Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: he started out hustling gigs for an unknown Bruce Springsteen for six years, moved on to handling Elton John’s American business, and spent long enough in the world to find himself jamming with Paul McCartney and chatting with Bob Dylan on a stoop in the Village. The Reagan and Julia Child books are harder to explain, and perhaps that’s the point—Spitz seems to do his best work when he has no business writing the book at all.
Tyler and Bob discuss how the Stones became so great so quickly, what they added to the blues, how their melodies stack up against the Beatles’, whether Exile on Main Street deserves its canonical status, which songs are most underrated, what Charlie Watts actually got out of playing in a rock band, the rise and fall of Brian Jones, how the Stones outlasted nearly everyone, the influence of Mick’s London School of Economics training, why popular music has lost its cultural influence, what we should still be asking Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, whether the Beatles’ breakup was good for the world, how senile Reagan really was in his second term and whether he was ever truly a communist, how good a cook Julia Child actually was, his next book on Lennon’s second act, and much more.
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Recorded April 28th, 2026.
Thanks to a listener who sponsored this transcript in memory of their beloved aunt, Eileen Thompson.
TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I’m sitting here chatting with the great Bob Spitz, the biographer. He has a new book out, which I enjoyed very much, The Rolling Stones: The Biography. He has other very well-known books on the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Ronald Reagan, Julia Child, and more. Bob, welcome.
BOB SPITZ: My pleasure, Tyler. Nice to be with you.
COWEN: Did the Rolling Stones have a long apprenticeship period the way the Beatles did? It seems they didn’t. How did they become so great so quickly?
SPITZ: Actually, they did. They worked in a little club called the Crawdaddy Club, which was in Richmond, a suburb of London. They worked long and hard there. In fact, the first time, and I document this in the book, the first time they show up, only six kids show up. They’re despondent. They go and talk to the head of the club. He said, “Look, play as if there are 100 people there and next week, there will be 100 people.”
Next week, there was 100 people. They played as if there were 100. The next week, 200 came. They worked in that club for about six months. Then they went on the road. They played a lot of really crappy little places, the same way that the Beatles did. Perhaps not as long an apprenticeship, but they served their time pretty well.
COWEN: That seems quite short, those six months. You read about Paul McCartney. He writes songs when he’s age 14, age 16. Is there anything comparable in the Rolling Stones?
SPITZ: No, not really. The Stones never dreamed that they would write music. It was beyond them. They were blues singers. Their primary goal in life was to bring that rich catalog of Delta and Mississippi, and Chicago blues to the world. They did not care about writing songs at all. They saw themselves as authentic blues masters. It was only their young manager, Andrew Oldham, who insisted if they were going to go anywhere, if they were going to compete in the music world, the pop music world, they would have to write music. They gave it a try. This came maybe two years after they were already on the road.
COWEN: There’s something they added to the blues. If you were to put your finger on what that was, the secret to their sound, the blues plus X, what’s the X there?
SPITZ: Rock ‘n’ roll. The X is rock ‘n’ roll. They jacked it up. They hotwired the blues. They turned it into a sound that we now know as rock ‘n’ roll. Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley started that sound. Then the Stones really gave it extra power and ferocious guitar and gave us the sound that we now know as rock ‘n’ roll today.
COWEN: They also have some songs that are very good. You could say almost Country and Western music, say, circa 1968. There’s some other element musically other than just rocking that they’re adding all along.
SPITZ: Absolutely. They took the records that the American servicemen had left behind after World War II. They left thousands of records behind. The majority of them were Country and Western records. The Stones grew up, like the Beatles did too, loving Country and Western music, courtesy of the American servicemen.
COWEN: Viewed objectively, how good are their melodies, just as melodies? If you ask about the Beatles, here, there, and everywhere, that’s an A-double-plus melody. How do you rate the Stones?
SPITZ: I would rate them maybe a B minus. Their rock and roll melodies are spectacular. “Gimme Shelter,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” these are melodies that I would put up against some of the Beatles’ better songs, but perhaps not as lush, not as romantic as the Beatles. Melodies in a different mode.
COWEN: Why was the album Satanic Majesty’s Request such a failure? Maybe you disagree, but I never listened to it.
SPITZ: I don’t disagree at all. Yes, it was a failure. What they did was they were trying to mimic the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s. You can’t copy. You really have to play what’s in your heart. I think they knew it. Certainly, the other people who took part in that, Satanic Majesty’s, knew it. The album’s rarely played, rarely listened to.
COWEN: They mimicked many other things quite well, including the blues, sometimes the Beatles themselves. They did “I Want to Be Your Man.” Arguably, their version was better. What was it about the psychedelic, or maybe it was studio production, that they couldn’t mimic so well?
SPITZ: Yes, it just wasn’t in their wheelhouse. They were not a psychedelic band. They certainly did as many psychedelic drugs as the Beatles, perhaps more, but the music just didn’t come to them easily. They gave it a shot, and then they went back to what they did best.
COWEN: Is it true that they weren’t an album-oriented band, the way the Beatles at least became?
SPITZ: I don’t know if I’d say that. The Beatles had concept albums. Sgt. Pepper’s was a concept album. Abbey Road is a concept album in its own way. Even The White Album is somewhat of a concept album, and certainly Magical Mystery Tour.
