Under Their Thumb

This unassuming but highly readable memoir portrays the Rolling Stones over a period which has never much appealed to rock’s literati. When Bill German began producing his fan’s newsletter, Beggars Banquet, in 1978 while he was still at high school in Brooklyn, the Stones’ death-and-glory years were over. The big career-defining moments - Brian Jones’s drowning, Altamont, the Exile On Main Street album and the orgiastic American tour which followed it – had all happened and been written up.

To German’s teenage peers the Stones were yesterday’s news, eclipsed by Pink Floyd, and Saturday Night Fever. Still hypnotized by his idols’ “sexuality, sarcasm and rebelliousness” German gives up his education “to interact with the Stones directly.” He spends the next 17 years following them around the world, usually at his own expense, issuing monthly updates on their exploits to Beggars Banquet’s 3,000 subscribers. This was never supposed to turn into a day job. “How could I have known in 1978 that the Stones were in the early stages of their career?” he asks, reasonably.

His youthful enthusiasm soon helps German to become a fringe member of the Stones’ entourage. As such he falls in with a crowd largely populated by the band’s drug dealers or narcotic advisers. Prominent amongst them is "Svi", the Israeli Talmudic scholar who acts as Keith Richards’ "drug taster", administers his $700 a day drug budget and helps him to smuggle cocaine hidden inside his son Marlon’s GI dolls. German also chums up with the band’s most entertaining supplier, Freddy Sessler, a sixtysomething Holocaust survivor who specialises in snorting coke in public places. It transpires that Sessler can do pretty much as he pleases around the Stones thanks to Richards’ everlasting gratitude to him for taking the rap for a drug bust in Arkansas in 1975. “Freddy”, German notes, “epitomized everything Mick despised about Keith.”

German is, to a degree, an innocent abroad. He blanks the sexual opportunities routinely offered in Stones’ circles. “I spent the prime of my virility licking more postage stamps than anything else,” he drily remarks, pointing out that many of the band’s groupies are old timers who have been “servicing the band since Brian Jones was a teenager.”

As a devout non-druggie, he arouses the hostility of the dealers swarming around Ronnie Wood, who suspect him of being an undercover cop.

Wood, who in one memorable scene sits with German in the kitchen of his London home discussing their plans for a book while feeding a large rock of cocaine though his pepper grinder, protects him from the sharks. Others are not so kind. German’s abstemiousness and naïve good nature nearly get him into serious trouble in Tokyo when a cocaine drought leads the Stones’ main dealer to organize for a consignment to be mailed to German from the States, without asking his permission. For a man who earns a paltry $14,000 in 1992 for his pains, German takes this in remarkably good part.

Nothing deflects him from his journalistic task. Welcomed by Keith Richards, befriended by Ronnie Wood, tolerated by Mick Jagger and completely unrecognized by Charlie Watts, he battles to maintain some sort of editorial independence. After a brief and unhappy spell in 1981 as the band’s "official" newsletter, during which German goes unpaid for months, Beggars Banquet reverts to printing stories that management – often meaning Mick – don’t like.

German is nearly attacked by a coked-up Jagger after suggesting in print that he succumbed to emotional blackmail by appearing at Live Aid. Richards’ personal manager lectures him about revealing that Keith spends most of his time in Manhattan while the US tax authorities believe him to be resident in Jamaica. Sometimes German can’t even use the word "work" in a sentence, without causing offence. Jagger’s infidelities are way out of bounds, and when a management flunkey has a go at him for naming Mick’s favourite restaurants, German retorts in style, “At least I don’t print what he tips.”

The reason why the cagey Jagger allows German anywhere near the band emerges when a call comes in from the actor Ben Stiller in 1994. Stiller and Brad Pitt have been asked to devise a film about  Stones’ fans which will sell the band to the younger "Generation X" demographic, a particular obsession with the Peter Pan-like Jagger. German has been proposed as a consultant. “If he honestly wanted to depict his fans, he’d get 40-year-old stockbrokers and soccer moms, not you and Brad Pitt,” is German’s level response. The film idea is later dumped on grounds of cost.

By the mid 1990s money is, German feels, the Stones’ overriding priority. Having patiently reported the personality clashes of the 1980s, when Jagger’s desire to launch a solo career almost broke up the band, he witnesses their transformation into a corporate cash cow after the 1989/90 world tour with mounting dismay. It depresses him “how many decisions about where and when to record or perform were determined not by artistic inspiration but by lawyers and accountants.” His erstwhile buddie Ronnie Wood grants him a 10-minute interview on the phone. The steep rise in ticket prices for the Stones’ concerts – from $30 to $300 in a mere six years – irks him as much as the way Jagger now reads scripted jokes from a teleprompter.

German realises that his time is running out after receiving a memo from the band’s promoter Michael Cohl in 1995. “Objectives for the balance of the tour are as follows: 1) sell the remaining tickets, 2) publicise the pay-per-view 3) generate merchandise awareness… All the press stories should be steered to these main points.”

The final straw comes when German attends a "secret" club show in Amsterdam which is being filmed. The “hotties" in front of the stage are, he discovers, hired models. “For every paid model on that dance floor, a Stones fan was robbed of a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” he concludes, and gives it all up on the spot. That German’s love for the band’s music remains intact, despite their best efforts, is not the least wonder of this remarkable book.