20 Years Later--and Still on a Roll

It was 1967, the era of LSD, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Lyndon Johnson, the war in Vietnam, a time of possibilities.

Here was a bold idea, thought the UC Berkeley dropout and aspiring postman, 21-year-old Jann Wenner: Why not a magazine “not just about music, but also about the things and attitudes that the music embraces”?

Optimistically, the former Daily Californian reporter created and printed 40,000 copies of the publication he called Rolling Stone, named for the song by Muddy Waters and the song by Bob Dylan. At 25 cents a copy, he hoped to recoup $7,500 he had borrowed from his mother, his stepmother and his future mother-in-law to start a magazine, as he put it, for “every person who ‘believes in the magic that can set you free.’ ”

The dedicatory issue of Nov. 9, 1967, sold only 4,000 copies. But what it did unleash--with its 24 pages, a breaking story on the resignation of the program director of a local radio station and a message from editor Wenner that featured two undeleted expletives (shocking stuff 20 years ago)--was a publishing force that has become both a beacon and a mirror of American culture these last 20 years.

Celebrating its 20th anniversary with a sparkling 300-page commemorative issue that hits the stands Monday, Rolling Stone now boasts a biweekly circulation of 1.1 million (with readership estimated at 7.3 million), annual sales that last year exceeded $41 million, and 125 full-time employees occupying three floors of swank Fifth Avenue office space, just opposite the Plaza Hotel. Were Rolling Stone to go on the market, industry analysts say, it would command a price in the range of $100-$150 million.

The numbers are impressive, proof that advertisers and a huge number of readers still believe in the magic. But it is the tradition of daring prose, distinctive photojournalism and unconventional reporting that has won Rolling Stone its reputation as a cultural measuring rod.

Followers fondly acknowledge the influence Rolling Stone carried for a pre-AIDS generation raised on love-ins, sit-ins and turn-ons, even though some charge the periodical today has deserted them, metamorphosed into an excessively slick music magazine, weak on the gutsy substance that once distinguished it.

“It really was an astonishing combination of innovation and quality,” UC Berkeley journalism professor David Littlejohn said of the magazine that, with its brash disregard for editorial convention, conceived the wildly irreverent genre and jargon known as Gonzo Journalism.

“It gave a unique and respectable rallying point for people of all ages who were discontented with many aspects of the Establishment,” said Littlejohn, an analyst of the role of the media in culture. In a time of social upheaval, he continued, “it was like a base you could run to when you were confused and concerned.”

Wenner, not known for his modesty, wears such praise as comfortably as he sports his custom-made monogrammed striped shirts. High above Fifth Avenue he sips seltzer water in an office the size of many New York apartments.

Rolling Stone, he said, stands as “the repository, the written record of our time.”

Conceived as a rock magazine with socio-political overtones, Rolling Stone “literally became the bible for those being initiated voluntarily into the alternative system,” said bicoastal rock impresario Bill Graham, a frequent target on the pages of the publication.

For “some 16- or 17-year-old who left Iowa to go to San Francisco,” Graham added, the magazine “became the literature of that large mass.”

Baron Wolman, a Bay Area photographer whose work appeared in the debut issue, recalled that, “They were the first to really identify the surface manifestations of something that was going on in the heads of the people.”

What the founding coterie of Rolling Stone realized, said Wolman, now 50, was that “the music was a metaphor for the changing attitudes. You could look at the lyrics and figure out what people were thinking about.”

They were thinking about music, certainly, as is shown through either back issues of the biweekly magazine or a glance at Friendly Press’ $24.95, book-length 20th-anniversary Rolling Stone retrospective, “What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been.” The pages of both, in fact, look like rock ‘n’ roll’s printed answer to “The Hit Parade.” They thought, too, about fashion, styles of the Beatle wives, Tom Wolfe on funky chic. They thought about issues: drugs, sex, blood banks, farm workers, the CIA, Karen Silkwood. Science and medicine: recombinant DNA; later, AIDS. Personalities and their problems: Charles Manson, Patty Hearst, John and Yoko, John Belushi, Roxanne Pulitzer.

Lillian Hellman interviewed Rosalynn Carter. Andy Warhol staged a conversation with Truman Capote while Tom Wicker took a look at Henry Kissinger. Ken Kesey wrote about The Meaning of Life. Kurt Vonnegut offered sex diagrams. There was poetry from Yevtushenko and Allen Ginsberg, a preview of John Irving’s “The Hotel New Hampshire,” and Tom Wolfe’s precursor to “The Right Stuff” and his first novel, “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”

And because, as Wenner said, “we have constantly promoted this idea of social responsibility and social conscience,” Rolling Stone readers have had no choice but to think about politics.

