No exaggeration: Rolling Stone played a huge role in making me the liberal I am today. My family was conservative Republican. Not crazy wingnuts, though we did have an aunt who was a John Bircher, but solidly Republican enough to roll their eyes at my solidly Democratic paternal grandmother. In my junior year of high school, I actually defended Nixon’s Vietnam policy in a US Government class debate. Watching the Watergate hearings on television started to turn the tide for me, but still, after wrestling with the decision, I pulled the lever in my first presidential election—in 1976—for Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter, something I recall with great embarrassment today.
But that autumn of 1976 is also when, at age 21, I moved out of my parent’s suburban home into my own apartment in a mixed neighborhood adjacent to downtown Philadelphia. At some point, an issue of Rolling Stone caught my eye on the newsstand. I wasn’t particularly into music at the time, and I can’t recall what teaser on the cover first attracted me, but I know it opened up a new world of politics, culture and writing for me. Rolling Stone in that era—the covers in the picture above are from 1977-1980—changed my life. I also started reading the Village Voice, The Nation, and more. But truly, it was Rolling Stone that first saved my life.
And so, reading Jann Wenner’s memoir, Like a Rolling Stone, published today, has been a pleasure. The book begins with a bit of defiance and a bit of melancholy. The defiance is in the brief A Note to the Reader, in which Wenner writes:
The battle about the legacy of the sixties continues, known today as culture wars. From my first days at college, it seemed we were on trial for generational crimes, and that trial has never ceased.
The melancholy comes in the equally brief prologue, as Wenner surveys the vacated Rolling Stone offices in May of 2019, after having sold controlling interest in the magazine. But then, it’s off to memory lane.
This is a memoir, after all, so Wenner devotes a handful of chapters to an entertaining run through his childhood and early adulthood, where we learn of his boarding school days, his early recklessness, turn to radical politics and the awakening provided by drugs. But the bulk of the book is made up of dozens of vignettes from the Rolling Stone years, most just a few pages long.
Yes, the book is a bit self-indulgent at times, with the whiff of baby boomerism wafting like marijuana smoke throughout the narrative: the idealism, the youthfulness, the self-assurance, the gratification and indulgence, but for me it is part of the charm of the book, never overbearing, but always illustrative of Wenner’s life, his (and my) generation, and the history of the past sixty years.
But for the most part, it is a thoroughly enjoyable ride through the music and politics from 1967, when he founded the magazine, until now. You read about the flak he got for criticizing the Yippie Party of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, informing his readers that all the rock bands they were promising would show up in Chicago for the 1968 Democratic Convention had not, in fact agreed to come. You read about the scandalized reaction to the magazine’s famous photograph photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono naked, and to their profile of the pair of groupies who called themselves the Plaster Casters, two young women who coaxed rock stars to arousal and then made plaster casts of the result. They were photographed in an early issue with the cast made of Jimi Hendrix. (Note that the last surviving Plaster Caster, Cynthia Albritton, passed away last April, but not before donating the Hendrix cast to the Icelandic Phallological Museum in Reykjavik.)
You’ll read about listening to Mick Jagger fine-tune Sympathy for the Devil, sit in on an interview with Bob Dylan after he’d been in seclusion for years after a motorcycle accident (“Do you think you’ve played any role in the change of popular music over the past four years?” “I hope not.”), and you’ll meet Michael Jackson, who agreed to an interview if they could do it at night with just the light of candles and a fireplace, then backed out, then made it up by inviting Wenner to a wedding whose attendees ranged from Nancy Reagan to Merv Griffin.
You’ll get in-depth looks at some of the great writers who have graced the magazine, like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, the great music critics like Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs, and the photographers like Annie Leibowitz. And you’ll be taken back to Altamont, to the shooting of John Lennon, to the Patty Hearst saga, and so much more.
With chapter names like John Lennon and Hunter Thompson Drop By, Truman and Andy, Paul Bowles and Uncle Earl, John Belushi Incoming, Christmases With Jackie, Bill Clinton and the Three Stooges, you know you’ll be treated to some good stories.
