HOW DOES IT FEEL?

As His Rock Magazine Hits 1,000 Issues, Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner
Is Still High on the Concept

Hunter S. Thompson is dead and the Capri Lounge is defunct, but
Rolling Stone keeps rolling along. The magazine publishes its 1,000th
issue tomorrow, complete with a neo-psychedelic, pseudo-Sgt. Pepper,
holographic, 3-D cover.

At the entrance to Rolling Stone's offices in midtown Manhattan sits
a guitar smashed by the Who's Pete Townshend. The shards of this
artifact are embedded in a thick block of plastic, like some
priceless relic of a prehistoric civilization.

Inside, it's clean and quiet -- not a murmur of rock-and-roll -- with
fishbowl glass offices that were designed, says Managing Editor Will
Dana, so that employees can't secretly snort cocaine, as many did at
the old Fifth Avenue quarters in the 1980s.

In those days, the office included the infamous Capri Lounge, a dark
den illuminated by a dim orange light, where staffers and guests
inhaled powerful herbs and giggled at an album of Polaroids showing
famous visitors inhaling powerful herbs in the Capri Lounge.

But now the Capri is just a memory fading from the minds of people
whose memories aren't what they used to be.

"We don't have a Capri Lounge anymore, and the gentlemen who ran it
are all gone, too," says Jann Wenner, who founded Rolling Stone in
1967 and is still the editor and publisher. "I shut that down. I
said, 'We can't do this anymore. It's counterproductive to getting
the magazine out on time.' It was a bad situation. And they had all
those Polaroids there -- I have that book now."

He smiles. "Those were the good old days," he says.

Now 60, Wenner is sitting in his spacious office overlooking
Rockefeller Center with one leg folded up on his chair. He's wearing
a tie but no jacket, and his face bristles with a hip three-day
growth of beard.

His secretary appears, silently bearing a dose of his current drug of
choice: espresso.

These days, Wenner is the kingpin of a publishing empire whose worth
was estimated recently by the Wall Street Journal at between $600
million and $900 million. The counterculture icon who once inspired
gossip about sex and dope now inspires gossip about . . . neatness.
Scurrilous rumors allege that he periodically conducts inspections to
make sure employees' desks aren't messy.

"True!" Wenner says. "I believe that a neat office is a good
workplace and a neat desk reflects an orderly mind. So we clean the
office up every year and everybody's required to go throw out all
their old stuff. And the place looks great."

The neatness, the sobriety, the quiet, the general air of brisk
professionalism -- Wenner figures it all serves to make Rolling Stone great.

"Rolling Stone is one of the best magazines in the United States," he says.

He may be right. Rebounding from a period frequently described as
"all Britney all the time," Rolling Stone is enjoying a renaissance.
The biweekly's circulation is up to a record 1.4 million -- far above
such rivals as Blender and Spin -- and in the past few months, it has
published a long expose on Scientology, plus excellent articles on
Iraq, Congress, Hurricane Katrina and, of course, pop culture.

In 2004 it won a National Magazine Award for its Iraq coverage, which
the judges called "brilliant down to the last detail." This year,
it's been nominated for three more of the awards, which will be
announced Tuesday.

At this point, Rolling Stone is a bit like the Rolling Stones: rich,
successful and reliably entertaining but no longer as innovative or
exciting as in their heyday.

"It's certainly not as novel as it once was," says Abe Peck, a former
Rolling Stone editor who teaches magazine journalism at Northwestern
University. "But short of blowing itself up, how could it be?" Quality Hip

It all started in San Francisco at the tail end of the Summer of
Love, when a pudgy 21-year-old Berkeley dropout started a rock music
tabloid with $7,500 raised from family and friends and a mailing list
swiped from a local radio station.

"I had no idea what I was doing," Wenner says. "I don't think I'd
ever heard the word marketing , let alone branding . I just thought
it was a good idea, and I had a lot of energy and a love of music. .
. . Nobody starts a magazine like that today. They come at you with a
business proposal and six-year projections and focus groups and
direct-mail tests. We just made it up."

"Rolling Stone is not just about music, but also about the things and
attitudes that the music embraces," Wenner wrote in the first issue,
dated Nov. 9, 1967. He printed 40,000 copies, and 34,000 were returned unsold.

Later, he concocted a crafty marketing scheme -- a free roach clip
with each subscription. "Act now," the ad said, "before this offer is
made illegal."

Soon, Rolling Stone was running ads from record companies eager to
find a way to reach young people in an era when most publications
either ignored rock or scoffed at it. The magazine found a unique
niche: hipper than "straight" newspapers but not as raunchy or
radical as the "underground" press.

"It was hipper than anything better, and better than anything
hipper," says Peck.

Rolling Stone covered rock with tough love. In an early issue, critic
Jon Landau panned guitar god Eric Clapton's hot supergroup, Cream:
"Clapton is a master of blues cliches . . . a virtuoso at performing
other people's ideas."

