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Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine
Joe Hagan
Alfred A. Knopf
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/246709/sticky-fingers-by-joe-hagan/
560 Pages; Print, $29.95

In the 1960s, rock music revolutionized the music industry. But the change was not immediate, nor was it readily apparent to the industry executives. When Clive Davis, for example, was made chief operating officer at Columbia Records in 1965, its best-selling music included Broadway soundtracks like South Pacific, My Fair Lady, and Camelot, and artists such as Mitch Miller, who had produced eleven Sing Along albums in a row that went gold. Its roster at the time was limited to Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Simon & Garfunkel, and Paul Revere & The Raiders, who were selling the most of the four. Though Dylan gave the company "prestige," his record sales "were good, rather than great." His only major single at the time was "Like a Rolling Stone." But the times—musically and otherwise—were "a changin'."

For Davis, who had unexpectedly won the "company's executive sweepstakes" and assumed his position at Columbia Records with "no A&R training, no claim to having [musical] 'ears,'" it was the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival that ushered in "a tidal wave of new music"—one that he would help shape until he was fired from his position in 1973. It was around the same time as this festival, which was held on the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California from June 16 through June 18—and featured the first major American performances of The Jimi Hendrix Experience and The Who—that a young man from just up the road in the Bay area had an idea for a new little magazine.

Drawing its power from its relationship with Dylan's song and a well-known rock band, Jann Wenner founded Rolling Stone, a little magazine dedicated to the flowering counter-culture and its music, in the spring of 1967. Only 21 years old at the time, Wenner approached the legendary Bay-area, music critic Ralph Gleason with the idea. "How about a magazine?" asked Wenner. "Like the Melody Maker and the Musical Express, but an American one that would be different and better and would cover not just the records and the music but would cover the whole culture." Gleason thought it was a great idea, and not only offered to write a column for it, but to also contribute $1,500 to help get it off the ground.

The first issue of Rolling Stone rolled off the presses on October 18, 1967, and featured John Lennon on the cover. Over the next fifty years, it would come to be one of the most influential and profitable magazines in American publishing history. Not only did it establish "rock criticism" as a serious genre, but by many accounts, it "made" what has come to be called "classic rock" music. "The rock stars collective stories, edited by Jann S. Wenner," comments Joe Hagan in Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, "helped sell millions of records and made them feel good about themselves."

Hagan does a wonderful job telling both the life story of Wenner and the story of the magazine. For some, it will be the biography of Wenner that is appealing, one of an ambitious and ruthless young man who through sheer force of ego builds a company valued in 2006 at $1.1 billion. For others, it will be the story of a magazine that has come to temper the views of many regarding music, politics, and culture for nearly half a century. But Hagan makes a good case that it is difficult to separate the "man" from the "magazine," arguing that Rolling Stone is "Wenner's life." Though there were numerous opportunities for him to sell off parts of the company—one whose success was in large part due to the efforts of his wife, Jane—he ultimately refused them all including an offer to sell the entire company to Hearst in 2006. As Hagan puts...

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