THIS WEEK’S NEW HARDCOVERS
- Holding the Line: Inside the Nation's Preeminent US Attorney's Office and Its Battle with the Trump Justice Department, by Geoffrey Berman. This book was in the news over the past week. Berman has been criticized for not doing more while in the US Attorney’s Office to impede and expose Trump, though Marcy Wheeler defended him: “And, no, Berman did not save his stories or his courage. He faced down Barr, publicly and privately, and then went to Congress to testify almost immediately.”
- Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships, by Nina Totenberg. It was twenty-two years before Ruth Bader Ginsberg was appointed to the Supreme Court, and four years before Totenberg was hired at NPR. Totenberg was a reporter for The National Observer, and she was curious about Ruth’s legal brief asking the Supreme Court to do something revolutionary: declare a law that discriminated “on the basis of sex” to be unconstitutional. In a time when women were fired for becoming pregnant, often could not apply for credit cards or get a mortgage in their own names, Ruth patiently explained her argument. That call launched a remarkable, nearly fifty-year friendship.
- Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America's Mayor, by Andrew Kirtzman. The author, who was with Giuliani at the World Trade Center on 9/11, conducted hundreds of interviews to write this insightful portrait of this polarizing figure, from the beginning of his rise to his ruinous role as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer.
- The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama, by Gabriel Debenedetti. An inside look at the historically close, complicated, occasionally co-dependent, and at-times uncertain relationship between Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
- Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice, by David Enrich. Enrich turns his eye towards the world of “Big Law” and the nearly unchecked influence these firms wield to shield the wealthy and powerful—and bury their secrets. To tell this story, Enrich focuses on Jones Day, one of the world’s largest law firms, that has been involved in many of Trump’s legal maneuvers, as well as tobacco companies, the Catholic Church abuse scandals, and Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin.
- The Storm Is Here: An American Crucible, by Luke Mogelson. This is the definitive eyewitness account of how—during a season of sickness, economic uncertainty, and violence—a large segment of Americans became convinced of the need to battle against dark forces plotting to take their country away from them. It builds month by month, through vivid depictions of events on the ground, from the onset of COVID-19 to the attack on the US Capitol—during which Mogelson followed the mob into the Senate chamber—and its aftermath. Bravely reported and beautifully written, The Storm Is Here is both a unique record of a pivotal moment in American history and an urgent warning about those to come.
- A Place Called Home: A Memoir, by David Ambroz. A galvanizing, stirring memoir about growing up homeless and in foster care and rising to become a leading advocate for child welfare, recognized by President Obama as an American Champion of Change.
- Hysterical: A Memoir, by Elissa Bassist. Between 2016 and 2018, Elissa Bassist saw over twenty medical professionals for a variety of mysterious ailments. Bassist had what millions of American women had: pain that didn’t make sense to doctors, a body that didn’t make sense to science, a psyche that didn’t make sense to mankind. But then an acupuncturist suggested some of her physical pain could be caged fury finding expression, and that treating her voice would treat the problem. It did. Hysterical is a memoir of a voice lost and found, and a primer on new ways to think about a woman’s voice, where it’s being squashed and where it needs amplification.
- Wise Gals: The Spies Who Built the CIA and Changed the Future of Espionage, by Nathalia Holt. The never-before-told story of a small cadre of influential female spies in the precarious early days of the CIA—women who helped create the template for cutting-edge espionage (and blazed new paths for equality in the workplace) in the treacherous post-WWII era.
- Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber, by Andy Borowitz. Millions of fans and New Yorker readers enjoy his satirical news column “The Borowitz Report.” Now, in Profiles in Ignorance, he offers a witty, spot-on diagnosis of our country’s political troubles by showing how ignorant leaders are degrading, embarrassing, and endangering our nation.
- They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent, by Sarah Kendzior. The author explores the United States’ “culture of conspiracy,” arguing that conspiracy theories are on the rise because officials refuse to enforce accountability for real conspiracies. Uncritical faith in broken institutions is as dangerous as false narratives peddled by propagandists. The truth may hurt—but the lies will kill us.
