Greenfield - S.t.p.: a Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones.

Having labored for lo these thirty years to see this book in print once more in the U.S. of A., it is with great pride and immense personal pleasure that I hereby introduce the gala 2002 edition of S.T.P: A Journey Through America with the RollingStones. Not that they have ever needed my help to sell a ticket, but even as I write, the Stones themselves are about to tour our fair nation yet again in the name of sex and drugs and rock n roll, not to mention also the occasional cheeseburger with fries to go. Despite all that has changed in America and the world since this volume first saw the light of day, it would seem that some things in fact never do change. At least not all that much.

As fossilized as the Stones themselves may have now become (and let me say right here and now that as a concept, Sir Mick makes no sense at all), in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and seventy-two, rock itself was only just becoming a business. On their previous tour of the United States in 1969, the Stones had careened from one gig to another like a band of gypsies in the night, never starting any show on time. Accurately, they reflected the utter chaos then rampant throughout the nation.

It was no accident that the 1969 tour culminated in the disastrous free concert at Altamont. As a rule of thumb, when you hire the Hells Angels for security and then pay them with cases of beer, you will almost always get what Bill Graham, rocks greatest promoter, called the Pearl Harbor of rock. Although the Stones left America after that tour with more money than they had ever made before, they spent the next three years explaining just how it was that a young black man named Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death directly in front of the stage, an event recorded in chilling fashion in the documentary Gimme Shelter.

By 1972, the counterculture itself, if not yet conclusively dead, was definitely ailing. While most of those who came to see the Stones were still under the age of twenty-five, the not-so-hidden agenda behind this particular tour was to mend fences everywhere while proving that the boys themselves were not so much despicable outlaws as moneyed exiles on Main Street who could in fact still rock with the best of them. That they did this in superior fashion while also introducing Stevie Wonder to predominantly white audiences throughout the South is, I believe, well documented in what you are about to read.

Strange as it may now seem, S.T.P: A Journey ThroughAmerica with the Rolling Stones was in fact the very first full-length book ever published about a rock n roll tour. Those times being what they were, no one expected those who loved the Stones to rush out to buy this volume. They were too busy getting high and listening to Exile On Main Street. Which is why only fifteen hundred hardback copies and thirty-five hundred trade paperback copies were ever printed.

As the years went by, the book acquired an odd kind of cult status of its own. Hard to find, it became a collectors item on both sides of the Atlantic. It was not until I went out to publicize Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out some twenty years later (Id had my first real conversation with Bill while interviewing him for this book) that I began meeting people who told me how much S.T.P. had meant to them during their teenage years. From what I could gather, no volume without explicit sex scenes on every other page had ever been stolen from more public libraries. For a more sincere tribute, I could not possibly ask. I only wish that some of the friends to whom I gave signed first editions hadnt lost them in the divorce, when the earthquake struck, or when the commune split up, man.

But then thirty years cannot pass without some significant changes along the way. In terras of the Stones themselves, Mick Taylor and Bill Wyman are no longer in the band. Having left of their own accord, both are still around. Had anyone told me thirty years ago that Ian Stewart, the Stones original piano player, whose drugs of choice (in order of preference) were red meat, single malt whiskey, and golf would be long dead while Keith Richard, he of the lifestyle that chal-lengeth human endurance, would not only be alive and well but living much like Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, I would have laughed myself sick and then gone out looking for yet another party after the show.