There are so many examples of narcissism-on-steroids that litter Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner’s memoir that it’s difficult to point out just one. But the following is typical: in 2001, Wenner was invited to a recording session for his friend Mick Jagger’s solo album Goddess in the Doorway. Wenner, long out of practice in writing for his magazine — clear prose was never his forte — submitted a review to his editor, who, knowing of the friendship, gave the album four stars. Wenner intervened, bumping it up to five stars, and reflected: “There was some snickering [in the office] about being on Mick’s leash, but so what, and what if I were?”
Wenner’s torturously long memoir is a very bad book. I can’t imagine the demographic that publisher Little, Brown & Company envisioned when it was commissioned. The dwindling number of people who fondly remember Rolling Stone’s remarkable run from 1967-76 (the magazine began its descent when Wenner cozied up to Jimmy Carter and his aides) likely don’t want to read such hagiography. Perhaps it’s a favor — Wenner collected chits from people in the music and book industries like kids used to hoard baseball cards — and the company is willing to absorb the loss on what’s plainly a vanity project.
My guess is that the seventy-five-year-old Wenner, like his heroes Bob Dylan and Keith Richards, is trying to control his legacy before he dies. But there’s a problem: while Wenner is justifiably praised for launching one of the most influential periodicals in the second half of the twentieth century — along with, by my reckoning, Playboy, the Village Voice and Spy — the product and its writers were always far more fascinating than the proprietor himself, who, because of his lust for meeting and befriending “stars,” first musical and later political, was roundly ridiculed in the business.
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