Hip Capitalist Establishment's `Rolling Stone' Magazine Revisited: Part 2

Before becoming a hip capitalist music magazine publisher/owner between the late 1960s and 2018, Jann Wenner--after having worked in 1964 as a campus stringer at the University of California-Berkeley for the then-RCA-owned NBC News establishment radio-tv corporate media news subsidiary--had, ironically, worked for the 1960s antiwar left-wing magazine, Ramparts, that first exposed in 1967 the CIA's covert funding of the National Student Association [NSA] during the 1950s and early 1960s. As Joe Hagan recalled in his 2017 Sticky Fingers book:

"Wenner's fortunes began when Ramparts, a monthly founded by left-wing Catholics...decided to launch a biweekly broadsheet in the fall of 1966 called The Sunday Ramparts...[Ralph] Gleason, a member of Ramparts' editorial board, recommended Wenner as an editor and `rock and roll specialist,' and Wenner...moved...to San Francisco to help put out the first issue in October 1966..."

During that same year of 1966, according to the same book, Wenner also "was classified as 1-A by the Selective Service System making him available for the Vietnam draft;" but according to Sticky Fingers author Hagan, "to help Wenner avoid the war," a "Dr. Martin Hoffman on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley" then "diagnosed him with a `serious personality disorder'" and Dr. Hoffman's "letter to the army draft board...achieved its purpose."

According to the Sticky Fingers book, "in creating Rolling Stone, Wenner borrowed heavily from...The Sunday Ramparts, where Wenner worked until it ceased publication in June 1967." The same 2017 book also observed, however, that, during the Spring of 1967, "Wenner was approached by Chet Helms, who told Wenner he was germinating a hippie music magazine for distribution in record stores" and "Helms came to believe Wenner had slunk away with his idea..." Sticky Fingers author Hagan also noted that Crawdaddy!, not Rolling Stone magazine, was actually "the first American rock-and-roll magazine;" and that Paul Williams, not Wenner, actually "invented in 1966" the first rock-and-roll magazine, which "was named for the club where the Rolling Stones" band "first played."

Much of the initial $2,500 [equal to over $19,500 in 2020] capital that Multi-Millionaire hip capitalist Wenner (whose 21st-century personal wealth was estimated to be $700 million by the Celebrity Net Worth website in recent years) required to launch his Rolling Stone magazine in California in October 1967 apparently came from a Manhattan dentist named Dr. Schindelheim--the father of Wenner's then womanfriend and later wife/ex-wife, Jane Schindelheim. The parents of Jane Schindelheim provided Wenner with $2,000 [equal to over $15,600 in 2020]. As the Sticky Fingers book noted:

"They wrote the check, plus a little extra, and gave Rolling Stone the financial push it needed. The money Dr. Schindelheim earned...also gave...daughter an ownership stake in Rolling Stone...which, in early October 1967, Wenner incorporated...under a name he liked quite a lot: Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc."

According to Sticky Fingers author Joe Hagan, much of the Rolling Stone magazine "thing" that was first published by Wenner on Oct. 18, 1967 had apparently "been begged, borrowed, recycled and stolen. Chet Helm [who died in 2005]...; Ralph Gleason's title...; the newsprint and layout of The Sunday Ramparts...; several stories from the Melody Maker [music magazine of the UK], rewritten by Susan Lydon..." (end of part 2.)