True Adventures of the Rolling Stones

by Stanley Booth

  “He does seem to take a romantic view of things,” I said from my position on the floor.

  “Yeah, man,” Keith said, lighting a joint as he stepped over me, headed for the couch. “He’s just a childish romantic, I have no time for such people.”

  We listened to television news reports of the killing, speculating on whether we’d have to stay and testify, wondering whether we should get out of town at once, but we were too hungry and summoned a waiter with a menu. “Oh, God,” Gram said, “it’s in French.” He handed the menu to Keith. “Here, you read this stuff.”

  “Ah,” Keith said, “this makes it so much more complicated.”

  Just before the waiter arrived, Keith had been talking about the Angels. “They’re homicidal maniacs, they should be thrown in jail.”

  Far out, I said to myself. Mick had said he’d rather have cops, and now Keith like Colonel Blimp wanted to throw the bastards in jail. The Rolling Stones had played their comeback tour, it had worked, they would get worse publicity than ever, they were still alive, the world’s greatest rock and roll band—but what could you do for an encore to human sacrifice?

  Sitting on the floor smoking, we listened a couple more times to television reports of the killing, then didn’t listen anymore. Keith played the Alabama tapes. Ronnie and Jo went to the airport and bought the getaway tickets. “I’ll let you know in the morning if I’m going to make the plane for Geneva,” Mick told Jo.

  Sam had passed out on the couch and we told him to leave, so he got up and made it to a chair where he passed out again, gaunt and bristly in his white turtleneck, head thrown back, mouth open. “Hey, wake up, man,” Keith said. “Go to bed, you’re a drag to have around, you’re unconscious.”

  Sam opened his eyes, looked around quickly, then collapsed again into a coma. We were all in varying degrees of shock, feeling as if we’d been tossed up on the beach out of an angry storm.

  When the food came, we ate and went on sitting, more or less speechless. We were all dead sleepy, but none of us wanted to leave. We had been through a shattering experience, in a way the experience we had been looking for all our lives, and none of us knew what to say. Talking on the phone to a radio station, Mick said, “I thought the scene here was supposed to be so groovy. I don’t know what happened, it was terrible, if Jesus had been there he would have been crucified.”

  When he was off the phone, he said that he was down on the idea of the movie. “I don’t want to conceal anything,” he said, “but I don’t want to show something that was just a drag.”

  At one point in the evening, Mick and I were sitting on the floor with Emmaretta Marks, a black girl who had spent some time with Keith in Los Angeles before the tour started. Janis Joplin’s name came up, and Mick said that she tried hard to be funky but she still wasn’t black. Thinking of Taj Mahal’s equipment boy saying that you can have more fun with niggers than anybody else, I said, to see how Mick would react, “Well, that’s the dream, we all want to be black, what we think black is.”

  “I don’t,” Mick said. “I’m not black and I’m proud of it.” Emmaretta laughed, and Mick smiled for the first time since going onstage that night.

  Tony went to bed but the hotel objected to his having two women in his room. “I told them it was my wife and sister,” he said. “They said I was immoral. Honky bastards.” I called the desk and ordered them one more room.

  At four in the morning we were still sitting around. Charlie usually went to bed early, but tonight none of us wanted to be alone. A scratchy old blues record was playing on Keith’s tape recorder. “Can you get that line there?” Mick asked me. “What’s he saying?”

  I listened, but there was too much surface noise, the message was lost. “I can’t get it,” I said. “Something about God and the Devil.”

  “I’ll play it back,” Mick said.

  I listened again. “I still can’t get it.” I was so tired that my ears were not clear.

  “But it’s the point of the whole song.”

  Finally I said good night and told Mick if I didn’t see him tomorrow I’d see him in England. I went to my room, didn’t call anybody, didn’t even think, just got into bed and fell asleep.

