerfold inside—was a signal moment, selling thousands of copies of Rolling Stone and establishing a new standard for self-exposure (and self-reinvention). It was also something Jann Wenner enjoyed looking at. Wenner turned the cover of Rolling Stone into a rock-and-roll confession box, with Paul Simon, George Harrison, Fleetwood Mac, James Taylor, Carly Simon, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young all eager to climb inside the Oxford border and expose their dramas, and very often their flesh, so as to be sanctified by the essential self-seriousness of Rolling Stone. And as the cover became the prime sales pitch for selling records, and the prime sales pitch of Wenner’s magazine, Wenner made Rolling Stone into a cultural event, adding vibrant colors (a rainbow border around a fedora-wearing Truman Capote), moody studio portraiture (Kris Kristofferson in shadow), winking humor (a Vargas girl riding a silver dildo for a Steely Dan profile), adventurous illustration (Daniel Ellsberg as a Roman bust), and