As I sat on that Naugahyde couch, in crazy sixties-end Los Angeles, roaring from the speakers were such sounds, such low-down human groans and cries not new, old as time, almost, but never on a record had they seemed so threatening. I had heard such sounds before, heard them as a little boy lying in bed in the wiregrass country of south Georgia, heard the sounds of animals crying far off in the woods, heard the sounds the black woods hands made having what they called church, far off in the woods, the all-night drums, like the heartbeat of the dark swampy woods, boomdada boomdada, and heard the sounds that I could not identify—the really frightening ones. I had not been so frightened since I was a boy lying slender and white and frail in the dark bed, finding a sound in the night, losing it, waiting for it again, a soft sighing sound that might have been the wind easing through the tops of the long-needle pines, or might have been cattle lowing a long way off, but always came back to sounding most like a simple human exhalation right outside the rusty screen of my bedroom window, the quietly released breath of a man standing quietly, just watching, waiting. I loved the woods but for years I lay awake at night fearing that sound. When I was old enough to have a rifle I would sometimes hear the sound, the wind, the distant animal call, the careful breathing in the dark, and I would lie there as long as I could stand it and then take my rifle and slip out of the dark house, not waking anyone, and look around outside, crouching low, breathing with my mouth open to keep from making the fearful telltale sound. It was the same feeling I had now, as the sounds, the awful wails of guitar and mouth harp, pitched and blended together. The feeling came partly from the music and partly from the presence behind my back of this man Klein, a full-blood Jew they would call him in the Swamp, a man of great power, to me almost incalculable power, a man who did not know me, who cared nothing for me. I did not know yet how good or evil the Stones were, but of Klein I was simply afraid, because even though I had a letter from the Stones, a magic piece of paper, there was still the tour, this gauntlet I had to run, and a man like Klein could, I sensed, stop me any time he wanted to take the trouble. But when I was twelve, standing in the dark outside my grandfather’s house, frightened nearly to death, I was still, in some part of my mind that is a gift from my father who got it from his father who got it from God knows where, calm and ready, I think, to do what had to be done. If there had suddenly appeared before me one of the men my grandfather worked with and whom I loved so much, loved their voices and their looks, their yellow eyeballs and smooth bulging black muscles, transformed by poison whiskey (it had happened; my grandfather was nearly stabbed with a sharpened three-corner file) into a mad death-wielding animal, I could have stayed calm enough and steady enough in my terror to shoot him. So I stayed calm and steady in my terror, sensing the craziness of the Stones, of mad Keith, and knowing that what the Stones had already done had killed one of them.
Sandison came in—I hadn’t noticed that he’d left—with a girl, and they sat beside me on the couch. She was wearing blue jeans and carrying a notebook. The song track was so loud as to preclude introductions. I spoke into her ear: “You must be from the Saturday Review.”
“Yes,” she shouted back. I read her lips. “Who are you?”
This was giving me something to do besides get scared. “Jann Wenner,” I said.
She looked at me as if I were crazy, which I had just been thinking about becoming. Then she turned to Sandison and in a second he answered her, speaking my name so loudly that I heard it. If I heard it, could Klein hear it? If he heard it, would he recognize it? If I had known more about Klein, I would be even more worried. But he had not heard; when I looked around, he was going out the door with Mick. They went into the studio, leaving the door open, light from the hall falling into the big high-ceilinged room, dimly illuminating Mick at the piano bench, Klein sitting backwards around a folding chair. Mick was erasing with the back of his hand something Klein had said. Big as Klein was, this skinny foppish young Englishman could stand him off, deny him the tour and get away with it. It was almost enough to make you afraid of Mick, of the Stones.
When they finished talking Klein left, Pete Bennett with him, and Jagger came back into the control room. For the moment the tapes were still, and Sandison introduced the Saturday Review’s girl reporter to Mick. She looked sleepy, hypnotized by Mick’s presence like a chicken by a snake. Then she remembered something. “Oh!” She picked up her carpetbag and took out a bunch of marijuana plant-tops. “I brought you some flowers.”
“Oh, thank you,” Mick said, taking the boughs and throwing them on the couch. “That’s very nice.”
Sandison was speaking to Mick, who emitted a tiny guffaw apropos of nothing Sandison was saying and threw a slow-motion pitch toward the girl’s left tit. She slowly managed to react; as his hand barely missed her breast she threw the same sort of punch back at him, but its aim was uncertain, she couldn’t very well hit him in the balls and it was pointless to strike his flat chest. Also, in the midst of the act, the sense of it seemed to come to her—she was returning a playful punch Mick Jagger had made at her tit, her tit had become more popular than she ever expected—and this was not stupid, he really was a star, his potency existed in the room, her hand stopped in mid-air, opened, fluttered like a shot bird to her side.
