Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Sticky Fingers: The life and times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone magazine by Joe Hagan

by
April 2018, no. 400

Sticky Fingers: The life and times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone magazine by Joe Hagan

Viking, $34.99 pb, 457 pp, 9780670078653

Sticky Fingers: The life and times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone magazine by Joe Hagan

by
April 2018, no. 400

Sometime in 1970, an unidentified person – perhaps a disgruntled journalist or aggrieved interviewee – scrawled the words ‘Smash “Hip” Capitalism’ onto an office wall at Rolling Stone magazine. It was an incisive piece of graffiti. Rolling Stone had begun publishing in 1967, in San Francisco, at the epicentre of the counterculture, but it had already proved less than radical. As the revolutionary promises of the 1960s flamed out in violence and despair – the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, the Manson murders, the Kent State shootings – Rolling Stone’s publisher, Jann Wenner, granted himself a new executive parking spot for his Porsche, and accepted $200,000 from the record labels CBS and Elektra in order to keep his magazine’s finances flush. ‘Well, Jann was building a corporation,’ remarked one former writer, who was sacked in 1970, alongside the majority of Rolling Stone’s early staff. ‘Love it or leave it, right?’

Anwen Crawford reviews 'Sticky Fingers: The life and times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone magazine' by Joe Hagan

Sticky Fingers: The life and times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone magazine

by Joe Hagan

Viking, $34.99 pb, 457 pp, 9780670078653

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.