“What did Gleason say, exactly?” Charlie asked me.
“He said the tickets cost too much, the seating is bad, the supporting acts aren’t being paid enough, and all this proves that the Rolling Stones despise their audience. I may have left something out. Right. He also said, ‘They put on a good show.’ ”
The back door opened and in walked a gang of men. Tall and lean and long-haired, they stood for a moment in the center of the room as if posing for a faded sepia photograph of the kind that used to end up on posters nailed to trees. The Stones Gang: Wanted Dead or Alive, though only Mick Jagger, standing like a model, his knife-blade ass thrust to one side, was currently awaiting trial. Beside him was Keith Richards, who was even thinner and looked not like a model but an insane advertisement for a dangerous carefree Death—black ragged hair, dead green skin, a cougar tooth hanging from his right earlobe, his lips snarled back from the marijuana cigaret between his rotting fangs, his gums blue, the world’s only bluegum white man, poisonous as a rattle-snake.
From his photographs I recognized Brian Jones’ replacement, Mick Taylor. He was pink and blond, pretty as a Dresden doll beside Jagger and Richards, who had aged more than a year in the year since I’d seen them. One of the others, with dark hair frosted pale gold and a classic country and western outfit from Nudie the Rodeo Tailor, I remembered seeing on television and record covers—he was Gram Parsons, and he came, so I’d heard, from my hometown, Waycross, Georgia, on the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp. We had not met, but I had reviewed his band the Flying Burrito Brothers’ new album, The Gilded Palace of Sin. I had no idea he knew the Stones. Seeing him here, finding another boy from Waycross at this altitude, I sensed a pattern, some design I couldn’t make out, and I got up to speak to Gram Parsons, as if he were a prophet and I were a pilgrim seeking revelation.
But as I stepped around the table Jagger turned, and for the first time since he came into the room we were facing, too close, his eyes like a deer’s, large, shadowed, startled. I remembered reading on the plane out here a Time magazine report of a study showing that when two people look at each other, the one who looks away first is likely to dominate the situation. So I gave Mick a friendly smile, and he looked away, just like the dominant people in Time. I had the feeling I’d lost a game I was trying not to play, but then I was past Mick, saying to Gram, “Good to see you.”
“Yeah,” Gram said reasonably, “but who are you?”
I told him, and he said, “I dug what you wrote about our band.”
“I’m from Waycross,” I said. He peered at me for a second, then handed me the joint he’d been smoking. We walked out onto the narrow front lawn (as we went out, Keith was saying to Charlie, “Did you see what your friend Gleason said?”), sat on the grass beside the hedge, and talked about people and places in Georgia. Gram said he had no intention of going back. I remembered my mother telling me that after Gram’s mother and father had divorced, his father, a man called “Coon Dog” Connor, had killed himself, and Gram’s mother married a New Orleans man named Parsons. I wouldn’t know until later, when people started writing articles and books giving Gram belated credit for creating a new form of music, that his mother, whose father had owned Cypress Gardens and most of the oranges in central Florida, had died of alcoholic malnutrition the day before Gram graduated from high school. Even the house in Waycross where Gram lived had been sold and moved off beside the main southbound highway.
From where we were sitting, high in the sky over Sunset Boulevard, it seemed that by facing the east we could see, except for the smog, all the way back to Georgia. But if the smog had gone, what could we have seen except the people who make the smog? Gram inhaled deeply on the joint, an Indian silver swastika bracelet hanging on his wrist, his eyes opaque pale green, like bird’s eggs. “Look at it, man,” he said, as if he had heard my thoughts. “They call it America, and they call it civilization, and they call it television, and they believe in it and salute it and sing songs to it and eat and sleep and die still believing in it, and—and—I don’t know,” he said, taking another drag, “then sometimes the Mets come along and win the World Series—”
With all the revelation I could handle for the moment, I spun back through the house to the patio, where most of the people who were here already and some new ones who had arrived were breaking up a powwow, leaving Jagger talking upward to a very tall young man with a Buffalo Bill mane and red side whiskers. “Now, Chip,” Mick was saying (so I knew he was real, this man who called himself Chip Monck), “we can’t do audience-participation things. I mean, I appreciate your suggestion, and we do want to get them involved, but we can’t play ‘With a Little Help from My Friends,’ and—what do they know? You can’t expect people to sing along on ‘Paint It Black.’ Rock and roll has become very cool now, but the Rolling Stones are not a cool sort of thing, it’s a much more old-fashioned thing we do, it’s not as if the Rolling Stones were, y’know, five dedicated musicians—I mean, I’d much rather go on stage in a gold Cadillac or wearing a gold suit or summink like that—”
Suddenly but gently, calmly, Chip put his hands on Mick’s shoulders and said, in the mellow baritone that soothed the dope-freaked, mud-soaked thousands two months ago at the Woodstock Pop Festival, “I just want you to know how pleased I am to be working with you guys.”
