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phoneybeatlemania · 2 years

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can you explain that post about jann wenner? i know he was the founder of rolling stone (?) magazine but idk much else

(Post anon is referring to!)

Okay so before I jump into this, I just want to make two disclaimers:

Firstly, that Im not an expert on Jann Wenner or Rolling Stone Magazine. I read the first 50-or-so pages of Sticky Fingers by Joe Hagan (and I enjoyed it btw, I just haven’t finished it yet because it wasn’t really clicking for me at the time!), but beyond that, this isn’t really my area of expertise. So I might be missing a few things here and there, which any of you are welcome to add if I have missed them and you feel they’re important!

Secondly, Im also not trying to take sides here. Im just trying to put the reasons why Paul has historically disliked Wenner into a post—and you can call him petty for them or you can say ‘fair enough’. That’s up to you.

So why has Paul disliked Wenner in the past, and why are people surprised about him referring to Jann as a “friend”?

Essentially, from what I know of The Situation here, Paul has historically disliked Rolling Stone Magazine and Jann Wenner because of a few things.

Firstly, a lot of the magazines critics gave his solo/Wings works poor reviews. I won’t get too much into music-criticism side of things, because you can find reviews of his albums archived on the rolling stone website easily enough, and I don’t think it requires much explanation to see why Paul would resent the magazine and certain critics for that. I will however just throw in this tid-bit from Jon Landaus review of RAM in 1971 as an example:

The album’s genre music—blues and old rock—is unbearably inept. On “Three Legs” they do strange and pointless things to the sound of the voice to liven it up; it doesn’t work. “Smile Away” is sung with that exaggerated voice he used for the rock & roll medley in Let It Be: it is unpleasant. The “When I’m Sixty-Four” school of light English baubles is represented by “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” a piece with so many changes it never seems to come down anywhere, and in the places that it does, sounds like the worst piece of light music Paul has ever done. And “Monkberry Moon Delight” is the bore to end all bores: Paul repeats a riff for five and a half minutes to no apparent purpose.

(I know I said I would try not to take sides here, but come on, Monkberry Moon Delight is a banger through and through!)

But then there’s Lennon, Remembers and the role Jann Wenner had in the aftermath of the Beatles breakup, and as well the construction of a certain historiographical narrative which Erin Torkelson-Webber cites as ‘The Gospel According To John’.

Lennon Remembers was an interview conducted in December 1970 between Jann Wenner, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, where John remarked a lot of not-so-nice things about people he’d known, including Paul McCartney.

The interview was published in the magazine in 1971, and John was allowed to edit it. But then Wenner wanted to publish it in full in book-form, which John objected to. Regardless though, Wenner made a $40,000 book deal and published it anyway.

John never spoke to him again after that.

Joe Hagan mentioned his interview with Paul on this podcast interview (which id highly recommend recommend listening to in full, it’s interesting!), and said:

I was asking [Paul] questions that nobody had ever bothered to ask him: What’s your opinion on Rolling Stone and the coverage you and your relationship to its publisher?

[…] [Rolling Stone] were partisans for John Lennon, and that John and Yoko used Rolling Stone to telegraph their independence from the Beatles. Well it turns out that Paul had an opinion about that. And he felt strongly about Rolling Stone as a result, or he had kind of ambivalent feelings—and sometimes not ambivalent—about Jann Wenner.

[…] And then over the long term, of five decades of Rolling Stone, the invention of the Rock N’ Roll Hall Of Fame […] He’s observing, Paul McCartney is, that his legacy as a member of the Beatles is being downplayed to John Lennon, making McCartney the second banana. In which he’s like ‘no, the songs are Lennon/McCartney. We co-wrote these songs.’. So he resents that and now he’s at the stage in his life where he’s really wanting to make clear what he believes his legacy is and should be and what he thinks of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone; where they play into that. Negatively, in his mind.

[…] I mean you’re talking about a view of the Beatles history and legacy through a different lens. You know, the lens of a magazine that mediated a lot of their mythology, Rolling Stone. Jann Wenner had a lot of power and at the outset was a John Lennon devotee. And he took John Lennon’s side, really.

He also goes on to talk about the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame incident, where he says:

When he was telling the story of how Jann had, in his mind, screwed him over on the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame induction, he was unvarnished. He was like ‘Jann promised me id be inducted, after I did him a solid, did him a favour—and I pick up the paper the next year and Im not inducted. And he says a bunch of choice words, you know? And I thought, well he wouldn’t just be saying that if he didn’t mean it.’

