Sticky Fingers. Joe Hagan

Hicks (of the Hot Licks), the couple had moved next door to the Wenners and befriended Jane. As Scaggs would write in a draft of his liner notes, it happened “over Christmas and between neighborly exchanges of the odd cup of sugar and the even cup of scotch.” This was the period of the record producer as auteur, the secret masterminds behind all the great albums. Jon Landau had temporarily left Rolling Stone to produce the next album by the MC5 for Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records (“My first gig right now is learning how to be a producer,” Landau would tell Wenner). Not to be outdone, Wenner sent Scaggs’s demo tape to Wexler and suggested himself as producer. For Wexler, this was a fine trade: He had just started a new studio in Muscle Shoals and was getting reverent ink from Rolling Stone. “He loved Jon and he loved me and he really wanted to cultivate us and of course we were enamored of Jerry,” said Wenner. “He had a Talmudic knowledge of music, and we didn’t know what a shady character he was on the other side, how tough and poisonous.”

      Scaggs was eager to make an R&B album that sounded like Wexler’s recordings of Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin, but he first wanted to investigate Wexler’s new venture, Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, so Wenner gave Scaggs a Rolling Stone press card to pose as a reporter. “I was welcomed as a man of the press and given a grand tour and treated very nicely,” Scaggs would recall. Wenner and Scaggs flew to Memphis in May 1969 and holed up in a motel, taking six days to record Scaggs’s LP while Jane and Carmella flew to Acapulco on vacation. Scaggs wanted Duane Allman on his album, but Allman had moved to Georgia to start the Allman Brothers, so Wenner convinced Wexler to bring him back for one last Atlantic date. Wenner, of course, knew nothing about producing records. “But I’m just very confident,” he said. “I knew what I liked. I said, ‘Play it like this,’ and I could reference a familiar record that everybody knew and I just knew how to manage things. And crazy enough, a little bit of dictating the girl singing parts to them.”

      Wenner said he conceived the twelve-minute blues jam, “Loan Me a Dime,” with Allman on a long stretch of slide guitar. When the record was finished, Wenner promoted the track on San Francisco FM radio. “I called up the local DJs in San Francisco and brought them to Trident Studios and I got them all stoned,” he said.

      After the recording, Boz and Carmella moved to Macon, Georgia, to hang out with Walden and the Allmans. When the Wenners showed up for a visit, Scaggs’s drinking was out of control, and they went on a terrifying drive down a country road until Jane Wenner insisted Carmella drive. She was also drunk, and the terror continued. The visit wasn’t a total loss: In a letter to writer Stanley Booth, Wenner said he scored some coke from Duane Allman.

      The Scaggs album, with a cover design by Bob Kingsbury, was a fine if langorous affair but not destined for success. The day after “Loan Me a Dime” was recorded, Wexler and Wenner had a screaming match on the phone over Wenner’s expensive studio time, and Wexler told him to shut the session down. Wenner ignored him and kept recording. “I said, we’re nearly done, I’m going to finish this up, I don’t care what he has to say,” said Wenner. “I think Jerry was more pissed off that we had made a really good record in a studio that he had failed to make a successful record in.”

      Consequently, Wexler didn’t promote the record, it sold fewer than twenty thousand copies, and Atlantic dropped Scaggs from the label. It was a deep disappointment for Scaggs, who later told Rolling Stone, “I was kind of countin’ on the album to sell or do somethin’ big.” Glyn Johns, who produced Scaggs’s next album for Columbia, felt Wenner’s arrogance nearly tanked Scaggs’s career. “That might have been why Jann and I fell out in the end,” he said. “He should never have risked Scaggs’s career by presuming to produce.”

      Though Rolling Stone gave the album a perfectly nice review (assigned by Greil Marcus), it was buried at the bottom of page 33, wedged between reviews for the Beatles’ Abbey Road and Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way, and didn’t mention that the editor and publisher of Rolling Stone was the producer. Wenner told The Village Voice that he and Scaggs had a falling-out (“artistic temperament, all that stuff”), but the Scaggs/Wenner split was only a temporary hiccup. Scaggs had more to gain from Wenner than not, and Carmella was spending endless hours with Jane, shopping and decorating the Wenners’ new apartment in the posh Ord Court neighborhood. For a while, the two women planned an interior decorating business, but Jane mainly curled up on the couch, stoned on downers, and complained to Carmella that Jann Wenner never paid attention to her. During one chat, Jane idly mentioned that Wenner was gay—as if it were only the third or fourth most depressing thing about her life.

      The friendship with the Wenners would prove a thorny business. While Carmella was between houses and temporarily living in the Wenners’ basement in 1971, Rolling Stone produced a feature on the All-man Brothers that revealed the story behind the band’s instrumental jam “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed”: While Scaggs was living in Macon with the band, Carmella was having an affair with Allmans’ guitarist Dickey Betts. “Fuck,” Duane Allman told Rolling Stone while snorting a pile of cocaine. “He wrote that fuckin’ song after he fucked this chick on a fuckin’ tombstone in a fuckin’ cemetery in Macon. On a fuckin’ tombstone, my man!” (The tombstone was Elizabeth Reed’s.)

      As Jane Wenner recalled, Carmella “always told Boz she was going there to look at the flowers, and whatever.”

      But it was too late; the story had already gone to press.

      Wenner was the best man in Boz and Carmella’s 1973 wedding in Aspen, Colorado—which made the Random Notes column and was attended by Hunter Thompson—but by then Scaggs had come to prefer the company of Jane over Jann. “Exquisite taste,” he observed of her. “Jann’s interest brought people in, but it was Jane who fascinated people. Always there, and funny, and sort of kept the party going when Jann’s off on tangents. His is a frenetic energy; hers is more solid.”

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