Overview

Stanley Booth, a member of the Rolling Stones’ inner circle, met the band just a few months before Brian Jones drowned in a swimming pool in 1968. He lived with them throughout their 1969 tour across the United States, staying up all night together listening to blues, talking about music, ingesting drugs, and consorting with groupies. His thrilling account culminates with their final concert at Altamont Speedway—a nightmare of beating, stabbing, and killing that would signal the end of a generation’s dreams of peace and freedom. But while this book renders in fine detail the entire history of the Stones, paying special attention to the tragedy of Brian Jones, it is about much more than a writer and a rock band. It has been called—by Harold Brodkey and Robert Stone, among others—the best book ever written about the 1960s. In Booth’s afterword, he finally explains why it took him 15 years to write the book, relating an astonishing story of drugs, jails, and disasters. Updated to include a foreword by Greil Marcus, this 30th anniversary edition is for Rolling Stones fans everywhere.

Reviews

“[Stanley Booth’s] affection for the band did not keep him from writing about the seamy underside of the Stones’ world in the 1960s. . . . It is the only book about the Stones that I would recommend both to the general reader and to the most devoted fan. Both will find an epiphany on almost every page.”  —Robert Palmer, New York Times Book Review

“If you’ve never bought a book about rock and roll, no matter—this is the one you’ve been waiting for.”  —Playboy

“Booth’s strong, sound prose brings to life the out-of-control process through which an age intoxicated by its own passions found a hard-driving music to live hard by. In all the annals of the 1960s, there is nothing on paper that so evokes those days and nights.”  —Robert Stone, Salon

“By far the best book on its subject (including Richards’s own well received effort), Booth’s book is also easily the most convincing account of life inside the monster created by the rock revolution of the 1960s.”  —Richard Williams, Guardian

Author Biography

Stanley Booth is the author of Keith: Till I Roll Over Dead and Rythm Oil: A Journey Through the Music of the American South. He has written for Esquire, Playboy, and Rolling Stone. He lives in Athens, Georgia. Greil Marcus is an author and music journalist who has worked for Creem, Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice. He lives in Berkeley, California.