BOOK REVIEW: You Had to Be There! The Rolling Stones Live 1962-69

The Rolling Stones are one of the longest-lived rock bands in history, having remained active for over fifty years and counting. In that time, they've played countless concerts all over the world, yet for most fans, their greatest work was during the 1960s. Starting off as a blues and R&B cover band in the clubs and coffee houses of London, the Stones played a grueling and punishing schedule of concerts to minuscule crowds in their early years, building up their following and becoming second only to the Beatles in the 1960s hierarchy of great bands. In You Had to Be There! The Rolling Stones Live 1962-69, author Richard Houghton offers a trip back to those heady years by telling the story of the Stones' 1960s concerts in the words of the fortunate fans who were there to witness them firsthand. 

***special thanks to the author for sending me a copy of the book to review!***

Soliciting memories from fans who were at any of the Stones' concerts in the 1960s, Houghton and his contributors tell the story of a ragtag group of five obsessive blues and R&B fans who started the decade playing dingy basement clubs to handfuls of teenagers and ended the decade as the second biggest rock band in the world. When I first heard of this book, I assumed it would be similar to another very good, if not flawed, book I've read and reviewed on the Beatles' UK tours. That book was enjoyable but suffered from being quite repetitive and devoid of charm after a while. However, as this Stones book got closer to being released, I began to think it might be quite different. This was most noticeable to me when my mum sent me a story from my parents' local newspaper in Massachusetts where Houghton was soliciting submissions from fans who had attended the Stones concert there in 1965. When I finally got my hands on the book and saw how the author had put the book together, I was delighted but still slightly hesitant. For each of the shows between 1962 and 1969, the story of the concerts was told entirely in the words of the fans who were there. What made me wary was the fear that the book would get repetitive the way the Beatles book did (that book became a real slog once I was halfway through it).

I'm happy to say that this wasn't the case at all with You Had to Be There...each entry is interesting and engaging and there are many reasons for this. When multiple people shared their memories about the same show, it was fascinating to see how similar or different their perceptions and experiences were. Reading about how the various concertgoers managed to get their tickets, got to the shows, met the Stones, and got home was a wonderful look back to a more innocent time when rock music and the concert business were both young and everyone was flying by the seat of their pants as the world changed around them at a rapid pace. Security was minimal, amplification was inadequate, prices were low by today's standards, and the bands were much more accessible. It was also amazing to read firsthand how quickly and profoundly it all changed...fans who attended a Stones show in 1964 mentioned how when they saw them just a year or two later the experience was different and in many cases, not as enjoyable. By the time the band got to the end of the decade, their tours were huge events and the small club and theater crowds they'd played to in earlier years gave way to faceless seas of humanity in arenas and stadiums. The innocence and simplicity of the earlier 1960s was now marred by restless crowds, police violence, drugs, groupies, cynicism, and money while the band became aloof and untouchable heroes to the masses. These are not new revelations, but somehow hearing it from the perspective of all of those were were there makes it more vivid and sharpens its impact.

Adding to the charm of the book are the many photos accompanying the entries of the contributors, with most pictures being representative of how they and the fashions looked back then. There is also a large section in the middle with fan photos of various concerts and meetings with members of the Stones throughout the 1960s. It's quite something to read about someone in their 60s or 70s looking back on something that happened to them when they were a teenager, especially when they mention how much they've seen the world around them change in the years since. Even better are the instances when fans mention that they went to the concert with their boyfriend or girlfriend who they then married and are still married to. It's really touching to read about couples who went together as teens and are still together fifty years later...some of these entries even have photos of the couples now and then, which is heartwarming and adds a more human touch to their story. Overall, You Had to Be There is a real time capsule that takes the reader back in time to those heady days and tracks the rapid pace of the decades evolution through the eyes of the everyday people who experienced their little bit of rock history. If I have any complaint, it's only that I would have liked to have seen more contributions from fans who attended shows on the 1969 American tour, including Altamont, as the book ends with the Stones' show at Hyde Park in July 1969. Thinking about it, though, I can understand why the author may have stopped here as Hyde Park was the first show the band played in the immediate aftermath of Brian Jones' death and in way, it was the full-stop end of their 1960s incarnation. However, the 1969 tour was their first that was an actual event and the Altamont show is widely seen as what killed the 1960s dream, so those could have been a nice way to bookend the decade for the Rolling Stones. Still, this is a small quibble of mine and as I said, the more I think about it the more I understand why Houghton ended the book at Hyde Park...it was the end of an era and the first chapter in the Stones' career. 

