still figured it would probably be dead in six months like every other fly-by-night paper that popped up at the Psychedelic Shop in the Haight. Wenner managed not to pay him for several months, which was fine with Perry until his dope trade dried up and he announced he was taking a job at the zoo. Wenner agreed to give him $40 a week. He would stay for ten years.
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ON HIS FIRST TRIP to New York in 1968, Wenner slept on a couch in the West Twentieth Street apartment of Danny Fields, the A&R man for Elektra Records. Ironic and frank, Fields was the consummate scene maker and gossip of New York, one foot in the world of Andy Warhol, the other in teen pop magazines like Hullabaloo and Datebook. He followed with delight the young male quartets who pranced on stage and sang to the big beats. “Monks! Mark! Stones! Spoons!” went a typical headline on the cover of 16, where Fields regularly published interviews. Fields joined Elektra in 1967 as a publicist and, after discovering the MC5 and Iggy Pop on the same weekend, became the “house freak,” an after-hours talent scout. Most nights, Fields worked the back room at Max’s Kansas City, Mickey Ruskin’s nightclub, where rock and rollers began mingling with the Warhol crowd after Beatles manager Brian Epstein held a press conference there. Fields had hosted Pete Townshend of the Who in his apartment before Wenner showed up, plying him with drugs and groping him. “I enjoyed what he did, though I didn’t let him actually fuck me,” Townshend said in his 2012 memoir.
Fields was the Virgil to Wenner’s Dante on a grand tour of the New York underground, which teemed with drugs and sexual adventure, groupies and bohemians. In Fields’s orbit were a gaggle of the like-minded, including a beautiful blond photographer named Linda Eastman, daughter of an entertainment lawyer, who used her access to both photograph and pursue romantic tête-à-têtes with Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison. Eastman’s best friend was Lillian Roxon, an Australian rock writer who published the Rock Encyclopedia in 1969 and whom Rolling Stone would later call “the Dorothy Parker of Max’s Kansas City.” In May 1968, Wenner put Eastman’s portrait of Eric Clapton on the cover for an interview with Clapton that Wenner had conducted the previous summer—the first female photographer whose work appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. From there, Wenner would regularly visit her apartment on East Eighty-Third Street to go through her portfolio for images. “That was how I came to hear of Jann,” said Paul McCartney, whom Eastman met while on assignment in London for Rolling Stone and would marry in 1969, “as the sort of guy who was doing Rolling Stone and who picked photos from her little apartment.”
Fields also introduced Wenner to Gloria Stavers, the forty-one-year-old editor of 16 magazine, a former model who looked like Katharine Hepburn and commanded four million teenage readers in America. When Wenner sent her a copy of Rolling Stone, Stavers welcomed the magazine as a “soul-brother in the fourth estate” and urged her readers to send a quarter to Brannan Street for a copy of Rolling Stone. (The Wenners used the coins that poured in to buy groceries.) Stavers received Wenner like a squire from the groovy West Coast kingdom. “They were excited to meet me,” recalled Wenner. Over dinner with Fields, Stavers taught Wenner how to eat a lobster while wondering at his naïveté. As she would later recount to a friend, Wenner sat at her feet, looked around at the guests, and asked, “Is this a good party?”
Fields and Stavers taught Wenner some of the tricks of their trade. For one, Fields explained to him, he needed to treat the cover of his newspaper as the sales pitch—bold, eye-popping images of superstars were how magazines sold the wares. “I never, ever thought of that; it didn’t occur to me,” said Wenner. “If you’re hip about media, it’s obvious.”
Stavers also pressed on him the importance of sexing up photos of young rockers by unbuttoning the top button of their pants before photographing them. These were experienced starfuckers, groupies, admirers, and they recognized Wenner as a fellow traveler, attuned to the provocative pleasures of boy rockers. “That’s how you love the stars,” observed Art Garfunkel, a staple of Tiger Beat and 16 at the time, along with Paul Simon. “You have to get under the pedestal and look up their pants, to praise the height of the star.” (He called Wenner’s lust for celebrity “erotic slavery.”)
Wenner said he was not yet clued in to Fields’s homosexuality or the gay culture hiding in plain sight at Max’s. Instead, he chased whatever he could get. One night, he tried taking Linda Eastman home, but Lillian Roxon intervened. “Roxon was a nice girl, very witty, but dumpy looking,” said Wenner. “She didn’t want me to be with Linda, because Linda was hers.”
Wenner said they went back to Eastman’s apartment, but Roxon had skunked the mood. “Then, after failing to consummate what I thought was going to be a situation, we got along because she was a stone cold rock-and-roll fan,” Wenner said of Eastman.
Wenner returned from his New York sojourns with an expansive sense of victory. He wrote to Baron Wolman that “Rolling Stone is distributed on every fucking newsstand in New York. I saw every important person in the music business, and they were most eager to see the man from Rolling Stone.
“When you get home,” he said, “we’ll just have to sit down and flatter the shit out of ourselves.”
Afterward, Roxon wrote a short profile of Wenner for Eye, the hippie exploitation magazine published by Hearst and presided over by editorial director Helen Gurley Brown. In the article, Wenner told Roxon he was considering publishing naked pictures of rock stars. “I am giving the project serious consideration,” he told Roxon. “After all, rock and roll is inescapably tied to sex.”
Wenner wrote to Roxon to say he had received “nasty” letters about the profile, including one from a reader who asked, “What kind of man would publish pop stars in the nude?”
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BOB KINGSBURY, twice the age of his boss, described the twenty-two-year-old Jann Wenner as standing with hands on his hips, chest puffed out, athwart his kingdom like a tyrannical king. “I’d bring a layout and he’d look at it and throw it back at me and say, ‘Do it over,’ ” said Kingsbury. “Well, I spent a long time on it, you know. And so I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Because I said so.’ ”
“I was pushing fifty and he was pushing twenty-two,” he said. “These are all kids. Twenty-three-year-olds. And if you’ve ever worked with a bunch of twenty-three-year-olds, you’ll understand. But if you haven’t, it’s one of the most horrible—listen, every single one of them: ‘I’m an editor of Rolling Stone!’ ”
Wenner wrote long letters to Jon Landau and spent hours running up phone bills as they schemed and bragged about their newfound influence. (“What did Jon have to say?” Jane would ask Wenner after a marathon phone call. “Not much,” he’d reply.) Landau was educating young Wenner about music, a subject that Wenner, as big a fan as he was, knew very little about. He took him to see the Four Tops in Boston and inspired him to interview Booker T. and the MGs. “I never had been exposed to the rhythm and blues until Jon turned me on to all that,” he said. “I really learned at his knees. I was a San Francisco guy, just the basics.”
In turn, Wenner was dropping Landau’s name to recruit writers from rival publications, including Robert Christgau, a writer for Esquire who had cited Wenner in a feature on college dropouts shaping the rock world. In a May 1968 letter, Wenner ripped up a review Christgau submitted (for Judy in Disguise with Glasses, by John Fred and His Playboy Band), declaring himself the “EDITOR of Rolling Stone” and calling Christgau “Bobby Baby” as he attempted to school him on the finer points of rock reviewing. “The first page is all about Bob Christgau, Esquire reviewer, late of a college education, a man of renaissance tastes, elegant opinion, and high tone critic of ‘secular music,’ ” scoffed Wenner. “I mean, baby, who cares? And is it true anyway?”
To rub it in, he declared Jon Landau “smarter than anybody.” “Did you know he is majoring in medieavil [sic] history?” he asked. “You may think you don’t have to know anything about music, but you are wrong. I can’t tell you why. That’s how wrong you are.”
In a concluding twist, he granted that Christgau