GRAEME THOMSON
The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones Rich Cohen Headline €26.50 ★★★★★
Some people worship saints or sportsmen. Rich Cohen kneels at the altar of The Rolling Stones. The American writer makes no bones about the fact that spending two weeks embedded in their 1994 Voodoo Lounge tour was less a job and more a kind of pilgrimage. ‘The Stones are the story I’ve studied all my life,’ he writes. ‘I’ve studied it as the ancients studied war. It’s my Hemingway, Dickens, Homer.’ When he visits the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cohen stands before a jacket worn by Keith Richards, ‘head bowed’.
From this lifelong love affair he has fashioned a partial, very personal biography of the band. Although never less than enjoyable, given the unique access he was afforded, it feels like a missed opportunity. There is a fascinating story to be written about the Stones’ career path since the mid-Eighties: rock’s first corporate brand, a money-making behemoth locked into a marriage of convenience. Perfectly placed to tell this tale from the inside, Cohen instead nibbles at the edges.
He does so with zest, insight and impressive knowledge, and can be clear-eyed when required. The Stones are a ‘machine that runs on bodies’, he writes, recognising ‘something monstrous about Mick Jagger’. But he adds little to a well-worn tale, while his perspective sometimes jars. Richards ‘grew up in an apartment on the wrong side of Dartford’. Bill Wyman ‘is a guy who parties from can till can’t’.
The book is at its best when Cohen takes us into the Stones’ inner sanctum in the Nineties. We see them rehearsing through the night in suburban Toronto, chatting between songs about the World Cup and the O J Simpson trial. Before a show, Richards – travelling with a doctor’s bag filled with ‘snake oil and elixirs’ – does five press-ups, ‘the tip of his cigarette burning a hole in the carpet’.
A whole book of this would have been quite something, but although Cohen tells us he was ‘at the centre of the best party in the world’, the reader is granted only limited access. The author now lives in the same Massachusetts town as Keith Richards, and was a co-creator of the recent TV series Vinyl, on which he worked closely with Jagger and Martin Scorsese. It’s all a little too close, perhaps, to draw biographical blood from the Stones.