In closing, while not offering any new revelations in terms of the inner workings of the Stones or their music, this is still definitely a book that any fan of the band would enjoy. Even those who are more a fan of the 1960s and its music in general and perhaps not dedicated Stones fans would have a good time taking a trip back to those years and reading about the experiences from the lucky fans who were there to live through it firsthand.

MY RATING: 9/10

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BOOK REVIEW: Keith Richards: Life

From the moment it was released in 2010, Keith Richards' memoir Life has been hailed as one of the greatest rock musician autobiographies ever published. I first read the book shortly after it came out and wholeheartedly agreed with the popular appraisal, but I ended up reading it pretty quickly and so there were huge chunks of it that, looking back, I didn't think I fully appreciated. Part of what made the book so great was Keith's down-to-earth nature and the sheer joy and love of life and music he's so well known to have, both of which leaped off the pages. As one of my favorite guitarists in one of my favorite bands, it seemed like the type of book I would read more than once, so when I decided to finally review it for this site, a thorough re-reading of it definitely seemed to be in order (not to mention long overdue).

In Life, Keith, with the help of his longtime friend and ghost writer James Fox, takes us through the story of exactly that: his entire life, from the very beginning all the way to the present. Starting with his birth and post-War upbringing as an only child in the London suburb of Dartford, it's clear that he had a hell of a lot of affection for his parents Bert and Doris. He also has fond memories of his numerous aunts as well as perhaps the most significant member of his family, both personally and musically: his grandfather Gus. It was Gus who ignited Keith's interest in music and nurtured it through by playing piano for the young boy and his eventual encouragement of Keith to take up guitar. In particular, the song "Malaguena" was a favorite of Gus' and would hold significance for Keith throughout his life after he learned how to play it...the song's significance literally runs through the book right to the very end. Taking us through the various adventures of his childhood, we see Mick Jagger briefly come into Keith's life as a classmate in primary school before they part ways. Jagger was from a more affluent family and had class climbing aspirations while Keith came from a more working-class background and was always down to earth. In fact, this is something Keith points out early on in the book and returns to several times throughout the book: Keith enjoyed the spoils of the Stones' success but remained, at heart, a normal guy without airs, while Mick aspired to climb the social ladder and became the rock and roll embodiment of the culture they initially rebelled against. Eventually Keith (now a student at art college) and Mick (a student at London School of Economics) encountered each other again in their teens while waiting for a train. Mick had an armful of records that caught Keith's eye and so began their mutual love affair with the blues, rock n' roll, and R&B music coming out of America in the 1950s and early 1960s. Finding out that Mick sang and played with a ragtag band called Little Boy Blue & the Blue Boys, Keith talked his way into the group and they began frequenting the numerous club nights on the nascent London blues and R&B scene. Eventually crossing paths with Ian Stewart and Brian Jones, they formed the nucleus of the band that became the Rollin' Stones. Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, the latter of whom they had to court for a while before he accepted their offer, completed the classic line up. (It should be mentioned here that Keith persists in insisting that Kinks drummer Mick Avory was their drummer for their first ever gig, while Avory himself and all others involved insist he only played one rehearsal with them and never did a gig...the truth is most likely lost in the mists of time).

