Summary of Jann Wenner's Like a Rolling Stone

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

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#1 I grew up in the suburbs of San Francisco, and didn’t have many friends. I learned early on not to make friends with the neighbors because my parents were Jewish and nonobservant, and that was not a common thing.

#2 I was a pudgy kid with freckles, a cowlick, a toothy smile, big ears, and blue eyes. I was also what in those days was called a problem child. I had been kicked out of two private schools in San Francisco.

#3 I grew up in the suburbs of San Francisco and was one of the most politically active kids in school. I was a pudgy kid with freckles, a cowlick, and big ears. I was also what in those days was called a problem child. I had been kicked out of two private schools in San Francisco.

#4 I had a very special and different kind of mom. She was anti-Tammany Hall reformer, and took me to see Gilbert and Sullivan comic operettas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Oct 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9798350039696

IRB Media

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Insights on Jann Wenner's Like a Rolling Stone

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I grew up on Rainbow Road, the name my parents gave the dirt lane that led to the home they had built in a valley filled with oak trees. We didn’t have nearby neighbors, so it was hard to make friends.

#2

I was a pudgy kid with freckles, a cowlick, a toothy smile, big ears, and blue eyes. I was also what in those days was called a problem child. I had been kicked out of two private schools in San Francisco.

#3

I had a very political family. My parents were active in Democratic politics, and they brought the liberal traditions of New York City to Republican California. I was always involved in some sort of political activity, from stuffing envelopes to walking neighborhoods to distribute buttons and yard signs.

#4

I thought my mother, who was called Sim, was a special and different kind of mom. I fantasized that she was Auntie Mame, the wacky character in the book who sent her nephew to a nursery school where the kids went naked and pretended they were fish.

#5

My father, Ed, was building a business and we saw him on weekends. He had a woodshop with table saws, and he built beds for us with built-in drawers. He was short but powerfully built. He loved science fiction.

#6

I was 12 years old in 1959 when my parents sent me to a private boarding school. I had become too hard to handle. When my father took me to Los Angeles for the admissions interview at the Chadwick School, I fought for a white jacket with silver threads, but ended up with a charcoal-gray suit.

#7

I was the first kid to arrive at the Chadwick School, a boarding school in Los Angeles, California, in the fall of 1959. I was 13 years old. I was in ninth grade, and my homeroom teacher was Virginia Chadwick. I had a relationship with a day student, a cute blonde who wore madras skirts. One weekend, her family asked about my religion. I knew right away that this would be a deal breaker.

#8

I had settled into school by tenth grade. I had real, if not many, friends. I had to watch my tongue, especially with the teachers. I was estranged from the school mainstream, but there were two activities I had my heart set on: the school newspaper, The Main Sheet, and the yearbook, The Dolphin.

#9

I had become a semi-BMOC at Chadwick. I was the editor designate of the yearbook, and I wrote two theses my senior year: one about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a lesson in war, morality, and the power of bureaucracy, and the other about Nixon, McCarthyism, and the rise of the radical right in California politics.

#10

I was also at war with the head of the boys’ dorm. I made a painting of him, and when he resigned, I was a dorm hero. When I returned to campus for my senior year, I discovered that my room was just across the hall from Jack Ashton’s.

#11

I was in love, and I decided to be on the student council. I was conspicious for the first time in my life. The Progressive Party won, and I delivered on all my promises. The dean of men, a double straight arrow, told me that The Sardine would never be printed again.

#12

I had ended up in my dad’s custody, and my sisters stayed with my mom. By then, my father had married his assistant and sales manager, Dorothy Arnold. They moved to Newport Beach and bought a sailboat.

#13

I had no friends when I returned to the Bay Area. I had been gone for five years, and Susie Weigel connected me to new people and a new crowd. I bought a 1954 Jaguar, a beast that had two tons of iron and steel in it. I had no intuitive mechanical skills, and barely got the fan belt back on.

#14

I was a freshman at Berkeley in 1963, when I saw students swell into Sproul Plaza. Something felt off; there was no focus, the crowd wasn’t doing anything together or engaged in anything I could see. I walked through them into the student union, where everyone was watching television.

#15

I was assigned to cover the Republican National Convention in San Francisco in 1964, and when I saw the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night, I was completely blown away. The Beatles were