Volume 31, Number 18 · November 22, 1984
Honest Floozies
By James Wolcott
Symphony for the Devil: The Rolling Stones Story
by Philip Norman
Linden Press/Simon and Schuster, 413 pp., $17.95
Dance with the Devil: The Rolling Stones and Their Times
by Stanley Booth
Random House, 385 pp., $16.95
Dylan
by Jonathan Cott
Doubleday, 244 pp., $35.00
For two decades the Rolling Stones have sprawled across the sofa, bored and surly, their laps warmed by debutantes and groupies, their bloodstreams roughed up with drugs. If the Beatles have been embossed in legend as the merry ambassadors of Mod (brushed bangs and boot shine), the Stones have been cast as the boll weevils of upscale Eros, toying with the chambermaid before having a nasty go at the duchess. (WOULD YOU LET YOUR DAUGHTER GO WITH A ROLLING STONE? was a famous early headline.) Of course, such a face-off is far too neat—recent books about the Beatles have shown that they were no slouches themselves when it came to groupies, chemical abuse, and social climbing, that, indeed, they envied the Stones' license to misbehave while they were obliged to keep up a squeaky-clean front. Philip Norman, an English journalist who wrote the best book to date about the Beatles (Shout!), has now turned his attention to the Stones in Symphony for the Devil. Unfortunately, where Shout! had a ruddy, exuberant glow, Symphony for the Devil is a group portrait in which the makeup has flaked and the skin gone sallow.
Review, 3209 words
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