and they knew less.”
“They were hippies,” reasoned Jane Wenner. “They were supposed to raise the money, and they were just dragging their feet. You know? It was, like, never going anywhere.”
Sometime in the spring of 1967, Wenner drove to Ralph Gleason’s house on Ashby Avenue in Berkeley, plunked himself down in the study, and popped the idea. “Jann came over one day and said, ‘How about a magazine?’ ” recounted Gleason. “Like the Melody Maker and the Musical Express, but an American one that would be different and better and would cover not just the records and the music but would cover the whole culture.
“And instantly that was the idea,” Gleason said, “as soon as he said it we both agreed it was a hell of an idea. And that was it.”
•
WHEN THE MONTEREY POP FESTIVAL opened in June, Jann Wenner arrived as both a consultant to the festival’s PR man, Derek Taylor, and the would-be editor of a rock-and-roll magazine. He had written an essay for the festival’s full-color catalog called “Rock & Roll Music,” wherein he proclaimed that “rock and roll music has turned out to be more than just noise” and went on to make a case for its cultural ascendance. The public, he wrote, was coming around to the realization that this music was about ambition. “Brian Wilson spent 90 hours in the studio making ‘Good Vibrations,’ ” he wrote. The Beatles were, “dare I say it, geniuses.”
More than fifty thousand people showed up in Monterey to see the Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas from Los Angeles; Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel from New York; the Who and the Jimi Hendrix Experience from London. Local favorites the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane—along with Janis Joplin, whom Ralph Gleason had helped book, and the Steve Miller Blues Band, for whom Wenner advocated—played alongside Otis Redding from Memphis and the Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar. Taylor, who called the festival the “most outrageously ambitious event in the history of popular music,” arranged a massive press pool, issuing a thousand press badges to reporters and photographers from the mainstream outlets of the East, including Newsweek, The New York Times, the Associated Press, and Esquire, plus every obscure underground paper in existence, “a flurry of hair and bearded and beaded literate hippies from Haight-Ashbury and Sunset Strip,” as Taylor recalled. D. A. Pennebaker recorded the proceedings on 16-millimeter film. The last issue of Mojo Navigator, which ran out of money, reported that press cameras crackled throughout Ravi Shankar’s set. The press area was so far beyond capacity Taylor likened it to “Buchenwald”; he was forced to issue new press passes to winnow the crowd the next day. “When John [Phillips] and I showed up on Friday morning,” said Lou Adler, “the amount of worldwide and domestic press was unbelievable. A lot of it had to do with Derek Taylor and how he put it out there. That was the breakthrough.”
As had been the fashion in the smaller world of San Francisco, Monterey was meant to be a microcosm of the whole culture. Outside the fairgrounds, hippies set up makeshift encampments that looked to Wenner more like “a medieval fair or an Indian religious holiday than a show. People camped out at night, danced until early morning on beaches . . . It is the music in which they find spiritual community.” Inside, Wenner roamed backstage in his monogrammed Oxford and jeans, a Nikon camera looped around his neck, snapping pictures, including a shot of Brian Jones, whom he’d last seen emerging from a Rolls-Royce in London. Wenner summoned Jane to Monterey on the third day, and they slept in a house with the band Blue Cheer, friends of John Warnecke’s. Jane shadowed him while he met Hendrix, and they sat near Brian Jones and Nico to watch Janis Joplin. “I was the girlfriend,” said Jane.
Wenner the budding tastemaker studiously scribbled reviews in his notebook. His favorite guitar player was Mike Bloomfield of the Butterfield Blues Band, whom he called “superb,” while Jimi Hendrix “lacks vocal style or smoothness, handles his guitar with agility and with minor drama; although not a master, his art is in his presence.” (After Hendrix pretended to jack off with his guitar and then set it on fire during his epic performance of “Wild Thing,” ABC chose not to air Pennebaker’s film.) And Wenner continued to be unimpressed with Paul Simon, opining that his “primary talent is on the guitar and composing melodies for that instrument; he is not a lyricist.” In his personal notes, Wenner lamented the absence of Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, B. B. King, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and “the sine qua non of pop, the Beatles.” “The festival was less than a complete artistic success,” he wrote. “Poor judgment was the rule in the invitations to some artists and not to others.”
