Hello everyone, welcome to the Book Review Podcast. I'm Gilbert Cruz, the new editor of

the Bookstask, and for the next many months we'll be highlighting great conversations

from our Decade Plus archive. We're planning a new iteration of this podcast, and as a

result we're going to take a while to figure out what that might sound like. Until then,

we hope you enjoyed these trips down memory lane. Jan Wetter, the former editor of Rolling

Stone magazine, has just released a memoir titled Not Surprisingly Perhaps, Like a Rolling

Stone. This seemed like a great moment to revisit a conversation from December 2017,

when Pamela Paul and John Williams interview the journalist Joe Hagen upon the release

of his winner biography, Sticky Fingers. And in keeping with the autobiography and memoir

theme, we also have a lengthy roundtable recorded in July 2019 in which Pamela and John

spoke to three of our book critics about what was then our newly published list of the

best memoirs of the past 50 years.

Joe Hagen is here now to talk about his new book Sticky Fingers, The Life and Times

of Jan Wetter and Rolling Stone magazine, and also joining us, my colleague, John Williams.

Joe, thanks for being here. Thank you.

All right. So how did you get involved in this project? Well, a few years ago, I left

the city and moved upstate into the Hudson Valley region of New York. And one day I was

working in a local cafe on my laptop and in Waxion winner, who I recognized immediately

and was perplexed as to what he was doing there. So I just went up and said, hello to

him and said, Hey, Jan Wetter, what are you doing in Little Tivoli, New York?

Right. And were you like a lifelong Rolling Stone reader, Jan Wetter fan?

Well, Rolling Stone. Yes, I first was a huge rock and roll fan, just huge music fan.

...