to Los Angeles, members of the Lovin’ Spoonful were cooperating with the police following a drug bust, and Jim Morrison was arrested for indecency in New Haven.
From the vantage of the loft on Brannan Street, Wenner looked out over a countercultural mecca that was quickly becoming a company town. Wenner, in his early column called Rock and Roll Music, defined and defended the local scene, which consisted of seven “indigenous” bands (the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape, Country Joe and the Fish, the Steven Miller Band, and Quicksilver Messenger Service) and was defined by long live shows with liquid light displays. A young economist named Michael Phillips, who was involved in inventing the MasterCard at Bank of California, predicted in the summer of 1968 that “the San Francisco Sound” would become a $6 million market by year’s end and “increase the wealth of the city by $8 to $15 million.” The Youngbloods, singers of the ubiquitous hit “Get Together,” moved to San Francisco from New York and saw themselves as part of a crucial industry. “You feel like you’re fulfilling a need,” singer Jesse Colin Young told Rolling Stone, “like a garage mechanic.”
Most of the record-selling business was elsewhere, a fact that actually gave Wenner a distinct advantage. Bands came through town on their tours and Wenner was their turnstile, giving them ink. “There was nothing else to do in San Francisco,” Wenner said. “There were no record companies there. There was nothing else to do but shop and hang out, or hang out with me.”
Steve Winwood of Traffic was the first rock star to visit the offices. “I showed him where all the lead type was,” said Wenner, who called Winwood, in April 1968, “probably the major blues voice of his generation.” To interview Hendrix, Wenner simply drove to his motel in Fisherman’s Wharf and hit record on the tape machine. “Baron and I went out to his motel room and shot the shit,” recalled Wenner. “We published it entirely as a quote.”
It was Hendrix at his loopy best: “The Axis of the earth turns around and changes the face of the world and completely different civilizations come about or another age comes about. In other words, it changes the face of the earth and it only takes about T of a day. Well, the same with love; if a cat falls in love, it might change his whole scene. Axis, Bold as Love . . . 1-2-3 rock around the clock.”
Through people like Derek Taylor, who was training the Byrds and the Beach Boys about the media, Wenner tapped into a network of advocates who put his newspaper in all the right hands. “I used to read every word of every page of every issue,” said David Crosby, who would soon form Crosby, Stills, and Nash. “It was the first one that wasn’t a Teen Scream boy thing. It was the first one that was about us, that was about actual music, and we dug the shit out of it.”
The artists came looking for him. Local heroes Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs took assignments to write stories and reviews for Rolling Stone (“Miller on the British Groups: Queer Bits in Underwear”). The manager of the Stooges in Detroit wrote asking for help booking gigs in San Francisco (Wenner suggested posting a free ad in his back pages). After Blood, Sweat, and Tears signed a lucrative contract with Columbia, Wenner assigned keyboardist Al Kooper to review the D. A. Pennebaker film of Monterey Pop, and two months later Wenner profiled Blood, Sweat, and Tears, calling them “the best thing to happen in rock and roll so far in 1968.” When Lou Adler and John Phillips tried organizing a second Monterey Pop Festival and were met by local opposition, Wenner put them on the cover of Rolling Stone and called their opponents a “vicious” and “ugly collection of voyeuristic ‘taxpayers.’ ” “They were going to the city council and the local swells to get a permit,” he said. “I met them at the airport and I was with them as they stepped off the Lear jet.” (The festival never happened, and Rolling Stone again turned on Adler, reporting that his accountant had embezzled $37,000 from the first festival. “[Wenner] was obsessed with the funds, and it went on for years,” said Adler. “Truly years, almost every time he mentioned Monterey, ‘Where’s the money?’ That’s how I always thought of him. ‘Where’s the money?’ He was definitely a pain in the ass.” Adler insisted that all the money went to charity.)
