Bob Spitz on the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Art of Biography

Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: he started out hustling gigs for an unknown Bruce Springsteen for six years, moved on to handling Elton John’s American business, and spent long enough in the world to find himself jamming with Paul McCartney and chatting with Bob Dylan on a stoop in the Village. The Reagan and Julia Child books are harder to explain, and perhaps that’s the point—Spitz seems to do his best work when he has no business writing the book at all.

Tyler and Bob discuss how the Stones became so great so quickly, what they added to the blues, how their melodies stack up against the Beatles’, whether Exile on Main Street deserves its canonical status, which songs are most underrated, what Charlie Watts actually got out of playing in a rock band, the rise and fall of Brian Jones, how the Stones outlasted nearly everyone, the influence of Mick’s London School of Economics training, why popular music has lost its cultural influence, what we should still be asking Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, whether the Beatles’ breakup was good for the world, how senile Reagan really was in his second term and whether he was ever truly a communist, how good a cook Julia Child actually was, his next book on Lennon’s second act, and much more.

TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I’m sitting here chatting with the great Bob Spitz, the biographer. He has a new book out, which I enjoyed very much, The Rolling Stones: The Biography. He has other very well-known books on the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Ronald Reagan, Julia Child, and more. Bob, welcome.

BOB SPITZ: My pleasure, Tyler. Nice to be with you.

COWEN: Did the Rolling Stones have a long apprenticeship period the way the Beatles did? It seems they didn’t. How did they become so great so quickly?

SPITZ: Actually, they did. They worked in a little club called the Crawdaddy Club, which was in Richmond, a suburb of London. They worked long and hard there. In fact, the first time, and I document this in the book, the first time they show up, only six kids show up. They’re despondent. They go and talk to the head of the club. He said, “Look, play as if there are 100 people there and next week, there will be 100 people.”

Next week, there was 100 people. They played as if there were 100. The next week, 200 came. They worked in that club for about six months. Then they went on the road. They played a lot of really crappy little places, the same way that the Beatles did. Perhaps not as long an apprenticeship, but they served their time pretty well.

COWEN: That seems quite short, those six months. You read about Paul McCartney. He writes songs when he’s age 14, age 16. Is there anything comparable in the Rolling Stones?

SPITZ: No, not really. The Stones never dreamed that they would write music. It was beyond them. They were blues singers. Their primary goal in life was to bring that rich catalog of Delta and Mississippi, and Chicago blues to the world. They did not care about writing songs at all. They saw themselves as authentic blues masters. It was only their young manager, Andrew Oldham, who insisted if they were going to go anywhere, if they were going to compete in the music world, the pop music world, they would have to write music. They gave it a try. This came maybe two years after they were already on the road.

On the sound of the Rolling Stones

COWEN: There’s something they added to the blues. If you were to put your finger on what that was, the secret to their sound, the blues plus X, what’s the X there?

SPITZ: Rock ‘n’ roll. The X is rock ‘n’ roll. They jacked it up. They hotwired the blues. They turned it into a sound that we now know as rock ‘n’ roll. Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley started that sound. Then the Stones really gave it extra power and ferocious guitar and gave us the sound that we now know as rock ‘n’ roll today.

COWEN: They also have some songs that are very good. You could say almost Country and Western music, say, circa 1968. There’s some other element musically other than just rocking that they’re adding all along.

SPITZ: Absolutely. They took the records that the American servicemen had left behind after World War II. They left thousands of records behind. The majority of them were Country and Western records. The Stones grew up, like the Beatles did too, loving Country and Western music, courtesy of the American servicemen.

COWEN: Viewed objectively, how good are their melodies, just as melodies? If you ask about the Beatles, here, there, and everywhere, that’s an A-double-plus melody. How do you rate the Stones?

SPITZ: I would rate them maybe a B minus. Their rock and roll melodies are spectacular. “Gimme Shelter,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” these are melodies that I would put up against some of the Beatles’ better songs, but perhaps not as lush, not as romantic as the Beatles. Melodies in a different mode.

COWEN: Why was the album Satanic Majesty’s Request such a failure? Maybe you disagree, but I never listened to it.

SPITZ: I don’t disagree at all. Yes, it was a failure. What they did was they were trying to mimic the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s. You can’t copy. You really have to play what’s in your heart. I think they knew it. Certainly, the other people who took part in that, Satanic Majesty’s, knew it. The album’s rarely played, rarely listened to.

