It certainly could have used one more film clip of the Stones with Wood in the band than the one we get, of them playing “When the Whip Comes Down.” There’s some interesting talk by Richards of how different a flavor Wood brought to the band, entwining with his own efforts instead of going off on melodic solos like his predecessor, Taylor Jagger talks about how they suddenly became a more “good-timey” band upon Wood’s mid-’70s arrival. Wood is operated on for lung cancer but comes out being told it’s as if he hadn’t smoked any cigs, let alone 30 a day for 50 years - what he calls “a get out of jail free card.” At some point we can agree with the title: God must enjoy doing the hang with Wood as much as Figgis.įor all that’s left out of a movie this short, Figgis makes some curious inclusions, like old video footage of himself talking with the famously scary rock manager Peter Grant, or Mick Jagger discussing about what kind of jazz art-school students favored in the early ’60s - interesting subjects for other, longer films. He’s very like me, with a great pain threshold,” figures Keith Richards, laughing Charlie Watts allows that he “did do a lot of things to excess” but “never lost it.” Wood’s third wife, Sally, his junior by several decades (two prior spouses and their children go unmentioned), points out that he’s “always a happy person” whether sober or not, but she prefers the extra realness now that, having rounded 70, her husband is completely substance-free. What’s almost funny - but which also precludes “Behind the Music”-level highs or lows - is how utterly functional an alcoholic and addict Wood was. In the interim, he spends the ’60s and early ’70s making career moves that would be peaks for most musicians, even if it was all prelude for him: stints with a garage band called the Birds (not to be confused with the Byrds), then fruitful hookups with Rod Stewart in the Jeff Beck Group and Faces, before Mick Taylor’s abrupt exit from the Stones creates a dream opening. From there, things look up for Scott, even if it does take him more than a decade after he first spots the nascent Stones playing blues covers in a nightclub in 1963 and make good on his vow to someday join them. Wood fills in a few early details that might have left psychological scars: an alcoholic father who might have ended up spending the night in any random neighbor’s garden a first love who perished in a car crash.

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