Book Review: Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan’s biography of Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner

There are two major reasons Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan’s new biography of Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, is a necessary book for serious Beatles fans, and particularly those interested in analyzing the band’s historiography.

The first involves how Hagan reveals the sheer scope of Wenner’s and Rolling Stone’s pro-Lennon partisanship, both during the Beatles’ breakup period and beyond. Previous authors (including myself, John Kimsey and Michael Frontani in The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles, Michael Brocken and Melissa Davis in The Beatles Bibliography, Robert Draper in The Uncensored History of Rolling Stone, and Rob Sheffield, among others) already have noted Wenner’s demonstrated pro-Lennon/anti-McCartney slant and acknowledged that it influenced the magazine’s coverage. But Hagan’s work lays out the motivations for and practice of Wenner’s pro-Lennon/Ono coverage more exhaustively than any previous writer. From a historical methods standpoint, such active, influential and avid partisanship on the part of the editor and owner of the magazine needs to be accounted for when analyzing interviews, articles, or music reviews provided by Wenner’s magazine.  (This is not to say that every piece of Beatles-related coverage provided by Rolling Stone is biased: the standard here includes filtering Rolling Stone’s material through a lens acknowledging the reasonable possibility of bias). This acknowledgement of presumed bias as applied to Wenner and Rolling Stone applies not only to the breakup period, but well beyond: Hagan’s work makes a convincing case that Wenner’s personal preferences and partisanship influenced his decisions and coverage surrounding the group well into the beginning of the 21^st century. (Other authors reinforce this: Michael Frontani’s “Spinning the Historical Record,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles, provides an excellent critical analysis of the highly inaccurate Wenner-sponsored 2000 Lennon exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame).

The second element Sticky Fingers inadvertently highlights involves overlooked but still crucial aspects regarding the breakup, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono, particularly their impressive and incredibly influential P.R. skill in using Rolling Stone and other publications in establishing their preferred narrative. For decades and across almost the entire spectrum of Beatles historiography, Lennon and Ono’s skill in tireless self-promotion, using and/or currying favor with the press, ensuring favorable coverage, and self-editing their interviews has been all but ignored. One of the few authors to delve into the Lennon’s P.R. efforts was the reviled Goldman. In The Lives of John Lennon, Goldman argued that the couple, seeking favorable coverage, purchased gifts for reporters at The Village Voice, and ensured non-critical coverage of Ono via painting previous uncomplimentary articles as the result of racist and chauvinist writers, while urging the new interviewers to fight back against such deplorable tactics. However, because of its association with Goldman, the evidence and interpretation that Lennon and Ono utilized the press in a deliberate, impressive P.R. offensive was overlooked and ignored by numerous successive authors.

Instead, throughout the decades, the popular image prevailed of Lennon the truth-teller, unafraid of making controversial statements, uninterested in currying favor with the press, and unwilling to play the P.R. game. Authors over the decades, from Wenner to Schaffner to Coleman to Norman to Goodman all have identified McCartney as the Beatle most obsessed with and adept at press relations and manipulations. Yet the numbers (Lennon and Ono’s amount of interviews outnumber McCartney’s 5:1 in the breakup period) and Hagan’s research indicates that this premise is unbalanced. Describing McCartney as a P.R. man is a valid conclusion, but such an assessment tells only half the story: authors and fans must also now acknowledge Lennon and Ono’s deliberate and sustained efforts to use the press to promote and sustain their at times inaccurate version of events. Indeed, both Lennon and Ono emerge as McCartney’s P.R. equals: Ono’s convenient reconciliation with Wenner following Lennon’s death, her continued promotion of the interview whose importance her husband had repeatedly dismissed, and her post-1980 editorial control over coverage of herself and Lennon, as promised by Wenner, clearly portrays a woman cognizant of and determined to shape the historical record, from the primary sources up.

That Ono was and remains a polarizing figure who received, at times, derogatory verbal abuse from the press and fans is undisputed. Numerous influential authors, including Wenner, Coleman, and Norman have noted the press abuse heaped on Ono. But such a one-sided, victim-only assessment of Ono’s portrayal in the rock press and Beatles historiography is imbalanced, in that it ignores her cultivation and use of the press to promote favorable coverage and her version of events. This is particularly evident in Hagan’s account of Wenner’s promise to Ono, following Lennon’s murder, that he and his publication would do nothing but support her and John’s image, and that she would retain the right to edit her own interviews. “Wenner became … Ono’s mythologizer in chief.” Wenner doesn’t dispute this promise, either in interviews with Hagan or elsewhere. This pro-Lennon slant is particularly corrosive when coupled with both Wenner and Ono’s seeming perception of Beatles historiography in general and the Lennon/McCartney partnership in particular as a zero-sum competition in which praising McCartney’s work somehow diminishes Lennon’s, and vice versa. “Over the next several decades, Ono and Wenner would collaborate to make John Lennon the only Beatle who mattered.” (Hagan, 399). This partisanship, coupled with this heavily flawed zero-sum premise, resulted in Wenner’s support for and promotion of, among other things, factually inaccurate museum exhibits (the aforementioned Rock and Roll Hall of Fame exhibit, 2000) inaccurate and hagiographic publications (The Ballad of John and Yoko, 1982) and the unquestioning, sycophantic coverage provided by Wenner and Ono in the 2000 re-edition of Lennon Remembers.

