Bob Spitz on the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Art of Biography
Biographer Bob Spitz, whose new book is The Rolling Stones: The Biography, talks with Tyler Cowen about the Stones’ sound and endurance, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, managing a 21-year-old Bruce Springsteen, travelling Sicily with Julia Child, and the craft of biography — how he enters a subject he knows nothing about and why he never rewrites a word.
Key ideas
- Endurance is not stability — it is a division of labour. Spitz rejects ‘stable’ for the Rolling Stones. They endure because Mick Jagger (showman and de facto manager) and Keith Richards (musician) want different things and never compete for the same role, so the partnership survives feuds, drug busts, and death; the Beatles broke because Lennon and McCartney competed and stopped performing.
- The best way to write about a subject is to enter as an ‘empty vessel’. Commissioned to write on Led Zeppelin, the 1969 Knicks, and Ronald Reagan while knowing almost nothing about any of them, Spitz treated the ignorance as an asset — studying the material ‘as if I were taking a foreign language’ and interrogating practitioners — and let each subject fill him.
- British rock ‘n’ roll was born in art colleges. The 11-plus exam sorted British children toward university or the factory; art colleges became a third path for the talented but non-academic, where pupils formed bands in the cloakrooms — producing Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, and John Lennon.
- Character is destiny for careers. Reagan turned right over a tax dispute with the IRS; Springsteen maximises not income but ‘his open heart’; Mick Jagger’s stadium stamina at 82 traces to a lifelong exercise habit drilled by his fitness-presenter father. Spitz reads artists through biography, not theory.
- Assemble everything, then write in sequence, and never rewrite. Spitz gathers all research before writing a word, works start to finish, and ‘massages’ each sentence once rather than editing after. The Beatles manuscript was cut from 2,800 pages to 964 — but not a word was rewritten.
Content
The Rolling Stones: apprenticeship, sound, and songs
The Stones did serve an apprenticeship, Spitz argues — a roughly six-month residency at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond that began with six people in the room and grew, then the same touring of ‘crappy little places’ the Beatles endured, if for less time. What they never intended was to write songs: they saw themselves as authentic blues masters carrying Delta, Mississippi, and Chicago blues to the world, and only their young manager Andrew Oldham forced the issue. The ‘blues plus X’ that produced their sound is simply rock ‘n’ roll — they ‘hotwired the blues’, adding ferocious guitar to what Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley began, while also absorbing the Country and Western records American servicemen left in Britain after the war. On melody Spitz rates them a candid ‘B minus’ against the Beatles — their rock melodies are spectacular but less lush and romantic. He and Cowen agree the Stones peaked with Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed, that Their Satanic Majesties Request failed by mimicking Sgt. Pepper’s, and that Exile on Main Street is overrated and sloppy — a view Spitz shares with Mick Jagger, who barely participated in it. His surprise pick for the underrated years is Hackney Diamonds, a fine blues album made when the band members were around 79.
The band: Watts, Jones, and the Mick–Keith bond
Charlie Watts, a jazz drummer at heart, never wanted out and loved being a Stone — a straight-laced, beautifully dressed man of Savile Row suits, Arabian stallions, and a car collection he never drove for want of a licence. Brian Jones is the opposite story: he founded and named the band and was a musical savant who could play any instrument, but once ego and his inability to write songs set in he stopped contributing, a decline Spitz captures in a 1968 exchange where Mick asks him ‘what can you play?’ The band’s real subject, though, is endurance. Spitz refuses the word ‘stable’ — the foundation was rocked again and again — and locates the Stones’ longevity in the Mick–Keith rapport and its clean division of labour: Mick the libidinous showman who also manages the enterprise, Keith the consummate musician content to let him, neither interfering with the other. It is what the Beatles never learned; they stopped performing in 1966 and let Lennon–McCartney rivalry pull them apart. The bond survived Mick’s 1980s solo deal, which enraged Keith (who took to calling Mick ‘Brenda’), because the personal loyalty held — Mick was Keith’s best man at the height of their feud.
Art schools, economics, and why pop lost its edge
Asked to explain his own sentence — ‘the nascent British rock ‘n’ roll movement was born in art colleges’ — Spitz describes an institution with no American equivalent. Britain’s 11-plus exam sorted eleven-year-olds toward university or vocational school and the factory; art colleges grew up as a repository for the talented but non-academic, and because pupils brought instruments and played in the cloakrooms, they became incubators for bands. Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, and John Lennon all came through them, as later did Jarvis Cocker and Florence Welch. On Mick Jagger’s noted admiration for Hayek, Spitz can add nothing, but he stresses that Jagger — a London School of Economics scholarship student — has effectively managed the Stones himself since Oldham left in 1967, negotiating every contract and investing the band’s money. His verdict on today’s music is blunt: it has lost cultural influence because ‘there are no more musicians’, only performers who let producers push the buttons and never master instruments — a charge he extends, bracing for the backlash, even to Taylor Swift. He is careful, though, not to begrudge younger listeners their own music, as his parents did not begrudge him the Beatles.
