By Drew Adamek
A Rock ‘n’ Roll Love Story: Bill German and the Rolling Stones
Bill German lived every literate rock ‘n’ roll fan’s wet dream: He turned a teenage cut-and-paste fanzine into a globetrotting adventure, rubbing shoulders with an unbelievable coterie of rock stars, celebrities and sycophants. For 17 years, he wrote, designed, published and circulated more than 100 issues of Beggars Banquet, the paper of record about the World’s Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll band.
German started Beggars Banquet in his bedroom as an aspiring teenage journalist in 1978 with little more than a pair of scissors, illicit access to his high school’s mimeograph room and an obsessive determination to get the story right. He created a newsletter that published everything fit to print about the Stones: public sightings, tour plans, recording updates, show reports and exclusive interviews.
He started out selling copies at Manhattan record shops, but over time Beggars Banquet grew to include thousands of subscribers from all over the world. German dropped out of NYU journalism school after a year to work full-time on the ‘zine. He never made much more than a subsistence wage for all his efforts. He kept Beggars Banquet going out of a love for journalism, the thrill of the chase and an unbridled passion for all things Stones.
Then German got his big break outside of a Manhattan nightclub one night when he handed Keith Richards and Ron Wood a copy of his newsletter. The Stones loved it, becoming supporters and important sources of information for him. In 1984, the band made Beggars Banquet its official newsletter.
German also fell in with the Stones personally; he co-authored a book with Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards took him under his wing and gave him some of his best tips. Mick Jagger was “a nice bunch of fellas” to him.
Under Their Thumb: How a Nice Boy From Brooklyn Got Mixed Up With The Rolling Stones (And Lived to Tell About It), chronicles German’s journey from high school kid with a passion for the Rolling Stones to band confidant and back. But more than a kiss-and-tell insider account of the Rolling Stones, Under Their Thumb is also a journalist’s tale, full of ethical conflicts and hard-earned learning experiences.
German set out to become a writer, not by classroom theory but by covering the beat he loved most. He followed the old journalism saw: Write what you know, and write as if you were the audience. He took his journalism seriously and practiced it with a passion rarely seen in music journalism these days.
The Beachwood talked to German recently about what drove him to dedicate most of his life to writing about the Rolling Stones, what happened to all the passion in rock ‘n’ roll, and what it takes to hang with the Rolling Stones.
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Posted on May 5, 2010
