Author Barry Coleman said that the memoir he was ghostwriting for Mick Jagger was scrapped due to the book being boring, according to NME.com. Coleman, who was the second writer hired to interview and write the book for Jagger, recalled publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson hiring him in 1983 and picking up the project where the original author left off.
Coleman recalled, “Two chapters were more or less presentable. The rest was a pile of interview transcripts, and nothing related to recent years. Stitching everything together was an awful experience.”
Coleman remembered that Jagger had covered meeting partner Keith Richards, Stones co-founder Brian Jones‘ 1969 death, and that year’s infamous free concert at the Altamont Speedway.
He went on to say, “All the big stuff was in there — there just wasn’t anything interesting said about it. There was always this sense in the transcripts that Mick was holding back, or trying not to hurt anybody’s feelings. We’d talked a lot about whether he still wanted to go ahead, or whether we could do it again, but differently. Mick didn’t blame me. He just didn’t want to do it.”
Coleman respected the Stones frontman for pulling the plug on a book that was destined to be lackluster: “I think he respected his audience by not giving them something ordinary about an extraordinary life. I’ve lived with this story for 38 years with a certain frustration, but in a way it tells you more about Mick than anything that could have come out in a mediocre book. It needed Mick to be able to talk to someone like he might a therapist, approach his life from a tangent. Instead, we ended up with something that was too pedestrian for Mick Jagger.”
Coming on Friday (July 9th) is the Rolling Stones’ new multimedia set, The Rolling Stones — A Bigger Bang: Live On Copacabana Beach.
SIDE NOTES
- Regarding many of his peers penning their memoirs while homebound during the shutdown, Mick Jagger recently told BBC Radio, “I could’ve done that, yeah. It was a thing that people started doing, writing. I think in the ’80s I started it and I was offered a lot of money. . . when I actually started to get into it I really didn’t enjoy it. . . reliving my life, to the detriment of living in the now. If you wanna write an autobiography, this is not a process you can just do in a week — it takes a lot out of you. It takes a lot of reliving emotions, reliving friendships, reliving ups and downs.”
- Jagger added: “It was all simply dull and upsetting, and there really weren’t that many highs out of it. So, I just said ‘I can’t be bothered with this,’ and gave the money back to my publisher.”
CHECK IT OUT: The Stones on December 18th, 1981 performing “Let Me Go” live in Hampton Roads, Virginia: