True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (4 page)

“What about it?” I looked around the room. Steckler and a few other people were there, Jo sitting on the floor with a Polaroid camera, taking a picture of Mick and me.

“Those books are never any good,” Mick said.

“That's true,” I said, assuming that he meant books like
My Story
by Zsa Zsa Gabor, as told to Gerold Frank. “But I'm not going to write one of those books.”

“What would your book be about?”

“About?”

“You know, what would be in it?”

“What will be in your next song?”

“A girl in a barroom, man, I don't know. It's much easier to write a song than a book.”

“I am hip,” I said. “I am fucking cognizant, Bucky.” He laughed so pleasantly that I said, “Well, maybe I can give you some idea.” I gazed into the gloom, frowning, and Mick said, “You don't have to tell me now, you can give it some thought if you like—”

“Naw, if I think about it too long I'll get bored.”

Mick laughed again. The others were quiet, watching us. Jo was waiting for the photograph to develop.

“Maybe I can make a comparison,” I said, and I told Mick that I had written a story about a blues singer who had swept the streets in Memphis for more than forty years, but he's more than just a street sweeper, because he's never stopped playing, if you see what I mean. I didn't look at Mick to find out whether he saw. You write, I told him,
about things that move your heart, and in the story about the old blues singer I wrote about where he lives and the songs he sings and just lists of the things he swept up in the streets, and I can't explain to him, Furry Lewis, what it is about him that moves my heart, and I can't tell you what I would write about the Rolling Stones, and so, well, I guess I can't answer your question. No, he said, you answered it, and for the first time since I thought, long months ago, of writing this book, I felt almost good about it. That should have warned me.

Jo showed us the photograph. It was too dark, Mick and I were dark isolate heads, like Mount Rushmore as a ruin. Steckler opened his case to submit for Mick's approval the cover for the Stones' concert program, featuring a girl wearing an Empire hairdo, a cloudy cape blown back to reveal her zaftig figure, and a surprised expression. Mick approved. Keith and Gram came in from the tennis court (none of the Stones could play tennis, and they lost balls, can after can of balls, day after day; you'd come up Doheny toward this place, on Oriole Drive, and tennis balls would pass you, headed toward Sunset) and sat down at the piano. Mick sang along with them. The afternoon lengthened. It was one of those Scott Fitzgerald Sunday afternoons in Hollywood that go on and on.

Just a kid actin' smart
I went and broke my darlin's heart
I guess I was too young to know

The force of romantic poetry, its details cribbed by Coleridge and Wordsworth from the writings of William Bartram on the country and the legends around the Okefenokee Swamp, had landed Mick and Keith (whose dog Okefenokee I would later meet), the two English rhythm & blues boys, at the piano with a Georgia country cracker singing Hank Williams songs. Mick didn't look sure he liked it.

Steckler was saying to the telephone, “A week from now is no good. We must have extra lines in by tomorrow . . . Would it help if I called the governor? . . . I'm quite serious, dear.”

I'll never see that gal of mine
Lord, I'm in Georgia doin' time
I heard that long, lonesome whistle blow

Just off the living room in the office (I told you this place was like a motel), yet another promo man, David Sandison from England, was pounding out a press release that, as I read it over his shoulder, said nothing about Brian Jones, only noted that this tour “marks the American debut with the Stones of Mick Taylor.” It condemned, without naming him, Ralph Gleason's attack on the Stones, assuring the press that “everyone will get to see and hear the group to best advantage.”
The release also said the tour “will take in 13 cities” and then listed fourteen cities where the Stones would play. I was glad to see that I was not the only one who didn't quite know what was going on.

In an alcove of the office there were a bar and a refrigerator. “Want a beer?” Sandison asked, fetching one for himself.

“No, thanks,” I said. The office was not bad as offices go, with bookshelves around the walls and a large desk cluttered with papers.

“At first they were going to play three days each in three cities,” Sandison said, opening the green Heineken bottle and filling a glass. “Then there were seven cities.” He took a long drink and I saw, there on the desk, partly covered by other papers, the letter I'd heard about but not seen, from my agent to “Mr. Ronny Schneider.”

