True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (45 page)

“I don't think you'd have to. I don't have to. He had nothing to do with this tour. I think they're breaking away from him.”

“Tell Shirley about your book. He doesn't have to have anybody's approval, it's fantastic.” Relaxation gave Jerry's accent some resemblance to that of Warner Brothers' Elmer Fudd, as it made mine resemble the speech of Erskine Caldwell's Jeeter Lester. Wexler did not
go from washing windows to owning yachts and living in such places as East Hampton and Central Park West by being a pushover, and his accent gave him a pleasant touch of humanity. Mine just made me sound like a redneck.

I was too close to the action to see what a wonder it was that anyone could maintain a position as undefined and free as mine in the presence of something so protected and pecunious as the world's leading rock and roll band. I didn't even know what my position was. I just wanted to stay alive and see what happened.

Wexler asked Shirley to call Ray Charles at the Plaza. Charles had left Atlantic at the end of the fifties, and now Wexler had hopes of signing him again. The first era of rock and roll, rhythm & blues, ended after the 1960 U.S. House of Representatives' investigation of the music business. Atlantic stagnated in the early sixties until it was refreshed by the influx of Stax/Volt records from Memphis. More recently Wexler had made a series of recordings with Aretha Franklin and musicians from Memphis and Muscle Shoals. Atlantic had also recorded various artists in Memphis, but having been squeezed out of the studios there and now denied even the privilege of bringing Memphis musicians to New York (by Memphis producers who said they were tired of being raided by carpetbaggers), they had begun to use a studio in Miami, staffing it with Cold Grits, a rhythm section from Mobile. “But they can't cut it,” Wexler said. “They don't even listen to records.”

“If you need a rhythm section,” I said, fatheaded as usual, ready to solve somebody else's problems on the spot, “the best one I know's down in Memphis.”

Wexler asked who they were. When I told him—Charlie Freeman, Jim Dickinson, and the Dixie Flyers—he asked, “Do you think they'd work for me?”

“If I were a musician, that's exactly what I'd want to do.”

Wexler made a quick sweeping motion with the Bloody Mary in his left hand, as if he were smoothing a dealing space in the desert sand. “Do you suppose if I gave them a production percentage and paid them twelve thousand a year and gave them an artist's contract as well that they'd move to Miami and—we'd pay for that, of course—and work for me?”

“Wouldn't hurt to ask.”

I made the phone call to Dickinson, and some of us lived through what it caused and one of the best of us, Charlie Freeman, didn't. Dickinson said he'd talk to the band, and Wexler, taking the phone, told Dickinson they'd talk about it in Memphis or Muscle Shoals. We said goodbye, a thunderhead of music, drugs, money and anguish starting to gather out in the future, as Thanksgiving continued in Great Neck.

“Those guys down in Miami now, they know nothing about what's happening in music,” Wexler said. “They'd never even heard the Band till I played it for them.”

Thinking of the Band, the group of musicians brought together by Ronnie Hawkins, the Arkansas Flash, that had been rustled from him by Bob Dylan and had then left Dylan to go on their own, Wexler recalled the session he'd produced not long ago with Hawkins in Muscle Shoals. Hawkins had come into the dry Alabama county in his private plane with his private case of booze and dope and Miss Toronto. “I got my pot, my pills, and my pussy,” he said. “Let's go to work.” Wexler played some of the tracks as we talked.

The Wexlers had seen things the likes of which would never be seen again, and I lusted to hear about them. They had gone to Café Society Downtown when they were too young to be served liquor. They'd been there the night Tallulah Bankhead came in and watched Billie Holiday's first set (Billie in the spotlight, trademark white gardenia in her hair) and then the two great ladies went into Billie's dressing room and didn't come out for the second set.

We were waiting for Wexler's mother to arrive so we could have dinner. Anita showed up with her boyfriend Jimmy, stayed briefly and left. The Wexlers' son Paul was in from some kind of experimental college in California, Norman Mailer on its board of directors. Finally Wexler's mother arrived, a small grandmother-shaped lady with darkened hair. She had just come from seeing an osteopath who'd given her an adjustment. “But I can't say what kind of adjustment.”

“Sure you can,” Wexler said.