- American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, by David Corn. Yet another book trying to make sense of the wild and harrowing story of the Republican Party’s decades-long relationship with far-right extremism, bigotry, and paranoia.
- The Fight of Our Lives: My Time with Zelenskyy, Ukraine's Battle for Democracy, and What It Means for the World, by Iuliia Mendel. In this frank and moving inside account, Zelenskyy’s former press secretary tells the story of his improbable rise from popular comedian to the president of Ukraine. Mendel had a front row seat to many of the key events preceding the 2022 Russian invasion. From attending meetings between Zelenskyy and Putin and other European leaders, visiting the front lines in Donbas, to fielding press inquiries after the infamous phone calls between Donald Trump and Zelenskyy that led to Trump’s first impeachment.
- Life’s Work: A Memoir, by David Milch. The creator of Deadwood and NYPD Blue reflects on his tumultuous life, driven by a nearly insatiable creative energy and a matching penchant for self-destruction. Life’s Work is a profound memoir from a brilliant mind taking stock as Alzheimer’s loosens his hold on his own past. “This is David Milch’s farewell, and it will rock you.”—Susan Orlean.
- Into the Great Emptiness: Peril and Survival on the Greenland Ice Cap, by David Roberts. A posthumous book by the great naturalist and explorer, who died last year. By 1930, no place in the world was less well explored than Greenland. The native Inuit had occupied the relatively accessible west coast for centuries. The east coast, however, was another story. In August 1930, Henry George Watkins (nicknamed Gino), a 23-year-old explorer, led thirteen scientists and explorers on an ambitious journey to the east coast of Greenland and its vast and forbidding interior. Their mission: chart and survey the region and establish a permanent meteorological base 8,000 feet high on the ice cap. That plan turned into an epic survival ordeal when August Courtauld, manning the station solo through the winter, became entombed by drifting snow. Read my appreciation of David Roberts in this Nonfiction Views from August 31st 2021.
- Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self, by Andrea Wulf. About a remarkable group of young rebels—poets, novelists, philosophers—who, through their epic quarrels, passionate love stories, heartbreaking grief, and radical ideas launched Romanticism onto the world stage, inspiring some of the greatest thinkers of the time. This brilliant circle included the famous poets Goethe, Schiller, and Novalis; the visionary philosophers Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; the contentious Schlegel brothers; and, in a wonderful cameo, Alexander von Humboldt. And at the heart of this group was the formidable Caroline Schlegel, who sparked their dazzling conversations about the self, nature, identity, and freedom.
- Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender, by Kit Heyam. This book illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance. Before We Were Trans transports us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to early America, and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures.
- 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir, by Ai Weiwei. Once a close associate of Mao Zedong and the nation’s most celebrated poet, Ai Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing, was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as “Little Siberia,” where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol and the artworks of Marcel Duchamp. With candor and wit, he details his return to China and his rise from artistic unknown to art world superstar and international human rights activist—and how his work has been shaped by living under a totalitarian regime.
- A Man of the World: My Life at National Geographic, by Gilbert Grosvenor. For Grosvenor, running National Geographic wasn’t just a job. It was a legacy, motivated by a passion not just to leave the world a better place, but to motivate others to do so, too. Filled with world travel, charismatic explorers, and the complexities of running a publishing empire, this is the story of one man, a singular family business, and the changing face of American media.
- Flush: The Remarkable Science of an Unlikely Treasure, by Bryn Nelson. A surprising, witty and sparkling exploration of the teeming microbiome of possibility in human feces from microbiologist and science journalist Bryn Nelson.
- The Transgender Issue: Trans Justice Is Justice for All, by Shon Faye. An incisive overview of systemic transphobia and argument that the struggle for trans rights is necessary to any struggle for social justice.
- Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir, by Jann S. Wenner.
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them. If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be appreciated. Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 15% each week). We also partner with Hummingbird Media for ebooks and Libro.fm for audiobooks. The ebook app is admittedly not as robust as some, but it gets the job done. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month.
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