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Mick and Keith: Never Stop: My Conversations with the Rolling Stones
Rona Elliot
By
Published: Dec 05, 2012
Category:
Biography
If you want to see the Rolling Stones — and they’re 70-ish now, so this really could be the last time — prepare to break the bank.
To sit behind the stage at the Brooklyn arena, you’ll pay $300. Back of the arena? $650. And if you want to sit right up front, you’ll spend $3,500 to $5,000 — that’s for one ticket.
Who will pay those prices? Boomers. And, specifically, hedge-fund sharpies, top-tier bond traders and their clients. As Mick Jagger told the crowd at one of those million-dollar gigs the Stones play for corporations that create profits but not jobs, “Hope you’re enjoying this — because this is your bonuses.”
If you love the Rolling Stones and want something new in your collection or if, at this late date, you’re curious to know what these guys are really like, I have a cheaper suggestion. It’s an enhanced e-book, “Mick and Keith: Never Stop: My Conversations with the Rolling Stones,” and it’s the handiwork of Rona Elliot.
At the dawn of rock, Elliot was an LA kid, “driving to concerts in my Dad’s 1960 Plymouth.” A few years later, she was covering rock music for the “Today” Show. She was in the mud at Woodstock, backstage at the Troubador. She interviewed everyone who mattered. "I slept with people I wouldn’t want to be with on the Titanic,” she told me, “but I never slept with a rock star.”
In 1989, she convinced Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to answer a gazillion questions. She met Jagger in New York, at the Waldorf. Three months later, on Antigua, she had her conversation with Keith. They were both relaxed, thoughtful, amused. And more: revealing. [To buy the Kindle editon of “Mick and Keith” from Amazon, click here.]
What comes across most dramatically in these conversations is that Jagger and Richards share few opinions.
Are the Stones a family? No agreement.
Were they hurt when they were called “ugly” and “rude?” Ditto.
Did they know “Satisfaction” would be a monster hit? Keith (who wrote the killer riff): “We needed an extra track. I thought it was filler.” Mick: “Oh yeah. I knew.”
Innocence on the road? “The road is terribly innocent,” Mick says. “The girls have such high-pitched voices I’m surprised they let them out without their mothers.” Keith: “If you’re a musician on the road, you don’t keep your innocence for more than a few weeks.”
Fun. And giggles. But what I really valued is how much seriousness is required to create a Stones show. Keith talks about “dedication” and why he isn’t quite the goofball he may seem to be: “The stage is my space, the one place I can get some peace.” And a much larger point: What happens between the band and the audience “makes you aware of how much people can do when they put their minds to it.”
Fifty years on, the Rolling Stones still put their minds to it. (Well, you say, they have many incentives, and their payday is surely not the least.) So does Rona Elliot, who has done more than recycle old interviews; she’s compiled rare photos, ticket stubs and personal memorabilia in the service of a smart, joyous celebration of a group that calls itself “the world’s greatest rock band.” They may not be that now, but this e-book makes you want to agree.
