True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (34 page)

As we drove, hundreds of thousands of people marched in Washington, D.C., demanding an end to the Vietnam War. Not until the summer of 1982, when a greater number demonstrated in New York's Central Park against nuclear weapons, would such a gathering occur. But the wars would go on, and so would the weapons.

Off the highway, down a winding asphalt road, at a crossroads with a post office and one gas station, we waited for Junior to get back with the truck, because the gas can was on it, but he showed up, and Pilkington drove me back to the car and wished us good luck. I was sorry I couldn't help him by telling him what a nice arrest I'd be, but I was in a hurry.

Dickinson drove slowly on, explaining things to me, for which I kept him around. “The Stones are trying to tour without a big agency booking them because they've been fucked by agencies,” he said. “They didn't trust house PAs or equipment rental agencies, and they felt they should give audiences a record-quality sound, so they got their own PA and a mixing board. They're controlling their own tour. They haven't booked the typical cow palaces—some, enough to make money—but they're in the revolution, they'll play places the Beatles wouldn't. They wind up hiring their friends who are actually incompetent. My God, they were late. Only acts of God excuse musicians.” I made a note to ask about that.

In Mississippi, as it was getting dark, I asked at a gas station if I might make a collect call to Memphis, and the man there said, “This a business phone.” I turned around without saying anything more, and he said, “They a pay phone about a quarter-mile down the road.”

“I can find a phone,” I said. Down the road, at a pay phone leaning against a cow skeleton, I called Christopher. The situation was typical; for years we had been together, happy in the New York snows and the Caribbean shadows, but as time had passed we had run more and more on separate schedules. Christopher would come in from work and go to bed while I wrote, like the drunk man in the Don Marquis poem, “falling upwards through the night.”

“What'd you tell her?” Dickinson asked.

“That I'd be home about nine.”

“We'll be there sooner, you shouldna told her that.”

But it was nine o'clock when I got home. I didn't know it yet, and it
would have seemed insane, knowing as I did what I had been doing, but it was possible to suspect a man on the road with the Rolling Stones of having a real good time. And not without justice. We were very close. She knew I was guilty before I knew it myself.

At the beginning of the 20th century there were only six reliable and effective pharmaceutical preparations, namely digitalis (still helpful in many kinds of heart disease), morphine, quinine (for malaria), diphtheria antitoxin, aspirin and ether. Two other successful means of chemical intervention were also available: immunization against smallpox and rabies. This pharmacopeia remained basically unchanged until about the time of World War II. Since then, drugs and other substances that can, if employed wisely, usefully affect the chemistry of life have been produced in startling numbers.

S
HERMAN
M. M
ELLINKOFF:
“Chemical Intervention,”
Scientific American

O
N
D
ECEMBER
5, 1965 , after forty-two days, the Stones ended their fourth tour of the United States at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. In a month and a half they had made two million dollars. They stayed in L.A. for the next week, recording at the RCA studios a single record and
Aftermath,
the first album composed entirely of Jagger/Richards songs. Then the band went their own ways, all of them returning to England for Christmas except Brian, who was in the Virgin Islands with Anita and a tropical virus. But he made it back to play
Ready, Steady, Go!
on New Year's Eve.

I had left Tulane and was in Memphis, working for the Tennessee Department of Public Welfare, an outfit that confirmed every fear I'd ever had about the social system. I would come out of a house that stank with the ammonia smell of poverty, start my car, turn on the radio—there was interesting music on the car radio for the first time since 1957—hear the Beatles or the Supremes and have to turn the radio off. The happiness of popular music was unbearable at such times, but I could always listen to the Stones. I sensed the strong blues truth that underlay their music.

