You Can’t Always Get What You Want, Unless It’s a New Rolling Stones Biography

 

 

 By Leah Greenblatt

 

Last December, two days before Keith Richards’s 82nd birthday, it was reported that the Rolling Stones would be calling off a 2026 stadium tour they hadn’t yet officially confirmed. Richards, a source said, was suffering from arthritis that affected his playing too much to commit to the laborious grind of four or five months on the road.

Well, yes, a sane reader of this anecdote might be muttering to themselves. What is the reward of fame and old age if not the right to do absolutely nothing other than enjoy your grandchildren, your innumerable seaside villas, the burnishing of your legend?

 

 

Instead, half a century after a 31-year-old Mick Jagger famously said, “I’d rather be dead than sing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m 45,” the band is set to release their 25th studio album sometime this year (for which they’ve already dropped a vinyl-only single). A previous tour, 20 dates across North America to support their last album, “Hackney Diamonds,” wrapped in the summer of 2024.

What is left to say about an act that’s made gathering no moss their signature move since 1962? The group’s improbable, near-mythical endurance in the face of addictions, defections, arrests and even death has become a dusty punchline: Ladies and gentlemen, the unkillable, are-they-still-thrillable Rolling Stones.

There’s a certain definite-article swagger, then, in Bob Spitz’s subtitling his new chronicle of the band “The Biography.” Short of Jagger’s apocryphal memoir — written and later abandoned in the early 1980s, per publishing-world legend — the Stones’ messy, extravagant peaks and valleys have been intimately if not exhaustively documented by journalists and music historians as well as the group’s own members (both longtime and provisional), assorted paramours, muses, sidemen and hangers-on for more than six decades.

As a biographer of record, though, Spitz has earned his bona fides. His past subjects constitute a sort of cultural Mount Rushmore — the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Ronald Reagan, Julia Child — documented in authoritative tomes the size of small ottomans. (He’s also been in the rock ’n’ roll trenches, having managed both Elton John and Bruce Springsteen in some capacity.)

His approach here is fond, voluble and diligent to a fault, a long and boisterous march whose outcomes — Can that indelible riff find its final form in the studio? Will this overdose be the one that ends it all? — are rarely in doubt, though many small revelations and corrections emerge along the way.

A set-piece prologue opens in 1961 at the suburban London train station where Jagger and Richards, acquaintances from grade school, first reconnected as teenagers over a near-obsessive love for Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. (“Like two alcoholics, they gush, besotted, over a mutual craving: not simply music, but the blues.”)

It’s a short walk from schoolboy days to the fetid bed-sits and scruffy pubs where the pair joined forces with the impish and mercurial Brian Jones. A blond savant who proved both a relentlessly canny promoter and a restless multi-instrumentalist, Jones helped solidify the ineffable chemistry that transformed a shambolic R&B cover band into hitmakers, and then almost overnight into the young lords of Cool Britannia.

A faithful chronology of that creative evolution — Spitz is both forensic and poetic in his extensive recounting of the band’s musical output — follows, along with a running tally of personnel changes, romantic entanglements and chemical dependencies that would become as much a band hallmark as Jagger’s libidinous chicken-winged strut or Richards’s freewheeling five-string hooks.

Drug busts scatter like flower petals (from opium poppies, perhaps) across the page, along with intra-band fistfights, shameless cuckolding of one another with wives and girlfriends, and myriad court battles stemming from possession charges, paternity suits and shady management. Law enforcement, high-horsing politicians and other members of the morality police were frequently in hot pursuit.

The amount of pearl clutching incited by the supposed social menace the group once posed might seem a little overblown and comical now: Stand back, Satan, from those velvet pants! But the era-defining disaster at Altamont, the ill-starred 1969 California concert at which heavily inebriated Hells Angels, acting as freelance “security,” attacked concertgoers indiscriminately and fatally beat and stabbed a young Black man, hasn’t much softened with the passage of time.

Nor has the lonely, grubby death of Brian Jones at age 27 in a swimming pool (Spitz acknowledges but doesn’t overly linger on the possibility that it was murder and not misadventure). His unresolved exit wouldn’t be the band’s last, though it may have been the most reverberating.

Other incidents in the book are merely surreal: the appearance of Bob Dylan in a blue mohair suit at Jones’s hotel door in the middle of a Northeast blackout in 1965, bearing guitars and “excellent weed”; a passing mention of future Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as one of the drug buddies who “revived Keith’s appetite for coke and heroin” in the late 1970s; a young Harvey Weinstein, then a regional concert promoter, passing out Afro wigs to the band and crew during a raucous tour closer in Buffalo.

Jagger and Richards’s partnership provides the book’s central platonic love story and its enduring source of tension. Keith, the addled punk-rock pirate with an extensive weapons collection and an apparent substance-fueled death wish, grew increasingly alienated for a time from Mick, whose taste for disco beats and champagne socialites he found both dishonorable and deeply uncool.

The rest of the band mostly emerges via snapshot appraisals and anecdotes. Charlie Watts, the group’s elegant jazzbo drummer, quietly excused himself from the debauchery of a group sleepover at the Playboy Mansion (his kicks leaned more toward Savile Row suits and Arabian stallions), while the bassist Bill Wyman’s too-Nabokovian romance at age 48 with a 13-year-old schoolgirl spun the tabloids into a rightful frenzy. (Reader, he married her.)

Mick Taylor, Brian Jones’s gifted if unlucky successor, never quite gelled as a full-fledged member, though Ronnie Wood, “a cheeky, chappy, irreverent character,” seemed to possess the right mix of talent and affability to keep Richards on track, even at his most erratic. All of them wrangled with addiction at some point.

“The Rolling Stones” duly acknowledges if also sometimes soft-pedals the band’s uglier dips into misogyny (the 1978 album “Some Girls” was a particular nadir) and the uneasy interplay between race, culture and creative license. After spending some 600 pages on the early 1960s to the late 1980s, the author suddenly leapfrogs over several decades in the final chapter, as if he just realized that his car is double-parked.

Rock music, like American politics, has become something of a gerontocracy; a once-vital form now sclerotic with emeritus acts and blowzy boomer nostalgia, largely reserved for those wealthy enough to afford its prohibitive entry fees. But the book’s emotional epilogue, set at a 2024 tour stop in Los Angeles, feels appropriately celebratory and bittersweet, like an Irish wake without the body. For two hours onstage, the Stones keep rolling; the crowd is ecstatic and on their feet. You could call that satisfaction.

THE NEW YORK TIMES