Review and Notes: Sticky Fingers, by Joe Hagan
Sticky Fingers: Review
“Sticky Fingers” is the biography of Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone magazine. Wenner was complicated, ambitious, and tumultuous, and so is this 520-page book.
He wrestled with many demons—mostly self-inflicted—and yet still managed to create one of the most culturally impactful media entities of the 20th century, building friendships and infuriating the biggest names in the music industry.
As a sub-plot, I was fascinated by the story of the Altamont Speedway Free Festival, a disastrous event which served as a turning point for the social movement of the 1960s and Rolling Stone Magazine itself.
On December 6, 1969, 300,000 people attended the free event, featuring acts like Santana and Jefferson Airplane. The Rolling Stones, spearheading the event as a response to criticism over high ticket prices, were the headline act.
A nice idea—which ended in chaos, violence, and four deaths.
Attendee Meredith Hunter was murdered near the stage by the Hell’s Angels while The Stones played.
The concert shattered the illusion of the 60’s counter-culture dream. It also marked the beginning of Rolling Stone Magazine as a true journalistic entity. The magazine, despite its relationships with the music industry and The Stones themselves, covered the event with eloquence and brutal honesty:
The 300,000 anonymous bodies huddled together on the little dirt hills were indeed an instant city — a decaying urban slum complete with its own air pollution. By the time the Stones finally came on, dozens of garbage fires had been set all over the place. Flickering silhouettes of people trying to find warmth around the blazing trash reminded one of the medieval paintings of tortured souls in the Dance of Death. The stench of the smoke from tens of thousands of potato chip packages and half-eaten sandwiches brought vomiting to many. It was in this atmosphere that Mick sang his song about how groovy it is to be Satan. Never has it been sung in a more appropriate setting.
Rolling Stone’s online archive of its Altamont coverage is fascinating, and so is Sticky Fingers.
Kindle notes from Sticky Fingers
I knew lots of people but I had no friends. I slept with girls but I loved no one. I had invitations to deb parties. That seemed the most important thing. I was social, I knew debutantes, and I knew rich people. I had worked so hard, I liked so many people I couldn’t stand.
More than fifty thousand people showed up in Monterey to see the Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas from Los Angeles; Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel from New York; the Who and the Jimi Hendrix Experience from London. Local favorites the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane—along with Janis Joplin, whom Ralph Gleason had helped book, and the Steve Miller Blues Band, for whom Wenner advocated—played alongside Otis Redding from Memphis and the Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar.
Wenner continued to be unimpressed with Paul Simon, opining that his “primary talent is on the guitar and composing melodies for that instrument; he is not a lyricist.”
Mike Bloomfield told the crowd, according to a glowing press release Wenner helped draft with Derek Taylor, “This is our generation, we’re all here together, to dig ourselves.”
“Forms and rhythms in music are never changed without producing changes in the most important political forms and ways.”
After Bob Dylan and the Beatles, he wrote, the record business “took another look at the music of the ponytail and chewing gum set, as Mitch Miller once called the teenage market, and realized there was one helluva lot of bread to be made there.”
He titled the article “Like a Rolling Stone.” Rolling Stone! The nature of youth, gathering no moss.
That’s the Jann I first knew in San Francisco, always hunched over because the issues are too compelling, and too much fun, and there is stuff to be done.”
With the name, the vision snapped into focus: Rolling Stone, the first mainstream paper for the rock-and-roll generation.
The magazine was carefully positioned to be accessible to the American mainstream. “We didn’t want to be a part of that hippie way of life,” said Wenner. “We didn’t want to be communal. We didn’t want to have a hippie design. Our values were more traditional reporting. We wanted to be recognized by the establishment. Part of it was our own mission; part of it was what we were looking for, music. We wanted the music to be taken seriously. We wanted to be heard, we wanted the music to be heard, we wanted to change things.”
