In late 1968 I took Jann Wenner to lunch on the Bank of California’s expense account. I was head of Marketing Research but not yet a vice president.
I was doing research on the future of the music business in San Francisco. I knew of Wenner as a ski bum who, with the help of Ralph Gleason, had started an every-other-week newspaper called Rolling Stone.
Jann brought me up-to-date on the finances of his fast growing newspaper and told me he wanted capital to expand and to buy out Gleason. He wanted a loan from the bank of over one hundred thousand dollars. At the time Gleason had put up more than half of the capital used to get started. Wenner planned to give Gleason a small percentage of the new cash infusion.
I was offended. I told Wenner that the bank would not make such a loan; that it was immoral to cut out such an important founder as Gleason who was the music critic for the major local daily newspaper.
The reality was that I could not personally make bank loans nor could I convince a bank loan officer to do so. Banks, no bank, would make a large loan to a start-up without 200% collateral.
Wenner remembered this offense six years later when my first book, The Seven Laws of Money was published by Random house. He told a staffer, Ben Fong-Torres, to write a nasty review. It was the only negative review the book ever got.
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