His unpublished critiques notwithstanding, the festival was a watershed moment. As Mike Bloomfield told the crowd, according to a glowing press release Wenner helped draft with Derek Taylor, “This is our generation, we’re all here together, to dig ourselves.”
By the end of the weekend, Clive Davis, the Harvard-trained lawyer who was taking over CBS Records, had traded his white tennis sweater for an open-collared shirt and beads. He signed Janis Joplin and her band for an unheard-of $250,000.
•
THE MONTH AFTER the Monterey Pop Festival, a nineteen-year-old Welshman named Robin Gracey made his way to San Francisco on a Greyhound bus, rucksack on his shoulder, proverbial flower in his hair. The winsome lad wanted to experience this “Summer of Love” he’d been reading about in the papers, the siren song of the Doors’ No. 1 hit “Light My Fire” curling through his imagination like hashish smoke.
Gracey had the easy manner of a naïf from the English countryside, oblivious to his own handsome looks, the casual mop of black hair, thick eyebrows, and easy smile. He met a beautiful Swiss woman on a stop in Winnipeg, Canada, and she gave him her number in San Francisco. When he settled in the Haight-Ashbury a week later, the woman invited him to a party north of the city, along the Russian River. It was the summer home of a prominent young man named John Warnecke. The woman, it turned out, was a nanny working for Jackie Kennedy, responsible for taking care of John junior and Caroline, ages six and nine. The senior Warnecke had an affair with the late president’s widow, and her watercolor paintings now graced the walls of the Warnecke home—the same house where members of the Grateful Dead were showing up on a semi-regular basis to take drugs with the architect’s wayward son. (“Phil the bass player roled [sic] a joint in a canoe while going down the river with the wind blowing,” Warnecke wrote to Wenner in 1966.)
That day, Gracey and the nanny went canoeing on the river and returned to find two of Warnecke’s friends hanging out: Jann Wenner and Jane Schindelheim. Recalled Gracey, “We were both swimming in the river below the house, almost certainly naked, and Jann was very ebullient and cheerful.” Charmed by the nude young man with the British accent—who looked a little like Wenner and stood the same height, five six—Wenner invited Gracey to dinner in Potrero Hill the following week, where Jane’s sister, Linda, was now living with them on Rhode Island Street. Jann and Jane were now a steady item. After Jane brought home a handsome doctor one night, Wenner became jealous and asked her to see him exclusively (it would not be the last time Jane used other men to try to get Wenner’s attention). The relationship ran hot and cold, with Jane frustrated by Wenner’s fickle desires and perpetual distraction. “Something tells me that your wants will always be three thousand miles away,” she told him.
In truth, his wants were much closer. Wenner offered himself as Robin Gracey’s all-access pass to the city. “He was my opportunity to go into Golden Gate Park, or see the Grateful Dead, or go to the Fillmore, and I saw Jim Morrison and the Doors,” recounted Gracey.
Gracey wasn’t gay, but Wenner’s enthusiastic seduction seemed part of the woozy spectacle of San Francisco in 1967. At one point, Wenner stole a kiss behind a bush. “He was wooing me,” said Gracey. “I felt on the one hand beguiled by it, charmed, and also somewhat frightened by it, I think. I think I probably lived under the philosophy that, you know, everything is experience.” One afternoon, Wenner asked Gracey if he wanted to try LSD. “I have no idea how many hours we were actually high,” Gracey said. “And I can remember being reluctant during this time, but knowing that, in a sense, I was actually in the vortex. A whirlpool, basically, and that it was going to happen. And it did.”
They had sex at the Wenners’