COWEN: They mimicked many other things quite well, including the blues, sometimes the Beatles themselves. They did “I Want to Be Your Man.” Arguably, their version was better. What was it about the psychedelic, or maybe it was studio production, that they couldn’t mimic so well?

SPITZ: Yes, it just wasn’t in their wheelhouse. They were not a psychedelic band. They certainly did as many psychedelic drugs as the Beatles, perhaps more, but the music just didn’t come to them easily. They gave it a shot, and then they went back to what they did best. [...]

On art colleges and rock ‘n’ roll

COWEN: Here’s a sentence from you: “The nascent British rock ‘n’ roll movement was born in art colleges.” Please explain.

SPITZ: Oh, well, art colleges, we don’t have them here, but they are a foundation of UK education. There is an 11-plus test that is given to every student when they’re 11 years old, and it really determines whether or not they’re going to go on to university or they’re going to go to a vocational school. In those early days, a vocational school meant that you’d wind up working in a factory. You’d wind up working as a clerk for the railroad. You’d take on one of those jobs.

Art schools came into being, and this was a repository for people who had talent but didn’t know what to do with it and weren’t that academic. Art schools sprang up in almost every community in the UK. We have people like Jimmy Page coming out of art school, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, all the great rock ‘n’ roll—

COWEN: John Lennon, also, right?

SPITZ: John Lennon, absolutely, went to Liverpool College of Art. It was an incubator for the arts, but also for rock ‘n’ roll because people brought their instruments to school, and they would play in the cloak rooms. That’s where they really formed bands and learned how to play with other musicians. The art school movement really gave us that whole British rock ‘n’ roll thing to this very day. Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine came out of it. Jarvis Cocker came out of art schools. They’re still thriving in the UK, and they’re still giving us new, innovative music. [...]

COWEN: Mick once said his favorite economist was Friedrich A. Hayek. Do you know anything more about that?

SPITZ: I do not, actually. I think it’s incredible that Mick had favorite economists. We do know that Mick was a scholarship student to the London School of Economics, and that for two and a half years, he attended and got pretty good grades. He did fairly well. The one thing that amazes me about Mick coming out of that London School of Economics is this. After 1967, when Andrew Loog Oldham stopped managing the Stones, they have never had another manager. They’ve had some money managers, but as far as managers go, Mick Jagger was their manager.

He has served as the Rolling Stones’ manager, bringing all of his experience from the London School of Economics since 1967. He’s negotiated all of the recording contracts, their publishing contracts. Every tour that comes along, he negotiates with the promoters. Every date he oversees, he designs the stage, and he invests the Stones’ money. So remarkable that this guy, a London School of Economics dropout, let’s call him that, has done so well for the rest of the band. [...]

COWEN: Let’s say we put you in charge of social welfare. Was it good that the Beatles split up when they did? I mean for the world, not for them.

SPITZ: Perhaps it was. I always felt that a lot of people run out of steam after three or four albums. If you look at Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Van Morrison and The Who and maybe even The Rolling Stones, after a couple years, after maybe four or five albums, they start trying to duplicate themselves. The Beatles gave us everything they had, and then they stopped. We have 230-some songs, perhaps the most remarkable songbook, aside from Hammerstein and Rodgers, that we know of from the 1900s on. The Beatles songbook I would put up against anybody’s. I think maybe if they had stayed together, they might have lost some of that spark.

COWEN: Think how many more George songs we got from this split, or Paul songs for that matter.

SPITZ: Absolutely right. George, toward the end, George really came into his own. Even after, in his solo career, we got some real gems out of George. I think it took him a little longer. More than that, I think he learned how to step out of the Lennon-McCartney shadow and stand on his own two feet.

COWEN: What did you learn jamming with Paul McCartney?

SPITZ: Boy, that was an experience.

COWEN: What year is this, just for context?

SPITZ: 1997. The New York Times Magazine sent me to the UK right after Paul was knighted to talk to him about that and give me a few of his memories of John Lennon. We were in Hastings in his house. It was a strange experience because I expected Paul McCartney to have an expensive house. It was really this tiny two-and-a-half, three-bedroom cottage. I said, “Do you actually live here?” He said, “I do.” I said, “But you have five children. You have three bedrooms.” He said, “Linda said that we all need to live on top of one another. That’s what we do. We are a family here.”

As I was leaving, he said, “Hey, you’re a musician, right? Want to see the studio?” Of course, that was like catnip to a guy like me. We went downstairs, and he shows me. It was a room no longer than say my dining room in New York City, but there were all the instruments from Abbey Road that he had, as well as Bill Black’s bass. Bill Black was Elvis Presley’s bass player. Paul had bought all these instruments and maintained them.