The new single, “19th Nervous Breakdown,” contained what may have been the first reference in a popular song to what were called psychedelic, mind-changing, drugs. Mick and Keith, moving with the times, were no longer having people thrown out of dressing rooms for dealing dope. Marijuana, heroin, and cocaine were associated—in popular legend, at least—with black ghettos, jazz musicians, and beatniks. In the middle 1960s, with the white man's burden heavy again from Vietnam to Birmingham, Alabama, and Birmingham, England, adolescent whites began to display sympathy for what many of them saw as the colored victims of white men, and old wars were fought again in living rooms between disturbed parents and uncommunicative offspring wearing long hair and Indian headbands. The situation was complicated by the increased use among the young of certain substances, such as the peyote cactus (active ingredient, mescaline) and “magic mushrooms” (psilocybin), that had been in limited use among tribal “medicine men” and religious mystics for centuries. The easy availability of substances like these and many synthetic analogues (among them LSD, DMT, STP) far more potent than anything of the sort occurring in nature, alarmed parents and other authority figures. Taking such substances could cause, for minutes or days, sense impressions to overpower the mind. The generation that had fought World War II and had created the postwar baby boom found the use of such drugs dangerous and made it as illegal as possible. They knew in their calcium-deprived bones that you can't be too careful.

From the Stones' point of view, things were not so simple:

On our first trip I tried so hard

to rearrange your mind

But after 'while I realized

you were disarranging mine

On February 4 “19th Nervous Breakdown” was released in England. It hit the
New Musical Express
singles chart at number 2 on February 11. That day the Stones flew to New York to tape an appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
refused to be photographed at the airport, and nearly got into a fight with the photographers. They split up for their
New York stay, hoping to avoid fans, or at least to spread them out. Mick and Keith stayed at the Essex House on Central Park South, while Brian, Bill, and Charlie stayed at the Regency on Park Avenue. No decent New York hotel would accommodate them all together. On February 16 the Stones flew into Sydney, where about three hundred kids were waiting in the rain to welcome them at the start of their second tour of Australia. The tour had been sold out in all the state capitals for days and extra matinees added to meet the demand. Mick sent a report to
Disc
magazine dated February 21, datelined Brisbane, saying that it had rained every day, the shows had been better than on the last tour because they had appeared then with Roy Orbison and drawn mixed crowds, the food was bad, the birds were all pretty and suntanned, but that Brian had asked him to say that he, Brian, was still in love.

The Australian tour lasted through February; on March 3 the Stones reached Los Angeles, where they stayed four days, long enough to record the Jagger/Richards song, “Paint It, Black.” It was to be their next single. The comma was Andrew's idea. On March 13 all the Stones except Brian arrived in London. They had two weeks off before starting a European tour. When Brian returned to London, he said that he'd been delayed four days after the other Stones because the clubs in New York stay open twenty-four hours a day. He arrived at his Earl's Court Mews apartment wearing rose-tinted spectacles and carrying a dulcimer.

One bright, cold morning in March of 1966, I sat on a brown Naugahyde couch in the Welfare Workers' lounge, on the seventh floor of the M&M building in Memphis, at the corner of Beale and Main streets, reading the
New York Review of Books.
The week before, after working eight months for the Tennessee State Welfare Department, I had given my two weeks' notice. This morning I came into the office, left at once, went for a walk and decided that I couldn't take another week. Now, waiting for lunchtime, when the supervisors would go out and I would sweep downstairs, clean out my desk and disappear, I came upon an advertisement. At first I assumed it was for the Famous Writers' School, but then I saw that it was for
Playboy.
All firm-jawed and one foot in front of the other, it said something like, We're Looking for Men Who Eat and Sleep Writing.

Years later I would find in my old Welfare Worker's notebook the remains of the letter I wrote to
Playboy
that morning. I suggested writing for them about cars, airplanes, and sound equipment (because I had read
Playboy
and had an idea of what they would want their serious writers to take seriously), but the only specific subject I proposed to
Playboy,
back in ought 66, was the Rolling Stones. No wonder they didn't hire me.

On Beale Street, half a block from the Welfare Department, was
Reuben Cherry's Home of the Blues Record Shop. Reuben kept a rubber snake to scare people in the store, and Elvis Presley would come in, get the snake, take it out on Beale and scare the people in cars as they drove down the street. “The boy's a menace,” Reuben used to say of Elvis, back when they were both alive, as Reuben had been the day he sold me a Folkways album recorded in 1958 by a Memphis street sweeper named Furry Lewis.

When I left the Welfare Department I took with me this note from Furry's Welfare file (which showed that he had been turned down twice): “Mr. Lewis has a pawn ticket in the amt. of sixteen dollars ($16) from Nathan's Pawn Shop 194 Beale Street which he states is for a guitar. He states he was an entertainer of some kind, as well as his work for the City of Memphis.”

In the first few months after leaving my job I wrote a novel about poor people and some stories, one of which was about Furry. During the heyday of Beale Street, when the great Negro blues artists played and sang in the crowded, evil blocks between Fourth and Main, Furry, a protégé of W. C. Handy, was one of the most highly respected blues musicians. He was also one of the most popular, not only around the saloons and gambling dives of Memphis but in the medicine shows and on the riverboats all along the Mississippi. In Chicago, at the old Vocalion studios on Wabash Avenue, he made the first of many recordings he was to make, both for Vocalion and for RCA Victor's Bluebird label.

But at the close of the 1920s, Furry told me, “Beale Street really went down. You know, old folks say, it's a long lane don't have no end and a bad wind don't never change. But one day, back when Hoover was President, I was driving my cart down Beale Street and I seen a rat, sitting on top of a garbage can, eating a onion, crying.” Since 1923 Furry had worked at times for the City of Memphis, Sanitation Department, and he kept on sweeping the streets.

Furry and I adopted each other. “Me and him just like brothers,” he told people, pointing at me. Several years after I wrote it, “Furry's Blues” was printed in
Playboy
and won an award. Furry went on to make many albums, to appear in a Burt Reynolds movie, to be visited by celebrities from Joni Mitchell to Allen Ginsberg, to be honored by the Rolling Stones (who refused to go onstage in Memphis in 1978 until Furry had played), and to heaven in 1981, but he is still with me, saying, “Give out but don't give up.”

I found Furry with the help of my friend Charlie Brown, who ran a Memphis coffeehouse called the Bitter Lemon, where old blues players sometimes appeared. Charlie took me to Furry's apartment, on Fourth Street half a block off Beale—I had been near there to visit welfare clients—went with me to watch Furry sweep the streets and hired Furry to play at the Lemon so I could watch him work.

The year before, Charlie Brown had come up with the first grass I'd seen since 1961, when I'd scored in North Beach and brought it—half a lid—back to Memphis. Charlie also had the first LSD I ever took, and I took it with him. I was somewhat prepared for the experience by reading Aldous Huxley, R. H. Blyth, and the haiku poets, and I had even eaten a large number of Heavenly Blue morning glory seeds, which didn't exactly free me from the temporal sphere—but on LSD I saw Charlie Brown change, become all races, all ages, I felt myself die, turn to damp clay, felt breath, air, come back into my body, was filled with a tender care—a new sense of the value, the preciousness, of life. When we could navigate, we drove CB's 1949 Ford that was rat-colored like Hazel Motes' down to an all-night eatery for a mild repast, marvelling at the city lights reflected in the raindrops on the windshield. At the café there was a cop, all dark blue, black leather, and menacing devices. He was sitting at a table with a cup of coffee, talking to someone on a walkie-talkie. There had been a burglary at a warehouse in a black neighborhood. The burglar was a black teenage girl. The cop said he'd be right there, his tone loaded with sex and sadism. The only way he could be intimate with a black girl was to punish her. After he left, the place still reeked with his lust, if you had taken acid.

At the end of March and into April, the Stones toured Europe, including Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris—where Brigitte Bardot came to their hotel to meet them, a rather embarrassing scene since only Mick spoke French, and her beauty made him speechless. On the next day the Stones played Marseilles, and Mick's forehead was gashed by a chair thrown from the audience. “They do it when they get excited,” Mick told reporters.

In April
Aftermath
was released in the United Kingdom, and “Paint It, Black” was released in the United States. Years later Charlie would recall how Brian “sat for hours learning to play sitar, put it on Paint It, Black' and never played it again.” The new single was amazing, a nihilistic outburst that would be a number one popular record. The Stones performed the song on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
and Mick, interviewed by the Associated Press, said that teenagers in the United States had changed, were asking more questions of their elders, becoming more independent in their thinking. “When we first came here in 1964, the kids wanted to be what everyone wanted them to be. . . . They were all satisfied by convention. They gave each other rings. They never thought about whether politically anything was right or wrong.”