Reliving the Glory Days at Rolling Stone

By Wendy Werris -- Publishers Weekly, 10/4/2007 10:00:00 AM

September 28, 2007. I checked into the sleek Phoenix Hotel in San Francisco on Eddy Street, somewhere between the Tenderloin and the red hot music scene, where they claimed that Keanu Reeves, Joan Jett, Little Richard and the Psychedelic Furs might be my fellow denizens lounging by the pool. A pleasant, spiky haired, punked-out young woman behind the reception desk asked me "What brings you to San Francisco this weekend?

"I’m here for the big Rolling Stone, Straight Arrow Books reunion, " I replied. "It’s called RSX. All the original staff who started the magazine and book division forty years ago are getting together. I worked for Straight Arrow Books back in 1973 and 1974."

She looked at me in astonishment. "You mean Rolling Stone used to be right here in San Francisco?" she asked. I smiled and nodded my head.

I was 23 years old when I started out at Straight Arrow, fresh out of retail bookselling in Los Angeles and just barely liberated from my parents’ home. After two years working at the legendary Pickwick Bookshop in Hollywood, I was confident of my ability to handle the sex, drugs and rock and roll environment of Rolling Stone.

Wrong.

On my very first day at work Hunter Thompson walked into the Straight Arrow office with a bottle of Wild Turkey. Our Straight Arrow Art Director Jon Goodchild looked, dressed, and had the same British accent as Mick Jagger. Led Zeppelin music exploded from the stereo speakers in the office, and I was certain I’d just signed up for crisis intervention duty at a mental hospital.

But I managed to stay at Straight Arrow for an entire year, working in close proximity to Annie Leibovitz, Ben Fong-Torres, Jonathan Cott, Charlie "Smokestack El Ropo" Perry, Ralph Steadman, Jon Landau, David Dalton, Joe Eszterhas, Sarah Lazin, David Felton, Joe Klein, Laurel Gonzalves, and Jann Wenner himself (who insisted on calling me Linda) -- and met the man who would remain the most important publishing mentor I’ve ever had, Alan Rinzler. Alan was Vice-President of Rolling Stone and editor-in-chief of Straight Arrow Books -- my friend and boss through thick and thin.

We were so young, in our 20s and 30s, and none of us had any idea that we were part of cultural history in the making. I knew that I’d never worked around a smarter bunch of people (and really haven’t since), but the idea that most of them would go on to become famous publishers, artists, designers, and bestselling authors never crossed my mind. I was too busy learning my job as Straight Arrow’s Sales and Marketing Manager, which I never did quite figure out. Eventually I was fired, and later most of my colleagues were as well, some for good cause but most on a paranoid whim of Jann Wenner’s, never famous for being a nice guy.

Setting out from the Phoenix that night I walked over to where the old office had been on Third and Townsend, then the outskirts of a desolate cheap rent warehouse neighborhood, now at the center of the trendy south-of-market tech office revolution. When I walked in to the familiar brick and timber second floor, currently the office of a video game manufacturer, the first person I saw was Ben Fong-Torres.

"Do you remember me, Ben?" I asked him tentatively.

"Of course I do, Wendy!" he said, then grabbed my hand and kissed it. I was so pleased. I could have melted on the spot. Ben, memorialized in Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film about Rolling Stone, Almost Famous, had always been nice to me. Adjusting my eyes to the dim light, I found Dian Aziza-Ooka sitting at a small table. She had been Goodchild’s assistant when she was only seventeen years old, then gone on to be an award-winning designer at Mother Jones, Home Magazine and elsewhere. Ex-staffers were everywhere, about 100 strong, and I had to look at the name tags to figure out who all these wrinkled and creased, grey-haired, and in some obvious cases plastic-surgeoned old people were. Things change, and I’ve become one of the old people, too. Still, the energy was so silly and adolescent, so naughty, that the middle-aged instant karma dissolved.

As the young faces of our comrades began to shine through and became familiar to us again, all hell broke loose. We screamed, laughed, hooted, applauded and yelled out the names of the people we recognized. . Some of us had died in the intervening years, most notably Hunter Thompson, and Doug Mount, who had worked at Publishers Weekly before joining Straight Arrow as VP of Marketing, I ran into Tom Baker, the chief accountant who’d fired me . In a very happy moment, we hugged each other. "Do you remember kicking me out, Tom?" I asked him sweetly.

"I did not!" he said, surprised. Reminding him that we’d all done a lot of drugs in those days I assured him it had actually happened – and realized what a blessing in disguise it had been, leading as it did to my return to Los Angeles and life as a successful publishers’ rep.

That night was the gala dinner and No-Talent Talent Show at Sweetie’s in North Beach. I was thrilled to see Rosemary Nightingale, who had been Rinzler’s assistant at Straight Arrow, followed by artist Mick Stevens who had gone on to become a famous cartoonist at the New Yorker. Also Joe Klein, who later became a celebrity everywhere as the author of Primary Colors, and The Natural, big bestsellers about Bill Clinton.

David Felton and Ben Fong-Torres, who'd been Rolling Stone’s best music writers, emceed the No-Talent Show. The name was apt, although a couple of the acts – including Mick Stevens’ smooth sax rendition, while dressed in a caveman costume, of the Flintstones theme song; and Charles Perry’s blasphemous imitation of Jann firing a staffer – were hysterical. Midway through the show Felton announced that he’d received an email from Jann himself just a few hours earlier. We thought it was a joke, and when he started to read it to the group – a saccharine, self-conscious jumble of thanks to the ex-staffers for their contributions to Rolling Stone – everyone screamed with laughter.

Felton held up his palm and promised that the email really was from Jann (it was). When he continued reading it, we still laughed like 10-year olds. The years have improved nearly all of us, but cynicism dies hard. Someone told me that the original title for this reunion had been Burning Jann.

At the end of the evening I couldn’t say goodbye to anyone. I was overwhelmed with emotions and images; better to just vanish back into my own reality.

I wondered if it was going to be one of those ‘you had to be there’ experiences.

Well . . . maybe, I thought. But I was there, then and now, and it was an honor. Many of the books Rinzler edited and published at Straight Arrow were memorable and ground breaking, some still in print, decades later. Like Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail by Hunter the Prince of Gonzo, James Dean: the Mutant King by David Dalton, Suburbia by Bill Owens, Kerouac, the first biography, by Anne Charters, not to mention such off-the-wall titles as The History of the Israeli Army, The Illustrated Hassle-Free Make Your Own Clothes Book, and the infamous David Felton investigative reportage Mindfuckers. They said no bookstore would carry that title . . . and they were right. But now you can only get a rare copy for $500 on Ebay.

That’s a lot to crow about, and as my beloved ex-boss Alan used to tell us staffers, "Onwards . . ."