Jann S. Wenner - Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir

Hail, hail rock and roll

Deliver me from the days of old

C HUCK B ERRY

L ATER , I found myself taking the song [Pirate Jenny] apart, trying to find out what made it tick, why it was so effective. I could see that everything in it was apparent and visible but you didnt notice it too much. Everything was fastened to the wall with a heavy bracket, but you couldnt see what the sum total of all the parts were, not unless you stood way back and waited til the end.

B OB D YLAN , Chronicles

I WENT TO THE Rolling Stone offices on a Monday morning in mid-May 2019. My assistant met me downstairs to take my attach case, as I was still walking with two canes. It was a gray day in New York, one of rain, with a forecast for more all week. When I got to our second-floor lobby, workmen were putting up plywood to protect the walls from the movers.

The spacious cubicles, which the great furniture designer Ward Bennett had chosen twenty-eight years earlier, and the glass-walled private offices with views of Sixth Avenue and Radio City Music Hall, were empty. The staff from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame were still there, as was Paul Scanlon, who came every day to help me start this book.

I never felt so completely that Rolling Stone was over for me as on that day.

The week before, the last fifty people on the editorial staff had packed their desks into boxes. Thursday of that week was their final day at 1290 Sixth Avenue before moving to small content farm tables at a new office, with a new owner. We took a group photo and I gave an off-the-cuff farewell speech. It was a sweet moment.

Gus, my twenty-eight-year-old son and heir apparent, my formally announced successor, came into my office, late again, for our weekly meeting. It would be our last one at the offices where I had worked for decades. The subject was paper stock for the cover. I advocated going to glossy, but Gus refused. A barely polite argument followed about who knew best what he was doing. We were each learning that it was not necessary to win every fight, but sometimes to just let it go. When I wrapped up my daily writing and packed up to go home, one or two people were still at their desks; the rest were gone.

The departure of the staff was what finally affected me. The reason I hadnt previously sold Rolling Stone was that once someone else owned it, they could do what they wanted, including fire me. I also knew that if the owner told me what to do and I strongly disagreed, I would have to quit. And I would never again find a job as great. Now all that was coming to pass. This was the end of the road.

When I returned the next week after the move, I walked onto a floor of empty offices, the desks and chairs randomly out of place, walls stripped of art, paper and trash scattered on the carpet, the detritus of a once revered and mighty magazine. It conjured up death. When you see the end coming to someone you know, whether from illness, injury, or just age, you handle it however it falls to you and do whatever you need to make sense of it. Even as you watch the person fade and fail, they are still with you, and death is not fully real. Even when the breath is gone, the body is there and you are not alone. Not until the flesh itself has been buried or burned, has gone to dirt or ash, do you grasp the finality of it. That person is gone, gone, gone, and you are alone, on your own. So I felt.

One message that came that day was from Jac Holzman, who had just been cut off the list of people who received a free lifetime subscription to the magazine. In the early years, Jac had loaned me money to keep Rolling Stone alive. There must be some karmic juju at work here, I thought, and I didnt intend to be on the slap-back end of that. Jac had once told me the biggest mistake he ever made was to sell Elektra Records, the idiosyncratic company that he had started. He had accepted millions but became one of many subalterns in a much larger company. I had always kept that in mind as big-name buyers flirted with me. Thanks, but no thanks. I was my own boss; I was having fun and making a difference in my world. I would have regretted losing that for the rest of my life. I almost bit once. It was the big one, right at the peak. But fuck it.

I got on the phone and had Jacs subscription restored.

The movers were ready to bubble-wrap my things. We packed up a bust of Bill Clinton with a Pinocchio nose that Bob Grossman had sculpted for us to use as a cover during Bills impeachment. I was too partisan to use the funny, truthful, but negative image. It would have been one of our great covers. I kept it to remind me not to forget the higher duty of the magazine.

I took down Annie Leibovitzs portrait of a young Pete Townshend, his hands bloody from playing his guitar. Leaning next to the picture of Pete were skis decorated with Rolling Stones iconography and graffiti. The band had made a few dozen pairs to mark its fiftieth anniversary. Mick sent them. They were serious skis, and I had put a hundred days on them. I packed up the small wood and metal sculpture of a skier that Patti Scialfa sent for my birthday. I had a poster of a Fillmore Auditorium show on one of my best acid-fueled nights before Rolling Stone. I took down the four-by-four-foot photograph of me that Hunter Thompson had shot a hole through with his .44 Magnum, spray-painted, framed, that he had presented to me on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Rolling Stone.

By the end of the week, workers had finished dismantling the last vestiges of Rolling Stone, ripped out the editorial department offices, turned off the telephones and data lines, and shut down the air-conditioning. The desks, chairs, computer screens, and telephones were thrown into dumpsters. The last wall would be breached, and within a few days workers would be tearing apart the private office where for nearly thirty years I had lived and ruled, achieved fame and fortune. When I walked out that last time, I left numb.