The Stones didn’t do that. I think their albums were solid. They followed a pattern. They knew how to sequence the music so that the music built on the albums the same way that the Beatles built their energy on each album. I think perhaps the Stones, when it came to engineering, when it came to production, worked even a little harder than the Beatles. They were in the studio a lot longer.
COWEN: Which, in your view, is their best album, if you had to say?
SPITZ: Yes. Listen, I am a Beggars Banquet, Let it Bleed, man, those two albums. All the hits, there they are. That was the hot spot of the Rolling Stones’ career as far as I care.
COWEN: I think those would be my picks. Exile on Main Street as an album. Is that really so great? There was a time when rock critics would put that in the top 10 albums of all time. Sometimes when I put it on, it just sounds like quite a bit of bluesy sludge. It’s all pretty good, but none of it sticks with me that much. Am I missing something there?
SPITZ: As far as I care, no. I’ve had friends who would call me on the carpet for that. A lot of people hear that album in a different way than you and I heard it. They hear it as something authentic, something that moves from genre to genre. There are blues songs, there are rock songs, there are Country and Western songs. For my money, I agree with Mick Jagger. Mick Jagger can’t listen to that album. That isn’t one of his favorites.
I think it’s because he didn’t really participate much on that album. He had just gotten married. They were in France. Everyone was in France, in exile. Mick was flying all over the world with his new wife. Every once in a while, he would check into the session and participate in the recording. It’s a mixed bag. We hear it in different ways, but I agree with you. Exile on Main Street is—I think they didn’t need two albums, and it gets sloppy and mushy.
COWEN: If you had to pick a most underrated Rolling Stones song, what is it?
SPITZ: Wow, that’s a good one. Wow, you’ve stumped me, Tyler.
COWEN: I’d say “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?,” which is pretty well known, but it’s one of their top half dozen songs, and I don’t think it’s that famous.
SPITZ: Maybe I’d say “19th Nervous Breakdown.”
COWEN: That was my other pick, yes.
SPITZ: It was the follow-up to “Satisfaction.” It got lost in the furor that “Satisfaction” made, and yet I think it has the same spark, the same energy, the same bite, the same snap, and it really showcases the Stones in that whole rock ‘n’ roll “Satisfaction” garage band mode that they got.
COWEN: I think it’s actually their very best song, if I had to say.
SPITZ: I’ll be darned, thanks.
COWEN: “Dear Doctor” would be another pick for underrated.
SPITZ: Absolutely, right.
COWEN: Which is too folksy to be a seminal or iconic Stones song, but it’s, again, I’d say one of their best.
SPITZ: Yes, and there are quite good songs on Hackney Diamonds, which took me by surprise. Forty years had gone by. The Stones’ music wasn’t as of the moment anymore. They hadn’t had hits in a while. Yet they put a fabulous blues album together when they were 79 years old, which I find absolutely remarkable.
COWEN: Now, as you point out, Charlie Watts was a jazz drummer at heart. Did he actually enjoy playing for the Rolling Stones? Was that just a money thing? Did he ever want out?
SPITZ: Never wanted out. I think he loved it. It brought out another side of Charlie. Charlie was a straight-laced guy. He didn’t say much. He didn’t participate in the hijinks much. When the guys sat down and computed how many women they had slept with, Charlie was out of the conversation completely. He loved to dress, and he dressed beautifully. Savile row clothing. He was a bespoke tailor man. Dressed to a tee. Raised Arabian stallions. Had a collection of the finest cars that money could buy. Never had a driver’s license. Never drove one of them. He was an unusual man, but I think he loved to bring out this other side of him and be the Rolling Stones drummer. Of course, as you know, he was an excellent drummer.
COWEN: Once we get past the early years when he was foundational, what exactly did Brian Jones add to the sound of the Stones, and what changed once he passed away?
SPITZ: Not much. He didn’t bring much to the Stones. As you know, Brian was the leader of the Rolling Stones at one point. He founded the band. He put it together. He named the band. Brian was a musical savant. He could play anything. When he was a young boy, he played piano and saxophone at an incredible level. Of course, learned the guitar, played every kind of instrument, including the sitar, without ever taking a lesson on the sitar.
He brought a lot of intricate musical sounds to the early Stones, but once his ego got involved, once he lost his will to be the band leader, once he couldn’t write music, he stopped contributing. He really did. There was one session in the book in 1968 when Brian shows up at a session and says to Mick, “Hey, Mick, what can I play?” Mick looks at him and says, “Yes, Brian, what can you play?” Because he just wasn’t contributing at all to the band after that.
COWEN: Here’s a sentence from you: “The nascent British rock ‘n’ roll movement was born in art colleges.” Please explain.
SPITZ: Oh, well, art colleges, we don’t have them here, but they are a foundation of UK education. There is an 11-plus test that is given to every student when they’re 11 years old, and it really determines whether or not they’re going to go on to university or they’re going to go to a vocational school. In those early days, a vocational school meant that you’d wind up working in a factory. You’d wind up working as a clerk for the railroad. You’d take on one of those jobs.
Art schools came into being, and this was a repository for people who had talent but didn’t know what to do with it and weren’t that academic. Art schools sprang up in almost every community in the UK. We have people like Jimmy Page coming out of art school, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, all the great rock ‘n’ roll—
COWEN: John Lennon, also, right?
