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William Eggleston

Photo by Stanley Booth

Beside him was Keith Richards, who was thinner and looked not like a model, but an insane advertisment for dangerous carefree Death. — Stanley Booth

#the rolling stones #the greatest rock and roll band in the world #Keith Richards #Stanley Booth

(From: The True Adventures of The Rolling Stones, Stanley Booth, 1972)

#pot kettle etc etc #the rolling stones #charlie watts #mick jagger #young married band #quote #stanley booth #meme #my edits #he’s allowed to say this but I’m 100% sure mick would kill anyone else who dared call Charlie a bitch

Stanley Booth: The True Adventures of The Rolling Stones (1984)

Tony Sanchez (w/ John Blake): Up and Down with The Rolling Stones (1979)

Here we have two separate, but inevitably related third-party accounts of The Rolling Stones in their late '60s and early '70s heyday, when they hit their stride as the world's biggest rock band and indulged in as much decadence and hedonism as rock 'n' roll has ever witnessed.

The first, which came second, published in 1984, was penned by Memphis-based journalist Stanley Booth, who wrote about many music legends during his long career: Elvis Presley, Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, James Brown, B.B. King, Al Green, etc.

Booth devotes a fair chunk of The True Adventures ... to chronicling The Stones' early days, from wide-eyed blues fans, to British Invasion bad boys molded as the anti-Beatles, to their ensuing drug busts and other controversies, to the tragedy of Brian Jones.

But all this is just a prelude for The Stones' tumultuous American tour of 1969, which culminated in their deadly free concert at Altamont Speedway and came to symbolize the end to the '60s naive, utopian dreams.

By embedding himself within the band's entourage, growing especially close to Keith Richards, Booth gained a rare, fly-on-the-wall perspective; partaking of their drugs, groupies, and other vices, to the point that he spent the ensuing 15 years recovering from his addictions while making sense of his part in their story.

The second, which was published first, in 1979, relates Tony Sanchez's (a.k.a. Spanish Tony) own, harrowing experiences as Keef's assistant, confidante, and enabler for over a decade -- hence this book's original sub-title: 'I Was Keith Richards' Drug Dealer'!

What Sanchez lacks in formal journalistic training (he leaned on tabloid veteran John Blake as a ghost writer), he makes up for with his unparalleled access to Richards, his bandmates, and his long-time partner Anita Pallenberg, at their best and worst.

So if you want to read all about the parties, orgies, smashed cars, police raids, black magic, those infamous flights to Switzerland for blood transfusions, and, oh yeah, lot's of rock 'n' roll, Sanchez's recollections should be your first port of call.

Finally, the reason these books are invariably connected -- beyond, obviously, their superstar subjects -- is that both authors admitted their own guilt as willing accomplices to The Stones' debauched and destructive career trail, which left untold acolytes-turned-casualties in their wake.

Featured Records:

The Rolling Stones: "Jumpin' Jack Flash" (1968)

The Rolling Stones: Let it Bleed (1969)

The Rolling Stones: Out of Our Heads (1965)

The Rolling Stones: Goat’s Head Soup (1973)

Buy from: Amazon / Amazon

#the rolling stones #mick jagger #keith richards #classic rock #rock n roll #vinyl #altamont #brian jones #jumpin jack flash #elvis presley #james brown #bb king #al green #otis redding #janis joplin #stanley booth #tony sanchez

Stanley Booth

American music journalist who chronicled ‘the mystery of the Rolling Stones’ in their pomp

As a group of Hells Angels beat and stabbed a Black teenager to death a few feet away from where the Rolling Stones were playing on warm evening in California in 1969, the writer Stanley Booth watched the mayhem from a vantage point next to his friend Keith Richards’s guitar amplifiers.

The murder of 18-year-old Meredith Hunter by thugs hired to act as security men for the Stones’ free concert at Altamont Speedway marked an end to the peace-and-love idyll of the 1960s. It also gave Booth a dramatic climax to the book he would write about the Stones and their rise from London’s clubs to worldwide success and notoriety.

The Stones embraced Booth, who has died aged 82, not least because he represented an authentic connection to the blues music from which they had taken their inspiration. He had been brought up in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the music’s centres, and knew many of the musicians whose work they admired and imitated.

Long-haired, silk-scarved and thoroughly familiar with mood-altering substances, he was perfectly in sync with the social currents they embodied. He met them when, having established himself as a contributor to major American magazines, he travelled to London in 1968 to cover the trial of their founder, Brian Jones, who had been charged with possession of cannabis. “I wrote a story,” he recalled many years later, “but I had only glimpsed – in Brian’s eyes as he glanced up from the dock – the mystery of the Rolling Stones.”

