When Rich Cohen, then a callow young reporter, first met the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, on assignment in the mid-1990s, the guitarist noted that the kid had never known a world without the Stones: “For you, there’s always been the sun and the moon and the Rolling Stones.”
Defying time, they’re still playing all the nasty, force-of-nature classics: “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Midnight Rambler,” “Shattered.”
The Stones have always been an elemental experience — guitars like serrated steel, grooves like churning water — which almost makes you feel guilty for sitting in a comfy chair and reading a book about them.
Not coincidentally, that puts it on the short list of worthwhile books about the Stones, including Stanley Booth’s “The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones” and Robert Greenfield’s “S.T.P.: A Journey Through America With the Rolling Stones.”
Like both of those books, “The Sun & the Moon” zeroes in on the Stones at their bottom-feeding apex, around the turn of the 1970s, before the band perfected the big business of razzle-dazzle.
Though Cohen has known the band since that first assignment for Rolling Stone magazine — he was a co-creator, with Mick Jagger (and Martin Scorsese and Terence Winter), of the new HBO series “Vinyl” — he doesn’t give a fingernail for anything they’ve done since the late 1970s.
Cohen, who wrote the gangster chronicle “Tough Jews” and “Sweet and Low,” about his own family’s feud over the artificial sweetener, likes the mythic Stones a lot more than he does the survivors.
Unlike most rock bands, in which the drummer establishes the beat, in the Stones, Richards starts with one of his signature dirty riffs, and then Watts latches on like a surfer catching a wave.
According to Dick Taylor, an early member of the Stones who went on to found the Pretty Things, that voice is partly an accident.
At 15, fooling around with music for the first time after seeing a Buddy Holly concert, Jagger collided with a schoolmate in a gym, biting deep into his tongue.
Speaking with Marianne Faithfull, the “it” girl who was Jagger’s girlfriend before spiraling into dependency in the ’70s, Cohen learns about her suicide attempt in Australia.
While she was in a six-day coma, Jagger, ever the playboy, wrote mash notes to one of his extracurricular lovers.
