Rolling along with the Stones
The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones Rich Cohen Random House
The best book about The Rolling Stones is obviously Keith Richards’ Life (2010), but there have been quite a few others.
The bibliography of Rich Cohen’s contribution to the canon runs to six pages, which is impressive until one notices it includes novels by Mikhail Bulgakov, William Burroughs and Don DeLillo, and also Cohen’s earlier book about the Chicago Bears football team. The reason for this eclecticism is that The Sun & the Moon & The Rolling Stones is as much about Cohen as it is about the Stones.
Cohen was born in 1968, which was, he feels, too late. His genera- tion is caught between the baby boomers, who consumed everything there was to consume, and the millennials, the boomers’ children, who have “remade the world into something virtual and cold,” leaving Cohen a tragic spectator.
When he turned 26, Rolling Stone magazine commissioned him to follow the Stones on a tour of the United States, which put him in the middle of “music, leather, eyeshadow, Spanish heels, gin.” Marvelling at Cohen’s youth, Richards asked him what it was like to live in a world where the Stones were always there: “For you, there’s always been the sun and the moon and the Rolling Stones.”
Cohen had always worshipped the band with a quasi-religious fervour and he adores Mick Jagger, with whom he worked on the script for the HBO series Vinyl. But he sees “something monstrous” about him.
His real hero is “Keef.” When the Rolling Stone article was published, Jagger’s publicist phoned to complain about the headline, On the Road with the Rolling Stones, saying it would have been better titled I Love Keith Richards and Want to Have His Baby.
What began as a magazine story grew into an “epic.” Cohen read everything he could about the band; sought out technicians and assistants, lovers and “drug buddies.” He visited their houses, recording studios and the Swiss clinic where Richards kicked heroin.
He begins in postwar England, where he gets the idea of poverty in black and white, before the Technicolor prosperity of the 1960s.
“At the beginning,” Cohen writes, “they imitated black blues musicians. At the end, they imitated themselves.” Jagger and Richards have become “like a bitter married couple who stay together for the kids. Only the kids are grown. Or maybe the money is the kids.”
There are minor revelations, such as that when promoter Sam Cutler first introduced the Stones as “the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world,” at the free concert in London’s Hyde Park in 1969, he was being sarcastic, since he had heard them earlier in rehearsal and they were atrociously bad. Or that the opening riff of Jumpin’ Jack Flash is that of Satisfaction, backward.
Cohen is astute about the music: Richards’ distinctive open G chord, for example, “a voice that wheezes when it laughs, that’s full of whisky, late nights, and trouble.”
He’s right that they made their best albums during what he calls their “Golden Run,” from Beggars Banquet (1968) to Exile on Main Street (1972), and that they haven’t made a good one since Some Girls (1978). A lesser critic would have plodded through their subsequent efforts, but Cohen has the decency to ignore them.