Going backstage with a Minneapolis Rolling Stones superfan

A printout of the Rolling Stones tour itinerary sits to his left. A framed "Sticky Fingers" album cover — with serial number — is mounted behind him. In front of him, behind his computer monitor, stands a poster for a reissue series of early Stones albums.

Of course, the mouse pad in his downtown Minneapolis cubicle is a Stones tongue logo.

Rob Chapman has tickets to the Stones' concerts this summer in Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Buffalo, N.Y. But he's not your get-a-selfie-with-Mick superfan.

He has spent an afternoon at Keith Richards' house in Connecticut, e-mails Ron Wood weekly and met Mick Jagger once — and didn't get a photo with him. And Chapman is working on a book on New Barbarians, a 1970s Wood side project that also featured Richards, Stones saxophonist Bobby Keys and others.

"I had a lot of fun — I don't care if you say [raising] hell — in high school," said Chapman, 53, a sales rep for a Minneapolis book publisher. "To me, the Stones were the epitome of that. The music was raw and dirty. I love the Beatles. But I migrated more to the Stones."

The youngest of four kids in Excelsior, he grew up on oldies such as Buddy Holly and Frankie Valli and even the Frank Sinatra records his mom liked. He went to his first Stones concert in 1981 by himself.

"I wanted to experience it without any chatter," he said. "That way I could focus on the show. It was surreal."

Since then, he has been to at least 40 Stones concerts, including seven on the 2005-06 A Bigger Bang Tour. He sometimes goes backstage. It didn't hurt that Chapman spent 25 years working for record labels and distribution companies, promoting the likes of George Strait, Reba McEntire and Warren Zevon. But, he said, he intentionally didn't go to any of the Stones meet-and-greets with scores of other people.

Instead, he wanted to have the opportunity to make an impression and have a conversation. At a music-biz event in 1997, he met a guy who knew a guy in Boston who was recording with the Stones. At the time, Chapman was representing a reissue series from Chess Records, one of America's early blues, soul and rock labels. The guy in Boston asked if he could have four copies of each of the 11 reissues. He explained they were for the Stones.

Chapman made the arrangements and the band received them. Then Richards wanted to meet Chapman to say thanks a few months later at the Metrodome in Minneapolis.

After passing through several layers of security, Chapman was ushered backstage, where drummer Charlie Watts was wrestling with two of Wood's sons. Chapman handed Watts a box of jazz CDs. Soon the visitor was escorted to Richards' dressing room.

"He offered me a drink and his set list was there, a pack of Marlboros and his infamous knife," Chapman recalled. "There was a runner who took the set list back to Mick and back and forth and they finalized it."

Whenever Chapman has gone to meet the Stones, he always brings some CDs as a gift. "Keith always called my music 'road food.' I even brought him a Bach set with about 20 CDs," Chapman said. "I never ask for tickets. I've never overstepped my boundaries. I think I got to meet them the right way."

He and two other fans from the music biz even created a Stones trivia board game that they presented to the band's merchandisers in 2007. Nothing came of it, but each of the Stones received prototypes.

Chapman's love of the band also led him to put together that photo-driven book, tentatively titled "New Barbarians: Guitars, Outlaws and Gunslingers," to be published in summer 2016 by Voyageur Press.

"I run everything by Ronnie," Chapman said. "It was his band. I'm the author. I don't need their approval, but I want their thumbs-up."

Twitter: @JonBream • 612-673-1719