Five years after the magazine started, Wenner began sending correspondents to national political conventions. They wrote about Vietnam, Watergate, Kent State, the nuclear freeze. Photographer Richard Avedon went to Washington and turned his lens on “the entire power structure.” Hunter S. Thompson took on George McGovern, the Democratic Convention in Chicago and, of course, Hunter S. Thompson.

“We wrote about politics and culture,” said author David Harris, currently at work on a book about William S. Paley at his home in San Francisco. Harris, who had his first byline in the pages of Rolling Stone, explained that using “the Rolling Stone approach, breaking open the approaches magazines were taking to subjects,” writers for the magazine could spin into the story rather than stand aside, cloaked in the traditional cloth of objective journalism.

“There were no rules,” Wolman remembered of the early days. “Writers were allowed to participate in their stories. They were encouraged to participate in the world they were writing about.”

“Jann ran an absolute meritocracy,” recalled William R. Hearst III, the publisher of the San Francisco Examiner. Hearst, hired by Wenner to serve as editor for Outside, a magazine Wenner started in 1976 and later sold, added, “You never had to explain anything twice. There was no hidebound older generation holding down the good jobs.”

Besides, Harris said, “all the rest of the press read it. It was a great place to start for a young writer, because it meant people saw your stuff.”

The result was a funnel for news that many other news organizations did not necessarily see as news. “People who were young in the ‘60s had no place to get information that was seen through eyes of their own,” Harris said. As a consequence, what was ostensibly and originally a magazine about music and its culture “had a lot of influence in terms of making that culture politicized in ways it wouldn’t have been otherwise,” he added.

Wenner is perfectly willing to accept full credit for this assessment.

“I guess if there has to be a symbol of all this, then it’s me,” he said. Most of the rest of the media missed the real meaning of the post-war generation, Wenner said. “But I was part of it, I was there.

“And then on top of that,” he added, “I also happen to be a good editor.”

The only son of a baby-food magnate who moved his family from New York to San Francisco when Jann was just a baby, Wenner is a short, stocky bundle of energy as he discusses his own 20-year-old journalistic offspring.

One moment Wenner is sitting at his massive wooden table-style desk, feet up and smoking fancy imported cigarettes. Next he is bouncing up to gaze out at one of his proudest possessions, a “tri-state view.” He chews his nails to the quick and exudes the kind of easy charm and restless impatience that has made the co-owner (with his wife, Janie) of Straight Arrow Publishers, Rolling Stone’s parent organization, a multimillionaire of such prototypal proportions that he played himself in the John Travolta movie, “Perfect.”

“To me,” Wenner said of Rolling Stone’s success, “it says a lot about the so-called ‘60s generation. Contrary to the myth that it all stood for nothing, that it was all sound and fury and nonsense and that everyone grew up to be a stockbroker or a dentist, I think the ethos and the spirit survive.”

Wenner sprang up again. “I mean, here is an actual institution that has come out of that period and survived.” Rolling Stone, said its progenitor, “is an ongoing, thriving, successful business” through which, as a body, “we can attempt to look back at the last 20 years and make sense of it.”

Wenner has always bristled at the suggestion that Rolling Stone was a counterculture publication. “Counter” to what, he asks. Rather, in his view, the magazine has reflected the evolution of a valid culture that, though chronologically middle-age by this time, still loves rock ‘n’ roll.

“The fact that a 40-year-old is not on the streets every day protesting does not mean they don’t hold onto those ideals,” Wenner said. “They’re 40, they have other obligations, families, but they still espouse those ideas and ideals.”

Demographic research shows, however, that Rolling Stone’s mean readership hovers not at 40, but at 25.1. The majority of its readers are male, and their median annual income approaches $30,000. Most, according to Wenner, voted for Reagan.

But to apply the word yuppie to this young, affluent readership makes Wenner cringe. On the contrary, he insisted, “A 25-year-old and a 40-year-old are pretty close in their interests” these days. “Listen, go to a Grateful Dead concert.”

Rolling Stone’s good fortune was a steady, gentle blurring of what once were well-defined generational lines, Wenner maintained.

“When I was 20, and my parents were 45, there was a generation gap,” he said. “They didn’t listen to the same kind of music as I did. They didn’t have the same kind of drug experiences that I was about to have. They had all this positive reinforcement about World War II, and what a good, romantic war it was.

“I look at 25-year-olds now. We look the same. We dress the same. We take the same drugs, listen to the same music.

“I remember having arguments with my parents about Vietnam,” Wenner said. “Whereas, can you imagine having the same argument now with a 25-year-old about Central America?”

