Wenner and our current president are the same age, and Hagan draws a straight line between them. “The solar eclipse of Donald Trump signaled the complete triumph of celebrity culture over every aspect of American life,” Hagan writes, and Wenner helped lead us to the state we are in.

Come for the essayist in Hagan, stay for the eye-popping details and artful gossip. Wenner has complained about how much of that gossip is focused on his changeful sexual appetites. Wenner has slept for much of his life with men and women and thus, to paraphrase Woody Allen on the upside of bisexuality, has rarely lacked a date for Saturday night.

Hagan could easily have named-dropped his way through this book, yet he doesn’t drop names so much as pick them up and coolly appraise them in a line or two. Here’s Joni Mitchell, “plucking a dulcimer and ululating.” Or the record executive Ahmet Ertegun, “with the half-lidded ease of a beat poet.” Or Thompson, who “mumble-grumbled like a character actor from a Bogart movie.” Or Keith Richards, “looking as if his face were roasted for a Thanksgiving dinner.”

Richards has become the Gore Vidal of rock, the elder statesman always armed with an acid quote. He says about Wenner and Mick Jagger (this book floats the possibility that the two slept together): “They’re both very guarded creatures. You wonder if there’s anything worth guarding.”

Wenner founded Rolling Stone with money borrowed from the family of his soon-to-be wife, Jane Schindelheim, after dropping out of Berkeley. A famous early cover featured a naked John Lennon and Yoko Ono. “Print a famous foreskin,” Wenner wrote in the next issue, “and the world will beat a path to your door.”

The staffers at Rolling Stone tended to sleep together, and often enough with Wenner, according to Hagan’s account. Wenner developed an outsize cocaine habit; writers and staffers were sometimes paid bonuses with the drug. When the staff stayed en masse in a hotel, the management couldn’t figure out, the next day, why all the mirrors were off the wall and on their backs.

Image Joe Hagan Credit... Samantha Hunt

As rock music faded in importance, Rolling Stone got a lift from Wolfe and Thompson and became, in many ways, the beating heart of New Journalism. Annie Leibovitz made the magazine’s images as vital as its writing.