The Watch - The Inside Story of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine With Writer Joe Hagan (Ep. 204)

Episode Date: November 17, 2017

The Ringer’s Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald are joined by writer Joe Hagan to discuss his new book, ‘Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine.’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello, and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I'm an editor at The Ringer.com, and joining me in the studio. He's got temptation eyes. It's Andy Greenwald! Hey, pal.

Boy, it's been a long day of podcasting for you and I. We just recorded a great podcast that you're about to hear with the author of the new Yon Winner Diography, Sticky Fingers. His name is Joe Hagan. Yep. He is a really interesting character, a great, great chatter, great talker. We did not talk about the other big news, which was me learning literally moments ago that the villain in Justice League, which opens tonight, is called Steppenwolf. And is a CGI Viking god who is voiced by Kieran Heinz.

We will be talking about Justice League Monday in some capacity. I have a feeling that things are not going well for this franchise. Did you know that his name was Steppenwolf? As I was, you know, we've been potting all day for various things, but as I went back to my office at check online, I saw that there was a controversy brewing because someone tweeted like this, I think Joanna Robinson from Vanity Fair tweeted that like the villain sucked in Justice League. Yeah. And Josh Whedon liked the tweet. And then all these other like JLA heads lost their minds and were like, I see you, Josh. And you will not be forgiven for the crimes against the Justice League.

Wow. So, Joss is an apocalypse head? I guess. I don't know, man. The main takeaway, and here we go again, but the main takeaway, I think, from the ringer's exhaustive superhero list that we talked about on Monday

is that they have a villain problem. Yeah. So as much as I do want to, I do want to make jokes about Steppenwolf, the CGI Viking God voice by Kieran Heinz, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? I don't know.

I mean, you could not make these movies. You could go ahead and do that. But you know what actually, so yeah, people go see it this weekend or they won't. Guess which category I'm in. But one thing that I'm kind of impressed by is just the press jiu-jitsu happening right now, where as a culture we have found a way, and we've agreed to find a way to just mercilessly shit on this movie, Justice League. And yet somehow, delicately, perhaps with a golden lasso of truth, extricate Gal Gadda. By the way, it's pronounced Galcadot.

I read that. That was great job. Katie Weaver's excellent GQ cover story. They did a great segment on her on Jam Session this week. But she has been saved from this. That happens. No, it's just impressive. When we all agreed to do that,

we take the jaws of cultural life and we extract someone worthy from an altogether unworthy enterprise. Your acute reading of the way things work and the way the media works is appropriate for this podcast today. So Joe Hagen came by today to talk to us. about his Jan Winter biography. And as interesting as the book is, it's salacious, it spans decades, it's exhaustive.

You can read it as almost as a soap opera or you can read it as the rise and fall of the baby boomer generation. There's also a very interesting creation myth around the book itself, which we get into, which is essentially that this began as Yon Winnard orchestrating his own legacy. You know, Yon asking Joe to write his biography.

They start getting into what will and will be included. Joe talks at length about this, and it was a fascinating part of our discussion. But it's interesting to get into, you know, no longer does Yon winner no longer a fan, it seems like. Yeah, and so it was not authorized, but in some way official encouraged. Like he, Jan, as Joe says, opened the kimono, but then also basically gave him his rolodex and said, you know, Bruce will talk to you, Mick will talk to you. Mick will talk to you, Keith will talk to you. And then it was very surprising what a lot of these people said. Joe...

It was also surprising when he found out Bruce Mick and Keith were just some guys that were hanging out at an Irish bar on 56th Street. I think Desmond's and Murray Hill was actually a place where he sourced much of this. It's a really fascinating thing. And so we came at this from... We have a very particular angle on this because while Rolling Stone was formative in some ways, I would say, to our experience, when we, do you mind that I'm using the Royal We Here? When we both became not together, because we didn't meet till later, but we both became really obsessed with magazines and with music,

but with music journalism where those two things met. Rolling Stone was just this behemoth. Rolling Stone was the establishment. Rolling Stone was the official word of rock and roll good and bad. Yeah, I would say that probably for both of us, that Rolling Stone was the script that we deviated from. that's very well put. I mean, Spin.

You have to have the baseline of information and you have to have the cannon that you're reacting against it. You don't have to. But punk had to rebel against something. Yeah, rap. It was like Rolling Stone, ignoring rap for as long as it did,

gave rap that much more of a chip on its shoulder to some extent. But I still gave it because, you know, when you are young and definitely in a pre-internet world, there were arbiters of things. And so, you know, when I discovered Spin in the late 80s, I was like, oh, this is very cool.

But it also feels fringy and fly by night. and these opinions are shocking and exciting, but in Rolling Stone it was official. As you say, as we said to Joe, when Rolling Stone and News and Notes said R.E.M. was in the studio. Well, there was a picture of them in the studio, and then they would put them on the cover, and then they would give Automatic for the People five stars.

