13
At any rate he calls us to come outdoors; Dionysus calls us outdoors. Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land. Out of the temple made with hands; out of the ark of the book; out of the cave of the law; out of the belly of the letter. The first tabernacle in Jerusalem; the second tabernacle the universal Church; the third tabernacle the open sky. “Only when a clear sky looks down through broken ceilings will my heart turn again toward the places of God.”
NORMAN O. BROWN: Love’s Body
THE WORLD, beyond the hedge outside the bathroom window, was once more invisible, shrouded by dense, dirty gases. Scrubbed and scraped as if I could wash away the poisons that surrounded us, I walked the length of the house to the kitchen. The office and the living room were aswarm with people I tried not to see, but in the kitchen I had to look around to find food, and there at the Formica-topped counter was Jane Schneider, holding a big red-yellow pomegranate, turning it over and over, looking for the zipper. She asked if I knew how to open these things, and of course I did, being from the South and all, so I went to work on the pomegranate with a paring knife and soon my cuffs were spattered with the rose-colored juice of the clear red kernels inside, each with its little white seed. “I don’t think that’ll come out,” Jane said cheerfully. Pete Bennett, also in the kitchen and looking, as usual, like Murder, Incorporated, was talking about the uncanny attraction he exercised over famous people and photographers. “I was at a party at the White House,” he said, “and somehow I didn’t know, they didn’t tell me, that everybody would be in dinner clothes, and I was wearing a regular”—anodized uranium—“business suit. It was terrible, like a bad dream, and then this photographer asked me to be in a picture with President Nixon and Neil Armstrong. Stuff like that keeps happening to me. Did you see the picture of me and Elvis Presley in Cashboxl I was in Vegas, see, and Presley is in Vegas, and he never sees anybody—”
“I know,” I said.
“—and never has his picture taken with anybody. The club manager asked if his wife and daughter could have their picture taken with Elvis, and Colonel Parker said that Elvis would be happy to do it for five thousand dollars. So I ask to see Elvis backstage, and the club manager says, ‘He won’t let you in, he’s got this Memphis Mafia, you’ll just be embarrassed.’ I say, ‘I’m Italian Mafia, tell him I’m here.’ Presley invites me into his dressing room for about three hours, and I get a picture taken with him that later comes out in Cashbox.”
Standing in the kitchen doorway munching toast, looking over the menagerie in the living room, I wondered whether the mail had come and if so, who had it? I had nothing to do but take notes and wait for my contract. Today was Wednesday. On Friday, my deadline, the tour would begin.
The place was swarming because Jagger had chosen, so the Stones could concentrate on rehearsing, to postpone the pretour interviews until today and tomorrow. All of the Stones except Wyman were in the living room, talking to radio people (after the bushy-haired ABC love-rock interviewer left, Jagger said, “You can’t tell by looking anymore, can you?”), periodical press and book writers. Keith, talking to a hungry-looking interviewer from an “underground” newspaper, said as I passed, going to sit on the couch, that the Stones’ contracts stated that no uniformed police were to be allowed inside the arenas where the Stones would play: “Uniforms are a definite bad scene.”
I sat beside Kathy and Mary, two blond locals who had been driving the Stones’ cars for the last few days. “The Dynamic Duo,” they called themselves. “We drive the Stones around and fill in during the lulls.” They got up to go out to the kitchen as Sam Cutler sat down, nodding at Kathy: “I’ve screwed that girl ten times today,” he said.
Finally the swarm buzzed off and so did we, a bit earlier than usual, to the last rehearsal. Gram Parsons showed up, wearing a furry brown beaver ten-gallon hat. We stood atop a wooden tower facing the marathon ballroom set. The music was so loud we couldn’t talk, so we smoked Gram’s marijuana and felt the floor patting our feet.
Talkin’ ’bout the Midnight Rambler
A few days ago in Memphis a young man named George Howard Putt was arrested for the “sex-slayings” of five women. Still at large were Northern California’s Zodiac killer and the killer or killers who this past summer had terrorized the Los Angeles area with bloody massacres like the one at the home of the actress Sharon Tate. Murder seemed to be in the air these days, like the scent of flowers in the spring.
