True Adventures of the Rolling Stones

by Stanley Booth

  “Yeah,” said Jagger. “That’s what you’ve got your god-given talent for.”

  “Actually I was thinkin’ of it for you, man,” Bill said to Keith. “I don’t have any trouble stayin’ in tune, you’re the one.”

  As they started to play “Monkey Man,” Phil Kaufman called me to the telephone. Pete Callaway was calling, a friend from Georgia. Later Pete and I had lived together in New Orleans, where he was a student and I was a dropout at Tulane. Now he was married and inching toward a Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia while sometimes getting his head cracked by police at student demonstrations.

  I took the call in the kitchen. We had a short version of the same phone conversation we had had every few months for years, a ritual of private jokes to let each other know that we were still ourselves, nothing had changed. Pete’s little sister Nicole was with him. She told me hello and asked me to come see her when I was in town with the Stones. She was twenty-two, had just left graduate school without taking a degree, and was living in Greenwich Village. The last time I saw her she was a ravishing seventeen. Because of the way she sounded, a certain quality in her voice, on my fatal yellow pad I wrote her number.

  The rehearsal room was a charging freight of sound. Jagger was the key—when he was sailing, screaming or moaning, he couldn’t do anything in between, the Stones sailed; when he stopped, the music disintegrated.

  “On ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ we’ll need another drum, some congas,” Mick said. “Maybe we can get some sort of black person to come along and do it.”

  Mick was trying to decide whether “Sympathy” should be “quite short or very long,” his voice shaky, insecure. I had the feeling it might have to do with me, watching them in this small room. Mick’s voice dragged until one by one they stopped playing. None of them looked at the others. Then Mick Taylor played a few notes, Keith played a chord, another chord, a bright pattern of notes, and everyone was playing, Mick singing at the end of the room, his back to me. They sounded like Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five, except that Mick Taylor was playing horrible Bo Diddley noises and Keith was playing a solo with a scream lost in it. Finally Mick sat down on the piano bench, Keith stopped, they all stopped: “Still falls down at the end,” Mick said.

  Waiting to go to what would be a dull party in Bel Air, we lounged around the house. Jagger and I were sitting with Wyman on the black leather couch, looking out the big window at the black hills of Halloween. Wyman said it was a holiday for kids, mostly, and Jagger disagreed: “They’re real, those spirits, and the people to come after us will know about them.”

  “If the world survives,” I said.

  “We’ll blow it up eventually,” Mick said. “That’s inevitable,”

  David Sandison woke me in the middle of the morning, carrying his bags out of the Oz room as he left, jaw firmly set, for England. I told him goodbye, showered, and dressed. On the coffee table in the living room was a magazine with a cover photo of Jagger and a story that ended, “The Rolling Stones are in town and everyone seems to be waiting for something to happen.” The lead story was about the Beatles’ financial problems with Allen Klein.

  A young man from Newsweek was sitting on the back terrace with a notebook and a telegram of questions from his bosses in New York. Charlie and I joined him, Bill and Astrid showed up, and finally the three other Stones arrived, stumbling across the back lawn. Keith was wearing snakeskin boots, a red snakeskin belt, and a rose-colored shirt, torn off like most of his shirts above the kidneys to keep the tail out of the way of his guitar playing. The reporter dutifully followed the telegram—How do you feel about touring again—and received minimal answers. He asked what happened to Brian, and Keith said, “We couldn’t figure it out. He was getting in touch with musicians, trying to get a band together—”

  Newsweek didn’t press any points, no interviewers did with the Stones, they hung back from the dark places in the Stones’ past. The Stones had learned that nothing of any interest was likely to happen in the presence of interviewers and managed with near-perfect success to ignore them.

  When the Newsweek talk ended and the reporter left, we all decided to have lunch together on the Strip. Charlie and I went inside for a minute and came back to see the other Stones driving away in a turquoise Continental. “Really, they are the rudest people,” Charlie said.

