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'Sticky Fingers' tells Jann Wenner's 'Rolling Stone' story — and it's not pretty 

Joe Hagan goes where no biographer could go before to tell the tale of the rock journalism icon

It's a minor miracle this book ever saw the light of day.

Two previously planned biographies of Jann Wenner were canceled after the fickle and notoriously power-hungry Rolling Stone founder abruptly stopped cooperating with the authors. So when Wenner approached journalist Joe Hagan to write Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, Hagan was understandably wary of working with a man he describes as "mercurial, controlling, litigious."

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.(Knopf)
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Against all odds, Hagan got Wenner's full cooperation — including access to his family, friends, colleagues and 500 boxes of photos and personal documents — all with the agreement that Hagan had the ultimate say. According to the author, Wenner didn't even read the manuscript.

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The result is an exhaustive, wildly entertaining biography that pulls no punches. Wenner, now 71, comes off as an "incorrigible egotist" blinded by money, fame and cocaine — a visionary who turned into a back-stabbing businessman, rejected 1960s idealism, and flew off to the Caribbean in his private jet.

Jann Wenner, editor and founder of Rolling Stone magazine, is shown in his office in this ...
Jann Wenner, editor and founder of Rolling Stone magazine, is shown in his office in this July 14, 1970, file photo. (The Associated Press)
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One ex-colleague at Rolling Stone compares Wenner to another famous "high-functioning narcissist": Donald Trump.

Born into a family of wealth and privilege, Wenner had a rocky childhood. Ignored by absentee parents who sent him off to boarding school, he turned into a self-centered braggart hell-bent on impressing the world.

By the time he dropped out of the University of California-Berkeley in 1966, he'd discovered LSD, tuned in to the hippie lifestyle and found his ticket to fame in the form of journalism. Mentored by San Francisco Chronicle music critic Ralph Gleason, he launched Rolling Stone, an irreverent biweekly newspaper that "bottled the counterculture," as Hagan aptly puts it.

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Yet in many ways, Wenner was the wrong man for the job. For starters, he wasn't very knowledgeable or interested in music, and his writing could be atrocious: "Tina Turner is an incredible chick," began one of his Rolling Stone stories.

He was, however, smart enough to surround himself with talented photographers and writers such as Lester Bangs, Ben Fong-Torres, Jon Landau, Greil Marcus and the infamous Hunter S. Thompson, leader of the boundary-breaking New Journalism movement. Through a combination of good timing and sheer ego, Wenner transformed his little San Francisco magazine into the worldwide bible of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

He fancied himself a beatnik Citizen Kane and like Kane, he could be ruthless. In 1970, in search of a quick profit, he turned his Rolling Stone interviews with John Lennon into a book -- something the singer had repeatedly asked him not to do. Lennon was so angry he never spoke to Wenner again.

He fired employees for little or no reason and sometimes refused to pay them when the magazine went deep into debt, a problem that plagued Rolling Stone for decades. He picked fights with a long list of musicians including Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon and Paul McCartney. (The ex-Beatle and Bob Dylan are among the many prominent musicians who spoke to Hagan for Sticky Fingers.)

But as quick as Wenner was to alienate people, he often acted like a total groupie, following stars like Mick Jagger across the country in pursuit of friendship. "The pugnacious editor could seem vulnerable and shy — the little fanboy whose Mummy didn't love him," Hagan writes.

And while he eventually found steady love and support in the form of his wife, Jane Wenner, she turned out to be a beard. Wenner finally came out of the closet in 1995 when he moved in with fashion designer Matt Nye, who remains his companion today.

Sticky Fingers brims with stories of Jann and Jane's flings and extramarital relationships. Yet the more interesting tales revolve around the magazine itself. Hagan, a contributing editor at New York magazine, takes us deep inside Rolling Stone's dysfunctional masthead and paints vivid, depressing portraits of Thompson and the equally drug-addled photographer Annie Leibovitz.

Even as Wenner tried to rein in his out-of-control staffers, he struggled with his own addictions. Swigging from a bottle of vodka, he hacked stories to pieces during frenzied editing sessions and openly snorted lines of coke during an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review.

You can almost get a contact high from reading Sticky Fingers. But the comedown is brutal for anyone who cares about journalistic ethics or liberal ideology.

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  In this May 8, 1979 file photo, editor and publisher of Rolling Stone Jann Wenner, appears...
In this May 8, 1979 file photo, editor and publisher of Rolling Stone Jann Wenner, appears in New York. (Suzanne Vlamis / The Associated Press)

Wenner operated Rolling Stone with little regard for either, and often changed stories or ordered critics to write positive reviews to please record companies and their top-selling acts. Intoxicated by the semi-fictional prose of Thompson, he wasn't always a stickler for the truth, which led to Rolling Stone's biggest blunder: the now-retracted 2014 article about a supposed gang rape at the University of Virginia.

And even though he launched Rolling Stone during the left-leaning era of Vietnam protests, he eventually grew bored with '60s idealism. "He wanted to overthrow the establishment by becoming the establishment," Hagan writes.

Years earlier, social activist Abbie Hoffman accused Wenner of being "the Benedict Arnold of the '60s." By the end of Sticky Fingers, you get the feeling Wenner wouldn't disagree.

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In one of the book's most telling passages, Hagan digs up an obscure passage in which the publisher summed up his feelings about the past, present and future of America.

"The real Seventies was a period in which the post-Sixties search for meaning was found to be pointless and premature," Wenner wrote. The brave new world is a place "where it is important to be rich, any way you can get there, and any way you care to define it."

Thor Christensen is a Dallas writer and critic. Email him at thorchris2@yahoo.com.

Sticky Fingers

The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine

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Joe Hagan

(Knopf, $29.95)

Available Oct. 24