PositiveThe Washington PostParachute Women is the first to narrativize the collective experiences of the consorts and wives who shaped the musicians. Winder spotlights how the vast influence of these women on the Stones has largely been hidden in the shadow of the band’s monolithic mythos ... A step toward according these women their rightful place in music culture ... Chapter after chapter, Winder shows how these four women persevered, in the face of indignity and trauma ... It’s a grim indictment of the band and their enabling coterie. Winder is deeply empathetic to these women, and her disgust for the band and their yes men is plain, but she is hardly a critical biographer; she leaves the reader to draw their own judgments ... A welcome reprieve from the typical Stones hagiography, which casts Mick and Keef as self-made gods ... A valiant start.
Ryan H. Walsh
RaveBookforumThe secret history unspools like an endless bar yarn, an almost-impossible tale in which obscure and famous figures are tethered in conspiracy and coincidence. Walsh’s voice is casual, his prose accessible, and his humor occasionally eviscerating. We follow the author as he hunts for witnesses who can explain a heretofore unexamined and mysterious time in Morrison’s career ... Walsh’s story continually connects seemingly disparate events, creating a Day-Glo Venn diagram of ’60s countercultural history ... Walsh unearths a lot of revelatory rock lore, but ultimately the story functions as a map of how organic culture worked in that place and time, the weird kids and their weird ideas that eventually codified into industries and institutions ... Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 is another right-on-time reminder of how crucial participation is in keeping art and music alive.
Joe Hagan
RaveBookforum\"Sticky Fingers may sell on the basis of its ample and sometimes ridiculous rock-world lore—Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney eagerly avail themselves for score-settling—but this is all incidental to the book’s grander purposes. Hagan’s most enviable feat is that he makes this harsh history readable not by portraying Wenner as a redeemable figure (there’s no goblin with a heart of gold here), but instead by centralizing the very ambitious women who made Wenner’s path-blazing possible … Hagan’s book is both highbrow cultural digest—a curious journalistic trip through the past fifty years of the (largely white) halls of music-biz power—and, thanks to the debauched nature of rock ’n’ roll’s coagulants sex and drugs, a gloriously trashy read. Wenner’s bad side seats thousands, making for some grade-A gossip and catty digs. That said, the rock-cultural deep dive Hagan provides is also crucial and compelling.\