Wenner seemed preternaturally certain in all things but his own writing powers. His failure to become a novelist still haunted him (he continued to rewrite and edit versions of “Now These Days Are Gone”), and at first his writing style had the generic feel of a student term paper. When in doubt, Wenner resorted to hippie patois, starting his cover story in issue No. 2, “Tina Turner is an incredible chick.” When Otis Redding died in a plane crash in December 1967, Wenner asked Michael Lydon to write the obituary, but Lydon declined, saying Wenner needed to write it to establish his authority. “I said, no, Jann, you’ve got to do this,” he said. “He wasn’t confident in himself as a writer.” (“Otis was the Crown Prince of Soul,” wrote Wenner, “and now the Crown Prince is dead.”)
Wenner improvised as he went. When John Williams left town for the holidays, Wenner was left to lay out the year-end issue for 1967 by himself—prompting a panicked call to Linda Schindelheim’s boyfriend, Bob Kingsbury a forty-three-year-old sculptor. “We’re on deadline and I need you to help me put something together,” he told Kingsbury, who was skiing in Tahoe. A graduate of the Swedish State School of Arts, Crafts, and Design in Stockholm, class of 1950, Kingsbury was a middle-aged bohemian and gifted artist with no experience in newspapers but a few novel ideas about arranging text and images. “He asked me if I thought I could be an art director,” Kingsbury would later recount. “I went over to Ramparts one night to watch John Williams paste up ’til the wee hours of the morning. I watched him a couple of times. I figured it would just take me three days, every two weeks.”
Wenner knew so little, even the most obvious suggestions were revelations—like Gleason’s advice that he put an ad in Rolling Stone asking for record review submissions. It not only worked, it attracted writers who would become major figures of rock writing, like Leslie “Lester” Bangs, who sent in reviews from his mother’s house near San Diego, and Jerry Hopkins, the future biographer of Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison. Hopkins was a sometime publicist and head-shop owner who sold Rolling Stone in L.A. He sent Wenner a story on seeing the Doors at the Cheetah club in Santa Monica, and Wenner wrote him a check for $15. Soon after, Wenner showed up in L.A. wearing a suit and tie and asking to sleep on his couch while he went hustling for ad dollars from the record companies.
As advertising trickled in from Elektra and A&M, Wenner kept his paper glued together through Tom Sawyeresque exploitation. Kingsbury built his own drafting table and drawers for the lead type and was responsible for buying new desks and chairs every time an employee joined the newspaper. He also collected the reader mail and served as Wenner’s personal handyman. When Jann and Jane complained that their power had gone out at home, Kingsbury came over and “changed the lightbulb and the lights went on,” recalled Linda Kingsbury.
The Wenners now lived Rolling Stone twenty-four hours a day. They took the bus to Brannan Street in the afternoon and worked into the night, Wenner whacking away on an IBM Selectric, soliciting Dylan and Lennon for interviews and sending blue-sky letters to A&M and Columbia, trying to get distribution for Rolling Stone in record stores. Jane, in pigtails and overalls, tabulated the day’s subscriptions, then went home to idle around the apartment or go shopping for furniture. If they got a dozen subscriptions in a day, it was cause for celebration, the uncorking of a bottle of wine or the smoking of a joint. The Springsteens of the world began writing letters to the editor. “At first it would be six or seven or eight [letters],” said Bob Kingsbury. “Then ten, fifteen, twenty, and pretty soon there’s half a bag full of letters. And it just kept growing and growing. I couldn’t do it anymore; I had to have someone else take over.”
In April 1968, Wenner offered a weed dealer named Charlie Perry a job copyediting and managing the work flow at Rolling Stone. A Berkeley graduate, Perry was an eccentric drug adventurer, experimental cook, aspiring Arabic scholar, and former roommate of Augustus Owsley Stanley III’s who heard about Rolling Stone through Jerrold Greenberg, a poet and junkie who wrote for the paper. Perry knew Wenner’s byline from Ramparts, thinking this Jann person was “a pretty shrewd rock critic for a girl.” He took the job because he figured “John Lennon knew something