“Now there are—how many? Fifteen?” Sandison asked.

“Dear Mr. Schneider,”
I read.
“This letter will confirm . . . your willingness and that of the Stones to cooperate . . . we will seek and obtain the approval of the Stones . . . through your office before entering . . . agreement with publishing house . . . Rolling Stones will share in the proceeds. . . .”

“Or is it thirteen?” Sandison asked.

“. . . we further agree that the final text will be cleared with the Stones and their management. . . .”

“Doesn't matter, it'll probably change again tomorrow,” Sandison said, coming back from the bar as I slipped the letter into my shirt.

“I wouldn't be surprised at anything,” I said, going out into the hall, where I came face to face with Schneider.

“I've been looking for you,” he said. “We need to talk about our deal. First of all, I think the boys should get half.”

“Talk to my agent,” I said, planning to tell my agent not to talk to him. “I don't know nothing about that stuff.”

Earlier this afternoon I had driven out of Memphis, Tennessee, where I lived, along the wide, tree-lined streets, oaks arching over the road out of town, the old town center within the Parkways, on the way to the airport. Farther out along the road there was a wide strip of land that had been, ten years ago when I first came to Memphis, a row of three or four farms, with a mule in the field, an unpainted cabin or one wrapped with imitation redbrick tarpaper, an old Ford disintegrating in the front yard, an old black man in overalls sitting on the front porch smoking a pipe, all of it laced over with poverty and honeysuckle, all of it now gone; as I passed there was only a flat expanse of mud, little puddles standing in it, a television picture tube sunk like a fossil in the timeless ooze. I had to pass the mud-colored office building where Christopher, who if she wants can be one person after another, who—allow me to show you this blue-eyed watercolor unicorn—was teaching our cat
Hodge the alphabet, had for the last four years taken reservations for Omega Airlines. She had a sweet disposition, and her manners were just as nice. “Rats and mice,” she would say when she wanted to curse. But the work at Omega was hard on her, and so on us. For the last three years, since Christopher and I had entered what passed for married life, I had taken flights at family rates to research the stories I wrote so slowly that no one could imagine how desperate I was for the money.

Later twenty of us, the Stones and company, lazed around a sunken, white-clothed table at the Yamato-E, a Japanese restaurant in the Century Plaza Hotel, waiting for dinner. It took a long time, and someone—Phil Kaufman—passed around a handful of joints. Kaufman, from Los Angeles, a dwarfy German type with a yellow mustache, hung out with Gram and had been hired to help take care of the Stones while they were in town. He had done time on a dope charge at Terminal Island Correctional Institute, San Pedro, California, with someone named Charlie Manson. The rest of us had not heard of Manson yet, although we soon would, but it would be several years—four—before Kaufman made the news by stealing Gram's dead body from a baggage ramp at the L.A. airport and burning it in the Mojave Desert. (The subject of funeral arrangements had come up during a conversation between Gram and Phil some months before the night—in September 1973—when Gram overdosed on morphine and alcohol.) As I started to light one of the joints, I noticed that the others were putting theirs away. Chip Monck, who had been flying around for the last few days, checking light and sound conditions at the concert locations, and who was now sitting across the table from me asleep, his head lolling to one side, woke up, saw me holding a joint and a burning match, said that there would be no dope on this tour, and if you got arrested with any, you'd be on your own. Then he fell asleep again. I thought he sounded silly, but I put the joint in my pocket.

As Keith was coming back from the toilet, a man and woman passed behind him, and the woman, seeing his ragged black mane, said in a loud, drunken voice, “You'd be cute if you put a rinse on your hair.”

Keith turned, smiling, showing his fangs. “You'd be cute,” he said, “if you put a rinse on your cunt.”

Some of the group, led by Jo Bergman, were singing “Happy Birthday.” Ronnie Schneider was twenty-six today. I was twenty-seven. I did not sing. Neither did the Stones.

After dinner we went in a fleet of Cadillacs to the Ash Grove, a small club where the old blues singer Big Boy Crudup was sharing the bill with the young blues singer Taj Mahal. The place was too crowded to see if you were sitting, so some of us were standing in the aisle when a tall redheaded cowboy kid with freckles came up and told us he was
Taj's road manager, and he was happy the Stones were in L.A. because he remembered how good the Stones were to them when they were in London. We got grass, coke, Scotch, wine, anything you want back-stage.

