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Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this?? (Read 2,966 times)
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Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Jan 25th, 2015 at 3:01pm
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http://www.northjersey.com/arts-and-entertainment/music/a-look-back-at-the-stone...

By JIM BECKERMAN
STAFF WRITER |
The Record
Print

Time, time, time is on the side of the Rolling Stones. Or is it?
Stanley Booth, who traveled with the Rolling Stones in 1969, wrote the 1984 book "The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones" which has been reissued with a new forward.      


As of this year, the 45th anniversary of the classic Stones concert film "Gimme Shelter," the band is still going strong — a far longer run than the Stones themselves, in the 1960s, could have imagined in their wildest amphetamine binge. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and company are still performing the same songs — "Under My Thumb," "Sympathy for the Devil" — they were doing at that disastrous Dec. 6, 1969, concert at the Altamont Speedway in Northern California, where, as seen in "Gimme Shelter," all hell broke loose.
Stanley Booth, who traveled with the Rolling Stones in 1969, wrote the 1984 book "The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones" which has been reissued with a new forward.      

But are concertgoers, 45 years later, getting the same Stones experience their hippie grandparents did? Writer Stanley Booth, who was part of the Stones entourage during the key year, 1969, that saw the death of Stones founder Brian Jones and the catastrophe at Altamont, has doubts.

"I think the last time I saw them was Birmingham, Ala., probably seven, eight years ago," he says. "I went in the gate like a civilian, and the first person I saw was passing out applications for a tongue-logo Visa card. That's not exactly what was happening in 1969."

"The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones," Booth's widely admired 1984 account of those early years, has just been reissued with a new forward from rock critic Greil Marcus, in paperback from Chicago Review Press (394 pages, $18.95). Keith Richards himself has called the book "the only one I can read and say, 'Yeah, that's how it was.' "

Booth's prose (his other books include "Rhythm Oil" and "Keith: Till I Roll Over Dead") is writerly, funny. Good anecdotes about bad behavior abound. But in telling the tale of the Stones, during that 1969 American tour that sent him and them criss-crossing the country en route to the date with fate — Altamont, the giant outdoor "free concert" where four people were killed and four were born — Booth also has a larger story to tell. "This is about a musical tradition," he says.

Summoning Freud, Jung, Buddy Bolden, Margaret Mead, Nietzsche, Edmund Wilson, Lightnin' Hopkins, Jack Kerouac and Furry Lewis to his defense, Booth makes the case that the Stones are, capital I, Important. They are — or were — part of a continuum of truth-tellers who, in a world of sham and scam, used music to talk straight.

"They're telling the truth," Booth says. "That's life, that's blues, that's the truth. And it's to be found in the music of the Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed, Howlin' Wolf. These people are great poets."

It was a mutual love of blues that first brought Booth into the orbit of the Stones in 1968. A native of Waycross, Ga., he fit easily into the Stones' circle when he came to London as a journalist and covered Brian Jones' final drug trial. "English people are interesting," he says. "They get these enthusiasms, and they pursue them beyond the call of sanity. If they grow a rabbit in a cage, my god, it's a major production. If they grow roses, that's a major production. The Stones just got bitten by the boogie disease, and they never got over it."

As soon as he met the late Ian Stewart, the Scottish keyboardist and co-founder of the Stones who later transitioned to road manager, he was in.

"Stu took it upon himself to call all the others and say, 'Hey, there's this guy from Memphis in town, and I want you to meet him,' " Booth says. "So they never thought of me as a writer; they just thought of me as another blues lover. Which I was, and am."

So Booth was in on the ground floor for the series of fatal decisions that resulted in Altamont — the calamity that, many say, rang down the curtain on the '60s. Ralph Gleason, the San Francisco jazz critic, bears some responsibility: he needled the Stones in print about their high ticket prices ($4.50 to $8), and thus spurred the last-minute free concert that was a monument of mismanagement. Then there was Rock Scully, manager of the Grateful Dead, who suggested the Hell's Angels as bodyguards because hey, like, you know, they're against the system, too.

