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List Price: $15.95 | | Publisher: Broadway
Salesrank: 689534
Released: September 3, 2002 |
| Our Price: $85.80 |
| Used Price: $5.91 |
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| Media: Paperback |
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Editorial Review:
The acclaimed, bestselling rock-and-roll biographer delivers the first complete, unexpurgated history of the world’s greatest band.
The saga of the Rolling Stones is the central epic in rock mythology. From their debut as the intermission band at London’s Marquee Club in 1962 through their latest record—setting Bridges to Babylon world tour, the Rolling Stones have defined a musical genre and experienced godlike adulation, quarrels, addiction, legal traumas, and descents into madness and death_while steadfastly refusing to fade away. Now Stephen Davis, the New York Times bestselling author of Hammer of the Gods and Walk This Way, who has followed the Stones for three decades, presents their whole story, replete with vivid details of the Stones’ musical successes_and personal excesses.
Born into the wartime England of air-raid sirens, bombing raids, and strict rationing, the Rolling Stones came of age in the 1950s, as American blues and pop arrived in Europe. Among London’s most ardent blues fans in the early 1960s was a short blond teenage guitar player named Brian Jones, who hooked up with a lorry driver’s only son, Charlie Watts, a jazz drummer. At the same time, popular and studious Michael Philip Jagger–who, as a boy, bawled out a phonetic version of “La Bamba” with an eye-popping intensity that scared his parents–began sharing blues records with a primary school classmate, Keith “Ricky” Richards, a shy underachiever, whose idol was Chuck Berry. In 1962 the four young men, joined by Bill Perks (later Wyman) on bass, formed a band rhythm and blues band, which Brian Jones named the “the Rollin’ Stones” in honor of the Muddy Waters blues classic.
Using the biography of the Rolling Stones as a narrative spine, Old God Almost Dead builds a new, multilayered version of the Stones’ story, locating the band beyond the musical world they dominated and showing how they influenced, and were influenced by, the other artistic movements of their era: the blues revival, Swinging London, the Beats, Bob Dylan’s Stones-inspired shift from protest to pop, Pop Art and Andy Warhol’s New York, the “Underground” politics of the 1960s, Moroccan energy and European orientalism, Jamaican reggae, the Glam and Punk subcultures, and the technologic advances of the video and digital revolution. At the same time, Old Gods Almost Dead documents the intense backstage lives of the Stones: the feuds, the drugs, the marriages, and the affairs that inspired and informed their songs; and the business of making records and putting on shows.
The first new biography of the Rolling Stones since the early 1980s, Old Gods Almost Dead is the most comprehensive book to date, and one of the few to cover all the band’s members. Illustrated throughout with photos of pivotal moments, it is a celebration of the Rolling Stones as an often courageous, often foolish gang of artists who not only showed us new worlds, but new ways of living in them. It is a saga as raunchily, vibrantly entertaining as the Stones themselves.
From the Hardcover edition.
Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-Year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones Reviews:
Old God and Stones are comprehensive 
2009-08-07 - A generally well-written and reasonably (2002) up-to-date volume with minor errors here and there. Easy to read and useful information.
Seems to be definitive 
2009-05-28 - This answers all your questions about the Stones and then some, and is packed with interesting info if you are not a rabid fan. I never realized, for example, that "Let It Bleed" was the Stones' answer to "Let It Be." Finally, the full Brian Jones saga is brought into focus, and the many women, such as Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithful, are fully dissected and put into proper timelines. The music is not neglected either, with each album receiving an intelligent, and not overly worshipful, critique. This gave me a renewed appreciation for one of music's most vital groups. Very readable.
Excellent Biography of the Rolling Stones
2007-01-14 - This is an excellent in-depth biography of the Stones and their music. It's an easy read, full of interesting information, lots of good photos, and covers the entire career of the bad boys of Rock and Roll from their early days till the time of the book's publication. It is well-researched, balanced, fair to all involved, not overly fawning, and filled with new information I had not read elsewhere. I highly recommend it.
Five stars.
some insight
2007-01-08 - I was required to buy this book for a musicology class focusing on the Rolling Stones at Boston University. We were asked to read pretty much the entire book as supplemental reading along with the class. I like the way the book chronicles the events and feelings of the band throughout their gargantuan career however there are a few things I could have done without. I love the music but the rambling way that Davis describes each album when they released them is not really an easy read. I think that if he had somehow devised a different writing style for these crucial descriptions I would have given the book a full five stars. Nevertheless, its a good read whether you are or are not interested in the Rolling Stones and the pictures are also interesting. Its a good history.
I Got Satisfaction
2006-11-02 - This is the only Stones' book I've read and I plan on reading more, but as a start, I was impressed and feel Davis has written a decent biography of the band. He appears to deal thoroughly with the early years of the band all the way up to the death of Brian Jones. The Mick Taylor years seem a bit rushed (he wasn't there that long, though), in fact, the last two decades of the band seem written hurriedly, but I guess they weren't working nearly as much as they had in their true youth or weren't making as much news.
The details of the interrelationships of Anita Pallenberg, Brian Jones, Keith Richard and Mick Jagger alone would probably make a great book on it's own. I wouldn't mind knowing more about that!