“A coccygeal adjustment. And no more backaches.”

Wexler sat her down and gave her a glass of sherry. She had taken a cab from the train station because Wexler's limousine driver was sick. Shirley called the driver to see if he could take Mrs. Wexler and me to the train later. The man's wife said he was still sick. “If he's sick, he's sick,” Shirley said in Long Island double-talk.

“I'll see nobody misses the train,” Wexler said.

Lisa, the Wexlers' younger daughter, fifteen, had joined us. Dark-haired, with shapely high cheekbones, she cast demure but intense glances from dark, long-lashed eyes. “I'd be glad not to ride in the limo,” she said.

“Lisa hates the limo,” Wexler said. “She makes the driver let her out a block from school.”

Lisa made an elegant, feline shudder.

When it was time for dinner I lingered in the sitting room to telephone Jon Jaymes. “Be sure, you bastard, I can get in—put my name on the backstage pass list. I don't want to be standing outside in the fucking snow.”

“You got your button? Nothing to worry about.”

We ate goose, broccoli, potatoes, and drank fine red wine while Ronnie Hawkins sang “Down in the Alley” and other good songs. Wexler talked about how much he enjoyed recording with Southern musicians. “I've always wished my kids could grow up in the South,” he said.

“My God, whatever for?” his mother asked. In spite of her years, she was, Wexler had told me, quite active on the political left—always out leafletting shopping centers, that kind of thing. She would call Wexler to tell him where she was going so he could bail her out if she got arrested.

“Because the good people in the South understand bwotherhood better than anybody else in this country,” Wexler said, but his mother looked skeptical, knowing how fallible he was, her son the record millionaire.

Soon after dinner Wexler's mother and I said goodbye to Shirley and the kids and Wexler drove us to the station. Wexler and I made plans to meet at the Stones' show the following night.

On the train I heard how Wexler had made his mother suffer. Once again—or still—slightly drunk, I had been telling Mrs. Wexler what a great man her son was in the history of American music, and she said, “Do you really think so?”

“It ain't what I think, it's what's so. Haven't you seen all them interviews?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I was very worried about Gerald when he was younger. He wanted to be a writer and I wanted him to be one—sent him to journalism school in the Midwest. . . .” She told me that Wexler didn't knuckle down and work hard in school and she finally had to come out to Kansas and extricate him from the clutches of the
shiksa
he was shacked up with and bring him back to New York where she locked him in his room to write. “But he started fooling around with music, and I guess he's done well enough at it.” A worrier, like all good mothers.

At Penn Station I saw Mrs. Wexler safely to a taxi and walked around to the back door of the Garden. The streetlights were shining on the piles of dirty snow in the gutters and on the sidewalks. Outside the door long-haired boys and girls in warm coats crowded around a folding chair where sat a white-haired, ruddy-cheeked Irish cop. I showed him my flag badge and it meant nothing to him; just as I'd expected, I was a fool standing out in the cold with a
GOD BLESS AMERICA
button.

I asked the cop to check for my name on the guest list, and he went inside and returned to tell me that nobody knew nothing about no list. He was polite and unperturbed and in my frustration I had to admire his cool.

On that crest of mixed feelings, the door opened and Jon Jaymes
beckoned me inside. I went down the hall to the Stones' dressing room, where for a moment I was alone with the concrete block walls and hard benches. I heard voices and in came the Stones with Jimi Hendrix. They were followed by the Maysles brothers, tape and film rolling.

Jagger took off his shirt and walked around; Albert followed him, filming. Mick Taylor and I sat on a bench with Hendrix, who seemed subdued but pleasant. I told him about seeing Little Richard, and he said, smiling as if it cheered him up to think about it, that once when he was with Richard, he and the bass player bought ruffled shirts to wear onstage, and Richard made them change: “I am the beauty! Nobody spoze to wear ruffles but Richard!”

Mick Taylor handed his guitar to Hendrix and asked him to play. “Oh, I can't,” he said. “I have to string it different.” Hendrix was left-handed, but he went ahead and played the guitar upside down, a wizard he was.