The Beatles, up close
What we should still ask the surviving Beatles, Spitz says, is to come clean about the often-fraught relationships, and to hear Ringo on his sickly, hospital-bound, barely-schooled boyhood. He marvels at their physical durability: Mick Jagger danced a two-city-block proscenium for two and a half hours at 82, a stamina Spitz traces to lifelong exercise drilled by Mick’s father, ‘the Jack LaLanne of the United Kingdom’; Keith Richards, who abused his body for decades, turns out to be felled only by arthritis. Living in Liverpool for nearly two years while writing the Beatles book taught him the city itself — beautiful, built from the shipwrights’ fine woods, home to the West’s original Chinese community, and giving its largely-Irish ‘Scousers’ a singular humour. On whether the split served the world, Spitz suspects it did: most acts run out of steam after four or five albums and start duplicating themselves, whereas the Beatles gave everything — a roughly 230-song catalogue he ranks with Rodgers and Hammerstein — and stopped, and the break let George Harrison come into his own. The chapter’s set piece is his 1997 jam with Paul McCartney: sent by the New York Times Magazine after Paul’s knighthood, he found a tiny Hastings cottage, and McCartney sat him down among the Abbey Road instruments and Elvis’s bassist’s bass to play Beatles songs — ‘frightening’.
Led Zeppelin and Springsteen
Spitz knew nothing of Led Zeppelin when his editor insisted he write the book — he owned none of their records among 20,000 vinyl albums and could barely name a song — because he had been on the road with Springsteen and Elton John while the band rose. He treated the ignorance as method: an ‘empty vessel’, he studied the music ‘as if I were taking a foreign language’, asked musicians (including Jimmy Page’s boyhood neighbour Jeff Beck) to explain Bonham’s drumming and Page’s guitar, and fell in love with the catalogue; ‘Stairway to Heaven’, he decides, is ‘completely rated as it should be’. His Springsteen material is first-hand and older: at 21, he, Mike Appel, and Jim Cretecos quit their jobs the day after Springsteen auditioned, and Springsteen wrote many early songs in Spitz’s apartment. He describes an exacting, demanding rehearser who is also an unfailingly kind gentleman, and argues Springsteen maximises not his astronomical income but ‘his open heart’ — recounting him personally driving stranded young fans home from stadiums and introducing himself to their parents. His masterpiece is ‘Thunder Road’, from Born to Run.
Dylan, Child, the Knicks, and Reagan
The conversation fans across Spitz’s other lives. Bob Dylan skipped his Nobel because ‘Bob Dylan doesn’t do anything anyone expects of him’, and Spitz — his biographer forty years ago — cannot say how Dylan fills his days beyond reading and studying Talmud. Julia Child, he reveals, was a great cooking teacher but not a great cook (guests sometimes fell ill from her butter and cream), yet she changed how Americans cook, eat, and shop and helped birth the US wine industry by demanding it on television; travelling Sicily with her, he watched her halve every dish with a knife and then eat both halves, march into kitchens to check women were being hired, and love McDonald’s as much as haute cuisine. The 1969 Knicks were another subject he took on knowing nothing, learning basketball from Oscar Robertson and Jerry West and coming to prize Red Holzman’s one rule — ‘see the open man’ — against today’s stats-hungry play. On Reagan, he judges the second-term president ‘wearing down’ rather than senile until a post-office riding accident, and traces his rightward turn not to ideology but to a tax dispute: having wrongly withheld his wartime taxes, Reagan was dunned by the IRS, grew obsessed with taxes and economics, and crossed the aisle.
The craft of biography
Underneath the anecdotes runs Spitz’s account of the work itself. His model is Robert Caro — ‘the biographer’s biographer’, who works around the clock and stays out of public life because he is too busy writing, a discipline Spitz says he has learned not to imitate. Marriage to another writer, Becky Aikman, means writing back-to-back in one room and editing each other nightly. He rejects writer’s block outright — when stuck, walk away and return — and describes writing as ‘like doing a crossword puzzle’, a daily problem solved by turning every angle while the subconscious works overnight. His signature method is to assemble every scrap of research before writing a word, then write in sequence from start to finish and never rewrite, ‘massaging’ each sentence once; the Beatles manuscript came in at 2,800 pages and was cut over two rounds to 964, but not a word was rewritten. His deepest regret is bibliographic: exhausted, broke, and divorced after the Beatles, he took all his research and interviews to the dump, so the cut stories are gone for good. Next comes John Lennon’s ‘second act’ — the decade from the Beatles’ breakup to his death — drawn from Lennon’s never-before-seen archives.
See also
- Bob Spitz — speaker
- Tyler Cowen — host