In Memoriam: Stanley Booth, the demon poet of rock journalism (1942-2024)

He was the best writer ever on Southern musical idioms, author of the ultimate Rolling Stones book, and rock journalism’s finest New Journalist.

“So then, Dewey starts telling me about Elvis goin’ down on Natalie Wood!” Stanley Booth (r) backstage with Keith Richards on The Rolling Stones’ 1972 tour. (pic: Jim Marshall)

Over fifty years ago, the late Stanley Booth wrote, “The back door opened and in walked a gang of men. Tall and lean and long-haired, they stood for a moment in the center of the room as if posing for a faded sepia photograph of the kind that used to end up on posters nailed to trees – The Stones Gang: Wanted Dead or Alive.”

And thus The Rolling Stones entered, on page 9, the best book ever written on them, The True Adventures of The Rolling Stones. Booth, who died in the Memphis that both nourished and nearly killed him on December 19th last year, paid a dear price for writing it, which took him 15 years. Keith Richards later joked that it took “longer to write than the Bible,” before admitting it was “the only (Stones book) I can read and say, ‘Yeah, that’s how it was.’”

Actually, it was the book and those titular true adventures, not Memphis, which nearly finished Stanley Booth off. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

The paragraph continued, offering concise, lyrical physical descriptions of the Stones: “Mick Jagger, standing like a model, his knife-blade ass thrust to one side…. Beside him was Keith Richards, who was even thinner and not like a model but an insane advertisement for a dangerous carefree Death—black ragged hair, dead-green skin, a cougar tooth hanging from his right earlobe, his lips snarled back for the marijuana cigaret between his rotting fangs, his gums blue, the world’s only bluegum white man, poisonous as a rattlesnake.”

He later spun pure poesy, describing rock ‘n’ roll’s potency, especially as played by the Stones: “There is at the heart of this music a deep strain of mysterious insurrection, and the music dies without it.”

Stanley Booth wrote like Raymond Chandler as a rock critic, combining a noirish sense of atmosphere with an unflinching look at human flaws, besides a brutal poetic flow. He once named his “stylistic heroes”---Kerouac, Nabokov, Waugh—and gave Chandler pride of place: “I tried to make every sentence one that could be spoken by Chandler’s detective narrator Philip Marlowe,” he wrote. Greil Marcus once noted that Booth came eerily close to approaching his role model’s standards with lines like, “He was the only person I had ever seen who could make falling asleep pretentious.”

Booth became the emerging form’s best New Journalist—following bluesman Furry Lewis on his job sweeping streets for the City Of Memphis, or observing a lost Elvis Presley driving his motorcycle around his swimming pool in circles, months before the '68 Comeback special was filmed. The latter piece, “A Hound Dog To The Manor Born,” was as crucial as Gay Talese’s classic profile “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” in proving you sometimes get the best journalistic portraits of a given subject simply by observing them and interviewing everyone but them.

After months of banging his head against a wall called Colonel Tom Parker, struggling in vain to score an Elvis interview through those damned “proper channels,” Booth found the best backdoor possible: DJ Dewey Phillips. The pilled-up, jive-talking hillbilly tornado introduced white Memphis to Elvis and rhythm & blues via his mega-influential radio show, Red Hot & Blue, broadcast daily over WHBQ “from the magazine floor at the beautiful HOTEL CHICSA!”

Now Phillips was taking Booth down to Presley’s newly-acquired Circle G Ranch, besides providing deep Presleyana in his own interviews. In fact, Booth’s original manuscript opened with Phillips recounting a salty tale involving Elvis, Natalie Wood and cunnilingus—an anecdote Esquire deemed too raw for print. (Opening sentence: “Talkin’ about eatin’ pussy….”) It all shoehorned into a cogent analysis of Presley’s rebel rise and eventual corruption, culminating in that circular motorcycle trip around the Graceland swimming pool.

It’s the best magazine profile ever written about Elvis Presley.

Booth’s knack for being in the right place at the right time extended to Stax Records. He was present at their studio as Otis Redding and Booker T. and The MGs cut “Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay,” even witnessed the singer and MGs guitarist Steve Cropper writing the song, later recounting it in detail in another astonishing article. Days later, Redding’s plane crashed.

“I spent the last week of Otis’s life with him, told him goodbye on Friday, and Sunday night he was dead,” Booth told The Vinyl Press in 2015. “He made other people feel good. I’ve never really recovered from his death.” Indeed, Redding’s death left a scar, one that shaped Booth’s ability to capture not just the triumphs but also the tragedies that defined rock ’n’ roll.