And in Hagans book, he also writes in more depth about the Rock N’ Roll Hall of fame fiasco:

It wasn’t just the underrated groups who disliked the opaque internal dynamics of the Hall of Fame. Even Paul McCartney felt Jann Wenner was back to his old tricks. McCartney didn't attend the Beatles' induction in 1988. But in the early 1990s, Wenner tried befriending him in the Hamptons, inviting Paul and Linda over to look at his new Picasso. Shortly after, McCartney got a call from Wenner. “He asked me, would I induct John into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” McCartney recounted. "I said, Yeah, sure.' I put the phone down, and thought, ‘What about me?’. The thing about John Lennon-McCartney is we were all equal.”

When McCartney asked if he could be inducted too, Wenner said it wasn't up to him; there was a nominating committee, which now included onetime Elektra A&R man Danny Fields. “And it was like, ‘Oh, no, we can't do that, we can't do that,” said McCartney. “In all my dealings with him, it's never up to Jann. It's up to these ‘other people’ who are down the corridor somewhere. His thing just happens to have ‘Owner, Editor’ on the door, but they're responsible for things.”

Indeed, the offices of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame resided inside Wenner Media, which charged the foundation $80,000 a year for rent. According to Paul McCartney, Wenner told him that if he agreed to induct Lennon, the Hall of Fame would induct McCartney the following year. And so McCartney inducted John Lennon in 1994, reading an open letter to him that recounted the highlights of their lives together. […] The next year, McCartney discovered that he was not in fact being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “I rang Jann and said, I’m getting all the papers; I don't appear to be in it. You fucking bastard,” said McCartney, “We had a deal. A verbal contract that was not worth the paper it was written on. So that didn't endear me to him.” (Wenner said he didn't remember making such a deal.)

Far from receding into the past, the history of rock and roll was a living drama, beholden to the same old Rolling Stone agenda, which was Jann Wenner’s agenda. “It all added to this historical thing, that John was really it in the Beatles, and the other three weren't it, by implication: said McCartney. “To me, me and John writing, it was so equal. And sometimes it was not equal. Sometimes I was absolutely the one that got his ass out of bed. Which I don't go round saying. You won’t find me saying, ‘Oh, it was me!’ You'll find other people saying, ‘It was him! It was me!’ I don't want to do that. I'm happy with half credit.” (pg. 447-48)

As I mentioned before, Im still yet to read Hagan’s biography in-full—I do however own a copy of it, and on the blurb there’s a quote from Paul where he says:

Jann is very good friends with Bono. But you can see it. I think it's a little bit obvious. When I saw that, I thought, “They're gonna get a great review. Whether it's great or not.”

Im not sure when or where this quote came from, but Im fairly certain it came from an interview conducted between Hagan and McCartney—so from that I have to assume its a fairly recent thing Paul has said, given that the book was only published in 2017. And you can tell from these interviews with Hagan that, at least a few years ago, Paul still seemed to hold some type of resentment towards Wenner and his magazine. Hence why people are surprised about him describing Wenner as a “friend” in his recent instagram post.

In that same interview with Hagan I transcribed earlier, he also mentions Pauls agenda in saying these things:

When you’re interviewing people about this subject in particular, its not like you come to them and they’re just innocently waiting for the question. He has an agenda, Paul McCartney. He’s thinking, ‘you know? Im finally gonna lay this one down. You know, Im gonna tell him what I think.’ And I knew this was the case because towards the interview he looks at me and he’s like: “this isn’t gonna be a whitewash, is it?” And I said “No.”. And he said, “Good.”

And I do feel it’s important to recognise that the things Paul said about Wenner to Hagan (just a few years ago) weren’t done so in a vacuum. It’s no secret that Paul is a good PR man, and generally speaking, he doesn’t give off the impression that he’s someone speaks before thinking. So for him to speak negatively about Wenner kind of tells us that, as Hagan points out, there is an agenda against him.

#sorry for taking like 2 days to answer this lol #was feeling too nauseous to write yesterday #and then had to pack all day today because im moving to Liverpool on Friday (yay!)#so yeah. late reply but hope it was informative! <3 #there's also a few other things ive come across in hagans book which im happy to post if anyones interested #but yeah hope this helped my luv #jann wenner #paul mccartney #beatles historiography #erin torkelson webber #lennon remembers #beatles #joe hagan

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