True Adventures of the Rolling Stones

by Stanley Booth

  But as he told the story now, while we rolled down the California coast on this pleasurable night, this pleasure-seeking night, before a tour that would be stranger than any of the Stones’ previous ones, Bill’s memory lifted the story to heroic proportions: “. . . so I go behind this place, see, and I’ve got me chopper out, when here comes this bloke waving a bloody electric torch, cryin, ’Ere, ’Ere—”

  “He probably had to have a torch to see it,” Shirley said.

  We found a gas station and while waiting for Bill we lost the other limousines. None of us knew where the Corral was, least of all the driver, and we raced along the highway looking for spoor. Somebody thought it was down that turning to the right, is that it, nah, that place is closed, and then there it was on the left, a little roadhouse, capacity about two hundred, tables and a small dance floor, crowded with rednecks and members of Los Angeles rock and roll society. Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys was present, and so were the young ladies Miss Christine and Miss Mercy, members of the Bizarre Records act called the G.T.O.’s, meaning Girls Together Outrageously or Orally or anything else starting with O. Miss Mercy was dark and heavy, a fortune-teller with kohl-rimmed eyes, many bracelets, rings, and scarves. Miss Christine, willowy and blond, in a long red dress with virginal lace at the bosom, was a California-bred magnolia blossom. Dancing together, they glided before us like one person, red yellow and blue jukebox lights washing over the room as Gram sang “I made her the image of me.”

  We sat at a long table, the Stones Gang and their friends and women, drinking pitchers and pitchers of beer, whooping and hollering while the Burritos played “Lucille” and old Boudleaux Bryant songs, a real rock and roll hoedown. It had been nearly six years since the Stones played in English clubs where sweat condensed on the walls and people swung from the rafters. They were glad when they stopped working in clubs and went on to bigger places, but later they missed them, as they had come, over nearly three years, since their drug arrests, to miss playing itself.

  Now, getting ready to go back on the road, it was good to be at the Corral and see all these different types, motorcycle boots, eagle tattoos, lesbian romancers, white English niggers, Beach Boys, Georgia boys, brought together by the music. The night seemed to pass like a dream, one minute all of us were singing along and the next minute it was closing time and we were going out. We dozed on the way home, and when we got there I drank a glass of raw milk and went to bed, with my notebook, the letter inside, under my pillow. I was nearly unconscious, but I always read something before I go to sleep. I had been rereading Kerouac, preparing to visit him, and I opened the book I was reading to the place where I had stopped:

  Never dreaming, was I, poor Jack Duluoz, that the soul is dead. That from Heaven grace descends, the ministers thereof. . . . No Doctor Pisspot Poorpail to tell me; no example inside my first and only skin. That love is the heritage, and cousin to death. That the only love can only be the first love, the only death the last, the only life within, and the only word . . . choked forever.

  6

  One evening there, hot and astonished in the Empire, we discovered ragtime, brought to us by three young Americans: Hedges Brothers and Jacobsen, they called themselves. It was as if we had been still living in the nineteenth century and then suddenly found the twentieth glaring and screaming at us. We were yanked into our own age, fascinating, jungle-haunted, monstrous. We were used to being sung at in music halls in a robust and zestful fashion, but the syncopated frenzy of these three young Americans was something quite different; shining with sweat, they almost hung over the footlights, defying us to resist the rhythm, gradually hypnotising us, chanting and drumming us into another kind of life in which anything might happen.

  J. B. PRIESTLEY: The Edwardians

  “SO WE START TALKING to Brian,” Keith said, “and he’s moving up to London with his chick and his baby. His second baby, his first one belongs to some other chick. He’s left her and he’s really cuttin’ up in Cheltenham. He can’t stay there any longer, he’s got shotguns coming out of the hills after him, so he’s moving up to town.”

  “He used to come up on the weekends and I’d say, ‘Look, man, stick it out till you’ve got a bit of bread together, and then come to London,’” Alexis Korner said. Korner, who sang and played guitar, was one of the first Europeans to perform the music of American country blues artists. Brian, after changing from clarinet to alto saxo-phone and playing in a Cheltenham band called the Ramrods, had become interested in the blues and had begun playing guitar.

  “I’d met Brian,” Korner said, “because while I was working with the Chris Barber band doing odd concerts we played one in Cheltenham and Brian came up to me after the concert and asked if he could speak to me. That’s how we got together. He used to show up at the Ealing club on Thursdays and weekends and occasionally play a bit.