SPITZ: John Lennon, absolutely, went to Liverpool College of Art. It was an incubator for the arts, but also for rock ‘n’ roll because people brought their instruments to school, and they would play in the cloak rooms. That’s where they really formed bands and learned how to play with other musicians. The art school movement really gave us that whole British rock ‘n’ roll thing to this very day. Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine came out of it. Jarvis Cocker came out of art schools. They’re still thriving in the UK, and they’re still giving us new, innovative music.
COWEN: How is it that the Rolling Stones proved so stable? They’re still with us, right? That’s incredible. Led Zeppelin is not still with us. They could still use the name, but they don’t. The Beatles, that’s a long time ago. Why so stable?
SPITZ: Stable is never a word that I would use with the Rolling Stones. Maybe enduring is the proper word. Stability, I don’t know. Their foundation has been rocked time and time again, first with Brian’s death, the drug busts. There are times when Mick and Keith don’t speak to each other.
Let’s talk about their endurance. Their endurance begins with Mick and Keith. The entire enterprise depends on their rapport. Mick being the libidinous peacock, the showman, Keith being the consummate musician. The great thing about it is they do not interfere with each other. They have different tasks. Keith is so happy to let Mick be the front man as long as he can play music. They endure because they love what they do, and they perform.
It’s one thing that John and Paul never learned. In 1966, the Beatles stopped performing. They stopped connecting with their audience. They stopped getting a response from their audience, and they soon came apart. They broke up in the studio. Also, John and Paul competed to be the top musician in that band. No competition with the Stones. They really endure because Mick and Keith love being out there. The minute they stop recording in the studio, Mick says, “Let’s go on the road,” because the bad boys know that if they are not performing, if they’re not in the studio, then trouble arises. To keep them out of trouble, to keep them stable—I’ll use your word, Tyler—Mick keeps them working. I think that is the secret to the Rolling Stones’ longevity.
COWEN: When Mick had that solo recording deal in the early 1980s, I thought at the time, for sure this is it, but it wasn’t.
SPITZ: No, Keith thought it was it too. It offended Keith. He couldn’t believe that Mick, number one, would want to make his own album, but more than that, that Mick would want to go on the road and perform and sing Rolling Stones songs. Keith was just not having it. He was furious. As we know, he attacked Mick in the press. He began referring to Mick as Her Majesty or Brenda, because Keith went by a bookstore in France and saw that there was a novel written by a woman named Brenda Jagger. Mick became Brenda.
To their credit, and this is another example of their stability, Mick turned a deaf ear to almost all of it. Keith really slagged him off in the press. It didn’t bother Mick. He forgave him for it. Also, at the height of their rancor with each other, when Keith turned 40 and married Patti Hansen, who stands up for him as best man? Mick Jagger. It’s that unshakable bond which keeps that band on the road. Those guys are intertwined. Their lives are intertwined. They’re mates for life, and they are the Rolling Stones.
COWEN: Mick once said his favorite economist was Friedrich A. Hayek. Do you know anything more about that?
SPITZ: I do not, actually. I think it’s incredible that Mick had favorite economists. We do know that Mick was a scholarship student to the London School of Economics, and that for two and a half years, he attended and got pretty good grades. He did fairly well. The one thing that amazes me about Mick coming out of that London School of Economics is this. After 1967, when Andrew Loog Oldham stopped managing the Stones, they have never had another manager. They’ve had some money managers, but as far as managers go, Mick Jagger was their manager.
He has served as the Rolling Stones’ manager, bringing all of his experience from the London School of Economics since 1967. He’s negotiated all of the recording contracts, their publishing contracts. Every tour that comes along, he negotiates with the promoters. Every date he oversees, he designs the stage, and he invests the Stones’ money. So remarkable that this guy, a London School of Economics dropout, let’s call him that, has done so well for the rest of the band.
COWEN: A very general question. Why do you think popular music today has less cultural influence than it used to?
SPITZ: An easy answer. I think there are no more musicians. The bands that come out today, they’re performers. They let their producers push all the buttons in the studio. They do sing, but they’re much more interested in showmanship. I think they’ve lost their edge in that respect because they’re not really thinking in terms of studio excellence. They’re not mastering instruments. It’s a different form of music.
Look, I have learned to step aside and give them a wide berth. My daughter is of that age. My parents stepped aside and gave me a wide berth when I discovered the Beatles and Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, of course. I may not understand my daughter’s music or the music of today, but it’s their music, and I don’t begrudge them that.
COWEN: Why have guitarists fallen out of favor?
SPITZ: Yes, because they’re not musicians. They don’t play. They don’t even play keyboards. That’s all done with electronics. I’m going to get crucified for this, but you take a performer like Taylor Swift, beautiful voice and a wonderful performer, I’d love to teach her more than the four chords she knows on guitar.
COWEN: How much real talent do you think The Partridge Family had? You worked with them, right?
SPITZ: Yes, I did. It was my first job out of college. I met a man named Wes Farrell, who was producing The Partridge Family. Interesting. There was a lot of talent involved. Very little of it had to do with The Partridge Family. Again, they were performers. Most of the musicians, even most of the singers on those albums, were done by studio musicians.
Boy, I’m pulling this out of my memory because it was 55 years ago, but there were a pair of twin brothers who did most of the singing as The Partridge Family on the albums. My colleagues, Michael Pell and Jimmy Queticus, with whom I went on to manage Bruce Springsteen, wrote a lot of songs for The Partridge Family. It was a collaborative effort, but it was really a television show.
