‘UNZIPPED’ OFFERS A PEEK
Please allow them to introduce themselves. They are men of wealth and taste.
Also, sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, along with more than half a century of hit records, sell-out tours, and cultural revolution.
The Rolling Stones have long billed themselves as “the greatest rock and roll band in the world,” and they’re not ready to give up the title. Even the recent death of drummer Charlie Watts hasn’t stopped them.
But as the band’s last two original members, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, continue to push forward, “The
Rolling Stones/ Unzipped” takes a long look back.
Although the word “authorized” doesn’t appear anywhere on the cover, this is pretty much an official history. There’s good and bad to that.
The bad is that the book, written by various contributors, focuses almost entirely on Jagger and Richards. Watts and Ronnie Wood get less attention, and former members Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor are barely mentioned. Particularly disrespected is the tragic Brian Jones, who actually started the group in 1962 before getting waylaid by drugs.
The good is that, as an approved project, “Unzipped” has an enormous amount of material to draw from, most credited to The Rolling Stones Archive. There are chapters devoted to the rockers’ fabulous clothes and Richards’ guitars. Hundreds of photos document posters and album covers.
But best is a peek into Jagger’s and Richards’ thoughts – on their early days, on songwriting, and on the band’s astounding longevity.
“I didn’t expect to last until 50 myself, let alone with the Stones,” says the famously hard-living Richards.
Richards and Jagger were friends in grammar school, then drifted apart. They met again as teenagers at the Dartford railroad station in 1961, waiting for the London train.
“We were both carrying albums, and when we got on this train, we noticed that our albums were blues albums,” Jagger recalls. “In those days, you thought you were the only person that collected blues because nobody really did.”
Jagger’s albums were hard-toget American imports. Richards was immediately impressed.
“I’m looking at this guy and for a weird moment through my mind goes, ‘I’ll strangle him and take the records,’” Richards confesses. “Nobody had those records.”
Once Richards’ murderous urge passed, the two began chatting. Jagger, who was at the posh London School of Economics, said he sang a little. Richards, who was going to a small art school, shared that he played guitar.
They started playing together. The following year, they answered an ad in Jazz Weekly. Guitarist Brian Jones had formed a band and needed musicians.
On July 12, 1962, the newly named The Rollin’ Stones played their first gig at the Marquee Club in London. By 1963, Wyman and Watts had joined too, and the Stones – now “Rolling” – had come together.
For a while, they lived together, too, sharing an apartment in a house. There were three floors of tenants, but only one bathroom. “It was a pigsty, basically,” Richards admits.
“They were the laziest buggers in the world,” Watts said of his new bandmates. “They would never pick anything up.”
“We used to send our laundry out to my mother,” Richards says. “[The house] probably should have been condemned.”
The poverty didn’t last long. The Stones got a manager who pushed them as the anti-Beatles – rough and raunchy. Once they started releasing records in 1964, they decided to copy the Beatles in one crucial way: Writing their own music.
Jagger later said that the idea came to them when the Beatles, already superstars, went to an early Stones gig. “They had on these beautiful, long, black leather trench coats,” he said. “I thought, I could really die for one of those. Even if I have to learn to write songs, I’m going to get this!”
Although the Stones’ first albums were dominated by old R&B songs, their sixth, “Aftermath,” boasted only originals. Many Stones songs would go on to become classics, although their creation was typically haphazard.
“I was lying in bed with a guitar, just plonking about when I fell asleep,” Richards says of one.
He’d left a tape recorder running, though, and when he woke up and rewound it, he realized he now had the first few seconds of “Satisfaction.”
“It’s the most bizarre version you’ll ever hear,” he says. “But there it is – ‘I can’t get no satisfaction, dun, dun, dun, dun,’ then a moment of silence, and then 45 minutes of me snoring.”
It later got fleshed out in the studio, as did “Sympathy for the Devil.” Jagger had begun writing it on his acoustic guitar, “very slow, more like a Bob Dylan song.” But when he debuted it for the band, “Keith or Charlie or both of them decided, ‘Well, you know, let’s make it faster.’ ”
“That’s what happens,” Jagger reflects. “You’ve got a good song, but it needs arranging and recording. It goes through a process of becoming the thing that people think of as ‘the song,’ but it’s not really the song at all. It’s not the song you wrote in your kitchen, it’s
something else.”
Although the process is constantly changing, Richards says he still always knows when the magic is happening.
“When Mick starts to dance,” he says, “you know that there’s something good going on.”
Although the band began with the blues, over the years, they’ve experimented with different genres. In the ‘70s, when punk vowed to make ‘60s rockers irrelevant, the Stones met the challenge, roaring back with “Some Girls,” their rawest record in years.
“We had to pull something out – not make another Stonesin-the-doldrums album,” Richards explains. The Stones had to prove, he says, that they could still “outpunk the punks.”
Even when they changed with the times, the Stones still set their own style; pictures of their clothes alone take up almost a third of the book.
Jagger’s are the most eclectic, ranging from the T-shirt and American flag stovepipe of the “Gimme Shelter” era to crotch-hugging athletic wear and richly brocaded dinner jackets. Watts, in contrast, stuck with the English gentleman look – handmade leather shoes, bespoke suits, stylish ties.
Richards’ signature style was singularly his own, half psychedelic cowboy, half mad pirate. His go-to clothes included animal prints and Western boots; accessories ranged from silver skull jewelry to beads in his hair. Filmy tops and flowing scarves often filched from a current girlfriend usually completed the outfit.
“It really pissed off Charlie Watts, with his walk-in cupboards of impeccable Savile Row suits, that I started to become a fashion icon for wearing my old lady’s clothes,” Richards says.
Watts is gone now, of course, dying on Aug. 24, at 80. Wood, though still in the band, is 74 and has twice fought cancer. Richard is 77; Jagger just turned 78. Yet while their most recent tour was postponed twice – first for Jagger’s heart-valve operation, then because of COVID — they’re back on the road. And likely to remain so until they drop.
“There’s one thing we haven’t achieved, and that’s to really find out how long you can do this,” Richards says. “It’s still such a joy to play with this band that you can’t really go of it. So we’ve got to find out, you know?”