And I was like, oh, my God, this album is a classic because they said it was, because they would never, this wouldn't be serious. To me, the exciting thing about this book, which I'm enjoying very much, and you'll hear this in our conversation, is the way that Joe didn't just do a biography of Yon, Wendner, he drilled down and attacked, not in a violent way, but in a really journalistic way,

the very notion of there being a canon, of there being an establishment. Why did I receive this wisdom that these five stars from a magazine meant something important, both to me and to the larger culture? And that's what's kind of interesting about it, especially as the era of giants of publishing, of giants of rock, is drawing to a close. I think when I immediately think of music biographies, I think of them as acts of love as acts of fandom, as acts of trying to memorialize or, you know, put down in stone the age geographies. I get to say it again. Yeah, yeah. This is not that. There's a lot of really

cool stuff in it, but even talking to Joe, I felt like I was in the presence of a very pugnacious reporter, you know, and not someone who was like, it's important to me to interrogate myths. It was like, it was important for him to get to the bottom of the stories that he was talking about. And that's it. It gives the book a different feel than some other biographies that you might read that are a little bit more about, like how this person, how this man or woman became a god for a while. And I also say, if this isn't too grandiose, it's a really interesting moment for this book and for this conversation because we do seem to be living in an era where the perceived wisdom and the accepted stories are just crumbling. Because in a very small way,

When we were working in magazines, there was the opinion of Rolling Stone that we shared, you know, good and bad, good people worked their friends, worked there, didn't. But we kind of wink, wink, we knew Jan had his thumb on the scale or they didn't really believe, the writers didn't really stand behind this thing. And frankly, magazines we worked for too. But yet we agreed to maintain this fiction because it had always been that way, right? That maybe something was disingenuous or maybe something wasn't on the up and up. we are living in an era where all that is crumbling in very large ways. And so it's a particularly, it's a book that is particularly suited to its time. Yeah.

And Joe talks about that, about sort of writing into the narrative and writing into this idea. And he says he couldn't help but draw comparisons between Jan and Trump, not in the way in which they were, like their careers are in none of themselves acts of narcissism. So let's get to this conversation with Joe Hagan, his book, Sticky Fingers. The biography of Steppenwolf. Sorry, guys. We'll be back on Monday to talk about Justice League and other stuff. We'll take some listener questions. Until then, have a great weekend and enjoy this conversation with Joe Hagan.

We are very excited to be joined now by the author of Sticky Fingers, The Life and Times of Yon Wrenner and Rolling Stone magazine out now in hardcover from which press. Knopf. Knapp, one of my favorite words to say out loud. Joe Hagan, welcome. Just found out I've been mispronouncing that. It's Knoff. There's a lot of letters that shouldn't be next to each other.

And yet, this sounds so sweet. Joe, welcome to the show. Welcome to L.A. Yeah, thanks for joining us. Very much. I love it here. We, congratulations on this book. Thanks. It is terrific read and a terrific work, which is journalism, covering an enormous amount of time and some pretty contentious figures.

Yes, thank you. We're going to get into some details about the book and about your process writing it. I have to confess I'm about halfway through the book, and I want a spoiler here, and I want to begin them with this. Yeah. I just want you to give me a ballpark of how, what percentage. percentage of the remaining 15, 200 pages that I have left in the book, how much of that is devoted to Rolling Stones' five-star review of Goddess in the Doorway, the Mick Jagger solo.

You know, it's funny. I didn't mention it in the book, which is probably like a... My mind is blown! Yeah, I know. In the paperback, I may have to put in a footnote. But the truth is, by the time you reach that period, it's so much of a foregone conclusion how this kind of relationship has shaped up. that it's almost beside the point.

It would just be gilding the lily at this point. What's funny about it is, is it was a controversy at the time. Yes. But now... What year was that? Gosh, it was in the 2000s. Yeah, early 2000s.

So for people who don't know, early 2000s, Mick Jagger releases his third or fourth solo album. It is exactly as good as a third or fourth Mick Jagger's solo album would be, except in the opinion of one low-profile Rolling Stone record reviewer named Jan Wiener,

who bestowed a classic rating on it. Yes. And at the time, this was big, shocking thing. What, I mean, what people didn't know is that this had been going on for ages that this sort of, you know, they were personal friends. Right, right? Not mentioned in the review. Not mentioned at all in the review.

With this, Jan had a history of this, you know. And in addition to that, you know, he had done a gigantic interview with Mick Jagger in 1995, you know, as in as he had with many of his favorite artists who was able to edit it himself. So, you know, this was, if you were in the upper echelon in yon's social world, this was, you got this treatment, you know. It's, I imagine you've figured this out now in just talking to people about the book, that that, that anecdote has an outsized presence in the stories of people who used to work in the music industry or like in music journalism. That was always the thing we'd point to, but obviously there were many more things to point to. I think that was one of the earlier things we've talked about in our friendship was that review. And I remember it also said a lot about, I was sort of, I think on my report. approach to us. We're like, well, isn't that really that surprising? And the magazine's called Rolling

Stone. Did you think that he was going to roast this movie? Chris also just suggested we didn't actually speak for the first five years of our friendship because that album came out in 2001. That's true. That's true. But Jan and Mick had sort of a, it's a, their relationship is central to the book and the relationship that starts in the beginning when Jan is kind of skirting copyright infringement on the band's name. He talked a little bit about the sort of role that Mick has played in this guy's life? Well, I sort of think of it as they were, by virtue of the name and the kind of legal tension there at the start, they were, and Rolling Stone's success, quickly it was successful.

It put them into like a shotgun marriage that in which the name was both the, could be the virtue of their relationship and sometimes the not virtue of the relationship. And so sometimes Mick Jagger's going to do very well. He's going to be on a cover of a magazine with his band's name virtually on it. And that's good for him. On the other hand, Jan might have Truman Capote follow him around on tour and produce something really horrible that makes embarrasses Mick Jagger. And he would be embarrassed and be like, why did I do that? Well, that tension, and maybe we can circle back to just how this story was, I mean, you worked on this for many years, but Jan gave you permission, right?

