eighteen-year-old kid with a modified Beatles haircut and cuffed blue jeans was standing on the corner of Main Street in Freehold, New Jersey, dropping dimes in a pay phone. He was a guitarist in a rock-and-roll group that wore matching shirts and vests and played covers of “Twist and Shout” at the local drive-in and high school gymnasium. The kid’s father was underemployed, and the family had no telephone in the house, forcing him to amble up to the newsstand to use the pay phone on the corner. In November 1967, he noticed a broadsheet folded in half and stamped with a druggy logo. On the front was a black-and-white photo of John Lennon wearing an army helmet, spectacles on his nose, lips set in a whistle.
Bruce Springsteen slapped twenty-five cents on the counter.
“I used to spend hours and hours on the phone outside the newsstand calling my girlfriends,” he said. “You went in, and there it was. It reached out to my little town and said, ‘You’re not alone.’ ”
In the working-class town of Freehold, population 9,140, Springsteen could count on one hand the number of local teens involved with rock and roll—most of them were in his band. “Maybe there was one or two other people you could talk to if you had something in common,” he said. “At that time, basically the rest of the world was against who you were becoming. You were young; you couldn’t travel to San Francisco. The most you could do was go to the [West] Village on the weekend, which Steve [Van Zandt] and I did, where we initially discovered this form of rock-and-roll writing. It initially came out in the form of Crawdaddy! magazine, which was sheetlike, this small printed sheet, and then Rolling Stone. These were your lifelines.
“You can’t explain to someone today how unique and essential those things were to the fiber of your being in those days,” he continued. “They were the only validating pieces of writing that somebody else out there was thinking about rock music the way you were. That was comforting.”
The pages of Rolling Stone shaped Springsteen’s idea of what a rock-and-roll star did, how to behave. Springsteen himself wouldn’t appear in its pages for another four years—ironically, he would receive a rave review in Hearst’s Examiner before that—but he would never forget that first issue. Rolling Stone opened to a full-page publicity shot of the wives of the Beatles, including Cynthia Lennon in a gold lamé dress, then flipped to a gossip column called Flashes, which reported that David Crosby had left the Byrds and A Hard Day’s Night would be televised on NBC. Further on, Ralph Gleason opined on race in the record business, pointing out that Otis Redding sold more records than Frank Sinatra, and three pages later was “The Rolling Stone Interview” with Donovan, Wenner’s homage to the Playboy interview, conducted by a friend of Gleason’s in L.A. (Slotted into the bottom corner of page 11 was a little trade story reporting that Philco-Ford was spending $1 million to advertise a portable 45 player just as the full-length album renaissance was starting.)
Everything was in charmless black-and-white columns, blocked off with clean Oxford lines, stiff and workmanlike except for the rock-and-roll content—a no-frills Daily Worker for stoned rock fans. The whole thing had been begged, borrowed, recycled, and stolen: Chet Helms’s idea and contestant list; Ralph Gleason’s title and editorial philosophy; the newsprint and layout of The Sunday Ramparts; Jon Landau from Crawdaddy!; several stories from the Melody Maker, rewritten by Susan Lydon. Ramparts magazine had even published a cover image of John Lennon from How I Won the War the month before. But the seams of Wenner’s Frankenstein’s monster were fused together by his obsessive mania and the newspaper’s bold statement of purpose. The table of contents directed the reader to page 20, where “Jann Wenner reviews the new records.” He panned two out of the three albums, including Chuck Berry’s Live at the Fillmore: “If you judge the album by what’s happening today, the judgment isn’t very favorable.” For his own opening gambit, Jon Landau dismissed the breakout Jimi Hendrix as having “inane” lyrics and a “violent” artistic vision, which ran alongside a blurry photograph of Hendrix by Jann Wenner. In the arc of rock-and-roll history, many of these opinions would seem arbitrary and even wrong. But who else was treating these strange records—the new Sopwith Camel album—as matters of consequence?
As important, the clean look of Rolling Stone—the packaging—was a revelation to rock fans used to squinting at the soupy, under-edited prose of Crawdaddy! for the latest Bob Dylan exegesis. Newsprint, which Wenner saw as merely pragmatic until he could afford to become a “slick,” gave Rolling Stone a street feel that made it more authentic than a rock exploitation magazine like Cheetah. As Wenner told Time magazine in 1969, “A lot of people ask why we’re not psychedelic. But that’s the whole point. Psychedelic language and so-called hip language is what the over-thirties think the kids want to see and hear. It’s not. What they respond to is somebody talking to them straight.”
While Springsteen thumbed through his copy in Freehold, Jann Wenner had no idea who was reading the forty thousand copies he printed. As it later turned out, the distributor Miller Freeman left most of the issues moldering in the warehouse and only six thousand copies were sold. But a few reader letters trickled in, the first one from Sharon Miller of Los Angeles, who said, “We all dig Rolling Stone.” By issue No. 3, they heard from a representative of Stax Records in Memphis, who declared, “Amen.” By April 1968, Charlie Watts, the Stones’ drummer, was writing to thank Jon Landau for the “nice things he said about me personally,” a coy reference to a critical slam of Their Satanic Majesties Request (“The rest of us, I’m sure, will try for the next one,” said Watts).
Wenner had one of his volunteers type up a survey to send out to the KFRC contestant list, which generated a murky view into the nascent “youth market” Rolling Stone was hitting—young men who bought and listened to records, smoked pot, and avoided the Vietnam draft and regular work. One reader, for whom music was “the expression of the soul and mind,” said his goal was to “drop out and distribute posters.” Another described himself as “fanatically devoted to rock because it is the truth for a change,” and another made an ornate psychedelic doodle to prove his point. “If I had to fill out the same questionnaire, it would probably sound the same,” said Wenner. “I remember from our first surveys, the average reader was twenty-one, which is the age I was.”
Wenner molded the results into a dubious report for advertisers, claiming that “seventy-three percent” of his readers were men and “95% of the total readership” bought six records a month. After Rolling Stone debuted, Wenner got a letter from Jerry Wexler, the genius producer of Atlantic Records who recorded the soul albums of Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding. “First issue was strong,” he wrote to Wenner, saying he admired Jon Landau but “believe[d] Rolling Stone needs a more specific orientation and point of view. For god’s sake, avoid the groupie syndrome, and let’s not be wide-eyed about the hashcapades or pot busts of the venerated. Need professionalism and detachment. Need identity.”
Was Rolling Stone a trade paper, a critical journal, a teen rag like 16?
“What?” Wexler asked.
But Jann Wenner knew better than this fifty-year-old man did: It was all of the above.
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WHEN GARRETT PRESS SPAT OUT the first issue of Rolling Stone, Jane Schindelheim’s name was printed inside as the head of subscriptions. “BRAVO JANN WENNER!” she wrote to him. “ROLLING STONE LOOKS SMASHING!”
They were planning to move to a new apartment on Rhode Island Street in Potrero Hill, across the street from Jim Peterman of the Steve Miller Band. Jane was ready to become Jann’s full-time partner in their ascendant enterprise. “Is there enough room in the kitchen for a table?” she asked, “and space for you and Rolling Stone and Chessai [her Lhasa apso] and me?
“I shall make it beautiful,” she promised. “I will touch you soon my darlingest.”
If she could catch him. If Wenner seemed manic before, the demands of his biweekly paper now spun him like a 45. Bands were forming and breaking up weekly, record deals getting made, albums recorded, drugs consumed, musicians busted, rock festivals mushrooming