Up And Down With The Rolling Stones My Rollercoaster Ride W, De Sanchez, Tony. Editorial John Blake, Tapa Blanda En Inglés, 2011

Descripción

Legendary among fans since its 1979 release, originally titled "I Was Keith Richards' Drug Dealer", this is the absolutely over-the-top, outrageous account of the Stones at their debauched peak. Tony Sanchez worked for Keith Richards for eight years buying drugs, running errands, and orchestrating cheap thrills. In this notorious chronicle of that time, he records unforgettable accounts of the Stones' perilous misadventures racing cars along the Cote d'Azur, murder at Altamont, nights with the Beatles at the Stones-owned nightclub Vesuvio, frantic flights to Switzerland for blood changes, and the steady stream of women, including Anita Pallenberg, Marianne Faithfull, and Bianca Jagger. Here are the Stones at their debauched peak cavorting around the world, smashing Bentleys, working black magic, getting raided, snorting coke, and mainlining heroin. Sanchez spares not even himself in these accounts, told with hard-hitting prose and featuring candid photographs.

Review
"It is hard to decide whether the Stones' lifestyle, or Sanchez's account, is more unbelievable." - Kirkus Reviews

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Up and Down with the Rolling Stones: My Rollercoaster Ride with Keith Richards
By Tony Sanchez
John Blake Publishing Ltd
Copyright © 2010 Tony Sanchez
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84358-263-2

CHAPTER 1
I was still just a little in awe of the Rolling Stones in the mid-sixties. The Beatles were richer and sold more records. But they had compromised their integrity with neat hair and command performances. In London, the Stones were the new potentates. Their hairstyles, their attitudes, their clothes were aped by every young man with aspirations to style - from elegant, leisured aristocrats to schoolboys barely out of short trousers. It is hard to remember now just how vast, if transient, an influence they were. No other musicians in history had wielded such power for social revolution.

At the centre of it was Brian Jones. He was the musically gifted Stone, the one who could pick up any instrument - from a saxophone to a sitar - and learn to play it in less than half an hour. The one who was playing pure, soaring rhythm and blues for a living when Mick Jagger was a mediocre student at the London School of Economics and Keith Richard was just another grubby, delinquent art student who thought he was Chuck Berry because he could pluck three chords on his out-of-tune guitar.

Brian epitomized the arrogantly hedonistic attitude that was the mainstay of the Rolling Stones' special appeal. He had left six illegitimate children - all boys and all by different girls - in his wake. He was the one who grew his hair longest. He was the first to wear outrageously androgynous clothes - chiffon blouses and Ascot hats with make-up - and yet carry such an aura of street guerrilla aggressiveness that no one would dare suggest to his face that he looked anything less than totally masculine. Where Brian led, the other Stones limped along behind.

Lately things had changed. The word among those who worked with the Stones was that Mick and Keith were inadvertently grinding Brian down, breaking him, destroying him. Egocentric, obsessed with becoming stars themselves, they couldn't forgive Brian Jones for having bent them to his will musically and visually in their early days. Such rumours are common in the tough, bitchy world of rock music, and I hadn't taken them seriously - until now.

I was sipping a scotch on the rocks in a dark London nightclub called the Speakeasy, waiting for my girlfriend, a nightclub dancer, to show up. It was two in the morning, and the club was crowded with the young and beautiful men and women who had turned London, momentarily, into the hip capital of the Western world. Swinging London may be a dusty cliché now. But then it was a reality we all were working hard to perpetuate.

At clubs like the Speakeasy everyone tries to