That's right. He gave you. He asked me to ride it. He lifted the skirt, so you will. Open the kimono is basically. Oh, that's even better. But that central tension is fascinating to me because as part of this, and stop me if I'm wrong, he basically said, I want you to write this book. You can have access to my life story, but also

I'm going to tell my Rolodex, which is an unrivaled Rolodex, to talk to you. I find this fascinating because that central tension, and Chris and I both experienced this when we were writing about music, between the journalist and the musician, maybe this is true in all parts of journalism, but particularly the musician gets, certainly gets the fame, and the adulation and the money and the magazine covers, but never gets the last word. This seems to me, and this is maybe because of some of the tension that came later after publication,

these guys could talk now, and they could talk about Jan. And I don't know if that occurred to him that they could finally talk about him. Absolutely. That is definitely something that was eye-opening to me, and it's both that we're at the end of the arc of the rock and roll story here. They're all in their 70s. And 70-year-olds, I learned. They're at the point where they don't care anymore.

You know what I mean? If they ever did, yeah. Yeah, if they ever did. But in the past, it was in their benefit not to go around complaining about this. I have future records to sell future covers to be on. And so they were at a point. They were like, okay, I'm going to tell you what my story is. And that was especially kind of shocking to me when I interviewed Paul McCartney, who I remember going in.

This is really maybe close to the beginning of the process thinking nothing's going to come out of this. This will be totally canned stories and a lot of... And this was in person? It was in person. I went to England, took a train, there was a station called Rye, it was near the channel. I went out to his studio. He had an office. It was amazing. Can I just say also, what is that like for you? Because you're flying across the ocean, you're going to London. And in the back of your mind, do you just have it loaded if someone asks you what you're doing, you're going to say, I'm going to meet a beetle? Like, is it, is it, what does that even feel? Well, I definitely felt it, you know, as a, you know, as a,

a person who's just an incredible, obviously, fan of just, like everybody else in the world. And I was doing other interviews while I was there, but with people you wouldn't have known about or not as famous. So when I was going out there, I was thinking to myself, well, if nothing comes out of this, I'll have met Paul McCartney. And what the hell? Let's go. So I went. And so I was surprised to learn that he had a lot to unload, that he had had a kind of like years-long. tension and resentment of Yon and Rolling Stone. What was the moment that you realized that the interview was going in a different direction

than you had expected? I think, well, what happened was in the book, I don't know if you've gotten this far, but there was a Polaroid that had been sent to Yon anonymously, care of Johan Weiner that I found in Yon's archive, and it was from 1974, and it had Paul and John together in it, kind of cavorting with Keith Moon and Linda McCartney in some kind of patio scenario. And underneath the white space on the Polaroid, it said, how do you sleep? Question mark, question mark, question mark.

Oh, yeah. Which is an allusion to the Lennon song that was hitting McCartney. And so I pulled this out, and then lots of things began to flow with he told me. Had you seen that image in a while? He knew exactly what it was. In May Pan, I've learned since, published a book of other Polaroids from this same period. because what had happened, as you learn in the book, and Paul told me, which was that Yoko Ono had come to him and said, you know, John and I are broken up. He's out in L.A. going crazy. The Nielsen era. It was the Lost weekend era. She actually asked Paul to go act as an emissary and tell him that she would take him back. And so he goes to L.A. with Linda, and this whole scenario unfolds in which he sees Lennon. Now, the reason this was significant is it sort of portended, you know, John Lennon.

and going back to New York and living in the Dakota. And then, but it also was sort of a period where they were going to repair their relationship a little bit after the breakup of the Beatles. And Rolling Stone had been really in the middle of the Beatles breakup. Yeah. In the John Lennon interview of 71, which is the epic interview of really the biggest rock and roll interview Yon ever did by any measure. And that was a very painful interview for Paul. It had sort of, it was putting salt in the wound about what the brink. break up, and, you know, he, Paul recognized correctly that Yon and Rolling Stone were partisans

for John Lennon in this whole scenario. But you would think, okay, maybe that was an isolated period, but this went on for the rest of the history of Rolling Stone in Paul's mind. That Lennon, that Rolling Stone and Yon, especially after he died, had turned John, had gone and worked hand-in-glove with Yon, because they became social friends, Jan and Yon, to make John Lennon the only Beatle it mattered. The true genius. The true genius. And in fact, Paul says in my interview in the book, you know, I just booked the studio. That's what it seemed like. And this went on to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, too. That became another issue, as you'll read later.

Which Jan is the gatekeeper, self-appointed gatekeeper of essentially. That's right. And Paul felt like he got screwed over by Jan and then his own induction. And so it's a real, you know, listen, I was thinking, obviously these things all happen in the 60s. Clearly they're over it. They're not going to be. No, they're never get over it. They're always sensitive flowers. They're artists. Sensitive flowers, exactly. We'll have more from Joe Hagan in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors.

