True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (58 page)

“I think this one's in tune,” I said.

“But it's got tacks in it,” Dickinson said.

“I
know
it,” I said.

Dickinson went to the tack piano, sat down and began to play.

“Lights out,” Keith said.

“Lights out, mouths shut,” Mick said.

“Lights out in the boys' dorm,” Keith said, “two in a bed.”

Later, in the control room, listening to the last playback of “Wild Horses,” Keith would tell Dickinson, who'd asked, that he had written the chorus and Mick had written the verses. “That's usually the way it works,” he said. “I have a phrase that fits what I'm playin'—like ‘Satisfaction'—I had that phrase and Mick did the rest. I wrote this song because I was doin' good at home with my old lady, and I wrote it like a love song. I just had this, ‘Wild horses couldn't drag me away,' and I gave it to Mick, and Marianne just ran off with this guy and he changed it all round but it's still beautiful.”

They played the song over and over, punctuating the repetitions with artistic encouragements to each other: “We want a soft warm lovely sound from you, Wyman,” Keith said, “stop donkeyin' about.”

Dickinson had written out the chords in numbers the way Nashville studio players did.

“Where'd you get that?” Wyman asked, looking at the chord sheet.

“From Keith,” Dickinson said. He had taken Keith's first chord as the “one” chord, putting him in a different key from the one the song was in.

“Don't pay any attention to Keith, he doesn't know what he's doing,” Bill said. He wrote a chord sheet that left out the passing chords and gave it to Dickinson, who put it up on the piano's music stand, from which Mick Taylor took it away. Dickinson went on playing.

“What do you think about the piano?” Jagger asked Keith.

“It's the only thing I like so far.”

After listening to the first playback we spent some time standing in the hall smoking grass and sniffing cocaine. “You all right?” Charlie asked Dickinson. “It's hard work.”

“It's better than if I was in Memphis,” Dickinson said, “making sixty-five dollars for a three-hour session that lasts twelve hours. Shows what a strong union we have.”

“Unions ain't no good,” Tony said. He had not been arrested after all and was standing by holding the dope.

“He says he can't play, and he's standin' here, a piano player,” Charlie said. “Ridiculous. We can't play either, legally.”

“Why not just
i
gnore the union rules?” Tony asked.

“Disc jockeys won't play nonunion records,” Dickinson said.

“But we're doin' it,” Charlie said. “We're here playing.”

Mick said to start again. “All right, Grimblewick,” Charlie said to himself. “Back to your percussion.”

At four in the morning, the Maysles brothers, Tony, and Stu were asleep on couches at the studio, Jerry and Ahmet were asleep at the Holiday Inn, Mick was in a vocal booth under a blue-green light, Bill was sitting beside Charlie, Dickinson was at the piano, Mick Taylor and Keith were sitting on facing chairs. After another good take, Keith woke up Tony to give us more cocaine.

“That shit'll burn your nose out,” Tony said.

“Won't hurt you for long,” Dickinson said.

“Just burns out a few connections in the brain,” I said.

“You never seem to miss them,” Keith said. He inhaled deeply and shook his head. “Gram Parsons gets better coke than the Mafia. From some Black Panther dentist in Watts.”

The take, on second hearing, was not good enough. “Doesn't seem the rhythm's coming in the right place,” Keith said. Back in the studio, he said, “Tony, let's have some muggles.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “Some mezz.”

The song began again, but Keith hit a wrong note. “Shit,” Mick said.

“That was going good, too,” Mick Taylor said.

“I accept the Golden Prune,” Keith said.

Bill went into the John, nothing unusual. When he came back, Mick said, “All right? Everybody in the booth?” But instead of saying “booth,” he said my first name, and he and Keith kept that up for the rest of the night. They were trying to be friendly.

“Yeah,” Keith said. “Now, Bill, get it into your Hampton that this is it.”

The song started well and went on until someone said, “No.”

“Who said no?” Charlie asked.

“Jimmy said no,” Dickinson said.

“Did you say no?” Mick asked.

“Tape's running out,” Jimmy said. He reloaded the eight-track recorder.

