According To The Rolling Stones
As the novelist Carl Hiaasen elegantly remarks in one of the essays that punctuate this quartet of first-person memoirs, “what they do defies the actuarial tables”. The youngest Rolling Stone, Ronnie Wood, is 56; the oldest, Charlie Watts, is 62. Keith Richards, whose DNA Hiaasen suggests “should be distilled and made immediately available to the general public”, turns 60 this year, and while nobody can pretend that he looks well on it, that strict diet of bourbon and Marlboro reds shows no sign of felling him. Sir Mick, meanwhile, puts on a far more energetic show, both on and off the stage, than most rock wannabes a third his age.
Heaven knows there has been no shortage of books about them, but there are still a few unanswered questions and odd silences. What did happen to Brian Jones, the group’s wayward blond, on the night he drowned in his swimming pool 34 years ago? Has Richards really sworn off the hard drugs, as he claims, since 1978? How does Jagger manage to run his domestic affairs in the manner of a polygamous African chieftain? And when will Watts spill the beans on what he has quietly observed from behind the drums all these years?
In an account that is light on sex and drugs and extremely well stocked with rock and roll, According To The Rolling Stones only seriously addresses the last of those gaps. But what an ace reporter and keen character analyst old Charlie turns out to be. Whether he’s recalling Jones’s nervous rehearsal of dance steps (“Brian was insecure, and, much to his annoyance, embarrassed”) or reflecting on Jagger’s contradictory impulses (“He longs to have big status records, number ones, and when he gets them he’s the first to put them down”), the drummer’s tale is the one of the four that best lives up to the book’s billing as “the inside story”.
It reaches a messy climax when he decks a drunken Jagger in a hotel room in Amsterdam for patronisingly referring to him as “my drummer”. By this time – the mid 1980s – Watts himself was strung out on heroin and booze, a problem that he owns up to with typical candour. By contrast, the hard-partying animals Wood and Richards are more guarded throughout, and Jagger appears never to have touched so much as a shandy since the famous drugs bust at Redlands in 1967.
What the others do have to say, however, is more interesting more often than you might expect from a book over which the group clearly had ultimate editorial control. Jagger is wearily critical of many of the Stones’ finest recordings, in particular their 1971 magnum opus Exile On Main Street.
He also explodes the cherished myth that he and the Deptford Delta crew were scholars of the blues, preferring to cast them as pop magpies: “We didn’t sit listening to Muddy Waters, we listened to everything.” Richards rather surprisingly applauds the way their manager Andrew Oldham would lock him and Mick in the kitchen and only let them out after they’d got a song down, opining that “if we had been allowed total artistic freedom, we probably wouldn’t have written half of those songs”.
The group’s most polished raconteur, Richards has the funniest, and cruellest, line on Jones: “He was so self-important, maybe because he was so short. I mean, why would a guy buy a Humber Super Snipe when he couldn’t see over the steering wheel?” Aside from his exotic coinage, “gazongas”, for women’s breasts, Wood’s paragraphs are the least arresting. But he does reveal an under-appreciated “humanitarian” side of bassist Bill Wyman – the only Stone who consistently supported his claim to be treated as a full-time band member rather than, as he remained for 20 years, a paid employee. Mindful no doubt of his role as the group’s peacemaker, Wood handles this contractual humiliation with good grace, and even seems unfazed by the way in which he was denied the credit for co-writing one of the Stones’ main anthems, ‘It’s Only Rock’n’Roll’.
Tensions do surface, particularly where the sibling-esque rivalry of Jagger and Richards is concerned, but this is mainly a boy’s own story of successful rock-music making. The sort of reader whose imagination is piqued to discover how Richards achieved the biting guitar sound on ‘Street Fighting Man’ (he fed an acoustic guitar through a cassette recorder) and is curious to know more about the design and logistics of the Stones’ current world tour will have a great time – and might even lap up Jagger droning “when you get a really bad cold it can completely throw you. You can do the show but you’re always on edge.”
Those of a less trainspotterish disposition are fortunate that the book contains contributions, like Hiaasen’s, in which a dozen high-profile fans and business associates offer third-party insights into the band’s 40-year reign. Priceless anecdotal items here abound. The photographer David Bailey tells how a 20-year-old Jagger secretly pocketed a ten-bob tip after Bailey had just explained the concept of a restaurant gratuity to him.
Christopher Gibbs, the old Etonian antiques dealer who assisted the band’s passage into high society, reports how Jones hospitalised himself in Tangier with a broken arm after a blow he aimed at Anita Pallenberg landed on a metal window frame. He also offers a dispassionate analysis of Jagger’s social ruthlessness in befriending then dropping people, which he calls “an editing instinct”.
Not everybody is so restrained. The Stones’ first manager Giorgio Gomelsky takes them to task for not financially supporting the old blues musicians whose idioms they have plundered. And not everybody talks the same language: enter Prince Rupert Loewenstein, a director of a merchant bank who took over managing the group’s financial affairs in 1970 after Jagger met him through their mutual friend Gibbs.
Like Gibbs, Loewenstein has never publicly spoken about his clients before, and reading him now you get a rare sense of just how strange and deeply subversive this remarkable group and all they stood for once were. “Rock music was a symptom of a new secular evangelisation, where the prohibitions of the Decalogue were subordinated to the gospel of fulfilment of the individual’s desires. The Rolling Stones’ enormous popular success is a tribute to their ability to capture this taste and to gratify its expectations.” Buy that man a beer.
Robert Sandall, The Sunday Times, 17 August 2003
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