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slash watch. To get started today, stitchfix.com slash watch. And now back to our conversation with Joe Hagan. You know, one of the things that's sort of interesting

about music journalism and I don't know whether Jan is the chicken or the egg here is this idea that, you know, in other forms of journalism, you may be,

you're predetermined adversarial relationship with your subject. Let's say you're covering crime. Let's say you're covering politics. Your job is to hold those people. people's feet of the fire. But music journalism, at least we grew up with it, was an act of

kind of intellectual fandom. You know, you already wanted to love these things because music was so important to you in your life. I was curious about whether you viewed Yon through that lens. Oh, absolutely. And what that means for a journalistic enterprise that you oversee. Well, it's multi-dimensional here. On the one hand, you have artists that Yon personally loved. Sure. And he gave them the fan treatment, you know, most often. And then there were artists that he didn't love or he just sort of decided it's okay, let it rip, embarrass that guy if we have to. Right.

And Jackson Brown is in the book saying he couldn't believe how, like, violated he felt after they did his first cover story, right? So clearly there was a different thing going on there. But then there was the critics. And the critics were allowed to be free. Generally, you know, occasionally, Jan would come in there and noodle around. Up a half star. Yeah, in the late 60s especially. And there was a big conflict if the critics wanted more autonomy and, you know, Chinese wall or whatever.

And so he – but the critics became a big thorn in his side over time. Yeah. And especially in the mid-70s, he was just – he got so upset about how critical they were of his favorite groups, including the Stones. in the late Dylan, late 70s, Dylan, that he came out of the woodwork to criticize them in his own magazine. And he wrote these incredibly glowing essays about the Stones and Christian era Dylan saying that these were, and you know, slow train coming. It's a good record.

But, you know, that whole period's getting like a reevaluation out. He's got a boolex series coming out. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, he had a real, it was a balancing act for him. It's interesting to follow up on Chris's point, which I totally agree with, that the business of writing about rock and roll is often trying to sort of professionalize the fandom.

There's also an aspect of just trying to professionalize all of it and create gods. When you add Jan Wenner and Rolling Stone into it, it's also about creating gods and creating a business plan and creating an industry that you can then be the captain of and have the gatekeeper of. And just in terms of our personal history with it, I think Chris would agree too,

like becoming a music fan, becoming aware of music like in the 80s, Rolling Stone was just the establishment. Not even in the bad way. It just existed. It was a benchmark. These things mattered. These things didn't. And that was the received wisdom that then you could play with and learn more about or poke holes in. What's really essential to me as a reader of your book is realizing, truly realizing and seeing it happen, how it was always created. How everything about, Jan, from the beginning, understood art and commerce equally, maybe even not equally, if we're being honest about it.

And one of the sort of initial revelations for me, when I wrote a book proposal for the book, it was the John Lennon stuff. Because that was I decided, let me go into an archive and see what's in there about John Lennon. And it turned out there was this whole story that which I tell him the book about his sort of – he said Lennon, we were like partners. I was a partner with him. I was going to help him say whatever he wanted to say out in the world. And John and Yoko were thinking, we're going to use Rolling Stone as a vehicle to drive our own narrative separate from the Beatles. They were happy to use each other. Exactly. And then with Mick Jagger, literally partners on a British version of Rolling Stone in which Mick Jagger was half owner.

Yeah. I mean, so when I started to see these things, I was like, oh, I see what happened here or what was going on. These were partnerships. And he built it on a kind of fan magazine model, even though he had all this genuinely great criticism and sometimes good journalism. He also understood the value of the old kind of like teen beat model of like, being kind of hand in glove with some of the big artists who everybody wanted to read about. Sure. There are a lot of paths into this book for a lot of different types of readers. To you, how do you describe it? Is it a business book? Is it a... Initially, I thought it was, but I think it's a cultural history. Okay. I've thought a lot about this in recent times because I've had to articulate the book for people.

You know, when I was writing it, I was just in it. Yeah. And how many years was the process? Four years. Yeah. And, you know, and basically I closed the book in August. Oh, my gosh. This is how, like, tight this was. Really?

Whoa. Yeah, so it was intense, and it was very stressful. But because I had, like, a fact checker for five months and lawyers, you can imagine all the process. But the thing that I came to realize in the writing of the book that was really a revelation for me, at first I was like, well, I know all these personal soap operas about what's going on in his life with his marriage and his secret sexuality. and his private relationships with big rock stars and how that happened.

And I begin to realize when you have a magazine like Rolling Stone, which is kind of an expression of the man who invented it, the personal is the historical. The more I got into the kind of texture of the soap opera of these relationships between Jan Wiener and Annie Leibowitz, Jan Wiennman and Mick Jagger, John Lennon, the more kind of granular I could get, the more of a cultural history it would be,

because you'd understand kind of the secret history of the history. and especially of a man who invented a history of his own kind of making. I mean, and, you know, I'm going to get to a point here that will be of interest to you guys here, which is that, you know, he created a big top, essentially, and underneath it were all these rock writers and all these people who had had careers there, and it was sacred to them, a lot of them. Now, some of them got booted out of there and were resentful, as you can see in the book. Yeah. But my mandate, I felt like as a journalist, was to go out of that tent.

And in a way, I had to kind of drain away some of the nostalgia and some of the reverence that, you know, other writers who were more devoted to Rolling Stone might have had for it. And this has been somewhat controversial for people. This is what we want to talk about also. Yeah. Yeah. And I – but I have no regrets whatsoever about it because the truth is, is like I wanted to tell. the true story. And in a way, while I understand the magic that will set you free of music, nobody, you know, I'm a huge fan.

