Jo Wood – It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll

Jo Wood’s It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll: 30 Years Married To A Rolling Stone hurt my head.

I can’t even begin to imagine how anyone would think this person is normal. I get that she started modelling very young, and moved in those circles from the get-go. I get that she married a Rolling Stone, and her life became unreal because of the circus of indulgence and entitlement that seems to come with that, and we’re supposed to ooh and aaah about how ‘wow, the rich and famous really do have it tough after all.’ But I don’t buy it, because even before she hooked up with Ronnie Wood, she had an abortion at 17, married another guy very quickly afterwards and, when that didn’t work out and fight over the custody of the child they did have together turned nasty, she was quite content to let her mother raise her son while she went off and partied (where she met the Stone and the parties got heavier). It’s a wonder any judge released a child into her custody at all. She talks quite a bit about what a great mom she thinks she is, but as a parent of two small children myself, I say give your head a shake lady. You weren’t there. You’d turn up on weekends, every now and then? Garbage. And you follow a chapter of self-righteous and sanctimonious parenthood fervour with a chapter of trumpeting how you spent the entire year of 1980 freebasing and ‘thank god for the nanny!’ Whatever.

I gave this book almost 150 pages, hoping it would get better and she would gain some insight and grow up, but it didn’t happen. I stopped reading. And probably, if I had read it through to the end, I’d find out that now she’s older and just divorced from Ronnie and this is her way of proving that, yeah, things were pretty wild there for, oh, most of my adult life while I snorted and smoked every drug I could get my mitts on, but yeah, now I sell perfume and now I’m done being selfish so aren’t I the perfect mum now! Probably.

I dunno, maybe the book is just poorly written. Maybe I’m the wrong audience. Maybe she really is a nice person and these comments would cut her deeply and how dare I because I don’t know her and how can I judge? Maybe she really did get her shit together after decades of jetting off and ditching her kids. Well, lady, you put it there in black and white and to me all I read was ‘twit…’

The best bits about this book were, of course, the stories about Keith. But you don’t need to read this book to get plenty of those; they can be found in a million other places.