Bill Wyman’s Daily Diary Captured the Stones’ Early Chaos

Bassist Bill Wyman was the only Rolling Stone who kept a daily diary from the band’s earliest days in 1962. While Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were living in the moment (or forgetting it), Wyman jotted down setlists, girlfriends, hotel rooms, and petty squabbles — nearly every show, studio session, and argument got a date stamp.

Those notebooks became the backbone of his 1990 memoir Stone Alone and later the massive coffee-table book Rolling with the Stones. Without his obsessive record-keeping, we’d have almost no reliable day-to-day account of the pre-fame tours, the fires at clubs, and exactly how many times Brian Jones stormed off stage. Wyman’s diary is the closest thing the Stones have to a ground-level logbook from the early 60s.