Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-Year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones
By Stephen DavisBroadway Books, $27.50
Mick Jagger was wrong: It wasn’t only rock & roll. It was riots, bad record deals, teenage girls, booze, drugs, car crashes and murder accusations. Everyone knows the Rolling Stones personified excess in the ’60s, but Stephen Davis’s Old Gods Almost Dead, the band’s most comprehensive biography to date, debunks any notion that the Stones later became a harmonious jet-setting money machine.
In fact, they’ve never stopped bickering. Davis, author of the lurid Led Zeppelin bio Hammer of the Gods, reveals a patchwork of personal slights and rifts that threatened to topple the band even before Brian Jones drowned in 1969. The band twice invited Eric Clapton to replace departed guitarists Jones and Mick Taylor, and twice he turned them down — perhaps sensing, Davis implies, the anger Taylor felt at getting insufficient songwriting credit. (Taylor quit just days before the band was to start recording Black and Blue, infuriating Jagger and Keith Richards, who growled, “No one leaves this band except in a fucking pine box.”)
The Stones’ hedonism — on tour in 1976, they reserved a backstage lounge for drug dealers — was hardly a common bond: Bassist Bill Wyman was so disgusted by Richards’s heavy self-medication that he refused to speak to Richards for 11 years.
Davis never fully explains why the latter-day Stones didn’t resonate as they did in the ’60s and ’70s. But the book itself offers a clue. More than half of Old Gods details the ’60s, and the narrative falls flat after that. The band still exists, of course, but as its significance faded, its story became less interesting.
While he can’t hope to encompass the Stones’ 40-year history with the eloquence and beauty of Stanley Booth’s The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, at least Davis has the perspective to explain how and why the Stones’ steel wheels, despite everything, roll on and on.
—Steve Matteo
