Before he would famously go on to chronicle the rock ‘n’ roll generation as the founder of Rolling Stone magazine, a 10-year-old Jann Wenner got his start in publishing with the Weekly Trumpet, a ditto-copied mini mag full of news about his San Rafael neighborhood, editorials about politics and postal rates, jokes for kids and gossip picked up from his schoolmates, once including a scandalous item about someone’s parents talking about divorce.
With the exception of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, “it would be all the things that I went on to do,” the 76-year-old erstwhile enfant terrible of publishing says via FaceTime from his beachside home in Montauk, an exclusive enclave in the Hamptons populated by celebrities like Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Jerry Seinfeld and Paul McCartney, who once rode over to the Wenners for a visit on his horse.
In his new memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone” (592 pages, Little, Brown and Co., $35), Wenner devotes the opening chapter to his heretofore little-known Marin County roots. The hefty tome is his repudiation of New Yorker writer Joe Hagan’s exhaustively researched and ultimately unflattering portrait of him, “Sticky Fingers,” published five years ago.
Even though Wenner handpicked Hagan and gave him access to his archives and contacts, he ultimately hated Hagan’s book, denouncing it as “deeply flawed and tawdry.”
Winner returns to the Bay Area next week to discuss his book at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club and at Dominican University of California in San Rafael.
In 1951, Wenner’s parents, transplanted secular Jews from New York, moved their young family (he was 5 years old) from San Francisco into a rambling ranch house with a pool that they built on five acres in the Los Ranchitos development, on the west side of Highway 101 across from Santa Venetia, in then-rural San Rafael. His father gave the woody lane they lived on what would now be considered a quintessential Marin County street name: Rainbow Road.
This was the Beaver Cleaver 1950s, the conformist decade before the hippie migration to Marin in the late ‘60s and ‘70s and long before the county would evolve into one of the wealthiest — and grayest — in the country.
“I don’t think it’s the kind of place that people really remember,” says Wenner of the Marin of that era. “There was no Terra Linda. San Rafael was this little, tiny town, this beautiful suburban place.”
In “Like a Rolling Stone,” he describes himself as “a pudgy kid with freckles, a cowlick, a toothy smile, big ears and blue eyes,” and paints an idyllic picture of his sylvan Marin childhood: sliding down grassy hillsides on sheets of cardboard with his sisters, splashing in a creek, flattening pennies on railroad tracks and going every summer to Camp Lagunitas, where, coincidentally, the Grateful Dead would encamp briefly when they were still developing their sound in 1966.
Like so many kids of his generation, he got turned on to rock ‘n’ roll by Elvis, knocked out by “Heartbreak Hotel.” His first records were Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” and the sexually suggestive “Party Doll” by Buddy Knox. In the book, he quotes the song’s line “come along with me when I’m feeling wild,” admitting that as a kid he didn’t know what that meant, but that it sounded “exciting and dangerous.”
“You got to dance and jump around at Santa Venetia school,” he remembers. “As a young person, you’re so spastic and full of all that juice. It (the music) kind of went through you.”
‘Problem child’
His parents, Ed and Sim, who had done well for themselves as the owners of a baby formula company, were active in Marin’s Democratic Party and were among the founders of Marin Country Day School, which his two sisters attended. Because he was older, Wenner went instead to what is now Venetia Valley Elementary School, where he continued his budding journalism ambitions, working on the school paper, the Santa Venetia Informer.
Kicked out of a couple of private schools in San Francisco, he was a self-described “problem child” whose own father called him “a pain in the ass.”
“I was rebellious and wouldn’t take anybody telling me what to do,” he says. “I had a smart mouth, you know.”
As cocky and smart as he was, he had a tough time making friends and fitting in with the other kids, who were mostly from working-class families who lived in Rafael Meadows, a housing tract on the wrong side of the tracks.
“I felt like a stranger at Santa Venetia on all kinds of levels,” he recalls. “On an intellectual level, my parents were well-read New Yorkers, very liberal. But we were in a very blue-collar neighborhood. I went to school with all blue-collar kids. One of my best friends’ dad was a fireman, another was a San Quentin inmate. I was somewhere on a different planet.”