Clapton read the review and agreed. "It was true!" he told an
interviewer years later. "I immediately decided that that was the end
of the band."

Rolling Stone killed Cream! Such was the power of Wenner's brainchild.

In 1970, a writer wearing shades and a bad wig over his shaved head
showed up in Wenner's office carrying two six-packs of beer and
pitching a story idea about his campaign for sheriff of Aspen, Colo.,
on the "Freak Power" ticket. His name was Hunter S. Thompson, and
soon he was Rolling Stone's biggest star.

After the piece about his campaign -- he lost, but not by much-- he
did a story on Latino activists in Los Angeles. In 1971, he wrote a
long, rambling, hilarious piece about a drug-fueled trip to Las Vegas
to cover a motorcycle race and district attorneys convention.

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the
drugs began to take hold," it began -- an opening line that soon
became nearly as famous as "Call me Ishmael."

"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" caused a sensation, first as a
two-part story in Rolling Stone, then as a best-selling book. Wenner
dispatched Thompson to cover the 1972 presidential campaign in his
wild "gonzo" style, and his "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail"
made Rolling Stone a must-read for political junkies.

Soon Rolling Stone was America's hot mag, filled with amazing
stories: Joe Eszterhas on crooked cops and hippie murders; Timothy
Crouse on the Washington press corps; Howard Kohn revealing the
inside story of the Patty Hearst kidnapping; Tom Wolfe on the Mercury
astronauts, rough drafts of what later became "The Right Stuff." Plus
great rock profiles by a teenager named Cameron Crowe, who later went
on to direct "Almost Famous," a movie about his experiences as a
teenage writer for Rolling Stone.

Wow! All that, plus eye-popping photos by the soon-to-be-legendary
Annie Leibovitz. He'll Take Manhattan

In 1977, Wenner left funky old San Francisco and moved the operation
to New York, center of the publishing world.

Ensconced in fancy Fifth Avenue digs, he expanded his empire. That
same year, he founded Outside, a hip outdoors magazine, then sold it.
In 1979, he briefly ran Look magazine before it folded. In 1985, he
bought a piece of Us -- a poor man's People magazine -- and lost
millions until the new millennium, when editor Bonnie Fuller turned
it into a huge moneymaker.

In 1992, he founded Men's Journal, an outdoorsy lifestyle magazine
that has been a modest success. In 1994, he started Family Life,
which soon expired. By then, Wenner had changed the name of his
enterprise from the cheeky Straight Arrow Publishing to the plain Wenner Media.

Wenner's wheeling and dealing changed the tone of life at Rolling Stone.

"It became a business," says Stuart Zakim, who was hired and fired --
twice -- as Wenner's PR man. "He started buying other magazines and
it became more corporate and buttoned down."

But not totally buttoned down. Wenner sometimes wandered the office
swigging from a vodka bottle, and he became legendary for losing his
temper and abruptly firing people he once wooed.

"He could be unbelievably cruel," says David White, who was RS's
production manager in the '80s. "But he could also be unbelievably
generous. If you had a personal problem or a sickness in the family,
he'd bend heaven and earth to fix it for you. He'd charter a plane or
get the best doctor."

In 1985, Wenner repositioned Rolling Stone with his
"perception/reality" ad campaign, which was designed to boost ad
sales by changing Madison Avenue's view of the magazine's readers.
One ad had the word "perception " above a roach clip, and "reality"
above a money clip. Another had "perception" above a peace sign ,
"reality" over a Mercedes-Benz symbol.

Hipsters grumbled about selling out the ideals of the counterculture,
man, but the ads worked: Rolling Stone's advertising revenues skyrocketed.

In 1995, a British newspaper revealed what was already widely known
in media circles: Wenner had moved out of the $3 million Manhattan
townhouse he shared with his wife, Jane, and their three sons -- and
moved in with Matt Nye, a fashion designer and former model. The
story sparked a brief media flap, but today Wenner is still married
to Jane (who owns a big chunk of Wenner Media) and is still living with Nye.

"It had no impact on his business, and he became more calm and
rational," says Zakim. "Since Jann came out, he's healthier than he's
ever been. And financially he's in the best shape he's ever been in."

Through it all, Rolling Stone chugged on, its editorial quality
rising and falling with the vagaries of pop culture. "God knows the
disco years were rough," sighs former Stone writer Gerri Hirshey.

In the '80s, as Thompson's production plummeted, his political slot
was filled by P.J. O'Rourke, who did gonzo from a Reagan Republican
perspective.

In the late '90s, when "teen pop" ruled the charts, Rolling Stone
entered its infamous "all Britney all the time" era -- and for a
while, it seemed as if the magazine had hit bottom.

Alas, it hadn't. In 2002, Wenner -- eyeing the success of the
"laddie" mags Maxim and FHM -- hired FHM's editor, Ed Needham, to run
Rolling Stone. Needham Maximized the magazine with short, zippy,
dumbed-down stories.

