Though he always exhibited the wounds of an abandoned child, with insecurities that were painfully obvious (he would cover part of his face with his hand when talking to you, and he almost always kept a table between himself and anyone else who was around), he also early on demonstrated a powerful ability to empathize with an entire generation that felt betrayed by its parents. This was, after all, a generation that simultaneously rebelled against the Vietnam War and a host of constrictive social arrangements and gravitated to the one force that bridged racial and class lines -- music. Jann really could trust his own wounded instincts as he proceeded to capture the Zeitgeist of the age.

His short, muscular body zoomed around the magazine's office; if you didn't look quickly, you'd easily miss him as he passed. Though he surrounded himself with taller people, he didn't like to look up at anyone, so most meetings were held at something approximating room-length, or at least everyone else had to be sitting. And despite his insecurity, he never had much trouble making eye contact, and there always seemed to be a conspiratorily mischievous glint in his large, lovely blue eyes. His voice rapped out orders in a rapid-fire delivery, made even more so in those early years by his heavy cocaine habit.

Staffers often worried that Jann was overdoing powder (and later alcohol), especially when he'd tend to be missing at important moments. Sometimes, though, it wasn't the mind-altering substance that was to blame, but Wenner's pure fear of being onstage. During a hastily arranged news conference following the Patty Hearst/Symbionese Liberation Army exposé that Howard Kohn and I co-authored in 1975, for example, Jann was nowhere to be found. Reporters from virtually every national and local media outfit in San Francisco clamored for an explanation of how the magazine had gotten this scoop, but Jann was too nervous to appear before them himself. We were told later that he had hidden under a table, vomiting, while avoiding the media.

One-on-one, however, Jann was a master at exerting personal power. He knew how to charm anybody who came into his orbit. He stalked the objects of his greatest affection, and used the magazine to gain access. Thus did he get cozy with John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Jackie Kennedy, the royalty of the age. But once Jann got to know these stars, he cared about them, not as a fan but as family, just as with his staff. And then, just as with the staff, he'd fight with them and drive them away.

The stars often accused Jann of going back on his word, of betraying them, of lying. But usually he would cajole his way back to their sides, where he'd extract another interview from them, another deal, yielding yet another wave of accusatory charges and countercharges. Have Jann, have drama.

His blow-ups with Lennon were especially legendary, yet when Lennon was murdered, according to Draper's book, Jann was inconsolable; he raced across town to the Dakota and stood across the street with a sorrowful band of other fans, crying in the rain. Later, without telling anyone, he stopped the memorial issue of the magazine as it was headed to the printer and hand-scribbled in tiny letters a final message in the fold: "John, I love you I miss you you're with God I'll do what I said 'Yoko hold on' -- I'll make sure, I promise XXX Jann."

By the mid-'70s, the stars of other, somewhat imitative media hits started gravitating to Jann's side. As "Saturday Night Live" came into being, Jann and Rolling Stone developed a synergistic relationship with actors like John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. One time, in advance of a visit to the magazine's offices, a large package arrived for the Blues Brothers. When a curious staffer poked at it, sure enough, white powder began to leak from inside.

At Jann's Victorian mansion in Pacific Heights in San Francisco, Saturday nights were sometimes the excuse for him to show off new toys, like an early large-screen TV set on which he displayed the first episodes of "Saturday Night Live" to staffers juiced on Remy Martin, coke, scotch, bourbon, marijuana, cigars and other substances hard to recall now, let alone the following morning. Outside, in Jann's driveway, the painfully insecure and brilliant photographer Annie Leibovitz would leave her cameras in her car. Hours later, after stumbling outside only to discover her car had been broken into and her cameras were gone, Annie would come back in, crying. Jann always laid out the cash for new ones.

When certain staffers' birthdays came around, the staff passed a hat, and when enough cash had been collected, the lucky one's present was procured -- a nice big bag of cocaine. It was normal practice for an editor stopping by the staff darkroom to sniff a line or two while checking over photos for upcoming feature story layouts.

One thing this account of partying obscures is how hard the people who built Rolling Stone worked. The magazine was published biweekly, but throughout the early years, few of its editors and designers had any substantial publishing experience. Just like today's Web pioneers, this was a new generation creating new media -- if we'd fit in to what already existed, we wouldn't have been there. As a result, some pretty funky production standards and long hours were the norm. It wasn't uncommon to work around the clock the last few nights before we shipped an issue. Those of us who wrote the main articles often stayed at the magazine night and day until we got our long, tortured manuscripts into their final form.

Jann's own work rhythms helped set the pace. He was, to put it lightly, a "night person." He rarely even showed up at the office until afternoon, and then normally it was with a dark growth of beard and some kind of hangover. As the night wore on, however, Jann kicked into high gear, sometimes with assistance. As other people began to fade, his energy seemed to pick up, allowing him to break down any creative resistance to his ideas the rest of us might have had.

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