But what did a twenty-year-old Berkeley dropout know about starting a business? Not much. Jane’s sister, Linda, recalled seeing business books piled in Wenner’s room on Potrero Hill that summer. But mainly he turned to Ralph Gleason, whose Rolodex overflowed with names of lawyers and press agents, record executives and music writers. Wise in the ways of newspapers, Gleason would point his finger and Wenner would go running: Here’s a law firm who can help you incorporate. Here’s a writer from the Melody Maker in London. What about my friend in L.A.? He can write. Here’s a record agent at A&M and a publicist at Columbia. Maybe this guy at Vanguard can help you get a few ads.
The pages of Rolling Stone shaped Springsteen’s idea of what a rock-and-roll star did, how to behave.
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.
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.
Local heroes Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs took assignments to write stories and reviews for Rolling Stone
Wenner seemed preternaturally certain in all things but his own writing powers. His failure to become a novelist still haunted him
“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.”)
He took the job because he figured “John Lennon knew something about LSD that he isn’t putting in his songs and I thought if I met him I could ask him.”
Townshend was trying to reposition the Who in the post-Monterey rock scene, because the mod incarnation of the band had been going out of vogue. He used Wenner as a kind of therapist and adviser—all on the record. “It was a tricky time for me, and I was surprised that Jann seemed to understand exactly where the Who would fit and would—if we were successful—prevail in a new self-created order,” said Townshend. “I described my plan to complete Tommy, at that time a project around two-thirds completed.”
Townshend waxed philosophic on the power of rock and roll to upend society—and waxed and waxed and waxed. This would become a hallmark of Wenner’s interview style, evincing naïveté to draw a subject out, and it often yielded results.
What made Rolling Stone unique, Wenner told a Time reporter, was that it was authentic. “We never thought of filling a market,” he said, “and we never created Rolling Stone toward anyone in particular.”
Davis put Rolling Stone into record stores through Columbia’s distribution system, which now accounted for 15 percent of the newspaper’s single-copy sales.
Orange highlight | Location: 2,127
When Time magazine tried to beat Rolling Stone with a groupies feature of its own, Wenner borrowed a play from the old carnival barker Warren Hinckle: He preempted Time with a full-page ad in The New York Times, asking, “When we tell what a Groupie is, will you really understand? This is the story only Rolling Stone can tell, because we are the musicians, we are the music, we are writing about ourselves.”
Scaggs had just finished recording his solo album in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with Allman on slide guitar and a rookie record producer in the booth: Jann Wenner. By this time, the Wenners had become close friends with Scaggs, the laconic bluesman from Plano, Texas, and his new girlfriend, a stylish and beautiful socialite named Carmella Storniola
After Scaggs’s acrimonious split with Steve Miller, and Carmella’s breakup with Dan Hicks (of the Hot Licks), the couple had moved next door to the Wenners and befriended Jane.
After the recording, Boz and Carmella moved to Macon, Georgia, to hang out with Walden and the Allmans. When the Wenners showed up for a visit, Scaggs’s drinking was out of control, and they went on a terrifying drive down a country road until Jane Wenner insisted Carmella drive.
Wenner’s arrogance nearly tanked Scaggs’s career. “That might have been why Jann and I fell out in the end,” he said. “He should never have risked Scaggs’s career by presuming to produce.”
If Rolling Stone was a professional newspaper about rock and roll, the moment of truth was nigh. What did Jann Wenner really stand for? Was he a groupie or a fucking journalist? He told him to cover the Altamont disaster “like it was World War II.” The following week, Wenner, according to Greil Marcus, sat before his editors over lunch and declared, “We’re gonna cover this story from top to bottom, and we’re going to lay the blame.”
“Altamont,” said the story, “was the product of a diabolical egotism, high ineptitude, money manipulation, and, at base, a fundamental lack of concern for humanity.” Wenner had never betrayed his heroes quite like this before. He had slammed a record or two, angered a few record executives, made Eric Clapton faint. But through an alchemical mix of petty business grievance and self-preservation, Jann Wenner nailed Mick Jagger’s hide to the wall with vindictive aplomb. For a generation of readers, the story of Altamont was the one printed in Rolling Stone, seared into history like a cattle brand held in Jann Wenner’s grip.