As Hendrix played I went into the bathroom, where Jagger was putting mascara on his lashes. Hendrix had tried to take Marianne Faith-full away from Mick, who wasn't about to stand around and listen to him play, upside-down or sideways. I told him about my afternoon with Wexler. He seemed distracted, I figured because he was about to go onstage. I didn't know that in the distance a black girl was telling him she was going to have his baby, and a blond girl (who two weeks ago had been threatening to join the tour) was telling him goodbye. Back at the Plaza in a few hours, Jo would write in her notebook, “Tried talk Mick imposs—concert fantastic—Mick better but must keep his mind on necessary things.” He listened politely, or appeared to, till I finished talking about Atlantic and the Magrittes; then, with the Stones changing into their stage drag, I went out to see the show.

In the hall I saw another of the next year's ghosts, Janis Joplin, heading for the Stones' dressing room. Because I'd heard that something I had written about her had made her angry, I avoided her. The next day, when I came into the Garden for the afternoon show, Bill Belmont told me that Janis, being stopped at the Stones' door—because, as nobody got a chance to tell her, they were mostly naked—stuck her head in and gave the middle-finger salute to what must have been a surprised bunch of Rolling Stones. I think she was drunk, not an unusual state for her. Later tonight, when Jagger, onstage, sang “Don't you want to live with me?” Janis would yell, “You don't have the balls!”

It was cold in the Garden, under the high arches and giant mushroom spines. Terry Reid and B. B. King had already played and Tina Turner was onstage singing the Otis Redding song, “I've Been Loving You Too Long,” her sleek red beauty shimmering in a black dress, back arched, legs bowed, one arm thrust out, testifying as she had been for years to drunks in juke joints and cuttin' parlors. Ike was standing
back from the spotlight, small and black and nasty, eyeballs glowing under his shiny processed Beatle cut, chopping chords as if in anger. This afternoon Wexler, who often saw the Turners when they were in New York, said, “He's really got the fear of God in her.” As you watched them, you couldn't help wondering if Mother Nature were married to the Devil.

Tina sang “Respect” and “Come Together,” eyes bleached out in the spotlight, her pupils swimming white slits. When the band geared up for “Land of 1000 Dances,” Janis Joplin stepped onto the rear of the stage, stomping with delight, and Tina called her to the front. Janis looked for once in her life completely happy; it was plain that she would love to nose around in Tina's crotch all night long. “Roll over on your back—y'know I like it like that,” they sang together, Ike's guitar whipping them, and Janis pulled off her little crocheted cap and threw it into the air.

After Tina and Janis finished there was a delay during which the audience had contact flashes from what they had seen and the recording equipment was prepared for the Stones. How can they follow this, I asked myself, as I did at almost every show. After watching Tina in Oakland, Mick had said that he wasn't cocky anymore; but he was still following her. I went backstage, and Mick was wandering among the Coke bottles and folding chairs, looking rather lost and forlorn. The others kept their distance. He was about to be consumed, and there was a reverent silence between them. With his blue-beaded moccasins and black pants with silver leg buttons (only back here you can see they're not silver, just shiny in the spotlight), little black jersey, his scarf dragging, hair hanging limp, chin slumped over gold-medallioned choker, Uncle Sam hat in hand, Mick seemed not bored but not comfortable, making little sounds under his breath as if to say, What a dumb thing this is, waiting.

As time passed and nothing happened, I went out front again into the smoky darkness. No one seemed to mind the wait. “Ain't nothin' any good without it has some grease on it,” Tina (the former Annie Mae Bullock, of Brownsville, Tennessee) had said, and she and Janis had left the audience greased and pleased. There were guards, but they weren't wearing togas, and the few police didn't seem intent on ruining a good time. The atmosphere was, if not relaxed, at least secure—perhaps because we were on an island in a giant tin can, concrete and metal shell, and no apparent threat to anybody.

Stu, walking across the stage to check a microphone, dressed in his pale-yellow tuxedo with shiny satin lapels, caused a ripple of applause, which he answered with a V-sign—very satirical, Stu. Then the stage was deserted and out of the stillness a disembodied cockney voice mused, “Everyone seems to be ready, are you ready?”

Yesss,
the crowd answered in a snow-slide's whisper-roar,
Yesss.