Yeah. You let people should know that Joe walked into the studio with a bag with a record in it that he purchased in a store, not moments before. So he's the real deal. Yeah, I'm into it. And I spent way too much time in there. But so, you know, but the story is about Jan Wiener, and he was a culture maker, and he was a culture maker. a businessman, and he was a social climber. And it was his ego and the force of his ego and the force of his appetites that really drove the magazine, no matter what was in it, who was in it, who was writing it, and he knew how to find talent, and he did all these incredible things.

But I had to track him. I couldn't track everybody else's feelings about it. You know, if you want to read about the writer's point of view, go read Robert Draper's book, okay, Rolling Stone, censored history, which is even more negative than my book, actually. You know what I mean? I don't consider my book negative. Because it's more personal. It's resentful. Well, it's all these resentment and all this resentment. And so, you know, your own reviewer said that it was a feast of sourness, the book, my book. And I just totally disagree with that. And I think that, but I get it. It's like, it's an emotional response from somebody that wants you to give it more kind of romance.

But if you were me and you had gone through Yon's archive and talked to him for four years, some of that, you know, the scales would have fallen from your eyes and that was the story you had to write. Yeah. And that's my position. I think it speaks to, you're talking about this big tent.

It was also, it meant different things to different people at different points in their lives. I remember, you know, for us, there was definitely a point where the reviews were the most important thing. There was a point in time in the early 90s and in the 80s where it essentially was what the internet became, where the news and notes and the in the studio section was the only thing you knew about you two going back in the studio.

Or EM's making a new record. Yeah. Okay. Now I know. Yeah. It's like there was no way to get information. And then there was, you know, there are some people who look at it as this paragon of new journalism and the place that birth, you know, helped promote a certain kind of journalism.

In celebrity culture, too. I remember the Michael Keaton cover when Batman was coming out. and it's like, oh, this is, this covers all, potentially all my interests. Yeah, right. And then there's a concept. I mean, we used to, when Andy and I used to work at Spin, we used to hear things all the time about, you know, different artists and where in the book they would go, where in the magazine they would go, and are they ready for this, that or the other section?

Are they ready to be in the front of the book? Are they an upcoming banner? They ready to have a feature? And Stone's cover was this, it's like, this kind of like, you were marked if you did it. If you got on the cover, that was, you were a significant contributor to American popular culture at that point. And I think that's also part of the thing that people have to wrap their head around, because in some ways, what you're doing is you're bringing us back to yon and you're showing us this is all. The man behind the curtain. Yeah, exactly. And that's what the book is about. It's like

the great and powerful Oz. Okay. And how did it up work? The thing that really, I remember, I struggled with this in the writing of it. Because I remember getting to the 80s and I was looking through the issues and there, you know, instances of really fabulous journalism. There were all kinds of writers that we all know who were in there. And I would ask, Jan, well, tell me about some of the great stories from this period. What were you involved in? What are you proud of? And he could think of a couple, Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities, the AIDS coverage, which is interesting. But he was way more animated talking about his private jet than he was about any article that he published. And at first, I was very disappointed in this. And I thought, really? I mean, wow,

in the details. And there was a couch and it was a bed. And And my friends and I all went on these great journeys, and we were going everywhere, and Fran Lee Liebowitz was there and all these crazy things. And at first I was like, I remember saying to myself, I'm not putting that in the book. You know, oh, God, that's disappointing. Yeah. But then I realized, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's the point. That's where this was all going. And that's, that's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's been, when it's been, when I was, in, in 99th or in 2000, someone showed me Rolling Stones ad, ad,

sales material that went to the companies that were advertising in the magazine and the disconnect between what they wanted to be still be known for, the artist that they wanted to cover or deal with. And then this document, which was basically saying, Bob Dylan is still the only thing that matters. Here's a jaguar. And balancing that is very tricky, but that's what the audience and what that generation became. Well, that's what the perception reality ad campaign was about from the late 80s.

He was honing in right on that, saying, listen, we can broach this divide between your perception of the hippie reader who's stones, you know, and the yuppie who's got a briefcase and sports car. Yeah. He basically, and he loved that. I mean, he, and it really worked. Yeah. I mean, ad pages went up.

The ad community loved it. They were like, yes, and his circulation had reached this peak. And but even before all that, the cart was already leading the horse here. You know what I mean? By the late 70s, they were already moving towards, we're going to do a, you know, this is for people that probably don't pay attention to print anymore, but there was like to staple the magazine and have it be glossy and cover and everything. They were moving into, we're going to be a serious magazine on the newsstand and not just like a newspaper like they used to be. And it

was all about getting better ads. And that's what Jan was really, listen, Jan could do two things at once. He is a kind of, he was a kind of a brilliant guy who could attend to the business and then people come to him, what stories do you want? Yes, this and not that. You know, he had that power. But what made him who he was was his social movements, you know, across this nude tier of like jet setters and rich guys who were going to build something like the rock and roll a film. And I had to follow that narrative. Let's talk specifically about that relationship with Jan because, as you said, he opened the kimono. He said, have at it. You're the guy. And then you as a good journalist and a good writer, you wrote a true book, you know, and there has been

some discussion that maybe he doesn't love that. He hates it. I'm of the opinion that he will probably come around and realize the value of it, but can you talk about that entire journey from when you met him to the relationship during the book to the relationship right now in November? Well, listen, I knew him. just really casually before any of this book stuff started. I had met him in a cafe in my little village of Tivoli, New York, where I live. He had just bought a big estate up there and had it had just been finished being remodeled and everything. And so I meet him in a cafe.