  32

  Tragedy absorbs the highest orgiastic music and in so doing consummates music. But then it puts beside it the tragic myth and the tragic hero. Like a mighty titan, the tragic hero shoulders the whole Dionysiac world and removes the burden from us. At the same time, tragic myth, through the figure of the hero, delivers us from our avid thirst for earthly satisfaction and reminds us of another existence and a higher delight. For this delight the hero readies himself, not through his victories but through his undoing. Tragedy interposes a noble parable, myth, between the universality of its music and the Dionysiac disposition of the spectator and in so doing creates the illusion that music is but a supreme instrument for bringing to life the plastic world of myth. By virtue of this noble deception it is now able to move its limbs freely in dithyrambic dance and to yield without reserve to an orgiastic abandon, an indulgence which, without this deception, it could not permit itself. Myth shields us from music while at the same time giving music its maximum freedom. In exchange, music endows the tragic myth with a convincing metaphysical significance, which the unsupported word and image could never achieve, and, more-over, assures the spectator of a supreme delight—though the way passes through annihilation and negation, so that he is made to feel that the very womb of things speaks audibly to him.

  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: The Birth of Tragedy

  “I THOUGHT that I’d fallen down, on top,” Shirley Arnold said, “but I fainted at the side. The next thing I can remember apart from seeing the coffin go down was being back in the car, and I was saying, ‘How did you get me up?’ Everyone was saying, ‘Are you all right?’ Then we went back to the house, had a quick cuppa tea, and made our way home.

  “While we were driving down to the cemetery—at the cemetery gates there was a policeman. He saluted as Brian went past, and Charlie laughed. I was so tearful, and I said, ‘What you laughin’ at?’ and he said, ‘The policeman saluted. Brian’s curlin’ up somewhere, lookin’ on and lovin’ it.’ ”

  I didn’t want to outstay my small welcome at the Joneses’, but Mrs. Jones sat with me and the cat as Mr. Jones talked, rambling from one time of Brian’s life to another, putting together clues. “Very soon,” he said, “the two together, Jagger-Richards, were getting very uptown. Louie and I went to the Colston Hall, Bristol, in the fall of ’66 to see Brian, when he and the group were playing there, and Brian seemed very different. All of his spark seemed to be gone. He was very unhappy. We didn’t stay. Brian was not friendly. An indefinable change had come over him.

  “It was typical of Brian that he called later, after the tour was over, and apologized. He said, ‘I wasn’t very nice.’ I said, ‘That’s all right.’ He said he had been upset about Anita—who I understand said after his death that she did him wrong.

  “Brian played ‘Honky Tonk Women’ for me down at Cotchford Farm. It was his arrangement—but I believe it was re-recorded without him. We were with Brian about five weeks before he left the Rolling Stones—and I’m convinced that he had no notion of leaving the Rolling Stones then—but there were moves afoot to get him out.

  “When Brian became a Rolling Stone it seemed that he had found his soul, he had achieved what he wanted. The criticism troubled him very much for our sake—when there’d be an attack in the newspapers he’d call. Especially later with the drugs, he’d say he was ‘very upset because he knew it would react on you.’ I told him it didn’t, of course it did.

  “After he was arrested the second time he called us—he was in tears. ‘I’ve been fixed,’ he said. ‘I give you my word, Dad, I had no idea that blasted stuff was there.’ I said, ‘I believe you, Son,’ and I did. He never told me a lie. When I was upset with him, even as a child he’d always tell me the truth about what he’d done.

  “I never went
to court. Brian asked me not to, so we never did. After the trials he always would call his Mum and tell her that things would be all right. He’d say, ‘Is that a bit better, Mum?’

  “And he’d call other times, fairly regularly—every month or so. When he felt happy and secure and strong he didn’t. And sometimes he’d come to see us, thought nothing of time, he’d blow in at four in the morning. He’s rung me at all hours of the night, from Hollywood, Vienna, Paris, Melbourne. . . . He called from Melbourne once and we talked for the best part of an hour. He was homesick. He’d been listening to Winston Churchill’s funeral on the radio.

  “I was very foolish once. I trusted that chauffeur, Brian Palastanga. He came here after having taken Brian to the Priory Nursing Home. I told him people had been rude to Brian’s mother—he told Brian and Brian was terribly upset. He called up, all in tears. The whole experience at the Priory was very bad for Brian, a lot of psychological rubbish which made him feel a freak.

