He is Argentine, knows everything about the Rolling Stones and wrote a giant book about them as soloists

35 years ago, Diego Perri had a journalist diploma and his interests were very clear: football and rock. Therefore, even before graduating, he was already taking his first steps editing a fanzine sports and with a music column on FM Lomense. He knew that that was where the shots would go, and he was not wrong.

For more than three decades, he built his career around his interests and achieved a goal reserved for few: meet your musical heroes face to face. And, on top of that, without being disappointed. As it could not be otherwise, those experiences were transformed into books.

“I worked at Pelo magazine doing notes with artists and several people asked me if I didn’t feel like doing press. I didn’t even know what it was, until a producer and friend, Alejandro Taranto, called me to his agency,” recalls Diego about his beginnings in a world that led him to manage the communication of bands such as JAF, Los Guarros or Los Violadores in those early 90s.

The work in artists’ press took him everywhere, literally. And to add all kinds of genres such as tango, folklore or classical music. But rock always had a special place in his life, because as he worked side by side with bands, it fueled his obsession with one in particular: Rolling Stones.

“It was love at first sight when I discovered them on TV, between 1979 and 1980. I was already quite a collector as a child, I collected t-shirts, cans, things like that. In the ’90s I started collecting Stones stuff,” Diego says it naturally, but the truth is that this man from Loma by birth and from Banfil by adoption became one of the greatest Argentine experts in the band.

The catchphrase “I follow you everywhere” applies equally to Independiente and the Stones. In 1994 she traveled for five months through the United States in what would be a key, almost initiatory moment, for his total fanaticism. Already in 1990 she had interviewed Mick Taylor in the pre-show Eric Clapton in River and in ’92 I had seen Keith Richards for a press conference at the Sheraton Hotel, during his only solo visit to Argentina. But in a short time I would end up meeting all the members of the band and sustaining a closer bond.

“In ’94 I ran into someone in the lobby of an Oakland hotel. Ron Wood and Charlie Watts, we had a very warm talk. I turned that into an interview for Gente Magazine,” says Perri. Contact with Richards’ manager on that first visit was key, and kept the flame alive between the band and Perri forever.

In this fanatic’s library there are no less than 900 books that talk about the Stonesbut at a certain point he realized that none of them were talking about a specific topic: band members work on their own. With that idea in mind, he embarked in 2013 on the idea of ​​writing the definitive book on the Stones’ solo productions and participation outside the group.

It was a decade of very intense work and the result is ua giant work, in the broad sense of the word. “It was marathon and required a lot of patience. A German collector who has a spectacular database helped me a lot. He sent me songs in MP3 to form a complete discography,” he says about the process. Find who will edit the huge “Stones outside of Stones” It was another challenge: “It couldn’t be done here, the publishers loved it but it was very expensive. Luckily Zorn Books appeared, a publisher owned by Roberto Bindon, also from Banfil but who lives in Switzerland.”

Thus, the book finally came out, which a few weeks ago was presented at the Lomas Municipal Theater. The book has an extra surprise: Perri met the last Stone she was missing, Bill Wyman, to whom he gave a preliminary sample of the book, in London, and asked for a few words as a prologue. In this way, “Stones outside of Stones” began to have a prelude from the mouth of one of its protagonists.

Although the author already knows them all and has been able to share tours, concerts, rehearsals and talks, there is much more to say. A day before this note, he returned from the United States after seeing three shows of the band in a row. He is preparing a reissue of another legendary book of his, Stone Republica sort of travel diary of those five months following them on the ’94 tour. “That book has 50% fan subjectivity and a lot of precise information as well. I’m preparing eleven or twelve new chapters,” he says.

Both in his two books Stones and in the one he wrote in 2018 dedicated to Independiente, his other love, Perri considers that the greatest virtue, the common thread of his work, is that “they are honest.” And she closes: “The books, especially this last one, have a lot of research and also very personal comments. I don’t know if the others are well or poorly written, but what I do know is that I wrote them from the heart.” At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about.