“Yeah,” Keith said. “Now, Bill, get it into your Hampton that this is it.”
The song started well and went on until someone said, “No.”
“Who said no?” Charlie asked.
“Jimmy said no,” Dickinson said.
“Did you say no?” Mick asked.
“Tape’s running out,” Jimmy said. He reloaded the eight-track recorder.
“Everybody ready?” Mick asked. “Ready?”
“Yeah, all ready,” Keith said.
“That’s a moot point,” Mick said.
“All right,” Jimmy said. “Take eleven. This is the money take.”
It wasn’t, but the next one was.
By daylight the Jack Daniel’s was gone and Keith and Mick were deeply into the J&B, overdubbing vocals on “Brown Sugar,” lurching across the studio to the control room to listen to playbacks. Mick had forgotten the words and Dickinson had reminded him to sing the line, “Hear him whip the women just around midnight.”
Talking in the control room to Mick Taylor, Charlie, and Bill, Mick said, smiling, looking collegiate, “We can make next year sort of get-out-the-way year if we really push it. We usually wind up at the end of the year all wasted, no ideas, no songs—but this year we’re still pushing.” Mick wanted to put out “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses” as a single right away, like next week. Anything seemed possible that morning in Muscle Shoals.
Keith was sitting on the control room couch, holding a Coke in his left hand and the Scotch bottle in his right. Dickinson was sitting beside him, wearing a black plastic shirt, looking greasy, as if he were about to go out and rip a tire off a semi. There was a gaping hole in the toe of Keith’s python boot. Jimmy Johnson, who had been engineering the regular studio sessions in the day and the Rolling Stones undercover work at night, was still at the board, playing back tapes.
“How do you keep going, man?” Keith asked him.
“Courage,” Jimmy said. He had taken, to my knowledge, no drugs.
“Just thinkin’ about how Glyn Johns is always flakin’ out.”
We were listening to “You Got to Move.”
“Put the voices back with the guitars,” Mick told Jimmy.
“Bring the drums up when they come in after the solo,” Keith said.
“That vocal makes Brownie and Sonny sound like a coupla nowhere white boys,” Dickinson said to Keith.
“Just ’cause they been playin’ to all them white people,” Keith said. “Have you heard Fred McDowell’s wife or sister sing with him—I don’t know what she is—”
“Wife from time to time,” Dickinson said.
“She’s great,” Keith said. “She sings for herself.”
Mick had told Dickinson that he needed to lose some weight, and Dickinson on the couch made a self-deprecating remark about being old—at twenty-nine—and fat.
“Doesn’t matter if you’re sixty-eight and bald,” Keith said. “If you can do it, there’s somebody who can dig it, but if you’re a rock and roller you’ve got to be on the stage. A rock and roller doesn’t exist unless he’s on the stage.”
Charlie had left the control room and now, at seven o’clock in the morning, was sitting alone in the studio playing the drums, pounding away. “There’s a rock and roller,” Keith said.
Jimmy seemed to take forever to get the tapes ready. Mick played piano, Keith played piano, Mick played guitar, waiting. “Fuckin’ ’ell, Shuscle Moals,” Mick said. “Come on—even Astrid’s gone ’ome.” Astrid had almost always been present at the studio, but like a ghost, I’d never noticed her. Finally we heard the playbacks. Dickinson asked Mick if he’d mind his having a copy of “Wild Horses.”
“No,” Mick said, “but we don’t want to hear it on the radio.”
“I’m shocked you’d suggest it,” Charlie said.
Mick had at the end of each night’s work erased or destroyed all the outtakes. The Stones would leave not a trace behind them at the Muscle Shoals studio, nor would they pay anyone for anything.
“Too bad,” Keith said as the tapes wound their last. “We didn’t get to go to a juke joint.”
We wobbled out into the early morning light. “Like to come back for two weeks or so,” Keith said, “if we could rent a house and not stay at the Squaliday Inn.”