Hagan’s views on Wenner’s personality and publication correspond with those provided by The Uncensored History of Rolling Stone, which also notes how the editor’s personal relationships with artists impacted the scope and tone of their coverage in his magazine. Both Draper’s work and Hagan’s note multiple instances of Wenner altering already independently written reviews of various artists (Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, U2, and John Lennon, among others); less on the basis of musical merit, and more, seemingly, on the basis of Wenner’s emotional or personal feelings regarding the particular artist at that particular time. Wenner’s efforts in pushing for a more negative rewrite of Langdon Winner’s initial, favorable review of the McCartney album – which was, according to Marcus, an editorial re-write prompted by Wenner’s blaming McCartney for the Beatles split and the McCartney press release’s criticism of Lennon – is discussed.

The altering of the McCartney review is not an entirely new piece of evidence, but Hagan’s work does contain previously unknown pieces of information. According to Hagan, Wenner opened his archives to the author, and they included a “Lost Weekend” era postcard and picture, presumably sent by Lennon, of a pleasantly mingling Lennon and McCartney, with the words “How do YOU sleep?” included, serving as a barbed shot at the Rolling Stone editor. Wenner’s claims to not understand the motivation or message behind the postcard seem conveniently oblivious. Hagan’s work also adds to the speculation regarding Lennon’s sexuality, a topic that has gained increased attention over the last decade or so from authors such as Philip Norman and Joshua Wolf Shenk, and from primary sources such as Ono. According to Wenner, following their 1980 reconciliation, Ono frequently hinted to the bi-sexual Wenner that she believed Lennon was somewhat homosexual, but Ono failed to offer examples or provide further evidence beyond teasing Wenner with the subject.

McCartney, who provided interviews to Hagan, has little to say on Ono but much to say regarding Wenner and Rolling Stone; little of it is complimentary. The musician retrospectively declares that he knew Rolling Stone would never, following Lennon Remembers, provide him with fair coverage, and asserts that Wenner’s pro-Lennon promotion helped provide inaccurate and flawed views on his musicianship, character, and the Lennon/McCartney partnership. “It all added to this historical thing, that John was really it in the Beatles, and the other three weren’t it, by implication … To me, me and John writing, it was so equal.” McCartney argues that those artists with whom Wenner has cultivated personal relationships were/are often given good reviews, but argues that that he and his wife, Linda McCartney, purposefully kept their distance from Wenner and “made fun of him.” This, in turn, makes McCartney’s account regarding Wenner’s failure to keep his verbal agreement regarding first Lennon’s and then his own entrance into the Wenner-sponsored Rock and Roll Hall of Fame appear to be either disingenuous or naïve. That McCartney, a savvy businessman and intelligent man, would make a quid-pro-quo deal with Wenner (a known pro-Lennon/Ono propagandist) on the basis of no more than a verbal agreement, with no documentation to back it up, appears either ridiculously naïve or arrogant. (I’m going to preempt the anticipated riposte to the preceding sentence by providing the standard example regarding McCartney’s stunning naiveté and/or sheer arrogance: Heather Mills. Example Acknowledged).

The other Beatles receive little coverage in Hagan’s work, although the author does note the fluctuations – from favorable to derogatory — regarding Rolling Stone’s 70s coverage of George Harrison. Certainly, Hagan’s numerous interviews with Wenner, on both the Beatles and other subjects, give no indication that Wenner even now acknowledges any errors in overtly allowing his personal preferences, relationships, or self-interest to dictate the at times inaccurate and partisan information provided within the pages of Rolling Stone and/or Rolling Stone sponsored events. “There is no such thing as objectivity … nobody is objective” in journalism, according to Wenner.

In a sense, Wenner is right. Complete objectivity is, as historians acknowledge, very difficult to achieve. However, the purpose of a historian is to provide as objective an analysis as they possibly can in order to provide as accurate an analysis as they possibly can. What does Wenner’s partisanship mean for Beatles historiography? Once a source has disavowed and/or demonstrated a serious lack of objectivity, it is the responsibility of other writers using that source to acknowledge that lack. The appropriate response, according to historical methods analysis, is for Beatles authors to include a caution or acknowledgement of Wenner’s and Rolling Stone’s lack of objectivity when using the magazine as a source for their research in Beatles historiography. This is as simple as providing a note by the author, either in the endnotes, bibliography or the text, acknowledging Wenner and Rolling Stone’s documented and admitted decades-long pro-Lennon/Ono slant. This is not an extraordinary step: historians who use the incredibly influential American periodical Time Magazine for research openly acknowledge how, in the 1950s and 1960s, the publication often reflected the political views of its Republican owner, Henry Luce. This does not mean that historians no longer use evidence or interviews from that time period within Time’s publication, but that they acknowledge its existence and account for that element when using it as a source. Beatles historians can incorporate that same method when using sources within Rolling Stone. Given how pervasive a source Rolling Stone is for many Beatles historians, and how much it has shaped and misshaped the band’s story and historiography, this fundamental level of source analysis is long overdue.

 

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I’d like to apologize for the lack of page numbers provided in the citations: when I photocopied the pages of Hagan’s work I accidentally often cut off the page numbers, and I have since returned the book to the library and can’t double check them. This will also be my last new review for some time; the end-of-semester papers I need to grade have already started to roll in. Cheers. But I look forward to discussing comments or questions with you