A PRINCE AMONG STONES

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.