By: A. E. Hothner
1990; 341 pages
Why would anyone spend any amount of time writing a book around a band they didn’t like? Money of course. The Stones may have been in decline in 1990, but they were still worth money. Hotchner’s writing makes it clear that he doesn’t like the men who make up the Rolling Stones so I can only assume he wrote the book for the money.
The writing style is a little overblown and a little hard to read:
In the seventies and into the eighties, the Stones were subjected to a continuation of persecutory drug busts; wives and girlfriends were traded in for new models; the band was further depleted by resignation an death; the Stones’ life-styles emphasized wayward opulence and their behavior remained unpredictable and self-indulged; their new albums continued to sell, but nevertheless a pall, a taint, a catheter of doubt drained something vital from both the Stones and their times, which, in turn, had lost their militant thrust towards the end of the Vietnam War. (p. 332)
My grammar check had a real time with this paragraph, I finally had to tell it to ignore the whole thing. It’s all one sentence. Hotchner had the opportunity to end it many times but he added a semi-colon and kept on going. This passage is typical of the writing style. But the writing is not that much of a problem.
I find the whole premise of Blown Away: The Rolling Stones and the Death of the Sixties a little hard to swallow. Times changed, the sixties faded away. Nothing unusual there. To say that the Altamont concert marked the definite end of the sixties is ludicrous. It was just one more event signaling the coming changes, like the Manson Family murders and Vietnam.
Maybe Hotchner is mad at the Stones for not bringing about the revolution, not providing “satisfaction” as it were. Maybe the disappointment of finding out that Mick Jagger really isn’t a “street fighting man” at all was too much. Hotchner provides an interesting and surprisingly wise quote from Phil May the leader of the Pretty Things:
So many people now ask those of us who were well known in the sixties – Mick, Pete Townshend, myself, other band leaders – ‘Why when you had it in your hands, did you not use your power to bring the who fucking thing down? You had the sway’ they say, ‘so if you’d have said to go out and do it at the end of each concert, you could have caused great commotion.’ And my response is we’d have created a power vacuum which we didn’t have the wherewithal to fill. It’s alright brining something down if you can replace it. But to have no backup would be very irresponsible. It’s all right saying, ‘This, this and this sucks. Let’s pull it down.’ But if you haven’t got something to replace it, if you’re going to put up a tent afterwards, what’s the point? (p. 337)
