Review: 'Parachute Women'

The Rolling Stones have long been celebrated for their glamorous, titillating rock and roll decadence, but before hooking up with two remarkable women, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were basically a couple of low-key, awkward, middle-class English boys. It was Marianne Faithfull and, especially, Anita Pallenberg who helped elevate their art and personas by exposing them to culture outside of Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry. It was these women who imbued them with black magic mystique by pushing Jagger and Richards out of their comfort zones and into the more liberated/dangerous realms of sexual exploration and hard drug use. And while Jagger and Richards were lauded as "bad boy" templates for the male rock star, Faithfull and Pallenberg were held up as examples for how women should never behave and practically destroyed by both the men they loved and Britain's misogynistic tabloid press.

This is the story Elizabeth Winder tells in her new book Parachute Women. It's a tricky balancing act because Winder recognizes the nasty allure of those days even as she clearly has the legit feminist goal to expose the rancidness beneath it.  It's a clash that Winder never quite resolves, partly because she does such a fine job of romanticizing a period that doesn't seem so romantic through twenty-first century eyes. Her rich, descriptive prose taps into the lush, louche, hash-smoked decadence of the story almost too perfectly. It's hard to not find it all more than a little seductive, which results in an uneasy tone. Perhaps a story like this should be uneasy reading, and speaking as a big fan of the Stones music and the trappings of "Swinging London" who also recognizes how fucked up the truth behind the trappings were, I know I couldn't have done any better. I had a hard enough time writing this review.

Nevertheless, I did think Winder went oddly easy on Brian Jones, whom she largely paints as a victim even as she shows that he was horrifically abusive in ways that Jagger and Richards were not, and she occasionally seems to tweak facts to enhance a point (wouldn't Jagger's callous decision to deprive Faithfull of co-writing credit on "Sister Morphine" be all the worse if the Stones' version were "a hit," as Winder contends? Of course, it would be, and of course, "Sister Morphine" wasn't even a single). But the author fully conveys Faithfull and Pallenberg's, intelligence, talents, and abilities, as well as those of Marsha Hunt, who is a relatively minor yet equally unforgettable figure in this story. There's also a place for Bianca Jagger, though she doesn't get as much attention, seemingly because she was more bourgeois. Yet Bianca also makes some of the strongest points about the degrading roles women have long been forced to play in the rock world. Indeed, Parachute Women is most powerful whenever these women make similar statements, sometimes in half-a-century-old quotes that could not seem more contemporary or relevant today.