A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Wenner Fake All (Well, Much)

The newly released memoir from Rolling Stone's guiding genius isn't
where you'd go for facts, as such, but if there were a Pulitzer for
name-dropping, it'd win going away.

**** Let's take a post-election break from politics and take a look,
instead, at Jann Wenner's recent memoir,

**Like a Rolling Stone**. First, allow me to stake my claim as the only
person in history to compare its author to the famous mid-century New
York intellectual Lionel Trilling. How is such a comparison possible,
you ask? It works in only one category: name-dropping. By page four of
the first essay in Trilling's The Liberal Imagination
<[link removed]>-likely
the best-selling collection of literary criticism ever
published-Trilling found reason, as Stefan Collini has noted
<[link removed]>,
to mention Diderot, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Shaw,
Rousseau, Blake, Wordsworth, Burke, Coleridge, Arnold and Schiller,
Mill, Shelley, Schlegel, Sand, Ibsen, Tieck, and Stendhal, to be
followed shortly thereafter by Dostoyevsky, Poe, Baudelaire, Nerval,
Rimbaud, Proust, Eliot, Kafka, Mann, and Joyce.

True, he wasn't doing blow or having orgies in hot tubs with them, but
still, as a pure power play, it may outdo Wenner. You be the judge. I
made a couple of lists as I read his book.

List 1: People who called to advise or console Wenner when the news of
his divorce (and sexual preference) made the news

Mick Jagger

David Geffen

John Kennedy Jr.

Calvin Klein

Edgar Bronfman

Robbie Robertson

Diane von Furstenberg

Michael Douglas

Jay Leno

Barry Diller

Bette Midler

Camilla and Earl McGrath

David Bowie and Iman

List 2: People who spoke or played at Wenner's 60th birthday party

Spoke:

John Kerry

Al Gore

Ahmet Ertegun

Robin Williams

Played:

Paul Shaffer

John Mayer

Robbie Robertson

John Mellencamp

Peter Wolf

Bette Midler

Darlene Love

Spoke

**and**played (and even wrote Wenner a special song):

Bruce Springsteen

(Wenner would also be eligible for the Nobel Prize for chutzpah, were
such an award to be founded, for mocking Bono for

**his** name-dropping.)

[link removed]

**** I should mention up front that for two years, I covered politics
for

**Rolling Stone**-a position that had opened when Bill Greider went on
book leave. I had little direct contact with Wenner except, working
through two layers of editors, he sometimes demanded that I change my
reporting to fit his political priorities, especially on gun control. I
have experienced some political interference almost everywhere I have
worked, but nothing ever came close to Wenner's heavy-handedness. I
left the magazine when Greider returned to claim his spot back (though
he, too, left not long afterward, also for

**The Nation**, where Bill ended his career).

I should also say that I grew up reading

**Rolling Stone** from the time I was 12 and dreamed of working there
for most of my (extended) adolescence. My first issue was the infamous
David Cassidy "Naked Lunchbox" issue
<[link removed]>,
which I took to camp with me, and I can still recall the excitement of
the world it opened up in my imagination. While the magazine was nowhere
near as politically influential as Wenner would have his readers
believe, it was really important as an expression of a sensibility, an
embrace of rock music's cultural significance. Wenner's willingness
to fund and publish some of the best investigative journalism published
anywhere, ever, also made it a must read.

A great deal of his book takes place on various luxury island retreats,
Montauk mansions, hot tubs belonging to the rich and famous, and private
jets, with Wenner customarily checked out on some Hunter S. Thompsonish
combination of booze, coke and/or acid. Even so, the world is a much
better place for his having founded

**Rolling Stone**. I've often noticed that famous magazine editors act
capriciously-much like Stalin did-because they want people to think
they are geniuses and appear to believe that if nobody can find a rhyme
or reason to their decisions, their myth will remain protected. Wenner
really was a genius magazine editor, but like many of them, he was also
a deeply insecure person who needed to take credit for everyone and
everything around him-as he does in this book.

Wenner wrote this book because he was angry about the results of the
authorized biography
<[link removed]>,
by Joe Hagan, that he had previously engineered. I don't blame him
being pissed off that Hagan thought his sex life to be so central to his
story. But I also have no doubt that Hagan's version is more reliable.
Here's one story that I happened to see firsthand and says something
about both the man and memoir:

In a story that appears like many in his book, entirely without context,
Wenner brags: "I took my ten year old son, Theo, G.E. Smith, and George
Stephanopoulos to watch the band rehearse the full show for the first
time on the Voodoo Lounge stage [in July, 1994] to an empty stadium,
sitting with the Stones' wives and their kids on blankets around the
pitcher's mound. The all-time private show."

