A Prince Among Stones

January 28, 2013
Ever since 1973, when the music press reported that Lowenstein had saved the Rolling Stones from financial ruin, Stones fans have asked the question, “Who the hell is Prince Rupert Lowenstein?” With a dry wit and a gimlet eye for detail, first-time author Lowenstein fully answers that question, in an elegant biography that provides new insights into the Stones’ financial escapades over the almost forty years that he was their advisor. Born into a branch of a Bavarian royal house, Lowenstein describes a youth of “liveried servants, gamekeepers, French governesses” that was actually based on “weak financial foundations.” Lowenstein’s “instinctive sense of money” leads to his financial success; to his own place in early 1960s British society (such as his dinner with a “miserable,” heartbroken Maria Callas); and to Mick Jagger, who he had earlier met at a lavish party, and who asks Lowenstein to address the band’s nearly nonexistent finances. Stones fans will be delighted by Lowenstein’s fascinating descriptions of how he extricated the band from horrible contracts with their record company and ex-manager Allen Klein (which went on for 18 years); his involvement in every aspect of the Stones’ touring life from 1969 through 2008; and the role that his financial advice played in the creation of the band’s classic album, Exile on Main Street.

December 15, 2012
Languid memoir by the German-British noble who built a fortune for Mick Jagger and company, among other pop icons. The prince assures us on several occasions that he didn't come to the Rolling Stones as a fan. He doesn't like rock 'n' roll; though, as the scion of a dynasty displaced by history, he has a certain fascination with the power of the band, and especially Jagger, to hold an audience spellbound in the way that a certain Hitler fellow did in the Germany of yore. "I never played a Stones track by choice," he writes. Yet, noblesse oblige; toward the end of the 1960s, once they'd amassed enough money--if only on paper--Britain's rock stars began to hobnob with the upper crust, a group that returned the favor by advising them on how to spend their fortunes. In the case of Loewenstein, well known as a capable stockbroker and financial adviser, part of his counsel involved wresting the band from the talons of American promoter Allen Klein, whereupon the millions began to flow. Fans of the Glimmer Twins won't learn much about the two here, though Jagger won't like hearing that the prince believes that Keith Richards is the brains in the band. Loewenstein is a touch vague on the exact workings of building a rock-star fortune (he worked with Pink Floyd, Terence Trent D'Arby and other artists besides the Stones), which makes for good accounting but not terribly exciting storytelling. He is better when he turns his gaze elsewhere and goes into full gossip mode, as when he writes of another misplaced noble and his wife: "The Wrangells were often in Europe and by and large lunched on dry martinis and the odd olive." Stones compleatists will want to shelve this alongside the collected works of Spanish Tony, but ordinary civilians won't get a lot from the prince's pages.

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February 1, 2013
Loewenstein, former director of the merchant bank Leopold Joseph, met Mick Jagger in 1968. A Stones insider asked if he would be interested in taking care of the finances for the band. The band's name meant virtually nothing to Loewenstein, but he accepted the offer. In 1968, rock bands were not paid well by today's standards, even the Beatles and the Stones. The Stones' recording contract with Decca was bad enough, but their rights to future earnings of the masters and copyrights had been sold to Allen Klein, who had bound the band to him by a bewildering mass of contracts. After extricating them from the nefarious clutches of Klein and Decca, Prince Rupert later prompted them to become tax exiles and, over the years, contributed much to making Rolling Stones Inc. one of the most profitable brands in the world. This smoothly written autobiography is an essential companion to all of the other Stones titles coming out in honor of their fiftieth year in the music biz.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)