  “Brian couldn’t stand Cheltenham. He simply loathed Cheltenham. He couldn’t stand the restrictions of Cheltenham. He couldn’t stand the restrictions imposed by his family on his thinking and his general behavior. That’s why he came to London, just bang! like that. Every weekend I’d be saying, ‘For God’s sake, Brian, hold on a bit longer, don’t suddenly arrive in London. It’s a very hard place.’ And then in the end one of my weekend chats didn’t do anything and he arrived in London and that was that. One day he said, ‘I’m leaving Cheltenham and coming to London, can you put me up?’ So he arrived, so we put him up. He slept on the floor for a few nights and then he found a place of his own and went to work at Whiteley’s, a store in Queensway.

  “Mick sent me a tape of some stuff he and Keith had got down, odds and ends of Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry numbers. I either answered the letter or we got together by phone, and he came over to my place. Mick was into the club at Ealing almost from the beginning, sort of standing around waiting to sing his three songs every night. If we made any bread, Mick got thirty bob to get back to Dartford on, if not, not. Keith was a very quiet guitar player who used to come up occasionally with Mick from Dartford. He didn’t make every gig but he’d come up most times, and sometimes he’d play and sometimes he wouldn’t. It was a very loose arrangement.

  “In general terms Mick wasn’t a good singer then, just as he isn’t a good singer now, in general terms. But it was the personal thing with Mick, he had a feel of belting a song even if he wasn’t. He had this tremendous personal—which is what the blues is about, more than technique; he’s always had that. I’ve got a very early photo of Mick with a zip-up cardigan and a collar and tie and baggy trousers—Mick always had that, and he had this absolute certainty that he was right.

  “Mick was very edgy, because he was having a lot of arguments with his family. I remember his mother ringing me up one night and saying ‘We’ve always felt that Mick was the least talented member of the family, do you really think he has any career in music?’ I told her that I didn’t think he could possibly fail. She didn’t believe me—she didn’t see how I could make a statement of that sort. I don’t suppose she can to this day. Don’t suppose she’ll ever understand why he is what he is. You know that about someone or you don’t know it, and blood relationship has nothing to do with it. I never met any of Mick’s family. I spoke to his father on the odd occasion, but I find it very difficult to speak to gym instructors. He was a basketball player, I saw him on television once or twice refereeing basketball games. Mick used to come out from Dartford with a sigh of relief as he left and got into the area where he could say what he wanted, which he felt he couldn’t do at home.”

  On May 19, 1962, a news item appeared in the music paper Disc, titled “Singer Joins Korner”:

  A nineteen-year-old Dartford rhythm-and-blues singer, Mick Jagger, has joined Alexis Korner’s group, Blues Inc., and will sing with them regularly on their Saturday night dates at Ealing and Thursday sessions at the Marquee Jazz Club, London.

  Jagger, at present completing a course at the London School of Economics, also plays harmonica.

&nb
sp; “In the early summer,” Keith said, “Brian decided to get a band together. So I went round to this rehearsal in a pub called the White Bear, just off Leicester Square by the tube station. Got up there and there’s Stu, this is where Stu comes in.”

  Stu—Ian Stewart, a boogie-woogie piano player—comes from a Scottish town just north of England, Pittenweem, Fife. “I’d always wanted to play this style of piano,” Stu said, “’cause I’d always been potty on Albert Ammons. The BBC used to have jazz programs every night, and one night many years ago my ears were opened. I’d thought boogie was a piano solo stuff, and they had this program called ‘Chicago Blues.’ I don’t remember any of the records, all I can remember is that they had this style of piano playing with guitars, harmonicas, and a guy singing. So when a little advert appeared in Jazz News—a character called Brian Jones wanted to form an R&B group—I went along and saw him. I’ll never forget, he had this Howlin’ Wolf album goin’, I’d never heard anything like it. I thought, Right, this is it. He said, ‘We’re gonna have a rehearsal.’”