Booth's work wasn’t merely about music; it was about life, death, and the ragged edge where art and existence collide. He didn’t just profile the Stones or Otis Redding—he lived with them, suffered alongside them, and bore witness to the chaos that gave birth to their art. His gift was not only his prose but his willingness to pay the toll exacted by proximity to greatness, madness, and mortality.

In ‘68, he went to England to cover Brian Jones’ latest drug trial. The magazine profile morphed into Booth embedding himself in the Stones camp, book contract in his back pocket, as they marauded across the United States for the first time in nearly three years. They were the newly-knighted blackhearted princes of rock ‘n’ roll, defying authority and the overarching “peace and love, maaaan” mood of the day.

They were breaking in Jones’ replacement, Mick Taylor, and discovering that audiences now sat and applauded politely, rather than screaming and pissing themselves, and that musicians could now hear themselves onstage, with improvements in PA system technology. Along the way, whipping up audiences with such apocalyptic new material as “Sympathy For The Devil,” they decamped at legendary Muscle Shoals Sound Studios to cut “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses.”

Booth sent for his Memphis pal Jim Dickinson to play piano on the latter. The writer’s briefly spotted at the mixing sessions in footage shot by the Maysles brothers for their tour documentary, Gimme Shelter .

When Booth embedded with the Stones for their ‘69 US tour—the one that ended in the bloodbath of Altamont—he wasn’t just reporting on “the scene”. He was documenting the unraveling of the ‘60s, the death of the flower-power dream, and the rise of a darker, more cynical era. As he stood at the edge of that infamous Altamont stage, watching the Hells Angels brutalize fans as the Stones played on, Booth captured what no one else could: the way art and violence sometimes become indistinguishable.

In the cracks between reporting the tour, he retold the band’s biography as if you were witnessing it all, putting you right there at Richmond’s Crawdaddy Club, crushed against the stage as the band ripped through “Route 66” or some Bo Diddley obscurity, or pissing on that gas station wall.

Even deeper, Booth found himself staring into Joseph Conrad’s seductive “heart of darkness,” and saw something deeper—in the Stones, in America, possibly even in himself. The reader can hardly discern whether the author likes it or not.

“In 1969, few people at Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving Day thought that what The Rolling Stones were doing was a performance,” he wrote, going on to catalog a litany of modern ills they’d endured: “cold war, hot war, race riots, student riots, police riots, assassinations, rapes, murders, trials, waking nightmares.”

He continued, “But Keith, Mick, Charlie, Bill, and the new guitar player were impersonating The Rolling Stones, and the audience were impersonating their audience… dancing under the circumstances seemed to have a transcendent value. Many people thought then that dancing and music could have a major role in changing the structure of society. They may have been naïve, but they were much more interesting than the sensible people who came along later.”

His ultimate conclusion? “In the ‘60s we believed in a myth—that music had the power to change people’s lives. Today we believe in a myth—that music is just entertainment.”

Stanley Booth’s genius didn’t come without cost. Immersing himself in the world he wrote about, he often found himself dragged into its undertow. Addiction, depression, and near-constant financial instability plagued him henceforth. “If you live through it, you can write it,” Booth once quipped, though he narrowly survived that credo.

Even so, Booth’s lens was always wider than just the music. He understood Memphis was not merely a backdrop in his stories, but a character in its own right. It was a city steeped in contradictions, where divine inspiration and human suffering collided in equal measure. It’s no wonder he was drawn to the blues. Writing about Furry Lewis sweeping Memphis streets or Otis Redding’s final days went beyond reportage; it was Booth’s way of grappling with the city that shaped him and the music that saved him.

Stanley Booth’s legacy is one of unwavering sacrifice and brilliance, a testament to the costs—and rewards—of living for the story. His writing not only chronicled the legends but also gave us a sense of what it felt like to be in their orbit—to see the world through their eyes, however fleetingly, and to feel the weight of their lives pressing down on the page. I never wrote the same after reading him, especially after the one or two times I was lucky enough to talk to him on the telephone.

But knowing him, even in the limited fashion I enjoyed, is not the reason I mourn Stanley Booth so hard, though it certainly is a factor. Nay, I mourn because Stanley Booth wrote in a way that altered your molecular structure, your DNA, your very soul. You never recover after reading The True Adventures of The Rolling Stones, or Rythm Oil, his ‘90s collection of his magazine works. And you don’t want to.

Despite his personal struggles, his lens remained focused, never wavering from the tumult of rock ‘n’ roll's brutal beauty. Stanley Booth could fucking well WRITE! But he won’t anymore, and that kills me. Rest in peace, good sir.

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