This unassuming but highly readable memoir portrays the Rolling Stones over a period that has never much appealed to rock’s literati. When Bill German began producing his fan’s newsletter, Beggars Banquet, in 1978 while he was still at high school in Brooklyn, the Stones’ death-and-glory years were over. The big career-defining moments — Brian Jones’s drowning, the infamous concert at Altamont, the Exile on Main Street album and the orgiastic American tour that followed it — had all happened and been written up.

To German’s teenage peers the Stones were yesterday’s news, eclipsed by Pink Floyd and Saturday Night Fever. But still hypnotised by his idols’ “sexuality, sarcasm and rebelliousness”, German gives up his education “to interact with the Stones directly”. He spends the next 17 years following them around the world, usually at his own expense, issuing monthly updates on their exploits to Beggars Banquet’s 3,000 subscribers. This was never supposed to turn into a day job. “How could I have known in 1978 that the Stones were in the early stages of their career?” he asks, reasonably.

His youthful enthusiasm soon helps him become a fringe member of the Stones’ entourage. As such, he falls in with a crowd largely populated by drug dealers or narcotic advisers. Prominent among them is “Svi” the Israeli Talmudic scholar who acts as Keith Richards’s “drug taster”, administers his $700-a-day drug budget and claims he helped him smuggle cocaine hidden inside his son Marlon’s GI dolls. German also chums up with the most entertaining supplier, Freddy Sessler, a sixtysomething Holocaust survivor, who specialises in snorting coke in public places. German notes that Sessler can do pretty much as he pleases around the Stones thanks to Richards’s everlasting gratitude to him for taking the rap for a drug bust in Arkansas in 1975. “Freddy,” German writes, “epitomised everything Mick despised about Keith.”

German is, to a degree, an innocent abroad. He blanks the sexual opportunities routinely offered in Stones circles. “I spent the prime of my virility licking more postage stamps than anything else,” he drily remarks, pointing out that many of the groupies are old-timers who have been around “since Brian Jones was a teenager”.

As a devout non-druggie, he arouses the hostility of the dealers swarming around Ronnie Wood, who suspect him of being an undercover cop. Wood, who in one memorable scene sits with German in the kitchen of his London home discussing their plans for a book while feeding a large rock of cocaine though his pepper grinder, protects him from the sharks. Others are not so kind. In Tokyo, a cocaine drought leads the Stones’ main dealer to organise a consignment to be mailed to German from America without asking his permission. For a man who earns a paltry $14,000 in 1992 for his pains, German takes this in remarkably good part.

Nothing deflects him from his journalistic task. Welcomed by Richards, befriended by Wood, tolerated by Mick Jagger and completely unrecognised by Charlie Watts, he battles to maintain editorial independence. After a brief and unhappy spell in 1981 as the band’s “official” newsletter, Beggars Banquet reverts to printing stories that management — often meaning Jagger — don’t like.

German is nearly attacked by Jagger after suggesting in print that he succumbed to emotional blackmail by appearing at Live Aid. Richards’s personal manager lectures him for revealing that Keith spends most of his time in Manhattan, while the American tax authorities believe him to be resident in Jamaica. Jagger’s infidelities are way out of bounds, and when a management flunky has a go at him for naming Jagger’s favourite restaurants, German retorts in style, “At least I don’t print what he tips.”

The reason why the cagey Jagger allows German anywhere near the band emerges when a call comes in from the actor Ben Stiller in 1994. Stiller and Brad Pitt have been asked to devise a film about Stones fans that will sell the band to the younger “Generation X” demographic, a particular obsession with the Peter Pan-like Jagger. German has been proposed as a consultant. “If he honestly wanted to depict his fans, he’d get 40-year-old stockbrokers and soccer moms, not you and Brad Pitt,” is German’s level response. The film idea is later dumped.

By the mid-1990s money is, German feels, the Stones’ overriding priority. Having patiently reported the personality clashes of the 1980s, when Jagger’s desire to launch a solo career almost broke up the band, he witnesses their transformation into a corporate cash cow after the 1989-90 world tour with mounting dismay. It depresses him “how many decisions about where and when to record or perform were determined not by artistic inspiration but by lawyers and accountants”. The steep rise in ticket prices for the Stones’ concerts — from $30 to $300 in a mere six years — irks him as much as the way Jagger now reads scripted jokes from a teleprompter.

The final straw comes when German attends a “secret” club show in Amsterdam that is being filmed. The “hotties” in front of the stage are, he discovers, hired models. “For every paid model on that dancefloor, a Stones fan was robbed of a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” he concludes, and gives it all up on the spot. That German’s love for the band’s music remains intact, despite their best efforts, is not the least wonder of this remarkable tale.

Under Their Thumb by Bill German
Aurum £14.99 pp368

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