‘My Life as a Rolling Stone’ Is a Tribute to Charlie Watts — and Gives You the Stones as the Sum of Their Parts
The Rolling Stones have been doing Rolling Stones documentaries for nearly as long as they’ve been a band, and given their early goes, it’s impressive they’ve kept at it. The first, Charlie Is My Darling (1966), was shelved for decades due to legal fights and various shenanigans; The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (1968), a trainwreck of poor planning, was also shelved for years. Jean Luc-Godard’s brilliant but befuddling docufiction One Plus One (Sympathy For The Devil) got consigned to the art film circuit that same year, while Robert Frank’s verité Cocksucker Blues (1972) was too revealing for anyone’s comfort and was largely disappeared. And Gimme Shelter (1970), of course, turned out to be more the document of a tragedy than the triumph of a band at its peak.
Joining these and subsequent Stones films, jostling for space in the flood of other pandemic-born music docs, is the four-part My Life as a Rolling Stone, which begs the inevitable question: Beyond cash-grab brand-building, what’s the point of yet another film about this band? The generous answer is: Who needs a point to savor the world’s self-proclaimed greatest rock ’n’ roll band defending that assertion in vintage performance clips? But what’s striking about this surprisingly satisfying docuseries (currently running on Epix) whose dubious conceit is devoting a full episode to each of the group’s four tenured members, is how effectively it shows the Stones’ magic as being fully about the sum of its parts. Not just Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, for all their storied magnificence, but also the irrepressible Ronnie Wood and the late great Charlie Watts — and, for that matter, key players like Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, and Mick Taylor, who get passing mention here. The most compelling episodes of My Life, in fact, are about Watts and Wood; their stories map the band’s symbiosis, and nicely complicate the standard Jagger/Richards Glimmer Twins mythology.
For sure, there’s plenty of mythology, dished up in Sienna Miller’s History Channel narration and a parade of beheaded talking heads (virtually all non-Stones soundbites are delivered in voiceover). It’s a useful approach, maximizing archival screen time, and the commentators are smartly-chosen; most are fellow musicians, with women (Sheryl Crow, Tina Turner, Chrissie Hynde, Bonnie Raitt) in a refreshing lead role. Jagger begins his episode, the series’ first, stressing his desire to avoid documentary cliché, which is comically inevitable — and indeed, the pans and zooms through empty recording studios and tape vaults soon begin. But Mick does his best to pull back the curtain. Describing how he plotted out gestures and camera angles in advance of the band’s first British TV appearances, we see a pokerface hot-boy twentysomething Jagger staring down the BBC lens, delivering the deliciously porny verses of Willie Dixon’s “Little Red Rooster” to a rapt nation. It’s a riveting clip, and after that, boilerplate talk of British parents wanting to lock up their kids, et al., feels earned.
Jagger’s long been viewed as the band’s cold-blooded strategist — or “brand manager,” as he’s dubbed here. In the wake of their ballooned fame and the Altamont disaster, however, that role was crucial to the band’s survival, and it’s illuminating to see Jagger wax Jigga-ish about his business acumen in between onstage ass-shaking. And debate the merits of stadium-sized corporate Stones vs the more human-scaled ‘70s version all you like, but the sight of ecstatic Cubans feeling the band at Ciudad Deportiva de la Habana stadium in 2016 (see also: the Havana Moon doc), a major geo-political feat, is a genuinely moving argument for supersizing. Moving, too, is the sight of Jagger nearly breaking down on a St. Louis stage last year at the start of the first Stones show following Charlie Watts’ death.
The Watts episode is the series’ revelation, its poignancy heightened by his absence (he died before his new interview segments could be filmed). “The best drummer England has ever produced,” as Richards calls him, was the band’s oldest member, and Watts testifies in old clips about his love of jazz (as a young player, he aspired mainly to be Chico Hamilton backing up Gerry Mulligan), and how much he disdained the madness of fame (“I hated being chased by girls,” he declares unequivocally; “it was embarrassing”). Less well-known was an apparently world-class case of OCD. His road cases were organized with tissue-paper between each piece of clothing, with a custom case for his trusty Victorian tea set; he was a skillfully obsessive visual artist who seems to have made detailed line drawings of every hotel bed he ever slept in; he housed a museum’s worth of instruments owned by jazz legends; he collected cars he didn’t know how to drive, horses he couldn’t ride, bespoke suits he never got around to wearing.
Watts could perfectly mimic Dre’s beats on The Chronic, while his dressing room, known as “The Cotton Club,” was set up as a sanctuary where Ellington recordings reliably set the mood. (The fact that later in life Watts got hooked on heroin and boozing was out-of-character, but unsurprising.) All this was a backdrop to his quietly phenomenal playing, invariably on the simplest of drum kits, setting others to marvel how “he could rock so hard while being so loose,” as the Police’s Stewart Copeland put it. In one of a number of bits unpacking great Stones musical moments, the deceptively simple cowbell beat of “Honky Tonk Women” gets dissected, and remains no less magical for it.
The Ron Wood episode is similarly eye-opening, not just for his chameleonic musicianship and Zelig-like role in mid-century British Invasion rock — as Rod Stewart’s foil in the Faces and owner of “The Wick,” the legendary London townhouse/studio/hangout — but also for his little-brother role in the Stones social dynamic. Mirroring the call-and-response weaving of his guitar lines was the emotional weaving he did behind the scenes, shoring up bonds between Jagger and Richards when they were at their most frayed, and he’s credited here with literally saving the band. Wood brought his own flamboyant dysfunctions, though, as Richards’ partner-in-crime drug buddy; as Wood describes it, his freebase/crack addiction got so out of hand, it took Richards punching him in the face during a relapse to set him straight. Wood may never have delivered the fireworks of Mick Taylor, who he replaced, but a case is made here that the good time goofball pub-rock vibe he brought was probably more sustainable for the band in the long run.
By focusing on individuals, the structure of My Life allows the band to bury or sideline certain parts of their story. The decades between 1980 and 2020 are largely MIA. There’s minimal attention on childhoods and pre-Stones life, less still on extra-curricular activities like family lives. Touchstone moments are tucked into each episode: the 1967 Redlands bust, Jones’ death, and Altamont all get screen time in Jagger’s episode; the 1975 flatbed-truck jam of “Brown Sugar” while driving down New York’s Fifth Avenue flashes by in Wood’s segment; and naturally, Richards’ 1977 Toronto arrest gets real estate in his. But Keith, who is touchingly ID-ed as the tough-love rehab enforcer for Watts and Wood, mostly sticks to the music here. He riffs on the battered acoustic guitar his grandfather gave him as a kid. While the documentary only touches on the significant cultural appropriation questions that have always trailed the band, Richards concedes his deep debt to black musicians, his love of the blues and R&B, his pride in helping boost the career of John Lee Hooker and in sharing a stage with Muddy Waters. But Richards crammed on Beatles records, too, trying to suss out the secret of writing great pop songs, which he soon did — as Jagger points out, he’s the guy who wrote “As Tears Go By” and “Angie” alongside the haunted sorcery of “Gimme Shelter.”
One of the best moments in My Life as a Rolling Stone is the reveal of Richards’ signature open-tuned, five-string deconstruction of the standard guitar set-up that made “Gimme Shelter” and other tunes possible. That a new generation of musicians can learn about that, and more, is justification enough for the whole project. “Solos come and go,” as Richards notes with his trademark cackle, “but a riff lasts forever.”