There were a couple of carloads of friendly and relaxed Alabama teenagers outside. They took pictures and followed us back to the motel. We went to our rooms, cleaned up, Dickinson and I smoked my last joint—the Stones were out of grass and I’d mentioned that I had one joint left—and went down to the dining room for breakfast. Keith soon joined us. He had shaved and was dressed with his usual quiet good taste: white tennis shoes, raveled beige nylon socks, red velvet pants with long strings hanging from their hemless cuffs, black velvet jacket, brown cap, long yellow and black wool scarf. “Tea, please,” he said to the waitress.
Behind me a woman was saying, “Ah thank ah’ll give ’im a chemistry set,” reminding me that Christmas was coming. Charlie and Mick Taylor, then Ahmet, then Mick, joined us. Mick was wearing his white velvet suit and red ruffled silk shirt, red muffler, burgundy maxicoat and cord cap. He sat down with us and ordered some corned beef.
Bill and Astrid sat at a nearby table. “Are you all with some group?” their waitress asked.
“Martha and the Vandellas,” Bill said.
“Oh,” the waitress said.
“You still got that joint?” Keith asked, wanting to smoke it at the table and give Ahmet a heart attack.
“Gone,” I said.
“When’s the plane?” Keith asked.
“We’ll wait till we’re called,” Mick said, eating corned beef.
When we finished breakfast we went up to Keith’s room to listen again to the new Stones recordings.
“Got some nice tracks,” Wexler said. He had come to breakfast late. “Taking them back to London to add the sweetening?”
“Not very much,” Keith said. “I like them just the way they are.”
“I sent a song to Aretha once,” Mick said—“Sympathy for the Devil,” the one Wexler had described to me as being suitable for Sonny Bono or Burl Ives. “And she didn’t do it. I was very disappointed. Very hurt.”
“Well, man, ah,” Wexler said, “there’s still time—”
Soon we were at the airport, the little girls following us, snapping photos as we walked out to the plane. “Your daddy’s gonna kill you,” Tony told a girl who was posing beside him. We were going to Atlanta—Wexler would stay there for a record-awards banquet—and on to San Francisco by way of Dallas. Wexler sat beside me talking but I was too sleepy to hear him. Across the aisle Mick and Keith were sprawled, Mick’s head on Keith’s shoulder, asleep.
I passed out for about twenty minutes and we were in Atlanta, then aboard a crowded plane where we had to split up, Keith sitting with some soldiers in the tourist section. I sat next to a well-dressed middle-aged woman who was reading John Cheever’s Bullet Park, a new book that season.
“That’s a beautiful book,” I said. We became involved in an odd, intimate conversation brought on by fatigue and romance and bourbon. We talked about Cheever’s characters, how sad they were, how acutely they felt the limits of their lives. “No matter what, we’re not in control, we don’t plan any of the things that happen to us, they just happen and our hearts are broken by it all—”
I went back to speak to Keith, who gave me the cocaine and the gold bamboo and said, “Take this.”
“Why, thanks.” I went into the toilet and came back refreshed to find Keith, now in the first-class compartment, engaged in conversation with an advertising executive in a business suit.
“You’re not free, man, you’ve got to do what they say,” Keith said.
“You have to play what people want,” the man said. “What’s the difference?”
“No, we don’t,” Keith said. “We don’t have to do anything we don’t want to do. I threw my favorite guitar off the stage in San Francisco
.”
“You can’t do that every night,” the man said.
“I can do it as often as I feel like it. Not always but sometimes.”
The man turned to me: “Do you believe this guy?”
“I believe him,” I said.
“Ah, you know what my scene is,” Keith said to me.
“Well,” the man said, “what I do isn’t bad, I’ve never hurt anybody.”