Mick took her up to a chair beside the control board and told her to ask him some questions. She began to ask tiny Saturday Review questions, and he gave brief, smiling replies. Al Steckler arrived with the pictures for the concert programs, showed them to Mick and asked, What about text? I don’t know, Mick said, Keith, what about a text? Yeah, Keith said, something short, just— Maybe we can get Sam to do something. Hey, Mick said, looking at me. Ah, Keith said. You’re a writer, Mick said.
“What— what— all right, what do you want?”
“Something for the program,” Mick said. “Not very long. Something lighthearted.”
“How long, Al?”
“A hundred and eighty words.”
“A what? How do you know?”
Al shrugged. “That’s long enough.”
“You know,” Mick said. “Something lighthearted.”
“I need it as soon as I can get it,” Al said.
I figured I’d better go home and start writing. Sandison was leaving, so we went together. There were no cars at the studio, but we expected to get a cab on Sunset. Once we got out, the doors locked behind us, there were of course no cabs, this was Los Angeles. We walked along, thinking we’d find a cab in each block. Two with fares passed and then none, but I didn’t mind, it was a pleasure to walk toward the sunset on Sunset. There were all sorts of signs around, a machine that took your fifty cents and dropped into your hot hand a map to the homes of Hollywood stars, and just a step away another machine selling the L.A. Times, whose headline read I WANT HELP, SAYS ZODIAC KILLER. We passed Ralph’s Pioneer House, the Vienna Hofbrau, Father Payton’s Crusade for Family Prayer, and a man who was walking along reading the newspaper. (I want help!) On his back he was wearing a battery-powered machine with a mask that fit over his mouth and nose, allowing him to breathe the polluted air. Across the street was the Apocalypse, a store specializing in pornographic books and notions. Sandison had “never been in one in America,” so I went in with him. Kama Sutra Oil, plastic vibrating dildoes, inflatable vaginas, posters of men, boys, women, girls, and various animals, separately and in combinations. The books were equally various: Hot Snatch, Pedophilia, The Story of O, all manner of porn for all persuasions. By the time we left the store the books had become in my mind one giant volume called The Return of the Son of the Curse of the Vengeance of the Giant Vaginas.
Night fell, the lights came on, cars buzzed around us, the mist filled our lungs. We found a taxi in the deadly romantic murk and made it back up to Oriole.
While I was wandering around the house trying to get high enough to write 180 words, Steckler gripped my biceps, gave me the high beam from his baby blues and said “Please.” I told him if he wanted his fuc
king text to leave me the hell alone. Bowery Boys Routine #87, the Artist. I went back to the bedroom and tried to write. A few minutes ago I had been in the office with Sandison and his friend Sharon, from United Press International, who told me that Kerouac’s wake had been going on since two o’clock that afternoon. He would be buried tomorrow. Sandison had read aloud selections from the pornography he’d bought, and now as I sat on the Wizard of Oz bedspread I could think only of phrases like “Keith’s proud nipples stiffened.” There was an idea at the back of my mind, certain words kept flashing: Stones, Apocalypse, I want help, but it was too heavy, not lighthearted. Finally I told Steckler that there was nothing new to be said about the Stones in 180 words.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I never thought it needed words.”
8
At the present time Buddy Bolden is made out to be an epochal figure, his importance in the history of jazz seems to be overwhelming, and legends are woven about his person: he was somewhat of a scoundrel and sot, he never paid his musicians, he delighted in regaling or shocking his audience by singing obscene couplets, his instrumental talents and his powers of improvisation earned him the soubriquet of “King” Bolden; he used to place himself near the open window and blow his horn like a maniac, he could be heard miles away across the river, and all within range, attracted as if by a magnet by this clarion call, would flock around the great cornetist. We are witnessing the birth of an epic of our own times.
ROBERT GOFFIN: Jazz
“ BECAUSE the chick has split, and Brian’s very upset, and because he gets thrown out of his pad, Mick takes it on himself to find Brian a nice pad where he can live,” Keith said. “Mick finds him a pad in Beckenham, halfway between London and Dartford. Weird little pad in a suburban street full of houses. Brian had one big room built onto this house. It was quite groovy, until he invites some chicks down to cook for him one day, and they burn half of it down, but he’s still got to live there, so there’s a hole in the ceiling, piece of canvas above it, tryna hide it from the landlord. When I left home I went to live with Brian in this place. We used to lay around, listen to sounds and play all day and always read Billboard, just to see what was goin’ on and keep in touch with some kind of reality. Used to read every page, even jukebox profits, used to know everything about what was happening in the charts, absolutely everything.”