COWEN: Now, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, they’re still alive, of course. Assuming they would be relatively willing to be open while they’re still with us, what should we be asking them to better understand the history of the Beatles or their lives?
SPITZ: Yes, I think they ought to come clean with the relationships. The relationships were often fraught. We understand that Paul and John were intertwined as songwriters, but that only happened for a very short period of time. I think we should be asking Ringo a little bit about his background, the fact that he never went to school, that he was a very sickly young man who wasn’t supposed to live beyond the age of 10 or 12 years old, lived most of his youth in a hospital recovery room, stricken with polio and other diseases, bronchitis. I’d love to ask them about how they keep their youth, they keep their sound, again, their longevity. I’d like to know the secret. I’d like to drink the same water.
COWEN: Keith Richards and Ringo Starr have held up remarkably—well, Paul McCartney too—they’ve all held up remarkably well.
SPITZ: Look at Mick, too. I went to see the Rolling Stones last year at SoFi Stadium in California, a massive football stadium, and from the stage extended a proscenium that, no exaggeration, was two city blocks long. Mick Jagger danced out and back on that proscenium for two and a half hours. I had to jab my wife in the ribs and say, “You’re looking at an 82-year-old man.” I know how Mick does it. Mick, from a very early age, was an exercise freak.
As we know from my investigation in the book, Mick’s father was the Jack Lalanne of the United Kingdom. He had a television show, an exercise show like Richard Simmons, and he always had a great person to show off the exercises, young Michael. He would say, Mike, get down, show him 50 pushups. Mike, do 100 chins, and Mick would jump to it and do it. That man still has a 27-inch waist at the age of 83.
Keith, on the other hand, is a medical miracle. Look, we all know Keith abused his body. If he had nine lives like a cat, that cat has had nine lives many times over. The fact that he’s still alive, still making music, still has his great sense of humor is beyond anyone’s knowledge. Although it looks like arthritis, of all things, has caught up with him—not drugs, not smoking, not alcohol. It’s his body. It’s arthritis. We’re all headed in that direction, Tyler.
COWEN: When you wrote your Beatles biography, you lived for a year and a half in Liverpool. Putting aside the Beatles, what did you learn about Liverpool?
SPITZ: Fabulous city. Unbelievable. First of all, it has the best Chinese food I’ve ever tasted because it was the port where people came in from China. That was where Chinese food really originated in the Western world. It still has a big Chinese community there.
The town itself, the city itself, was remarkably beautiful. I think that’s because all the Chandlers who built those Cunard ships and Whiteline ships that sailed out of Liverpool built all the buildings there, the interiors of the buildings. They’re gorgeous. The libraries and the bars, and the concert halls were all built by the people who built those ships with the remarkable woods that were still around at that time. The city itself is gorgeous. The people there have a different sense than anybody I’ve ever met, they have a sense of humor.
COWEN: They’re Irish in a sense?
SPITZ: Most of them were Irish. Yes, exactly right. They called themselves Scousers because they made a scouse stew. They kept a pot simmering all week long. Whatever scraps came off one meal went into that pot. At the end of the week, they ate that. It was called scouse. They took the name Scousers. Scousers have a really unique sense of humor. That year and a half, it was almost two years, that I spent commuting between New York City and Liverpool, gave me a remarkable insight into the people and a real education about the history of that unbelievable city.
COWEN: Let’s say we put you in charge of social welfare. Was it good that the Beatles split up when they did? I mean for the world, not for them.
SPITZ: Perhaps it was. I always felt that a lot of people run out of steam after three or four albums. If you look at Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Van Morrison and The Who and maybe even The Rolling Stones, after a couple years, after maybe four or five albums, they start trying to duplicate themselves. The Beatles gave us everything they had, and then they stopped. We have 230-some songs, perhaps the most remarkable songbook, aside from Hammerstein and Rodgers, that we know of from the 1900s on. The Beatles songbook I would put up against anybody’s. I think maybe if they had stayed together, they might have lost some of that spark.
COWEN: Think how many more George songs we got from this split, or Paul songs for that matter.
SPITZ: Absolutely right. George, toward the end, George really came into his own. Even after, in his solo career, we got some real gems out of George. I think it took him a little longer. More than that, I think he learned how to step out of the Lennon-McCartney shadow and stand on his own two feet.
COWEN: What did you learn jamming with Paul McCartney?
SPITZ: Boy, that was an experience.
COWEN: What year is this, just for context?
SPITZ: 1997. The New York Times Magazine sent me to the UK right after Paul was knighted to talk to him about that and give me a few of his memories of John Lennon. We were in Hastings in his house. It was a strange experience because I expected Paul McCartney to have an expensive house. It was really this tiny two-and-a-half, three-bedroom cottage. I said, “Do you actually live here?” He said, “I do.” I said, “But you have five children. You have three bedrooms.” He said, “Linda said that we all need to live on top of one another. That’s what we do. We are a family here.”
As I was leaving, he said, “Hey, you’re a musician, right? Want to see the studio?” Of course, that was like catnip to a guy like me. We went downstairs, and he shows me. It was a room no longer than say my dining room in New York City, but there were all the instruments from Abbey Road that he had, as well as Bill Black’s bass. Bill Black was Elvis Presley’s bass player. Paul had bought all these instruments and maintained them.
