October 10, 2022

TRIUMPH OF A LIMOUSINE LEFTIST: Review: Like a Rolling Stone by Jann Wenner.

A great editor requires many qualities—an intuitive understanding of his audience, an ability to spot small stirrings before they become big trends, a taste for good writing, money—but self awareness is not one of them. In a memoir as gossipy as Wenner’s this is less of a handicap than you might think. The reader will figure out what’s going on even if the memoirist doesn’t. Wenner seldom lets more than a few pages go by without a reference to his soul-deep friendship with some rock star or other. Bob Dylan drops by when he’s in town. Bruce Springsteen invites him to his horse farm. Jagger jets in for a sail around the Caribbean. Why, a court order couldn’t keep Paul McCartney or Bono or Jackson Browne away from the radiant pleasure of hanging with their pal Jann.

That their pal Jann also just happened to be the editor of their industry’s most important trade magazine—the cover of which generated enough publicity to almost guarantee the success of a new record or tour—is, as Jann himself sees it, an item of no importance in maintaining the spiritual communion he enjoys with these busy, ambitious, calculating, and relentlessly transactional show biz figures. He must be a hoot to be with! His charm, his humor! The sparkle of his conversation! Why else would Bob or Paul or Bruce be so eager for his company? Of course, he usually goes ahead and obliges them with a cover story. What else are friends for?

The same obliviousness holds true in his political excursions. Manmade climate change is evidently unaffected by the long flights on his personal jet. He is, who would’ve guessed, a passionate advocate of gun control and the confiscation of private firearms; one chapter is even titled “Fuck the NRA.” But—boy!—was he ever glad his guide on a cross country motorcycle trip was packing heat to protect him from the rednecks that infest the land between the coasts. (In fairness, I should add that the guide didn’t have to shoot any of them.) He bravely condemned the “greed” unleashed by Ronald Reagan and other Republicans. Yet even as he tends an ever rising pile of money, fighting for every inch of market advantage, squeezing the best financing rates he can from Wall Street, and slashing payroll to juice profits, he never succumbs to greed himself. Greed is one of those terrible character flaws that only afflicts other people. Most of them, thank God, do not have summer compounds in Montauk.

Like most great magazines, Rolling Stone not only fed off its readers’ enthusiasms but in time began to shape them too. In the early days, as the magazine’s and Wenner’s success grew, a debate stirred among the hippies about “whether making money, or more than you needed, was wrong.” Could there be such a thing as “hip capitalism”?

In nearly 600 pages of memoir, Wenner doesn’t answer the question directly—he was never good at making arguments, as he proved in the many pompous, moralizing editorials he wrote for the magazine and insists on quoting here.

His life was his answer—a resounding “Hell yes!” The same market economy he disdained in theory could be squeezed in practice for unlimited financial gain. The radicalism that Wenner flirted with in his youth and quickly rejected requires a kind of self-denial, even asceticism, that couldn’t withstand the constant allurements to which he happily submitted. By contrast, he writes, “I believed in a revolution of culture and consciousness.” Good choice! That kind of revolution is a much lighter lift than a revolution in economic arrangements, and much more fun.

And now that Wenner has had his fun and made his millions, it’s time to pull the drawbridge up:

A socialist wanting to nationalize the media — why is the founder of Rolling Stone working Salon’s side of the street?

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll