True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (3 page)

“But Shirley, you
were
washing dishes. What else could I say?”

“You should have made something up.”

“Where was this?” asked Bill Wyman, another Rolling Stone, sitting with his girlfriend, Astrid Lindstrom, the Swedish Ice Princess, far away from me at the end of the couch. “Great bass sound, ennit?” A portable phonograph in a corner of the room was playing 1930s records by the Kansas City Six.

“Yeah, Walter Page, really good,” Charlie said. “An American magazine. They had it at the office.”

“Was it about all of us? We never
saw
it,” Astrid said. Wyman kept scrapbooks.

“I shouldn't want to, if I were you,” Shirley said.

“Never get a sound like that with an electric bass,” said Wyman, a bass player whose hands were too small to play the acoustic bass.

“The electric bass is more flexible,” I said, trying to help divert the conversation. “You can do more things with it.”

“You can't do
that,”
Wyman said. “Can you, Charlie?”

“Never,” Charlie said as Page's bass and Jo Jones' brushes blended with Freddie Green's guitar, their rhythm steady as a healthy heartbeat.

“Sorry,” I said.

“We've had you on the defensive since you got here,” Charlie said. “Did you happen to bring the paper with Ralph Gleason's column? We haven't seen it.”

“I read it on the way in.”

“Was it bad?”

“It could have been worse, but not much.” Once I asked Charlie how he felt about the many press attacks on the Stones, and he said, “I never think they're talking about me.” And Shirley had said, “Charlie
and Bill aren't really Stones, are they? Mick, Keith, and Brian, they're the big bad Rolling Stones.”

Charlie smiled, pulling down the corners of his mouth. “I always liked Gleason's jazz pieces. I know him, actually. I mean I met him, the last time we played San Francisco. I'd like to ask him why he's become so set against us.”

A man with receding black curly hair and bushy scimitar sideburns was coming into the room from the open doorway at the far end, wearing white shorts, carrying two tennis rackets and a towel. “Tennis, anyone?” he asked in a voice it would hurt to shave with.

I had never seen him, but I knew his voice from suffering it on the telephone. He was Ronnie Schneider, nephew of Allen Klein, the Rolling Stones' business manager. Almost before I knew it I was standing between him and the door. “Did you get my agent's letter?” I asked after telling him who I was.

“Yeah, I got it,” he said. “There are some things we have to change. Tell your agent to call me.”

“He says he's been trying to get you. There's not much time.”

“I
know”
Ronnie said, his voice a fiend's imitation of girlish delight. He gave me a bright smile, as if I had just swallowed the hook. “Doesn't anybody here want to play tennis?”

“I'll play,” Wyman said.

“Here, this one's warped.” Ronnie handed him a racket shaped like a shoehorn, and they went out across the patio and the juicy Saint Augustine grass to the tennis court. I watched them through the glass door as they walked; then I noticed that my hat was in my hand, and I decided to sit down and try to relax.

Serafina, the Watts' eighteen-month-old daughter, came in with her nanny, and Shirley took her out to the kitchen for something to eat. Astrid went along, possibly to chill the orange juice. The Kansas City Six were playing “Pagin' the Devil.”

“What did Gleason say, exactly?” Charlie asked me.

“He said the tickets cost too much, the seating is bad, the supporting acts aren't being paid enough, and all this proves that the Rolling Stones despise their audience. I may have left something out. Right. He also said, ‘They put on a good show.' ”

The back door opened and in walked a gang of men. Tall and lean and long-haired, they stood for a moment in the center of the room as if posing for a faded sepia photograph of the kind that used to end up on posters nailed to trees. The Stones Gang: Wanted Dead or Alive, though only Mick Jagger, standing like a model, his knife-blade ass thrust to one side, was currently awaiting trial. Beside him was Keith Richards, who was even thinner and looked not like a model but an insane advertisement for a dangerous carefree Death—black ragged hair, dead
green skin, a cougar tooth hanging from his right earlobe, his lips snarled back from the marijuana cigaret between his rotting fangs, his gums blue, the world's only bluegum white man, poisonous as a rattle-snake.

From his photographs I recognized Brian Jones' replacement, Mick Taylor. He was pink and blond, pretty as a Dresden doll beside Jagger and Richards, who had aged more than a year in the year since I'd seen them. One of the others, with dark hair frosted pale gold and a classic country and western outfit from Nudie the Rodeo Tailor, I remembered seeing on television and record covers—he was Gram Parsons, and he came, so I'd heard, from my hometown, Waycross, Georgia, on the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp. We had not met, but I had reviewed his band the Flying Burrito Brothers' new album,
The Gilded Palace of Sin.
I had no idea he knew the Stones. Seeing him here, finding another boy from Waycross at this altitude, I sensed a pattern, some design I couldn't make out, and I got up to speak to Gram Parsons, as if he were a prophet and I were a pilgrim seeking revelation.

But as I stepped around the table Jagger turned, and for the first time since he came into the room we were facing, too close, his eyes like a deer's, large, shadowed, startled. I remembered reading on the plane out here a
Time
magazine report of a study showing that when two people look at each other, the one who looks away first is likely to dominate the situation. So I gave Mick a friendly smile, and he looked away, just like the dominant people in
Time.
I had the feeling I'd lost a game I was trying not to play, but then I was past Mick, saying to Gram, “Good to see you.”

“Yeah,” Gram said reasonably, “but who are you?”

I told him, and he said, “I dug what you wrote about our band.”

“I'm from Waycross,” I said. He peered at me for a second, then handed me the joint he'd been smoking. We walked out onto the narrow front lawn (as we went out, Keith was saying to Charlie, “Did you see what your friend Gleason said?”), sat on the grass beside the hedge, and talked about people and places in Georgia. Gram said he had no intention of going back. I remembered my mother telling me that after Gram's mother and father had divorced, his father, a man called “Coon Dog” Connor, had killed himself, and Gram's mother married a New Orleans man named Parsons. I wouldn't know until later, when people started writing articles and books giving Gram belated credit for creating a new form of music, that his mother, whose father had owned Cypress Gardens and most of the oranges in central Florida, had died of alcoholic malnutrition the day before Gram graduated from high school. Even the house in Waycross where Gram lived had been sold and moved off beside the main southbound highway.

From where we were sitting, high in the sky over Sunset Boulevard,
it seemed that by facing the east we could see, except for the smog, all the way back to Georgia. But if the smog had gone, what could we have seen except the people who make the smog? Gram inhaled deeply on the joint, an Indian silver swastika bracelet hanging on his wrist, his eyes opaque pale green, like bird's eggs. “Look at it, man,” he said, as if he had heard my thoughts. “They call it America, and they call it civilization, and they call it television, and they believe in it and salute it and sing songs to it and eat and sleep and die still believing in it, and—and—I don't know,” he said, taking another drag, “then sometimes the Mets come along and win the World Series—”

With all the revelation I could handle for the moment, I spun back through the house to the patio, where most of the people who were here already and some new ones who had arrived were breaking up a powwow, leaving Jagger talking upward to a very tall young man with a Buffalo Bill mane and red side whiskers. “Now, Chip,” Mick was saying (so I knew he was real, this man who called himself Chip Monck), “we can't
do
audience-participation things. I mean, I appreciate your suggestion, and we do want to get them involved, but we can't
play
‘With a Little Help from My Friends,' and—what do they
know
? You can't expect people to sing along on ‘Paint It Black.' Rock and roll has become very cool now, but the Rolling Stones are not a cool sort of thing, it's a much more old-fashioned thing we do, it's not as if the Rolling Stones were, y'know, five
dedicated musicians
—I mean, I'd much rather go on stage in a gold Cadillac or wearing a gold suit or summink like that—”

Suddenly but gently, calmly, Chip put his hands on Mick's shoulders and said, in the mellow baritone that soothed the dope-freaked, mud-soaked thousands two months ago at the Woodstock Pop Festival, “I just want you to know how pleased I am to be working with you guys.”

Mick laughed. When Chip had touched him, Mick's hands had come up to hold Chip at arm's length by the collarbone. Not certain whether Mick was laughing at him, Chip also laughed. They stood, knees slightly bent, in the classic starting position of wrestlers, grinning at each other.

Inside, someone was playing the piano. I looked, saw that it was Keith, joined him on the bench and asked, “What about this book?” I trusted Keith, at least to tell the truth; a bluegum man don't have to lie.

“What about it?” he asked, playing no recognizable melody.

“I need a letter.”

“I thought Jo sent you a letter.”

“Many letters, but not what I need. She says I need Allen Klein's approval.”

“You don't need anybody's approval. All you need is us. Jo! Hey, Jo!”

From the depths of this serpentine house Georgia Bergman emerged. She was the Stones' secretary, an Anglo-American girl in her middle
twenties, with black kinky hair done in the current electric fashion, sticking out all around like a fright wig.

“What about this letter?” Keith asked. He was still playing, nothing you could recognize.

“We sent it,” Jo said, “but it wasn't right, it didn't work, it umm—”

“I'll talk to Mick about it,” Keith said, no certain comfort to me, but I said “Fine,” and Jo took me for a walk on the grounds of this place, rented at great expense from some of the Du Ponts. We strolled out the back, toward the far corner of the property, where there were a child's playhouse, slide, and swings. I walked with my head down, groping toward thought.

Just over a year earlier, in September 1968, thinking that with one more story I could publish a collection of pieces about music, I went to England to visit the Rolling Stones. For almost three years, since Mick, Keith, and Brian had been arrested for possession of drugs, the Stones had stayed out of sight, performing in public only once. I saw the Stones, attended Brian Jones' trial, and wrote a story, but I had only glimpsed—in Brian's eyes as he glanced up from the dock—the mystery of the Rolling Stones. In the spring, after the story was published, I asked the Stones' cooperation in writing a book about them. It was June, and I was still waiting for an answer, when Brian, who had started the band, left it because, he said, of “musical differences” with the other Stones. Less than a month later, Jo Bergman called me in the middle of the night to say that Brian had been found dead, drowned in his swimming pool.

After some weeks Jo sent me a letter for the Stones, offering their cooperation subject to agreements between the Stones, the publishers, and me, but you can't do good work that way. You have to write the best you can and share control of nothing, neither the manuscript nor the money. Any other arrangement produces not writing but publicity. Finally Jo turned the book matter over to Ronnie Schneider for Allen Klein, widely considered the most powerful agent in show business. In self-defense, I hired an agent, Klein's literary equivalent. He sent Schneider a letter to sign for the Stones. But Keith said I didn't need Klein. Then why did Jo tell Klein, or his nephew Schneider, about my book?

Jo sat in a swing and swung slowly back and forth. It was, as I would learn, typical of the Stones' manner of doing business that I didn't know exactly what Jo did for them, and neither did she, and neither did they. She had consulted an astrologer in London who had told her that I would write this book, but that it would cost me everything except my life. She did not know the details—that while writing it I would be assaulted by Confederate soldiers and Hell's Angels, would go to jail, be run over by a lumber truck on the Memphis-Arkansas bridge, fall
off a Georgia waterfall and break my back, have epileptic seizures while withdrawing from drugs—but if she had known, she would not have told me. She didn't tell me about the astrologer until much later, when there was no way to turn back. Now, eager, I climbed a swing chain with my hands—climbed it easily, for months I'd done nothing but write Basic English letters to the Stones and lift weights. As I reached the top and started down, my scarf fluttered up, my left hand clutched it around the chain, the silk was like oil, and I crashed to the ground, searing my hand, mangling the little finger, shocking it blue-white, with great crimson drops welling up where the flesh was torn away from the nail, dropping in the dust. “I thought you'd do that,” Jo said, and I thought, Where am I, what is happening to me? I was in California, being punished for wearing a scarf.

I walked away from the playground with a kind of psychic limp. Al Steckler, a promotion man from the Klein office in New York, was arriving at the back gate, carrying an attaché case. We'd met in London. I told him hello and went inside to sit on the couch and suck my little finger. The next thing I knew, Jagger was sitting beside me, asking, “What about this book?”