“We were still rehearsing,” Stu said. “We didn’t have a name or anything. In those days it was the thing to do, to open your own club. You’d find a room that you thought would be a good place and you’d have a club. Korner had started a very successful club up in London—the Marquee Club on Thursday nights—and he was packin’ the place. Thursday night was the BBC live jazz broadcast. They said to Alexis, Do you want to do this? which meant that he had to go to BBC studios. So he said to us, Do you want to fill in for me one night? We said Yeah—had to think of a name, so in desperation it became the Rolling Stones. The Marquee was our first job.
“At the start, nobody in England played this kind of music. But nobody. Mick and Keith and Brian were about the only people in the country that knew the music and were trying to play it. Everybody else were jazz musicians trying to play the blues, that hadn’t really heard them. And having seen the Stones once at the Marquee, the people who were running the scene in those days were one hundred percent against us, and it was one bloody fight to get anywhere. They thought R&B was a jazz thing and there should be three saxophones. They said, What, two guitars and a bass guitar, that’s rock and roll, we don’t want to know about it, we’ll try and put it down.
“We tried to open in Ealing on a Tuesday night and for two weeks we got not a soul, not one person would come to Ealing to see the Rolling Stones. We tried Tuesday night at the Flamingo, and it was the same thing. That lasted only two or three weeks. I’ll never forget the first time we went down to the Flamingo. We did an audition on a Sunday afternoon, and the Flamingo was a pretty smart place. It was the modern jazz club in town, and everybody was going down there in their zoot suits, white shirts, and all that. I’ll never forget sayin’ to Keith, ‘You’re not going to the Flamingo lookin’ like that, are you?’ He said, ‘What ho, Stu, I’ve only got one pair of fuckin’ jeans.’ ”
“Winter of ’62 was the tough one,” Keith said. “It’s down to cello-taping your pants up, Scotch tape across the rips. We’re going through the weirdest period, completely broke, and this guy arrives, this strange little guy who lived in the next town to Brian, used to go to school with him. He was about five feet three, very fat, wore thick spectacles. He belonged to the Territorial Army, sort of a civil defense thing. They all live in tents and get soaking wet and get a cold and learn how to shoot a rifle and at the end they get eighty quid cash. This cat arrives in London fresh from the hills, from his tent. And he wants to have a good time with Brian, and Brian took him for every penny. The guy would do anything for Brian. Brian would say, ‘Give me your overcoat.’ Freezing cold, it’s the worst winter, and he gave Brian this army overcoat. ‘Give Keith the sweater.’ So I put the sweater on. ‘Now, you walk twenty yards behind us.’ And off we’d walk to the local hamburger place. ‘Ah, stay there. No, you can’t come in. Give us two quid.’ This cat would stand outside the hamburger joint, freezing cold, giving Brian the money to pay for our hamburgers.
“Brian gets him to buy a new guitar, a new Harmony electric. He pays for everything, and so in two weeks we’ve spent all the money and we say, ‘See ya, man,’ and put him on a train and send him home. He’s incredibly hurt, but all the same, we’ve taken him around with us to all these clubs, and although he regrets very much being fleeced, he still comes up to London again later with even more bread, and we fleece him again. Terrible sadistic scenes we were pulling on him, Brian and I were really evil to this guy. It ended up with us stripping him off and trying to electrocute him.
“That was the night he disappeared. It was snowing outside. We came back to the pad and he was in Brian’s bed. Brian for some reason got very annoyed that he was in his bed asleep. We had all these cables lyin’ around and Brian pulled out this wire: ‘This end is plugged in, baby, and I’m comin’ after you.’ Brian would run after him with this long piece of wire cable that’s attached to an amplifier, electric sparks, chasing around the room, and he ran screaming down the stairs out into the street with nothing on, screaming, ‘Don’t go up there, they’re mad, they’re trying to electrocute me.’ Somebody brought him in an hour later and he was blue.
“The next day the cat split. Brian had a new guitar, and his amp fixed, a whole new set of harmonicas. This was down at Edith Grove. The second time the guy came we were at Edith Grove in this pad Mick found. I’m not in on it ’cause I haven’t got any bread, can’t afford rent. Brian can afford it ’cause he’s working, Mick can afford it ’cause he’s got a scholarship grant from the university. It’s Brian, Mick, and these two cats from the LSE. One’s a Norwegian and one’s a cat that comes from the Midlands. The straightest people you’ve ever seen in your life. Underneath are three old tarts, and on top are student teachers. It’s a three-story house, with the second floor Mick and Brian and those two guys, and immediately I start in with the immortal phrase, Can I crash at your pad? So as not to have to go home. So virtually I leave home. Because I’m staying there all the time these cats are always kicking up a fuss, they won’t pay the rent and they’ll kick Brian out for letting me stay there. We’re always very brought down when they arrive, and they’re sittin’ in the corner of the room lookin’ very out of it, ’cause there are three or four musicians in another corner trying to get their thing together, and these guys are trying to study.
True Adventures of the Rolling Stones Page 8