True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (56 page)

A goldfish-colored line shimmered on the black Atlantic as I turned to go inside.

We were all together in the Bob Hope suite, Stones, press, management, security, pilots. Behind the bar a black-tied, white-haired waiter was preparing breakfast. He took obvious pleasure in his work, piling steaming eggs, sausages, and rolls on gleaming plates. Sam, sitting with Keith and Charlie on a couch near the bar, asked for a pot of tea, and the waiter said, “Certainly, sir. I'll have to go down to the kitchen.” He was still earnestly dishing it up five minutes later when Sam said,
“Please,
man, could we have our tea, I asked you about twenty minutes ago.”

“Sir,” the waiter said, as if he were speaking to a blind man, “I'm still serving these—”

“Just
leave
it,” Sam said, “and go get the tea.
These
are the musicians, man, they've been up all night working, they're tired, they need their tea. These other people understand, they don't mind—even if you said Fuck 'em, they wouldn't mind.”

“Sir, we don't need that kind of talk,” the waiter said. Tony walked from the bar to stand in front of Sam, the sun that was brightening the suite shading the mounds and hollows of hard black muscle, making him look bigger than ever. “Wouldn't they, Sam?” he asked, so quietly that everyone in the room paused, listening. “I know at least one person who would.” Tony stood over Sam, breathing lightly but a bit faster than normal, while Sam, who glanced up just once, swallowed, looked side to side and said nothing.

I was standing beside the bar. “I don't like the way he spoke to me, sir,” the waiter said.

“I don't think he'll have anything else to say for a while,” I told him.

He took my word for it and brought the tea, placing the tray beside Keith's boots on a low table in front of the couch. Keith was inhaling heaping spoons of cocaine from a film can, smearing his nose and upper lip with the white powder.

Jon Jaymes came over to the couch with a Dodge catalogue and told the Stones to pick out the cars they wanted, one per Stone, free from Dodge, to be delivered soon in England and replaced each year as long as Dodge felt like it. Charlie and Keith ordered aluminum-finish Chargers, Jagger wanted a Charger in purple, Bill also wanted a Charger, Mick Taylor wanted a station wagon, and they wanted another wagon for Stu and the office. Jon wrote all this down. There was something suspicious about a big fat mama's boy giving away free cars in the early morning light. As Jon walked away Mick looked at his wide back and said, “Christ, I can't stand that man—”

Keith went to the piano, began to play clunky rocking chords, and Mick, who'd showered and dressed in his black-and-white checkered suit, red shirt, and burgundy newsboy cap, leaning against a marble column, clapping on the afterbeat, sang “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.” The
performance worked on its own and as a parody of Elvis Presley. It was magic; even at this point of exhaustion it made you want to dance.

Downstairs, another kind of magic was going on. Jon and Mike Scotty were with the hotel manager, settling the bill.

“Give him a check from Teenage Enterprises,” Jon said to Mike.

“Should I give him the Broadway address?” Mike asked.

“That'll be fine,” Jon said. Something about the way he said it made you think that the Broadway address might be a parking lot.

It was nearly nine-thirty when we left, passing through the dining room where Johnny Winter and Janis Joplin and other musicians who had played at the festival were eating. They stopped, watching the Stones walk past. We went out to the front lawn, waited for a second helicopter, and flew to the West Palm Beach Airport. Jon Jaymes, Mike Scotty, the Maysles brothers, and Ronnie were going to New York. Sam was going to San Francisco to help Jo start setting up the free concert, and Michael Lydon was going home to Southern California while the Stones were recording in Alabama. We stood around the airport until everyone had left but the Stones, Stu, Astrid, Tony, and me. As he left, Jon had told me that he was holding me responsible for the Stones' welfare. He gave me his New York telephone numbers and said, “If anything happens, call me immediately.” I was staggering-tired and left the others in the Butler Aviation office to go sit on the plane, a Constellation propeller aircraft that looked like a converted school bus. I sat down in a small rear cabin and went to sleep, waking up as Mick and Charlie joined me in the back and the rest took seats in the front. The engines started and the plane taxied to the middle of the runway, sat for a few minutes with the engines racing, rolled another few feet forward, turned right again, then forward and right once more, and we were back where we started. The engines stopped, and one of the pilots opened the door and got off the plane. Mick and I followed him. A mechanic standing on a ladder was working on one of the engines.

