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.
This interview has been edited and in some places re-sequenced for clarity.
Beachwood: Starting off, were you looking at Beggars Banquet to build a journalism career or as a way of ingratiating yourself to the Stones? And ultimately, did you see yourself as fan with a fanzine or as a reporter covering the beat you loved the most?
German: That’s really what it was – it was my beat. I started Beggars Banquet in September 1978. It was the week of my 16th birthday. I was a junior in high school, at South Shore High School in Brooklyn, where I was taking journalism classes. I was a crazy Rolling Stones fan but I was also a fan of journalism. And one of the things that really annoyed me was, other than Rolling Stone and Creem and WNEW in New York, everyone got the story wrong.
The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls came out in the summer of 1978. They went on tour and all the articles about them in the local paper and on the radio shows just kept screwing up the facts and it drove me crazy.
When it came to the Stones, I just had this crazy desire to get the story right. And that’s what motivated me. Wanting to ingratiate myself with the Stones, that was maybe somewhere in the back of my mind, but definitely not in the first year or two of doing it because I didn’t even show it to the Stones for the first year, year-and-a-half.
As far as it leading to a journalism career, I had no idea where it would lead. I wanted to be a journalist but I didn’t know if these two would connect me or lead anywhere. It was really an end unto itself, starting Beggar’s Banquet, at least when I was 16-years-old. I did it almost without thinking about it, that’s how passionate I was. I was a Rolling Stones know-it-all, and I needed to put all of this knowledge and energy into some kind of outlet. That was it. I didn’t care if I got one reader or a million readers, it didn’t matter. I was just going to keep putting this thing out.
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Beachwood: Did you have a mentor teaching you how to do the journalism of Beggars Banquet or were you just driven by your love for the subject?
German: More the latter. I wish I had a mentor. I really didn’t actually. If I had any mentor, I know this sounds crazy, I think it was Tom Snyder on the Tomorrow show. He was my idol. I would stay up and watch his show when I was a teenager, and from watching him, I just got a sense of journalism and journalistic ethics.
I didn’t really have a hands-on mentor to ask questions if I dealt with any kinds of problems. But somehow, I just kind of had some kind of journalistic ethics that I picked up, you know just like from reading the New York Times, or watching someone like Snyder. And really, from the one year of journalism I took from Mr. Weber, who I mention in the book very briefly, in high school, and a year of journalism in college before I dropped out to follow the Rolling Stones.
Maybe I was an underachiever, because I channeled all of my journalistic knowledge into a fanzine about the Rolling Stones. But it really was my favorite beat, and it was a subject that I really had a passion for. I probably would have had the same passion if I was covering the White House or the New York Mets, but I honestly felt like there were people out there who could do that job better than me. But when it came to the Rolling Stones, I felt like I can do this job as well, if not better than anyone else out there. So it was that knowledge that drove me.
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Beachwood: At what point did you say, after starting in your pajamas, I am really doing this – I am actually covering the Rolling Stones?
German: When I was 20-years-old, once I moved into my apartment. I took over the lease from Keith Richard’s “pharmacist,” and I was paying incredibly cheap rent. And so I knew that this was it; I am living on my own and my parents aren’t paying my way. I only have to come up with $300 a month, which probably still seemed like a lot back then, but I only had to make $4,000 a year.
I realized this was my job. It became a full-time occupation because the Stones were always doing something. If I wanted to cover them as best I could, it was a full-time occupation. I couldn’t have any other job. It also had a lot to do with the hours of it all. During the day I was at the printers and the post office; at night, I am off chasing the Stones at some nightclub because I want to see Keith jam with Chuck Berry or something like that. So I guess that was the point, when I was 20-years-old, and I had been doing it for four years when I realized, this is now turning into a career.
Within a month or two of moving into that apartment, I got the phone call from the Stones management, saying, “Hey, Mick and Keith love your little newsletter and they want to take your fanzine, that you started in your pajamas and printed out in your high school mimeo room, and they want to turn it into their official newsletter and advertise it in their next album, which turned out to be Undercover, and you’ll get to interview them and you’ll get to go out on the road with them.”
So then it just took off and then it was like, well, this is really my job. I couldn’t even think about doing some other fanzine about some other subject or any freelance stuff. It just took up every minute of my day. But that was fine; I was able to cover my nut you know, pay for my cheap rent, pay for my food and write about a subject that I loved.
Beachwood: It must have been a 20-hour-a-day job.
German: It really was at points. I just kept going and going. I don’t think that I could do it at this age. But back then, in my 20s and early thirties, I had the stamina to do it and you can do it substance-free. I didn’t even drink coffee. I really just did it on pure adrenaline and emotion and desire.
