JOHN, YOKO, AND ME

In an excerpt from his new memoir, 'Rolling Stone' founder Jann Wenner reveals John Lennon's history with the magazine and how he helped make it a success

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Jann Wenner founded “Rolling Stone” in the fall of 1967, when he was a 21-year-old UC Berkeley dropout working out of a tiny San Francisco loft. One of his main goals was to pull the curtain back on the most fascinating cultural and political figures of our time and reexamine their inner lives. But Wenner’s own life has remained mostly a mystery to the readers, even as Rolling Stone became one of the most respected and widely read magazines in America. That’s going to change Sept. 13 with the release of his memoir, Like a Rolling Stone. The book offers readers an intimate portrait of Wenner’s life and times as the driving force behind Rolling Stone — and examines its many ups and downs over the past five decades. He opens up about his private family life and close friendships with the likes of Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Bono, Yoko Ono, Bette Midler, and Bruce Springsteen. Wenner also goes into frank detail for the first time about the dire health issues that plagued him in recent years and his difficult decision to sell Rolling Stone to PMC in 2017. In this exclusive excerpt, he looks back at his relationship with John Lennon. It began with the very first issue of the magazine, when a still from Lennon’s movie How I Won the War ran on the cover, and continued the following year when the magazine ran nude photos of Lennon and Ono from their