CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL: It’s Only Rock and Roll.

What at the time seemed like robust modern ideas about drugs and sex were in large part accidental prerogatives, conferred on the Baby Boom by its demographic might. In his autobiography, Wenner writes of managing his youthful “ambition and rebelliousness.” Youth brings those two things out in everybody. But they tend to be at odds. Elders capable of rewarding ambition do not look kindly on rebellion, and they outnumber the young. Today, for instance, only 31% of the population is under 24. Normally, adolescent rebellions end in a mix of emancipation and humiliation.

It was different for the Baby Boomers. Wenner, born at the very prow of the postwar Boom, turned 24 in 1970, when 46% of the country was his age or younger—an army of potential youth rebels large enough to tip the intergenerational balance. The more stridently youth put forward its demands, the more desperately grown-ups pled for “with-it” interlocutors. So for the early Baby Boomers, the ones born in the first decade after the war and today recently retired, adolescence had a different meaning than it has had for any American generation before or since. For them it was not a time of illusions, exclusions, and sputtering impotence. It was a time of camaraderie and effective conflict resolution that offered a set of best practices to last a lifetime. That is the story of Wenner, Rolling Stone, the 1970s, and the age of rock and roll more generally.

***

Wenner’s autobiography reads like a response to Joe Hagan’s Sticky Fingers, a better-written, more thorough, and more trustworthy life of Wenner published in 2017. Wenner grew up in California to parents who were striking it rich. They started a successful baby formula company before divorcing. His mother moved away to Hawaii when Wenner was in his early teens, telling him, “You’re on your own, Buster Brown.” It was a privileged kind of dysfunction. His father kept a ski house in the Rockies. His relatives lived on Park Avenue. Wenner was shipped to a Southern California prep school, carrying a terrible emotional imbalance: He was way oversupplied with self-importance and way undersupplied with love. He was sexually conflicted. He loved politics. He arrived at Berkeley in time for the Free Speech Movement—a brief outburst at which a bunch of earnest kids sang “We Shall Overcome” to protest the rules for the campus extracurricular-activities sign-up tables, implicitly comparing their provincial spat to what turned out to be the climactic struggles of the civil rights movement. Its standing as a significant historical event is unlikely to outlive the Baby Boom radicals who carried it out.

Here’s my review of Hagan’s Sticky Fingers from 2017, which, as the title implies, dishes up much dirt on Citizen Wenner.