There was one issue were Keith’s eye didn’t fill in properly in the picture. I sat there with a number two pencil filling in his eyeball in each one like a hundred times in every copy. I remember another issue where I said that something took place in June but it was really July, and I remember sitting with an eraser, I don’t even know how it erased because it was ink, but I sat there with my eraser and an ink pen and replacing the “ne” with an “ly.” It’s something that people can’t even relate to today because you click and you delete and that’s it. Back then, that’s what it required. It was a mistake that I caught too late, after the printing. I sat on each issue and did that.
I just felt I never wanted to let my readers down and my readers were me. I mean, all I ever put into the fanzine was what I would have wanted if I were on the other side, if I was receiving it in the mail. So I really knew what the fans wanted.
And maybe that’s the difference; for a lot of these people (music journalists) it’s just a job. I don’t even know what’s on MTV but I would guess it’s got very little to do with music. But whoever is on there and supposedly giving you music news, they’re on there because they want to be famous. Whoever it is, Carson Daly or whoever, he just wants to be famous, it doesn’t matter what the venue is for him. That’s his goal, and not to pick on Carson Daly but it’s all of them, whoever they are. They just want to hang out and go to some parties and get free stuff.
That’s the problem, and you see that across the board, the people running the radio stations and the people running the record companies, as well as the artists, obviously. You look at these little girls that are coming out with their songs; they might have one or two little catchy tunes but they are just there for the fame more than the music. So that’s where the passion goes out of it.
Beachwood: In the face of the Internet for 24-hour celebrity news, and eBay for memorabilia, can guys like Bill German exist anymore?
German: Can I exist being the fanzine guy? I don’t think so, certainly not as a hard copy fanzine. Things are more accessible. Although, I hear from my old people, now that I have a website – I’m not a total Luddite – who tell me how much they miss that experience. They loved coming home from work or school, and seeing Beggars Banquet in the mailbox. They would open it up and just sit there on their front steps and read it immediately. That’s a nice feeling.
I think some of those people would still pay for a hard copy fanzine but less and less obviously. None of the kids, no one who is 30 or under would care and that just makes it obsolete. Especially now that everyone can do it. You had to have the passion to do a fanzine, which meant that you had to believe that you were good at it. And now the Internet has allowed anyone with a keyboard to put anything they want up there. You have no idea whether it is accurate in terms of your favorite band.
The marketplace is just too flooded for someone like me to exist nowadays because people would just say, who cares about Bill German. There are a hundred other places to get information. It wouldn’t matter that I was the best – let’s just say that I was, just for argument’s sake – because there are just so many now and everyone thinks that they are entitled to their opinions.
It’s a great thing, the democratization that the Internet has brought, that everybody could do it; that was sort of the DIY ethic of fanzines back then. But back then the dividing line was that passion. But now it is so cloudy and muddied up that no, I don’t think someone like me can exist anymore.
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Beachwood: Were there tough moments of balancing your journalistic integrity and your love for the Stones where you said, I don’t want to put this out because it might hurt the Stones?
German: There were a couple of instances. There was one time when I was interviewing Bill Wyman in England. It was my first time overseas. I was 23-years-old. I wasn’t as close to him as I was Mick and Keith and Ronnie, but that was largely a geographical thing because he lived in London the whole time. Whenever I did see him, he was actually pretty nice to me. He had me over to his office, and he gave me a pretty good interview.
Then he dropped a bombshell on me: He revealed to me that Mick had tried to throw him out of the band a couple of times. At the time that he told me this, in 1986, this was exclusive news. I don’t even know why he volunteered this to me. But I did sit on that. As a journalist, I am embarrassed that I sat on it, but I knew that if I put that in Beggars Banquet, it would be too explosive.
Mick, as well as the Stones management and their lawyers, had already hassled me about some of the things that I had put in the newsletter. Them complaining to me had a chilling effect on me. So I just kind of skipped over the fact the Mick had tried to throw Bill Wyman out of the band.
Beachwood: In the book, you describe emotionally transitioning from work being fun to fun being work, and losing some of your drive to keep operating Beggars Banquet. What kept you going?
German: I loved getting the story; I still loved the journalism part of it. I still enjoyed chasing a story, tracking down and interviewing sources or witnessing an event myself. It was still putting together a fanzine and writing about a subject that I loved, even if some of the people around the Stones, or the Stones themselves- well, Mick- were giving me a hard time.
I also felt like I had this commitment to the readers. I was in a very unique situation. Being in New York and having befriended the Stones as a fan, it was almost like a responsibility to my fellow fans. I was in this unique position to give fans the news that they wanted and at the time, no one else could do this. I was in the right place at the right time, with the right temperament.
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Tomorrow: The Stones go corporate.
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Comments welcome.
Posted on May 5, 2010