Keith does a wonderful job of describing the Stones' career from their humble, hardscrabble beginnings (including the pigsty flat he shared with Brian and later on, Mick, at Edith Grove) to meeting the Beatles and becoming part of the burgeoning London rock scene. The huge revelation was when Lennon and McCartney gave them a song, "I Wanna Be Your Man," which became the Stones' breakthrough single and inspired Mick and Keith (via manager Andrew Oldham) to begin writing their own songs. As Keith tells it, he's not so much the creator as he is the vessel for the music to come out of the ether. It's clear throughout the entire book that he absolutely loves music, all music...country, jazz, classical, rock, blues, folk, it's all part of the magic of sound and something that is as essential to his life (and mine, too, honestly) as water, air, and food.  For him, the greatest joys in life are writing songs, recording music, and playing onstage. However, he's very open and honest about all aspects of his life as he tells his story through the tumultuous 1960s, detailing the problems the band had with Brian Jones which in particular are interesting to read again since I've just recently read a thoroughly researched account of this period from someone on Brian's side. He discusses how his long-term relationship with Brian's ex-girlfriend Anita Pallenberg began and how Brian ended up becoming so much dead weight that he was booted from the band, eventually dying in July 1969. The Mick Taylor years of 1969-1974, which produced the band's best run of albums, are mentioned as such by Keith although it's interesting to hear him describe how Taylor never fit in as a personality with the band. Despite all of this, his sudden departure from the band in 1974 on the eve of new recording sessions and an upcoming tour left the Stones in the lurch. Eventually they recruited Ronnie Wood in 1975 and embarked upon what is, for me, the least interesting and most unfulfilling era of their career, at least musically. However, Keith's life was no less interesting from 1975 onward...if anything, as he sank further down into heroin addiction and an increasingly chaotic relationship with Anita that now involved their two small children, it gets more fascinating. Making no bones of his heroin addition and how awful it was from his perspective, it's gratifying to read how Keith finally broke up with both Anita and "the junk," as he called it, in order to save himself. It's equally funny to read of how frustrated he gets at people who still think he's a wild-man junkie even though he's been clean and sober for over thirty years!

Bringing us up to the present day, including such high-profile incidents such as his falling off a tree limb in 2006 which required serious brain surgery to save his life, getting his "blood changed" in Switzerland, the "snorting" of his father's ashes (read the book for the true stories), and others, Keith never fails to make you smile and laugh out loud as you read passage after passage. It's nice to see that he's found love and contentment in his personal life, being married to his soul mate Patti Hansen since 1983 and adding two more daughters to his brood, but Keith never manages to sound content to drift into old age. Indeed, he states many times that music is what he does and who he is and that the only way he'll ever stop is "when I croak." He puts to bed many of the myths that have sprung up over the years about him while also revealing several new things that none but the most hardcore fans would ever have suspected, if even known. Years spent in a nomadic existence as a tax exile from the UK, living in Jamaica and forming a ragtag band (Wingless Angels) that he's recorded albums with, his various side- and tribute- projects, the various animals he's rescued and adopted, his love of bangers & mash and shepherd's pie (complete with recipes!)...nothing is off limits. Of everything, though, the most fascinating thread running throughout the entire book is his lifelong friendship with Mick. In fact, as Keith describes it, they're no longer friends; rather, they're brothers and despite their ups and downs, they'll always be there for each other. He laments the fact that he doesn't really know Mick anymore and hasn't since the mid-1970s and that they have two entirely different approaches to life, fame, and music. Clearly there's still something there as they continue to work with each other into their sixth decade together. (And for the record, the famous line about Mick's "tiny todger" that caused such an uproar when this book first came out...read it in its proper context and it's little more than just the way all guys rib each other, although it's no less hilarious!). Yes, he takes several swipes at Mick, Bill Wyman, and Mick Taylor, but it's clear that he still has a lot of affection for them all (well, maybe not so much for Bill...).

I'm really glad I read Life again because it's only reaffirmed my opinion that Keith is one of the funniest, earthiest, coolest, and most talented musicians of our era who also happens to embody what being a "rock star" is all about. Reading this book is like sitting in the darkened corner of a pub with Keith and a couple of pints as he chain smokes cigarettes and tells you story after story. It may sound strange but after reading this book, you almost feel like you know Keef and that he's your pal. It's the mixture of honesty, candor, perspective, and humor that makes Life such an engaging read and one of the rare memoirs that's worth multiple revisits. It's certainly essential for any true Rolling Stones fan (although I'd have a hard time believing all Stones fans haven't already read this), any fan of 1960s rock, or really, any music fan in general. Just be prepared to have a hard time putting it down and to laugh out lout...a LOT.

MY RATING: 9.5/10

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BOOK REVIEW: The Rolling Stones

For over fifty years, the music of the Rolling Stones has been blasted out of our speakers and performed on concert stages across the world. As absolute legends of rock music and the longest continually active band of their generation (if not of all time), the time was ripe for a career retrospective book by the band, for the fans.  That moment is finally here with Taschen's officially authorized book, titled simply The Rolling Stones.

