It’s just rock and roll…until someone starts counting.
From the moment they burst onto the music scene, the Rolling Stones embraced their reputation as rock’n’roll’s ultimate bad boys, cultivating an aura of rebellion and danger that captivated fans and shocked critics. Their music pushed boundaries, and so did their love lives.
In The Rolling Stones: A Biography, Bob Spitz chronicles the band’s decades-long career and argues that Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and their bandmates became as famous for their off-stage excesses as they did for packed arenas and chart-topping hits.
“The Stones have always been known for their off-stage behavior,” Spitz told FOX News Digital. “One time, when Bill Wyman, Keith Richards, and Mick Jagger were older men, they got together to determine how many women they had slept with over the years. It was a shocking number.”
“Bill stopped counting at about 1,800,” Spitz claimed. “He kept a diary with the names of all the women he spent the night with. Mick thought the total was in the hundreds. Keith counted to four on his fingers. So when you look at them as an orgy band, you have to put things into perspective. Keith, the worst of the delinquents, turned out to be the most romantic of the Stones.”
The tally called into question one of rock’s longest-running assumptions: that the band’s most notorious outlaw was also its biggest womanizer.
FOX News Digital has reached out to a Rolling Stones spokesperson for comment.
Richards has never publicly disclosed the number of sexual partners he has had. In interviews and his memoir, Life, he primarily focuses on the women who have had a major impact on his life, particularly Anita Pallenberg and his wife Patti Hansen. Richards has often said that drugs and music dominated his life more than his pursuit of women.
If Richards challenged stereotypes, Wyman reinforced them. He was described as the group’s “invincible hound,” Spitz wrote.
“Bill Wyman had a tradition in the band that he couldn’t sleep alone,” Spitz told FOX News Digital. “Each night he scouted the most beautiful young women standing closest to the stage. He would point out one or two and one of the roadies would invite them backstage.”
“Bill was the oldest person at Rolling Stone,” Spitz said. “Initially, he was the only married member of the Rolling Stones. But once he joined the band, he became free. He was, without a doubt, the most dissolute man in all of the Stones.”
However, Wyman’s personal life ended up causing controversy far beyond the band’s usual extravagance.
Wyman married his first wife, Diane Corey, in 1959. Their son, Stephen, was born in 1962, but they divorced in 1969. In 1989, Wyman married his second wife, Mandy Smith. He was 52 years old and she was 18. According to multiple reports, the two met when she was 13 and he was 48.
Spitz writes that the relationship was “rebellious” for Jagger, whose daughters Caris and Jade are older than Smith. The rest of the group read Wyman as “Riot Law.” According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, Wyman later expressed regret about the marriage.
“Rock and rollers have always gotten a pass,” Spitz said. “As a biographer, I can’t give them a pass. I’m sorry. I have a responsibility when looking into these things.”
By the late 60s, it had become almost impossible to separate romantic lines within the Stones’ circle.
As The Times of London later summarized, the band’s romantic entanglements often overlapped. Richards slept with Pallenberg, and Pallenberg slept with Jagger. Marianne Faithfull slept with Brian Jones, Richards and Jagger, and Jagger also slept with Jones’ girlfriend Pat Andrews.
Jagger proposed to Faithful in 1968, but she declined.
Spitz writes that it was no secret to Faithfull and “much of London” that Jagger had “two violent affairs with her” with Marcia Hunt.
“Marianne Faithful said Keith was the most romantic person,” Spitz said. “The night she spent with Keith was the most romantic night of her life.”
Spitz claims that Jones set the tone for the band’s reckless reputation long before the band became part of the Rolling Stones mythos.
“Brian had five children by the time he was 21,” Spitz said. “He had resettled alone in post-war England. That didn’t really affect the band’s stability, because every time a paternity lawsuit came up, the Stones decided to pay off those who had been harmed by Brian’s actions. That affected the band’s finances. But believe it or not, the band’s reputation improved little by little.”
“They decided in the early ’60s that they were going to be the anti-Beatles,” Spitz continued.
“That was supposed to be their image. They weren’t going to take a bow at the end of every song. They weren’t going to wear suits on stage. Civility was out the window. They tried to act like they were dancing. It meant going their own way, being a little arrogant and arrogant. They wore street clothes and smoked cigarettes on stage. They were bad boys, and they liked being bad boys.”
Mr. Jones drowned in 1969. I was 27 years old at the time. The coroner recorded his death as “death due to misfortune.”
In his book, Spitz detailed how sex complicated the band’s relationships. He described how Jagger and Pallenberg played a couple in 1970’s Performance and had sex in the film.
“There were a number of highly explicit videos of Mick and Anita having intense sex that Anita had taken with a handheld movie camera, which were then edited into another steamy adult featurette,” Spitz wrote, quoting a Rolling Stones employee.
Pallenberg, who died in 2017 at the age of 75, confirmed the story in a personal diary quoted in the 2024 documentary Catching Fire, Page Six reported.
Spitz writes that “things got itchy” between Pallenberg and Richards. The house they were renting was a “pressure cooker of tension and frustration, polluting its once carefree atmosphere.”
“Even Keith, who has always been fearless, couldn’t handle this,” Faithful recalled, as quoted in the book.
After decades of affairs, marriages, breakups and betrayals, the band’s longest-running love story was anything but romance.
“The Stones have a magic that binds them through thick and thin, and there were plenty of thin moments,” Spitz told FOX News Digital.
“Over the years, there were times when Mick and Keith weren’t talking to each other. There were times when they weren’t making the music they were making now. But somehow, they’ve connected with audiences time and time again.”
“Everything about the band is about the relationship between Mick and Keith,” Spitz said. “Their trust is very important to the survival of the Rolling Stones. There were times, especially in the ’90s, when things were quite tense. But theirs is a love story.”
“They have a lot of respect for each other. When Keith married Patti Hansen, who did he choose to be his groomsman? The guy he wasn’t talking about, Mick Jagger. This tells you everything about them. You see how strong their bond is and how much they really care and love each other.”
