The Stone Age
Sixty Years of The Rolling Stones
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An acclaimed rock and roll journalist evokes the legacy of The Rolling Stones—iconic, granitic, commercially unstoppable as a collective; and fascinating, contradictory, and occasionally disturbing as individuals.
As Lesley-Ann Jones writes, the Rolling Stones are "still roaming the globe like rusty tanks without a war to go to. Jumping, jacking, flashing, posturing, these septuagenarian caricatures with faces that might have been microwaved but coming on like eternal thirty-year-olds.”
On 12th July 1962, the Rollin’ Stones performed their first-ever gig at London’s Marquee jazz club. Down the line, a ‘g’ was added, a spark was lit and their destiny was sealed. No going back.
These five white British kids set out to play the music of black America. They honed a style that bled bluesy undertones into dark insinuations of women, sex, and drugs. Denounced as ‘corruptors of youth’ and ‘messengers of the devil,’ they created some of the most thrilling music ever recorded.
Now their sound and attitude seem louder and more influential than ever. Elvis is dead and the Beatles are over, but Jagger and Richards bestride the world. The Stones may be gathering moss, but on they roll.
Yet how did the ultimate anti-establishment misfits become the global brand we know today? Who were the casualties, and what are the forgotten legacies? Can the artist ever be truly divisible from the art?
Lesley-Ann Jones’s new history tracks this contradictory, disturbing, granitic and unstoppable band through hope, glory and exile, into the juggernaut years and beyond into rock’s ongoing reckoning . . . where the Stones seem more at odds than ever with the values and heritage against which they have always rebelled. Good, bad, and often ugly, here are the Rolling Stones as never seen before.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Music journalist and biographer Jones (Who Killed John Lennon) chronicles in this tiresome survey the legacy of the Rolling Stones, who "still roam the world like rusty tanks without a war to go to." As Jones looks back at the band's history of backbiting, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, she dutifully rattles off details about the successes of the "songwriting and recording superstars"—three Grammy Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award—before delving into a less-than-flattering look at the band members' selfishness, their callow treatment of women, and their formulaic performances. Though the late Charlie Watts, the band's drummer, is given credit as "the dignified Stone, the antithesis of a rock star, and a joyous contradiction," Jagger and his "infamous propensity for infidelity" are hashed out—Jones estimates the singer has had 4,000 lovers (in an appendix, Jones reckons that bassist Bill Wyman had canoodled with more than 1,000 women). Elsewhere, a conversation with David Ambrose, former head of A&R at EMI records, revisits the rumor that guitarist Mick Taylor left the band because he and Jagger were having sex, while the late Brian Jones is depicted by a "snarling" Keith Richards as a " ‘cold-hearted and vicious dwarf' who physically abused his girlfriends." Though there's plenty of exploits, most of them won't come as revelations to the band's devoted fans. This feels more shallow than substantive.
