Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones by Stephen Davis...

Is it any good?

Yep - terrible hack work. The historical inaccuracies are borderline shocking, at times.

" Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones by Stephen Davis...

Is it any good ? "

Frig Yeah !


The weighty tome " OLD GODS ALMOST DEAD " is an unmitigated masterpeice of unquestionable integrity . Indeed , there is a foursquare gracefulness about this project allied to the writer's high talents which compels the awed admiration even of the skeptic.

If ever the proposition about genius as the taking of infinite pains was relevant, it is surely here. If scholarship, psychological acumen and compulsive readability are the true indices of the great biography, this volume must rant as the greatest musical biography ever written.

In describing The Rolling Stones , Davis writes of ambition so great that it is hard to fathom, of perseverance in epic quantities, of a hunger to succeed that ordinary mortals do not possess.

Anyone who wants to understand why the citizens of developing countries queue for hours in order to vote for tyrants should read the chapter about daily life in America before Michael Cohl took over the management / promotion of the band and rose the group up from the dead  .

The Rolling Stones brought happiness ( read : sexual liberation ) to the United States , a boon so great that almost any amount of corruption and greed  would have been tolerated from the band who turned on the power.



I Thank You for your time today .

'kins !

" Joey, one of my college teachers once gave me a crappy grade on a poetry analysis and told me I had failed to attribute my work to the actual author.  "I swear professor, I made it all up myself!" I pleaded.  He raised his eyebrows, but eventually changed my grade from a C- to a B+.

This little anecdote does not apply here, however. "


Thanks Zack   -- appreciate it !!!!!!

What ?! ...... oh , sure ! :


Davis'  achievement in OLD GODS ALMOST DEAD is not only vividly to tell the story of one remarkable band -- It is also to explain with clarity the lives of the people they worked with, the history of the institutions in which they exercised their power, and the deep social forces which moved those people and institutions to action...

I read it. Didn't think it was terrible. But that was many years ago when I was young and naive. being old and bitter is a much better way to go about life these days.....Anyway,it's not as bad as the Robert Greenfield book a few years ago. A season in hell with the rolling stones. That was terrible.

i picked away at this when i was traveling the country biding my time at barnes and noble...it didn't grab me. don't let me stop you from reading it.

next winter i plan to re-read Ronnie and see how much i believe.

everybody say owwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

I read it years ago, I can't remember to much about it, it didn't impress me too much, but one book did, Stanley Booths "True Adventures Of The Rolling Stones" that one really stood out.

Thanks for the feedback - this is not one to buy I guess..

But - can anyone recommend a recent, good, up-to-date, overview of Stones history?

" But - can anyone recommend a recent, good, up-to-date, overview of Stones history?   "


" Stone Alone " by our very own Bill Wyman is a watershed  literary work of art and a DEFINITE ' must read '  that spent over twenty - eight weeks at the top of the NY Times BEST SELLER list in the mid - 1990's and sold over thirteen million copies in the United States ALONE   ( Hard Back ) .


Indeed , many   '   High - End   '  Hotel Chains have replaced the Bible in all of their rooms with Wyman's beatific tome . Word .


I remain ....... forever  ... your Joeykins !


The Joey , Est. 1999 and loved by EVERYBODY ! ™

Honky Tonk Man wrote on May 5^th, 2009 at 4:40am:


Ransom Stoddard: You're not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?
Maxwell Scott: No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

Didn't you like the part about the B2B sessions that had info unavailable anywhere else?

I really need to pull out of the box where it sits since I moved!

Good point, I think one of his sources was one of Mick's girlfriends at the time, not necessarily very reliable or "classy" I must admit.

I do remember a Q interview of Mick in September of 1997 where he said in answer to a question that the sessions had almost collapsed and/or been discarded so that part of the book giving more details on this made sense.

Talking of the B2B sessions I think one of the UC List regulars had popped around the Blue Ocean studios at the time, possibly for a plumbing/electricity job (or maybe that was just his normal job and he hung around the studios)...or was that Chelskeith who was played a song by Keith because he'd called his newborn Keith...a bit of a blur now. Chelskeith did get us some stellar seat for the Oakland thanksgiving show, my best stadium show ever!

The B2B sessions were really the first "internet age" sessions, before that you had to rely on outdated information from music rags like Q or RS, I remember that most song titles were reported on by an LA newspaper and promptly published on the UC list, must have been in April of 1997. The we had the "Hans Mulders" incident...then the exciting Brooklyn Bridge press conference streamed over 56k (best you could do at the time)...then this guy who said he had tapes of the sessions that never surfaced...then the controversy of the sloppy Karnback book, those were the days !

" What are the absolutely essential/best 100% must-have Stones books? "



A Masterpiece !!!!!!!



!!!



http://www.ecampus.com/bk_detail.asp?isbn=0306807831

Stone Alone: The Story of a Rock 'N' Roll Band
Author(s): Wyman, Bill
ISBN10:  0306807831
ISBN13:  9780306807831
Format:  Paperback
Pub. Date:  8/21/1997
Publisher(s): Perseus Books Group