When the acid-tripping hippies collided with the beer-fueled Angels, the result was catastrophic: fist-fights, beatings, tramplings and the climactic stabbing of a concertgoer, Meredith Hunter — just a few yards from the stage where the Stones were singing "Under My Thumb."

"The funny thing was, after Meredith Hunter was killed, the Stones starting playing 'The Sun Is Shining,' the Elmore James song, and it was almost like some psychic release had taken place," Booth recalls.

"There wasn't any more violence. And the Stones finished the concert, and we ran through the darkness to the helicopter. And the last thing you see leaving Altamont is the seat of my Levis."

After that, Booth says, the Stones — though good — weren't the same. When they came back to the U.S. in 1972, he says, Mick was wearing a pink top hat and almost parodying his dark, feral image.

Popcorn and souvenirs

"They were playing it for comedy," he says. "And believe me, when Mick did 'Midnight Rambler' back in 1969, it was not funny."

And the Stones today? Booth hasn't seen any of the recent arena shows where tickets are $113 to $831, with popcorn and souvenir programs available at the concession stand. But that might not be quite what Furry Lewis, Lightnin' Hopkins and Jimmy Reed had in mind.

"We believed in a myth in the 1960s, that music could change history," he says.

"Nowadays, we believe in a myth, that music is just entertainment. I don't think it has to be just entertainment, but I'm afraid that's where we've come."

Email: [email protected]
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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #1 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 3:22pm
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Yup, read it many years ago, very well done and readable. Stanley Booth is a good writer and an interesting guy; also read his 'Rhythm Oil', about southern R & B, lots of Stones content there as well.

Highly recommend them both.
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« Last Edit: Jan 25th, 2015 at 3:24pm by Mr. Yeats »  

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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #2 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 5:27pm
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I love how this dude couldn't even be bothered to write a new dek for his article and instead just cut and pasted a sentence from the article. Lazy fucking journos. This is why there are no edit jobs.
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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #3 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 5:49pm
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I looooove this book and have loved it since the first time I read it as a highly tripping 15-year old girl. My tripping buddies and I would quote it to each other: After a stupid/disappointing or bad experience we'd say consolingly to each other "At least we got to hear the band play!" This book is responsible for my relationship and mythology around Keith Richards.

I read it every four years or so (along with Huck Finn and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72---these things help me keep my priorities straight) and I just re-read it this summer.

Stilll writing as good as it gets, writing about music I almost think the absolute best still, and that includes anything by Lester Bangs, whom I think it's obvious to anyone I worship.

I ripped my copy of this picture out of the copy at the local library, and I hang it in my cube, whenever I have one:

...

Little Richard (to Booth): Are you behavin?
Booth: I'm bein' have.

<swoon>
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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #4 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 5:52pm
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Marvin, are you really saying you have NOT read this book? It's like Rolling Stones Fan 101 pre-req...
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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #5 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 5:59pm
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Though I like Booth's writing and musical sensibilities, I don't dig that pic of him with the Stars n' Bars on his tee shirt.

Paul Simonon, too, had a Confederate flag draped over his bass cabinet on the Clash's '79 US tour, but he's a Brit, and was raised working class (in Britain in the '70s, that was fucking poor) so may not have known better at the time.

Just like Thunders and Vicious sporting swastikas - oooo! how shocking! - it's just plain offensive. To Rock n' Roll people.
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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #6 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 6:05pm
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Booth is from Waycross, GA and working class. Doesn't that make it even more apropos?

I mean, really. Are you questioning Booth's anti-racist street cred? Even LL Cool J is over this issue.

"If you don't judge my do rag,
I won't judge your red flag"

Does Gazza have a ban on this video?

Do you also impotently protest The Dukes of Hazzard by not watching?
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« Last Edit: Jan 25th, 2015 at 6:10pm by SheRat »  
 
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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #7 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 6:12pm
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Not questioning Booths anti-racisit views, and certainly not Simonon's, nor Thunders' for that matter.

