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Summary
Summary
A delicious romp through the heyday of rock and roll and a revealing portrait of the man at the helm of the iconic magazine that made it all possible, with candid look backs at the era from Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Elton John, Bono, Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, and others.
The story of Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone 's founder, editor, and publisher, and the pioneering era he helped curate, is told here for the first time in glittering, glorious detail. Joe Hagan provides readers with a backstage pass to storied concert venues and rock-star hotel rooms; he tells never before heard stories about the lives of rock stars and their handlers; he details the daring journalism (Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, P.J. O'Rourke) and internecine office politics that accompanied the start-up; he animates the drug and sexual appetites of the era; and he reports on the politics of the last fifty years that were often chronicled in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine.
Supplemented by a cache of extraordinary documents and letters from Wenner's personal archives, Sticky Fingers depicts an ambitious, mercurial, wide-eyed rock and roll fan of who exalts in youth and beauty and learns how to package it, marketing late sixties counterculture as a testament to the power of American youth. The result is a fascinating and complex portrait of man and era, and an irresistible biography of popular culture, celebrity, music, and politics in America.
Author Notes
JOE HAGAN has written for New York, Rolling Stone , The Wall Street Journal , and many other publications. He has published long-form profiles and investigative exposés of some of the most significant figures and subjects of our time, including: Hillary Clinton (her first post-Secretary of State interview), Karl Rove, the Bush family, Henry Kissinger, Dan Rather, Goldman Sachs, The New York Times , and Twitter. He lives with his family in Tivoli, New York.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
As freelance writer Hagan posits in this searingly honest biography, Rolling Stone and its founder, Jann Wenner, turned rock stars into celebrities, fed salacious fare to slavering fans, and assembled a staff of writers (including Ralph Gleason, Greil Marcus, and Jon Landau) who elevated rock music criticism into serious writing. Wenner, who founded the magazine in 1967, was a schmoozer who was equally capable of making close friends and repelling them, as adept at publishing gushing profiles of his favorite artists as firing at those he disliked or against whom he held a grudge. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with Wenner (who exercised no control over the book), his family and friends, writers who've worked for the magazine, and musicians, Hagan, who has written for Rolling Stone, chronicles Wenner's fawning over Mick Jagger and aborted attempt to start, with Jagger, a British edition of Rolling Stone; Keith Richards describes Wenner and Jagger as "very guarded creatures," but wonders if "there's anything worth guarding." Hagan has provided an entertaining insider's history of a legendary magazine. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The definitive biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner (b. 1946).Much like its spiritual cousin Saturday Night Live, Rolling Stone magazine has been a murderers' row of talent for decades, from the groundbreaking Lester Bangs to the gonzo engine of Hunter S. Thompson to political wunderkind Matt Taibbi. Here, former Rolling Stone contributing editor Hagan provides the most complete portrait ever of the man who has firmly gripped the magazine's helm the whole time, a man whose thumbprint on the American culture was matched only by a vacillating stew of ego and insecurity. For fans, newbies, and journalism junkies alike, the iconic stories are heree.g., Patti Hearst's Stockholm syndrome, the assassination of John Lennon, and the combative, brotherly bond between Wenner and Thompson in the latter's heyday (Wenner's response to his first meeting with Hunter is priceless: "I know I'm supposed to be the youth representative in the culture, but what the fuck is that?"). The author also explores the heavily drug-fueled work ethic among Wenner and contemporaries like Annie Leibovitz, Wenner's infamously combative marriage, and his long, painful struggle with his sexuality. To his credit, Hagan doesn't trade on his access to his subject's celebrity friends; when Mick Jagger or Michael Douglas pop up in the narrative, it's because they're substantive eyewitnesses to the scene at the time. Working with his subject's full consent and participation, the author manages to create a far deeper portrait than many readers will expect. In capturing Wenner's legend, Hagan creates a moving portrayal of a complicated, brilliant, flawed man who genuinely moved the needle on American culture. "He was the fame maker but also the flame keeper," Hagan writes of Wenner's evolution after Lennon's death. "The success and power of Rolling Stone made him the de facto architect of rock's cosmology, but it was his attention to the legends that made him the indispensable man." An engaging doorstop of a biography and a lasting legacy for the keeper of rock-'n'-roll's watchtower. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The first issue of Rolling Stone appeared in November 1967. Its founder was an ambitious kid whose goal in life was to become bigger and more important than Hugh Hefner: specifically, to become the Henry Luce (the founder of Time) for the counterculture. Wenner dared to take rock seriously (Rolling Stone popularized rock criticism) while also reinventing the idea of celebrity and fame around youth culture. He built up a network of important writers and photographers and published articles that covered the movers and shakers of pop culture and politics. It was a potent and popular mix, and it made Wenner, according to Hagan, the most important magazine editor in America in the 1970s. Anecdotes about musicians, including Lennon, Springsteen, and Jagger, among others, abound as well as stories involving some of the magazine's finest writers and photographers, including Hunter S. Thompson, Ben Fong-Torres, Cameron Crowe, Tom Wolfe, Richard Avedon, and Annie Leibovitz. Drawing from more than 100 hours of conversation with Wenner as well as interviews with musicians, writers, publishers, friends, lovers, and past and present employees of the magazine, Hagan has fashioned a fascinating biography of a controversial figure and the iconic publication he started.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