The Stones, under the glittering mirror-chip ball and the gold-fringed red hanging lights, looked like a ghost band playing to a deserted ballroom. I remembered the line they tell you when you lose at the carnival: “At least you got to hear the band play.”
After the rehearsal Charlie and I rode with Stu to Oriole, where a long-haired, blue-jeaned reporter from the New York Times, Michael Lydon, was listening to stagehand Bill Belmont set the scene: “Two towers . . . three trusses . . . Supertroupers . . . Chip Monck directs an ambience. No psychedelic crap. No ‘blue spot on the slow songs, red spot on the fast songs.’ ”
Lydon nodded soberly. Then he heard Jane Schneider telling me, “The Stones’ third tour, when I was eighteen, opened my eyes to—everything.”
I hate to ask questions, but “Everything?”
“Men with men, girls with girls, I walked into this room and all these people were fornicating, right out in the open. I didn’t know about anything like that, and I was knocked out. I’m blushing, Ronnie’s saying, ‘Do you want to leave?’ ” Lydon tiptoed away to get something to write with. I made a note myself, of something I heard Ronnie say on the telephone this afternoon: “He did the worst thing you can do to anybody. Sure you know what that is. He turned him in to the Internal Revenue.”
Keith said that I didn’t need Klein’s or Schneider’s approval to write a book. Mick said I had to have a deal by Friday. Every day Schneider said that he couldn’t get in touch with my agent and asked me about the contract. Every day I liked this place less.
The morning was foul, surf breaking just the other side of the hedge. I staggered through another lobby crowd to the kitchen. A glass of orange juice gave me the strength to walk to the hearth and sit facing the fire, my back to the room. Michael Lydon, appearing at my elbow, wanted me to meet a man dressed in rumpled brown corduroy trousers, a blue shirt with buttondown collar, a wrinkled silk necktie, and glasses with tortoise-shell rims. He looked like a parody of a 1957 college student, and he was, I was told, the correspondent from Esquire. I returned to my orange juice and the fire, the licking blue flames. After a while I noticed Esquire still beside me.
“How’re you doing?” I asked him, just to make a noise.
He shook his head like a movie actor showing despair. “It’s over.”
“Oh?” I said, wondering what could be over so early in the day.
“It’s hopeless,” he said, looking toward the couch where a girl who resembled Emily Dickinson with leukemia stared into smoggy space. The New Yorker. “Sorry to hear it,” I told Esquire.
What must readers believe, when writers for periodicals regarded as standards of sophistication could believe Mick Jagger so purified the air around him that in his presence they would receive absolution for their past lives? It like to overcome me, being as it was a cloudy day, and I went to the Oz room for help. I came back to find Jagger, in a white velvet suit, reclining on a couch, discoursing. “Been on the musical stage since I was foive,” he was saying in a broad cockney accent, “and I’ve missed it for the past few years. So I said to meself, ‘Back to the boards where we belong—’ ”
Someone asked whether the Stones’ music was nothing more than imitation black blues. I was lighting the reefer I got from the Oz room. “We’re an imitation, certainly,” Mick said, “but so is black blues—of something—but by being derivative, a new music
results.” He could get away with talking like this because on stage and records he seemed to be the Prince of Darkness. I passed the joint to him. Between hisses he said, “When we started, we’d go in clubs, they’d say, ‘You don’t play blues, you play rock and roll.’ We said, ‘Yes, fuck it, we play rock and roll.’ We never thought we’d be big. Thought we’d do blues for fanatics. When we heard ‘Love Me Do’—” Smiling now, he passed the reefer to The New Yorker, who took it as if it were a torch. “ ‘Love Me Do,’ right, we thought we might have rock and roll hits, because it was obviously changing.”
“May I ask a question?” I asked.
“If it’s good,” Michael Lydon said.
“He always asks good questions,” Mick said. I was almost—but am never—too surprised to talk. “Do you ever think about the effect of what you’re doing on kids—I mean, the effect of the awful things you do on children?”