I'm on my computer working on something, and I recognized immediately who he was. And I was like, what's he doing here? And I immediately just stood up and went over to him. And I was like, Jan, Wenner, what are you doing around here? And he said, whoa, hello, okay. I'm getting this milk and this cappuccino. And he invited me to his house for a birthday party that his kid was having. This is his kid, Gus, who took over the magazine?

His younger children. Okay. And one of his kids was turning five. So I was, wow, this will be interesting. You know, and you have to go up to the gate and you press the button. Okay, the gate opens. You go along, winding path, come out onto this fabulous plantation on the Hudson River. and there's this beautiful pool house,

and it's like a modernist thing, and it's outrageous, and down at the pool are Annie Leibowitz and her children and Young and his kids and an exotic animal handler for the birthday party, and it was just a whole scene that I was just like, wow, okay, I am a gawker. I am gawking at this.

This is outrageous. And so, and he was interested because he didn't know anybody around there. Annie Leibowitz had a spread up the road, and so he thought... Not exactly a townie. No, he wasn't. He not at all and he never has been, and he never really comes out of the gated fortress, frankly.

I mean, occasionally. But he, you know, wanted to talk to me because I was in the magazine business and I was a writer. And for whatever else's reason, he just wanted to hang out. So after that, we would meet for coffee and lunch once in a while and chat. And he wanted me to write for him. For Stone. For Rolling Stone. And Men's Journal, too.

And I wrote a piece for Rolling Stone and a piece for Men's Journal for him. And I was working at New York Magazine. And at one point, he wants me to work. He was saying, you should come to Rolling Stone and cover politics because he liked something I did about Carl Rove and stories I was writing about Republicans at the time. And so I was like, I don't know if I want to do that. And I must admit, part of it was that Rolling Stone wasn't where I was, it just didn't have the stature that I at once had, you know, to be frank. I enjoyed some of it. but I was uncomfortable with their kind of left-wing stance in the magazine.

I wanted to be at something where I could be more cool in my writing, and they have a very – Temperature-wise or temperamentally. Yeah, temperamentally, yeah, because they're very forward in the way they – and muscularly kind of democratic and everything, and that wasn't my reputation, you know. And that's getting too into the weeds. But the truth is – But the magazines have personalities and temperament. And especially this one.

Especially this one. So he took me out to lunch to kind of convince me. that I could take a contract with them. And then I was sort of hemming and hauling, and he said, well, why don't you write my biography? That was his second offer. That's right. Can I ask when you guys are having coffee

and you're just hanging out and typically, what are you guys talking about? What's small talk with you guys? There would have been, you know, what was going on in politics, what's going on in the magazine business, ad sales are up or down, you know, like just shop talk.

Is he asking you questions? Are you asking him questions? Both. Yeah. And I would be more. more like, so tell me about Dylan. I mean, yeah. And I asked him one time, you know, are you going to do a memoir?

It seems like you should do one because you probably have this fabulous history. And he said, oh, he kind of alluded to the fact that he had had something fall through. And then I started to kind of poke around on that. And it was all on Wikipedia, like, you know, these two failed attempts to write a book. Yeah. So he asked me to do it. It was in a restaurant. And I was sort of sitting, it was lunch.

He drove me there in his Porsche, which was kind of exciting. And I just was like, well, God, that's amazing, but I really got to think about it. That was a big thing. And I walked out of there, a little stunts, you know. I remember going home telling my wife, you're not going to believe what he just asked me. And so I told Jan, let me think about it. And I called, I believe that week I called Rich Cohen, who had previously tried and it didn't work out to write one. And he told me his story of what had happened to him. And I kind of drew from that, that,

you know, I have to be careful here. And so I remember the Steve Jobs book had only recently come out, and I had read it, was reading it, and I was thinking, you know, the only way to write a good book is if Jan can handle negative information. This is the Walter Isaacson book, which had no negative information, if I remember correctly. Walter Ozzy's a book It just shows Steve Jobs to be the biggest jerk Who Ever lived? Oh, I guess I've completely misremembered that problem.

It was like he is a very unappealing person in the book And because he was an unappealing person. Yeah. But he was iconic and you could still read the book and enjoy it because, but you would also be like alarmed by what a jerk he was. But I was thinking, well, I know who Jan is by reputation. I know this is a very tricky situation. I told Jan, I said,

Well, let's see if you can handle some negative information. I said, that's what it's going to take. You're going to be able to have to metabolize things that aren't that you don't like. And he said, no, there's no problem, whatever. Come into the office and throw hard balls. And I was like, fine. I remember reading Robert Draper's book, plucking out some choice anecdotes in there that were tough. And just going into his office.

And I just, we started talking about it. And he kind of, he grew agitated when I would bring up kind of these notes. notorious stories. And he said, listen, it's, you know, that, those stories aren't true. But, and the other thing is I'm going to want some control over my sex life. And I said, okay, this is not going in the direction that it should be going. And I, the next day, I wrote him a letter, and I said, no. I said, if you want somebody to write an authorized biography, you should find that person. I'm sure it'll be a great book, but that's not the book I'm going to write. I said, I can only do this as an independent book.