We were in the aisle again, Crudup was singing “That's All Right, Mama,” with Taj's band, two black men, two white men, and one Indian playing together, and I was feeling each vibration of the music with every spidery tracing of my nervous system when the road manager said to me, “You know, it's hard, workin' for niggers.”

I didn't know what to say to that. He nodded at the rest of the band: “And that bass player and guitar player and drummer may look like, uh, Caucasians, but in they hearts they niggers.”

I didn't know what to say to that either. Then he completed the thought: “But you know, you can have more fun with niggers than anybody else in the world.”

Music's music. Talkin' 'bout puttin' on a show in New York, I'm gone be like the monkey, I ain't gwine. There's so much shootin' and killin' and goin' on now. These places, all the folks be all crowded, you don't know what's gone happen. Ain't I'm right? You can't tell how these guys is, fella. Pshaw, man, they's snipers everywhere. I don't mean hidin'. I can recall three or four fellas was killed dead for playin' music. Me and you partners—I got you wid me—we playin'—you see what I'm talkin' ‘bout. Well, we
over
dem. I ain't gone call 'em, dey dead now. Poisoned one and kilt the other. They done it 'cause he could play better than they could. I'm tellin' you what I know, now. I wouldn't kill nobody 'cause he could beat me doin' anything. That's right. Ain't I'm right? Anybody gone kill me, 'cause you and me can do a little better than they can. They callin' on us all the time. Ain't callin' on them. Me and you goin', say we goin', let's go. We play over there, jump up an' mess you up. Mess you up, boy. Another thing, you be around these places, don't do much drinkin'. Drop a spool on you. Don't drink much whiskey. Keep on playin'. They drop a button on you, boy, 'fore you can be sure. They got a gang, now. You try it. Mess you up, boy. Buck Hobbs—some friends I ain't gone call they names—he could play, they couldn't play like him. The same song I play ‘bout Frankie and Albert, all them old
songs, “John Henry,” he could play. Others couldn't beat him. One hit him 'cross the head one night with a guitar, 'cause they couldn't beat him. It didn't make him no difference. He just rock right on. Got down and stopped playin', he got hold of a drink, he was dead. Buck Hobbs. They kilt him. I think about all that. I don't want to leave here. House full. Fightin'. Over in our home where I was born, up in Pleasant Hill, that's where they done it. Just near Pleasant Hill. In the grove.

M
ISSISSIPPI
J
OE
C
ALLICOTT

T
HE
11:4 5
A.M
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TRAIN
from Paddington Station (£3 2s 5d return and Who is the third that walks beside you?) rolled west from the drab blocks of flats at the outskirts of London to the May-green fields around Reading and Didcot, with trees, hedges, pink pigs, black and white cattle, tractors, thatch-roofed barns and houses under heavy white clouds.

I sat facing forward, trying to read the biography of Hemingway that William Burroughs recommended during one of our talks about Brian Jones, earlier in the spring, when my life, as Brian's had, was beginning to come apart. I was reading to find out how Hemingway kept going after he lost Hadley. For the first time in almost ten years—it was 1970—I was a single man; that is to say, alone.

Past Kemble, after the Swindon change, there were hills, horses on hillside fields in the sun. To the left of the track the land dropped away, green treetops down in the valley reminded me of the foothills of middle Georgia. Outside Stroud, as we were crossing a stream moving quickly through young willows, I saw ducks rising together and schoolchildren on a narrow dirt path leading under a small brick bridge, one boy waving a Union Jack at the train. Two seats ahead of me, a woman was telling her little boy and girl to stop singing “Yellow Submarine.”

After Gloucester, where the land is flat again, the train heads north to come to Cheltenham. The official guidebook still called it Cheltenham Spa, though the “healing medicinal waters” that attracted “the elite of many generations” went bad some years ago. Exactly how many years ago the guidebook didn't say. It didn't matter. I didn't come here to take a bath.