***special thanks to Julie and Mallory at Taschen for sending me a copy of the book to review!***

I first need to get the obvious out of the way: this is a MAMMOTH work of art, with emphasis on those two words for a reason. The book is absolutely huge, handsomely presented in hardcover with a dust jacket featuring a photo by the legendary Gered Mankowitz from the Between the Buttons cover session on the front and a shot of a massive concert audience on the rear.  The book comes housed in a folding cardboard case complete with carrying handle (see photo below).  A quick look at the table of contents reveals that, in addition to the gorgeous photos contained within its 500+ pages, there are also some essays on the Stones and large sections in the back dedicated to other aspects of their history. I'll go through these in order as the review progresses, so keep reading...

The book next to its box

This book is an officially authorized photographic history of the Rolling Stones, put together with complete cooperation from the band; this included access to their vast archives in both London and New York City. It spans the period of 1962, when the nucleus of the band first came together, up to the present day.  Most of the photos take full advantage of the high quality paper stock and large page sizes and are of such high resolution and clarity that many of them look as though they could have been taken yesterday, never mind decades ago. What makes this book more than just a collection of photographs are the detailed captions that accompany each photograph. These include the year, date (when available), photographer, and a brief explanation from both the photographer as well as the subject of the particular picture. Thus, even as you go through the visual tour of the book, there is information and background for each photo that puts it into context and clarifies what is going on.  Sprinkled throughout are the essays, which are interesting enough although they don't really offer anything too new in terms of information that any serious Stones fan won't already know. Additionally, one of the essays is rather annoying in how the author feels the need to simultaneously tear down the Beatles with every compliment he bestows upon the Stones; it's doubly pointless since then as now, both bands have been good friends and were never rivals.

Starting with the earliest photos, the book traces the history of the band from their beginnings as shaggy young men playing blues and R&B in sweaty London nightclubs as they worked their way up the ladder to become one of the leading bands of Swinging London and 1960s rock.  From their 1969 American tour to the present, the Stones became larger than life and beyond immersing themselves in now-cliche rock and roll lifestyle, they became the rock and roll lifestyle. We see them go from young, shaggy, wide-eyed young men who cannot believe their good fortune to get paid for making music to the road weary, drug-addled bad-boys of the mid-to-late-1960s over the course of many pages. Most fascinating and also most tragic is witnessing the gradual physical and mental decline of Brian Jones over these same pages.  From 1969, when Mick Taylor replaced Brian shortly before his (Brian's) death to the present, the Stones were (and still are) larger than life; this is conveyed perfectly through the pictures.  The bulk of the book (I'd estimate ~2/3 of it) focuses on the 1962-1975 era which coincidentally happens to be what I and most Stones fans consider their best era.  The remainder of the photographs cover the Ron Wood era in rather rapid succession which is surprising given that this has been the longest-lived incarnation of the band! Indeed, it feels as though once the book gets past the release of the Some Girls album in 1978 it rushes fairly quickly through the rest of their career. There is a paucity of images documenting the 1980s...the Dirty Work album (admittedly, one of their worst) is completely absent from the book. I was also really surprised (and a little disappointed) that there weren't extra photos devoted to sixth Stone Ian "Stu" Stewart, their loyal friend, roadie, and piano player who tragically passed away in 1985. I would have expected numerous photos of Stu when the book got to the point in their history when he passed, especially given the love and admiration they've expressed for him throughout their career. Not something I'm taking major points away over, but a confusing omission nonetheless.  Finally, the end of the book has two large sections devoted to Stones history: the first is a detailed chronological list of their history year-by-year starting with the birth of the oldest member (Bill Wyman) and hitting every milestone over the past 50+ years.  The second section is a collection of single, LP, and magazine covers from all around the world over the same time span.  It's truly a wealth of history and imagery that is almost too much to take in all at once!

Overall, this is an absolutely gorgeous and extremely well thought out, well put together book chronicling one of the most important rock bands of all time.  It's nearly flawless...the only things I will knock it for are the aforementioned thin selection of photos from the 1980s and the fact that there are several pages left blank apart from small captions pertaining to photos on the opposite page: I would have loved even more pictures from the archives to fill these pages up.  These are minor quibbles, however, and no serious Rolling Stones fan can be without this book.  This should be the benchmark by which any band who aspires to put a photographic history together should measure.