When his parents split up and eventually divorced, his free-spirited mother moved into an Eichler home nearby and his father remarried and settled in Newport Beach.
Twelve-year-old Wenner was sent to a tony boarding school, Chadwick, in Southern California, where his classmates included Liza Minnelli and the sons and daughters of movie stars and families of wealth and status. These were his people and this was his planet, the foreshadowing of the affinity he would later feel at Rolling Stone for the rock stars and music moguls who would become his friends and colleagues.
“We were uprooted from Rainbow Road,” he says. “I was a kid who was away, living at home during the summers. It (Marin) wasn’t my home anymore. That was the end of that childhood.”
A few years ago, he returned to Rainbow Road one last time on a trip to scatter his mother’s ashes.
Drugs and rock
Wenner was a student at the University of California, Berkeley when LSD and music, as he writes in his book, “took over my life.” One of his columns in the Daily Californian was a 3,000-word essay, “The Future of Psychedelics.” He was grooving to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Byrds and the Mamas and Papas, and he was a regular at the ballroom concerts promoted by Bill Graham and the Family Dog’s Chet Helms. He remembers getting stoned on Kool-Aid laced with LSD at Ken Kesey’s second Acid Test, tripping to the music of a loud house band.
“They looked like rough characters,” he writes. “When they stopped, I asked the bass player who they were. He whispered in my ear, from one head full of acid to another, ‘We are the Grateful Dead.’ That is a mind-blowing phrase to hear when you are deep in the psychedelic. They had been the Warlocks, and that night was their first performance as the Dead.”
On a shoestring budget bolstered by money from his then-wife, Jane, and her parents, and with the advice and encouragement of his co-founder, the late Chronicle music critic Ralph J. Gleason, Wenner launched Rolling Stone in 1967, the Summer of Love, when psychedelic San Francisco was the center of the counterculture, radiating its music and youthful ideals all over the world. Wenner believed in a “revolution of culture and consciousness” and Rolling Stone reflected that. It would become the first mainstream magazine to take rock and the youth culture around it seriously.
An editor with an eye for talent, he famously championed the careers of drug-addled Hunter S. Thompson, inventor of gonzo journalism, the exquisitely tailored literary stylist Tom Wolfe, the political humorist P.J. O’Rourke and the Bowie knife-wielding former Marin writer Joe Eszterhas, among others. Marin’s Baron Wolman was the magazine’s first official photographer, followed by the future superstar Annie Leibovitz, who took the cover photo for Wenner’s book.
“San Francisco was the perfect place for a thing like this to be nurtured,” he says. “I don’t think it would have made it out of the nest in L.A. or New York under all the commercial pressures that were brought then in the record business. It could only have happened in San Francisco.”
A controversial interview with a bitter John Lennon over the breakup of the Beatles, headlined “Lennon Remembers” (which a chastened Lennon would later refer to as “Lennon Regrets”) and Rolling Stone’s full-court-press coverage of the debacle at Altamont, laying much of the blame for the stabbing death of a concertgoer by Hells Angels at the feet of Mick Jagger and the Stones, helped put the magazine in the national conversation. When Wenner published the Lennon interview in book form over Lennon’s objection, it ended their friendship. Lennon never forgave him. Jagger did, though, and they remain friends to this day.
Move to New York
Despite all its successes — the half a million readers and national awards — by the mid ‘70s, the so-called golden age of the magazine, was losing its luster. At the same time, Wenner says he had lost interest in “the ethos of San Francisco and its fading hippie orthodoxy.”
The Boomers and aging hippies who were his readership now had jobs and careers and families. They were growing up. It was time for Rolling Stone to do the same. In 1977, Wenner sent shock waves through his hometown by moving Rolling Stone to New York.
“It was one of those fortuitous things in my life that the center of cultural gravity had moved from San Francisco to New York, and we were a part of that,” he says. “Not deliberately. I had to be there because New York was the only place the magazine itself could grow, where the talent was, where the advertisers were. We had to be there.”
The move changed the nature of the magazine, both outwardly in its appearance and content and internally among its employees. Covering movies became important. Actors and celebrities began showing up more often in its pages. His rock purist staff freaked out when he put disco queen Donna Summer on the cover. The celebrated editor Ben Fong-Torres had stayed behind in San Francisco, and those who made the transition probably wished they had, too.
