http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainmen ... -1.2612388Mick Jagger portrayed as 'monstrous' in new book 'The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones'
BY SHERRYL CONNELLY NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Saturday, April 23, 2016, 7:11 PM
It's only rock and roll — but it was enough to transform Mick Jagger into a power-hungry monster.
The Rolling Stones’ lead singer left a trail of tragic destruction, including ex-bandmate Brian Jones, in his “insatiable” hunger for stardom, a stunning new book on the band charges.
Rich Cohen delivers the unflattering portrayal of Jagger in “The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones.”
“There’s something monstrous about Mick Jagger,” Cohen writes after exhuming details from the band’s dark past.
“The Stones had been shedding people from the start. Use ’em up, toss ’em aside,” Cohen continues. “It’s a machine that runs on bodies.”
Cohen, a respected author and contributor to Vanity Fair, is one of the rare journalists ever invited into Jagger’s inner circle.
He was a Rolling Stone magazine writer already tight with the Stones when Jagger and Martin Scorsese tapped him to write a movie they had in mind about the music industry.
That was back in 1997. The project finally appeared this year in the form of HBO’s overhyped and disappointing series, “Vinyl.”
During those years, Cohen spent a lot of chatty and intimate time with Jagger while deepening bonds with the other band members. Band associates, past and present, were also forthcoming with their tales.
Cohen certainly appears in the loop when he writes about the cold-blooded firing in 1969 of the band’s drug-crazed founder Brian Jones.
It had to be done — Jones was out of control. But it was cruelly executed. Weeks later, Jones was found dead in his pool — and Cohen fingers Jagger.
Jagger, “who’s always operated with a cruel edge,” had by then remade what was once Brian’s band in his own image.
At that point, Jagger had hardened into being, well, Jagger. Someone “for whom obscurity was even more terrifying than death.”
He’s the rock star version of a Hollywood diva, according to the book, unconcerned about the wreckage of anyone drawn into the Rolling Stones’ orbit.
“No one else matters,” Cohen writes. “He’s the ego that became the world.”
Gram Parsons, whose blend of country and blues inspired other musicians, was another discard. Cohen puts that one more on guitarist Keith Richards, who formed a special bond with the sweet-natured young musician.
Parsons was a fixture at Nellcote, the villa on the French Rivera where the Stones recorded “Exile on Main Street” in 1971.
That summer, the Stones hit their peak in both creativity and decadence. The proximity of Parsons to the Stones “unmoored him,” with his heroin use soon escalating.
Jagger grew tired of having a junkie around but Richards claimed he was jealous.
“Mick regards Keith in the way of a lover ... He’s the angry wife chasing away the pretty young thing. Keith calls it a marriage,” Cohen writes.
Parsons was booted while in very bad shape.
“Like a lot of us ... Gram could not survive the intensity,” said Bobby Keys, the Stones’ hard-partying saxophonist.
Parsons’ influence on the Stones was considerable, Cohen claims, and that can be measured by Jagger’s vehement denial that he contributed at all. Parsons continued to spiral, dying of an overdose in 1973.
Cohen also learned from the band’s girl Friday, June Shelley, how close Richards came to dying as he detoxed in preparation for the 1972 tour to promote “Exile.”
In the early days, Richards was an “unbelievable drug prude,” according to a girlfriend. But Richards said heroin made fame easier to take.
It was the ugly aftermath of Altamont in 1969, when it seemed the whole world hated the Stones after a concertgoer was fatally knifed by a Hells Angel, that deepened his use.
Nine months holed up in Nellcote left both Richards and his wife, Anita Pallenberg, with an appetite for heroin that was nothing less than ravenous. She was pregnant with their second child.
In March 1972, Shelley was ordered to Geneva, Switzerland, to facilitate Keith and Anita’s entry into a nearby detox.
But Anita delayed things, angry that their son Marlon couldn’t join her at the facility. At the hotel, Keith started detoxing and was soon in critical condition.
“He looked dead,” Shelley said.
When the nurse first saw Richards, she panicked — running around shouting, “My God, my God, my God.”
Keith was revived, and Anita’s daughter Dandelion was miraculously born heroin-free.
Richards, while alive, was not cured, and his rampaging addiction played out in the headlines. He was arrested in Toronto in 1977, but was so close to death on the hotel room floor, he almost missed his arraignment.
Jagger took control of the Stones, keeping the band together while Richards stumbled through his opiate haze.
Things turned uglier once the guitarist got clean and sought to reassert his role in the band.
Chris Kimsey, who produced the album “Undercover” through the winter of 1983-84, says the two were worse than he’d ever seen them.
They refused to record together, staggering their times in the studio and ordering the producer to undo whatever the other had done.
“It was killing me,” Kimsey says.
Jagger wanted out, envying David Bowie and Michael Jackson’s unfettered solo stardom. It was time to claim his status in what would become a triumvirate of music gods.
The Stones signed another contract, but when the others learned of the provisions for two solo albums from Jagger, things turned even more tense.
When Jagger bagged a Stones’ tour to promote one of the albums, the Stones called it quits, only to come together again in 1989 after solo albums “Primitive Cool” and “Goddess in the Doorway” both tanked.
Without the Stones, His Satanic Majesty was a non-starter.
“It was not love that brought them back together but calculation,” Cohen writes. “Mick and Keith had realized they could never earn as much alone as they could together.”
The feud continues, the chill still permeating the band. Richards’ 2010 memoir, “Life,” brought it to full fury again.
Richards eviscerated Jagger as a prima donna and a sellout while deriding his solo work. Having demeaned Jagger as a musician, he then mocked his manhood with reference to Mick’s “tiny todger.”
Jagger told Cohen about driving to Weston, Conn., to read the manuscript at Keith’s home. He was obviously hurt and angry after saving the man’s career through the years of his addiction.
Richards refused to delete the offending passages and yet the band plays on.
Richards is now “somewhat fragile,” coming closer to death than the public knows after falling out of a tree in Fiji in 2006.
He banged his head again when a wave hit the boat transporting him to rescue, increasing the urgent need for surgery. The 73-year-old has to live carefully.
Jagger is still trying to make it in Hollywood at 72. Cohen describes his multi-pronged efforts as “escape attempts.”
“Another run at adulthood, another search for a life free of Keith Richards,” he writes.
The failure of “Vinyl” with both critics and viewers is mystifying given all the money and talent that went into its making. The series was renewed for another season, but it will be a challenging comeback.
Jagger’s next act is problematic as well. He’s managed to remain a rock star even as he’s visibly aged. But Cohen points out that it’s not a country for old men.
“And,” he writes, “an old man defined by sex is a strange thing.”