He said, “Sit down.” I said, “Sit down?” Paul sat down at the piano, and he nodded me into a guitar. What did we play? We played a few Beatles songs. It was frightening. I played with some great musicians before, but when you see Paul McCartney nodding you into a song, it’s a different feeling altogether, believe me.
COWEN: He was good?
SPITZ: Was he good? Oh, yes. I would say he was good. Then I let him sing “Maybe I’m Amazed” by himself on the piano. That was freakish, having a private audience in a tiny room. Never experienced anything like that before.
COWEN: Why didn’t you like Led Zeppelin at first?
SPITZ: Ah. I knew nothing about Led Zeppelin. I was in the midst of writing a biography of Ronald Reagan. In fact, I had just begun the research on that book. My editor called and said, “Listen, I need to sign you up for another book.” I said, “I’m up to my eyeballs in this. I’m not even thinking of the future.” He said, “No, I’ve always wanted to do this book. We’re going to sign you up now. We’re going to give you a contract. You’re the only guy who can write it.” I said, “Who is it?” He said, “It’s Led Zeppelin.” Tyler, I have to admit, my heart sunk. I knew nothing about the band.
COWEN: How can you know nothing about Led Zeppelin, given all the other things you know? That’s weird. It’s like if I said I know nothing about Adam Smith or Keynes.
SPITZ: I had been on the road with Bruce Springsteen and Elton John while Led Zeppelin came into the forefront. Our paths never crossed. I never listened to their music. I knew that they were a heavy metal band. I wasn’t interested in heavy metal. I have 20,000 vinyl albums in my collection. I didn’t have a single Led Zeppelin album. When my editor asked me about it, I might have been able to mention that I knew “Whole Lotta Love.” I might have known “Stairway to Heaven,” but I couldn’t name another Led Zeppelin song.
I found myself saying to my editor, “Of course, I’m your guy.” I was really happy that I did it. I’m convinced now that I was the right person to do it because I’m a musician. I love music. I was an empty vessel when it came to Led Zeppelin. I just let them fill me up. I really studied it as if I were taking a foreign language and had never studied that language before. It gave me an opportunity to spend a good year and a half before I started writing, listening to their music, trying to understand it.
Asking other great musicians, “Explain John Bonham’s drum technique to me. Explain Jimmy Page’s guitar to me.” I asked Jeff Beck to explain it to me. Jeff Beck was Jimmy’s boyhood neighbor. I came at Led Zeppelin from a neophyte’s angle, and I thought, “Okay, I can be incredibly objective here when it comes to writing about this band.” I was happy that I had the experience to do it. It taught me a lot, and I fell in love with their entire catalog of music that I had never appreciated before.
COWEN: “Stairway to Heaven,” overrated or underrated?
SPITZ: Completely rated as it should be. Although I promised my wife I would never play that song again in the house. I have to do that. However, listen, we all made fun of that song at some point in our lives, but listening to it, I find it remarkable. The same way that I can hear Bob Dylan sing one of the early songs, a song that we’ve heard 100 times, “Blowin’ the Wind,” and it can still bring tears to my eyes when I peel back the layers of the voice, of the instrumentation, of the words. I can do the same thing with “Stairway to Heaven” and really appreciate it for what it is.
COWEN: What can you tell us about Bruce Springsteen’s work ethic?
SPITZ: Wow. Never saw anybody who had a work ethic like Bruce Springsteen. I got a chance to see it up close. When we were kids, when we were 21, Bruce came into our office and auditioned with his guitar. We quit our jobs, Mike Appel and Jim Cretecos and I, we quit our jobs the next day. Bruce, because he lived in Asbury Park and needed to be in New York to record and to see John Hammond, the great Columbia Records producer, Bruce stayed in my apartment.
He wrote a lot of those songs in my apartment. I watched him work and put a band together like never before. Bruce is a master when it comes to rehearsals and making demands on the other musicians. There are a lot of demands. Timing has to be right. Sound has to be right. It has to be everything that’s in his head. He knows exactly what he wants, and he knows how to get it out of people. Yet, he is an incredibly nice person. Just a gentleman.
Not that easy to work with. When it comes to music, because he is so demanding, but really a master of knowing how to work with people and how to get what he hears in his head onto a record and onto a stage. My hat goes off to Bruce. We’ve known each other for 45 years, and he still amazes me.
When Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, he flew back to Chicago that night to make an acceptance speech. The helicopter landed in a field near the stage. Obama hopped out. Michelle hopped out. The next person who hopped out of that was Bruce Springsteen. When I saw that, I burst into tears. We had come a long way. Twenty-one years old, rough kids, unformed, unlicked. Maybe Bruce, less unlicked than me. Here he was with the next president of the United States, the first Black man to accept that honor. It was beyond my imagination.
COWEN: I’m amazed how many of his live versions of songs sound as good and as tight as the studio versions. How does he manage that?
SPITZ: He’s a master performer. He has a beautiful voice. He works harder than anybody I know. How does he stay on stage for three and a half hours and not lose his energy and not lose his voice? It’s another example, a different example of what Keith Richards does. Keith learned how to live through drugs and alcohol. Bruce learned how to extend his life battering his body and his voice on the stage for three and a half hours. You can’t explain these things, Tyler, but we have to know that when one or two of these people come along, it really does as well to sit back and appreciate them because you won’t see people like that very often.
COWEN: What does Bruce maximize? It’s not income, is it?
