Description
All great music is a threat.
What is left to say about The Rolling Stones? A hell of a lot, it turns out.
Bob Spitz brings his indefatigable energy and five decades of experience in the fields and hollows of rock 'n' roll to his five-year effort to reexamine one of popular music's greatest stories. There are myriad revisions to the conventional narrative that underscore just how much control the band has had over its own story — small example: no, Muddy Waters was not mopping the floors at Chess Records when the Stones showed up. In a larger sense, as with the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, Spitz's greatest gift is for the big picture. He knows where the magic is, and why it is. He is as clear-eyed a connoisseur of show business, spectacle, and the collateral damage of this whirlwind as anyone alive, and that lucid gaze pierces a lot of incrusted bullshit; the ultimate goal is to connect with a creative force whose power shows no signs of fading, over sixty years on.
At its heart, the story is about two boys, Mick and Keith, and their unique, fraught, alchemical bond — often tested, never sundered. The Glimmer Twins. The bandmates who found their groove in relation to this double star, like Charlie Watts, made the trip intact, while those who struggled, like Brian Jones and Mick Taylor, were chewed up and spit out. This is a story with many dark corners, including a surprising number of deaths. Whether Jagger and Richards sold their souls to the devil in the quest for blues greatness or merely squeezed their heroes for every drop of inspiration, in the end their connection to their music and to each other put them in a category of one, where they very much remain.