Rock idols, movie stars and presidential candidates who quoted Bob Dylan—not tech giants—were… rolling stone‘s stock in the trade. Wenner knew Steve Jobs and noted some similarities—when they met in the early 1980s, they were both long-haired Dylan aficionados who had disrupted their fields—but the two never really clicked. “We had a conventional disagreement about the future of print,” Wenner says. “He turned out to be right.”
I have my own story about Jobs and Wenner. When I interviewed the Apple co-founder about the upcoming Macintosh computer for: rolling stoneJobs told me he lobbied to get the Mac team on the cover, a demand Wenner declined. “Jan makes a mistake!” Jobs said to me. When I brought this up to Wenner this week, the autobiographer said, “God, I wish I remembered that — I put it in the book!” (One of the Norman Seeff photos I took for my 1984 story ended up being a rolling stone cover, 27 years later, when Jobs died.)
Today, Wenner’s view of technology is colored by his anger at how the Internet has destroyed the traditional business model of magazines. In his book, he speaks of the Internet as “a vampire with several hundred million unattached tentacles, the ubiquitous iPhone.” He wants it to be regulated. “I think the internet players have literally stolen all the intellectual property from the world of magazine journalism, without any kind of compensation,” he says. “They repackaged it, gave it away to consumers for free, and sold it to advertisers at lower rates. It was cold-blooded, it was sterile, and it was devastating. We lay dead on the ground.”
On the other hand, he likes to stream. “Music is everywhere,” he says. “I listen to it on my Sonos system, all the time. Incredibly great.”
Despite his reservations about the internet age, Wenner admits that starting a tech magazine may not have been the worst idea. But the combination of his lack of interest in the subject and his company’s full list of other titles contradicted this. “I don’t think I had the bandwidth or the time or the interest at the time. we had started Outside,” he says. “I really didn’t feel like we could put out another magazine. I wish we had.”
Wenner did get a chance to get a part in a startup tech publication. He told me that WIRED co-founders Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe once approached him because he was a minority shareholder in what they often called the rolling stone of technique. Wenner flew back to his hometown of San Francisco and visited the WIRED offices, just steps from rolling stonethe former headquarters. “It looked exactly the same — everything except the computers,” he says. But he succeeded, in part because he felt there might be a clash in philosophy. Rather than just focusing on journalism, Wenner felt that WIRED should be more of a product-oriented magazine, like the Ziff-Davis publication PC Magazine. “I had the feeling that there would be more advertising,” he says. (Metcalfe confirms the visit. “He noted how tall everyone was and that the people in his office were small,” she says.)
