NEW YORK – Bill Wyman stopped counting at around 1,800. He had been keeping a journal.
The Rolling Stones’ bassist, who quit the band in 1993 after 31 years, documented each encounter by name: a ledger of the years when the Stones were arguably the most famous band on earth and backstage access meant something different than it does now. According to Bob Spitz, whose biography “The Rolling Stones: The Biography” arrives this week from Penguin Press, three members of the band once sat down and compared their sexual histories. The numbers bore no resemblance to the legend.
Wyman’s tally put him at the extreme end of a scale that fell sharply on the other side. Mick Jagger, whose name has appeared in more romantic narratives than perhaps any other rock musician of his generation, estimated his total “in the hundreds.” Keith Richards, whose image of narcotics, riffs and studied danger has defined a particular rock archetype for sixty years, said he had counted four.
Four.
The disparity reads like a punchline, but Spitz frames it as a portrait of who each man actually was behind the image he carried for decades. Marianne Faithfull, romantically involved with Jagger for several years in the late 1960s, reportedly told Spitz that the single night she spent with Richards was “the most romantic night of her life.” The guitarist rock mythology crowned the ultimate bad boy was, in private, the most tender.
Wyman’s approach was industrial by comparison. During concerts, according to Spitz, the bassist would scan the crowd near the stage. Roadies would approach selected women afterward and extend an invitation backstage. The mechanics were routine; the journal was the archive.
Spitz does not present these revelations as uncomplicated entertainment. He places Wyman’s behavior alongside the chapter that became one of the most discussed tabloid stories of the late 1980s in Britain: Wyman’s relationship with Mandy Smith, who was 18 when he married her in 1989 at age 52. Reports at the time established the relationship had begun when Smith was 13. The marriage ended in 1993, the same year Wyman left the Stones.
Spitz is best known for his 2005 biography of the Beatles, a work that became the standard reference for that band’s history. He spent several years researching the Stones biography, according to Penguin Press, drawing on interviews with former associates and archival material that had not been previously published. The publisher has positioned the book as the most thorough unauthorized account of the band in four decades.
The book takes its place alongside a tradition of comprehensive rock biography that has accelerated as the musicians who defined the 1960s and 1970s age. Spitz’s approach, which worked to such effect on the Beatles, involves assembling testimony from sources who witnessed events from different vantage points. The sex-tally comparison, by its nature, required at least one participant in that conversation to agree to describe it.
The biography covers the band’s full timeline: their beginnings in London’s rhythm-and-blues clubs in the early 1960s, where Brian Jones, Jagger and Richards first converged; the management conflicts; the lineup changes; the deaths and absences that reshaped the group’s identity over six decades. Jones drowned in his swimming pool in 1969 at 27. Charlie Watts died of cancer in 2021 at 80, and the band subsequently recorded “Hackney Diamonds,” their first album of new material in 18 years, without him.
In the same week Spitz’s book appeared, Welsh rock singer Bonnie Tyler died at 75 in Portugal, another voice from the era that the Rolling Stones helped shape now gone. The coincidence offered a reminder of how much of that world has passed in the years since Wyman put down his journal.
According to Fox News, which first reported on the biography’s revelations, the current Rolling Stones lineup of Jagger, Richards and Ronnie Wood has not publicly responded to the book’s claims. Wyman, now 88, has not commented publicly.
What Spitz has produced is a biography of a band that accumulated mythology faster than it could accumulate evidence. The sex tally is among the book’s details that have traveled farthest in the days around publication: the kind of specific number that lodges where abstractions slide off. The comparison among three bandmates took place at some point across the decades; Spitz provides the count, not the room.
Richards, who has spent most of his adult life cultivating an image as rock’s most reliable survivor, emerges from that comparison as the most unexpected figure in the story. He had four. Jagger had hundreds. Wyman stopped at 1,800 and wrote down every name.
The Rolling Stones have sold an estimated 240 million records worldwide. The number making the rounds on the weekend their biography appeared is considerably smaller. It belongs to the bassist who left thirty years ago, not the singer, not the guitarist whose four has attracted more attention than perhaps anything in his vicinity.
