Or we’re through—yeah, through!
She printed a hundred copies of a 45 single, but they were stolen from a car, and the song never surfaced beyond San Francisco.
Wenner also tried forming a rock group, called the Helping Hand-Outs, with a spaced-out hippie named Scratch who lived on a mattress in North Beach. They disbanded after playing some strip clubs. Music was not exactly the focus. “With my hair as long as it is, if you didn’t listen to my singing or playing, I look like a Beatle,” he wrote to his grandmother.
Kaufman rebuffed Wenner’s romantic entreaties but brought him along on her adventures, including a road trip to L.A. with Neal Cassady (who kept calling him “Jan,” to Wenner’s irritation) and the seminal event of the San Francisco rock boom, a psychedelic dance at the Longshoreman’s Hall near the wharf featuring the Jefferson Airplane, the Charlatans, and the Great Society. “A Tribute to Dr. Strange,” named for the Marvel Comics character, was conceived by a group of hippies who convinced Ralph Gleason, the aging Chronicle critic, to help promote the event in his column, On the Town. That night Wenner witnessed poet Allen Ginsberg lead a line of beaded dancers through colored lights that pulsed to clanging, psychotropic guitar playing and caterwauling vocals. Denise Kaufman, in a dress made from an American flag, briefly introduced Wenner to Gleason, who was hanging out with a record man from Capitol Records. The next day, Wenner flipped through the paper and reexperienced the event through the eyes of a veteran culture writer. Gleason would say he saw the 1960s come to life that night, documenting the costumed youths like butterflies pinned on a spreading board. “They all seemed to be cued into Frontier Days,” he wrote in his 1969 book, The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound, “and ranged from velvet Lotta Crabtree to Mining Camp Desperado, Jean Laffite leotards, I. Magnin Beatnik, Riverboat Gambler, India Import Exotic and Modified Motorcycle Rider Black Leather-and-Zippers alongside Buckskin Brown.”
A personal friend and devotee of Duke Ellington’s, Gleason nonetheless called the Jefferson Airplane “one of the best bands ever.” His advocacy got them an advance from RCA Victor for $25,000, an astonishing sum for a psychedelic rock group.
Turned on by Kaufman, Wenner now spent his weekends flopped out on the floor of John Warnecke’s garden apartment on Telegraph Hill, along with Ned Topham, listening to Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home and the Byrds’ Mr. Tambourine Man while tripping on Owsley Stanley’s high-powered blotter acid. “We had costumes and toys,” wrote Wenner in “Now These Days Are Gone.” “Life was like a little kid. Instead of skip rope we played with pieces of cut glass from chandeliers. Eye orgies.” (One evening, Wenner had a druggy sexual encounter with Warnecke, which he recorded in an outline for his novel: “[Told] him I was thinking of a girl,” he wrote, “a lie.”) In his book, Wenner described dressing up in his own frontier costume—an Annapolis naval jacket, a cowboy hat, and a gold-handled walking stick—to see the Lovin’ Spoonful with Denise Kaufman. While she mingled easily with “the sandaled spades and boys with funny glasses,” Wenner felt awkward and out of place around the hippies. “The navy jacket was too hot,” he wrote. “The collar rubbed on the back of my neck. People were standing around looking at each other. We danced to a few songs, but then she found other friends and danced with them without thought of tomorrow, like she was playing the drums. They stood and watched her and I was glad they saw me with her, but then they knew, they always knew.”
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THE IMAGE WAS TAKEN from the back of the $1 bill: a human eye inside a pyramid. It was a flyer posted around the Berkeley campus with the tantalizing question, “Can you pass the acid test?” Ken Kesey wanted to recruit local students for his LSD experiments with a large “happening” inside a Victorian mansion in downtown San Jose following a Rolling Stones concert at the Civic Auditorium in early December 1965. It was the first time Wenner saw the Stones. Mick Jagger swung a blue checkered jacket over his head, singing “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Afterward, Wenner drove his VW downtown to press into the throng of acid-zonked students who vibrated to a very different rock band that chimed with involved psychedelic jams. Wenner approached the handsome guitar player in blue corduroy pants and velvet shirt to ask the name of the group. “The Grateful Dead,” Bob Weir told him. Jerry Garcia later said it was their first show.