  Later, at Shady Oak, while the Stones rehearsed, Gram Parsons and I stood out back, leaning against his iridescent blue Harley-Davidson motorcycle, the hills dark behind him as he talked, seemingly against his will, about the Okefenokee country. Gram was born in Florida but grew up in Waycross, going hunting and fishing in the Swamp with his father. After his mother remarried he learned about other places, attended Harvard for a while. “You might say I was lucky,” he said. “I got both sides of it.”

  I said nothing. Anyone who heard Gram sing “Do You Know How It Feels to Be Lonesome” had an idea how lucky he was.

  Gram was going to play with the Burritos tonight, and I wanted to hear him. He wished I could, only he had to carry a lot of instruments and equipment, his roadie, equipment handler, in his car—but Sam Cutler wanted to come too, and Sam Cutler was not to be denied. So we commandeered the station wagon, the roadie loaded it, and I was nominated driver because the others couldn’t believe I drove as badly as they did. Waiting a few minutes in the wagon for Sam and Gram, who were inside, Gram’s roadie was bitching about what a drag Gram was to work for, unreliable, not punctual, his rich stepfather gives him a tremendous allowance—

  The servant’s grumbles subsided as Gram and Sam came out and we set our course south on the freeway for a club called the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach, but soon the roadie told me that if I was going to drive this slow I’d better get in another lane. Yeah, but it’s driving funny, I said, and we had to drive for miles, the left rear end wobbling worse all the time, until we could stop at a gas station. Phil Kaufman’s girlfriend Janet, now they tell me, had a flat tire, changed it herself, the wheel had never since been tightened, and had almost cut through the lug nuts. The station attendant said he didn’t have any lug nuts, and we tightened up the worn ones and rolled slowly with our fingers crossed through Huntington Beach to the Golden Bear.

  While Gram and the Burritos were getting ready to play, the proprietor, George Nikos, a courtly man, not young, invited Sam, Gram’s roadie, and me into his office, gave us glasses of red wine, and Sam called Hertz about the wagon. He’d asked me to call them and I’d advised him that Americans would do anything for a person with an English accent. “Not one loik moin,” Sam said, but I explained that in California they didn’t know the difference. He finished the call and sat back like a lord in his library after dinner, the blaze on the hearth, and talked about his experiences with bands as if they were military campaigns. “But the Stones are the best,” he said. “They’re the best because they’re the scaredest: they’re the most worried band I’ve ever seen.”

  I spent the night drinking wine and watching Gram sing. His step-father was there, soft and prissy, with a large table of guests. Everybody got drunk—during the last set it seemed that Gram, his hair-frost glistening, would fall out of the spotlight. But he glowed. He was radiant. He was covered with star-frost like Elvis Presley in his white suit on The Jackie Gleason Stage Show in 1956.

  I started out younger

  At most everything

  All the pleasures and dangers

  What else could life bring?

  “You all are really gone be a success,” I said after the first set.

  “I think we already are,” Gram said.

  We went out back to smoke a joint, where it was not cool at all, Gram said, they love to bust you for dope down here. There’s a garage down this alley, I’ll go first and you follow me in a minute.

  The garage was open and empty, with a dirt-and-cinder floor. I smoked while Gram peed in the alley, then he smoked while I peed, then we both smoked. Though we both tried to be cosmopolitan as hell, Gram, whose adren
alin was pumping from being onstage, was declaiming in the manner of Eugene Talmadge: I know one damn thing, I love the Rolling Stones and Keith Richards. We were both staggering pretty good, but I paid close attention.

  What it comes down to, Gram said, is a man and a woman. I’ve got a little baby girl, beautiful, she’s with her mother—I passed him the end of the joint and he said, What we got to have in this world is more love or more slack.

  Late the next afternoon, the Stones rehearsed at the Warner Brothers movie lot, on soundstage four, copped by Al Steckler, who’d dangled before the Warner record company the Stones’ soon-to-expire recording contract. Past the gates, down the central drive (wide concrete, lined with firs and palms), the soundstages all looked abandoned, their exteriors cracked and faded mauve. Inside soundstage four the Stones, minus Wyman (who wasn’t coming: “Nobody told me what time”), were rehearsing on a partially dismantled set, a marathon dance ballroom on a pier, made for the film of Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, a reproduction of a place where people danced themselves to death.

