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Stanley Booth obituary

American music journalist who chronicled ‘the mystery of the Rolling Stones’ in their pomp

As a group of Hells Angels beat and stabbed a Black teenager to death a few feet away from where the Rolling Stones were playing on warm evening in California in 1969, the writer Stanley Booth watched the mayhem from a vantage point next to his friend Keith Richards’s guitar amplifiers. Published in 1974 as Dance With the Devil, and republished in the UK in 1985 as The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, his book brought to bear an observant eye and literary skills that elegantly stripped the varnish off the story, leaving posterity with a faithful eye-witness account of the group’s activities and their social milieu during their prime years. The book’s UK edition opened with a mood-setting series of colour photographs taken by William Eggleston, Booth’s friend and fellow Memphian: freight trains, cotton fields, diners and lonesome highways.

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