The image of Paul, singing from the rooftop in the final ten minutes, had set him off. Jann Wenner shifted in his seat. In the darkness of a tiny movie house in San Francisco, the Beatle, Wenner’s hero, whose iconic spectacles and nose adorned the first issue of his rock-and-roll newspaper, Rolling Stone, had tears running down his cheeks as light flickered off his glasses. And next to him was Yoko Ono, the bête noire of Beatledom, raven hair shrouding her porcelain face, also weeping.
It was a Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1970, and John and Yoko and Jann and his wife, Jane Wenner, were watching the final scenes of Let It Be, the documentary about the Beatles’ acrimonious recording session for their last album. John and Yoko were deep into primal scream therapy, their emotions raw and close to the surface, and the image of a bearded Paul McCartney singing from the rooftop of Apple Records, against a cold London wind, was too much to bear.
Get back to where you once belonged . . .
For Wenner, the twenty-four-year-old boy wonder of the new rock press, who worshipped the Beatles as passionately as any kid in America, this was a dream, sitting here in the dark, wiping away his own tears at the twilight of the greatest band of all time, elbow to elbow with “the most famous person in the world, for God’s sake.”
“And it’s just the four of us in the center of an empty theater,” marveled Wenner, “all kind of huddled together, and John is crying his eyes out.”
Lennon and Ono had driven up from Los Angeles to meet the San Francisco fanboy who had bottled the counterculture and now commanded 200,000 readers. Wenner received the couple like visiting royalty to his spanking-new offices on Third Street, the clatter of typewriters going silent as they walked through the cubbies of writers and editors, bushy-haired men in ties and Levi’s who paused from parsing Captain Beefheart and Pete Townshend to gawk. Wenner’s unabashed idol worship had so often embarrassed them—starfucker, they grumbled behind his back—but now here he was with an actual Beatle. And Yoko! Who could deny this? The hirsute supercouple were smaller than anybody imagined, but John Lennon still towered over Jann Wenner, who at five six so often found himself gazing up at his heroes like a boy vampire.
“I mean, it’s everything you ever worshipped or cherished from afar,” said Wenner. “You try and be as natural as possible because I don’t think people want the worship and the ‘gee whiz.’ And you’re just mainly curious and fascinated and hanging on to every word but also trying to be sociable, entertaining, and good company and not be groupie-ish and slavish.”
Wenner guided them to his back office, past the plastic marijuana plant and the picture of Mickey Mouse shooting heroin, laboring to project the air of a self-possessed press baron inured to celebrity. He looked every bit the modish publisher, plump in his button-down oxford and blue jeans, shoulder-length hair fashionably styled, a True cigarette smoking in his fingers. Wenner personally moved the couple from the Hilton to the more upscale Huntington Hotel, in Nob Hill, and then took them sightseeing in Wenner’s convertible Porsche, hoping to impress. “People like John Lennon,” Wenner would say, “want to feel they are dealing with somebody important.”
It worked, but maybe not for the reason he imagined: Yoko Ono’s memory of the weekend would be Jane Wenner, Jann’s wife, a chicly dressed waif with sculpted cheekbones and an insolent gaze. “I thought, how lucky is this man!” said Ono. “What did he do to get her?”
The women were crammed in the back of the Porsche, while Wenner and Lennon talked up front and Wenner drove through the hills where Ono once lived as a child in the 1930s with her Japanese immigrant parents, scions of imperial wealth. While he casually offered advice on promoting Lennon’s promised “primal” album and inquired about their lifestyle in Los Angeles ( Wenner recalled John and Yoko living in the mansion featured in The Beverly Hillbillies), Wenner found the proximity to John Fucking Lennon as intoxicating as a drug. Here was the selfsame Beatle who’d cracked open Wenner’s world in 1964 when, on summer break from UC Berkeley, he first saw A Hard Day’s Night in a Pasadena movie theater. The sly smile and scabrous wit had seemed to wink across the screen directly at him. Wenner even named his aborted novel for a Beatles lyric—“Now These Days Are Gone,” a nostalgic, Holden Caulfield– at– Berkeley roman à clef. From the very first issue of Rolling Stone, Lennon was the lodestar: In his first editorial on November 9, 1967, Wenner declared that Rolling Stone was “not just about music, but also about the things and attitudes that the music embraces,” proving his point with a cover image of Lennon from his role as Musketeer Gripweed in Richard Lester’s absurdist antiwar comedy, How I Won the War. “Since 1965,” wrote Wenner for an issue naming Lennon Rolling Stone’s “Man of the Year,” a few months before John and Yoko’s visit, “the Beatles have been the single dominant force in the new social thought and style for which the Sixties will forever be remembered, just as Charlie Chaplin was the public figure of the Twenties.”
And so every moment with John Lennon felt like a story Wenner would tell for the rest of his life, a page of history he’d stepped into—indeed, that he would publish. Every detail of the weekend seemed charged with significance: the white sneakers dangling from Lennon’s flight bag, the look of shock on the bellboy’s face at the snobbish hotel when Lennon casually tossed him the bag. Over lunch, Wenner watched with awe and a certain satisfaction as Lennon savaged fans who approached him. “People would come up and ask him for an autograph, and he would just snarl, ‘Go away!’ ” Wenner said.
When they got out to stretch their legs on Polk Street at four in the afternoon—the skies overcast, not a soul on the sidewalk—they chanced upon a little movie house showing a matinee of the Beatles film Let It Be. Wenner figured John Lennon of all people had seen it, but he hadn’t seen the final cut. Just as surprising, the woman selling tickets didn’t recognize Lennon—another bearded hippie who looked like John Lennon—and none of the half a dozen people in the theater noticed that John and Yoko themselves had ducked in. “It was so emotional to see Paul up on the roof and singing,” recounted Jane Wenner. “First of all, it was hard to believe John had never seen it before. And he was so taken aback.”
An hour later, blinking in the evening light, Jann and Jane Wenner were crying, too. They began to hug, all four of them, on the sidewalk. “He’s crying, she’s crying, and we’re just trying to hold on to ourselves,” Wenner said. “You’re there helping come to the emotional rescue of the Beatles.”
But if this was the end of the Beatles, it was only the beginning for Jann Wenner. He was, after all, courting John Lennon for an exclusive interview in Rolling Stone. And before the weekend was over, Lennon would give Wenner a kind of promissory note in the form of an inscription inside a copy of Arthur Janov’s book The Primal Scream: Primal Therapy, the Cure for Neurosis:
Dear Jann,
After many years of “searching”—tobacco, pot, acid, meditation, brown rice, you name it—I am finally on the road to freedom, i.e., being REAL + STRAIGHT.
I hope this book helps you as much as [it did] for Yoko + me. I’ll tell you the “True Story” when we’re finished.
Love, John + Yoko
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ROLLING STONE CAUGHT FIRE as soon as it first appeared in November 1967. The fertile crescent of psychedelia, the Bay Area, was a firmament of names and places that were already becoming touchstones for a generation: Haight-Ashbury, the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Bill Graham and the Fillmore, the Hells Angels and the Black Panthers. Music was at the center of much of it, but it was bigger than music. It was an entire worldview in which young people had cornered the market on Truth with a capital T. As John Lennon would articulate it for Wenner in Rolling Stone: “Rock and roll then was real, everything else was unreal.” The original rock and roll that Elvis Presley built out of rural black blues had already been reduced and refined to (quite unreal) teen idols like Frankie Avalon and Ricky Nelson. Even the British Invasion, three years earlier, seemed brittle against the hammer blows of civil rights and the Vietnam War. The psychedelic counterculture of San Francisco