Photo: Jann Wenner | By Lyndsey Parker, Yahoo Music | Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner’s new autobiography, Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir, is a sprawling account of a fascinating life, its more than 500 pages packed with stories about coming out to his wife after 25 years of marriage, his political reporting and activism, and his deep friendships with Mick Jagger, Jackie Onassis, Bruce Springsteen, Bono, Hunter S. Thompson, and John Lennon. But as Wenner speaks with Yahoo Entertainment for our Under the Covers series, the conversation naturally turns to Rolling Stone’s most iconic — and most infamous — covers themselves.
When asked which is his favorite Rolling Stone cover, Wenner doesn’t hesitate to answer. “Well, the one of John and Yoko, their second naked one… that Annie Leibovitz took three days before he died, is certainly probably the most iconic, recognizable, famous cover,” he says.
Lennon and Wenner/Rolling Stone shared a long history — Lennon appeared on the cover of the magazine’s very first issue in 1967, and after Wenner reached out to John Lennon and Yoko Ono about publishing the couple’s widely banned Two Virgins nude photos, their bond was cemented. As detailed in Like a Rolling Stone, Wenner and his then-wife Jane accompanied the couple to a screening of the Beatles’ documentary Let It Be, then wept with them on the street outside the theater as they contemplated the band’s impending breakup. And Wenner’s “Lennon Remembers” 1970 interview was so explosive and in-depth, it was eventually published as a book on its own. When the Jan. 22, 1981 issue of Rolling Stone ran after John’s tragic murder, Wenner made sure to slip in a secret message to Yoko and Sean, which Beatles buffs only discovered years later — making that Leibovitz cover even more special. In the hidden note, Wenner vowed to look after Lennon’s widow and child. Wenner later became the godfather to Lennon and Ono’s son, Sean.
“I was just car wreck of emotional… I was distraught, and upset, and very moved by all the events. And so, just as the last thought, as a little last little bit of a prayer to John, I wrote [a note] by hand and snuck it into the issue in a place where nobody could find it, right where the staples are, right in the binding. And I never told anybody about it,” Wenner reveals. “And somehow it started to get out. I don’t know how — I guess it’s the same people who listen to the records backwards and found ‘Paul Is Dead,’ you know what I mean? Somebody found it, and it ultimately made it way to Yoko, who kind of made it public.”
Other covers were more controversial. In light of the #FreeBritney movement, Framing Britney Spears, and recent revelations about the hell a young Spears endured throughout her career . . .
> > > > > > > > >
“Why I started Rolling Stone, it was part of the vision that we had: that the music itself had enormous social, political, moral, ethical messages, powerful, and that they were being communicated to people. Not the conventional politics at the time, but more kind of moral politics — the politics of Bob Dylan, of alienation, what’s going in society. And this became an important facet of music and something I wanted to deal with personally. I felt the music… was the better way of looking at politics, through the prism of what the rock ‘n’ roll poets were saying.”
Read the whole story with photos of the magazine’s covers here:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/rolling-stone-founder-jann-wenner-talks-memoir-iconic-britney-lennon-go-gos-cassidy-covers-154850341.html
Photo: Jann Wenner’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir.’ (Photo: Little, Brown and Company)
Under The Covers: Rolling Stone Founder Jann Wenner Talks New Memoir and Iconic Britney, Lennon, Go-Go’s and Cassidy Photos
