BOOKS READ:
- S.T.P.: A Journey through America with the Rolling Stones—Robert Greenfield
- The Great British Woodstock: The Incredible Story of the Weeley Festival 1971—Ray Clark
- Improvement—Joan Silber
- Janesville: An American Story—Amy Goldstein
BOOKS BOUGHT:
- The Great British Woodstock: The Incredible Story of the Weeley Festival 1971—Ray Clark
- Fools—Joan Silber
- The Library Book—Susan Orlean
- Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra—John F. Szwed
- The Lost Soul of Eamonn Magee—Paul D. Gibson
- Sevens Heaven: The Beautiful Chaos of Fiji’s Olympic Dream—Ben Ryan
In 1971 I was fourteen, and did not attend the Weeley Festival; in 1972 I was fifteen, and did not take a journey through America with the Rolling Stones, nor did I see any of their shows. Luckily, I don’t have to tell you all the other things I failed to do in my teenage years, because those failures are irrelevant to my reading, and in any case I have only a couple thousand words; I am trying merely to demonstrate that it wasn’t simply nostalgia that drew me to the books by Ray Clark and Robert Greenfield. I have to say, though: those were the days, eh? I don’t know why I’m asking you. You wouldn’t know. You missed it all.
The Stones book may or may not have something to do with some work I may or may not be doing, but the uncertainty of the project doesn’t really matter when the “research” is as much fun as this. S.T.P.: A Journey through America with the Rolling Stones is a firsthand account—a kind of illustrated oral history—of a chaotic, occasionally violent, tumultuously successful tour, with as much sex and drugs as you can imagine, and then a lot more on top of that. As those who have seen Crossfire Hurricane, the riveting documentary about the group, will know, the Stones are probably the toughest band of them all—not tough in the sense that they would or could beat you up (Mick was and still is a skinny little thing), but in the sense that they survived situations that would have destroyed less-steely mortals. The stage invasions that ended every show in the first half of the 1960s, the death of Brian Jones, Altamont, police harassment, press intrusions… Tumultuous events flew at them like a constant blizzard of asteroids, and in 1972, crisis mode was the only mode they had known for a decade. I don’t know whether you’re a Beatles person or a Stones person, and the question never made any sense to me, anyway—are you a...
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contributor
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Nick Hornby is the bestselling author of eight novels, including High Fidelity, About a Boy, and, most recently, Just Like You. He has also published several works of nonfiction including his ground-breaking debut, Fever Pitch, and has written numerous award-winning screenplays for film and television including Brooklyn, Wild, and State of the Union.