  “We have one rehearsal which is a bummer,” Keith said, “with Stu, Brian, a guitar player called Geoff somebody, oh garn what was his name, and a singer and harp player called—we used to call him Walk On,’ that was the only song he knew. He was a real throwback, greasy ginger hair. These two cats don’t like me ’cause they think I’m playing rock and roll. Which I am, but they don’t like it. Stu loves it ’cause it swings, and Brian digs it. Brian doesn’t know what to do, whether to kick me out and keep it together with these cats or kick those two out and have only half a band again. Nobody is even thinking yet of actually playing for the audience. Everybody’s still very much into rehearsing together and playing together just to try to get it together and find out whether you’ll ever get anywhere near it. Brian was working. He had a job in a record store. After being thrown out of another for nicking something or other. He decides to get rid of these two cats, which is all right with me, and meanwhile I persuaded Mick to come to rehearsal, which is now going to consist of Stu, me, Mick, Brian, and Dick Taylor on bass, no drummer. Piano, two guitars, harmonica, and bass. Mick starts learning to play harmonica. We get this other pub for rehearsals, the Bricklayers’ Arms in Berwick Street. We had a rehearsal up there and it was great, really dug it. It was probably terrible. But it swung and we had a good time. Most of the pubs round the West End have a room upstairs or in the back which they rent off to anybody for five bob an hour or fifteen bob a night. Just a room, might have a piano in it, but nothing else, bare floorboards and a piano. Cardboard boxes full of empty bottles. That was virtually home for the rest of the summer. We’d rehearse twice a week, no gigs. The first fans if I remember appeared on the scene at this point. I left art school during this period. I did try for one job with my little portfolio, and I was promptly turned down by the cat who designed the cover for Let It Bleed. Mick mean-while still singing with Korner, to make a little bread and ’cause he dug it. Brian was living right in the middle of where all the spades live here, in a basement, very decrepit place with mushrooms and fungus growing out of the walls, with Pat and his kid. Now sometime this summer something really weird happens. One night Mick, who’d been playin’ a gig with Korner, went round to see Brian, if I remember rightly, and Brian wasn’t there but his old lady was. Mick was very drunk, and he screwed her. . . . This caused a whole trauma, at first Brian was terribly offended, the chick split, but what it really did was put Mick and Brian very tight together, because it put them through a whole emotional scene and they really got into each other, and they became very close . . . so that kind of knitted things together. Mick was still very strongly into school, music was just a sort of absorbing hobby, nobody was taking it seriously except Brian, who was really deadly serious about it.”

  After Brian’s death, Alexis Korner’s wife went into Whiteley’s, Brian’s first employer in London, “and suggested,” Korner said, “they erect a plaque. They were absolutely shocked. She said, ‘On houses where famous men have lived they put up plaques saying Charles Dickens 1860, or whatever, I don’t see why you shouldn’t put up a plaque in the electrical department saying Brian Jones worked here in 1962, I can’t see any reason why you shouldn’t.’ ”

  7

  During the entire trip my dreams stubbornly followed the tactic of ignoring Africa. They drew exclusively upon scenes from home, and thus seemed to say that they considered—if it is permissible to personify the unconscious processes to this extent—the African journey not as something real, but rather as a symptomatic or symbolic act. Even the most impressive events of the trip were rigorously excluded from my dreams. Only once during the entire expedition did I dream of a Negro. His face appeared curiously familiar to me, but I had to reflect a long time before I could determine where I had met him before. Finally it came to me: he had been my barber in Chattanooga, Tennessee! An American Negro. In the dream he was holding a tremendous, red-hot curling iron to my head, intending to make my hair kinky—that is, to give me Negro hair. I could already feel the painful heat, and awoke with a sense of terror.

  —C. G. JUNG: Memories, Dreams, Reflections

  INSTEAD OF SNEAKING past the office door as usual, I went in this morning to tell Jo Bergman that I needed to use one of the numerous limousines or rented cars. She asked where I was going and I said, playing it close to the vest, Got to run some errands. Jo said she had to look at a house for Bill Wyman on Beverly Boulevard, and I could use a car while she was there if I would take her (Jo didn’t drive) and come back for her. So I cruised in an Oldsmobile down Santa Monica and up Beverly, dropped Jo off, doubled back to a Xerox copy shop on Santa Monica and waited, jingling the car keys, probably making even slower the bovine matron who operated as deliberately as the giant machine that hummed and flashed and finally spat out grey speckled copies of the Stones’ letter. I paid the b.m. a dollar fifty for them, drove to the post office, sent the original air mail special to the literary agency and one copy home to Memphis. I went out past the blind man’s cigaret stand to the Olds and headed down Sunset Strip, looking for a telephone booth. I didn’t see one on the street, so I stopped across from the Playboy Club, ran inside like a man in a spy story and asked the bunny lady who greeted me if I might use the phone. It was only about 11:00 A.M., no other customers yet, but she was all decked out—a young blond, God knows what she really looked like—in the sadomasochist high heels, blue satin up the crack, pushed-up bosom (as if her breasts were two poisonous fruits, delicious but untouchable, offered on a tray to tantalize), and bunny ears. I’m working on a story for Playboy magazine, I told her, and I need to call my agency. It sounded convincing, the last time I was in Hollywood I had been working for Playboy, and she called someone upstairs in the Byzantine hierarchy to see if it was permitted to let a writer use the phone, then gave me the receiver and walked discreetly a few steps away, her fluffy white bunny-tail bouncing.