“Everybody ready?” Mick asked. “Ready?”

“Yeah, all ready,” Keith said.

“That's a moot point,” Mick said.

“All right,” Jimmy said. “Take eleven. This is the money take.”

It wasn't, but the next one was.

By daylight the Jack Daniel's was gone and Keith and Mick were deeply into the J&B, overdubbing vocals on “Brown Sugar,” lurching across the studio to the control room to listen to playbacks. Mick had forgotten the words and Dickinson had reminded him to sing the line, “Hear him whip the women just around midnight.”

Talking in the control room to Mick Taylor, Charlie, and Bill, Mick said, smiling, looking collegiate, “We can make next year sort of get-out-the-way year if we really push it. We usually wind up at the end of the year all wasted, no ideas, no songs—but this year we're still pushing.” Mick wanted to put out “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses” as a single right away, like next week. Anything seemed possible that morning in Muscle Shoals.

Keith was sitting on the control room couch, holding a Coke in his left hand and the Scotch bottle in his right. Dickinson was sitting beside him, wearing a black plastic shirt, looking greasy, as if he were about to go out and rip a tire off a semi. There was a gaping hole in the toe of Keith's python boot. Jimmy Johnson, who had been engineering the regular studio sessions in the day and the Rolling Stones undercover work at night, was still at the board, playing back tapes.

“How do you keep going, man?” Keith asked him.

“Courage,” Jimmy said. He had taken, to my knowledge, no drugs.

“Just thinkin' about how Glyn Johns is always flakin' out.”

We were listening to “You Got to Move.”

“Put the voices back with the guitars,” Mick told Jimmy.

“Bring the drums up when they come in after the solo,” Keith said.

“That vocal makes Brownie and Sonny sound like a coupla nowhere white boys,” Dickinson said to Keith.

“Just 'cause they been playin' to all them white people,” Keith said. “Have you heard Fred McDowell's wife or sister sing with him—I don't know what she is—”

“Wife from time to time,” Dickinson said.

“She's great,” Keith said. “She sings for herself.”

Mick had told Dickinson that he needed to lose some weight, and Dickinson on the couch made a self-deprecating remark about being old—at twenty-nine—and fat.

“Doesn't matter if you're sixty-eight and bald,” Keith said. “If you
can do it, there's somebody who can dig it, but if you're a rock and roller you've got to be on the stage. A rock and roller doesn't exist unless he's on the stage.”

Charlie had left the control room and now, at seven o'clock in the morning, was sitting alone in the studio playing the drums, pounding away.
“There'
s a rock and roller,” Keith said.

Jimmy seemed to take forever to get the tapes ready. Mick played piano, Keith played piano, Mick played guitar, waiting. “Fuckin' 'ell, Shuscle Moals,” Mick said. “Come on—even Astrid's gone 'ome.” Astrid had almost always been present at the studio, but like a ghost, I'd never noticed her. Finally we heard the playbacks. Dickinson asked Mick if he'd mind his having a copy of “Wild Horses.”

“No,” Mick said, “but we don't want to hear it on the radio.”

“I'm shocked you'd suggest it,” Charlie said.

Mick had at the end of each night's work erased or destroyed all the outtakes. The Stones would leave not a trace behind them at the Muscle Shoals studio, nor would they pay anyone for anything.

“Too bad,” Keith said as the tapes wound their last. “We didn't get to go to a juke joint.”

We wobbled out into the early morning light. “Like to come back for two weeks or so,” Keith said, “if we could rent a house and not stay at the Squaliday Inn.”

There were a couple of carloads of friendly and relaxed Alabama teenagers outside. They took pictures and followed us back to the motel. We went to our rooms, cleaned up, Dickinson and I smoked my last joint—the Stones were out of grass and I'd mentioned that I had one joint left—and went down to the dining room for breakfast. Keith soon joined us. He had shaved and was dressed with his usual quiet good taste: white tennis shoes, raveled beige nylon socks, red velvet pants with long strings hanging from their hemless cuffs, black velvet jacket, brown cap, long yellow and black wool scarf. “Tea, please,” he said to the waitress.

