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| Music journalist Stanley Booth, who brilliantly chronicled the Rolling Stones and Furry Lewis, has died at 82. He'll be greatly missed. |
Writes music journalist Chris Morris...
Informed sources say that writer Stanley Booth has died in Memphis.
Sometimes all you need to do is leave a single book behind. Booth -- seen below pointing his shotgun in your face on the dusk jacket of his book “Rythm Oil" -- left one the size of a continent: his 1984 book originally titled “Dance With the Devil: The Rolling Stones & Their Times” and later retitled “The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones.” (Booth was annoyed that his publisher also used the title for a novel, by the actor Kirk Douglas.) It depicted, close up, the band’s fateful 1969 tour, which climaxed at Altamont, so intimately that it instantly rendered any other effort on the subject slight; it also delved deeply into the group’s history, and into Brian Jones’ sad fate. It was a work of personal journalism; the writer is as important a character as Keith Richards, whom he befriended over the course of his reporting. I bought it the week it came out, bought each succeeding edition of it, and bought used hardback copies to give to my friends. Best book on the Stones, best book on rock ’n’ roll, best book spawned by the inheritors of the New Journalism.
Booth managed to publish other books — an elongated version of his Playboy interview with Keith, "Rythm Oil" and its successor collection "Red Hot and Blue" — and the writing was invariably fine, flawless, funny. It is a marvel they appeared at all, for Booth was a reckless and hard-living man who cheated Death for decades. But he was claimed today, at the age of 82. You can talk about the others, those figures now passed like Bangs and Palmer, or the ones still living. Stanley Booth had no true peer among the observers of the music’s long dark trail. He was the pistol.
Watch Furry Lewis play "When I Lay My Burden Down." See the link below for Stanley's feature article "Furry's Blues" originally published in Playboy in April, 1970.
LINKS
Memphis Commercial Appeal Stanley Booth Obituary
Joni Mitchell Library "Furry's Blues" by Stanley Booth
