How Bill Wyman's 'Stone Alone' Sparked a Rift with Keith Richards

Bill Wyman’s 1990 autobiography Stone Alone didn’t just recount his time in the Rolling Stones—it poured gasoline on old fires. The bassist spilled details about the band’s chaotic finances, the heavy drug use during the 1970s, and his own growing disillusionment. But what really burned Keith Richards was Wyman’s candid description of Richards’s heroin addiction and the “dead atmosphere” that sometimes overtook the studio. Richards fired back in his own memoir Life years later, calling Wyman’s book “billious” and accusing him of airing dirty laundry for cash.

The tension went deeper than just hurt feelings. Wyman claimed the Stones had secretly incorporated in the Netherlands in the 1970s to avoid UK taxes, a move that left him and other non-partner members in the dark. He also detailed how Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’s creative stranglehold left everyone else as hired hands. Richards saw this as a betrayal of the band’s unspoken code: never reveal the business side. For a group that prided itself on myth and mystery, Wyman’s tell-all felt like a stone through the window.