  “The famine in Biafra affected Brian terribly. He felt he should go with Mick to Biafra to try to do something to help the situation. ‘People say it won’t do any good,’ he told me, and probably it wouldn’t have. But he had great feelings for the sufferings of others—animals, other people.

  “Down at Cotchford Farm that night, Brian had gone to bed with his sleeping tablet, a ‘sleeper’ as he called them. He knew this Frank Thorogood, who’d been down there working on the place, and this nurse were up in his flat—a flat in the garage, away from the house. Brian had said that Frank could stay in the flat. Then when Frank brought the nurse out Brian was not happy with that. It was a small town, and Brian knew it might cause trouble. He got up from the bed and tried, so Anna told us later, to get Frank to leave, couldn’t, then they had what was referred to as a ‘party’ which I interpret to mean that they had a few drinks together, and Brian was sleepy, he’d taken a sleeping pill after all. He got up, tried to get them to leave, and then after a few drinks decided to have a swim. With the pills and the drink and the warmth of the pool—Brian kept it at about ninety degrees or better—he simply went to sleep in the bath.

  “I could never understand that statement the papers supposedly got from Anna about a ‘party.’ If one were planning to have a party, would he take sleeping pills first? Why? At the inquest, Anna never got to testify—she was so upset. I was horrified by people’s knowing that a doctor had prescribed the drugs Brian had taken and their saying nothing at all about it. Nobody asked any questions. I wrote the police a letter telling them the drugs were prescribed, so they could investigate and have that cleared up at any rate, that the drugs were in fact prescribed for Brian by a doctor. I sent the letter on Friday, by Monday the doctor was out of the country. I have no idea what it means.”

  Jaws clenched, Mr. Jones peered at the cold fire, unable, though Brian lay buried in Cheltenham Cemetery, to stop wanting to make things right. “I think,” Mr. Jones said, “that when Brian was in the sixth form the school made a mistake. They wanted him to study science and technology. I said, ‘The boy has an artistic temperament—shouldn’t that be taken into account?’ The school said, ‘No, that’s not practical. Science, technology’s where it’s at today.’ Brian wasn’t interested in that sort of thing at all. I remember buying him a hammer when he was just a little chap. He wasn’t interested in it at all. Most boys love hammers—not Brian.”

  Asking about Linda Lawrence, I offended Mr. Jones. “You can’t expect me to be proud of that side of my son’s life. I felt that Brian never cared for Linda, that the only girl he ever really loved was Anita.”

  “But he—Julian—is your grandson,” I said, fatuous and foolish, and until my own daughter, named after Billie Holiday, was safe with my parents, I would never know what the Joneses had been through. Once, yes, a family might withstand once, but Brian had done it and done it and done it. He was a menace. He was madness. He was out of control. “It was Brian’s fanaticism that put the Rolling Stones on the map,” Mr. Jones had said.

  Had I done these things—everything Brian did, I did—had I done them on purpose to research the part? If so, how awful. And if they were accidents, how awful.

  Soon it was late and I called a taxi. Mr. Jones, shaking my hand, said, “We’ve had no cards at Christmas, nothing from the boys. If you see them, remember me to them—tell them that if they want to write or call, I’d be happy to hear from them.”

  On the way to the hotel I told the driver, who noticed my accent, that I was a tourist, I’d heard about Cheltenham Spa.

  “You’re a bit late, you know. The waters spoiled about eight years ago.”

  Eight years—about the time Brian left Cheltenham.

  The driver said he was thirty-two, a Jim Reeves fan. I told him that I wrote about music. “I liked the fifties rock,” he said. “Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly. The Americans seem to have more feel for it. Now the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and all this nonsense—one of ’em’s from here, actually.”

  “Really, who’s that?”

  “One who died. In fact he lived just five or six doors down from where you were tonight. His mother and father still do live there. We have ’em, fans like, who go to see his grave. We had two German girls, didn’t speak a word of English, they came at Christmastime—a crazy sick business. Well, good night.”