MY RATING: 9.5/10

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BOOK REVIEW: The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones

They've been called "the greatest rock and roll band in the world," and for a time during the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was hard to argue that it wasn't true.  Bursting onto the rock music scene in 1964 in the wake of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones are music history's greatest runners-up.  Ironically, while the media pitted the Beatles and Stones against each other as rivals, the bands were good friends.  However, whereas the Beatles were universally adored and considered a national (and later, worldwide) treasure, the Stones were set up as their polar opposites by the press: scruffy, dirty, vulgar, and dangerous. As usual with these sort of things, the truth of the matter lies somewhere in the middle of the two extremes, although it is fair to say that the Stones did have a seedier image, lifestyle, and mystique attached to them. This reached its fever pitch during their golden period of 1968-1973 when they released a run of albums and singles that stands with the best that any band of any era produced.  In the middle of all of this, from 1968 to 1970, writer Stanley Booth traveled with the Stones and the resulting book, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, ended up being one of the greatest rock and roll books ever in spite of its tortuous gestation period (more on that in a bit).

***special thanks to Stacey at Chicago Review Press for sending me a copy of the book to review!*** 

Drug busts,  trials, sentencing hearings, and the rapid deterioration of Brian Jones forced the Stones off the road after their 1967 European tour.  Even though they'd continued to release several excellent singles and albums in the interim, by early 1969 the band were itching to get back on the road and play in front of crowds, especially in America where they hadn't toured since 1966. Complicating matters was the mental and physical degradation of Jones, who had become increasingly irrelevant to the Stones' music since the end of 1966. With Mick Jagger and Keith Richards firmly in control as the songwriters and creative drivers of the band, Jones was marginalized as he sank deeper into his addictions. Several months before setting out on their comeback tour of the US, the Stones replaced Jones with Mick Taylor, whose debut show was to be a massive festival in London's Hyde Park in July 1969. A few days before this concert, Jones was found dead in his swimming pool, turning the concert from its intended introduction of Taylor into a tribute to Jones. Three months later, the band would head to America to rehearse for the tour, which started in November and became one of the most epic and mythical tours of its era (at least until the Stones' equally celebrated 1972 US Tour). Into the middle of all of this dropped Stanley Booth, an at the time unknown writer from Waycross, Georgia who spent 1968 and 1969 in London working on a biography of the Stones before accompanying them on the 1969 tour. The resulting book would turn out to be more gripping, informative, interesting, and shocking than either the author or his subjects could have ever known.

The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones was originally written between 1968 and 1970, but wasn't published until 1984.  Thankfully, it has been reprinted for its 30th anniversary by Chicago Review Press and it is this edition that is the subject of the present review.  The book is set up as both a history of the Rolling Stones from their inception to the present (ie 1970, when Booth's time with the band was over) and as a blow-by-blow chronicle of the 1969 tour as it happened.  The structure has chapters alternating the band's history with the ongoing tour before they meet head-on at the end.  After starting the book with a tease about the situation at the ill-fated Altamont Festival (which we'll get to later) prior to the Stones taking the stage, Booth takes the reader for a ride on two parallel tracks: from humble beginnings in the country suburbs of London and the R&B clubs of the city before the Stones achieved stardom, and the decadent sleaze and boredom of a rented house in Los Angeles a month before the US tour starts in November 1969.  The central figure of both tracks is Brian Jones, the enigmatic and doomed young man who founded the band before he was usurped and pushed to the side the more successful they got.  As far as the band history part of the book goes, Booth does an excellent job tracing their history from the nascent jazz and R&B clubs of London where the band members began sitting in with each other to the moment when the five of them finally came together and started down their road to success.  Besides the concert riots and negative press that dogged them at every turn, what was most shocking to learn was just how soon after the Stones became famous that Brian's influence and participation in the band began to wane.  Indeed, Mick, Keith, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, and Ian "Stu" Stewart all recall how Brian would not turn up for gigs or recording sessions, leaving the band to capably carry on without him.  Additionally, while Jagger and Richards' dismissive and often cruel treatment of Jones is well known and well documented, most fans (myself included) usually consider it to have started in the 1966-67 period, when Brian's drug problems became overwhelming and he lost his girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, to Keith. However, the book clearly shows that the Stones (and then-manager Andrew Oldham) took this attitude toward Brian as early as 1964 and in earnest by 1965.  The book also gives the most detailed and in-depth look at the infamous Redlands drug busts of Mick and Keith and the resulting overreach of the courts in sentencing (and then releasing) the duo. However, Brian's offenses are also discussed, in even more detail as Booth was present at the hearings, and it's quite surprising as to how differently he was viewed by the media and the courts when compared to his two bandmates.  Booth also managed to interview Brian's parents for the book, albeit after his death, and their somewhat ambivalent yet ultimately loving feelings toward their late son and his former bandmates makes for fascinating reading.