And thus began a month-long series of talks with him over coffee in which he pushed and wanted me to do it. And I kept saying, only if you let go on this kind of like sex thing. So while you're having these conversations with him and he is at once enticing you to do this, but at the same time giving you parameters about, what do you think is going through his head in terms of, I mean, if he doesn't want these. kinds of things in the book, why keep going after you? I guess it's the thing that I just don't. Well, here's how his mind works, now that I know. There was a 50-year anniversary coming up the road,

and he wanted to have this treatment. The Steve Jobs book was hovering in the background as a thing. I want to think like that, the big iconic tone about my life. And also, I had just interviewed Hillary Clinton, and I think he liked that I, you know, was worthy of her getting this exclusive interview with her. And all these things were sort of commingling to make me seem like I could – and I was near him. And so he thought his proximity would help, yeah. He's got a reputation in the business. He'll be the guy that can do this. But I just need this a little bit of control.

And I just said, you can't have it. Or you can't have me. I just know I'm not going to do that. And then we had this series of things where I'd be asking him, well, why? What is the thing? Because obviously you're paranoid as a journalist. What are you afraid of? Yeah, what is the thing that you're hiding? And at first I thought, oh, there were rumors that he had had, you know, affairs with actors and different people.

And so I started asking him, did you have an affair with this person? Is this what you're worried about? No, no, no, it's none of that. Well, so eventually we got to the point where I said, listen, he said, write it down what you need. Have a lawyer, draw up a thing, put it in what you want, and we'll see if we can get there. And I wrote it up. I said, it's an independent book. You can't read the manuscript.

And I have to have a carte blanche. And he said, well, he pushed back on the sex thing. And I finally said, okay, anything that is related to Rolling Stone or any of your magazines, if I can connect anything you did to the magazine, I have to be able to write about it. And he said yes. And when you think about it, even this latest allegation that's out there about him, about, you know, the young man who's claiming that Yon offered him a contract for sex. Right. That would have been under neat. That would have fallen under the, you know, under the contractual thing. Yeah. And the other thing I said is, anything you say on the record is on the record, no matter what it is, even if it's about this stuff. And that was a pretty big, that gave me a lot of room because he's somebody that, you know, he'll talk.

He's a raconteur. He will talk eventually. And so anyway, this is how it all began, you know. And it was sort of like high risk. And there was a lot of intense intensity there. Once we got through the contract, we were relaxed. We're like, now let's just do this. And I felt like I have the freedom to write the book I need to write. And he just was really excited to unload all the stories. And his version of the story. Right.

And you got the other versions too in there. And so at what point this summer did he get his hands on it? And at what point did? I sent it to him after Labor Day. Knowing it was being published on Wednesday. Yeah, on October 27th. Right. Or I think 24th.

And I said to him, well, what happened was I was told by the publisher, it's at the printing plant. So the ship has sailed. If the ship has sailed. And that's when I sent it. And at first I told him, I'll send you the first copy off the printing press. But then I thought, you know what, I'm going to give him some time to digest this because I knew some of it would be hard. for him. Yeah. And he was already upset, actually, about the title. The title was revealed in the spring of last year, and he was really upset about it. And, but... What do you think it should be called?

Huh? What did he think it should be called? American Lion. Yon Wenner in his Times. Yeah. Right. And which I was like, I don't, you know, I'm sorry. I mean, and then he wanted it to be like a Rolling Stone. And he at one point he said, that's really all you can call it. So there's this thing here, we alluded to before you told us the details of it, which is that this guy, there's this binary, right, where he has the creative side of him and then there's the business side of him, and that is what fueled him and what created the magazine and his success, but it's also what has undone him at many stages of his career, and it does seem to be playing out maybe one last time with gusto with his relationship with you in the book, because what you have written is an exemplar of the field. I mean, you've written not just a great book to read, but a document of the Times with a clear point of view and real journalism.

the sort of things that he, when he's wearing a certain hat or wearing a certain suit, champions. Exactly. And so one would think. Yeah, but that's hard. Imagine reading a 540-page book about yourself in which 250-odd people are telling everything about you. Right.

And it's going to be, you know, a kind of a historical colonoscopy, so to speak. And it's like he, that's hard for him. And at the stage he's at, it's hard for him. Because, you know, one of the things that, you know, we've all noticed. in the last 10 to 20 years as Rolling Stone was being propped up basically by all these old rock stars.

Yeah. Okay. And by us weekly. And by us weekly. Exactly. The other things. And I think that Yon, and maybe not just Yon,

but people that were his allies, these hip capitalists of a certain generation, they were maybe the last to know that it was over. And in a way, I think Yon, if you've seen the HBO documentary about Rolling Stone, well, it's very, soft and celebratory, and God bless them, do it. And Jan's the executive producer of it. It's his vision

of history. But at some point, I'm writing the book, and it's in the 2016-2017 period. And I have to, it almost was an opportunity, actually, to look back on it and strip away some of the nostalgia for it, because, look, it had not saved us all. You can't immunize yourself. from history because of how great the Rolling Stones are. There's going to be a lot of stories. I mean, we'll look back, assuming we're all still alive in 10 years, and we'll look back at this time. And I don't know if you could have known when you were writing, but this is, you think about the fall of the boomers. You think about the end of Hillary, the end of Harvey, the end of yon, these people who wielded this kind of left center political, social might, this kind of like economic cachet that they had.

And the idea that this book comes out right at the same time is just fascinating. Well, it was in it. I have been – and maybe it was because I was writing it in real time, along with these things that were happening, I didn't really realize it at the time. I just remember thinking this book came organic from the material. I mean, if you read some of these anecdotes, if you're kind of shocked and surprised and alarmed by them, well, so was I. I was like, this is an incredible story. I got to write it this way. And so much of it was like folly, you know?

