True Adventures of the Rolling Stones

by Stanley Booth

  Keith and Charlie and Mick reached England early in the morning of a new day, tired, jet-lagged, still in Altamont shock, ready for anything, Moscow, Japan, the world, whatever it takes, but there were a crowd of newspaper reporters and photographers at Heathrow, and Anita was there with Marlon. The big story was that Anita might not be allowed to stay in the country unless she and Keith married to remove her alien status. “Keith, they’re throwing me out of the country,” she said, playing the scene to the hilt, holding aloft the baby she had feared would be Brian.

  “Keith, what do you have to say about it? What are you gonna do about it?” the reporters asked, crowding around Keith as they had a thousand times before.

  “We’ll get it straightened out later,” Keith said, heading for the exit, “but first I’ve got to get some rest.”

  CODA

  MUCH REMAINS untold, but at least you got to hear the band play. Following the tour that ended with Altamont, I went to live in England and stayed until, after a certain weekend at Red-lands, I decided that if Keith and I kept dipping into the same bag, there would be no book and we would both be dead.

  I spent time with the Stones on later tours, and they were always good, but there never seemed to be so much at stake. There was, though, just as much at stake, but it was harder to see. For one thing, we were never again in the desert, beyond all laws. At later Stones concerts I gave my seats to people like Sir John Gielgud and once to a candidate for vice president of the United States. Guitar players, producers, and women—except for Shirley Watts—came and went, terrible and wonderful things happened, in concert halls, outdoor arenas, nightclubs, jailhouses, courtrooms, bedrooms, as we persisted in our folly.

  Hump yo’se’f ter de load en fergit de distress,

  En dem w’at stan’s by ter scoff,

  Fer de harder de pullin’, de longer de res’,

  En de bigger de feed in de troff.

  JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS:

  “Time Goes by Turns,” Uncle Remus,

  His Songs and His Sayings

  AFTERWORD: ONE HALF OF FOREVER

  Writing this book seemed, at the time, like such a good idea. And it was, in the sense that the hunch I spoke of in Chapter 7 was justified, something was indeed about to happen, and I didn’t miss it. But the book brought none of the benefits I’d hoped for, financial or otherwise, and hasn’t to this day on the eve of the year 2000. I’d envisioned writing a book containing sex, drugs, rock and roll, violence, murder, mayhem, comedy, tragedy—a book that would make it possible for me to go back to my home country of South Georgia and write the stories I felt I was born to tell.

  Well, The True Adventures contained all those elements, but it failed to prove commercial. I continue, perhaps stubbornly, to believe that this was through no fault of its own. The fault was partly mine, I suppose, for taking nearly fifteen years to write the book. By the time it appeared, in late 1984, the atmosphere in the United States was radically different from what it had been at the end of the sixties. Ronald Reagan was president, and the forces of greed had triumphed. Militarism, laissez-faire capitalism, indifference to the sufferings of the poor were upheld as positive virtues. The hippies and yippies had been replaced by yuppies, young urban professionals, and though some people put bumper stickers on their cars saying Die Yuppie Scum, they didn’t die but reproduced. You can see their children at the nearest mall, wearing baggies and nose rings.

  Why did it take so long to write the book? I had to wait for the statute of limitations to expire, I’ve said, but that wasn’t the main reason. I had to become a different person from the narrator in order to tell the story. This was necessary because of the heartbreak, the disappointment, the chagrin, the regret, the remorse. We had all, Stones, fans, hangers-on, parasites, observers, been filled with optimism there in the autumn of 1969, optimism that the following years proved completely unjustified. In our private lives as in the public life of our time, we were disappointed, by others and by ourselves. This is I expect the experience of all generations, but we believed that we were different, that we were somehow chosen, or anointed, for success, for love and happiness. We were wrong.

  My problem in writing the story was expressed in a Bob Dylan song: “if you can’t bring some good news, don’t bring any.” What good news did I have to bring? Day and night for years I sought the answer to that question. The action in the book was not so disheartening as the action that followed and seemed to deny everything that had gone before. The significance of Altamont can be exaggerated but afterward things were different, and not just for the Rolling Stones. It was as if, in response to that event, the young men of the time got into their vans with their big ugly dogs and stringy-haired female companions and, reeking of patchouli, headed for the hills.

  I did a version of this myself, going to an Arkansas Ozark cabin for the better part of a decade. Like my contemporaries, I tried to forget about saving the world. But I had this story, this burden to carry, and I couldn’t let it go. I believed it was, in spite of everything, a story of lasting value, but telling it, in the face of clinical depression, drug addiction, domestic upheaval, nearly killed me. So torn was I that at times I begged for death and for years tempted death almost constantly, at last throwing myself off a North Georgia mountain waterfall onto the granite boulders below, smashing my face, breaking my back. It was an accident. I think.

  The I Ching tells us that the superior man is like a gentle breeze that never stops blowing in the direction of his fate. (Desperate for guidance in those years, sometimes I consulted the I Ching so often that I would get the reading that says, in effect, Stop bothering me.) No matter how many times I lost my bearings, I came back to my story. At times, when hardly anything else did, it seemed to make a kind of sense.

