Tim Riley’s Tell Me
Why was one of the very first books about The Beatles I ever read. It’s a
track-by-track analysis that really opens up the unconscious brilliance of
Lennon and McCartney by exploring their songs from a music theory basis while
never fumbling into off-putting academic speak. Riley examines their
performances and production strokes with equal keenness. It is enlightening,
unpretentious, and iconoclastic (certainly Riley must have been one of
the first writers to actually challenge the quality of some of The Beatles’ best-loved
works, including Sgt. Pepper’s). I
read Tell Me Why right around the
time I was first becoming obsessed with The Rolling Stones. Naturally, I
started dreaming someone would write such a book about those guys too.
While The Beatles have a reputation for being four little
Mozarts and the Stones are considered masters of three-chord simplicity,
there’s a lot more happening in their music than is often acknowledged. Lennon
and McCartney certainly never penned a lyric as literary as “Sympathy
for the Devil.” There have been track-by-track explorations of the Stones
before—Martin Elliott’s The
Complete Recording Sessions, Steve Appleford’s Rip This Joint, and most
recently, Sean Egan’s The Mammoth Book of
The Rolling Stones—but none that ever approached the group’s hefty body of
work with all due seriousness and attention to detail.
Bill Janovitz’s new book Rocks
Off: 50 Tracks That Tell the Story of The Rolling Stones is frustrating
because about one-sixth of that book I’ve always wanted to read is in here. Janovitz
has a legit musical background (he was the singer and guitarist of the nineties
band Buffalo Tom) and brings his knowledge of working in the studio and writing
songs to his analysis of fifty select Stones cuts. The problem is that he
limits himself to fifty, filling out the rest of his book with a story told a
hundred times before. It probably didn’t help that I read Rocks Off back-to-back with The
Mammoth Book, which also uses the Stones’ music as a guiding device to tell
their story. Sean Egan’s book also covers all the same historical incidents
and even uses many of the same quotes as Janovitz’s. I would have loved Rocks Off if the writer decided to
commit to the analytical bits that make his book worth reading and left the
history lesson to all the other Stones biographies that came before it. Janovitz
conducted a few new interviews with the band’s associates to justify his retelling
of their story, but there isn’t much to learn from them aside from keyboardist
Al Kooper’s fascinating first-hand perspective of the recording of “You Can’t
Always Get What You Want.” If you’ve never read another book about The Rolling
Stones, Rocks Off certainly isn’t a
bad starting place. As for that definitive analysis of their music, keep
waiting.
