He’s With the Band
A young Jagger found his singing style after biting his tongue deeply during a basketball-court collision.

Keith Richards, Mick Jagger attend the press conference <br>announcing their Voodoo Lounge tour in 1994 in New York City.<br>PHOTO: Sonia Moskowitz / Getty Images

You will be forgiven for wondering if the world needs another Rolling Stones book. Of course it doesn’t. But this is not “only rock ’n’ roll.” This is a cultural juggernaut, a superstar band with a singular body of work that both influenced and reflected multiple generations. The Stones have sustained an artistic collaboration over the course of six decades, sold hundreds of millions of records, and continue to pack in thousands of fans night after night at eye-watering ticket prices that compromise family college funds. There is no group like the Rolling Stones.

Any of the millions of us who have been affected by their music have our own relationship with the Stones, and we all have our own stories—about the first record of theirs we had, the first time we heard them and realized they were different from everyone else. There is often a moment when we really “got” the Stones, probably via some album track like “Shine a Light” that we were hearing for the first time. Maybe one of the older among us saw them in the 1960s but wrote them off after the 1969 death of Brian Jones. Someone else might have come in around 1978’s “Some Girls.”

Think about it as a bar conversation. The Stones start playing on the jukebox. We have had a drink or two and the conversation flows freely. Some of us are more informed than others and know more back stories, more trivia, more colorful details. Where did you get on or off the train?

But then one of us, this guy named Rich Cohen, steps up with this fabulous story right out of the film “Almost Famous,” about how he was a 20-something cub reporter for Rolling Stone magazine and, employing a little ingenuity, got himself assigned to cover the Stones, his favorite band, as they rehearsed for their 1994 North American tour. He ended up gaining the trust of the band and covering the tour. That alone would have made a great story, but he also went on to form a working partnership with Mick Jagger, one that brought him into a yearslong collaboration with Martin Scorsese, as the three conceived and created “Vinyl,” the HBO drama about the record industry of the 1970s. That’s Mr. Cohen’s book, “The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones.”

Your reaction might be one of envy or perhaps an obscene exclamation. But Mr. Cohen is indeed one of us. At least, he is close enough in age to this reviewer, and his early experiences mirror mine, right down to living in one of those debauched and decrepit houses during college where you lose track of who is actually a roommate and who is just crashing there for the week. Mr. Cohen is our stand-in during what would be a rock ’n’ roll fantasy for many of us.

Mr. Cohen interweaves his firsthand accounts of the men in the band with the well-trodden history of the Stones, from inception around 1963 through the golden period of 1968 to 1973 and then hopscotching through time to bring us up to when he met the band. The research is meticulous (I only spotted one minor error that described Muscle Shoals Sound Studio as “owned by” producer Jim Dickinson). Mr. Cohen’s own interviews even yield some new Stones lore.

This is the first time, for example, I have read a theory—of Mick Jagger schoolmate, pre-fame Rolling Stone and eventual Pretty Things co-founder Dick Taylor—of how the singer got his voice: a collision on a basketball court during which he “bit deep into his tongue.” After being ordered not to speak for a week, Mr. Jagger turned up anyway at the next rehearsal and “insisted on performing,” Mr. Cohen writes. “When he opened his mouth, he sounded different, guttural, strange . . . his voice was formed by a happy accident.”

The book is strongest when Mr. Cohen shares his own experiences. While he is an unabashed fan, he tempers his initial gobsmacked amazement with a sharp reporter’s eye for human imperfections. He does not shrink, for instance, from digging into the tensions between Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards. Speaking to Mick soon after the publication of Keith’s autobiography, “Life” (2010), Mr. Cohen hears Mick’s exasperation, which he paraphrases: “Imagine that everything Keith says is true. Now imagine those things being said by a business partner, a man you’ve joined into a multi-million-dollar enterprise. Now imagine that partner is drug addicted. . . . Sometimes, as you’re about to make a big deal, he gets busted. . . . What, in such a case, would you make of his complaints?”

But the author does not allow his earned coziness with Mr. Jagger to block him from describing the man, warts and all: “The famous features—lips and hair—had rearranged themselves into the countenance of an elderly man,” Mr. Cohen writes about seeing a picture of him in 2014, just after the suicide of his girlfriend L’Wren Scott. “I’ve always admired Mick; for the first time, I sympathized with him. He’s always been defined by sex and satisfaction—youth. He’s now reached the far shore of that country. An old man defined by sex is a strange thing.”

Mr. Cohen’s interjections of memoir are always welcome and don’t come off as self-aggrandizing. And unlike some of the early Stones reporters who got swept up in the circus around the band and started to believe that they were partners in crime, Mr. Cohen respects the band and maintains a distance. Perhaps it is the age gap. The band members at times seem genuinely curious about Mr. Cohen as a representative of his generation. But the author never mistakes his place: He remains one of us. As Mr. Richards says to him with a bit of wonderment: “You tell me. I don’t know. What’s it like to live in a world where the Stones were always there? For you, there’s always been the sun and the moon and the Rolling Stones.”

After all the loss of legendary artists we have experienced in 2016—Prince, David Bowie, Merle Haggard, Paul Kantner and Glenn Frey, to name just a few—we know that we will not have the Rolling Stones forever.

Mr. Janovitz is the lead singer of the band Buffalo Tom and author of “Rocks Off: 50 Tracks That Tell the Story of the Rolling Stones.”

By Bill Janovitz
May 20, 2016 2:38 pm ET