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Table of Contents
About the Book
For readers of Keith Richards’s Life and Jann S. Wenner’s Like a Rolling Stone, legendary former Rolling Stone editor and New York Times bestselling author Robert Greenfield reveals the dangerous, hilarious, and untold stories he once had to leave out, drawing on a half-century inside rock ’n’ roll with the Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell, Jerry Garcia, Neil Young, Pete Townshend, David Crosby, and more.
For fifty-plus years, Robert Greenfield knew the rock ’n’ roll stories he could not tell. As a Rolling Stone editor, biographer, and collaborator with legends, he gained access to a world built on talent and friendship but also excess and betrayal. Discretion kept the most revealing stories off the record. Until now.
As a Brooklyn teenager transfixed by Jackie Wilson, Greenfield found himself backstage at Harlem’s Apollo Theater with James Brown, Patti LaBelle, and Dionne Warwick. He was embedded with the Rolling Stones on the 1971 farewell tour of England. He broke into a dressing room with Keith Richards, lost Gram Parsons on the way to the stage, spent two chaotic weeks at Villa Nellcôte, and attended Mick Jagger’s rooftop birthday party after the band’s 1972 American tour.
In Off the Record, Ginger Baker chases Greenfield into the street, Jerry Garcia wonders whether someone dosed Greenfield’s Coke, and Bruce Springsteen slips into a Jacuzzi unrecognized. Neil Young retains an otherworldly innocence, Pete Townshend becomes an intellectual friend, and Joni Mitchell transforms a hostile festival crowd. There are darker stories, too, with addiction, damaged relationships, impossible loyalties, and sudden loss, including Bill Graham’s death after five years of collaboration.
More than a collection of celebrity encounters, Off the Record is the firsthand account of a writer who entered rock ’n’ roll’s inner circle as the music changed the culture. And Greenfield has hard-earned advice: If you truly love the music, think twice before meeting the people who made it.
For fifty-plus years, Robert Greenfield knew the rock ’n’ roll stories he could not tell. As a Rolling Stone editor, biographer, and collaborator with legends, he gained access to a world built on talent and friendship but also excess and betrayal. Discretion kept the most revealing stories off the record. Until now.
As a Brooklyn teenager transfixed by Jackie Wilson, Greenfield found himself backstage at Harlem’s Apollo Theater with James Brown, Patti LaBelle, and Dionne Warwick. He was embedded with the Rolling Stones on the 1971 farewell tour of England. He broke into a dressing room with Keith Richards, lost Gram Parsons on the way to the stage, spent two chaotic weeks at Villa Nellcôte, and attended Mick Jagger’s rooftop birthday party after the band’s 1972 American tour.
In Off the Record, Ginger Baker chases Greenfield into the street, Jerry Garcia wonders whether someone dosed Greenfield’s Coke, and Bruce Springsteen slips into a Jacuzzi unrecognized. Neil Young retains an otherworldly innocence, Pete Townshend becomes an intellectual friend, and Joni Mitchell transforms a hostile festival crowd. There are darker stories, too, with addiction, damaged relationships, impossible loyalties, and sudden loss, including Bill Graham’s death after five years of collaboration.
More than a collection of celebrity encounters, Off the Record is the firsthand account of a writer who entered rock ’n’ roll’s inner circle as the music changed the culture. And Greenfield has hard-earned advice: If you truly love the music, think twice before meeting the people who made it.
About the Author
Robert Greenfield is an award-winning journalist, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and the author of fifteen books, including STP: A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones; Exile on Main Street: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones; the National Jewish Book Award-winning novel Temple; Timothy Leary: A Biography; and True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times. A former associate editor in Rolling Stone’s London bureau, he co-wrote Bill Graham: My Life Inside Rock and Out, winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award and ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award, and Anyone Who Had a Heart with Burt Bacharach. His authorized Ahmet Ertegun biography, The Last Sultan, won the ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Sound Research. Greenfield co-wrote the Emmy-nominated NBC miniseries The Sixties and has written for Esquire, GQ, Playboy, The New York Times Book Review, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. He lives in California.
Product Details
- Publisher: Diversion Books (August 24, 2027)
- Length: 304 pages
- ISBN13: 9798895153420
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Raves and Reviews
Praise for Robert Greenfield’s S.T.P.: A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones
“One of the greatest rock books ever written.”
—GQ
“Unsparing in its picture of the calculation and lyrical decadence behind the tour.”
—The New York Times
“The best book ever written about the Stones, if not music in general.”
—Independent
Praise for The Last Sultan: The Life and Times of Ahmet Ertegun
“We first met when the Stones signed up with Atlantic. The stories began to flow and a lot of them are in these pages. Robert Greenfield has done a masterful job of relating them.”
—Keith Richards
“Mesmerizing, entertaining, informative. . . . There are a great many delicious stories in this page-turning work. . . . A vivid portrait of Ertegun but also a colorful panorama of the indie record-business during and after its rough-and-tumble years.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A loving, vividly detailed and utterly compelling history of one of the most fascinating lives of the twentieth century. . . . The Last Sultan is the remarkable odyssey of a truly remarkable man.”
—Jann Wenner, Editor, Publisher and Founder of Rolling Stone
Praise for Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones
“Compelling. . . . One hit of Greenfield’s Exile and you’ll be hooked.”
—Vanity Fair
“[A] dusky and gossipy eyewitness account of the kinky sex and toxic drugs behind the ferocious rock and roll. . . . Addictive.”
—Miami Herald
“Anyone who thinks heroin enhances musical performance should read Exile on Main Street, Robert Greenfield’s fly-on-the-syringe account.”
—New York Daily News
Praise for True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times
* New York Times Editor's Choice
“What [True West] achieves in its finest pages is placing the artist in his time. . . . I was filled with excitement, envy and reverence for the New York City that embraced the young Shepard in the 1960s and early ’70s.”
—Ethan Hawke, The Washington Post
“Fascinating . . . a masterful look at the wild life of an enigmatic artist that shows how captivating the truth can be.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Praise for Timothy Leary: A Biography
“Unfolds like the great novel Sinclair Lewis might have written had he lived to the age of 120.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“It will never be necessary to write another [biography of Leary].”
—The New Yorker
Praise for Dark Star: An Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia
“[An] unflinching portrait of one of the most prolific and enigmatic figures in American music.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A fascinating exploration into the life of late legend Jerry Garcia.”
—Billboard
“This testimonial by people who knew him will be embraced like an extra-long set.”
—Playboy
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