  The atmosphere was that of a deserted carnival, overarching beams braced by orange and red pilings topped with female figures of gilded stucco, draped in low-cut ancient Greek gowns, carrying gilded baskets of fruit and playing gilded trumpets. At one end of the ballroom set were bleachers, with this sign above them:

  ? HOW LONG WILL THEY LAST ?

  DAYS COUPLES HOURS DAYS

  Remaining Elapsed

  In front of a row of amplifiers—twenty-five of them, courtesy of the Ampeg company, twenty-one in operation—Mick Taylor and Keith were tuning their guitars, and in the center of the ballroom, beneath a huge mirror-chip sphere, Mick Jagger was singing Chuck Berry’s “Carol”:

  I’m gonna learn to dance

  If it takes me all night and day

  Charlie was playing hard and tight, all business. Mick Taylor knew the song but was having some sort of trouble, playing in fits and starts, shaking his head. After “Carol,” they did the Jagger/Richards songs “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Midnight Rambler,” and “I’m Free,” Jagger singing with his arms folded, then in the instrumental breaks walking to the far end of the ballroom floor to listen. They played each song three or four times, and finally, on his own “Stray Cat Blues,” Jagger began to show a little enthusiasm, doing microphone monkey-shines, spinning the mikestand like a baton, throwing it up in the air and catching it. None of the others seemed to be having fun except Keith, who played louder and louder. They kept stopping to diddle with the amplifiers, and Stu, who had a new blue station wagon loaded with equipment parked right center stage, talked to Mick Taylor in hushed tones. When they started again Keith turned his amp all the way up and, standing in the movie set’s leftover confetti, made god-awful loud noises on a clear plastic guitar. In a world with guitars made from all different kinds of woods, stainless steel guitars, tortoise-shell guitars, guitars inlaid with gold and ivory, Keith chose to play one that looked as if it were made of hardened unflavored gelatin.

  Next the Stones played Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie” and more Jagger/Richards songs: “Satisfaction,” “Honky Tonk Women,” and “Street Fighting Man,” the song banned last year in Chicago during the riots at the Democratic national convention. Keith, a concave figure, eyes nearly closed, bent over his ugly guitar, was making a deafening mad racket. I remembered seeing, back at the Oriole house, an interview in an old issue of a music magazine with Jim Morrison asking the interviewer, “You were in Chicago—what was it like?” and the interviewer saying, “It was like a Rolling Stones concert.”

  When the Stones took a break, Charlie came over and asked me, “What do you like about this band?”

  “That’s a very hard question to answer,” I said.

  “Do we sound—like one of those bands at the Whisky? I mean, Mick’s something more than that, and Keith is, but the rest of us . . . do we sound like one of those bands?”

  “No,” I said.

  The Stones had rehearsed all the songs in the show except three old blues that Mick and Keith would do without electric guitars. They started one, sitting down, Keith playing a National steel-bodied guitar, but Keith said, “We can’t do it.” “It’s a wank,” Mick said.

  “Right, Mick,” Keith said, standing up. “It’s a wank, everybody.” He put on his fringed leather jacket and purple bug-eye sunglasses, and everybody left except Charlie and me and Stu, who would give us a ride home as soon as he finished packing up the guitars. “Really,” Stu said, putting the guitars in their velvet-lined cases into the station wagon, “I never heard the like. A musician told me his amp was too loud. I simply told him Keith Richards is a very strong guitar player, and if you don’t play as loud as he does, you’ll be just as well off playing rhythm.

  “I’m getting so fed up,” Stu muttered to himself as we got into the station wagon and headed out. “You get them new amps, new guitars, new everything, and it still goes wrong, then what do you do?

  “Mick asked what I’d wear onstage and I suggested what about dressing like this” (golf shirt, blue jeans, and Hush Puppies) “and he seemed to think that was completely laughable, not to be taken seriously at all.” Stu was quiet for a moment, as if even he could not believe what was coming next: “It seems I’m to wear a white tuxedo.” After another moment of pregnant silence he said, very matter-of-factly, “It’s going to cost them a bloody fortune to have me play with them” (Stu who knew hardly any chords by name and was reluctant to ask Keith since Keith didn’t know their names either and would just as soon have people think he did) “. . . and even more if I have to wear a tux. Cash every night one thousand dollars, two thousand with the tux.”

