According to the Rolling Stones [Hardcover]

The Rolling Stones (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2003

Here's the inside story: the history of the Rolling Stones - according to the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, and Ronnie Wood have come together for this remarkable project. They've also opened up their personal and band archives to include many rare and intimate images that are interwoven with the text. The book gets right to the heart of what makes the Stones the Stones, as musicians, songwriters, performers, and colleagues. They describe how their music has evolved and how it has affected and changed their lives. They also reveal, with refreshing frankness, how their own lives have helped, or hindered, their music-making. The Stones' own words - insightful, funny, poignant, surprising, and above all, completely authentic - are complemented by insider reflections from key players in their story over the years such as Ahmet Ertegun, David Bailey, and Cameron Crowe. A comprehensive reference section including discography, and chronology, studded with the Stones' personal comments on the music and memories, completes this must-read volume. Here, in their own words and images, is the life and work of a band which has played the soundtrack of our lives for the last forty years.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

According to the Rolling Stones hews closely to the formula set in 2000 by the publication of The Beatles Anthology. Like its predecessor, it's a beautiful coffee table tome with hundreds of gorgeous photographs, from childhood pics of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to concert shots from the 40 Licks Tour. The text is taken from recent interviews with the band's four latter-day members (Mick, Keith, Charlie Watts, and Ronnie Wood). Notably missing, however, is any contribution from former bassist Bill Wyman, who left the band in the early '90s and published his own history of the band in 2002, Rolling with the Stones. Where Wyman is an obsessive collector and diarist, the other Stones are more impressionistic in their memories, lending an approach to history as casual as the band’s concerts are rigorously planned and staged.

The first half of the Stones story has plenty of high drama (tours through the segregated South, Brian Jones's death, Altamont), which no one seems eager to reflect on deeply. (Charlie is the only one even to mention Altamont.) The more recent years has seen a long string of ever-more-successful tours and ever-less-popular albums, interrupted only by Mick and Keith’s near divorce in the '80s, plus rehab stints for Charlie and Ronnie. While The Beatles Anthology offered the surviving members' interpretations of their experiences at a distance of 30 or more years, the Stones are still living the tale they're trying to tell--and they aren’t always the most self-aware narrators. Or generous: Wyman's three-decade tenure is given short shrift, but the book finds enough space for some unnecessary digs (Wyman has "tiny hands," we're told, and an "almost effeminate" style of playing).

To flesh out the band members' own recollections, the book also contains 13 essays from music-industry friends (Ahmet Ertegun, Marshall Chess), collaborators (Don Was), famous fans (Sheryl Crow, novelist Carl Hiaasen), and, yes, even the band's financial advisor for the past 33 years, Prince Rupert Lowenstein. Their views are sometimes fascinating (the unvarnished perspective of Crawdaddy Club owner Giorgio Gomelsky, the well-told stories of art bon vivant Christopher Gibbs), but just as often self-indulgent or sycophantic. Fans looking for an artfully designed volume of photos spanning the Stones' career won't be disappointed. Anyone seeking a comprehensive history of the band may want to wait for the band's definitive biography, which has attempted many times but has yet to be written. --Keith Moerer

From Publishers Weekly

That their longtime band mate Bill Wyman did his own exhaustive Stones coffee-table book last fall hasn't stopped the other members from doing a collection of old photos and recollections, too. The snapshots are wonderful (one of Jagger talking to Chuck Berry, each in a more outrageous '70s getup than the other, is particularly memorable) and the reminiscences, set up as an oral history, London slang and all, are engaging as well. Richards recalling postwar London as "horseshit and coal smoke, mixed with a bit of diesel here and there" really drives home just how long these guys have been around. Richards's wit is razor sharp, and the band's collective knowledge about old blues, R&B and jazz is awesome. What sets the book apart from Wyman's is a collection of essays from various musicians, industry people and authors. Sheryl Crow's is particularly heartfelt, as she describes when Jagger called to invite her to sing at a 1995 pay-per-view gig in Miami, then to share Thanksgiving dinner with the band and vomiting up the holiday meal before taking the stage. "Is there a way to describe what it is like to have Mick Jagger flirt with you on stage as if you were alone in a bedroom?" she writes. Author Carl Hiaasen writes about drawing inspiration from the old Stones photograph that hangs above his desk. Whether there's room on the coffee table for both Wyman's book and this one depends on the fan's love of the band.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books; First Edition edition (October 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811840603
• ISBN-13: 978-0811840606
• Product Dimensions: 11.9 x 8.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #984,057 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Thru the past in a rose colored light., March 1, 2004

By 

L. Alper (Englewood CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: According to the Rolling Stones (Hardcover)

The recent publication of "According to the Rolling Stones" to coincide with the Forty Licks Tour, is classic Stones-style media manipulation. Looking back over their career & my collection of Stones videos, books & CD's, it is obvious that once again Jagger (& to a lesser extent, Richards) are attempting to revise their personal history and somehow cleanse themselves of their bad-boy image. This particular effort is the penultimate revision of a well-documented history.

