UNDER THEIR THUMB HOW A NICE BOY FROM BROOKLYN GOT MIXED UP WITH THE ROLLING STONES (AND LIVED TO TELL ABOUT IT)

Under Their Thumb by Bill German - This was such a great book. Bill German was a 16 year old high school student when he started a magazine about the Rolling Stones called Beggar's Banquet. It was a labor of love, and although he never got rich from his 17 year, 102 issue project, he became an insider to the band while maintaining his distance as a journalist. He's a great writer (which his subscribers already knew), and this is a great story. He worked in both worlds. The one before the commercialization and corporatization of American life, and the one after, where everything went haywire and became more about money than passion. Or maybe it's that the people with the passion for money were able to turn things to their advantage in a big way, and the Americans and now the world followed. I'm not saying that money isn't good, but the gap between the haves and have nots gets wider and wider and wider. Anyway, the Rolling Stones was my first concert, at Cobo Arena in Detroit, and around here somewhere is my ticket stub. $7.50. Except the concert was sold out, and I had to buy my ticket from a scalper who was a friend of my Uncle Peter's and owner of the bar across the street from where I worked in the summers at Michigan Bell. The bar was the Lindell AC and it had good hamburgers, when a good hamburger was just a great burger in a dark and somewhat mysterious place with a little atmosphere. So Uncle Peter made the call to his buddy, the owner, and I went over there on my lunch hour, and Jimmy Butsicaris took me upstairs to his office and pulled out some tickets from a drawer, and we chose two tickets that were like on the third base line if you were at Tiger Stadium, except this was Cobo Arena. I was of course not allowed to go to a rock concert, but I was going to go to that show no matter what. Here I was making my own money and everything, but my parents wouldn't drive me, and I couldn't use their cars to go, and I wouldn't be allowed to take the bus at night, and besides, they wouldn't drive me to the bus stop on Michigan Avenue for it either. So I got one of my Junior Achievement friends from Detroit, from another high school, Donna W something ski (it was a polish name) (I just remembered! Donna Wysocki!) (I'm going to look her up on Facebook!) said that she would go, and that her brother would drive us. So I bought the tickets ($35.00 each) from Jimmy Butsicaris, and her brother drove us, and Donna and I went to the concert. It was a good show and noisy and wild, and one of the blues guys played with them, and they were kind of far away, and it wasn't fun so much as an experience, and I was so happy I went, and still am. And my favorite albums are still my Hot Rocks albums Big Hits and Fazed Cookies. The early one with the white cover, and the next one with the black cover. I'm going to go look up Donna now.