SPITZ: Oh, no, it’s not income, although his income is astronomical. I think he maximizes his open heart. He has a huge heart. He loves his fans. He is a kind human being. More times than enough, I have seen him after a gig, see kids in the parking lot not knowing how to get home. Bruce, in his truck, which he drove to the gig himself, to a stadium, stops and takes those kids home, picks them up, and takes them home.
He would ring the doorbell and walk them into the house and introduce himself to his parents. I’ve told Bruce this recently after all these years. We’re both now the same age. We’re in our 70s. The first time I ever said to him, “Bruce, you’re my hero. I look up to you. You speak for all of us. You put yourself on the line. You’re a magnificent performer, and you’re a kind human being.” As far as I go, in my book, that says it all.
COWEN: What’s his greatest musical achievement?
SPITZ: I guess it would have to be the Born to Run album. For me, I guess there are a couple of masterpieces on that album.
COWEN: “She’s the One.” “Thunder Road.” All of it, really. The sequencing.
SPITZ: I would say “Thunder Road” is his masterpiece. I’ve seen him do it with a band and hotwire it, but I’ve also seen him sit down at the piano and play it where he rings every last ounce of romance out of that song. Who writes a song that starts out, “the screen door slams?” It’s beyond me. I don’t know where that comes from. You have to bottle it.
COWEN: Why didn’t Bob Dylan show up for his Nobel Prize?
SPITZ: Because Bob Dylan doesn’t do anything anyone expects of him. He’s never shown up for any prize.
COWEN: What does he do all day?
SPITZ: Beats me. I don’t know.
COWEN: You’re his biographer.
SPITZ: Bob reads a lot. He studies a lot. He still studies Talmud. Listen, I was his biographer 40 years ago. He sat on my steps in the village, chatting with me. I got a sense of who he was then. I wish I were his biographer again. I’d love to have another crack at that. I don’t know what he does all day. I don’t know what I do all day. It’s beyond me.
COWEN: You write all day, or you assemble materials, right?
SPITZ: I do, but then the day goes by. It goes by in a flash. I wonder how all that work that I spent that day contributes to maybe a couple of sentences in a book. It’s magical.
COWEN: You have this unusual habit that you don’t start writing until you’ve assembled all your materials. Is that true?
SPITZ: That is true. Then I write in sequence. I start at the beginning, and I work to the end of the story. Also, perhaps unusual, is that I don’t edit. I’ve never edited a word of my book. I don’t rewrite. I massage each sentence as I go. Sometimes that works to my benefit, and sometimes it doesn’t. You might have heard that when I delivered the manuscript to the Beatles, I put it on my publisher’s desk. It was 2,800 pages. He looked at it, and he said, “Bob, you know this is unpublishable.”
He was right. He said, “We’re going to do an edit, and we’ll get back to you.” They called me about three months later and said, “Okay, the first edit’s in. We cut 1,100 pages out of the manuscript.” I read it, and I said, “What did you cut?” It read beautifully. He said, “Now we’re going to make you cry. We’re going to cut another 600 pages out of the book.” They did make me cry. I gave up about 1,500 pages of Beatles stories that you’ll never hear again, that were really fantastic stories. They made the book much more streamlined. They made it a sleek 964-page book. We didn’t rewrite a word. We just cut.
COWEN: Can you talk them into putting out a director’s cut, all those stories? We can search it using AI. Oh, give me the three best Paul McCartney stories, and then someone just reads that on their Kindle. Won’t that work?
SPITZ: Tyler, I wish we could. I’m going to tell you why that could never happen. It’s the same nightmare that I have whenever I have a nightmare. I moved out of a house in Connecticut after I was done with the Beatles. It had taken every last ounce out of me. I was broke. My marriage had fallen apart. I was 50 years old and really wondering where I was headed after that. I had spent eight and a half years on a three-year book, and I was wiped out. My wife and I moved out of that house. Before we moved, I took all my research and all those interviews, and we took them to the dump.
COWEN: To the dump?
SPITZ: Yes, we did. It’s the most foolish mistake I’ve ever made. I did it out of exhaustion and temper and not thinking. All those stories, I’m afraid to say, are gone. You and your viewers can berate me for it over and over again.
COWEN: How good a cook was Julia Child? That’s another of your biographies. Actually, how good was she?
SPITZ: She was great. She was a wonderful person, but here’s the little secret. Julia was a great cooking teacher, but not a very good cook. There were people who left her house—and John Updike told me this. He was a frequent guest with her. Corby Kummer, who was a wonderful food writer, told me this as well. They’d leave Julia’s house. They’d go to a little park around the corner, and they’d get physically ill. They’d get sick. Julia used too much butter, too much cream. She really had no reins on her when it came to using things like that.
She knew how to teach cooking. She had great recipes. She changed the way that Americans not only cook, but a way that they eat as well. She changed the way supermarkets position food. She gave us the wine industry. This was all because Julia went on TV and she demanded it. I was extremely lucky to be able to travel with her in Italy for a couple of months.
COWEN: That was Sicily, right?
SPITZ: It was. It was in Sicily.
COWEN: What was she like as a traveling companion?
SPITZ: Fabulous. We ate three meals a day together, and otherwise we talked. At those meals, I always said to her, “Julia, you’re 6’3”. You’re in great shape. How do you do it?” She went, “Oh, dearie, I’ll show you how I do it.” She took a knife, and she divided a line right down the center of every meal that came. Then I watched as Julia ate one half. When she was done with one half, she ate the second half as well. She was funny. She was intuitive. She loved people and loved watching them cook.
