Throughout his five decades at Rolling Stone, the magazine’s co-founder Jann Wenner wrote hundreds of articles and spent time with some of the biggest names in music — Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, John Lennon and Bob Dylan, to name a few — and politics, too, including presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as vice president Al Gore.
Talking upon the publication of his new memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone,” Wenner said he looks back on those experiences fondly and that writing the book gave him a new appreciation for the past 50 years.
“It was fun,” he said of the process during a recent phone interview. “When you’re doing something like that, it means going back to the past to recall these things and you put yourself back into that emotional and physical state so you can describe all of the essential details. I essentially relived every moment of my life in doing this and it was a fabulous experience.”
Wenner was born in New York City and raised in San Francisco, where he started Rolling Stone in 1967 alongside jazz critic and journalist Ralph J. Gleason. Though Wenner had written for The Daily Californian at the University of California Berkeley and later for Ramparts magazine, he said there wasn’t a publication that wanted to publish the stories he wanted to write, so he started his own. He was 21 years old.
There were bumps along the way, but Wenner said that he doesn’t have any real regrets. Sure, there are a few articles that he admits he probably shouldn’t have published, which he doesn’t specify, some business ventures that weren’t the best idea at the time and people he shouldn’t have hired, but “you can’t change any one thing without changing everything, so I wouldn’t touch it,” he said.
“The thing you realize is how it all connects together and how all of these things that were happening that felt like they came out of nowhere. But when you get to the end, you realize how predetermined it all was,” he continued. “You can see how it all fits and how all of those pieces were meant to go together and that there was this plan going on behind the scenes the entire time.”
In the book, he writes about getting to know some of rock music’s most iconic figures and the most powerful people in politics; he said that politicians are definitely harder interviews than musicians.
“They’re tough to talk to because everything is so pre-tested and they’ve said it about 100 times, so to get them to say anything original or possibly extemporaneous is very difficult,” he said while adding that his chats with world leaders were “important conversations.”
There were plenty of times when it took work, sometimes years of interviews, to get certain artists really talking.
“Of all the musicians, I think Mick (Jagger) is the hardest to get to open up because he doesn’t really like to talk about himself,” he said. Jagger, he adds, has been on the cover either solo or with the Rolling Stones more than almost anyone else. Only Paul McCartney has appeared more, as an individual and with the Beatles.
Wenner formed close bonds with Jagger, as well as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, but he said friendships were friendships and business was business. Wenner said Jagger wasn’t thrilled with Rolling Stone’s coverage of the infamous Altamont Rock Festival in 1969, which the Rolling Stones headlined. The poorly planned event turned chaotic and violent, resulting in the stabbing death of Meredith Hunter, a member of the audience, by members of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, who worked security at the free concert event.
“You have to say in your heart what’s the most important thing to you and the most important thing to me was my obligation to the role as a journalist,” Wenner said about the Altamont coverage. “The most important thing was our credibility. And with Mick, I had no choice but to do what was right to me and while Mick was angry at the time, he quickly got over it and you can read in the rest of the book, we became very good friends.”
Wenner is also quick to acknowledge the others who helped build Rolling Stone. Dozens of people were instrumental, including photographers Annie Leibovitz, Herb Ritts, Albert Watson and Richard Avedon and journalists like Ben Fong-Torres, the legendary Hunter S. Thompson and writer-turned-director Cameron Crowe, who chronicled his teenage experience writing for Rolling Stone into his award-winning film “Almost Famous.”
“It was never just one person,” he said, calling himself “lucky” at the talent who contributed. “Whether they walked through the door, or I sought them out, sooner or later we had collected one of the most wonderful groups of writers and photographers working in the country or even the world for about 20-30 years. These were some of the greatest writers and journalists of our time.”
Wenner said it felt good to revisit his days with the late gonzo journalist Thompson. Thompson had been a prolific, high-profile contributor to Rolling Stone, including “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which first appeared as a two-part series in the magazine before becoming a book and later a feature film starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro.
“One of the most fun parts of writing this book was going back and writing about all the fun and crazy places we went to,” Wenner recalled. “I put myself right back there and had read over some stuff he’d written, some of that had been buried for years. Hunter was not only our star writer, but he was also my best friend. We were comrades and it was one of those fantastic friendships. Like I said in the book, I hope that when I die, I end up wherever he is.”
It’s not just other people’s lives and stories he’s sharing in the book, Wenner is also candid about his own personal life. Though he hid his homosexuality for years during his marriage to his wife Jane, he made the decision to announce it publicly in the ’90s.
“It wasn’t difficult for me when I decided to be open about it,” he said. “At that time, it was much more accepted. I mean, ‘Will & Grace’ was on TV and the subject was so much more open. I grew up in a time when they used to throw people in jail for homosexual acts and it was considered a sickness.”
These days, Wenner said he’s enjoying hanging out and traveling with his husband, Matt Nye, and their three kids. When he’s at home, he spends his time reading. He’s currently deep into Richard Ford’s “The Lay of the Land” and he’s also picked up works by Edmund White and Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami.
Wenner gave up the reins to Rolling Stone in 2017 when he sold his share to Penske Media, which now fully owns the magazine. Noah Shachtman is the current editor-in-chief and Wenner’s son, Gus, is the CEO of Rolling Stone. Wenner said he felt like he was leaving things in good hands and that he was “excited and hopeful” for the future of the publication.
In his final editor’s letter for the magazine, Wenner wrote about climate change in a special issue that was inspired by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg’s speech at the U.N. Climate Action Summit in 2019.
“I felt like the last letter I still had something important that I wanted to tell everyone,” he said. “What I’ve learned is that climate is everything and everything is tied up in that and if you could solve the climate problem, you could solve a lot of other problems, too. It was emotional and it was rewarding to write. I liked the way that last chapter turned out.”
