True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (67 page)

“I could never understand that statement the papers supposedly got from Anna about a ‘party.' If one were planning to have a party, would he take sleeping pills first? Why? At the inquest, Anna never got to testify—she was so upset. I was horrified by people's knowing that a doctor had prescribed the drugs Brian had taken and their saying nothing at all about it. Nobody asked any questions. I wrote the police a letter telling them the drugs were prescribed, so they could investigate and have that cleared up at any rate, that the drugs were in fact prescribed for Brian by a doctor. I sent the letter on Friday, by Monday the doctor was out of the country. I have no idea what it means.”

Jaws clenched, Mr. Jones peered at the cold fire, unable, though
Brian lay buried in Cheltenham Cemetery, to stop wanting to make things right. “I think,” Mr. Jones said, “that when Brian was in the sixth form the school made a mistake. They wanted him to study science and technology. I said, ‘The boy has an artistic temperament—shouldn't that be taken into account?' The school said, ‘No, that's not practical. Science, technology's where it's at today.' Brian wasn't interested in that sort of thing at all. I remember buying him a hammer when he was just a little chap. He wasn't interested in it at all. Most boys love hammers—not Brian.”

Asking about Linda Lawrence, I offended Mr. Jones. “You can't expect me to be proud of that side of my son's life. I felt that Brian never cared for Linda, that the only girl he ever really loved was Anita.”

“But he—Julian—is your grandson,” I said, fatuous and foolish, and until my own daughter, named after Billie Holiday, was safe with my parents, I would never know what the Joneses had been through. Once, yes, a family might withstand once, but Brian had done it and done it and done it. He was a menace. He was madness. He was out of control. “It was Brian's fanaticism that put the Rolling Stones on the map,” Mr. Jones had said.

Had I done these things—everything Brian did, I did—had I done them on purpose to research the part? If so, how awful. And if they were accidents, how awful.

Soon it was late and I called a taxi. Mr. Jones, shaking my hand, said, “We've had no cards at Christmas, nothing from the boys. If you see them, remember me to them—tell them that if they want to write or call, I'd be happy to hear from them.”

On the way to the hotel I told the driver, who noticed my accent, that I was a tourist, I'd heard about Cheltenham Spa.

“You're a bit late, you know. The waters spoiled about eight years ago.”

Eight years—about the time Brian left Cheltenham.

The driver said he was thirty-two, a Jim Reeves fan. I told him that I wrote about music. “I liked the fifties rock,” he said. “Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly. The Americans seem to have more feel for it. Now the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and all this nonsense—one of 'em's from here, actually.”

“Really, who's that?”

“One who died. In fact he lived just five or six doors down from where you were tonight. His mother and father still do live there. We have 'em, fans like, who go to see his grave. We had two German girls, didn't speak a word of English, they came at Christmastime—a crazy sick business. Well, good night.”

• • •

Next morning I checked out of the hotel, leaving my bags at the desk, and took a taxi to the cemetery, on Priory Road. It had been cloudy, then raining, then the sun started to shine, bright and warm, and as we came to the cemetery it was starting to rain again, a few drops falling. We drove part way in, but a man trimming the flowers beside the motorpath stopped us, and I told the driver to wait. Down a path to the left, turn right, and there, on a corner south of the church, was Brian's grave, with its little metal marker. No stone yet; it takes at least a year for the ground to settle after being disturbed by gravediggers.

It looked so small, like Brian's old house, that once again I had the feeling this must be wrong—but it was right; this small man, never more than a boy really, from that small house, now in this small grave.

Standing before the grave, in the little cemetery on the edge of Cheltenham, you could see the Cotswolds in the distance, not too far away, not too tall, perfectly decent green English hills. The graveyard church was nearby, a small medieval building of dun and grey stones, decorated and protected by snarling, scaly gryphons, its spire reaching up into the grey sky. The rain was steady now, though lacy fir trees sheltered the graves. The number of Brian's grave is V11393, a single plot on a little turning of a lane in the cemetery, next to Albert “Bert” Trigg, beloved husband of Ethel.

Three sprays of flowers were on the grave, and a poem written in a schoolgirl's insecure tiny round hand on a white sheet of paper, folded and wrapped round with cellophane to protect it from the rain, but already fading with each day's condensation of dew.

Only the living die
By the hand of life
Privileged, Branded
Spoken to when alone
By the voice of earth—
Marked through multiplying nights
Of sorrow and defeat, eaten by
Victory.

And then, at the bottom of the page, in the same hand: “But it will never be the same without the boy we used to adore.”

I replaced the note, standing over the grave, with the rain coming down all around, and looked up to where the sunlight was shining on the hills.

Who speaks of victory?
Survival is everything.

R
AINER
M
ARIA
R
ILKE
:
“Requiem for Count Wolf von Kalckreuth”

W
HEN
I
WOKE
it was bright Sunday morning in San Francisco, Pearl Harbor Day. I dressed and went down to Keith's suite. Charlie, Mick Taylor, Gram, Michelle, and Emmaretta were there. Mick had caught the nine o'clock plane to Geneva, taking with him the money the Stones had made in America. He and Jo flew together, Bill and Astrid taking the same plane to New York, then going to Sweden for a vacation.

In Keith's sitting room we had cocaine and Old Charter for breakfast, swapped addresses, and suddenly it was over. We went downstairs and took the last limousines of the engagement to the airport in the morning light. On the radio Buster Brown was singing, “Well, I want somebody to tell me what's wrong with me / I ain't in trouble, so much as misery.”