I went into restaurant after restaurant with her in Italy, where she marched into the kitchen, and she demanded to know how many women were cooking in the kitchen. She wanted to make sure that women were being integrated more and more into the kitchen.
She also had a wide palate. When we got back to the United States, she said to me, “Oh, dearie, we’ve eaten such good food. I want to take you to one of my favorite restaurants.” She did. She took me to McDonald’s, and we had a Big Mac. Julia could go high. She could go low. She was quite a character.
COWEN: When she was young, she lived in Kunming and also Chongqing in China. Could she cook good Chinese food?
SPITZ: She never cooked Chinese food. She had enormous respect for it, and it was one of her favorite cuisines. I don’t think I ever saw a wok in Julia’s kitchen. She stayed away from that, and she let others who knew how to do it better than her cook Chinese food.
COWEN: One of my favorite books of yours is your New York Knicks book about the team in its glory years.
SPITZ: Yes. Another thing I had no interest in, no knowledge of. Somebody asked me to write a book on the 1969 Knicks. I was a poor, young, up-and-coming writer at the time, and I said, “Sure, I’ll do it.” I didn’t know anything about basketball, but I got to talk to all these wonderful individuals who played for the Knicks, and not only them, but all the great players. I sought out all the great players who played opposite them—Oscar Robertson and Jerry West—who explained the game to me and explained how they interacted with the wonderful Knicks, Bill Bradley and Walt Frazier, and Dave DeBusschere, a team like we’ve never seen in New York since those days.
I learned all I could about basketball, and I became a lifelong Knicks fan. It’s one of the great things about writing, not knowing Led Zeppelin, not knowing basketball, never voting for Ronald Reagan, and yet becoming his biographer. Very fortunate that I may not have gone to grad school, but I’ve done a PhD in heavy metal. I’ve done a PhD in Republican politics and basketball. What a wonderful experience.
COWEN: I saw some of those Knicks games at the time. Now, how did Dave DeBusschere end up as coach of the Detroit Pistons at age 24? That sounds so impossible today.
SPITZ: He not only played for them, he would come off the bench, and he would sit back down on the bench and coach them as well. They didn’t have any money. They couldn’t afford a new coach. Dave was a gregarious guy. He sometimes didn’t show up because he and his father loved to drink beer, and they couldn’t get it together to get to the game for the next day. When it came time to finding who had a rapport with the rest of the players and could motivate them, this 24-year-old kid could. Dave wore both masks as a player and a coach. I don’t think we’ve seen that happen since.
COWEN: Why did those Knicks gel so well as a team?
SPITZ: They were smart, and they were willing to play for Red Holzman, who played a smart game. He had one rule, and that was, “See the open man.” That’s what I loved about watching that team. They were selfless. They looked for the open man. They passed the ball. Today, it’s all, give me the ball, give me the ball. They want to get the ball. They want to score their points. They want to look at the stats. I have seen players today sit on the bench, and the first thing they do is they want to see the stats. They want to see how many points they scored. None of the Knicks in those days cared about that. They cared about the team and winning the game and hitting the open man.
COWEN: How senile was Ronald Reagan in his second term toward the end?
SPITZ: I don’t think senile. I think he was wearing down. His battery was wearing down. He was tired. He was too old to be president, I think, that second term. He napped repeatedly during the days. He didn’t sneak away to do it. He did it in public. He would fall asleep at a cabinet meeting, but I don’t think the senility happened until he had that accident right after he was out of office on July 4th. He fell off a horse. He hit his head. Something went wrong, and it was downhill from then on.
Nancy knew it. There’s a wonderful scene at the end of my book where she calls people together, and she admits that Ronnie is not thinking clearly, and they decide what to do, and then he sits down and writes that heart-rendering speech about his lack of memory, and an incredible moment, especially for a biographer, to get that close to somebody.
COWEN: The very early Reagan, the Hollywood years, was he actually a communist or just a leftist?
SPITZ: He was just a leftist. I think he would have been offended to have been called a communist in those days. He was still a patriot, but of course, he was a Democrat. Where he grew up in his hometown, there was a Democratic headquarters. Who ran it? His father did, and Ron came in to help him all the time, Ron and his brother. They were some of the only Democrats in that small city. It wasn’t until after World War II that he went to the other side of the aisle.
COWEN: What shifts him?
SPITZ: Money. An unusual story, but when Reagan was in World War II, he put together promotional films for the army. He had read somewhere that the soldiers in World War I, after the war, were excused from paying taxes while they were soldiers. Reagan just withheld his taxes during World War II because he was sure he didn’t have to pay them. It didn’t happen that way. Then he started being dunned for money by the IRS, and it irked him. He became obsessed with economics, obsessed with not paying money to the government, not paying a lot of taxes, and that ushered him right into the Republican Party.
COWEN: In the later years, do you think there’s still a real Ronald Reagan under the surface, or is he, as a human being, just becoming the TV personality?
SPITZ: Oh, I think there was a lot of Ronald Reagan under that surface. He really cared about the laws that were being enacted and the relationships of lawmakers and the relationships that he had with foreign affairs people. I think he was still pretty riled up. Yes, he was a personality as a president. He knew how to turn on the charm. He could look in the camera and really sparkle like an actor would sparkle, and that’s what made him connect with his audience. I think there was still a lot of fire and brimstone under there.