  • • •

  Next morning I checked out of the hotel, leaving my bags at the desk, and took a taxi to the cemetery, on Priory Road. It had been cloudy, then raining, then the sun started to shine, bright and warm, and as we came to the cemetery it was starting to rain again, a few drops falling. We drove part way in, but a man trimming the flowers beside the motorpath stopped us, and I told the driver to wait. Down a path to the left, turn right, and there, on a corner south of the church, was Brian’s grave, with its little metal marker. No stone yet; it takes at least a year for the ground to settle after being disturbed by gravediggers.

  It looked so small, like Brian’s old house, that once again I had the feeling this must be wrong—but it was right; this small man, never more than a boy really, from that small house, now in this small grave.

  Standing before the grave, in the little cemetery on the edge of Cheltenham, you could see the Cotswolds in the distance, not too far away, not too tall, perfectly decent green English hills. The graveyard church was nearby, a small medieval building of dun and grey stones, decorated and protected by snarling, scaly gryphons, its spire reaching up into the grey sky. The rain was steady now, though lacy fir trees sheltered the graves. The number of Brian’s grave is V11393, a single plot on a little turning of a lane in the cemetery, next to Albert “Bert” Trigg, beloved husband of Ethel.

  Three sprays of flowers were on the grave, and a poem written in a schoolgirl’s insecure tiny round hand on a white sheet of paper, folded and wrapped round with cellophane to protect it from the rain, but already fading with each day’s condensation of dew.

  Only the living die

  By the hand of life

  Privileged, Branded

  Spoken to when alone

  By the voice of earth—

  Marked through multiplying nights

  Of sorrow and defeat, eaten by

  Victory.

  And then, at the bottom of the page, in the same hand: “But it will never be the same without the boy we used to adore.”

  I replaced the note, standing over the grave, with the rain coming down all around, and looked up to where the sunlight was shining on the hills.

  33

  Who speaks of victory?

  Survival is everything.

  RAINER MARIA RILKE:

  “Requiem for Count Wolf von Kalckreuth”

  WHEN I WOKE it was bright Sunday morning in San Francisco, Pearl Harbor Day. I dressed and went down to Keith’s suite. Charlie, Mick Taylor, Gram, Michelle, and Emmaretta were there. Mick had caught the nine o’clock plane to Geneva, taking with him the money the Stones had made in America. He and Jo flew together, Bill and Ast
rid taking the same plane to New York, then going to Sweden for a vacation.

  In Keith’s sitting room we had cocaine and Old Charter for breakfast, swapped addresses, and suddenly it was over. We went downstairs and took the last limousines of the engagement to the airport in the morning light. On the radio Buster Brown was singing, “Well, I want somebody to tell me what’s wrong with me / I ain’t in trouble, so much as misery.”

  At the airport we embraced and walked away. Gram and Michelle were going to Los Angeles. I was going to Memphis and then to London. Keith, Charlie, and Mick Taylor were going to England, Charlie to Shirley and Serafina, Keith to Anita and Marlon. Brian was staying in the churchyard near the hillside.

  At Geneva the first customs official who saw Mick at once called the police. Mick and Jo were searched as they say in the body, but the only questionable items the police found were in Jo’s luggage, herbal tablets from a Los Angeles naturopath, so they were allowed to enter the country. They opened a bank account, then took a Learjet with a German pilot to Nice, where Marsha Hunt joined them and they spent a day looking at houses in the south of France. The next day they flew to Gatwick with a French pilot. Over the Alps Mick and Jo discussed plans for the coming year. After Mick’s drug trial there was the new single, “Brown Sugar,” to finish for release in early February. Mick thought the Stones should spend February recording and arranging a tour to include all major European capitals and Moscow. The recording should go on through March and April. The tour should start with a May Day concert somewhere in the middle of Europe and end in Moscow in June. (The Stones knew people who knew people who knew a woman who’d been Khrushchev’s mistress and was now Minister of Culture and was considered fairly hip and so there seemed a reasonable possibility.) There had also been an offer for Rolling Stones concerts in Japan. In July, Immigration willing, the Stones would appear at festivals in the United States. They would spend August on vacation, September and October recording, November on the road, and December was too far away even to think about. Not much of this happened, and none of it as anybody expected.