The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones
By Stanley Booth
A Cappella Books

 The pages are a tattered, faded yellow; the edges, torn and frayed. The cover--a black background with a drawing of an tattooed arm, dripping with blood on top--is battered, wrinkled and coming apart. Four thick pieces of scotch tape hold the cover in place, and there are more pages than not inside being held together by the same. The book has been in all sorts of environments: in the bottom of a bag that has been trudged through the elements, across several state lines, and it has been handled by a great many enthusiastic hands. The book is the reviewer’s copy of the paperback edition of Stanley Booth’s masterful 1984 work, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, and it is just about ready to be retired.
 After 16 years, it will finally be given the rest it deserves, for A Cappella Books has republished the long out-of-print “cult classic,” as it has been called. Whether it truly is a cult classic or not is debatable, but one thing is not--this is a book that has been under-appreciated, and certainly under-circulated. Hopefully, with this new edition, all that will change. Booth’s book is a chronicle about a time when the Rolling Stones shared the Mount Olympus of Rock with only one other band (some obscure group called the Beatles), but it is also so much more. It captures perfectly the atmosphere of the time in which it was written. It is, in a sense, the closest thing to a time machine that we have. When one cracks open the pages of this buried treasure, the sights, sounds, and awareness of our present time melt away into a time of political upheaval, social transformations, unforgettable personalities, and, of course, timeless music. Page after page is full of words and phrases that fight to get off the paper to transport the reader into the lives and adventures of five young men caught in the center of the cultural revolution that was the late 1960s.
 Booth, who befriended the Stones in 1968, traveled on tour with them in their late-’69 American jaunt, which ended up tragically in violence and murder at Altamont. A film about this event, titled “Gimme Shelter,” was re-released last year in selected theaters nation-wide to coincide with its thirtieth anniversary, and it is a must-see for many different reasons. Certainly, it is hard to imagine a time when the Stones were at the pinnacle of their career, five cocky, self assured young men who were releasing some of the most exciting music going. Certainly, the film captures the looks and sounds of a generation ago, full of idealistic young hippies who actually believed that the power of good music could change society. Yet, Booth’s book does the film one better, by taking the reader deep inside the center of the activity, giving us first-hand
accounts from Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, and Bill Wyman on what was going through their heads while the world impatiently waited for each new record. The book, which chronicles the band from its South London roots in 1963
right up through the day just after the Altamont fiasco in a series of alternating chapters, introduces the Rolling Stones not as untouchable figures on a celluloid film strip, but as three-dimensional characters who are sensitive, thoughtful---and yes, occasionally wild--young men. That these real life people in a real life situation play out in a story that reads as entertainingly and informatively as a fictional work is not only a testament to their active times, but also to the way the story is presented.

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