Bob Spitz has compiled a press-cuttings history of the Rolling Stones. Like much of their music, it is hacked together from other people’s work, though Spitz at least gives attribution. The Rolling Stones is conventional rockographical stuff: a heroic legend, sensibly frontloaded. The first 350 of Spitz’s 600 pages carry the band from postwar English childhoods to early success and the death by water of Brian Jones in July 1969. The next 200 pages describe the tax-dodging and depravity of their 1970s second act. The 44 years from 1982 to now get just over a page each, but even 50 pages are too much. The only interesting things the Stones have done since 1981’s Tattoo You album are Keith Richards falling out of a coconut tree (2006) and Mick Jagger’s solo recording of the Slow Horses theme tune “Strange Game” (2022).
The Rolling Stones went from a group of blues mimics to a catalog of songs, and then to a slick offshored business and a sloppy circus of nostalgia. The enduring aspects of this mystique derive from Keith Richards’s drug use. Though Mick Jagger supplied much of the scandal in their early years, his minstrel-show vocals and preposterous dancing have aged badly. They already render the band unwatchable. They may eventually render much of their music unlistenable. That will resolve the last round of the struggle between Jagger and Richards. The death of drummer Charlie Watts in 2021 leaves them the last original Stones still rolling. Time was on their side, though Richards’s timing has been all over the shop for years.
As Spitz shows, Jagger and Richards have survived in the manner of rival empires or married couples, by dividing the terrain and sniping across the border. Jagger takes care of business, and Richards does the riffs. There is, however, a much more interesting dynamic than this in the Stones story, and it pokes through Spitz’s book despite his best efforts to honor the deceits of the genre. Rock biography rarely produces a work like Roger Lewis’s bio of Anthony Burgess. Lewis decided halfway through that Burgess wasn’t a Joycean genius but a cunning fraud. The result was a sideways compliment, as fantastically dyspeptic as his subject. Only Albert Goldman’s 1988 biography of John Lennon comes close. But sometimes the story is there regardless, as it is here.
The core dynamic of the Stones is a series of murderous love triangles. It was a commonplace of the ’60s that the electronic saturnalia was a pagan revival. (See, if you sit through it all, Jean-Luc Godard’s One + One from 1968, which explains the dialectic by intercutting footage of the writing and recording of “Sympathy For The Devil” with eroticized exhortations to racial violence in the key of Franz Fanon.) In the Stones’ case, it produced a cult of triangulated sacrifice and substitution of the kind that the French literary theorist René Girard described in Violence and the Sacred, which Girard wrote while the Stones were recording their 1972 anthropological study Exile on Main St., at Villefranche-sur-Mer, near Nice.
The Stones are a story of Girardian mimetic desire, in which erotic competition leads to scapegoating and then, because “it’s just a kiss away,” murder. This is obvious to anyone who watches the two films that came out in 1970 and form the hinge between the first version of the Stones, the English R&B band founded by Brian Jones, and the second, the American country-rock band refounded by Jagger and Richards: Nicolas Roeg’s Performance or the Mayles brothers’ Altamont movie, Gimme Shelter.
At first, it’s Brian and Keith and Mick. These adolescent lovers of the blues are pure in heart and joined by a desire to mimic black blues singers. But mimetic desire leads them from Muddy Waters to deeper waters. Brian is the first leader, but he gets deleted from the love triangle when Keith betrays him by becoming Mick’s songwriting partner and writing pop hits like “Satisfaction,” which does not satisfy Brian’s blues purism. The dark triads begin in 1966, as the band starts to sound like itself. Now, it’s Brian, Keith, and Brian’s girlfriend Anita Pallenberg. Brian becomes the fall guy for the second time when he loses Anita to Keith, or is it the other way round? Brian cannot tell because he’s taking so much acid.
Keith is now the leader. But when Anita sleeps with Mick on the set of Performance in 1968, she initiates the Keith, Mick, and Anita triangle. The band break through to a new sound as Keith discovers the delights of open tunings, heroin, and cuckoldry. Mick and Keith realize they have to stabilize the ship before it capsizes. To affirm their union, they erase the traces of their love triangle with Brian, and complete Brian’s scapegoating by firing him from the band he founded and named. After Keith squares his account by triangulating with Mick’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, Anita cheats on Keith whenever she fancies. Mick and Keith then substitute Brian, who has now drowned in his swimming pool, with an epicene youth named Mick Taylor. When Taylor feels unloved, Mick and Keith set up another artificial triangle. This time it’s with Ron Wood, a man whose surname promises staying power.
