REQUIEM FOR THE ME DECADE: I’m currently working my way through the Kindle version of Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan’s new biography of Jann Wenner. As Thor Christensen writes in his review in the Dallas Morning News, “It’s a minor miracle this book ever saw the light of day…Against all odds, Hagan got Wenner’s full cooperation — including access to his family, friends, colleagues and 500 boxes of photos and personal documents — all with the agreement that Hagan had the ultimate say. According to the author, Wenner didn’t even read the manuscript:”

And even though he launched Rolling Stone during the left-leaning era of Vietnam protests, he eventually grew bored with ’60s idealism. “He wanted to overthrow the establishment by becoming the establishment,” Hagan writes.

Years earlier, social activist Abbie Hoffman accused Wenner of being “the Benedict Arnold of the ’60s.” By the end of Sticky Fingers, you get the feeling Wenner wouldn’t disagree.

In one of the book’s most telling passages, Hagan digs up an obscure passage in which the publisher summed up his feelings about the past, present and future of America.

“The real Seventies was a period in which the post-Sixties search for meaning was found to be pointless and premature,” Wenner wrote. The brave new world is a place “where it is important to be rich, any way you can get there, and any way you care to define it.”

Wenner, who had aspirations of movie making himself, both in front of the cameras and behind the scenes, is the linchpin connecting the lurid excesses of the rock stars of the 1970s, and the lurid excesses of modern day Hollywood moguls such as Harvey Weinstein. As we seem to be at an inflection point in the culture wars, his story is well worth studying as a cautionary tale.

(Classical reference in headline.)