The Rolling Stones members Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are known as ladies men, but according The Guardian‘s review of the new Bill Wyman documentary ‘The Quiet One,’ Wyman and the late Brian Jones were with significantly more women by just 1965.
In Stone Alone, the bassist was more effusive on the subject, while also tipping off his talent for chronicling. “I fared much better than the others in the girl department,” he wrote. “In 1965, we sat down one evening in a hotel and worked that out. Since the band had started two years earlier, I’d had 278 girls, Brian (Jones) 130, Mick (Jagger) about thirty, Keith (Richards) six, and Charlie (Watts) none.”
More detail of this sort would have been a useful addition for the film. Many of the subject’s observations are bland. He describes the Stone’s historic concert in Hyde Park, directly after the death of Brian Jones, simply as “extraordinary”.
He’s more colorful about the Stones’ time as tax exiles living in France, where he met James Baldwin, who introduced him to the music of Ray Charles, who became his idol. There’s also rare footage of Wyman creating his hilarious, new wave novelty, solo hit in 1981, Je Suis Un Rock Star, as well as of his heady time backing Howlin’ Wolf, along with Clapton and Charlie Watts.
NYUNews wrote in a review:
Sitting alone amid piles of cameras, photos, videos and more, Bill Wyman begins to give the audience a trip through the archives he has built across five decades. The former Rolling Stones bassist opened up this collection to filmmakers for the first time in 2014, and its material not only details the rise of the band, but also documents the man’s entire life in depth.
“The Quiet One,” directed by Oliver Murray, uses mostly voice-over from its subject, allowing him to tell the stories everyone knows — and the ones they don’t. This decision provides a connection to the subject that some documentary films lack and gives the audience a chance to feel a kind of kinship with the subject.