“What's the trouble?” Mick asked.

“Bad plugs from an oil drip,” the pilot said. “We'll have it as good as, uh, ready to go in a couple minutes.”

Mick and I walked across the landing field to a patch of rough grass forty or fifty yards away and lay down in the sunlight. Lying on his back, eyes closed, Mick said, “I don't feel very good about that plane.”

“Neither do I,” I said.

Bill and Astrid were coming towards us across the concrete.

“You should listen to your instincts,” Mick said.

“How d'you feel about about that plane?” Bill asked.

“Don't like it,” Mick and I said in unison.

“Neither do we,” Astrid said.

“Let's see what everybody else thinks,” Mick said, getting up.

Keith and Charlie were asleep, which counted as two votes for staying aboard, but Mick Taylor was awake and didn't like the plane either. Jagger decided to keep Tony with us, sleep somewhere close by, and fly to Alabama on another plane. Charlie woke up, and we asked if he'd like to come with us. “How about Keith?” he asked.

Keith was, as we pointed out, asleep. Charlie woke him up, but he wasn't interested. Charlie decided to stay aboard. Those of us who were staying in Florida got some of our bags out of the luggage compartment—couldn't find mine, but I was too tired to care—and walked back to the airport. In a few minutes Charlie followed, having correctly assumed that we had taken his bags. We had Stu's bags too. They retrieved them and headed back to the plane.

“We'll get a place to sleep,” Mick said, “and see you in the morning.”

“Be wistful,” Charlie said.

I telephoned the Colonnades, where there were no rooms, and the West Palm Beach Holiday Inn ditto. “Next time don't tell them it's us,” Mick said, and that worked. I made reservations for six people at the Holiday Inn in Palm Beach, a few miles away, all in my name.

We took taxis there, but when I asked at the front desk about the reservations the grim-faced manager, looking past me at the long-haired foreigners, said, “There must be some mistake, there's no record of that reservation.”

“But I just made it,” I said.

He went into conference with two women in an office behind the counter, came back and said, “Sorry, no rooms.”

“Come on,” Mick said. “If we're not wanted, we'll go someplace else.”

“Just a minute,” the manager said. He went back to talk to the women again, then returned to say, “We do have room for you, but if thousands of kids show up here, we'll get the National Guard in here to throw them out and you too.”

“All we want is some rest,” Mick said wearily.

“If thousands of kids show up it'll be because
you
told them we're here,” I said to the manager.

We ate and got some rest. I invited Charlie Brown to come down from Miami for the evening, and the next morning he drove us to the Miami airport. None of us talked as we drove along in the cool early morning. About an hour earlier I had wandered into Mick's room, finding his door open and him lying in bed, talking earnestly on the telephone. “I can only say how I really feel, what's in my heart,” he was saying. Then Tony had come in and asked me, while Mick was in the bathroom, whether I had heard Bill and Astrid fighting last night.
“I think he slapped her or something,” Tony said. “She went down to Mick's room for a while afterwards.” We had paid the bill and started to leave when the manager came out with a bill for another two hundred dollar's worth of phone calls. “I've been on the phone to Europe for hours this morning,” Mick said, “trying to get a house in the south of France.”

“Glad we got that in time,” the manager said, friendly enough once we were leaving.

At the airport we told Charlie thanks and goodbye and boarded a flight to Atlanta. In Atlanta we had an hour and a half to wait, and Mick and I prowled the airport, leaving Tony with little Mick, Bill, and Astrid. We played pinball machines, bought
GEORGIA STATE PRISON
shirts, went out on the observation deck, and sat looking at the cold cloudy day. We talked about old Chuck Berry and Little Richard songs, and Mick said that Keith had written about three hundred unrecorded songs. “I've got a new one meself,” he said. “No words yet, just a few words in my head—called ‘Brown Sugar'—about a woman who screws one of her black servants. I started to call it ‘Black Pussy' but I decided that was too direct, too nitty-gritty.”

