When you think of the bottleneck guitar you think of an octogenarian sharecropper from the Delta Blues hinterland. In a club in Ealing, in west London, one night in 1962 Alexis Korner took to the microphone to announce, “And now, folks, a very fine bottleneck guitar who has come all the way from Cheltenham to play for you tonight”.
Two things: the bottleneck guitar player all the way from Cheltenham was Brian Jones; and standing in the audience, rapt at his skills, were Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. The Rolling Stones proper were formed that night. That young white men from the Home Counties and Cheltenham went on to have an enormously commercially successful career out of black music is an important and constant refrain in this superb sociocultural history of not just the Stones but post-second World War popular music in general.
Cohen confesses early doors to being a fanboy. He grew up staring at a poster of the band in his brother’s bedroom. He simply wanted to be them, “not in a band – but in a gang, a pack of junkyard dogs”.
At school in New York he was in a Stones rip-off band; before one show he “lit a cigarette, took a drag and flicked it into a crowd of sixth graders”.
While reporting for Rolling Stone magazine in 1994 he got to go on the road with the Stones, accessing almost all areas, as part of a cover story on the band. Solely because Charlie Watts, the band's drummer, took a shine to him, doors were opened and secrets shared. Cohen got on so well with Jagger that the singer got Martin Scorsese to hire Cohen to work on the recent HBO series Vinyl.
Cohen never succumbed to the groupthink life of a favoured journalist. If, at the beginning of his time with The Rolling Stones, he was wide eyed and slack jawed, he soon became detached, cynical and laceratingly critical.
"The Stones haven't made a decent album since 1978's Some Girls – and their last great one was in 1972 (Exile on Main Street) . . . They have become a predictable imitation of themselves, they write cover versions of their previous material . . . They are like a Broadway revival, the millionth iteration of Annie where it's all about selling the T-shirts . . . Mick and Keith are like a bitter married couple only staying together for the sake of the kids, and here 'the kids' means 'money' . . . The only reason Jagger is still fronting the band is because his solo career was an embarrassing failure."
But this is no sour recollection from a former friend who has been cast out of paradise; this is measured, controlled, insightful prose that has been researched to the highest degree of accuracy. Definitive? That would be to damn this book with faint praise.
Cohen knows that, when he first met and travelled with the band, he was already three decades too late: “I’d spent my entire life trying to reach this party. By the time I got there, everyone was old.”
There was nothing left for him but to tell the story.
He saw the Stones play in dive-bar warm-up shows, got drunk with them in enormodomes, leaned against a speaker as they played an encore, drank whiskey in their dressing room – and registered each and every detail.
The small stories impress: at a postshow party in some luxury fortress the band’s publicist rushes up to Jagger to tell him that Steve Tyler of Aerosmith wants his photograph taken with the singer.
“What do you think?” Jagger asks the publicist.
“Give it a miss, Mick. Tyler only wants people to think Aerosmith is up there with the Stones.”
Another time the publicist angrily notes that a New York Post journalist has breached etiquette by writing about how the band get their bodies waxed. "She's enjoyed life on the inside," snarls the PR man. "Let's see how she likes life on the outside."
While Cohen looks at the Stones from a standard biographical point of view, the book is also an elegy for the rock star.
Chucking-out time
It’s now chucking-out time in the Last Chance Saloon for “a generation of musicians who were marked for lives of quiet desperation in factories and insurance firms but instead [fate] set them up like medieval princes in frock coats and buckles – a life that for centuries had been the sole entitlement of the debauched nobility”.
He takes us back to the Stones’ early abode – a permanently freezing flat in Edith Grove, in Chelsea, where the band spooned each other in bed to keep warm. Then it’s on to Olympic Studios in Barnes, Chess Records in Chicago, the Altamont Speedway, Joshua Tree National Park – good for taking mushrooms and watching the sunrise, by all accounts – the mansion in France once home to the Gestapo, where they recorded their best album (go on, guess) and the clinic in Switzerland where Richards tried to wrestle down his all-consuming love of heroin.
Jagger – “one foot on the stage, one in the boardroom” – emerges as shameless but oddly affable, able to stop looking at the bottom line and switch into charismatic rock-star mode in the blink of an eye. Richards – “he would have been the hack that picks you up at Heathrow and talks all the way into London,” were it not for the Stones – loves and needs his blues guitar sound like “a sick man needs penicillin”.
Cohen soon realises that Jagger has the professional athlete’s trick of saying a lot but actually saying nothing at all, whereas, although while Richards may be mentally fuzzy and talk in riddles most of the time, he is brutally honest in his opinions.
The title of the book, by the way, comes from Richards finding out one night that Cohen was just 28 when he first joined them on tour. The guitarist announces that Cohen has grown up with “the sun, the moon and the Rolling Stones”. That Richards is saying this while sitting on a velvet throne and dressed as a pirate is something you have come to expect.
Even when Cohen tracks down or recounts the experiences of people who have been ruthlessly expelled from the band’s inner sanctum, from Brian Jones to Marianne Faithful to Gram Parsons to Anita Pallenberg, all seem to blame themselves for their banishment rather than speak the truth: that their behaviour was no better or worse than that of the band members themselves.
The pace understandably slackens as we reach the 1980s: Jagger and Richards bicker and bitch, awful records are released and perfunctory tours are staged. The song remains the same. But this is supreme soap opera, albeit while dressed in Spandex with one foot on the speaker in front of a 100,000-strong crowd.
The Stones aren’t going quietly, and neither is Cohen. He writes: “Even at the most tired shows, before the most jaded crowds, you could still, now and then, just for a moment, catch a glimpse of what they had been: a revolution with ten hands, four chords, and a groove”.
I like it, like it, yes I do.
Brian Boyd is a music critic
