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Serving their satanic majesties

The conservative Bavarian prince who managed the Rolling Stones' finances for 40 years has written a wryly amusing and fascinating memoir of life with the world's most famous rock band

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Kanika Datta
Last Updated : Jun 28 2014 | 12:28 AM IST
A PRINCE AMONG STONES: THAT BUSINESS WITH THE ROLLING STONES AND OTHER ADVENTURES
Author: Prince Rupert Loewenstein
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages: 251
Price: Rs 399

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Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg could trace his lineage on his father's side to a Bavarian duke who died repelling the Huns in 907 AD. His family tree takes up two pages of small typeface.

His mother Bianca was descended from Henry Navarre, king of France (1553-1610). Descendants of Charles V, the Spanish king and later Holy Roman Emperor (under whose aegis Spain conquered most of southern and Latin America) bump into the line at some point.

As a result, Loewenstein was related to most of the major and minor royal families of Europe (and some across the Atlantic, Brazil, for example). He was a devout Catholic, worked with various powerful European Catholic charities, a connoisseur of the opera and classical music and President of the British Association of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. He was initially a stockbroker with an American firm and then bought a storied, boutique merchant bank Leopold Joseph.

This formidably respectable life would not have made Loewenstein any more notable than the minor celebrities who pepper Hello magazine and newspaper society pages. But Loewenstein, who died earlier this year, had an unlikely claim to fame. From 1968 to 2008, he managed the finances of one of the world's most famous rock bands, the Rolling Stones.

As this charming and wryly amusing autobiography - written about a year before his death but recently released in India - reveals, he actually did much more than that. He was the Stones' "bank manager, psychiatrist and nanny", an understatement going by the approving references to him by lead guitarist Keith Richards in his splendid autobiography Life. "Very pukka, trustworthy," wrote Richards of Loewenstein.

Yet, most remarkably, Loewenstein never became a Stones fan. Quite the opposite in fact. Through the 40 years of his association with the band, he was backstage or in the front row for most of their signature concerts, sat through studio recordings, attended rehearsals, managed their private lives and extricated them from their many personal crises - stuff for which any Stones' devotee would give her right arm. None of this had the slightest effect on his cultural tastes; he steadfastly loathed rock music till the day he died.

Rock'n'roll convulsed youth counterculture on both sides of Atlantic precisely at the time when Loewenstein shuttled between the continents on work. But those exciting, iconoclastic sounds of the sixties only penetrated his consciousness when he heard a friend play a Beatles album. His giggle-inducing reaction: "Their music was sufficiently harmonic to be acceptable to people like me who only liked classical music. I only really took against rock'n'roll when I heard the Stones."

No surprise, Loewenstein had never heard of the Stones when his good friend, the celebrity art dealer Christopher Gibbs, approached him with a proposal to help the band detangle itself from the toils of its venal manager Allen Klein. Klein had managed to skim off most of the Stones' earnings through complex and opaque corporate structures that had him owning the copyright to their work (including the all-time hit Satisfaction) till 1971. The group found itself perpetually broke even as their singles and albums sold strongly and they played to record crowds. As Richards succinctly put it, "Allen Klein made us and screwed us at the same time." Eventually, Mick Jagger figured something was wrong and looked around for help.

Predictably, no one within the square mile of the City would touch them. To the starchy banking world, rock musicians were "degenerate, long-haired and, worst of all, unprofitable layabouts". All the same, after a preliminary meeting with Jagger, Loewenstein convinced Leopold Joseph's sceptical directors to take the business. "…I managed to persuade them that the financial problems of a prominent rock band were no different in essence from the problems of other financial organisations which sought advice in the City of London. Indeed, I also made the point that many directors of any number of well-known companies listed on the Stock Exchange led unconventional lives."

Thus began the unlikeliest of partnerships that transformed the Stones from paupers to millionaires through a joint venture with the famous Chess Records and a distribution deal with Atlantic Records (though the court cases against Klein would drag on for 17 years). It was on Loewenstein's advice that the Stones', under investigation by the Inland Revenue at a time when the British income tax rate was 90 per cent, became non-resident, relocating to a mansion in France where Exile on Main Street was recorded. When Richards was arrested in Canada for peddling heroin, Loewenstein and his associates got him off by arguing that the guitarist had large quantities on his person as a stock for personal use, not for selling, much like people stock breakfast cornflakes in their larders.

So, the Stones needed Lowenstein's inexorable, intelligent practicality and dedication. Why did Lowenstein opt for this unconventional career shift? As he explained frankly, he was bored, young (in his 30s) and restless. "I… had come to the conclusion that running a small merchant bank was not going to satisfy me if it was my sole activity"….The conversation with Mick seemed to offer a glimpse of a new direction and a problem that I could use my particular skills to unpick," he wrote.

He was also shrewd enough to recognise a star act when he saw one. One of the first times he heard the group play live was at a concert at West End, shortly after his first meeting with Jagger. "What impressed me enormously was the quality of Mick's performance. I thought it was first class, even if the music itself did little for me. I could immediately understand why the band were such a draw for the public." And indeed, from his vantage point as a conventional banker handling an unconventional business he offers some fascinating insights into the hurly burly world of rock music.

If Lowenstein, who later left Leopold Joseph to manage the band full time, was attracted to the Stones, his own avant-garde upbringing also influenced his decision. He was part of the post-war nouveau pauvre aristocracy, born to parents who had no notion of money. One ancestral home was sold to Franciscan nuns owing to his grandfather's extravagance. Whenever his mother ran out of money, she sold a priceless piece of inherited art to tide over. His father - his parents were divorced - was a "serial Casanova" and writer of a modestly successful book on psychology. But mostly, Prince Leopold zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg relied on his impeccable pedigree and connections to see him through.

Which is why his son's readable and absorbing memoir is also peppered with casual and unselfconscious references to celebrity friends and relatives - actors, writers, publishers, artists, musicians. He was, after all, part of a cloistered, privileged universe, light years away from the profane world of the Stones. Rupert Loewenstein's professional and personal lives may have run on parallel trajectories. But he loved every minute of both. As he wrote in conclusion, "Although I firmly resisted changing my own habits to those of the rock'n'roll business…my life had certainly been enriched." In short, he remained a Prince among Stones in every sense of the term.


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First Published: Jun 28 2014 | 12:28 AM IST

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