From the outset, the choices made by the books' editor (Dora Lowenstein, daughter of the financial advisor to the Stones, Prince Rupert Lowenstein) as to whom to include make it obvious this will be a trip thru the past brightly. The single most glaring omission is that of Bill Wyman; yes, he's not currently a Rolling Stone, but one would think that 25+ years as an official Stone would count for something. Obviously, Dora & Co. didn't agree. Other omissions include Mick Taylor (only the spark for the finest Rolling Stones guitar interplay recorded), Andrew Loog Oldham (even Jagger/Richards admit they probably never would gone beyond the Crawdaddy Club without ALO), Bobby Keys (Keith's best friend for many years & the leader of the Stones horn section since 1969) and the Stones women, past & present. Marianne Faithfull & Anita Pallenberg were considered adjunct members of the Stones for many years, most of them the most productive and artistically satisfying of their career. The list of those Missing In Action could also include dead, but on-the-record Stones members such as Brian Jones and (especially missed!) Ian Stewart who was the original founder with Jones of the band. Stewart knew where all the bodies were buried, and never failed to take the Jagger/Richards egos down a peg or 10. Ian's contributions to the Stones legacy are glossed over at best.

Instead, in the tween-chapters essays, we have represented two journalists (one of whom has no claim to any contact with any Stone at any time), Peter Wolf of J.Geils Band, Sheryl Crow, Prince Rupert and Ahmet Ertegun. Needless to say, their contributions tend more towards the sycophantic than the enlightening.

Many excellent photos, a number of them full-page, are reproduced here, but again, almost none of Wyman, and very few of those in the inner circle. The majority of the photos are (in descending order) Richards, Jagger, Watts & Wood. Poor Ronnie, although a Stone now since the mid-70's, is still attempting to rationalize the fact that he has almost never been giving song-writing credit even when he was the primary catalyst of a riff.

The main pleasures of "According to the Rolling Stones" are hearing Charlie Watts speak out openly, especially concerning his period of substance abuse in the 80's. He analyzes and philosophizes on many aspects of the Glimmer Twins collaboration, as well as the contributions of some of the more ignored members of the organization. It's as much a pleasure to read Charlie's words, as it is to hear his lovely, economical drumming.

Ronnie is his usual entertaining self, & Keith comes up with some classic quotes as usual. Jagger's contribution is to once again prove what a jerk he's become in the past 20 years. "Exile on Main Street" not a good album? Apparently Sir Mick thinks the sound too muddy. I hate to mention this, your Lordship, but you did start out as a blues band, after all. "Exile" is one of the greatest blues albums ever recorded by anyone. The Mick of 1962 thru 72 would have adored this album. Just goes to show....(and of course, we all know what Mick's solo work has sounded like). Mick is quoted at one point as justifying the Stones later work by saying "as long as it works live, that's all that matters". Keith, on the other hand, offers that he can't stand playing such recent dreck as "Emotional Rescue" or "Undercover of the Night". At least someone in the band still has some musical integrity left!

So there it is. "According to the Rolling Stones" won't change anyone's mind about any of the band members, although Mick & Dora might wish it would. I am just praying, that we, the "peeps" in the audience, won't be subjected to a 50th Anniversary Tour/Commemorative Book. The thought of a 70 year old Sir Mick wiggling his geriatric fanny is really too grotesque to bear!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great story of 4 rockers and 3 invisible elephants, November 6, 2004

By 

Manny Hernandez "@askmanny" (Bay Area, CA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: According to the Rolling Stones (Hardcover)

This book makes for more than just a nice coffee table book. It's got more than cool shots (a good many of them posed for) and interesting tales of the band by its four remaining members (and a host of interviews by collaborators, fans and close friends). What's missing from the book almost speaks louder than wha'ts in it. It is inevitable to stumble upon the absence of ANY quotes from the late Brian Jones, his substitute Mick Taylor or the former bass player Bill Wyman. It's the proverbial invisible elephant in the room! Let's face it: the book is more about the vibe and chemistry that kept the surviving members together through the years. Those left behind (like Wyman) have only themselves or their legends to speak for them. Because of this, I take a star off my rating, and leave it still at a good four stars, because it is still a nice document.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars GREAT BOOK, NOT TOO BAD LOOKING EITHER, November 18, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: According to the Rolling Stones (Hardcover)

A couple hundred years from now historians will write about the endurance of the `flash in the pan' phenomenon called, pop culture. ACCORDING TO THE ROLLING STONES will certainly be one of their reference books. This is history as it should be told--as it is lived--in all its informal, intimate, gritty, and compelling detail. 

ACCORDING TO THE ROLLING STONES presents unique privileged perspectives of the evolution of rock from the earliest days to the present. Essays from friends and colleagues plus hundreds of photos spanning the Stones' career enhance the interviews of Mick, Keith, Charlie and Ronnie.

Older fans will fondly remember the `Bad Boys of British Pop' as an enduring icon of the extraordinary sixties and seventies. New fans will discover the history of the Stones through the group's lives and their music as told by the mythmakers themselves. Fans of pop culture will value these memoirs of the group that lived it.