“Can’t think about that,” Mick said, laughing.
“I don’t blame you,” I told him. The reefer had come back to me. The press conference had become a conversation. Someone asked about the days of drug-induced musical unity.
“The era of playing on each other’s records was a joke,” Mick said. “We may be all one, but we’re not all alike.”
This inspired The New Yorker, who was sitting well apart from Esquire, to ask about the Stones’ politics.
“I was much more involved with politics before I got into music,” Mick said. “At the London School of Whatsis I was always in arguments, pounding on tables—which is what you do at college.”
“But when you wrote ‘Street Fighting Man,’ ” said The New Yorker, “you must have been involved in the politics that was happening at the time.”
“But you’re always involved with what’s going on around you,” Mick said, beginning to mutter. “There is a certain political, I suppose, content to that song—”
“But it’s just a song,” I said.
“Right,” Mick said, and knowing an exit line when he heard one, he escaped.
The magazine writers left, and I went at Jo Bergman’s request to the Sunset Boulevard offices of Solters and Sabinson, the public relations people, to pick up copies of the tour itinerary. There I met David Horowitz, who could have been the “Under-Assistant West Coast Promo Man” of the Jagger/Richards song, except that he was not wearing a seersucker suit. But he did have horn-rim glasses and a suit that looked as if it had become shiny from lying on the couches of expensively upholstered psychiatrists. Jagger had hired Solters and Sabinson after talking to several firms, lying to them all to test their stupidity. For five hundred dollars a week, Horowitz told me, Solters and Sabinson were going to handle the Stones’ media conferences, being careful to include the underground press. “We are aware that the Stones know the under-ground press are their friends. Our job in the case of an act like this is not to make news, the Stones are news, a tour like this is big news. We see our job as facilitating the dissemination of that news as widely as possible.”
But when Horowitz’s secretary gave me the itineraries and I thanked her, saying, “I have to send my wife one of these, so she’ll know I’m not lost,” Horowitz broke into little beads of sweat and refused to let me have the itineraries until he had approval from the Stones, so alarmed was he at the prospect of all this big news being in the hands of somebody’s wife. He telephoned Jo, who told him to fork over the paper, and he did.
Back at Oriole, nothing much was happening. There were left-about signs of the times, managers’ ads in the daily Variety saying “No groups please,” and screenplays (“star vehicles”) sent for Jagger to read, such as The Adventures of Augie March and another called Children at the Gate: as its first scene opened, Theresa, sixteen, climbing back into her cotton underpants, said to her naked nineteen-year-old brother, “God damn you, Angelo! How many times do I have to tell you not to hang your God-damned tie on the God-damned cross?” Scripts we never finished reading.
At nightfall Jagger showed up again to check some last-minute details with Jo, who told him that for the big L.A. opening show at the Forum they needed more free tickets than had been reserved for press and friends. “They’ll be free to the press or free to your friends, that’s the choice.”
“Why is that the choice?” Mick asked, and paid for the friends’ tickets himself.
Dinner with the Wattses, the Schneiders, Jo, and a few other people, was pleasant, even though tomorrow would be Friday, and the odds were not getting any shorter. Afterwards, with the doors locked against the cool air and the Midnight Rambler, Charlie and I were sitting on a couch in the living room, listening to a Columbia collection of 1920s records (“Varsity Drag,” “Black and Blue”), when Schneider approached, wielding a deck of cards, asking us to take one, any one. Charlie said, in his deadly honest way, “When I started out playing, I played weddings and that sort of thing, where there was always someone interrupting with card tricks, just like that.”
Looking through the wide windows of the President’s Club at Continental Airlines in Los Angeles International Airport, under an ocean of smog, we seemed to be, but weren’t, in the very early morning. The President’s Club had low tables, quiet couches, solitary chairs, like a waiting room in a nondenominational mortuary.
Keith, wearing sunglasses with giant purple bug-eye lenses and a moldy green leather military greatcoat, was listening to Sam Cutler: “We’ve got all sorts of makeup and two very nice little hair dryers—”
“Good boy, Sam,” Keith said.