I asked Mick whether he took pills as a teenager like my friends and me in Georgia, and he said, “No, I didn't, I thought it was wrong. I was so—sort of suburban. I still think it's wrong.”

Just before we went back inside, Mick said, “When I got off the plane yesterday I forgot about the angels Richard sent to protect me. I should have remembered and I would've known it was gonna be all right. He said, ‘Remember, the angels are watching over you.' ”

On the plane to Muscle Shoals, Mick and I talked about movies and acting, which didn't interest him much.
“Ned Kelly
cost two million dollars and I spent three months being cold and muddy. I don't want to be an actor, pretending to be a thief—if you wanted to be a thief you'd either really do it or let it alone. I'd like to direct movies, but I have to learn a lot more.”

I pressed on, telling him an idea I'd had for doing Georgette Heyer's
The Black Moth
with the Stones, and other crackpot ideas, but he changed the subject. “Are there any vocal backing groups in Muscle Shoals?”

“Depends,” I said. “What d'you need them for, what kind of thing?”

“Certainly not to sing, man,” Mick said.

“Oh.”

“Whoo,” Mick laughed. “I don't like y'singin', honey, but I love the way you move.”

At the Muscle Shoals airport there was a small terminal building with a large window through which, it seemed, most of the local population and the people from the surrounding cities of Florence, Sheffield, and
Tuscumbia were looking out at the landing field. Keith was slouching against a post in front of the window, wearing an antique Hungarian gypsy jacket (that would also be left behind at Altamont), and just to start things off right in Alabama, Mick walked up in full view of the watching rednecks and kissed Keith sweetly on the cheek. “How are you, babe?”

“All right,” Keith said. “We been drivin' around lookin' at the woods this mornin', it's beautiful around here.”

Stu drove us to the Sheffield Holiday Inn, where I was relieved to find my suitcase in my room. I made some phone calls, took a nap, woke up after dark, and went downstairs to have dinner with the Stones; fresh fish from the Tennessee River, red slices of country ham, grits, butter, hush puppies. They were discussing what to do with the tour money.

“We could get an American to bring it in for us,” Bill said.

“We can't put it in the bank in America,” Mick said, “but we can in Switzerland.”

“We could,” Bill said, “buy a 1909 Lincoln penny for ten thousand pounds and sell it for fifteen thousand.”

The Muscle Shoals Sounds Studio, 3614 Jackson Highway, is a concrete-block building every bit as glamorous as an automotive parts ware-house. Inside under the green, yellow, and magenta lights and orange and black acoustical ceiling panels, were Jimmy Johnson, a rhythm guitar player and recording engineer; Jim Dickinson; and Ahmet Ertegun. In the middle of the recording room, the studio itself, there was a toilet filled with microphones and amplifiers, a blue plastic horseshoe over the door. The Stones began positioning themselves, preparing their instruments.

“What's the bass player's name?” Ahmet, bald, vandyked, Turkish, blasé, whispered to me.

“Perks,” I said.

The Stones began the process of recording “You Got to Move.” Instead of doing it as it had been performed onstage, by Mick and Keith alone, they were all trying to play it. They made awful noises tuning, then looked for riffs, sorting themselves out within the music in the only way they knew to work.

“They really hard to play with,” Charlie said.

“I'm hip,” I said. He was a man trained in the styles of modern jazz and Chicago rhythm & blues who was attempting to play a song most often performed on Fred McDowell's front porch outside Como, Mississippi, not far from where we were. They could have got Fred to produce. It progressed so badly, with Mick making a couple of embarrassing efforts to add to the classic lyrics, that Charlie told him, “I think you should do it with just you and Keith.”

“Do you want to do it with just you and me and Mick?” Mick asked Keith.

“Nah,” Keith said, because he had something in mind that he wanted to hear but couldn't explain to the others; they just had to strike out and keep stumbling forward till they tripped across it.

“Is this mike all right for doing it properly?” Mick asked portly, red-headed, good-ole-boy Jimmy.

After about ten unsuccessful takes they took a break. “You agreed with me, didn't you?” Charlie asked me.