Off the Record

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.