http://www.northjersey.com/arts-and-entertainment/music/a-look-back-at-the-stone...By JIM BECKERMAN
STAFF WRITER |
The Record
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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."
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