“I wrote, in the introduction to the interview, that it cost me and Keith 1/100th of what it used to get through an evening,” says Booth, referring to the drug problems that plagued both men throughout the late Sixties and much of the Seventies. “I’ve tried to keep a certain amount of distance from him in order to be able to still write honestly about him, other wise it would do neither us any good. But Keith is a wonderful human being, and one of the things I admire about him most is that, during Altamont, when the Hells Angels were busy beating people up, Keith was the only one out of everybody there that pointed to an individual Angel and said, ‘That guy there--stop him.’ It was a courageous, dangerous thing to do, and he was the only one who risked it.”
 Aside from his unflinching honesty, Booth also has that gift rarely found in a music journalist: literary grace. Some of the highlights of Rythm Oil are the beautiful passages that Booth writes to describe certain scenes. In the award-winning “Furry’s Blues,” Booth relates the tale of Furry Lewis, an old blues singer who used to be quite popular in the heyday of Beale Street in Memphis, before the Great Depression. In the years since, Lewis got a job collecting trash in the early morning hours, playing the occasional gig at a coffee house owned by Booth’s friend. In one passage, Booth describes Lewis collecting trash on Beale Street, the very place where his future once seemed so bright. As he wanders past a music club, Booth notes that there is a poster advertisement for an upcoming blues concert featuring Muddy Waters, John Lee
Hooker, and Jimmy Reed, three men who were able to support themselves by playing the music that they, as well as Furry, loved. The image of this sympathetic, skilled musician, getting up in the middle of the night, walking around the Memphis streets on his prosthetic leg while doing his thankless job, chatting with the locals, is as moving and powerful as the blues songs that Booth clearly loves.
 “I tend to write like a mole, slowly and methodically,” says Booth, who despite this fact has produced enough essays to fill several volumes. Booth’s methodical writing style has been conducive to a high caliber of writing not usually found in music journalism. As a result, Rythm Oil stands up as a solid, engaging collection of essays by a man who has a true feel for the importance of not only the music, but the people who make it. That, combined with his natural story-telling ability, makes his work so special. We can only hope that the next collection of essays is not long in coming.