God, what a delicious, gossipy, glamorous, but also emotional and thoughtful read is Parachute Women, Elizabeth Winder’s account of the Rolling Stones, from the time of their little-remembered album Out of Our Heads (1965) to their masterpiece Exile on Main St. (1972), and their four most significant girlfriends.
The women are given every bit as much play as Keith Richards and Mick Jagger (Brian Jones has a smaller role in the story, while the others —Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts—are just mentioned very briefly), and to have a palpably authentic female sensibility threaded into the lives of the greatest (and most macho) rock ’n’ roll group of all time is an overdue, relishable novelty. Her appealingly feminist thesis: “Marsha [Hunt], Bianca [Jagger], Marianne [Faithfull] and Anita [Pallenberg] never wanted to domesticate the Stones—it was the other way around.”