“Of all the people we brought there, not one relationship survived,” Wenner says. “Every romance that had been going on when we moved didn’t last. And slowly but surely every San Francisco transplant dropped off. It challenged people. You had to decide: Am I on the ambition train or not?”
There is no doubt that Wenner was not only on the ambition train, he was driving it. Arriving in New York, he was befriended by no less than Jackie Kennedy Onassis, becoming close with her celebrated offspring, John and Caroline. He vacationed in Barbados with Jagger and Bianca, skied in Aspen every winter, palled around with Bono, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, went on safari with Bette Midler and her family, regularly had dinner with Yoko Ono, and snorted coke with the late John Belushi and countless other characters who appear in the pages of “Like a Rolling Stone.”
“Cocaine had a stranglehold on the music business,” he writes. “Drugs were the coin of the realm, enabling bad behavior, bad relationships and lapses in judgment all around. If you hung out with musicians, especially at night, there was going to be cocaine.”
Wenner not only hung with rock stars who appeared in the magazine, he emulated their hedonistic lifestyles, accruing the kind of wealth that enabled him to fly around the planet in his private Gulfstream jet.
USA Today calls “Like a Rolling Stone” “a wildly entertaining romp that will stir feelings of envy and exhaustion.”
Digital vampires
The only time during this interview that Wenner becomes agitated is when he’s asked about the desiccation of print journalism by the internet and the digital media.
“They were f—-ing vampires,” he says angrily. “They came and sucked the life out of our business. There was no competition. They stole all our material and then they resold our material to our audience and our advertisers. We didn’t get a dime for it. They killed us.”
In 2017, Wenner sold Rolling Stone to the Penske Media Corp. His son Gus is now the magazine’s chief operating officer. Wenner reluctantly bowed out of the magazine he had run for 50 years, remaining proud of his legacy.
“Like I put in the book, we did something valuable and important and meaningful in American history,” he says. “And those people who say, ‘Oh, all you did was take drugs in the ’60s’ or ‘You didn’t solve the climate crisis so you old people are responsible,’ that’s nonsense, historical nonsense. And this book is meant to straighten that record out.”
Wenner felt the first stirrings of his homosexuality when he was in boarding school. After 26 years of marriage and three children, he left his family for designer and former Calvin Klein model Matt Nye.
“I wasn’t planning to leave. I just fell in love,” he says.
He and Nye are now married, live in Montauk and have three children, all teenagers. Wenner’s former wife lives nearby, and his three grown sons from that marriage visit often.
“The families are extremely close now,” he says. “The kids are being raised as one unit by the family. I was lucky to have support and a tolerant atmosphere with friends who said it just didn’t matter to them. I have the same friends today as I did before breaking up the marriage.”
Near-death call
In 2017, Wenner came close to death. While showing one of his sons how to improve his tennis serve, he broke his femur, suffered a heart attack and had to have open heart surgery. Springsteen brought him a mixtape to listen to as he rolled into the operating room. Wenner now gets around with the aid of a cane.
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At this stage in his life, he doesn’t have much interest in today’s pop music. He resigned his position as chairman of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and says he wouldn’t go out of his way to see the Rolling Stones again, finding it too much of a hassle.
His near-death experience ends the book on a poignant note, signifying the graying and passing of the original Rolling Stone generation.
“In the hospital scene, I make a list of all the things I want to say and do, and give you a good cry is one,” he says. “A book or a movie should give you an emotional experience like that. It’s a wonderful elegiac note to end it on. I sent the book to Bruce (Springsteen) to read. He said he read it in three days. And he said, ‘You made me cry.’ Well, it worked.”
Contact Paul Liberatore at [email protected]
IF YOU GO
What: Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner will discuss his new memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone,” with IJ music columnist Paul Liberatore
Where: The Commonwealth Club, 110 the Embarcadero, San Francisco
When: 12:30 p.m. Wednesday
Admission: $20, $55 with book
Information: commonwealthclub.org
More: Wenner will discuss his memoir with former Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong-Torres at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Angelico Hall at Dominican University of California at 50 Acacia Ave. in San Rafael. Tickets ($45) include a copy of the book. Information at bookpassage.com.
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