Running concurrently with the band history is Booth's diary of the 1969 tour which is the beating heart of the book, bringing all of the threads together.  Beginning in October 1969 when the band, their various mates, management, and hangers-on decamped to several rented houses in Los Angeles to rehearse and prepare the logistics of the tour, Booth's prose is a narrative of not only what was going on in the Stones' world, but in his own life.  His troubles with his agent and publisher in getting his advance and a proper contract for the book drawn up, the strain the assignment put on his marriage, and his burgeoning drug addition as he imbibed alongside the Stones and their friends are all issues that continued to dog him throughout the tour. Along with this, he does a great job detailing the boredom and drudgery that accompanies a lot of rock and roll touring. While the Stones were demigods by this stage, earning a small fortune every night for a few hours' work and able to have their every whim and desire catered to, there were still endless hours slogging around on airplanes, buses, taxi cabs, in hotel rooms, and the constant bouts of hurry-up-and-wait as they flitted from city to city. All of this led to the inevitable climax, the disaster at the Altamont Festival. The last show of the tour (although not actually part of the tour proper as it was added at the last minute and took place a week after the true end of the tour), Booth had a backstage view of the mayhem and violence of the festival from the moment the Stones arrived at the site all the way through their performance and their harrowing escape to the safety of their hotel. In particular, his play-by-play recap of the concert itself (which, along with listening to the audience recording of the entire show and watching the Gimme Shelter film gives one an almost completely immersive and accurate picture of what went on) makes for edge-of-the-seat reading.  Indeed, I literally could not put the book down while I was reading this chapter. His grisly description of Meredith Hunter's fatal injuries at the hands of the Hells Angels doesn't make for easy reading, especially when he conveys an eyewitness account from a man who was involved in trying to save Hunter's life. While most accounts rightly point the blame at Hunter for pulling a gun in the midst of the huge, restless crowd (and indeed, it's all captured in the film), the manner in which Booth describes the entire event is terrifying and places the reader firmly in the pitch dark madness of that cold California night in December 1969.

After that disaster, the finality of the tour is remarkably brief as everyone in the Stones entourage scattered to the four winds almost immediately after Altamont.  The rest of Booth's story, both in terms of his personal life and his book, is no less troubling.  It took him many years to recover, emotionally and physically, from the experience; he had to kick his drug addictions after a few more years of spending time with the Stones on subsequent tours nearly cost him his life.  The long and winding road his book took to being published, as well as the various missteps made by his publicity handlers, cost him a lot of money and fulfillment which led him to the desperate brink of suicide. He never made much money off of the book despite its critical darling status since its publication and this seems to have left a slightly bitter taste in his mouth, and understandably so.  However, we should be eternally grateful that the book did come out and that it is now available again.  If method acting involves an actor getting so immersed in his or her character that they actually become the character for a time, then Booth was a method writer as he became one of the Stones during this period in his life, and he paid a dear price for it both mentally and physically.  Apart from some rather dense and perhaps overly verbose and slightly pretentious passages scattered throughout, this is a fascinating and enjoyable book that puts the reader there in the moment. It's not fly-on-the-wall writing so much as it is fly-in-the-ointment writing, and it also contains one of my new favorite sentences of all time:

"In the sixties we believed in a myth: that music had the power to change people's lives; today people believe in a myth: that music is just entertainment."

That is powerful, profound stuff and so, so true.

This book has rightly been hailed as a classic of rock music writing and I can't argue with that assessment. It is, in my opinion, the most rock and roll book about the most rock and roll rock and roll band ever. And I meant that sentence exactly as I wrote it.  None other than Keith Richards himself said "Stanley Booth's book is the only one I can read and say 'Yeah, that's how it was.'" If it's good enough for Keef, that's more than good enough for me.

MY RATING: 9.5/10

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