That mystery was the subject of the book he planned to write when he joined the Stones on tour in the US the following year. He slipped so easily into their inner circle that soon they were inviting him to share not just their confidences – Anita Pallenberg told him that Jones had missed shows and recording sessions because he had broken his hand while hitting her – but their drugs. When a fan handed Charlie Watts a yellow-green LSD tab, Booth wrote that “Charlie asked, ‘D’you want it?’ ‘I ain’t too sure about this street acid,’ I said. ‘Maybe Keith will want it.’”

Published in 1974 as Dance With the Devil, and republished in the UK in 1985 as The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, his book brought to bear an observant eye and literary skills that elegantly stripped the varnish off the story, leaving posterity with a faithful eye-witness account of the group’s activities and their social milieu during their prime years.

Booth was born in Waycross, Georgia, near the Okefenokee swamp, a vast wetland straddling the border with Florida. His father, Irving, was the vice-president of an insurance company, while his mother, Ruby (nee McClellan), was a schoolteacher. He studied English at Memphis State University and remembered being thrown out of a Ray Charles show for sharing a table with some Black fellow students. He began postgraduate studies at Tulane University in New Orleans before breaking off in 1964 to return to Memphis, where he began his career as a journalist.

His background, his love of music and his social circle gave him access to local subjects that interested the editors of national magazines. In 1968 Esquire published his description of Elvis Presley’s life among his courtiers: “When he puts the cigar between his teeth a wall of flame erupts before him. Momentarily startled, he peers into the blaze of matches and lighters offered by willing hands. With a nod, he designates one of the crowd, who steps forward, shaking, and then, his moment of glory, of service to the King, at an end, he retires into anonymity. ‘Thank ya very much,’ says Elvis.”

Typically, the real interest comes when Booth aims slightly away from the target. The source of the best Elvis anecdotes is Dewey Phillips, the first radio DJ to play Presley’s records, found by the author working in a furniture store 20 years after his heyday. One of those tales, involving the actress Natalie Wood, was too ripe for the Esquire piece but is included in Rythm Oil, a collection of Booth’s magazine pieces published in 1994.

The book’s UK edition opened with a mood-setting series of colour photographs taken by William Eggleston, Booth’s friend and fellow Memphian: freight trains, cotton fields, diners and lonesome highways. The pieces included portraits of other local musicians, including the bluesman Furry Lewis, who had spent decades sweeping the city’s streets, and the ill-starred jazz pianist Phineas Newborn.

For all his warm empathy with most of the musicians he encountered, there was also evidence of the essential splinter of ice in the writer’s heart. About his piece for Rolling Stone on Janis Joplin’s poorly received visit to Memphis in 1969, he later reflected: “She died, so I hear, bearing me ill will. Can’t please everyone.”

With a reputation, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal newspaper, as “a libertine and a wild man”, in 1971 he was fined for growing his own marijuana and broke his back a few years later after falling down a waterfall in Georgia while high on LSD. A second collection of pieces, Red Hot and Blue, was published in 2019 and he leaves an unfinished memoir and unpublished biographies of the songwriter Johnny Mercer and the singer Gram Parsons, a friend who was also from Waycross.

Booth was married three times. After the death in 2014 of his third wife, the poet Diann Blakely, with whom he had lived in Georgia and Florida, he returned to Memphis. He is survived by a daughter, Ruby Booth, from another relationship.

🔔 Stanley Booth (Irvin Stanley Booth Jr), writer, born 5 January 1942; died 19 December 2024

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"The back door opened and in walked a gang of men. Tall and lean and long-haired, they stood for a moment in the center of the room as if posing for a faded sepia photograph of the kind that used to end up on posters nailed to trees. The Stones Gang: Wanted Dead or Alive, though only Mick Jagger, standing like a model, his knife-blade ass thrust to one side, was currently awaiting trial.

Beside him was Keith Richards, who was even thinner and looked not like a model but an insane advertisement for a dangerous carefree Death—black ragged hair, dead green skin, a cougar tooth hanging from his right earlobe, his lips snarled back from the marijuana cigaret between his rotting fangs, his gums blue, the world’s only bluegum white man, poisonous as a rattle-snake.

From his photographs I recognized Brian Jones’ replacement, Mick Taylor. He was pink and blond, pretty as a Dresden doll beside Jagger and Richards, who had aged more than a year in the year since I’d seen them.

One of the others, with dark hair frosted pale gold and a classic country and western outfit from Nudie the Rodeo Tailor, I remembered seeing on television and record covers—he was Gram Parsons, and he came, so I’d heard, from my hometown, Waycross, Georgia, on the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp.”

Stanley Booth

#stanley booth #mick jagger #keith richards #mick taylor #gram parsons