From Powells.com
Our favorite books of the year.
Staff Pick
Joe Hagan gives what must be a very honest portrayal of Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner. It must be because he doesn't paint Wenner in the most favorable light. However, it's a fantastic ride with hundreds of characters from the magazine's history: Hunter Thompson, Mick Jagger, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Annie Leibovitz, John Belushi, Paul Simon, and so many more. It's incredible how much the history of pop music has been shaped by Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone magazine. A great gift for music lovers. Recommended By Jeffrey J., Powells.com
In high school I was obsessed with the music of the ’60s and ’70s and the big collections of Rolling Stone interviews. This book reveals the man behind the magazine, and provides all of the juicy gossip and wild anecdotes my heart desires. Although Jann Wenner's behavior was almost grotesquely appalling on a regular basis, it's inarguable that the magazine he helped to create changed how we look at and talk about music and culture. Recommended By Eva F., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
The first and only biography of Jann Wenner, the iconic founder of Rolling Stone magazine, and a romp through the hothouses of rock and roll, politics, media, and Hollywood, from the Summer of Love to the Internet age.
Lennon. Dylan. Jagger. Belushi. Leibovitz. The story of Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone's founder, editor, and publisher, is an insider’s trip through the backstages of storied concert venues, rock-star hotel rooms, and the political ups and downs of the latter half of the Twentieth Century, right up through the digital age: connecting the counterculture of Haight Ashbury to the "straight world."
Supplemented by a cache of extraordinary documents and letters from Wenner’s personal archives, Sticky Fingers is the story of a mercurial, wide-eyed rock and roll fan of ambiguous sexuality but unambiguous ambition who reinvents youth culture, marketing the libertine world of the late sixties counterculture in a stylish, glossy package that would stand for decades as a testament to the cultural power of American youth. Joe Hagan captures in stunning detail the extraordinary lives constellated around a magazine that began as a scrappy rebellion and became a locus of power, influence, and access – using hundreds of hours of reporting and exclusive interviews.
The result is a fascinating and complex portrait of Jann Wenner that is also a biography of popular culture, celebrity, music, and politics in America over the last fifty years.
Review
"A lurid and revelatory tale of drugs, sex—and power...Wenner's voracious appetite...for power, status, drugs, drink and sex, is vividly chronicled in this engrossing study of how he turned a small rock ’n’ roll fan paper into one of the most important and influential magazines in American publishing history." Mick Brown, The Telegraph
Review
"A perceptive account that also details the bruised feelings, grudges, feuds and stitch-ups left in Wenner’s wake.... A terrific, sometimes comic portrait of a music biz mogul." Neil Spencer, The Guardian
Review
"Hagan creates a moving portrayal of a complicated, brilliant, flawed man who genuinely moved the needle on American culture…An engaging biography and a lasting legacy for the keeper of rock-'n'-roll’s watchtower." Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Joe Hagan has written for New York, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He has published long-form profiles and investigative exposés of some of the most significant figures and subjects of our time, including: Hillary Clinton (her first post-Secretary of State interview), Karl Rove, the Bush family, Henry Kissinger, Dan Rather, Goldman Sachs, The New York Times, and Twitter. He lives in New York with his wife and children.