At the airport we embraced and walked away. Gram and Michelle were going to Los Angeles. I was going to Memphis and then to London. Keith, Charlie, and Mick Taylor were going to England, Charlie to Shirley and Serafina, Keith to Anita and Marlon. Brian was staying in the churchyard near the hillside.

At Geneva the first customs official who saw Mick at once called the police. Mick and Jo were searched as they say in the body, but the only
questionable items the police found were in Jo's luggage, herbal tablets from a Los Angeles naturopath, so they were allowed to enter the country. They opened a bank account, then took a Learjet with a German pilot to Nice, where Marsha Hunt joined them and they spent a day looking at houses in the south of France. The next day they flew to Gatwick with a French pilot. Over the Alps Mick and Jo discussed plans for the coming year. After Mick's drug trial there was the new single, “Brown Sugar,” to finish for release in early February. Mick thought the Stones should spend February recording and arranging a tour to include all major European capitals and Moscow. The recording should go on through March and April. The tour should start with a May Day concert somewhere in the middle of Europe and end in Moscow in June. (The Stones knew people who knew people who knew a woman who'd been Khrushchev's mistress and was now Minister of Culture and was considered fairly hip and so there seemed a reasonable possibility.) There had also been an offer for Rolling Stones concerts in Japan. In July, Immigration willing, the Stones would appear at festivals in the United States. They would spend August on vacation, September and October recording, November on the road, and December was too far away even to think about. Not much of this happened, and none of it as anybody expected.

Keith and Charlie and Mick reached England early in the morning of a new day, tired, jet-lagged, still in Altamont shock, ready for anything, Moscow, Japan, the world, whatever it takes, but there were a crowd of newspaper reporters and photographers at Heathrow, and Anita was there with Marlon. The big story was that Anita might not be allowed to stay in the country unless she and Keith married to remove her alien status. “Keith, they're throwing me out of the country,” she said, playing the scene to the hilt, holding aloft the baby she had feared would be Brian.

“Keith, what do you have to say about it? What are you gonna do about it?” the reporters asked, crowding around Keith as they had a thousand times before.

“We'll get it straightened out later,” Keith said, heading for the exit, “but first I've got to get some rest.”

M
UCH REMAINS
untold, but at least you got to hear the band play. Following the tour that ended with Altamont, I went to live in England and stayed until, after a certain weekend at Red-lands, I decided that if Keith and I kept dipping into the same bag, there would be no book and we would both be dead.

I spent time with the Stones on later tours, and they were always good, but there never seemed to be so much at stake. There was, though, just as much at stake, but it was harder to see. For one thing, we were never again in the desert, beyond all laws. At later Stones concerts I gave my seats to people like Sir John Gielgud and once to a candidate for vice president of the United States. Guitar players, producers, and women—except for Shirley Watts—came and went, terrible and wonderful things happened, in concert halls, outdoor arenas, nightclubs, jailhouses, courtrooms, bedrooms, as we persisted in our folly.

Hump yo'se'f ter de load en fergit de distress,

En dem w'at stan's by ter scoff,

Fer de harder de pullin', de longer de res',

En de bigger de feed in de troff.

J
OEL
C
HANDLER
H
ARRIS:
“Time Goes by Turns,”
Uncle Remus,
His Songs and His Sayings

Writing this book seemed, at the time, like such a good idea. And it was, in the sense that the hunch I spoke of in
Chapter 7
was justified, something was indeed about to happen, and I didn't miss it. But the book brought none of the benefits I'd hoped for, financial or otherwise, and hasn't to this day on the eve of the year 2000. I'd envisioned writing a book containing sex, drugs, rock and roll, violence, murder, mayhem, comedy, tragedy—a book that would make it possible for me to go back to my home country of South Georgia and write the stories I felt I was born to tell.

Well,
The True Adventures
contained all those elements, but it failed to prove commercial. I continue, perhaps stubbornly, to believe that this was through no fault of its own. The fault was partly mine, I suppose, for taking nearly fifteen years to write the book. By the time it appeared, in late 1984, the atmosphere in the United States was radically different from what it had been at the end of the sixties. Ronald Reagan was president, and the forces of greed had triumphed. Militarism, laissez-faire capitalism, indifference to the sufferings of the poor were upheld as positive virtues. The hippies and yippies had been replaced by yuppies, young urban professionals,
and though some people put bumper stickers on their cars saying Die Yuppie Scum, they didn't die but reproduced. You can see their children at the nearest mall, wearing baggies and nose rings.

Why did it take so long to write the book? I had to wait for the statute of limitations to expire, I've said, but that wasn't the main reason. I had to become a different person from the narrator in order to tell the story. This was necessary because of the heartbreak, the disappointment, the chagrin, the regret, the remorse. We had all, Stones, fans, hangers-on, parasites, observers, been filled with optimism there in the autumn of 1969, optimism that the following years proved completely unjustified. In our private lives as in the public life of our time, we were disappointed, by others and by ourselves. This is I expect the experience of all generations, but we believed that we were different, that we were somehow chosen, or anointed, for success, for love and happiness. We were wrong.

My problem in writing the story was expressed in a Bob Dylan song: “if you can't bring some good news, don't bring any.” What good news did I have to bring? Day and night for years I sought the answer to that question. The action in the book was not so disheartening as the action that followed and seemed to deny everything that had gone before. The significance of Altamont can be exaggerated but afterward things were different, and not just for the Rolling Stones. It was as if, in response to that event, the young men of the time got into their vans with their big ugly dogs and stringy-haired female companions and, reeking of patchouli, headed for the hills.