“How can you be sure?” Keith asked, and then went on as if he didn’t want to think about that one too long himself. “The problem is when you’re talking you think you’re arguing with Spiro Agnew, and you’re not, you’re talking to a perfectly reasonable man. But I really think it’s true that you can’t do what you want to do. So many people aren’t doing what they want to do.”
“Most of us do both,” the man said. “We like what we do but we have to make money. It’s a compromise.”
“But that’s so sort of sad,” Keith said.
“But the world is not perfect,” the man said.
“No,” Keith said. “The world is perfect.”
At that I had to reach over and kiss Keith on top of the head, a gesture of blessing that did not even bring a pause in the conversation. “You guys work so hard,” he said to the man. “We work hard in concentrated periods but then we stop and it’s four months of doing nothing—”
“It’s a different schedule,” the man said.
“Yeah,” Keith said, “but most people don’t dig their work. Americans are into a very freaky scene—like Spiro trying to speak for the people and he can’t because most of the people are under twenty-five and into a very different sort of scene—”
“Are you sure they disagree with Spiro?” the man asked.
“I’ve just been talkin’ to those guys, those kids who’re goin’ into the army at Fort Bliss—strange name for an army camp—they don’t want to do anything but go to Juárez and score some marijuana.”
“Don’t they care about girls anymore?” the man said.
“Yeah, they all want to go to Juárez and screw some broads and smoke some dope. They signed up for four years so they won’t have to go to Nam and fight in a war they don’t believe in, for this idea of America as the policeman of the world.”
“It’s not a matter of being a policeman, it’s a matter of protecting your interests,” the man said.
“What interests, you got half a million soldiers in Vietnam which is certainly not yours. The North Vietnamese are right and they’re gonna win.”
“You know that?”
“Yeah, because I’ve seen films and read about it and talked to people who’ve been there.”
“Yeah, but you don’t know, you might have to fight yourself someday,” the man said darkly.
“I do, all the time,” Keith said, and then he seemed to despair of being able to get his point of view across to the man. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
“What what’s like?”
“Being a Rolling Stone, the attacks people have put on us, the violence—”
“You mean people try to beat you up?”
“They try to kill me, man, that’s what I mean by violence, cops have pulled guns on me and offered to shoot me with them.”
“Where?”
“Backstage in dressing rooms, for nothing, for the slightest pretext. The five members of this band have had to go through so much bullshit—”
The seat belt light went on and I went back to my seat, passing Mick and Charlie. “But in a love affair,” Mick was saying, very earnest. I knew which five members Keith had meant. The Stones were so funky that one of them was a dead man.
When we got off the plane our peaceful interlude was over. The people who had been comic voices on the phone were all around us. Ronnie grabbed Mick, sideburning him along. “Don’t worry about a thing, everything’s being taken care of, we have a site, we can go out there tonight if you want to, Chip’s out there, and Sam—”
As we walked out to the limousines a small boy asked me, “Are you a Beatle?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What’s your name?”
“Philo Vance.”
“They’ll believe anything,” Keith said. “Philo Vance, the well-known Beatle.”
Keith and I got into a limousine and Jon Jaymes followed us, talking about the free concert. “I’m insuring the whole thing,” he said.
“What does that mean?” Keith asked.
“That means if there are ten murders, I go to jail.”
30
His heart was achin’, head was thumpin’
Little Jesse went to hell bouncin’ and jumpin’
Folks, don’t be standin’ around little Jesse cryin’
He wants everybody to do the Charleston whilst he’s dyin’
One foot up, a toenail draggin’
Throw my buddy Jesse in the hoodoo wagon
Come here, mama, with that can of booze
It’s the dying crapshooter’s—leavin’ this world—
With the dying crapshooter’s—goin’ down slow—
With the dying crapshooter’s blues.
WILLIE MCTELL: “The Dying Crapshooter’s Blues”
WHEN, IN 1968 , I went to England for the first time to meet the Stones, wearing a trenchcoat in unconscious self-parody, I didn’t know what I was getting into. Four weeks later when I returned to America to write what I could about the Stones, I knew that something was going on with them under the surface, and that I hadn’t been able to get to the bottom of it.