Early the next year, Jann Wenner walked into the offices of The Daily Californian, Berkeley’s student paper, and pitched a weekly column on the rock and drug scene, which he wanted to write anonymously. A month before, Wenner had been roused from his bed at four in the morning by police officers searching for drugs and was arrested for possession of marijuana. Wenner spent the night in jail. “They missed the acid and the DMT, which I kept in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator,” he said. Wenner believed he was fingered by a Berkeley student seeking revenge on Wenner for sleeping with his girlfriend. Wenner’s lawyer got the charges dropped, arguing that the police had an improper search warrant. (The lawyer, Malcolm Burnstein, later employed a young Hillary Clinton as an intern.)
Wenner called his column Something’s Happening and wrote under the pseudonym “Mr. Jones,” the clueless, vaguely journalistic personage of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” who walks into a room with a pencil in his hand and sees something happening but doesn’t know what it is. But then again, who did? Across the Bay Area, student firebrands and stoned philosophers, biker outlaws and self-styled mystics, hipsters and poseurs alike commingled in a druggy renaissance of free expression that was remaking youth lifestyle, from the head shops of Haight Street to the bonfires of Stinson Beach. “The fact of the matter,” Gleason wrote, “is that we are in a new age with a new religion and with new standards.” In La Honda, an hour south of San Francisco, Ken Kesey was saying the same thing in country-cosmic aphorisms and into a microphone held by Tom Wolfe, who was documenting the lysergic bandwagoneers for a book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. “Everybody is going to be what they are,” Kesey told him, “and whatever they are, there’s not going to be anything to apologize about.”
With Something’s Happening, Wenner made himself the ultimate acid insider, Berkeley’s window into the insular psychedelic rock scene. He judged the Trips Festival, a psychedelic rock happening inspired by Ken Kesey and organized by Bill Graham, a “flop,” with “too many cops and too many undercover narcos.” It was nonetheless significant, he said, because it rated reviews from “Time, Life, Newsweek, etc., and camera crews.” (He blamed Graham for his “extreme uptightness,” establishing a negative posture toward the rock promoter destined to last for years. In another column, he called Graham “a little man” who turned the dances into “money making schemes.”)
Wenner also used his column to praise the Beatles and Bob Dylan and defend Mick Jagger against accusations that he was a “fag.” “Girls aren’t the only ones who adore Mick,” he wrote. “When he gets married there will probably be more disappointed males than females.”
In each column, Wenner turned his own friends into characters in an ongoing psychedelic serial that borrowed nonsense language from Dylan and the Beatles. Warnecke and Topham became Nowhere Man and Blue Nedd. “Nowhere Man and a bit of bored imagination,” he wrote, “both at once, Nowhere, Neverwas, Notnow, Nottobe, World without End; People without names; Friends without Friendship.”
The column ran alongside a photograph of “Mr. Jones”: Jann Wenner in a fake beard and granny glasses and a harmonica around his neck. Another benefit of anonymity was that Wenner wanted to start an LSD business. He wrote a friend to say he had an investor on the hook—probably John Warnecke—who could front him $1,500, which they could earn back with sales of eighty-five thousand milligrams of LSD. “Since you would be doing the production work,” he wrote to the friend, presumably a chemist, “and I would be distributing, which entails legal consequences, a fifty-fifty split seems thoroughly equitable.”
The business didn’t pan out, but Wenner advocated for legalization of LSD in his May 19, 1966, column, calling the drug “the closest we have come to a feasible manner in which men may reorient themselves around new pursuits and meanings.” Unlike Mario Savio, who called Timothy Leary’s “Turn on, tune in, drop out” motto an irresponsible slogan, Wenner saw LSD culture