Mick laughed. When Chip had touched him, Mick’s hands had come up to hold Chip at arm’s length by the collarbone. Not certain whether Mick was laughing at him, Chip also laughed. They stood, knees slightly bent, in the classic starting position of wrestlers, grinning at each other.
Inside, someone was playing the piano. I looked, saw that it was Keith, joined him on the bench and asked, “What about this book?” I trusted Keith, at least to tell the truth; a bluegum man don’t have to lie.
“What about it?” he asked, playing no recognizable melody.
“I need a letter.”
“I thought Jo sent you a letter.”
“Many letters, but not what I need. She says I need Allen Klein’s approval.”
“You don’t need anybody’s approval. All you need is us. Jo! Hey, Jo!”
From the depths of this serpentine house Georgia Bergman emerged. She was the Stones’ secretary, an Anglo-American girl in her middle twenties, with black kinky hair done in the current electric fashion, sticking out all around like a fright wig.
“What about this letter?” Keith asked. He was still playing, nothing you could recognize.
“We sent it,” Jo said, “but it wasn’t right, it didn’t work, it umm—”
“I’ll talk to Mick about it,” Keith said, no certain comfort to me, but I said “Fine,” and Jo took me for a walk on the grounds of this place, rented at great expense from some of the Du Ponts. We strolled out the back, toward the far corner of the property, where there were a child’s playhouse, slide, and swings. I walked with my head down, groping toward thought.
Just over a year earlier, in September 1968, thinking that with one more story I could publish a collection of pieces about music, I went to England to visit the Rolling Stones. For almost three years, since Mick, Keith, and Brian had been arrested for possession of drugs, the Stones had stayed out of sight, performing in public only once. I saw the Stones, attended Brian Jones’ trial, and wrote a story, but I had only glimpsed—in Brian’s eyes as he glanced up from the dock—the mystery of the Rolling Stones. In the spring, after the story was published, I asked the Stones’ cooperation in writing a book about them. It was June, and I was still waiting for an answer, when Brian, who had started the band, left it because, he said, of “musical differences” with the other Stones. Less than a month later, Jo Bergman called me in the middle of the night to say that Brian had been found dead, drowned in his swimming pool.
After some weeks Jo sent me a letter for the Stones, offering their cooperation subject to agreements between the Stones, the publishers, and me, but you can’t do good work that way. You have to write the best you can and share
control of nothing, neither the manuscript nor the money. Any other arrangement produces not writing but publicity. Finally Jo turned the book matter over to Ronnie Schneider for Allen Klein, widely considered the most powerful agent in show business. In self-defense, I hired an agent, Klein’s literary equivalent. He sent Schneider a letter to sign for the Stones. But Keith said I didn’t need Klein. Then why did Jo tell Klein, or his nephew Schneider, about my book?
Jo sat in a swing and swung slowly back and forth. It was, as I would learn, typical of the Stones’ manner of doing business that I didn’t know exactly what Jo did for them, and neither did she, and neither did they. She had consulted an astrologer in London who had told her that I would write this book, but that it would cost me everything except my life. She did not know the details—that while writing it I would be assaulted by Confederate soldiers and Hell’s Angels, would go to jail, be run over by a lumber truck on the Memphis-Arkansas bridge, fall off a Georgia waterfall and break my back, have epileptic seizures while withdrawing from drugs—but if she had known, she would not have told me. She didn’t tell me about the astrologer until much later, when there was no way to turn back. Now, eager, I climbed a swing chain with my hands—climbed it easily, for months I’d done nothing but write Basic English letters to the Stones and lift weights. As I reached the top and started down, my scarf fluttered up, my left hand clutched it around the chain, the silk was like oil, and I crashed to the ground, searing my hand, mangling the little finger, shocking it blue-white, with great crimson drops welling up where the flesh was torn away from the nail, dropping in the dust. “I thought you’d do that,” Jo said, and I thought, Where am I, what is happening to me? I was in California, being punished for wearing a scarf.
I walked away from the playground with a kind of psychic limp. Al Steckler, a promotion man from the Klein office in New York, was arriving at the back gate, carrying an attaché case. We’d met in London. I told him hello and went inside to sit on the couch and suck my little finger. The next thing I knew, Jagger was sitting beside me, asking, “What about this book?”
“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 archin
g 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.
True Adventures of the Rolling Stones Page 2