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← Back to all issuesGranta 12: The Rolling Stones
Summer 1984
Stanely Booth was meant to be the authorised biographer of the Rolling Stones, but, shortly after he began writing in 1968, things started to go wrong. The American concert tour that he joined ended in murder at a race track in the Californian desert, and the time that followed – in which Booth was assaulted by Hell’s Angels, beaten up by American soldiers, run over by a lorry, imprisoned, and subjected to epileptic fits while trying to withdraw from drugs – was characterised only be confusion, loss and disillusionment. Completed fifteen years after it was begun, ‘The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones’ is only in part about the group of musicians it depicts. It is also a social history and a confession – a chronicle, in the tradition of Michael Herr’s Dispatches, of people united in a curious commitment to their own destruction.
From this Issue
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The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones
Stanley Booth
‘It had been nearly six years since the Stones played in English clubs where sweat condensed on the walls and people swung from the rafters.’
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The Cabin
Raymond Carver
‘Yell defiance until his chest hurt, at the hawks that circled and circled over the meadow.’
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Danner, 1965
Jayne Anne Phillips
‘She was sliding down on the seat under him and it was like the soundtrack at the drive-in – a surface closed over her.’
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The Guardian and Sarah Tisdall
David Caute
‘Sarah Tisdall belongs to a generation which has inherited from us a world sewn thick with 50,000 nuclear warheads.’
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Resistance
Günter Grass
‘Isn’t it already apparent how the peace movement is slowing down, flagging, impotent?’
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Prison-Scribe
Breyten Breytenbach
‘In prison everybody eventually finds his own function in terms of his usefulness to the inmate community.’
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Christmas in Nicaragua
Peter Davis
‘Soaring and plunging, the revolution is like a kite in an uncertain wind.’
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Julio Cortázar, 1914-84
Gabriel García Márquez
‘I felt he was the most impressive person I've known.’
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Notes from New York
James Wolcott
‘Now and then it can appear that an entire magazine is opening up the silks, searching for a soft place to land.’
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Letters to the Editor
‘Can a literary magazine put writing of this sort to the political use it clearly requires?’
