Gathering all the moss he could grab
Andrew Clifford
THE ROLLING STONE STORY by Robert Draper
Mainstream Publishing, f9.99, pp. 389
The story of Rolling Stone magazine, America's most popular and in many ways most influential rock journal, is really the story of its editor Jann Wenner — Jann Wenner, who as a student deflowered his debutante girlfriend, and then had her to dinner with the boys and used the bed- spread upon which she had lost her virgin- ity as a tablecloth, with the bloodstain underneath her plate. Jann Wenner, who explained his disloyal, frantic megalo- maniacal personality by recalling how his separating parents had fought for custody of him when he was a teenager. That is, fought not to have him. Jann Wenner, the college journalist whose American charm and boy-wonder enthusiasm earned him the ironic nickname 'Citizen Wenner'. That's Jann.
And Rolling Stone. For despite its championing of the youth movement, counterculture, drugs and rock 'n' roll, Rolling Stone was Wenner's and Wenner was in many ways the worst kind of capitalist — nasty, brutish and, if not short, then fat (as his magazine got bigger, so did Jann). The magazine was set up in 1957 with $7,500, when Wenner, aged 21, real- ised that there was a gap in the market for a little San Francisco paper to tell everyone about Haight-Ashbury, Jefferson Air- plane, Captain Beefheart and the whole West Coast music scene. By 1989, Rolling Stone's parent company was worth $250 million. Wenner had an eye not only for good writers and good stories (he turned the corner for his magazine by getting an exclusive interview with John Lennon, and nude photos of John and Yoko from their banned record cover for `Virgins'), but, more importantly, a very good head for business. Rolling Stone was started up at a time when it was possible to see a 'market' — when it was becoming clear what the Sixties 'meant'. Dylan, the Stones and the Beatles had already led the way and Wenner's rock journalists were merely following.
But it was in the Seventies that the magazine, moving away from straight music writing, started to do something new — with its coverage of popular and un- popular culture. In 1970 Wenner assigned two journalists to write about a much- maligned rebel and counter-cultural hippy named Charles Manson, in prison awaiting trial, accused of organising the mass mur- der of, amongst others, the film star Sharon Tate (Roman Polanski's wife), and her friends. Manson had agreed to a two-hour interview with Rolling Stone to publicise his poor-selling album, and Wen- ner's idea was to have a cover story with the banner headline: 'This Man is Inno- cent'. Instead, after the interview, Wen- ner went with the headline 'The Incredible Story of the Most Dangerous Man Alive' — Manson had turned out, of course, to be a rebel without his marbles. The story Rolling Stone ran about Manson told the tale not only of a man but also a movement and a time gone wrong.
It is misguided to think that one char- ismatic psychopath (Manson, not Wenner) signals the death of the values of an era but as Patty Hearst, Karen Silkwood and the discovery of fear and loathing in Las Vegas showed, America was entering a period of neurotic but intelligent doubt. Rolling Stone, a magazine of the not-quite- first-generation of rock and rollers, with an editorial staff whose best writers were cultural politicians rather than simple music nuts, led that movement in a way that the magazine could never have led the Sixties. All the above named stories were covered first or best by Rolling Stone, and that is a serious and easily overlooked legacy.
Rolling Stone's fall from an interesting (though not as interesting as Draper be- lieves) magazine in the Sixties and particu- larly in the early Seventies, to the slick, mainstream operation it is today is told neatly and amusingly, and not mourned too loudly or too long. Nevertheless, Jann Wenner's jokey original motive for starting up the magazine — so that he could meet Mick Jagger — becomes so much the moral epitaph for the magazine that it is hard not to feel revolted not only by the magazine's current incarnation, but in particular by Wenner's specially thorough method of selling out to the system. Wenner hasn't just met Jagger. He's swum with him. He's had barbecues with him. He's voted for Reagan, twice. And — the absolute bot- tom line below which, when it first started up, Rolling Stone would never sink — his magazine now carries ads for military recruitment.
A resigned shrug seems to accompany much of this story, superbly told by Draper — as though the loss of the magazine's editorial depth was inevitable. But this resignation seems to change to anger when he discusses the demise of the fierce new journalism Rolling Stone pioneered in the early Seventies, as though, unlike the naivety of the Sixties, good journalism did not inevitably need to be sacrificed for big bucks, and MTV. If the Sixties revolution was a significant but well-financed holiday, the early Seventies offered something more difficult, substantial and, today, more neglected, analysis, cultural self- reflection, national self-parody.
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