Robert Greenfield

• 1. Introduction

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  Robert Greenfield, born in 1946, sat across from Keith Richards in the summer of 1971 at Villa Nellcôte, a grand villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer on the French Riviera. The Rolling Stones were holed up there, writing and recording what would become one of rock history's most celebrated albums. Greenfield was there as a journalist for Rolling Stone, notebook in hand, twenty-five years old and already inside the machine. How did a former sports writer end up in the south of France with the biggest band in the world? And what did he do with five decades of access to the people who shaped American music and culture? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. From Sports Pages to Rock Press

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  Greenfield's first bylines were not about music at all. He started as a sports writer before pivoting to the emerging world of rock journalism. By 1969 he was writing freelance pieces for Eye magazine, including a profile of early free-form radio at WFMU in East Orange, New Jersey. He also contributed to Cavalier. Those early freelance years were a training ground. When Rolling Stone opened its London bureau, Greenfield was hired as an associate editor, a post he held from 1970 to 1972. London in that era was the center of a world he was born to cover. Short fiction he later wrote found homes in Esquire, Playboy, and GQ, suggesting that even as a journalist he was always thinking in scenes.

• 3. Two Years in London

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  During his time at Rolling Stone's London bureau, Greenfield interviewed a remarkable range of figures: Jack Bruce, John Cale, Neil Young, Elton John, Nico, Jackie Lomax, Leon Russell, and the band Stone the Crows, along with the Rolling Stones themselves. He also interviewed Woody Allen and the feminist writer Germaine Greer, which signals that his beat was never purely music. The 1971 Keith Richards conversation at Villa Nellcôte proved durable enough to be reprinted decades later. Photographer Dominique Tarlé assembled a collection called Exile, published by Genesis Publications in 2001, and Greenfield's Richards interview was included in that volume.

• 4. The Books That Followed

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  Greenfield's first book came out of his Rolling Stones access directly. S.T.P.: A Journey Through America With the Rolling Stones was published in 1974, followed a year later by The Spiritual Supermarket, an account of gurus who had gone public in America. He co-wrote the memoir Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out with the rock promoter Bill Graham in 1992. Dark Star, an oral biography of Jerry Garcia, appeared in 1997. A biography of Timothy Leary came in 2006, the same year he also published Exile on Main St., his account of the 1971 period with the Stones. A Day in the Life in 2009 turned to British socialites Tommy Weber and Susan Coriat as a lens on the end of the 1960s. The Last Sultan, a life of Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, followed in 2012. Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye, a memoir of the Rolling Stones UK Tour 1971, appeared in 2014. Bear, a biography of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, came out in 2016. His final listed non-fiction title, Mother American Night, written with John Perry Barlow, was published in 2018.

• 5. Fiction, Theater, and the Stage

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  Greenfield also wrote two novels. His first, Haymon's Crowd, appeared in 1978. His second, Temple, published in 1983, drew on his own background; it is described as semi-autobiographical, following a young man who is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor and is obsessed with soul music. Temple won the National Jewish Book Award in 1983. The book also existed as a play. His theatrical work extended further: in 2000, a one-man play titled Bill Graham Presents ran at the Canon Theater in Los Angeles. Ron Silver played Graham. The play grew from the biography Greenfield had co-written with Graham years earlier, and it points to how Greenfield returned repeatedly to the same subjects, finding new angles across different forms.

• 6. Teaching, Criticism, and Screen Work

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  Alongside his writing career, Greenfield served as a popular music critic for Boston After Dark and taught as an adjunct professor of composition and literature at the University of San Francisco. He also taught at Chapman University and Cabrillo College. His work extended to screen: he was a co-writer of The '60s, a dramatic mini-series that received an Emmy nomination. He also produced three short documentary films that are on permanent display at the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. Greenfield lives in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, and has published book reviews in New West magazine and The New York Times Book Review, two outlets that represent opposite ends of the regional and national press he navigated across his career.