Behind me a woman was saying, “Ah thank ah'll give 'im a chemistry set,” reminding me that Christmas was coming. Charlie and Mick Taylor, then Ahmet, then Mick, joined us. Mick was wearing his white velvet suit and red ruffled silk shirt, red muffler, burgundy maxicoat and cord cap. He sat down with us and ordered some corned beef.

Bill and Astrid sat at a nearby table. “Are you all with some group?” their waitress asked.

“Martha and the Vandellas,” Bill said.

“Oh,” the waitress said.

“You still got that joint?” Keith asked, wanting to smoke it at the table and give Ahmet a heart attack.

“Gone,” I said.

“When's the plane?” Keith asked.

“We'll wait till we're called,” Mick said, eating corned beef.

When we finished breakfast we went up to Keith's room to listen again to the new Stones recordings.

“Got some nice tracks,” Wexler said. He had come to breakfast late. “Taking them back to London to add the sweetening?”

“Not very much,” Keith said. “I like them just the way they are.”

“I sent a song to Aretha once,” Mick said—“Sympathy for the Devil,” the one Wexler had described to me as being suitable for Sonny Bono or Burl Ives. “And she didn't do it. I was very disappointed. Very
hurt.”

“Well, man, ah,” Wexler said, “there's still time—”

Soon we were at the airport, the little girls following us, snapping photos as we walked out to the plane. “Your daddy's gonna kill you,” Tony told a girl who was posing beside him. We were going to Atlanta—Wexler would stay there for a record-awards banquet—and on to San Francisco by way of Dallas. Wexler sat beside me talking but I was too sleepy to hear him. Across the aisle Mick and Keith were sprawled, Mick's head on Keith's shoulder, asleep.

I passed out for about twenty minutes and we were in Atlanta, then aboard a crowded plane where we had to split up, Keith sitting with some soldiers in the tourist section. I sat next to a well-dressed middle-aged woman who was reading John Cheever's
Bullet Park,
a new book that season.

“That's a beautiful book,” I said. We became involved in an odd, intimate conversation brought on by fatigue and romance and bourbon. We talked about Cheever's characters, how sad they were, how acutely they felt the limits of their lives. “No matter what, we're not in control, we don't plan any of the things that happen to us, they just happen and our hearts are broken by it all—”

I went back to speak to Keith, who gave me the cocaine and the gold bamboo and said, “Take this.”

“Why, thanks.” I went into the toilet and came back refreshed to find Keith, now in the first-class compartment, engaged in conversation with an advertising executive in a business suit.

“You're not free, man, you've got to do what they say,” Keith said.

“You have to play what people want,” the man said. “What's the difference?”

“No, we don't,” Keith said. “We don't have to do anything we don't want to do. I threw my favorite guitar off the stage in San Francisco.”

“You can't do that every night,” the man said.

“I can do it as often as I feel like it. Not always but sometimes.”

The man turned to me: “Do you believe this guy?”

“I believe him,” I said.

“Ah, you know what my scene is,” Keith said to me.

“Well,” the man said, “what I do isn't bad, I've never hurt anybody.”

“How can you be sure?” Keith asked, and then went on as if he didn't want to think about that one too long himself. “The problem is when you're talking you think you're arguing with Spiro Agnew, and you're not, you're talking to a perfectly reasonable man. But I really think it's true that you can't do what you want to do. So many people aren't doing what they want to do.”

“Most of us do both,” the man said. “We like what we do but we have to make money. It's a compromise.”

“But that's so sort of sad,” Keith said.

“But the world is not perfect,” the man said.

“No,” Keith said. “The world
is
perfect.”

At that I had to reach over and kiss Keith on top of the head, a gesture of blessing that did not even bring a pause in the conversation. “You guys work so hard,” he said to the man. “We work hard in concentrated periods but then we stop and it's four months of doing nothing—”

“It's a different schedule,” the man said.

“Yeah,” Keith said, “but most people don't dig their work. Americans are into a very freaky scene—like Spiro trying to speak for the people and he can't because most of the people are under twenty-five and into a very different sort of scene—”

“Are you sure they disagree with Spiro?” the man asked.