Jann Wenner didn’t necessarily start out to make history. The Marin County–raised UC Berkeley dropout’s early career included stints as an NBC stringer covering the Free Speech Movement from the steps of Sproul Hall and Barry Goldwater’s 1964 nomination at the Cow Palace.
In his new memoir, Like a Rolling Stone — featuring a cover shot by Annie Leibovitz, whose career he famously helped launch — he recalls freelancing an early piece to San Francisco magazine on reefer madness among the bright young things of the City’s smart set, which earned him a rebuke from San Francisco Chronicle society writer Frances Moffat.
An early job working for Warren Hinckle at the Sunday Ramparts newspaper, a spin-off of the muckraking political magazine, ended when it ran into financial difficulties, but not before two defining moments in Wenner’s life: Jann met his wife, then Jane Schindelheim, who was working the reception desk, and his blossoming friendship with Chronicle jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason turned into a creative partnership. Gleason had previously recommended him for the Ramparts gig; when it folded, they both agreed that “it was time for Plan B, a rock and roll magazine,” Wenner writes.
“We created Rolling Stone in Ralph’s living room, sitting in his green, cracked-leather armchairs” in his Berkeley home, Wenner recalls in his memoir, including how he and Gleason reached out to friends and family to fund the publication with a grand total of $7,500. The first issue featured John Lennon on the cover.
Glory days followed, launching the career of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson; serializing Tom Wolfe’s debut novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities; assigning Truman Capote (disastrously) to cover a Rolling Stones tour; and getting up close and personal with everyone from Lennon and Yoko Ono to Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Bono and too many others to mention. He burned some bridges along the way, alienating Bay Area staffers upset about his decision to move the magazine’s headquarters to New York, closer to the media action, in 1977. What motivated the 75-year-old press baron — who sold off Rolling Stone in 2017 after resisting corporate overtures for decades, though his son, Gus Wenner, remains chief executive officer — to write a memoir now?
The pioneering magazine founder's new memoir from Little, Brown and Company published in September.
“If you’ve accomplished as much as I’ve had the luck, and the opportunity, to do, it feels good to put forth a record of achievement and, more importantly, offer a close look at what our generation wanted to be, and still is, about,” he tells me.
The writing came about in the aftermath of serious health challenges, including back and heart surgeries, but Wenner says the COVID era allowed him “the opportunity and time to write. To find the right words, you have to really bring yourself back to situations to recall them as vividly as possible.”
One of the more difficult personal moments was finally coming out as gay — his long-term partner, Matt Nye, fetches coffee for Wenner as we speak — not just for family reasons but given the macho rock-and-roll mystique. But Wenner says: “I never felt the gay rights thing was necessarily the crusade of Rolling Stone, which was more about drugs and politics. We did cover [drag performers] The Cockettes, who were a wonderful San Francisco cutting-edge phenomenon, though. I didn’t put it in the book, but I produced some demo recordings with [disco fave] Sylvester. But this was just after I’d produced Boz Scaggs’ first album. I thought, ‘I can’t be a record producer and run Rolling Stone — it’s got to be one or the other.’”
Wenner eschews the opportunity to settle scores with those still upset about his sometimes high-handed management style. “For many people, Rolling Stone was the peak experience of their lives,” he says. “If you felt that you somehow got discarded along the way, then there were a lot of sour grapes. I didn’t feel like refuting it, or wanting to make anyone feel worse.”
What’s the secret of the magazine’s success, when so many other publications of its era have come and gone?
“I think it was the understanding that rock and roll was the bond — not leftist politics,” he says. “Our generation was more wrapped up in, and taking cues from, Bob Dylan than Abbie Hoffman. Abbie could get a lot of press, but people were listening to, and getting their ideas about things from, the Stones and the Beatles. That eluded both the lefties and the mainstream press, who missed the truly subversive and compelling nature of the art. And then there was just timing, the fortuitousness and luck of being in San Francisco when all of this started to become so apparent.”
