Stanley Booth, a member of the Rolling Stones' inner circle, met the band just a few months before Brian Jones drowned in a swimming pool in 1968. He lived with them throughout their 1969 American tour, staying up all night together listening to blues, talking about music, ingesting drugs, and consorting with groupies. His thrilling account culminates with their final concert at Altamont Speedway - a nightmare of beating, stabbing, and killing that would signal the end of a generation's dreams of peace and freedom. In Booth's new afterword, he finally explains why it took him fifteen years to write the book, relating an astonishing story of drugs, jails, and disasters that has been called - by Harold Brodkey and Robert Stone, among others - the best book ever written about the sixties.