Blandness Cited

Today’s argument among many early fans focuses more on Wenner and the politics of the magazine; they cite a blandness and an abandonment of the outrageousness that made its early politics as exciting as its writing.

“That early crowd of writers, it was exciting times. It’s like talking about the Paris gang of the ‘20s, or the people who got together to found the New Yorker,” UC Berkeley’s Littlejohn said. Around 1977, just when Rolling Stone was moving its headquarters from San Francisco to New York, Littlejohn sold his collection of the first 200 issues of Rolling Stone for $500. “I’ve had two students write theses about Jann Wenner,” he said. “But I honestly haven’t read the magazine in about five years.”

“The thing that it was in the first place that attracted so much attention was poles away from what it is now,” San Francisco State University journalism professor John Burks, the magazine’s first managing editor, said.

Burks, after all, was hired away from Newsweek after dishing out armloads of armchair criticism to a friend on Rolling Stone’s early staff. “I understand you think our magazine sucks,” Burks recalls Wenner telling him when he called to offer him a job.

Now, borrowing occasional copies of Rolling Stone from his 18-year-old son, Burks said he is appalled by the magazine’s predictability and lack of innovation.

“I think of one case, the Eddie Murphy cover,” Burks said. “First you had People, then Newsweek, then ‘20-20,’ ‘60 Minutes,’ whatever, and then comes Rolling Stone--last.”

Last Great Gasp

Some say Altamont was Rolling Stone’s last great gasp, that the magazine faltered after its extensive coverage of the rock group Rolling Stones’ ill-fated free concert outside Berkeley in 1970, during which one audience member was stabbed to death in a clash between fans and Hell’s Angels. Others blast Rolling Stone for an overly adoring attitude toward celebrities, a fascination with fame so powerful that some ex-Rolling Stoners have adopted some of the very same trappings. Photographer Annie Liebovitz, for example, renowned for pictures that included the legendary nude-John and clothed-Yoko series, now considers interviews from fellow journalists only if the request and possible questions are submitted in writing through her assistant. Wenner himself, his detractors say, has become more famous than many of the musicians the magazine writes about.

Wenner brushes off such allegations, insisting that “we have constantly promoted the idea of social responsibility and social conscience.” Noting that “a long time ago, we used to be attacked by the political lefties for having too much music,” Wenner attributes criticism to “disgruntled ex-employees” and “people who don’t read the magazine closely.” He is equally immune to suggestions that Rolling Stone lost its edge 10 years ago when, as David Harris, for one, put it, “Jann retrenched” and moved to New York.

In San Francisco, Wenner had become legendary for tooling around in a chauffeured chocolate-colored Mercedes and holding forth, salon-style, at his own table at the North Beach coffee house Enrico’s. In New York, Wenner lives near Central Park with his wife and two young sons in an Upper West Side town house, just a few doors away from the house formerly occupied by the late fashion designer Perry Ellis. He is a fixture of the summer scene in the Hamptons, and around his office is viewed with the mixture of idolatry and healthy terror that befits a hip, benevolent dictator.

‘The Greatest City’

“You could live in San Francisco and postpone choices about your life forever,” Wenner said. “You come here and . . . “ he snapped his fingers fast three times . . . “and this is the greatest city in the world.”

Whether Rolling Stone can continue to assert its claim as the greatest socio-rock music in the world remains to be seen. Wenner, not surprisingly, remains confident that his publication will retain its cultural toehold.

“Our age group is going to be the dominant age group for its lifetime,” he said. “And so whatever we do is going to be fashionable.”

What’s fashionable now, said Wenner, is “growing up.” And at Rolling Stone, “we have encouraged the process of growing up and maturing.”

But 20 years from now? Wenner shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.

Though Wenner voices a rosy view of how “this generation will continue to dominate the economy,” he is adamant that “that never occurred to me when I started Rolling Stone. I never went out there and thought, ‘oh, there’s this huge marketplace out there which we can tap.’ I never thought that. I still don’t.”

Rolling Stone will endure the criticism, he said. It will prosper, Citizen Jann, as he is sometimes known, predicts, and will continue to record “this huge treasury of stuff that just doesn’t seem to stop.”

Once again, Wenner looked out his window, soaking up the view. Can Rolling Stone go on forever? he mused. Can the publication that launched “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “The Boys in the Bus” and “Tania’s World” adapt to an era of insider trading, moralistic political backlash and a housewife named Patricia Campbell Hearst Shaw?

“Well,” Wenner decided in unusually slow, measured tones, “Bucky Fuller used to say, it’s like Old Man River, it just keeps rolling.”