  I sat on her little greeting stool, called the agency, and told the number-one assistant agent that the fabled letter was on its way, that Schneider should be avoided like a school of sharks, and that the book contract should be sent to the Oriole house in a plain wrapper. Then back up to the house on Beverly Boulevard, whose red bricks, shrubbery, and oriental carpets Jo thought would do for Bill and Astrid. Something about it seemed sinister to me, but that could have been just a negative reaction to Jo, talking on the way back to Oriole about her nervous rash and her herb doctor while she chain-smoked cigarets.

  At Oriole I ate white cheddar sandwiches and drank beer for breakfast. Charlie was going to Sunset Sound, and Sandison was coming along, something about seeing a writer from the Saturday Review. I joined them. A limousine took us there, and we went down the little alley and through the many gates and doors, locking each one behind us, to the control room, a carpeted capsule containing a large console with hundreds of lights, buttons, switches, levers, a vast dark window before us, giant speakers mounted on the wall over the window, tilted toward our hea
ds, exploding with sound.

  Keith, sitting at the console, was wearing a fringed leather jacket of the kind then popular. But Keith, true to form, was wearing the worst-looking one I had ever seen, the leather faded yellow, cracked and dry, the lining ripped out. His ear-tooth was dangling, a big yellow joint was in his left hand, in his right hand the red knob that boosted the intensity of his guitar track. The tracks were stacked eight deep on the wide plastic tape wheeling through the recording machine, a sound engineer watching seven of the tracks, Keith watching his own. Jagger stood behind them, dressed in tight blue slacks, blue open-throated pullover, left hand on hip, right elbow tight to side, right hand palm up holding a joint the size of the average Negro basketball player’s putz, which he was smoking not like Joan Crawford or even Bette Davis but like Theda Bara, eyes closed, lips pursed, then mouth slightly open, smoke hanging luxuriantly in thick open lips, soft sucking inhale.

  Keith was grinning, showing bad teeth, making deep wrinkles around his eyes as his guitar lick came around and he turned the knob to make it scream, boosting the pain each time like men drunk in bars at the turn of the century twisting the knobs of an electric shock machine, five cents a shock—except that Keith was doing it to get your attention, just giving you a little high voltage to bring your mind around to what was being said: Did you hear about the Midnight Rambler?—Jagger’s harmonica and Keith’s guitar whining and bending, swooping together, just about to jump the garden wall— Says every-body’s got to go

  We were locked up in the studio not because of the dope but because the Stones, lacking work permits, were not supposed to use American recording studios. What they were doing was illegal, and they were enjoying it very much. In the middle of the song, the one you never seen before, two men came into the control room, one in a silk suit that changed from blue to green like automobile enamel, a cigar in his leaden jaw, glossy machined-looking black hair, Pete Bennett: ‘I’m the best guy in the world to have pushin’ ya record fa ya.” With him in Hush Puppies and a yellow T-shirt, looking, though only in his thirties, old and grey and sort of like Jack Ruby with cancer, was the legendary Allen Klein, who I realized had failed to squash my plans for a book like a bug under his Hush Puppies only because, so far, he hadn’t got around to it. I was frightened that he would notice me and step on me, and I scooted around to the front of the console, sat on a couch, and buried my face in a magazine. It contained an interview with Phil Spector, who when he was twenty-one became famous as rock and roll music’s first teenaged millionaire. In the course of the interview Spector ridiculed almost everyone in the music business, including the Mafia, but of Allen Klein he would say only, “I don’t think he’s a very good cat.” I huddled lower on the leatherette. The song was building to some insane climax, message of fear riding on waves of harmonica and guitar—faster and faster, breathless, frantic, and I wondered what the hell I was doing with these mad English owl-hoots, and what were they doing that they needed Allen Klein, who scared Phil Spector, a man with so many bodyguards and fences and so much bullet-proof glass that he ridiculed the Stones for getting arrested; even Spector seemed afraid of this pudgy glum-faced accountant in his bulging yellow T-shirt. But what scared me most was the knowledge that whatever they were up to, I had to know about it. No matter if Klein took my book, took my money, had me killed, I had to try to stick around and see what happened. I had to do it—to do something—for Christopher, but I had liked Brian and wanted to know him better. Also, I had the feeling something was going to happen, something I shouldn’t miss. The song had slowed down now to excruciating little bird calls between harp and guitar, Mick and Keith exploring the poetry of the last breathless moments as the blade rides, and Mick groaned in the voice of someone who told you he was not the Boston Strangler.