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Nonfiction Views: Like a Rolling Stone, a memoir by Jann Wenner [1]

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Date: 2022-09-13

No exaggeration: Rolling Stone played a huge role in making me the liberal I am today. My family was conservative Republican. Not crazy wingnuts, though we did have an aunt who was a John Bircher, but solidly Republican enough to roll their eyes at my solidly Democratic paternal grandmother. In my junior year of high school, I actually defended Nixon’s Vietnam policy in a US Government class debate. Watching the Watergate hearings on television started to turn the tide for me, but still, after wrestling with the decision, I pulled the lever in my first presidential election—in 1976—for Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter, something I recall with great embarrassment today.

But that autumn of 1976 is also when, at age 21, I moved out of my parent’s suburban home into my own apartment in a mixed neighborhood adjacent to downtown Philadelphia. At some point, an issue of Rolling Stone caught my eye on the newsstand. I wasn’t particularly into music at the time, and I can’t recall what teaser on the cover first attracted me, but I know it opened up a new world of politics, culture and writing for me. Rolling Stone in that era—the covers in the picture above are from 1977-1980—changed my life. I also started reading the Village Voice, The Nation, and more. But truly, it was Rolling Stone that first saved my life.

And so, reading Jann Wenner’s memoir, Like a Rolling Stone, published today, has been a pleasure. The book begins with a bit of defiance and a bit of melancholy. The defiance is in the brief A Note to the Reader, in which Wenner writes:

The battle about the legacy of the sixties continues, known today as culture wars. From my first days at college, it seemed we were on trial for generational crimes, and that trial has never ceased.

The melancholy comes in the equally brief prologue, as Wenner surveys the vacated Rolling Stone offices in May of 2019, after having sold controlling interest in the magazine. But then, it’s off to memory lane.

This is a memoir, after all, so Wenner devotes a handful of chapters to an entertaining run through his childhood and early adulthood, where we learn of his boarding school days, his early recklessness, turn to radical politics and the awakening provided by drugs. But the bulk of the book is made up of dozens of vignettes from the Rolling Stone years, most just a few pages long.

Yes, the book is a bit self-indulgent at times, with the whiff of baby boomerism wafting like marijuana smoke throughout the narrative: the idealism, the youthfulness, the self-assurance, the gratification and indulgence, but for me it is part of the charm of the book, never overbearing, but always illustrative of Wenner’s life, his (and my) generation, and the history of the past sixty years.

But for the most part, it is a thoroughly enjoyable ride through the music and politics from 1967, when he founded the magazine, until now. You read about the flak he got for criticizing the Yippie Party of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, informing his readers that all the rock bands they were promising would show up in Chicago for the 1968 Democratic Convention had not, in fact agreed to come. You read about the scandalized reaction to the magazine’s famous photograph photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono naked, and to their profile of the pair of groupies who called themselves the Plaster Casters, two young women who coaxed rock stars to arousal and then made plaster casts of the result. They were photographed in an early issue with the cast made of Jimi Hendrix. (Note that the last surviving Plaster Caster, Cynthia Albritton, passed away last April, but not before donating the Hendrix cast to the Icelandic Phallological Museum in Reykjavik.)

You’ll read about listening to Mick Jagger fine-tune Sympathy for the Devil, sit in on an interview with Bob Dylan after he’d been in seclusion for years after a motorcycle accident (“Do you think you’ve played any role in the change of popular music over the past four years?” “I hope not.”), and you’ll meet Michael Jackson, who agreed to an interview if they could do it at night with just the light of candles and a fireplace, then backed out, then made it up by inviting Wenner to a wedding whose attendees ranged from Nancy Reagan to Merv Griffin.

You’ll get in-depth looks at some of the great writers who have graced the magazine, like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, the great music critics like Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs, and the photographers like Annie Leibowitz. And you’ll be taken back to Altamont, to the shooting of John Lennon, to the Patty Hearst saga, and so much more.

With chapter names like John Lennon and Hunter Thompson Drop By, Truman and Andy, Paul Bowles and Uncle Earl, John Belushi Incoming, Christmases With Jackie, Bill Clinton and the Three Stooges, you know you’ll be treated to some good stories.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/13/2122102/-Nonfiction-Views-September-13th-2022

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