Jann Wenner & Rolling Stone redux from Author Ben Bryant
- Posted on 7th April 2015
- in celebrity books, celebrity stories online, celebrity story, Entertainment, entertainment books, Hollywood memoirs
- by Ben
When our new magazine was in deep financial trouble
Rolling Stone
publisher
Jann Wenner
stepped in and saved the day. This excerpt from Three Stages tells part of that story.
In April 1968 my friend Frank Enslow and I started publishing a new magazine called New York Scenes.
It was a sort of entertainment book aimed at – if not exactly at the actual drug culture of the time – the hip, the I-think-I’m-hip and the wannabe-hip crowd. Not only were we over optimistic and under financed but that same month New York magazine came out. I suspect that their ad in the Times cost more than our entire budget. Being idealistic idiots we hung in there somehow, raised a few bucks from a couple of friends, sold enough ads and subscriptions to barely stay afloat and kept it going through the year.
From Three Stages, Chapter 10 The Magazine, the Met & Moodus
“By February [1969] … in order to continue publishing both Frank and I agreed (foolishly) to sign personal guarantees to the printer. By March we were in serious trouble.
“We now had eight or nine issues under our belt and the ‘book’ was looking good; enough ads to make it look like the real deal, newsstand distribution and a steadily growing subscription list. But still, we were operating in the red and rapidly running out of options.
“Late that month we had a meeting with a ‘shark’ who was willing to assume all the magazine’s debt and continue publication but his terms were unacceptable. He wanted us both out and was going to run the enterprise himself. We stayed with him, negotiating – or trying to – until the middle of the night and were totally depressed when we went to bed not knowing what the hell we were going to do.
“I dragged myself the two blocks to the office by 11:00 the next morning and around noon I got a call from Jann Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone. In ‘69 it was not much older than Scenes but was already spectacularly successful. Jann asked for Frank and I said I’d have him return the call when he got to the office.
“When Frank finally staggered in and I gave him the message he thought Wenner was probably pissed about something that had been in a recent article critical of Rolling Stone so he was not eager to return the call. I convinced him that even if it was about that he should talk to the guy anyhow. So Frank reluctantly called him.
“Wow, was Frank wrong. Jann loved Scenes and wanted to discuss merging the magazine into his company, Straight Arrow Publishing. We were rescued! Two days later we were sitting in Jann Wenner’s room at the Pierre hotel on Fifth Avenue discussing the deal.
“I don’t remember the details of the arrangement but the stockholders of Enslow Publishing (Frank, me, Lowell and the other investor) got a block of Straight Arrow Publishing’s stock. I believe it was ten or twelve percent. Straight Arrow assumed all our debt (including the E&B [our typography company] back bills) and both Frank and I got two year employment contracts, with salaries, Frank as publisher and me as production manager (another harbinger, stay tuned).
“The deal was sealed very quickly, a new designer was hired and the first issue under the auspices of Wenner was May of ‘69.”
Lots more of this saga in the book.
Tags: Jann Wenner, New York Scenes, Rolling Stone
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