The Rolling Stones: Fifty Years

The definitive story of the most controversial and longest surviving band in music history In order to accurately chronicle the human drama at the center of the Rolling Stones story, the author of this book has carried out interviews with band members, close family members (including Mick's parents), and the group's fans and contemporaries. He has even examined their previously unreleased FBI files. In 1962 Mick Jagger was a bright, well-scrubbed boy planning a career in the civil service, while Keith Richards was learning how to smoke and swivel a six-shooter. Add the mercurial Brian Jones (who'd been effectively run out of Cheltenham for theft, multiple impregnations, and playing blues guitar) and the wryly opinionated Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, and the potential was obvious. During the 1960s and 70s the Stones were polarizing figures, alternately admired and reviled for their flamboyance, creativity, and salacious lifestyles. Confidently expected never to reach 30, they are now approaching their seventies, and have been together for 50 years. Like no other book before, this history makes sense of the rich brew of clever invention and opportunism, of talent, good fortune, insecurity, self-destructiveness, and of drugs, sex, and other excess, that made the Stones who they are.

Christopher Sandford has been a professional writer for 30 years and a frequent writer about the Rolling Stones for 25. His books include Keith Richards: Satisfaction, Kurt Cobain, McCartney, and Polanski. He divides his time between London and Seattle.