In the summer “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” had carried them back to the top of the pop charts. Their new album, Beggar’s Banquet, was released in November after a long dispute over the Stones’ proposed cover photograph of the graffiti on a toilet wall in a Mexican auto-mobile body shop in Los Angeles. Decca refused to release the album with that cover. “The record company is not there to tell us what we can make,” Mick had said. “If that’s the way they feel about it, then they should make the records and we’ll distribute them.” At last the record was released with a white cover designed as an invitation. “We copped out,” Keith said, “but we did it for money, so it was all right.”
Also released in November was One + One, a film by Jean-Luc Godard that was in part about the recording of “Sympathy for the Devil.” Filming had been completed for a movie called Performance, starring Mick and Anita. In December the Stones produced a filmed entertainment called “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.” It presented circus acts—tigers, acrobats, clowns, a fire eater—and rock and roll from the Stones, Taj Mahal, John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Jethro Tull, the Who. The Stones intended selling it to BBC-TV, but it was never finished.
At the end of the year, Keith, Mick, Anita, and Marianne went to Peru and Brazil. Seeing the black cowboys on the pampas inspired Keith to write a Jimmie Rodgers type of song called “Honky Tonk Women.” Brian, who had moved into Cotchford Farm in November, spent the holidays with Suki in Ceylon. John Lewis, a young English friend of Brian’s, would tell me sometime later that while in Ceylon Brian consulted an astrologer—supposedly, at one time, Hitler’s astrologer—who told Brian to be careful swimming in the coming year, not to go into the water without friends.
On January 13, Brian was back in London to appear before a court that denied his appeal to set aside his guilty verdict. That left him with two drug convictions on his record, two strikes against him. At the end of January Mick and Keith came back to England and started months of work on the tracks for Let It Bleed. In March the Stones were asked to play at the Memphis Blues Festival and considered doing it with Eric Clapton because of the problems they would have getting Brian into the country.
Brian had used his upset over his impending trial as an excuse for missing sessions and had even avoided England, telling the London newspapers from Morocco, “I have the feeling my presence is not required.” With his trial over and months of dental work finished (“What a waste,” Jo said), Brian—though he had
completed his Moroccan album, having spent £23,000 of his own money—was still not able to do his part, whatever that was now, with the Stones. “After the trial was over and Brian didn’t get it together,” Jo said, “the handwriting was on the wall.” Early in April, Jo wrote a letter to Mick. “What’s happening with the group?” she asked, and offered “a short report on what’s really happening:”
A few first thoughts—the office is completely loyal—also relatively free of intrigue and politics. No one is ambitious or on ego trips. It’s a nice place to work. Lately there hasn’t been enough to keep minds together, and that leads us to the basic crunch: it’s your office.
1. What’s happening to the group? Is there any real interest in doing public appearances? Or do you want to just record and make movies?
2. Aside from the Rolling Stones, any other projects? Record company?
The Klein problem is more than a drag. We’re puppets. How can you work, or the office, if we have to spend so much time pleading for bread or whatever. It’s never going to be efficient till that is straightened out.
1. Klein—some way of finance—agony over money & contracts
2. Mick’s personal plans
3. Records—you should just worry about the product.
4. Rolling Stones
5. Record company or studio
6. If the load is too heavy, fuck it. You really only should do what makes you happy. If you knew there wouldn’t be any hangups.
On February 3, Allen Klein announced that he had taken over the Beatles’ management. The Stones, feeling neglected and resentful, kept working on Let It Bleed, using the sixty voices (double-tracked) of the London Bach Choir on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and a young mandolin player named Ry Cooder on Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain,” finding ways to add the exotic textures and accents Brian had once provided. Brian would still come to some recording sessions. At one he asked Mick, “What can I play?”
True Adventures of the Rolling Stones Page 44