Like a rolling stone

Book review of 'Sticky Fingers'

Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine

Author: Joe Hagan

Publisher: Knopf 

Pages: 560  

Price: $29.95 

After a career spent editing zeitgeist-tilting writers like Hunter S Thompson and Tom Wolfe, tapping the journalist Joe Hagan to write his biography “was essentially Jann Wenner’s last great assignment,” Hagan observes in an afterword to Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, and “there was no way in hell I was going to screw it up.”

Screw it up Hagan did, according to Wenner, who has called the final product “deeply flawed and tawdry.” The Rolling Stone publisher had apparently hoped for a biography that was the equivalent of a marble bust to position in the foyer of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland (another Wenner production) — sanitised, full of kumbaya generational feeling and as uplifting as the chorus of a power ballad.

Whether Wenner can see it or not, his bet has paid off: Hagan has delivered a supple, confident, dispassionately reported and deeply well-written biography. It’s a big book, one that no one will wish longer, but its chapters move past like a crunching collection of singles and not a thumb-sucking double album. It’s a joy to read and feels built to last.

Hagan is among those relatively rare biographers who keeps macro and micro in yin-yang balance. He’s in command of the big picture. The critic and intellectual in him understands why a mere rock magazine editor — Wenner founded Rolling Stone in San Francisco in 1967 — matters to the history of the 20th century.

Here was the egotistical fanboy who had “legitimised and mainstreamed” the counterculture in the 1960s and early ’70s. You might buy a copy of Rolling Stone simply to ogle a superstar or to find out if Jerry Garcia was still dating Mountain Girl. But as the magazine began to filter out across America, it let a lot of lonely people discover that there were other people like them and other ways to live.

Over the ensuing decades, Hagan writes, Wenner assembled “an entire American cosmology of superstars and superstar journalists, stories, and myths, all fired in the kiln of his appetites and ambition. Millions had dreamed on his pages. Bruce Springsteen said Rolling Stone changed his life. Patti Smith found liberation in Rolling Stone.”

Sticky Fingers is about promises and promises betrayed, and about how Wenner’s life — his increasing obsession with fame and a plutocratic lifestyle — reflected both.

The visions the rock culture had once delivered “had morphed into the Me Decade,” Hagan writes, “and the Me Decade had turned into Me Decades, and finally the falcon could no longer hear the falconer, not even in the pages of Rolling Stone.”

Come for the essayist in Hagan, stay for the eye-popping details and artful gossip. Wenner has complained about how much of that gossip is focused on his changeful sexual appetites. Wenner has slept for much of his life with men and women and thus, to paraphrase Woody Allen on the upside of bisexuality, has rarely lacked a date for Saturday night.

Hagan could easily have named-dropped his way through this book, yet he doesn’t drop names so much as pick them up and coolly appraise them in a line or two. Here’s Joni Mitchell, “plucking a dulcimer and ululating.” Or the record executive Ahmet Ertegun, “with the half-lidded ease of a beat poet.” Or Thompson, who “mumble-grumbled like a character actor from a Bogart movie.” Or Keith Richards, “looking as if his face were roasted for a Thanksgiving dinner.”

Richards has become the Gore Vidal of rock, the elder statesman always armed with an acid quote. He says about Wenner and Mick Jagger (this book floats the possibility that the two slept together): “They’re both very guarded creatures. You wonder if there’s anything worth guarding.”

Wenner founded Rolling Stone with money borrowed from the family of his soon-to-be wife, Jane Schindelheim, after dropping out of Berkeley. A famous early cover featured a naked John Lennon and Yoko Ono. “Print a famous foreskin,” Wenner wrote in the next issue, “and the world will beat a path to your door.”

The staffers at Rolling Stone tended to sleep together, and often enough with Wenner, according to Hagan’s account. Wenner developed an outsize cocaine habit; writers and staffers were sometimes paid bonuses with the drug. When the staff stayed en masse in a hotel, the management couldn’t figure out, the next day, why all the mirrors were off the wall and on their backs.

This book lays those appetites bare. In scorning Hagan’s work, Wenner’s editorial antennae have failed him. He had the nerve to select a writer and not a hagiographer, and the decision, at the end of his long career, looks good on him. At times this book will help future generations remember Wenner the way he’d like to be remembered. He told his son Theo, Hagan writes, “Put Hunter’s name on my tombstone, not Brad Pitt’s.”
 

© 2017 The New York Times