Stone Alone: The Story of a Rock 'n' Roll Band »

Bill Wyman, the Rolling Stones' bass player for thirty years, has also released several successful solo albums. He departed the band in 1993.

Bill Wyman's diary recounting the chaotic life of a Rolling Stone.

Library Journal

As ``the world's greatest rock 'n' roll band'' lurches into its fourth decade, it seems improbable that any Stone remains unturned by publishers eager for biographies and histories. Contributing to the growing Rolling Stones bibliography is A. E. Hotchner's recently published Blown Away: The Rolling Stones and the Death of the Sixties ( LJ 10/15/90), and now the group's first autobiographical account by Wyman, bass player with the group since 1962. The Stones and the Sixties have almost become synonymous, and it is on this period--from the band's beginnings in small jazz clubs to the Hyde Park concert in July 1969 two days after Brian Jones's death--that Wyman concentrates. The early struggles, riotous concerts, musicianship, ever-shifting group dynamics, financial irregularities with manager Allen Klein, innumerable problems and triumphs of Jones, drug busts, and romantic involvements and relationships are all chronicled in great detail. That Wyman, at once observer and participant in this musical and cultural maelstrom, has been a prodigious diarist is both the strength and weakness of his book. His story is often significant, as in his disclosure that Jones may have been an epileptic, but also tedious in the and-then-we-did-this approach he often employs. Essential for all Stones fans and libraries. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/90.-- Barry Miller, Austin P.L., Tex.