Jeffrey Steinberg, a stoner who got rich selling reprints of the 1922 Sears, Roebuck Catalog—but
“Charles Manson: The Incredible Story of the Most Dangerous Man Alive” earned Rolling Stone a National Magazine Award for the year 1970.
If Jann Wenner had only one great idea, it was an idea with staying power: that the 1960s—“the Sixties”—was a mythic time that would be endlessly glorified and fetishized by his generation in records and books, TV shows and films, T-shirts and posters, for years to come, for ever and ever, amen.
The 1960s, with all its passion and idealism, was, at its sacred core, a business. Mick Jagger understood. So did Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead.
a story line gelled in the underground press: Jann Wenner was the man who sold out the revolution for dirty record money. “Kent State and Cambodia have concerned more of us, and in a more vital way, than the latest news on Paul McCartney,” Burks said in 1970. “What’s going to happen now, I think, is the trivialization of Rolling Stone—and that just makes me very sad.”
By the end of 1970, Wenner had all the ingredients for a new era of Rolling Stone: the financial backing of the American record industry; two reel-to-reel tapes of John Lennon spilling his guts about the Beatles; two budding superstars in photographer Annie Leibovitz and writer Hunter S. Thompson; a new book publishing division called Straight Arrow Books, which would launch with The Connoisseur’s Handbook of Marijuana; and last—and far from least—a new investor on the hook, Max Palevsky, chairman of the Xerox Corporation, a multimillionaire prepared to dump hundreds of thousands of dollars into Rolling Stone in 1971.
“We were a full forum for John and Yoko,” he said. “Anything they said, we printed.”
Throughout the early years of Rolling Stone, he was happy to run Lennon’s unedited missives on macrobiotics and rock festival controversies, and he worked hand in glove with Derek Taylor to make Apple Records a de facto bureau for Rolling Stone, publishing the PR man’s own essay about the Beatles, who in turn gave Rolling Stone intimate previews of Beatles albums and supplied Wenner with advertising dollars. (Later, a Rolling Stone editor learned that Beatles manager Allen Klein had “laundered and pre-digested” much of what Lennon sent to Wenner’s paper, editing him for libel.) Rolling Stone would become a convenient partner for John and Yoko to create their own narrative—and a formula for Wenner’s success.
THE “LENNON REMEMBERS” INTERVIEW buoyed Rolling Stone’s national presence like nothing before it. Archconservative William F. Buckley devoted a newspaper column to it, dubbing the interview “How I Wrecked My Own Life, and Can Help Wreck Yours,” describing Rolling Stone as “endless copy about other rock groups, classified advertising for abortion seekers, and home-growing advice for marijuana users, plus a great deal that is inscrutable except to high-honor students in the sub-culture.”
Thompson’s rap was in a lingo neither Wenner nor his accompanying editor, John Lombardi, could quite understand: “Fun Hogs.” “Greed Heads.” “Fat City.” “Pigfuckers.” “He was inventing vocabulary,” recalled Lombardi in an interview with Peter Whitmer in 1990. “You could see the seeds of the writing style.”
Wenner came across Thompson’s first book of journalism, Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs
Somewhere across the desert, Hunter Thompson was rumbling toward them in a rented Cadillac.
They set up a canister of nitrous oxide by the pool and sucked the gas from a clear tube as they swam by.
That night, Thompson tried the confrontational approach to disarming police that he described in Fear and Loathing, performing a stunt he claimed never to be able to replicate: Asking the officer whether an intoxicated man could do this, he flipped his sunglasses off the back of his head and quickly caught them behind his back. “That should count for something, shouldn’t it?” he said. Leibovitz snapped a photo and the cop let them go. The future of Wenner’s newspaper was saved in a single stroke.
“It was really a survival thing; you just get placed in these places,” she said, “and the volume of what I witnessed and saw and photographed began to create me.”
