A book of Rolling Stones photographs captures the band's unflagging half-century of rock'n'roll, writes TONY CLAYTON-LEA
THE ROLLING STONES 50/Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood Thames & Hudson 352pp £29.95:'YOU NEED A BIT of theatre, don't you?" says Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones' drummer.
“Playing with the guys has always been an up,” says Keith Richards, tongue in cheek, “and while it’s not an addiction, it’s certainly a habit.”
Mick Jagger admits his lack of foresight. “I was sometimes quoted in the press as saying that I couldn’t see myself doing what I did for much longer. How wrong could I be?”
Ronnie Wood, the band’s newest member – he joined 37 years ago – recalls his first sighting of The Rolling Stones, in 1964 in a tent at the National Jazz Blues Festival, in Richmond in London. “While I watched them playing, absorbing the energy and the excitement, I thought to myself: I’m going to be in that band. It looks like a pretty good job to me – not that you can really call what we do a job.”
So begins the story of The Rolling Stones 50. The introductory comments from the band members – Bill Wyman, the original bass guitarist, is noticeable by his absence – to this doorstop constitute the most we’ll actually read about the band, as the remainder of the text is little more than captions, some pithy, amusing and insightful but too many plain ordinary.
The former range from bemused comments about the band’s early days to wry observations about the band’s more recent life. An image of the band playing their first tour of the UK, in 1963, is accompanied by Richards’s piquant, pre-superstardom remark that “I’d never been around much of England before, and there were all those birds. There’s nothing like 3,000 chicks throwing themselves at you.”
Then, years later, talking of the Licks world tour of 2003, Watts claims: “I have resigned at the end of every tour since 1969 . . . I thought the Licks tour would be the last one . . . Wrong again!”
Ironically, at a time when 50th-anniversary biographies of the band are taking up space on bookshop shelves – brimming, inevitably, with seedy on-the-road reports and stories of dubious rock’n’roll goings-on – it’s this officially sanctioned illustrated book that works best as a primer in how to survive the rigours of almost half a century as one of the most highly regarded and commercially minded of rock bands. Words can tell a story, of course, but images can capture truth, lies and pretty much everything in between.
Look elsewhere if all you’re interested in reading about is the side of The Rolling Stones that oozes sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. But if you want to pore over almost 50 years of chronologically arranged photography of the band, this is the business. The images are culled from the archives of the Daily Mirror and from the portfolios of Gered Mankowitz, Dezo Hoffman, Michael Cooper and Terry O’Neill, among others, and the book ends in 2006 with images from the filming of Martin Scorsese’s documentary Shine a Light. You can also factor in rare band memorabilia, unseen versions of cover art, bubblegum cards, puzzles, tour posters and other previously unpublished ephemera, most of which comes from a fan, Ali Zayeri.
There’s no denying the quality and range of the images. The best date from the band’s prolonged zenith, taking in the monochrome innocence of the 1960s and the drug-addled years of the 1970s, a period when the band looked ridiculously cool despite their blatant sexism (not a whisper about which appears in the caption text). But the most fun is to be had by flicking through the book for flinty, witty quotes from Richards and Watts.
The former’s dry, laconic tone is reflected in lines such as: “We played Satisfaction every night. It had been number one in the US for a month in the summer of 1965. Mick and I were sitting back in a hotel room in San Diego when there was a knock at the door and the phone started ringing and people wanted the next hit. If we had been allowed total artistic freedom, we probably wouldn’t have written half of those songs.”
Watts sums it all up: “Ten years working. Forty years hanging about.”
Watts is still hanging about as the band strategises and schedules its anniversary shows for next year. “Touring is the only way to survive,” says Richards, in a mixed-metaphor soundbite. “Record royalties barely pay overheads . . . Megatours are, in the end, the bread and butter of keeping the machinery running.”
The machine, of course, continues to be serviced with books such as this. Avid Stones fans will want a copy. Whether they’ll be strong enough to lift it is another matter.
Tony Clayton-Lea writes about pop culture for The Irish Times. His most recent book is 101 Irish Records You Must Hear Before You Die (Liberties Press)
