the option of having the disputed matter printed in Rolling Stone under his byline.”
Using Gleason’s name as a reference, Wenner combed the Haight and North Beach asking for money from record stores and head shops to advertise in his new magazine, $100 for a full page. Tom Donahue’s new free-form radio station signed up; promoter Bill Graham declined Wenner’s offer to invest but bought ads for the first several issues at a discounted $25 a page. Wenner personally flew to Los Angeles to meet with record executives at A&M and Capitol, boldly promising he would displace Billboard magazine. (“Rolling Stone loves you,” he ended his letter to A&M.) In person, his rambling spiel geysered forth as if it were all too exciting and self-evident to explain. But the thrust of it was the basis of his first editorial, wherein he described a newspaper “not just about music, but also about the things and attitudes that the music embraces.” It was about “the magic that can set you free.”
“To describe it any further would be difficult without sounding like bullshit,” he concluded, “and bullshit is like gathering moss.”
Jane Schindelheim never liked the name Rolling Stone, but she liked what Rolling Stone was doing to Jann Wenner. When he moved into the Garrett Press warehouse, he hired contractors to erect Sheetrock partitions for his own office and assigned Jane to decorate the headquarters for her little would-be press baron, a court from which Wenner could command his empire—seven tables manned by unpaid volunteers and some rented typewriters next to a loud and foul-smelling machine burning hot lead all day. By October, Wenner was still short the money he needed to get Rolling Stone off the ground. The Schindelheims of Manhattan had not yet met Jane’s boyfriend, but received a letter describing how they could become a “limited liability partner” in his newspaper for the minimum investment of $2,000. There was, said Wenner, almost no chance of failure:
The very least that can happen for any investor is approximately a 15% return on his or her money per year as well as equity in a going concern. The best that can happen is too fantastic to really talk about, but is roughly comparable to owning a very big and successful magazine on the financial order of Playboy.
Her parents liked the cut of this young man’s jib. A nice Jewish boy with a business mind. They wrote the check, plus a little extra, and gave Rolling Stone the financial push it needed. The money Dr. Schindelheim earned from yanking teeth and capping molars also gave their daughter an ownership stake in Rolling Stone, making her “secretary and director” of the start-up, which, in early October 1967, Wenner incorporated in the state of California under a name he liked quite a lot: Straight Arrow Publishers Inc.
Hey, it was their baby now. Unlike the do-nothing Chet Helms, with his long hair down to his Levi’s, the clever and industrious Jann Wenner, who styled his hair in a pageboy, had managed to raise $7,500 in capital and make it all legal with lawyers. Clearly they were destined to be millionaires and Chet Helms was not. Many years later, while sitting in her vast estate in the Hamptons, on Long Island, Jane Wenner would recall walking into a little San Francisco shop to order an ice cream cone in the 1970s and behind the counter was Chet Helms taking her order. “He was smart enough to be at the right place at the right time, and he just couldn’t do anything,” she said. “There was something so sad to me about that moment for him.”
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JANN WENNER KNEW EXACTLY what he wanted: When the Rolling Stone telephone lines were installed at Garrett Press, he insisted they be answered by a woman because a woman’s voice was “classy.”
That fall, Jann Wenner and his girlfriend, Jane, and her sister, Linda, along with Michael and Susan Lydon and some volunteer hippies Wenner knew (“groupies,” he called them), toiled to cobble together the first issue of Rolling Stone. Michael Lydon would show up after his shift at Newsweek and work into the night alongside Wenner, who worried every detail. It was hot in San Francisco, and Susan Lydon, pregnant and pouring sweat next to the furnace, wore a slip hiked up over her belly as she watched Wenner bound in and out. “Jann was maniacally driven, a natural speed freak,” Susan Lydon wrote. “And to my great despair, he managed to involve Michael in most of his manic schemes, so that I had to be practically fainting or in tears before we could break for a meal.”
Wenner spent as little money as possible, using Newsweek’s offices for long-distance phone calls and the offices of Ramparts to make Xeroxes and lay out pages, courtesy of Ramparts’ production director John Williams, whom Wenner listed on Rolling Stone’s masthead as the art director. “He was just so energetic and so enthusiastic and knew what he wanted and could talk anybody into doing anything,” said Williams. “You just sort of wanted to help him.
“He offered me a hundred shares of stock for each issue. I was pasting up on some old flats that we had from another project, staying up until three in the morning, in between the Ramparts stuff . . . I didn’t know if it was going to go anywhere or not. I didn’t see how you could start a rock-and-roll magazine on newsprint and get anywhere.”
If Wenner harbored any doubts, they were about his credibility as a rock critic. He loved the music, but he was realistic about his own ignorance, how it worked, what made it good or mediocre. What he needed was the authority of a brand-name critic to rival the bylines at Crawdaddy!, but the person he needed already worked for Crawdaddy! A student of history at Brandeis near Boston, Jon Landau was a twenty-year-old college hermit who was homebound with a painful intestinal disorder and spent his days listening to records and writing crisply pedantic essays on soul and R&B, which he typed up and sent to Paul Williams. Among the small pool of people who wrote rock criticism in 1967, he made a splash for a dissertation-like analysis of Motown and the Supremes called “A Whiter Shade of Black.” Landau detested the San Francisco Sound, but Wenner didn’t care about his R&B bias, only his respected byline, which was being followed with great interest by record executives at Atlantic and Elektra scrambling to discover new acts to replace the fading folk and jazz artists on their rosters. As it happened, Landau was a classmate of Andy Harmon’s at Brandeis. In a pitch letter, Wenner shared his dream of turning Rolling Stone into a “very slick” magazine, describing the “youth market” he aimed to exploit and the competitors he aimed to vanquish, including the new full-color Cheetah, created by the publisher of Weight Watchers; the slickly turned-out Eye magazine, published by Hearst; and various others “proclaiming themselves mind blowing and turned on, hip and with it.”
Landau admired Wenner’s chutzpah. He had never been satisfied with the paltry money at Crawdaddy! and, to Wenner’s chagrin, had started writing for Eye. (To supplement his income, Landau also developed a brisk business selling his complimentary review copies of LPs to record stores.) Moreover, Landau didn’t share Williams’s aversion to negative, knives-out record reviews. He was an arrogant young man; he hated more records than he liked. This is precisely what appealed to Wenner, who wanted controversy in his paper. He didn’t care if a review was “wordy or obscene, as long as it says something.”
“Taste is the important thing,” Wenner said, “and that is the premise of what we are doing.”
Landau agreed to join Rolling Stone as Wenner’s Boston correspondent, telling him he looked forward to “a long and mutually profitable relationship.” If Landau was the high-flown critic Wenner needed, Wenner was for Landau a kind of walking, talking consensus of the new rock culture, the fat middle of youth opinion. “At that moment in time, Jann himself was a very pure distillation of the culture,” Landau said. “He could ask himself, ‘What do I like?’ ”
On October 18, 1967, Wenner gathered his exhausted staff of six next to the printing machine on Brannan Street as they watched the first issue of Rolling Stone roll off the conveyor belt of the Goss Suburban. They opened a bottle of champagne and drank from plastic cups. Only an hour before, Wenner had been typing a letter to Jonathan Cott asking him to get a Beatles interview for the next issue. A new Pink Floyd tape sat on Wenner’s desk, awaiting review. Had Wenner breathed since Monterey? There was no time. But as he finally drew a breath, holding the first issue of Rolling Stone in his hands, he could not imagine anything better. “It’s just so