Pat Caddell, a polling wunderkind from Harvard who became part of Rolling Stone’s druggie entourage and published a long and wonky election essay in the newspaper.
Wenner was, in effect, reframing rock and roll as a celebrity culture like any before it. It wasn’t a movement, or a youth culture anymore, let alone a revolution. This was the age of personalities, just as the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s had portended. Mainstream magazines like Time and Newsweek ran small sections called “Transition” and “Newsmakers” to highlight the famous and important, but boldfaced names were now the medium of rock and roll and thus the message of Rolling Stone.
The youth movement in the 1960s seemed to be essentially unitary, but as it shattered, its fragments proved to be even more journalistically interesting, and Rolling Stone was perfectly positioned to sweep them up.
As Wenner told a reporter in 1971, “There is no such thing as objectivity. It does not exist. Nobody is objective. No perceived event is objective, and any serious editor or writer will recognize that.”
In this new space, a minor press baron from San Francisco could casually float into high society with the drug dealers and the rough trade. “Jann, in a sense, was very lucky,” said Dotson Rader. “It was in the ’70s when the social categories collapsed. In the ’70s, you’d go to a party at Leonard Bernstein’s at the Dakota and you would see socialites, some of the Kennedys; you’d see the crème de la crème of New York society. And then you’d see musicians, artists, and then you’d see drug dealers and everybody, perfectly well mannered, but the social mix would’ve been unthinkable twenty years before. And suddenly, I think because the rich were frightened and were thinking, ‘We better let the barbarians in before they tear the house down,’ the walls came down. Forced tolerance is what it was. It also made it possible for Jann to move as quickly as he did.”
“The only thing that matters in life is sex,” declared Prince Egon, who when asked if he was a bisexual laughed and said, “Bisexual? That is funny! Hahaha. You talk like that is rare. Do you know any man our age, any man under thirty, do you know one who has not slept with a boy? No, you know none. There are none.”
earlier years.” The reality was that Thompson was not able to return to those productive earlier times.
As the Rolling Stone cover line put it, “There’s Gold in the Middle of the Road.” The band was Loggins and Messina.
Consequently, the Carpenters, John Denver, Carly Simon, Donny Osmond, and even actor Peter Falk, star of NBC’s Columbo, all made the cover of Rolling Stone. “That’s the period where Rolling Stone really does turn into a promotional vehicle,” said Greil Marcus. “Whether
said critic Dave Marsh, who first wrote to Wenner in 1970 asking why he hated groups from Michigan
As a rule, Rolling Stone critics hated Led Zeppelin.
Annie and Mick had become lovers, an affair that began in Montauk and allegedly inspired the song “Memory Motel”
The T.A.M.I. Show, in which the Stones were famously blown off the stage by the kinetic James Brown.
In New York, Wenner was exploring his sexuality more openly than in the past, socializing with Steve Rubell, the co-owner of Studio 54, and sexually ambiguous media executives like Geffen and Barry Diller, not to mention grade school classmate and gay icon Liza Minnelli.
The ticket stubs told the story: Rolling Stone Magazine vs. The Eagles, the Sunday afternoon of May 7, 1978. It was a supernova of 1970s spectacle, a “grudge match” of slow-pitch softball between the biggest rock-and-roll magazine and the biggest-selling rock-and-roll act, played out before five thousand spectators at Dedeaux Field at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Jimmy Buffett, slated to be the umpire until he broke his leg in a previous game, followed the action via CB radio.
Don Henley and Glenn Frey of the Eagles hated Rolling Stone. The music editor, Peter Herbst, who started in 1977, had described their live act as a bunch of “formless blobs” onstage who “flaunt no athletic grace—if anything, they loiter.”
Chuck Young wrote up a snarky item in Random Notes making fun of the band’s losses in intramural softball against a team led by Jimmy Buffett. Glenn Frey, whose competitive streak was legend, wrote in to correct the record and challenge Rolling Stone to a game: “Anytime you pencil-pushing desk jockeys want to put on your spikes, we’ll kick your ass, too.”