STICKY FINGERS: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, by Joe Hagan. (Vintage, $17.) This appraisal of Rolling Stone's co-founder and publisher holds nothing back: not his narcissism and violent temperament, nor his legendary appetites - especially when it came to sex. Even though rock music's importance faded and the magazine has thinned, Hagan makes a case for Wenner's lasting place in 20th-century history LEA, by Pascal Mercier. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. (Grove, $16.) Two Swiss men meet by chance in Provence; one is trying to repair his relationship with his daughter Lea, a brilliant but mercurial violinist who is hospitalized in an asylum that once sheltered Vincent van Gogh. As the men's stories and identities mix, the novel poses unsettling questions: Who are we? And what might it be like to be someone else? A BRIEF HISTORY OF EVERYONE WHO EVER LIVED: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes, by Adam Rutherford. (The Experiment, $16.95.) Blending data from archaeology to evolutionary biology, this rollicking study investigates how DNA links us to our ancestors. Rutherford takes readers back hundreds of thousands of years to the beginnings of the most recent iteration of humanity, and mines genetics to see our history in a new light. HARMLESS LIKE YOU, by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan. (Norton, $15.95.) This debut novel traces two coming-of-age stories: Yuki persuades her parents to leave her in New York so she can focus on her artistic development - and continue her love affair with the city in the 1960s and '70s. Years later, the son she abandoned tracks her down in Berlin. As our reviewer, Ñamara Smith, said, Buchanan reminds us that "the ethereal dreams of the 1960s shaped the all-too-solid contours of the world we inhabit today." I CAN'T BREATHE: A Killing on Bay Street, by Matt Taibbi. (Spiegel & Grau, $18.) This deeply reported account frames the death of Eric Garner, who died in a police chokehold in New York in 2014, as a consequence of profound societal inequities. Taibbi integrates the facts with the economic and political realities of Garner's life, from institutional poverty to crooked landlords to racist law enforcement agencies. THE NINTH HOUR, by Alice McDermott. (Picador, $17.) In Irish Brooklyn in the early 1900s, nuns take up the cause of a young widow and her daughter, Sally. Sally seems headed for a life in a convent, too - until worldly temptations interfere. Our reviewer, Mary Gordon, praised McDermott, saying, "She has now extended her range and deepened it, allowing for more darkness, more generous lashings of the spiritual."
Choice Review
Hagan, New York and Rolling Stone contributor, wrote this biography at Wenner's request. Hagan had access to 500 boxes of personal papers and Wenner himself; he conducted 240-plus interviews. In sordid detail, Hagan covers Wenner's youth through his co-founding of Rolling Stone and his publisher/editor role thereafter. Hagan emphasizes Wenner's betrayals and narrow-mindedness in his take on, e.g., MLK's murder and his limited interest in punk and black artists. Hagan does praise Wenner's ability to attract talent (e.g., Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe) and in-depth coverage of, e.g., politics and Altamont. Hagan examines the decline of Rolling Stone from the late 1970s onward. Two earlier works, Robert Anson's Gone Crazy and Back Again (CH Sept '81 80-5448) and Robert Draper's Rolling Stone Magazine (Doubleday, 1990), paint similar pictures. What's new in this book is coverage of Wenner's homosexuality and a plethora of anecdotes, especially about sex and drugs. Hagan devotes just 10 percent of the book's 511 pages to covering 1990-2017 (with primary emphasis on the serious fact-checking lapse of the debunked UVA story "A Rape on Campus"). He concludes by comparing Wenner ("a pioneer of the age of the narcissism") to Trump. Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels. --Robert A. Aken, University of Kentucky
Library Journal Review
Journalist Hagan's biography of Jann Wenner, the ambitious and contentious founder of Rolling Stone, marks the 50th anniversary of the magazine's debut in San Francisco during the Summer of Love in 1967. Wenner cultivated a swath of cultural icons, including photographer Annie Leibovitz and journalist Hunter S. Thompson. As an editor, he fostered their careers and sometimes bitterly alienated them. Born in New York City in 1946, Wenner was the son of a California businessman and an indifferent mother; a difficult child, he was often asked to leave the private schools he attended. His childhood was disrupted by his parents' divorce, and enduring a strained parental relationship, he began to exhibit his lifelong desire for social climbing. During his years at the University of California at Berkeley, he fell in with alternative journalists. At 23, with money borrowed from family, he launched Rolling Stone. Although Wenner ran the magazine into near bankruptcy several times, the publication's unique place in American culture is largely owing to his overt drive, which Hagan skillfully recounts using primary source documents, personal letters, and exclusive interviews. VERDICT This biographical chronicle of the cultural evolution from the 1960s to the present is a must-read for counterculture enthusiasts and historians.-John Muller, Washington, DC, P.L. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.