Mick Taylor resembled a young Mick Jagger. Ron Wood resembled an old Keith Richards. As in some primitive sacrificial ritual, Taylor and Wood were selected so that the reaper will get confused in the dark and carry off the substitute. Mick Jagger could not hide from the spotlight, so instead he masked himself from the furies by impersonating Tina Turner. The conventional rhythm section of anti-charismatic family-man Charlie Watts and trainspotting, dirty old man Bill Wyman functioned in much the same way: to shield Mick and Keith’s secret and murderous romance. Ron Wood, who is not the hick he pretends to be, understands what happened to Brian, so he subordinated himself to them both and stayed alive.
The Jagger-Richards power-sharing agreement worked, with Jagger offshoring the business and Richards leading the band. It also reflected the band’s songwriting balance of power. But Jagger and Richards realized after Altamont that the rock business is a death cult, with someone always marked for sacrifice. They insist that “It’s only rock ‘n’ roll,” but, as in the Athenian drama, it is and it isn’t. If it’s a show, it’s the greatest show on earth, and if it’s the greatest show on earth, it has to be much more than a show. But after Altamont, no one wants to die anymore. What remains is, as the movie title had it, performance, reenacting the Boomer ritual.
Thus corporatized, the Stones roll on forever. No one ever wonders whether it is an accident that their early erotic triangulations coincided with their best music. No one apart from Anita states the obvious: Keith is the recurring point in all the triangles. Everyone, especially Mick, wants Keith. Richards affects not to notice this, though for decades he taunts Jagger as a homosexual by mocking him as “Brenda,” Private Eye magazine’s nickname for the old queen, Elizabeth II. As Jagger wrote in “Angie,” “There ain’t a woman that comes close to you.”
All this is blatantly obvious and entirely in keeping with the finest traditions of show business, anthropology, and archaic religion. Spitz ignores it. Like most music writers, he uses adjectives as fig leaves for his shortcomings of musical knowledge. We read that “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” has “one hell of a down-and-dirty groove,” but not where down is, what makes it dirty, and whether their hyphenated relationship is additive or exponential. Spitz tells us the title came from Richards’s gardener, Jack Dyer, clumping past the window in the rain as they tried to come up with a song.
“That’s Jumping Jack,” Richards said.
“Flash,” Jagger replied.
Spitz doesn’t tell us where these associations came from. A Jumping Jack is the English version of the American star jump. Richards was thinking of calisthenics, which Jagger’s father taught. This made Jagger involuntarily think of Jack Flash, a 1950s English comic-book character knocked off from the Marvel heroes. Jack Flash was born on the planet Mercury, has ripped muscles, and wears tight tights. The inner story of the tune that saved the Stones is a biographical microcosm of the Jagger-Richards relationship and their musical recycling of American precedents.
Spitz tells us that Richards then strummed “a couple of open G chords” and found the riff. But the guitar on “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” as recorded in April 1968 is tuned to open-E, as recorded in April 1968 is tuned to open-E, and the verse is in the key of B. Worse, Spitz confuses the six-string open tunings that Richards started to use on the Beggars Banquet sessions (such as the open-D tuning of “Street Fighting Man,” recorded in mid-May 1968) with the five-string open-G tuning that he first used on “Honky Tonk Women” (recorded in March and April 1969). This tuning, which Richards copped from Gram Parsons, became the signature of the band’s 1970s sound. But, just as the Stones had not invented the sonic template of their first era but refined other people’s music, so the sonic template of the Stones’ second era came from other people’s playing.
The Performance soundtrack came out in 1970, but it was recorded earlier. The template for the sound of Exile on Main St. is on the track “Memo From Turner.” The song is credited to Jagger-Richards, but Richards appears on only the second of the three surviving versions. The earliest, which is close to the final version and remains unreleased, is a tight funk jam recorded in November 1968 with Traffic’s Jim Capaldi on drums and Steve Winwood on guitar and organ. The faster second version is also from late 1968. This has Jagger’s vocal backed by a leaden Stones rhythm section that added nothing to the final version, and was released on the Metamorphosis collection in 1975. The soundtrack version, recorded in L.A. in early 1970, has Ry Cooder on open-A slide guitar, Randy Newman on organ, and Gene Parsons on drums, and is easily the best. This take is the sonic bridge between Let It Bleed, which the Stones began recording in November 1968 and finished in November 1969, and the sound of Exile on Main St., which the band largely began to record in May 1971.
None of this is in Spitz’s book. But it seems to me that “Memo From Turner” is the key to the story he tells despite himself: the Stones evolution from the Jones-Jagger-Richards triad to the Jagger-Richards marriage. Ry Cooder’s opinion of Mick Jagger could be from the René Girard school of musical sacrifice and substitution: “That little twerp thinks he’s Lucifer.”
The Rolling Stones: The Biography
by Bob Spitz
Penguin Press, 704 pp., $38
Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
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