"Everything had to be a little sensationalized and slightly over the
top," says Will Dana, who worked under Needham, then replaced him.

Needham, who declined to be interviewed for this story, lasted only
about a year. Today he runs Maxim.

Even in its darkest days, Rolling Stone still published some serious
political and cultural stories. During the Britney era, Hirshey
recalls, Wenner sent her out on the road for weeks for a profile of
blues master B.B. King.

"Jann felt he had a responsibility to pay homage to those old guys,
and I was happy to do it," Hirshey says. "Riding through Oklahoma,
sitting at B.B. King's knee, it was like a mystical experience. I
would forgive Jann anything, because it was his idea and he gave me
7,000 words. . . . The great thing about Jann is: He always had
respect for the words."

Last month, Rolling Stone announced that it will collaborate with MTV
this summer on a reality series in which college journalists compete
for a job at the magazine. Wenner says he'll appear in the show, but
promises that he won't be doing any Donald Trump-style firing.

"It's 'American Idol' for journalists," Zakim says, laughing. "Jann
has always wanted to be an actor."

Zakim is a fan of the man who fired him twice. "People think I was
insane to work for him twice, but there's something about the guy,"
he says. "He's a brilliant editor, he has a great eye for talent, and
he has played a major role in pop culture. God bless him, he made it
to 1,000 issues. Who would have thought it?" Amped Up Again

"I think the magazine is better than it's ever been," Wenner says.

He has finished that espresso and now he's washing it down with a
diet ginger ale.

"Starting in 2003, when I decided that Ed Needham wasn't going to
work out and I took over the reins again, we got on a upward curve,"
he continues. "The election, the war, all that stuff really energized
us. Those are big stories to cover, and you get amped up for big stories."

He touts Matt Taibbi, who holds Rolling Stone's unofficial
Thompson-O'Rourke Chair of Gonzo Political Reporting. "He's a sharp
writer -- as many laughs-out-loud as I've had with anybody since
Hunter," Wenner says. "He's in Iraq right now."

Wenner's big, ballyhooed 1,000th issue is a nostalgic gallery of
Rolling Stone's "100 greatest covers," along with inside info about
them, including Leibovitz's revelation that at photo shoots in the
'70s, etiquette required the photographer to bring "cocaine for everybody."

But right now, Wenner would rather discuss issue No. 999, which
featured a cover cartoon of George Bush in a dunce cap and the
question: "The Worst President in History?" The story was written by
Sean Wilentz, a Princeton history professor who is also identified in
the magazine as the "historian-in-residence at Bob Dylan's official web site."

Not surprisingly, Wilentz answers the cover question in the
affirmative. So does Wenner.

"There's never been as incompetent and corrupt an administration in
history," Wenner says. "He campaigned as a compassionate man, a
healer, a uniter. He was the wolf in sheep's clothing. And on the
slimmest margin -- a margin that wasn't even there -- he turned hard right."

Wenner describes himself as "a good old Democrat," and Rolling Stone
has backed Democratic presidential candidates since 1972 when it
endorsed George McGovern without much noticeable effect. This time
out, Wenner has no particular preference.

"There seem to be several people who would make a fine president --
John Kerry, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton," he says. "You know who'd make
a good president? Mike Bloomberg!"

He's excited to see rock-and-roll getting political again. "Neil
Young has a record out that is really anti-Bush," he says. "Bruce
[Springsteen] has put out a record called 'We Shall Overcome,'
celebrating the songs and works of Pete Seeger. Green Day had the
biggest record of last year, which was an anti-Bush thing. Pearl Jam
has just put out a record, their best in 10 years, which is full of
antiwar stuff. Once again, the rock musicians and the rap musicians
are leading the charge."

Wenner is a 60-year-old man running a rock-and-roll magazine. Does he
have any plans to retire?

"Not in the near future," he says.

A young woman pokes her head in the door and says a photographer has
arrived to take Wenner's picture.

Walking out of his office, Wenner pauses at a big black-and-white
photo of himself. It was a gift from Thompson, who fired a bullet
through the photo at chest level, then added a splash of bloodlike red paint.

"He thought it was a masterpiece of art," says Wenner, who isn't sure
he agrees. "I didn't like being shot in the heart."

On his way to meet the photographer, Wenner ducks into his bathroom,
then sends out word that he can't be photographed today. Sorry, but
he'll have to reschedule.

The problem: He has a sty in his eye.

Huh? The guy displays a picture of himself with bloody hole in his
heart but he can't be photographed with a sty in his eye? Does that
make any sense?

Maybe not. But that doesn't matter.

Call him vain or egomaniacal, but Wenner does what he wants to do
when he wants to do it. He's been working that way since 1967, and
now, after 1,000 issues of the magazine that made him rich and
famous, he's not about to stop.