COWEN: As a person, what do you think that real Ronald Reagan was like, again, in the later years?
SPITZ: I think he was a nice grandfatherly old man. Yes, I think he lost some of that snap, lost some of the fire and brimstone just in the last few years, learned how to appreciate his life a little more and his wife a little more, retire to his home in Santa Barbara, in Montecito, and enjoyed riding horses. Yes, I think he was grandfatherly, but although at the same time never learned how to be a father. He was a very remote father.
COWEN: What is Robert Caro like?
SPITZ: Robert Caro is the guy I look up to whenever it comes to writing biographies. That man has a way with words that has often intrigued me and humbled me. I was at a party one time, and a guy came over and said, “I hear you’re writing a book about Ronald Reagan.” There were about 150 people in this party. I said, “I am.” He said, “Could you talk to me about it a little?”
We sat down on the couch. I looked, and I saw over the man’s shoulder, my wife was going, “It’s Robert Caro. It’s Robert Caro.” At which point, my semi-intelligent dialogue became bedab, bedab, bedab, bedab. He was an incredibly thoughtful man. He sent me a number of notes from time to time. He is the biographer’s biographer. I don’t know how he does it. A great read.
COWEN: Why doesn’t he do more in public? Is it a Bob Dylan kind of thing, or just he’s too busy writing and researching?
SPITZ: I think he’s too busy writing. This guy writes and researches around the clock. I have learned not to do that. From what I’ve gathered, he’s up to his eyeballs in work day and night. He lives to do that. That’s his process.
COWEN: Does he understand how much of a cult surrounds him since he’s not out in public much?
SPITZ: I think he does. When he’s out in public, people stop this guy on the street. He’s like a rock star. He gets a lot of letters from people, especially people who want to know if he’s ever going to finish that last installment of the Johnson biography. I expect we’re going to see that any day.
COWEN: That would be great. Why is Thelma & Louise an interesting movie?
SPITZ: We’re getting into my wife’s profession here. My wife, Becky Aikman, is the real writer in the family. She spent 20 years as a reporter. She is a brilliant writer. She felt that Thelma & Louise was really one of the very first feminist movies. It’s an outlaw movie. There was women who live as men in the movies have always lived as outlaws. Why not? Why shouldn’t they? Why shouldn’t they talk the same way men talk and behave the same way men talk? Plus, they looked out for themselves. When they were abused, they fought back.
It’s a controversial movie. People are still wondering, was it Thelma or was it Louise who shot the man? We don’t know. Should they have ended the movie the way they ended the movie by, we assume, committing suicide? It’s an intriguing film. It has a Sopranos ending, the same way the Sopranos ended. Did the movie really end that way? We think it did. Could it be a fantasy? Perhaps. We don’t know. It’s a movie that makes you think, and it’s a movie that has a great political undertone. I think movies need to get that edge again today. I’ve seen that film too many times, but every time I do, I learn something from it.
COWEN: How does it matter being married to another writer?
SPITZ: It’s such a treat. We write our books back-to-back in the same room. I can always shout out, “Becky, synonym for avaricious.” She loathes the fact that I would interrupt her writing, but we do that. We edit each other almost every night. We look over our work. We talk about it. It’s the table conversation. We get to live our books. To have somebody else who does the same thing and understands what I do and what I go through, it makes for a fabulous marriage.
COWEN: How is it that you write so much? She writes a lot, too, but the number of excellent pages you’ve written is really quite high.
SPITZ: I write so much because I can’t believe that there’s anybody in the world who would allow me to write. I’m going to keep doing it until they tell me I can’t. I learned very early on that writing was not a bloody process. Becky and I both don’t believe in writer’s block. If you can’t come up with what you need to come up with, take a walk. Walk away and come back to it. Think about it a little, and you’ll come to it.
I love the whole process of writing. To me, it’s like doing a crossword puzzle. You have to think about it and look at all angles on it until you’re sure what you’re writing is the right thing. It’s like solving a puzzle every day. I feel great while I write, and I feel great after I write. The fact that my subconscious works at night and allows me to wake up in the morning and solve certain things, it’s a fabulous feeling. I love doing it.
COWEN: Before the last question, just another plug for your new book, The Rolling Stones: The Biography, of which I read every page. Final question, what will you do next?
SPITZ: I’m working on a project already. I’ll tell you what it’s about. It’s about John Lennon’s second act. It is from the breakup of the Beatles to his tragic death. It covers about 10 years of his life. I think we’re going to get a picture of John that we’ve never gotten before. Fortunately, I’m going to be one of the first people allowed into the John Lennon archives. His scrapbooks are there. His journals are there. His diaries are there. No one’s ever seen them. I hope I’ll be able to bring this remarkable man to life.
COWEN: I think both Mind Games and Rock ‘n’ Roll are quite underrated albums.
SPITZ: You’re in a minority, Tyler.
COWEN: That’s why they’re underrated.
SPITZ: I see. All right. We’ll have to have that out on a different show, but we’ll see about that. I’m going to learn to love them. I am going to come to understand, like I’ve learned about Led Zeppelin, why this person made those albums and what makes them great.
COWEN: Bob Spitz, thank you very much.
SPITZ: This has been a pleasure. Thank you.