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Robert Greenfield

[Photo © Phil Franks]


STONES TOURING PARTY
by Robert Greenfield
First published in Britain by Michael Joseph 1974
ISBN 0 7181 1249 0
©Robert Greenfield

Sleeve notes:

May 1972. The Rolling Stones - the greatest rock group in the world - is about to begin an American tour. This book follows them on that bizarre rock odyssey.

The party gathers: the group, the recording man, the film man, the make-up man, the bus. The tension is intense. This isn't to be like the last tour - disorganization, touts, riots, even murder at Altamont. The Stones are returning to redeem themselves.

San Francisco and hysteria. The primary elections are on. A summons is served.

Los Angeles and on to the South-West. Problems erupt at every stop: the kids, the police, drugs. As the tour wears on more things go wrong, tempers are frayed. Denver, Chicago (Playboyland and Bunnies), Houston, New Orleans, hassles with journalists and photographers. Truman Capote wants to cover the tour and arrives with other chic camp-followers - Lee Radziwill, Terry Southern. With half the tour completed exhaustion and boredom replace hysteria. Washington, and the crowds get out of control. The team begins to run down. By New York the strain on everyone is fantastic; pestered by groupies, hangers-on, bomb threats, the police, Hell's Angels. But the last concerts are fantastic and Mick Jagger's birthday party is the feverish climax to fifty-four nights and days of drugs, drink and random debauchery.

No short description can give the flavour of this extraordinary book. It's style matches the subject, the crazy exhausting enormously exciting brutal punishing life of a rockbiz tour.

Robert Greenfield was formerly an Associate Editor at the London bureau of ROLLING STONE magazine. He accompanied the Rolling Stones on their 1972 tour, and then spent four months more researching this book, travelling some twelve thousand miles and undertaking hundreds of interviews.

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Phil's copy carries this dedication:

October 28, 1974
For Phil, who walked round the edge of the festival with me,
again and again, another witness.

With all my love,
Bob
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