He said, “Sit down.” I said, “Sit down?” Paul sat down at the piano, and he nodded me into a guitar. What did we play? We played a few Beatles songs. It was frightening. I played with some great musicians before, but when you see Paul McCartney nodding you into a song, it’s a different feeling altogether, believe me.

COWEN: He was good?

SPITZ: Was he good? Oh, yes. I would say he was good. Then I let him sing “Maybe I’m Amazed” by himself on the piano. That was freakish, having a private audience in a tiny room. Never experienced anything like that before.

On Led Zeppelin

COWEN: Why didn’t you like Led Zeppelin at first?

SPITZ: Ah. I knew nothing about Led Zeppelin. I was in the midst of writing a biography of Ronald Reagan. In fact, I had just begun the research on that book. My editor called and said, “Listen, I need to sign you up for another book.” I said, “I’m up to my eyeballs in this. I’m not even thinking of the future.” He said, “No, I’ve always wanted to do this book. We’re going to sign you up now. We’re going to give you a contract. You’re the only guy who can write it.” I said, “Who is it?” He said, “It’s Led Zeppelin.” Tyler, I have to admit, my heart sunk. I knew nothing about the band.

COWEN: How can you know nothing about Led Zeppelin, given all the other things you know? That’s weird. It’s like if I said I know nothing about Adam Smith or Keynes.

SPITZ: I had been on the road with Bruce Springsteen and Elton John while Led Zeppelin came into the forefront. Our paths never crossed. I never listened to their music. I knew that they were a heavy metal band. I wasn’t interested in heavy metal. I have 20,000 vinyl albums in my collection. I didn’t have a single Led Zeppelin album. When my editor asked me about it, I might have been able to mention that I knew “Whole Lotta Love.” I might have known “Stairway to Heaven,” but I couldn’t name another Led Zeppelin song.

I found myself saying to my editor, “Of course, I’m your guy.” I was really happy that I did it. I’m convinced now that I was the right person to do it because I’m a musician. I love music. I was an empty vessel when it came to Led Zeppelin. I just let them fill me up. I really studied it as if I were taking a foreign language and had never studied that language before. It gave me an opportunity to spend a good year and a half before I started writing, listening to their music, trying to understand it.

Asking other great musicians, “Explain John Bonham’s drum technique to me. Explain Jimmy Page’s guitar to me.” I asked Jeff Beck to explain it to me. Jeff Beck was Jimmy’s boyhood neighbor. I came at Led Zeppelin from a neophyte’s angle, and I thought, “Okay, I can be incredibly objective here when it comes to writing about this band.” I was happy that I had the experience to do it. It taught me a lot, and I fell in love with their entire catalog of music that I had never appreciated before.

COWEN: “Stairway to Heaven,” overrated or underrated?

SPITZ: Completely rated as it should be. [...]

On Robert Caro

COWEN: What is Robert Caro like?

SPITZ: Robert Caro is the guy I look up to whenever it comes to writing biographies. That man has a way with words that has often intrigued me and humbled me. I was at a party one time, and a guy came over and said, “I hear you’re writing a book about Ronald Reagan.” There were about 150 people in this party. I said, “I am.” He said, “Could you talk to me about it a little?”

We sat down on the couch. I looked, and I saw over the man’s shoulder, my wife was going, “It’s Robert Caro. It’s Robert Caro.” At which point, my semi-intelligent dialogue became bedab, bedab, bedab, bedab. He was an incredibly thoughtful man. He sent me a number of notes from time to time. He is the biographer’s biographer. I don’t know how he does it. A great read.

COWEN: Why doesn’t he do more in public? Is it a Bob Dylan kind of thing, or just he’s too busy writing and researching?

SPITZ: I think he’s too busy writing. This guy writes and researches around the clock. I have learned not to do that. From what I’ve gathered, he’s up to his eyeballs in work day and night. He lives to do that. That’s his process.

COWEN: Does he understand how much of a cult surrounds him since he’s not out in public much?

SPITZ: I think he does. When he’s out in public, people stop this guy on the street. He’s like a rock star. He gets a lot of letters from people, especially people who want to know if he’s ever going to finish that last installment of the Johnson biography. I expect we’re going to see that any day.

by Tyler Cowen and Bob Spitz, Conversations |  Read more:
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