  At Oriole there was nothing in the house to eat, so Charlie and I were driven to the Aware Inn, a restaurant on Sunset, by Mimi, the girl who hadn’t shown up to meet me when I arrived at the airport. Her performance then was typical, because she did pretty much as she liked even if she chose to show up, tall, skinny, barefooted, rat-faced, really like a rat, a face flat on both sides concluding in a sharp and most often displeased nose, seemingly displeased just to be there. On this tour we would have many idiosyncratic drivers, including me, but none quite so bored, so butch, or so belligerent as Mimi. If she showed up when she was not needed she made it no secret that she could be having a better time elsewhere, and if she was needed her attitude was about the same. While most drivers would, if your luck held out, get you to your destination and wait or come back to pick you up, Mimi would if she cared to, and she cared to, accompany you wherever you went, so that she sat down to eat at the Aware Inn with Charlie and me, both of us struck numb by the violent chicness of the place. We were, it was clear, barely worthy of being accepted as customers—in fact the Japanese waiter poured wine on me to put me in my place—while Mimi, perfectly not to say blissfully unimpressed, somehow managed to chew gum and rattle her car keys throughout dinner. Charlie and I gulped a few bites and escaped, but the management was superciliously slow to take our not-with-it money, and we both registered disappointment when, once outside, we saw our car, left by Mimi at the curb, being towed away by an L.A. county sheriff’s department tow truck.

  “Isn’t that our car?” Charlie asked.

  “Yeah,” said Mimi, engaged as assiduously in smacking her gum and rattling her car keys as a Hindu mystic in the tintinnabulation of his little prayer bell.

  “Well, tell them to stop,” Charlie said.

  “Hey, stop,” said Mimi, as the car was pulled into the swiftly moving traffic to disappear in the night. A white Jaguar stopped at the curb before us, and we moved aside to let some aware people enter the Inn. It was late Sunday evening on the Strip, the sidewalk busy with kids who looked so strange that the police, walking by in pairs, gazed blankly into space trying not to see. “Maybe you’d better do something,” Charlie told Mimi.

  “Right,” she said, went back into the Inn, and vanished. Charlie and I spent what seemed a long time standing fir
st outside the Inn, then outside a place where they sold beads and drug paraphernalia, finally outside a closed boutique as we sought shelter of increasing darkness from the kids who approached, their eyes weirdly peaceful wastes of drug-ridden urban madness, saying, “Wow, you’re Charlie Watts, far out.”

  Charlie listened to them with kind dismay. One girl said that San Francisco was much better than Los Angeles because around Haight Street you could get all the speed you wanted, and you could sit on the sidewalk and roll joints and nobody would bust you, and you could go to the Family Dog at night and drink this great punch that’s usually filled with acid, it’s great, you know, it’s a great place. How old are you? Charlie asked her, and she said, Seventeen.

  When we made it back to Oriole, the phone was ringing. Jo was already talking to Jagger on another line, so I answered it and found myself talking to the popular music critic of Esquire magazine. He told me that he and The New Yorker’s pop critic, a girl with whom he had been living for some time, were coming to interview Jagger. “Actually we’re not together anymore,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve heard about all this.”

  “Not really,” I said. Jo was saying goodbye to Mick.

  “We’re going to have a joint interview with Jagger where we’ll try to patch things up between us. Is Jo Bergman there?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Talk to Jo. Please.”

  Next day I sat out in the sunlight with Charlie, Shirley, and Serafina Watts. Serafina held out her arms with delight to Charlie and me. “Two daddies,” she said. Since coming to California Serafina had begun to learn to walk, and now she started across the lush lawn toward us, her plump little legs getting farther apart until, bottom-heavy, she sat with a plop.

  Shirley was writing a letter to a friend in England. “I’m saying that I’m going to meet Mae West tomorrow.”

  “Are you?” Charlie asked.

  “I’m being taken to the set of Myra Breckinridge, and even if I don’t meet Mae West I shall say I did.”