Over the course of several years, Wenner gave Hagan hours of interviews and access to his enormous archive, but in the end, he did not have approval on the material. STICKY FINGERS is an independent chronicle of Wenner’s life, chock full of explosive revelations. “One of the toughest parts of being a journalist is pivoting away from a relationship with the subject to writing about him or her with honesty and integrity,” says Hagan. “It’s also the most crucial part of the job.”
Kirkus, in the first pre-publication review, hails STICKY FINGERS as “definitive… a moving portrayal of a complicated, brilliant, flawed man… a man whose thumbprint on the American culture was matched only by a vacillating stew of ego and insecurity. For fans, newbies, and journalism junkies alike, the iconic stories are here… Patty Hearst, John Lennon, Hunter Thompson, Annie Leibovitz, Mick Jagger, etc.”
In STICKY FINGERS, Hagan goes deep on the mercurial editor and his legacy by securing on-the-record interviews with Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, Bono, Art Garfunkel, Elton John, Cameron Crowe, Keith Richards, Pete Townsend, Yoko Ono, Lorne Michaels, Steve Miller, Jon Landau, Dan Aykroyd, Michael Douglas, David Crosby, Jackson Browne, Billy Joel, Bette Midler, David Geffen, Tom Wolfe, Annie Leibovitz, and Danny Fields, among others. Their candid and revealing comments depict the extremes Wenner has been willing to visit in pursuit of both success and pleasure, and help to explain how Rolling Stone became a locus of power and influence and headline-making news, from Altamont to Fear and Loathing to the University of Virginia rape allegation.
Hagan lays out the full breadth of Wenner’s life, from his ambitious youth in San Francisco and the uncertain first days of Rolling Stone, to his seismic rise as a 1970s kingmaker of rock and roll and a vainglorious and irascible media mogul of Manhattan.
STICKY FINGERS gives readers a nuanced portrait of a man who helped define a generation, and provides an explosive chronicle of an era. Joe Hagan has written for Rolling Stone and also for New York, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He has published long-form profiles and investigative exposés of some of the most significant figures and subjects of our time, including Hillary Clinton in her first post-Secretary of State interview, Karl Rove, the Bush family, Henry Kissinger, Dan Rather, Goldman Sachs, The New York Times, and Twitter.