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Conversations with Tyler

Bob Spitz on the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Art of Biography

Conversations with Tyler

Conversations with Tyler

Education, Society & Culture

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2026

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded April 28th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:02:44 - The Sound of the Rolling Stones 

00:05:25 - Underrated Rolling Stones Songs and Albums 

00:09:06 - Charlie Watts and Brian Jones 

00:11:18 - Art Colleges and Rock 'n' Roll

00:13:06 - The Stones' Stability 

00:16:32 - Mick Jagger: Closet Economist? 

00:17:53 - Pop Music's Lack of Relevance 

00:20:10 - The Beatles 

00:28:14 - Led Zeppelin 

00:31:30 - Bruce Springsteen 

00:36:20 - Bob Dylan 

00:39:40 - Julia Child 

00:42:29 - The Knicks 

00:45:21 - Ronald Reagan 

00:49:01 - Robert Caro 

00:52:03 - Writing

00:55:00 - Outro

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,

0:09.4

bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.

0:13.5

Learn more at Mercatus.org.

0:15.7

For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links,

0:20.4

visit Conversationswithtyler.com.

0:28.5

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.

0:32.4

Today I'm sitting here chatting with the great Bob Spitz, the biographer.

0:36.5

He has a new book out, which I enjoyed

0:38.4

very, very much, the Rolling Stones, the biography. He has other very well-known books on the

0:44.0

Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Ronald Reagan, Julia Child, and more. Bob, welcome.

0:50.1

My pleasure, Ty, we're nice to be with you. Did the Rolling Stones have a long apprenticeship period the way the Beatles did? It seems they didn't. So how did they become so great so quickly? No, actually they did. They worked in a little club called the Croddetti Club, which was in Richmond, a suburb of London. And they worked long and hard there. In fact, the first time, and I document this in the

1:13.5

book, the first time they show up, only like six kids show up. And they're despondent. And they go and

1:20.9

talk to the head of the club. And he said, look, play as if there are a people there, and next week there will be 100 people.

1:30.0

And next week, there was 100 people.

1:32.3

And they played as if there were 100, and the next week, 200 came.

1:36.4

And so they worked in that club for about six months.

1:39.5

Then they went on the road.

1:40.7

They played a lot of really crappy little places, the same way that the Beatles

1:44.8

did, perhaps not as long an apprenticeship, but they served their time pretty well.

1:50.8

That seems quite short, though, six months. So you read about Paul McCartney, he writes songs

1:55.9

when he's age 14, age 16. Yeah. Is there anything comparable in the Rolling Stones?

2:03.4

No, not really. The Stones never dreamed that they would write music. It was beyond them. They were blues singers. And so their

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