Bill Janovitz: “The Stones spent a long time chasing the Beatles”

If you think you have always known everything there is to know about the Rolling Stones, then you have not yet come across Rocks Off by Bill Janovitz, reissued in paperback this summer. A musician, singer, guitarist and founding member of Buffalo Tom, Bill Janovitz invites us to listen to the story of the greatest rock’n’roll band through fifty songs. As the Rolling Stones release Foreign Tongues, their 25th studio album, we spoke with him about his relationship with the band, the origins of the book, Brian Jones, the Beatles and the imperfections that shaped the Stones’ sound.

🎙️ Bill Janovitz interviewed by Cédric Vernet

Before discussing the book, it is impossible not to talk about Foreign Tongues. What is your overall impression of the album, and where would you place it in the Rolling Stones’ discography?

I am mostly happy that the Rolling Stones are still able to release an album in their eighties. Foreign Tongues is uneven, with production by Andrew Watt that is sometimes too compressed and too rigid, leaving little room for the music to swing.

But several songs work very well, particularly “Ringing Hollow,” with its country feel and political commentary, and “Back In Your Life,” one of the album’s finest songs. I would not place it among their great albums, or on the same level as Blue & Lonesome, but it remains a welcome addition to their discography. Ending with the Chuck Berry cover “Beautiful Delilah” even creates the feeling that the circle is closing.

If you were writing Rocks Off today, would one of the songs from Foreign Tongues deserve a place among the fifty tracks you selected?

The fifty songs were not necessarily my favourites, although some of them were. They were chosen to help tell the story of the band’s first fifty years. With that in mind, I would discuss “Ringing Hollow,” because it is a return to their classic country style, but especially because the song offers some pointed commentary on the current situation in the United States.

Some songs on Foreign Tongues seem very controlled in terms of production. Can that become a problem with the Stones, when their sound has often relied on mistakes, hesitations and fluctuations in tempo?

Those imperfections are what make the music organically human.

“Those imperfections are what make the music organically human.”

Rocks Off is neither a conventional biography nor simply a selection of fifty songs. Why did this format seem like the right way to tell the story of the Rolling Stones?

The inspiration came from Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, who took a similar approach with the Beatles, placing their songs in the context of contemporary events.

Choosing fifty songs to trace the first fifty years of the Rolling Stones seemed like an interesting and rewarding way to weave the band’s much-told story into a musical chronology. I wanted to show what was happening in their personal lives, but also in the political and social world around them, and how all of those things influenced one another.

The fifty songs are ultimately only points of entry, since the index contains exactly 200 tracks. How did you create those connections without turning Rocks Off into a succession of technical notes?

You have to strike a balance: being technical enough to satisfy music and gear nerds, without excluding readers who may not understand those aspects or simply are not interested in them.

My job, and I think one of my strengths as a music writer, is to explain those elements clearly enough for people who want to learn. I try to maintain that balance in all my books. Some readers skip those passages, while others happily absorb them.

Rocks Off restores the importance of Brian Jones, Ian Stewart, Bill Wyman, Mick Taylor and Charlie Watts, as well as Andrew Loog Oldham, Glyn Johns and the recording engineers. Has the story of the Stones too often been reduced to the Jagger-Richards partnership?

I suppose it is a fairly natural evolution, although Mick Jagger and Keith Richards also helped to create that image, with the assistance of management, record companies and everyone involved in promoting them.

They were unquestionably the creative force of the band and are the last two standing. But I try to highlight everyone who contributed to making the records.

My most recent book, about the Cars, also shows how important every member was to the band’s sound, even though Ric Ocasek wrote all the songs, kept the credits, made most of the money and gradually tried to edge the others out.

Brian Jones played an essential role in the band’s early years, particularly around Aftermath, before entering a period of personal and musical decline. How do you explain his downfall, and is his contribution still underestimated?

Yes. Even today, his role in broadening the musical scope of the Rolling Stones remains underestimated. The band began with its original goal of blues purism, before becoming a much richer, more varied and more layered studio band. Brian Jones played a major role in that transformation.

I do not know exactly how much of his downfall was his own responsibility. But after reading many books, particularly the excellent biography by Paul Trynka, watching the documentaries and speaking to people who were there, I feel that Brian Jones was almost entirely responsible for the way his situation ended.

