"Like a Rolling Stone," by Jann S. Wenner

I feel as if I have just surfaced from a long journey back into my teens and twenties and beyond. I inhaled (no pun intended, given the times and topic of the book!) Jann S. Wenner’s 556-page memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone” (Little, Brown, 2022) in four days. Wenner was the founder/publisher/editor of the magazine Rolling Stone for 50 years, just recently selling the publication and retiring. The magazine was cutting edge, very high quality, and very popular, a source of great journalism and reviews and photography related to music (most of all), culture, and politics. What drew me in to the magazine, back in my youth, and to the memoir (now) was the intimate and detailed portraits of the musicians, writers, photographers, politicians, and other big players of the past five decades, especially during the earlier years (the years of my own youth). Writers and photographers who worked at Rolling Stone included Ralph J. Gleason, Cameron Crowe, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Ben Fong-Torres, and Annie Leibovitz, and so many more. (And yes, it is unfortunately -- but typical of the times -- true that there were far more men than women on the staff, especially in the star positions.) And it seemed that Wenner knew and knows all the musicians and writers and politicians, and was close friends with many, many of them, including Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Bono, Boz Scaggs, Bruce Springsteen, Jackie Onassis and her son John Kennedy, Al Gore, Michael Douglas, Bette Midler, John Belushi, and many more. One might be tempted to think that Wenner is exaggerating his closeness to these super-famous people, but his stories of time spent with each of these over the years ring true. Wenner has also had a complicated family life, which he describes (seemingly, at least) candidly. He was married for years to Jane, and they had/have three children together. At some point he realized he was gay, but wanted to preserve his close connection to Jane and to their children, and felt that occasional brief affairs with men did not threaten his marriage. But then he met Matt Nye and fell in love with him. They became partners and eventually married and had three children of their own. Although Jane was unhappy, remarkably they were able to all get along well, and the children of the two families became close as well. I imagine some difficult times were somewhat glossed over in this memoir, but still, one has to admire the maturity and caring involved in everyone in the family getting along and supporting each other. I never had strong feelings about Wenner, although I did read and enjoy Rolling Stone during my college years and for a while afterward. But he manages to make this book about much more than himself (aside from occasional self-aggrandizement – but after all, it is his memoir!) This book just grabbed me, with its sweeping story of the times, the times in which I grew up as well. I was particularly swept up in remembering the music of the early days of my youth – the 1960s and the 1970s - with all the dramatic changes that took place during those years, when we felt that youth would make the world a better place. It made me remember the personal and communal power of music, especially in one’s teens and twenties: the way the music insistently and intensely intertwined with our lives, our loves, our longings, our politics, our dreams.