There was a brief moment of hope that Hunter Thompson, the “sports editor” who inspired the team’s name, might bring much-needed star power to their side, but the night before the game a group of staffers went to see him in a luxury hotel in L.A. and watched him snort a pile of cocaine while telling his life story to the producers of a new film, Where the Buffalo Roam, starring Bill Murray as Hunter Thompson.
Crowe counted his Mitchell interview among the best he ever did for Rolling Stone. It was also one of his last before he left for a successful career in Hollywood, later directing Almost Famous, the nostalgic 2000 film based on his early life at Rolling Stone, in which he cast Jann Wenner in a walk-on part.
(He wanted Carl Bernstein to write it, but Herbst assigned it to the new editor of Random Notes, Kurt Loder.)
him by supporting his battle with the Nixon administration, which tried and failed to deport Lennon for fomenting political disorder.
Lennon was in his “Lost Weekend” period, carousing with songwriter Harry Nilsson and famously getting evicted from the Troubadour for heckling the Smothers Brothers. He showed up at an Ann Peebles
concert with a sanitary napkin taped to his forehead—an incident reported in Rolling Stone in February 1974:
Carson—but Rolling Stone was now a business formula, an uneasy détente between Wenner and his editorial staff rather than the cult of hip that it used to be in San Francisco. “To me, the whole scene felt unhappy,” said Annie Leibovitz. “It wasn’t exploratory any longer. I think everyone was living off of what Rolling Stone meant and was. Again, looking back at it, it’s growing up. I don’t know if Rolling Stone survived that move, on some level.”
In 1988, a writer named Albert Goldman published a massive biography called The Lives of John Lennon, which chipped away at the hagiography surrounding the Beatle to recast him as a closeted homosexual who was filled with rage and might have once beaten a man to death in Hamburg in the early 1960s.
The death of John Lennon was the end of the Beatles, but it was the beginning of Jann Wenner as keeper of the rock-and-roll myth. The Rolling Stone version of history—in biweekly issues and Rolling Stone–branded picture books, anthologies, and televised anniversary specials—was carefully shaped by Jann Wenner. He was the fame maker but also the flame keeper. The success and power of Rolling Stone made him the de facto architect of rock’s cosmology, but it was his attention to the legends that made him the indispensable man.
Commercials as art forms—it was an ingenious stroke, and it would become a revolution not only in marketing but in music fandom.
Furstenberg told him to give it up. “She took me aside,” recalled Wenner, “and she said, ‘Why are you doing this? There are fifty-five people around here who can produce movies; there’s only one person who can do Rolling Stone. Do that. Stay with that.’ ”
On March 5, 1982, John Belushi’s naked body was discovered in a room of the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, dead from an overdose of heroin and cocaine. The night before, he had been partying with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams until three in the morning. According to the female drug partner who was with him, his last words were “Just don’t leave me alone.” She left shortly thereafter.
And once a couple of Beatles and Bob Dylan appeared with the Rolling Stones, there was no rock or pop star who did not want to be installed in that historic continuum. This was a public honor but also a media spectacle that could revive careers, kick up record sales, spark reissues (on the new format enlivening the coffers of the music companies, the CD), and burnish the reputation of forgotten artists like the Rascals or the Dave Clark Five. It would also stoke old rivalries, as when Mike Love of the Beach Boys ranted, during his acceptance speech, that Mick Jagger was “too chickenshit” to get onstage with him.
“The richer Jann got, the more he thought he was smarter than everyone else, he was better than everyone.
“Jann works through his shame, but he does it publicly and through the pages of Rolling Stone and Us Weekly,” said Gary Armstrong, the onetime chief marketing officer for Wenner Media and a gay man in whom Wenner confided. “Every really good issue is a therapy session.”
He related to the Playboy publisher. Now, there was a man who stamped the world with his personal vision of life. An individualist. A maverick. A lucky guy. “He lived it,” said Wenner. “He lived it.”