He was addicted and increasingly unable to contribute. He did not write. He also treated other people, especially women, as expendable. That said, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were ruthless and controlling young men. They probably could have done more to help him.

“Brian Jones played a major role in the musical transformation of the Stones.”

The supposed rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones is far more complicated than the usual media narrative suggests. To what extent did the two bands really influence one another?

I live in Boston, where there is a sporting rivalry between the Red Sox and the New York Yankees. But until 2004, when the Red Sox finally began winning championships, people used to say that the rivalry was like the one between a hammer and a nail.

That is a little how I see the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. I do not think the Beatles ever regarded the Rolling Stones as real rivals. Both bands probably saw the Stones as chasing the Beatles’ influence, until “Jumping Jack Flash” and then Beggars Banquet.

That does not mean that the Rolling Stones did not have their own identity. They created a loose sound, heavily rooted in blues and soul, which they often played with more authority than the Beatles. They eventually absorbed the pop and lyrical influences of the Beatles, but also those of Bob Dylan, Ray Davies and others, and combined them with their real strengths as a rock’n’roll band.

By the late 1960s, the Rolling Stones may in turn have influenced the Beatles, when the latter returned to a more streamlined form of rock.

How should we listen today to songs such as “Under My Thumb” or “Stupid Girl,” whose lyrics can sound misogynistic or badly dated?

I think “Under My Thumb” still works, because the song is also about a narrator admitting that he had previously allowed someone to walk all over him.

As for the other songs described as misogynistic, they need to be placed in context, and we should also take into account the humour in Mick Jagger’s lyrics. Many of them are self-deprecating. Very few are truly mean-hearted.

“Stupid Girl” is simply a dumb song that has not aged well in any respect.

When did you first discover the Rolling Stones?

When I was seven or eight years old, in 1973 or 1974, a neighbour gave me Out of Our Heads. I probably already knew “Satisfaction” and “Honky Tonk Women” from the radio.

But that record was dark and dense. It sounded rough and tough. “Satisfaction” stood out, of course, but I remember loving everything, particularly their version of “Cry to Me,” “The Spider and the Fly” and “The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man.”

While writing Rocks Off, were you primarily a musician, a fan, a journalist or almost a musicologist?

I do not know which part of me took over. Probably the writer, out of necessity. But I cannot separate my work from my admiration for the band.

The book is a love letter to the Rolling Stones, without sparing them the criticism they deserve.

“The book is a love letter to the Stones, without sparing them the criticism they deserve.”

Despite your admiration for the band, have the Stones ever frustrated, disappointed or even angered you during their career?

I completely lost interest in them during the 1980s, after Tattoo You. I had moved on, and their records sounded pretty lame to me. They seemed like old guys desperately trying to stay relevant. From what I understand, that mainly came down to Mick Jagger.

I began paying attention to their albums again with Steel Wheels, although I did not start buying them again until I began working on the book.

While reading Rocks Off, I thought of Rob, the main character in High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, who is constantly making lists but can never regard them as definitive. Since the book was first published, have you ever wanted to revise your selection?

No, because the selection was never intended as a list. The songs were chosen to tell the story of the band.

You end Rocks Off with “Plundered My Soul,” a remarkable song that remained in the archives for decades before being completed and released in 2010. Will unreleased tapes, alternate takes and forgotten songs allow the Rolling Stones to live on long after they are gone?

All their music will allow them to live on in our hearts and minds. But “Plundered My Soul” remains a singular case: a great unfinished song that was brought back to life, like some of the tracks on Tattoo You.

📚 About Bill Janovitz

American musician and author Bill Janovitz is the singer, guitarist and founding member of Buffalo Tom, a band formed in 1986 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Passionate about rock history, he has written several books about music, including a volume on Exile on Main St. for the 33⅓ series, Rocks Off: 50 Tracks That Tell the Story of the Rolling Stones in 2013, and a biography of Leon Russell that became a New York Times bestseller.

Rocks Off, l’histoire des Rolling Stones en 50 titres, translated into French by Stan Cuesta, is now available in paperback from Éditions Rivages.

Follow Bill Janovitz: billjanovitz.com

Our thanks to Bill Janovitz for this interview.
To continue the journey, Blues Actu has collected the fifty songs featured in Rocks Off in a Spotify playlist.

🎧 Listen to all 50 tracks in our Spotify playlist!