They agreed they could see other people at first. “You can be free to do what you want; I’ll do what I want,” he recalled telling her. “We’re not going to get that serious. [But] we were still fucking in the house.”
Jane was both charmed and flummoxed by Wenner. He was in perpetual haste, but when he slowed down enough to pay attention to her, it opened her like a flower. “I remember one time he was running; he came to pick me up and was late from the plane,” said Jane. “He had just bought this cake in the shape of a heart. That’s when I think my feelings for him changed. He had a buttoned-up shirt over blue jeans. It was endearing.”
But then off again he went.
•
AT THE SUNDAY RAMPARTS, Wenner wrote capsule reviews for the local film and theater listings, with a roving eye for the drug and sex flicks bubbling up from the underground, like the LSD exploitation film Hallucination Generation (“predictable, inaccurate”) or Underground Cinema 12, “a potpourri of sexual revelry about an orgy, an intimate look at heterosexual stuff, a surrealistic glance or two and a ‘sensitive’ leer at homosexuality.”
Typical was his review of the 1965 film Sexus: “The plot is a bore, but it contains a good sado-masochistic lesbian bit. Only for a joke at the Presidio.”
For the rock listings, however, Wenner lavished wholly uncritical praise on the local scene like the junior-league Ralph Gleason that he was. Wenner touted San Francisco as having “two of the five or six top rock groups in the country.” Local hero Steve Miller created “a musical ecstasy unusual in a blues group,” and the Jefferson Airplane were “distinguished by an unusually professional manner, excellent original material and a unique tenor-alto sound.” What he lacked in insight, he made up for with enthusiastic accessibility. While his Berkeley classmate Jonathan Cott, also at The Sunday Ramparts, was writing sophisticated criticism of avant-garde cinema (“Nowhere Man: A Clarification with Seven Propositions” was his review of Blow-Up), Wenner was glossing the revolution for the squares: Rock and roll, Wenner informed readers, was “noted for its heavy rhythms, pounding beat and loudness of approach, or, in a word, its sexuality.” He named “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones the best rock-and-roll song “ever done,” though, he emphasized, the Beatles were the greatest band, and Dylan the greatest lyricist. His simple idea was already in evidence. “If [the songs] are about drugs, and more and more of them are, then that’s what’s happening with this generation,” he wrote. “Rock and roll speaks for today’s experiences. It is the poetry of youth.”
Wenner interviewed Muddy Waters, who told Wenner that his favorite white rock-and-roll band was the Stones. “You know their name comes from a song I wrote,” Waters said.
For new arrivals on the scene, Wenner was the travel guide to the renaissance in his backyard:
Five to ten huge dance concerts take place every weekend, not just indoors, but often on the beaches and mountains. In addition, the big name tours, East Bay drag strip discotheques and smaller high school oriented shows flourish. This city loves that sound . . .
. . . Avant-garde theater has been presented. Poster art comparable to that of Paris in the twenties has been nourished (one Family Dog poster bore the credo: “May the Baby Jesus Open Your Mind and Shut Your Mouth”).
Wenner reserved his critical swipes for out-of-towners. Folksinger Tom Paxton of Chicago “left a feeling of pretentiousness much like Paul Simon’s ‘poetry.’ ” Wenner drove to Los Angeles for the express purpose of sniffing at the rival scene, disparaging the bands, mocking their clothes, and deriding their fraudulent fans (“two short haired boys in Macy’s mod”). The two best L.A. groups, the Peanut Butter Conspiracy and Iron Butterfly, paled in comparison to any San Francisco band, he wrote, quoting Ellen Harmon, a co-founder of the Family Dog, calling L.A. “super uptight plastic America.”
Meanwhile, his review of hometown favorites the Grateful Dead was so reverent Warner Bros. used it as a promotional tear sheet to sell the album. His article noted that Bob Weir was “from a social Atherton family” and that his jug band “played for his sister’s debutante party this summer”; “noted jazz critic” Ralph Gleason had named Pigpen McKernan “one of the major bluesmen in America.” “My tastes, and my music, were pretty mainstream,” Wenner said. “I wasn’t raised listening to the blues . . . I was not a deep musical person. I was a fan, and it spread out from there.”
But San Francisco was no longer a secret beyond the Sierras. As boldfaced names of the youth revolution, like Tim Leary and Joan Baez, came to sample the scene, Wenner received them like a local diplomat. Wenner had worshipped Leary as a righteous advocate of his favorite drug and was disappointed when he only wanted to eat a hamburger and drink beer in a bar. Wenner wrote a positive article nonetheless, titled “The Case for Dr. Leary.”
In truth, Wenner was as interested in Leary’s star power as in the content of his propaganda. After he met Joan Baez for lunch, getting her view on the rock revolution (she was ambivalent), he paraded her through the Ramparts offices to enjoy the effect of her celebrity. “I just remember everybody in the office gawked,” said Wenner. “I was interested in watching the reaction of everybody. It lifted my stock.”
Inside the Ramparts offices, Wenner kept his eye trained on Warren Hinckle, in whose profile Wenner could see an outline of his own future. A bon vivant and socialite, and heavy drinker, who wore expensive haberdashery and reveled in self-promotion, Hinckle made his name as a young journalist teasing a gay Chronicle columnist, “Count Marco,” revealing that he’d been a hairdresser and hung out around public restrooms. Willfully eccentric, Hinckle owned a pet capuchin monkey named Henry Luce and wore an eye patch over one eye (lost in a childhood car accident). Hinckle was a gifted provocateur, drawing attention to Ramparts with searing covers like the image of a crucified Jesus Christ planted in a Vietnam battlefield. The magazine raked as much muck as possible, capturing the left-wing political tumult of mid-1960s San Francisco by hiring Eldridge Cleaver, a confessed rapist who was politically radicalized in a California prison and became a leader of the Black Panther Party, as a columnist. But Hinckle’s main passion was controversy. For a feature on Hugh Hefner, Hinckle included a centerfold of Hefner smoking a pipe. The magazine was famously said to have “A Bomb in Every Issue,” and Wenner watched, in early 1967, as Ramparts detonated the biggest bomb in its history: a story on the infiltration of student groups across the country by the Central Intelligence Agency, which ended up exposing, among others, pioneering feminist Gloria Steinem and her front work while a student at Harvard. As Hinckle muscled the story toward publication, the CIA tried to counter the report before Ramparts could print, but Hinckle beat it to the punch by taking out a one-page ad in The New York Times to break the story. The magazine’s circulation doubled. Wenner clipped out newspaper stories about it and filed them away. “He transformed the magazine from a lefty, radical, Catholic magazine to a much more commercial, broader, muckraking publication,” said Wenner. “It was a breakthrough magazine of its time. And in addition to the tough political, cultural writing, it was elegant . . . The mix was highly unusual. And that mix moved into Rolling Stone.”
But a cultural divide now separated Hinckle’s older twentysomethings, who drank liquor and aspired to New Left discourse, from Wenner’s generation of younger twentysomethings, who smoked dope, wore denim, and embraced Bob Dylan. In truth, Wenner might have gone either way. He was devoted to rock and roll but was turned off by the hippie hair balls mobbing the Haight-Ashbury. After visiting Ken Kesey’s ranch in La Honda with Warnecke, Wenner published a bracingly skeptical review of Kesey, who he felt had corrupted his would-be paramour, Denise Kaufman. He quoted at length a “noted writer in the Scene”—really just Wenner himself—criticizing Kesey as being on a “Christ Trip.” Quoting himself “was a way of having an opinion but also doing objective journalism,” Wenner said.