I am questioning young men trying to be shocking by flaunting pro-racist imagery. ("oh, the Old South wasn't about slavery per se: it was about a way of life, a culture, blah blah blah". Not only a flat out lie, but a horrible myth that many southern peeps have bought into).
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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #8 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 6:14pm
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SheRat wrote on Jan 25th, 2015 at 6:05pm:
Do you also impotently protest The Dukes of Hazzard by not watching?

Never saw an episode once, mate. I've heard of it and it's rep; sounds like garbage.
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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #9 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 6:17pm
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lol. Honestly. I've got two words for you: Waylon fucking Jennings.
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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #10 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 6:24pm
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Haha. Joke's on you. I don't like any country music recorded after 1929!
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« Last Edit: Jan 25th, 2015 at 6:27pm by Mr. Yeats »  

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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #11 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 6:33pm
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Hmph. Well, slavery actually WAS the defining element IN a culture. So your statement makes no sense. As a sentence. Whether the flag is pro-slavery or not, is another matter. I have Black friends from the south who are academics (who else would say such a thing as the following) that they first identify as Southern and THEN as American. I've never even been there, so WTF do I know. I tend to respect the opinions of those who *are* from the South and unanimously, they agree that it is different from the larger culture. Understandably, that flag is a dog whistle. Maybe they should all get together and decide on a different symbol for "We're From The Fucking South," I don't know.

Having grown up in the alt-country movement in a town as PC as SF, I *do* think it's funny that the only people who ever seem to have a problem with a Southerner wearing their little Dixie flag are lily white people with penises.

In any case, think you'll see, upon closer inspection, that Booth is wearing a product t-shirt and probably, given where he's from, and the time, the flag on it seemed completely incidental. I feel confident betting you two nights in a hotel room with 3 bottles of whiskey and only Exile on Main Street, that Booth is not trying to "shock" anyone or even reappropriate the symbol (as could be made the case with anyone wearing a swastika, originally a Native American symbol).

I leave you with my future husband John Trudell:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhLatWoWrKA&x-yt-ts=1421914688&x-yt-cl=84503534


Why can't I fucking post videos?????? Starbuck can upload 10 fucking Black Crowes vids in a single post but I can't put up a John Trudell interview? What gives?
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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #12 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 6:43pm
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" Well, slavery actually WAS the defining element IN a culture. So your statement makes no sense."

Re-read my post - this is exactly what I said.


"Having grown up in the alt-country movement in a town as PC as SF, I *do* think it's funny that the only people who ever seem to have a problem with a Southerner wearing their little Dixie flag are lily white people with penises."

...and lily white people with vaginas and darker hued people with penises and vaginas. 


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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #13 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 6:45pm
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Mr. Yeats wrote on Jan 25th, 2015 at 6:24pm:
Haha. Joke's on you. I don't like any country music recorded after 1929!



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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #14 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 6:46pm
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Oh, and btw - I believe the swastika was actually an ancient Greek symbol.

The events of the mid-20th century changed all that trivial minutiae for ever and ever.
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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #15 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 6:59pm
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Mr. Yeats wrote on Jan 25th, 2015 at 6:43pm:
" Well, slavery actually WAS the defining element IN a culture. So your statement makes no sense."

Re-read my post - this is exactly what I said.


"Having grown up in the alt-country movement in a town as PC as SF, I *do* think it's funny that the only people who ever seem to have a problem with a Southerner wearing their little Dixie flag are lily white people with penises."

...and lily white people with vaginas and darker hued people with penises and vaginas. 




1) You said: the following is a lie: "oh, the Old South wasn't about slavery per se: it was about a way of life, a culture."

Let's break this shit down.

First of all, people who are wearing Dixie flags aren't talking about "the old south" they're saying they're from THE SOUTH which is a concept that exists in the present.