In an alcove where a man in a dark suit watched, eyes wide, Mary was sitting on Kathy’s lap, stroking her gently.
Keith, who had gone to see Bo Diddley last night and got to bed at six A.M., said, “Sam, bring me a vodka.”
“But you said you didn’t want nothing till you got on the plane,” Sam said.
As if he were speaking to himself Keith said, “Must get used to my—unpredictability.”
Several men wearing dark suits came in together and signed the guest list. I ambled over and did a little reading. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston, Texas. I went back and sat on a couch with Keith and Mick, no time to worry about contracts today. Keith, having finished his vodka, was adding teaspoons of sugar to a cup of coffee, one two three four five. Jagger and I read the ads for inflatable party dolls in the back of Cavalier. Keith got up for a bit of a stroll, coattails trailing.
Bill and Astrid, sitting near us, were joined by one of the men in dark suits, who sat on a table beside Astrid. Deeply tanned and, now I notice, deeply drunk, he thrust a ball-point pen and a piece of paper toward Astrid and said, “Little lady, would you sign my thing?”
Astrid looked at Bill as if the least he could do was to challenge this madman to a duel. Bill smiled and said nothing. He was in Black-pool the night the audience tore the whole auditorium apart. Two others in dark suits came over and said, referring to the drunk, “You need this guy. He’s a full-blood Indian harmonica player. You ought to hear him.” I asked them if they really worked for NASA and they said sure. What are you doing, I asked, going to Mars?
“That’s where we’re headed,” one of them said. “Just waiting for Nixon to turn us on.”
I looked out at the fog, said, “I don’t think he’s going to turn me on,” and the NASA men stopped smiling.
Across the room a middle-aged woman who had been reading Palm Springs Today looked up and asked Kathy and Mary, who were following Keith, “Are there girls in the group?” The girls smiled like the sisters of Dracula, and the woman asked, “Which one had the two babies with two different women in this month’s Cosmopolitan?”
Whirling to face the woman, Keith said, sounding like Bea Lillie, “You talkin’ ’bout me babies?”
“Are you the one in the magazine?” the woman asked.
“You read too many goddamned magazines,” Keith said in the same high voice.
“I know he’s not the one,” the woman said.
And she was right, Keith was not the one, the magazine article could only have been about Brian. But Keith growled, “Try me sometime, baby.”
“Why are they so goddamned hostile?” the woman asked her husband, who was staring at the Los Angeles Times, pretending that he was alone on a tropic island. “I’m not hostile, am I, Chuck?”
Then, without warning, at 12:00 noon, only forty minutes late, our plane was ready. We boarded what the plump blond Passenger Service Director called over the intercom “The Proud Bird for Denver and Kansas City” and were airborne, headed for the out-of-town opening, our first contact with what was to come. Jagger, across the aisle from me, was pushing away, back to Schneider, a movie contract. “I can’t read it,” Mick said.
“It’s in layman’s language,” Schneider said.
“I can read legal Latin easier,” Mick said, putting on a pair of headphones. I put on a pair also and dialed the same channel, to hear Otis Redding. “Nice,” I said, but Mick said, “Bad karma for a plane ride.”
We were flying eight hundred miles over the Colorado River, Lake Mojave, across the Continental Divide, into the heartland of America. Over the Grand Canyon we heard Count Basie; Stan Getz accompanied us in the blue sky above clouds that brushed the dark snowcapped Rockies. All at once there was Denver, sunny and, so the P.S.D. said, sixty-six degrees Fahrenheit. The last time I was in Denver I was nineteen, stole poems from the library and a Bible from the YMCA, met girls in parks and bums in bars. As we touched down John Lee Hooker was singing: “Losin’ you to my best friend.”
In the Denver airport there was a Mercury Cyclone GT on a pedestal. All around were characters in cowboy boots and hats. Outside the weather was, sure enough, clear and cool. Parked at the curb were two limousines for the Stones, rented cars for the rest of the party. I selected the fastest one, a Dodge Charger, raring to fly into the dry brown flat fall.
True Adventures of the Rolling Stones Page 15