“Gram was somebody who was such a genuinely nice person, and such a polite person,” remembers Booth. “He was in certain ways, like Otis. If you were talking to him talking about music, you might be sitting around at night, and some name might come up, and he would say, ‘You’ve never heard of her man? Listen, I’ll be right back.’ And he would jump on his motorcycle and drive across town, get a couple of albums, and he’d come back, you know? Gram was not waiting for tomorrow for anything.”
 While Booth tends to write mainly about people whose music he admires, he makes every attempt to remain truthful in his writing, a fact that has allowed him to be openly critical of people like B.B. King and the Rolling Stones.
“B.B. King is one of the sweetest people on earth, and just very honest and gracious. He’s gone on to tremendous, unprecedented success for a blues artist,” says Booth. Yet, despite Booth’s admiration for King, he is critical of King’s recent work.
 “The trend today seems to be to take someone like B.B. or Willie Nelson, for example, and to pair them up on an album for a series of duets with contemporary stars to try to get people who might not ordinarily listen to them to buy their album.” Booth feels that King’s music does not necessarily lend itself to such pairings, and that “...the kind of blues that B.B. has played is basically kind of mean music, very realistic music. Blues is rather demanding.” Indeed, this theme crops up in Booth’s 1968 profile of King, which chronicles King’s appearance at the legendary Fillmore West auditorium in California, and juxtaposes that show, played mainly to white college kids, with a later show at a Black blues club in Memphis. This was a pivotal point in King’s career, as he was in the process of finding an appreciative white audience, being embraced as a statesman of the blues, just as he was starting to lose his Black audience base, being edged out by more contemporary performers such as James Brown and Sly Stone.
 Another person that Booth has been close to throughout the years is Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, yet he has been unflinchingly honest in his critique of the Stones’ contemporary work.
 “I have written critically of the Stones giant stage shows with the inflatable dragons and so forth, which is not what the Rolling Stones are all about,” he says. “I have been listening to those early albums like ‘Flowers’ and ‘The Rolling Stones Now!’ and I think they were just so good. The records were simple, and Brian Jones could certainly play the slide guitar. The music today seems to lack a certain sense of purity, although they still can be very good on any given night.” Booth, who shares with Richards a passion for acoustic blues music, witnessed the Stones cut the classic “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses,” and he took shelter at Altamont behind Keith Richards’ amplifier. In 1988, he wrote about Richards for Playboy Magazine, at a time when the Rolling Stones were not working together.

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