Yeah. The folly of the drug abuse and the kind of sexual ambiguity and confusion and the messiness and the backroom deals and all this. And I thought, this, you know, Yon probably won't like it because some of it is kind of irreverent, you know what I mean, on its face. Because the enduring story of the baby boomers in the 60s is that everything they did mattered, that it was all in process or service to. control of the voice to say. Yes, it was messy. Yes, we broke some hearts. We abused things. We lost some people along the way. But there's beauty. There's truth and beauty here. Yeah, that's good. And that's exactly what I was trying to say about the immunity is like they felt immunized. Right. Jan felt immunized against the kind of warts and all version of the history because he still believed he had the force field of their success. He controlled how people thought of it. So just in conclusion, you said something at the very beginning, just as a side.

comment that I thought was really interesting, which was, you said that now that we're at the end of the rock and roll era. And we talk a lot just as fans and his former music journalist that rock music is not central to the culture anymore, no matter how much, no matter how much you pretend that it could be. We are all in different ways, veterans of a time when magazines were central to the culture in a way. And one of the reasons that I stopped, and I bet Chris would say the same, I had to get out of writing about music for magazines as I felt like I was at the Venn diagram of a death spiral of two industries. Boy, you said it. So, From your experience, both before, during, and after this book, but also writing the book being around Yan, what big picture thoughts do you have about this?

The world that we grew up in, magazines matter a certain way, these magazines matter, these power brokers from Jan to Graydon Carter to whomever else matter. Rock and roll matters, the boomer myth matters. Where are we? Well, at the end of the book, and you're going to get there. I am going to get there now, but I, although I'm still upset about the goddess in the doorway. I understand. Well, wait for the paperback. I'll put it in as a note.

At the end, I addressed this directly. And it's one of the reasons Jan is upset about the book. That is proof he finished it. Well, yeah, exactly. So I tee it up a little bit at the beginning, which is that, you know, I talk about how the thread was lost in this narrative that began in 1967. And what over time, you know, the emergence of Trump, who is a figure of the celebrity culture. And the same age as Yon, right? Exact same age as Yon in a kind of similar personality profile. I don't want to take that

too far, but they're both narcissistic individuals. And I sort of maintain at the end that one of the things that happened is, you know, I say that Yon is a man of the me decade of the 70s, as they Tom Wolfe called it. And that was followed by a series of me decades. And eventually you get the me president. Yeah. And what happened was the culture that Jan was a part of, the celebrity culture, the world of fame and money and power that kind of built up from this stuff. Yeah. Uncoupled from ideas.

It decoupled from what they originally were talking about in all these songs that you love, you know. And eventually, you know, the fame culture knocks through to the last door. And now there's a pure reality television star in the White House. who doesn't really have any kind of coherent worldview other than him. And I couldn't, in good conscience, finish this book without connecting what I had seen for the last 500 pages and what was happening here. I mean, he did publish us weekly. I mean, he's called my book Todry. The man published us weekly, for God's sakes.

I mean, it was like, you know, this was Todry stuff, some of this stuff. And rock and roll was sex drugs from rock and roll. He put Britney Spears on the cover with dolls. I mean, he knows what he was doing. He knows what he's doing. But he, at this stage in his life, and he's not alone in this, all these guys want to look back and see it as a more vaunted thing. I mean, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was really an expression of Jan's kind of idea that rock and roll could be kind of cooled down and sculpted into institution of that would be next to the Lincoln Center, right? But in a way, that's not – and my job was to heat it back up and show how kind of messy it was.

And narcissistic in many ways. These were egos of epic proportions of these people. And there was a kind of preening and in self-regard that you could sign on for because you loved the music. Or because you could admit that that's part of rock and roll. peacocking and being a star, but there was also that you have to be earnest. You can't actually want fame or adulation or drugs just for pleasure's sake. No, it had to have a purpose. And then the drugs were part of the purpose at the beginning. You know, they thought of drugs as part of the creative source. I think that's, I just have to ask, the last communication between the two

of you? Well, some emails when I told him I was sending him the book. He was like, great. And he was very nervous about getting it. We spoke on the phone the day before his triple bypass operation last June. And he was in a somewhat confessional mood because it seemed like it was a real sort of mortality moment for him. And he told me about Springsteen coming by his hospital bed and giving him a mixtape for the surgeon to listen to. Like an actual cassette? Yeah, I don't know what if it was a cassette or some kind of mix or thumb drive or something. Dr. Meredith Gray is still got a cassette player when she's doing that.

You get one when you're doing Young Winter's surgery. Yeah, yeah. But since publication. Since publication, nothing. And to something you said, I do predict and hope that he'll, when all this emotionality cools down, he's sold Rolling Stone, he's in a new phase. He feels vulnerable right now. I get it, you know, that he will come to see that the book, my devotion to the truthful

story and to making it great, as great as I could, was my homage. to him. And it's hard for him to feel that way right now. Well, I hope he comes around, but in the meantime, people should check out this book. It is a terrific read, whether you are a fan of the music, whether you want to mock the music, whether you are a fan of the culture, history, celebrity. It's really all there. It's a terrific book. Sicky Fingers by our guest, Joe Hagan. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thanks a lot. I appreciate it. Today's episode of The Watch was brought to you by Stitch Fix Men,

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