Second, it's not a lie. The fucking South is a culture. Which HAPPENS to include, as its defining characteristic, slavery.

What you MEANT to say, but did not, is that *some* people try to deny slavery's central role in the culture of the south as if there were other parts of the culture that they wish to celebrate, neglecting to acknowledge the fact that such cultural accents wouldn't have existed without slavery as their inceptive agent.

2) I am speaking of my own experience. I have never met "lily white people with vaginas and darker hued people with penises and vaginas" who had a problem with it. And belieeeeeeeve me, there was a HUGE motherfucking scandal about this exact fucking issue that hastened the demise of an SF record company who was putting out records of someone many people here admire, Chuck Prophet. There were plenty of fingers in that pie of the kind you describe who could have agreed with you when they chimed in, but did not.

While I take issue with the "ironic" co-opting of white trash culture, especially by middle class brats from places like, oh, I don't know, Minneapolis or Chicago (Hello! Bloodshot Records!) and especially San Francisco, I do not begrudge the actual white trash theit own thoughtful expressions of their own culture. And quite frankly, I rail against those who would silence the racists among us with PC bullshit. If someone's a fucking KKK member, I wanna know it up front.

In the case of Stanley Booth's t-shirt, your post seems like so much, ironically, given your apparent disdain of all things Southern, pearl-clutching.


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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #16 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 7:17pm
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WOW! Talk about hijacking a thread...

btw...Am I to be Marvin?? If so, No...I haven't read it...In the hell of excesses  that was the 80's, 1984 was  my junior year at school... I was still clinging on to Punk and loving the one hit wonders of the New Wave as well as the ones who survived into the 2nd LP...while tripping to the Dead and in love with UnderCover...who had time to read??
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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #17 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 7:26pm
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SheRat wrote on Jan 25th, 2015 at 6:59pm:
[quote author=7A4519686E52564344370 link=1422219709/12#12 date=1422232993]

1) You said: the following is a lie: "oh, the Old South wasn't about slavery per se: it was about a way of life, a culture."


Jesus Christ, dude - I put it in quotation marks to show that this is what OTHER people who hold that view often say. It's NOT what I believe - quite the opposite. What I QUOTED IS THE LIE.
The fuck is wrong with you tonight?
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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #18 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 7:35pm
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Paranoid Android wrote on Jan 25th, 2015 at 7:17pm:
btw...Am I to be Marvin??


You're the Paranoid Android aren't you?

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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #19 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 7:36pm
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But what you quoted isn't a lie!

It's true. The south IS a way of life AND a culture.
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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #20 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 7:52pm
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Paranoid Android wrote on Jan 25th, 2015 at 7:17pm:
New Wave as well as the ones who survived into the 2nd LP


Surely this doesn't mean you liked Duran Duran?
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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #21 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 7:56pm
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Bullshit. The Confederacy and the attempt at succession was 100% about the right to use slave labor as the driving force behind their dying and outmoded agrarian economy. And their bullshit non-culture as well of racist, classist English and Presbetyrian Scots-Irish bullying, land-owning, murdering landed gentry.

You know Godamned well what I meant to convey in my post under consideration.
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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #22 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 8:00pm
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You have reading comprehension problems. When you get over your righteous indignation and defensiveness, you'll reread this and see I've actually tried my hardest to agree with you and at least find some common ground. If that doesn't happen, there's not much I can do for you.

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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #23 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 8:01pm
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BTW: Just 'cause you don't like a culture or you find it's economic underpinnings morally reprehensible doesn't mean it's not a culture.

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Re: Reissued Stones Band-Bio...Has anyone read this??
Reply #24 - Jan 25th, 2015 at 8:10pm
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SheRat wrote on Jan 25th, 2015 at 7:36pm:
But what you quoted isn't a lie!

It's true. The south IS a way of life AND a culture.

Where did you get that fairy tale? Do you know what century it is?

How far south of the mason/Dixon line have you been?

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