Here's the thing. I was there, too. Wenner was all over
Stephanopoulos, then (as a top aide to President Clinton) a big
political celebrity, to go to the show with him. I was then the
Washington correspondent for

**Mother Jones**, but I had been waiting for what felt like forever to
find out if I was going to get the

**Rolling Stone** gig. I also really (really) wanted to see the Stones
rehearse. George didn't care about the Stones, but he agreed to tell
Jann that he could only go if I could come along. After much
back-and-forth, Jann said he had "spoken to Mick" and gotten permission
for me to come too.

So, we get to RFK Stadium and immediately, Jann ditches us. G.E. Smith
and George and I sit in the stands while the

**really** cool people sit on the field. There were at most 250 people
in the 54,000-person stadium, and there was

**still**a VIP section. (I recall seeing Jann, from afar, sitting with
Dan Aykroyd.) I sat next to Smith, who was genuinely nice and said
interesting things about Keith and Ronnie Wood's guitar playing (but
they were not interesting enough, in retrospect, to make up for the fact
that he has now led the band repeatedly for recent Republican
conventions, even under Trump). Another thing: The show sucked. Seeing a
band play in an empty stadium does not work. You are just as far away as
ever but the sound is terrible because of the constant echo that comes
from the distance it travels without anything to soak it up. I don't
understand the physics, but you could actually see the sound travel from
the stage to the back of the stadium where it hit the scoreboard and
then traveled back to collide with the music that had just left the
stage to make a big acoustic mess. Third, George and I had worried about
what we were going to do at the likely after-party. He could not afford,
politically, to appear at a typical Stones/Wenner gathering, and yet we
had to be polite. Plus, it sounded really cool. This problem turned out
to be moot. After the show, Wenner showed up just long enough to inform
us that he and his friends were flying back to East Hampton on his jet.
We were stuck outside the stadium after public transportation had shut
down for the night and had to walk through some pretty iffy
neighborhoods to get back to Dupont Circle, where we both lived. I made
fun of George for getting caught in a mess that David Gergen would
surely have known enough to avoid.

(Speaking of private planes, I coined the term "Gulfstream liberal
<[link removed]>"
in

**The Atlantic** to apply to Laurie David in 2004. There is nothing more
hypocritical-and likely more infuriating to "real" people-than some
rich phony who claims to be an environmentalist but also insists on
flying "private," since it is pretty much the most wasteful use of
fossil fuels known to humankind.)

Wenner also paints himself and his magazine as a paragon of journalistic
virtue. Again, it was great in many ways, but adhering to the recognized
rules of journalism was not among them. Wenner was always demanding that
his friends get good reviews, occasionally writing them himself when the
hired help proved insufficiently enthusiastic. Wenner pretends not to
know this today. For instance, when discussing his firing of movie
critic Peter Travers, he refers to him as "Mr. Integrity," and "one of
the important American film critics. I introduced him once to a singer
who said, 'Oh you're the guy with four names: Peter Travers,

**Rolling Stone**.'" Well, yes, that was because virtually every
Travers review contained a "smash-bang rock-you-off-your-seat" sort of
quote that fit perfectly in a newspaper advertisement. This was free
publicity for the magazine as well as a valentine to potential
advertisers. Wenner could have saved some cash by not bothering to
publish the reviews at all and just sending them to the studios. I doubt
anyone would have noticed the difference.

Also, Wenner slags his mom an awful lot in this book. That's just
fucked up.

But I want to end on a positive note, so this: While I'm sure Wenner
does not get his phone calls returned the way he did when he could make
or break a career, Bruce Springsteen seems to genuinely like him. He not
only generously blurbed the book but also conducted an interview with
Wenner at the 92nd Street Y upon its release. Moreover, one of the only
two times Bruce ever had to talk to me without it being set up in
advance was when he was staying with Wenner in the Hamptons, and they
came to a movie screening after-party together.

Upshot: Read this book if you cannot help it-as I could not-for its
gossip. But if you want the same story with more context, go with Hagan
<[link removed]>
and skip the dirty parts.

______________________________________________________________________

Today's music is this obvious choice <[link removed]>
along with this wonderful (and inevitable) cover
<[link removed]>. Oh, and here
<[link removed]>'s Bruce doing it, and here
<[link removed]>'s a video that Bob's people put out for
the song in 2017, just 52 years after its initial release.

****

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!
<[link removed]>

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 12 books, most
recently

**We Are Not One: A History of America's Fight Over Israel** (Basic
Books, November 2022). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal
Media" column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman
<[link removed]>

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