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Title: According to the "Rolling Stones" by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, Charlie Watts ISBN: 0-297-84332-X Publisher: Weidenfeld Nicolson Illustrated Pub. Date: 11 August, 2003 Format: Hardcover

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Average Customer Rating: 3.88 (17 reviews)

Rating: 3
Summary: Solid but incomplete-feeling
Comment: "According To the Rolling Stones" is a must-have for the Stones fan, but is hampered by the fact that you must already be a fan to know fully what's going on. With amazing pictures but incomplete text, this is a pretty good but unsatisfying coffee table book.

It charts the Rolling Stones from their respective childhoods, to becoming the baddest rock band in England. Then it follows them into parenthood, marriage, addiction, rehab, the death of messed-up bandmate Brian Jones and the near-breakup of the band in the 1980s. Music, mayhem, and the occasional arrest make up this book.

The pictures virtually MAKE this book. Many of them are ones I hadn't seen before, and there are actually more candids than posed pics. Pics of Mick Jagger being punched in the street, Keith Richards playing with his son on a tire swing, and the Stones examining possible cover photos are among these. The pictures have an intimate quality, and many of them get across the camaraderie or alienation between the Stones.

One of the major problems with the book is the lack of insights into the dynamics behind the music. Wives, girlfriends, children, fellow musician friends and so on are barely mentioned, occasionally pictured (Marianne Faithfull is barely visible behind her huge hat). It feels incomplete to have no view of what these guys are like to anyone except one another.

If they had included interviews from more than just the Stones themselves, it would feel more rounded, like the Aerosmith autobiography "Walk This Way," which included interviews from just about everybody associated with the band. And about half of the essays don't add to the book's content at all, especially the ones that analyze the Stones from a distance instead of talking about the writer's personal experience.

"According to the Rolling Stones" will delight fans of the Stones, especially those who like to see backstage pictures and hear how this song or that song came to be. But though this book is a hefty snack, I finished it feeling vaguely hungry.

Rating: 5
Summary: According to the Rolling Stones
Comment: Inevitably, this official autobiography of the Rolling Stones will be compared with The Beatles Anthology. Not only does the Stones's book employ the same alternating-quote format, but it also shares the same publisher. But whereas Anthology attempted to be an exhaustive and lavishly illustrated Beatles history, with comments from key figures outside the band, According is more modest. Taken from new interviews, the only voices and perspectives belong to the current Stones lineup-Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, and Ronnie Wood. No historical interviews represent deceased band founder Brian Jones; nor does his replacement guitarist, Mick Taylor, participate. Even more disconcerting, Bill Wyman, the Stones's bassist for 30 years, is only mentioned a handful of times (perhaps in retribution for his publishing a coffee-table memoir, Rolling with the Stones). Though the Stones touch only lightly on many aspects of their long career, their comments are often entertaining and thoughtful, especially those from the uncharacteristically verbose Watts (who also serves as consulting editor) and the always colorful Richards. The book is richly illustrated but eschews memorabilia (reproduced in abundance in Wyman's book) for photographs and portraits, many rarely or never before seen. This is essential for Stones fans, though Wyman's tome and Stephen Davis's Old Gods Almost Dead are needed to fill out the details of this legendary band's story. [Publication of this book is set to coincide with the end of the Stones's 40 Licks World Tour

Rating: 5
Summary: all about the music
Comment: According to the Rolling Stones is really a lot of fun. Leaving aside the great pictures, the reproductions of some of Ronnie Wood's portraits, the essays by famous fans and friends like Giorgio Gomelsky, Marshall Chess, Sheryl Crow, and Don Was, the book is great for a simple reason: the story of the Rolling Stones is told by the Rolling Stones in a perfect Rolling Stones style.
There's a lot of verve in the way the whole story is told and put together. For example: Keith Richards says he is very thankful to Andrew Oldham for forcing the Stones to write their own songs. Keith says that 'he put a guitar in the kitchen and locked the door and we stayed there all night'. Mick Jagger's reply arrives ten lines later: 'Keith likes to tell the story about the kitchen, God bless him...but he didn't literally lock us in'.
The story told by the Rolling Stones is made up by many different stories: the London years, the royal exile, the Stones' many addictions, the great world tours and so on. But of all the stories, the best story is a story that many biographies of the Stones generally overlook: how the Rolling Stones' music came into being. In 'According to the Rolling Stones', it is possible to find quite a lot on the music of the Stones. Rob Bowman's essay takes a very close look at the way in which the Stones wrote their songs and how the songwriting was deeply affected, after 1967, by Keith's fascination with open tunings. But even more interesting is Keith's account of the musical potential of playing an acoustic guitar in a tape recorder and so on.
It is this attention to the Rolling Stones' music that makes this book more interesting than most books about the Stones.