  The French film director François Truffaut once uttered a kind of zen koan by saying that films should not say anything and replying, when asked whether it was possible for a film to say nothing, that it was not. Hemeant, of course, that films should show, not tell. This is also the task of rendering in prose—to show, not tell. There also it is impossible. A number of readers complained about the epigraphs to the chapters, of which I remain rather fond. I intended the epigraphs to present or at least indicate a companion story, the exemplary tale of legendary jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden, among others, to show that the Stones had precursors, they were part of a tradition. I also tried with the quotes from Brown, Freud, Lovell, Nietzsche, and so on to place this tradition within Western religious and intellectual history. No wonder people complained. But I felt, and still feel, the use of the quotes was justified. On the one hand the story was about a few people traveling around playing for kids to dance, as the noted philosopher Shirley Watts observed. On the other hand it seemed, if nothing else because of the numbers involved—millions of people cared about the Stones to some degree, at least enough to pay them money—that there was a larger meaning.

  The war in Vietnam, the assassinations, the riots, the demonstrations, the drug war, were all part of the fabric of the period, the background against which the narcissism of rock and roll played out its (ultimately petty, perhaps) dramas. But the contrasts were so strong—characters like Brian Jones, Gram Parsons, and John Lennon, coexisting with Nixon and his cronies Spiro Agnew and John Mitchell. The bad guys were so easy to identify.

  Then everything seemed to change around. The war, an obvious and ugly mistake, went on for more than another half decade. President Carter at least recognized the malaise of American life in the second half of the seventies, but could do little to change it. Who changed it was Reagan, giving the country what it craved, namely denial. Death Valley Days rerun as Morning in America. Meanwhile many of us kept on taking drugs to numb the pain of loss. We had lost loves, friends, goals, faith. That we survived is a miracle.

  Part of the reason the book remains to this day little more than a rumor is the way it was published, as a sort of cross between a fan rag and serious cultural history. If it’s well wri
tten, let people find out later, I advised, not being optimistic enough to believe that many readers, certainly the ones who had any interest in the Rolling Stones, purchased books based on the quality of the writing. I have read that in my happy native land three percent of the people buy hardback books. What minute part of that three percent reads for style? There were actually a couple of print ads for the book, its publisher making an enormous investment of faith. The ads appeared in the Times of New York and Los Angeles, newspapers read daily by all Stones fans, I don’t think. Not even a classified in Rolling Stone. For the price of the ads in those two prestigious bicoastal papers, you could have bought at least a modest-size ad that someone who cared about rock and roll might have seen. But the book’s editor, who’d been a high school sophomore when Jimi Hendrix died, had for whatever variety of reasons a disdainful attitude toward Rolling Stone’s founder, Jann Wenner, and proudly rejected the idea of buying ad space from him. This did the book little good with music fans.

  My idea had been to have signings in convenience stores, 7/Elevens, airports. A concept greeted with a total lack of comprehension on the part of the publisher. The Stones were a mass phenomenon, so why not go where their fans were? Once again I was oversimplifying what smart folk had complicated for their own ends. Here’s what I learned: the mass-market paperback racks are a quarter inch too small to accommodate trade paperbacks, even small ones. You are assigned a fate.

  In England, where the business was not quite so perverse, the book was promoted ably and intelligently—by Susan Boyd, wife of novelist William Boyd—and appeared on the London Times bestseller list. From the beginning—even before it was finished—the book was a critical success. That is, people who write good books themselves, such as Mikal Gilmore, Harold Brodkey, and Robert Stone, read it and praised it highly, making me feel as if my time wasn’t completely wasted.

  I tried as consciously as I was able to write a book about famous people as if they were completely unknown to the reader, so that a hundred years later, say, someone could pick up the book and read it simply for the story, the working out of the characters’ destinies. Naturally, I did not succeed entirely, but I have to admit I’m not ashamed of the attempt.

  “This book tells you far more about Stanley Booth than you ever wanted to know,” a reviewer in Chicago wrote. He was not alone in that opinion. In fact, the German translation left out an entire chapter, I’m sure because it wasn’t about the Stones. But my objective was to write something more complex than a traditional biography.

  The book possesses, as few have remarked, a highly deliberate form. Its three sections are preceded by scenes of Altamont, the location of the story’s climax. That climax comes just after we topple (mentally) with Shirley Arnold into Brian Jones’ open grave. From the outset I had the sense that telling Brian’s story and the story of the 1969 tour in alternating sequence would make for a powerfully emotional ending. After Altamont we find ourselves back again where we were thirty chapters previous, in Chapter 2, Brian’s parents’ living room with Jinx the cat. The poem on Brian’s grave was a gift to the writer from God, along with the rain and the sunlight shining on the hills. Nothing left to do after that but go home and rest.

  The book was written in various media. First on the midget legal pads I’d jam into the front of my jeans before swinging up onto the stage to seek refuge behind Keith’s amps. Later on regular legal pads used three or four at a time, rewriting passages on first one and then another, arriving finally at an acceptable version. The body of the book was created on a Royal upright typewriter using legal-size paper in much the same way that Kerouac, one of the book’s principal style guides, used teletype paper. (The book’s other stylistic heroes are Vladimir Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh, and—most of all—Raymond Chandler. I tried to make every sentence one that could be spoken by Chandler’s detective narrator Philip Marlowe.) Ultimately I typed the pages on an Adler, which I understand is the kind of typewriter Hitler had, a very good one.

  The draft on legal pages was single-spaced, without capitalization or punctuation except for dashes here and there, as impenetrable as I could make it. There was a reason for my doing this. The book’s original contract called for an advance of $51,000, a goodly sum in the sixties. On signing, I was paid $10,000. But soon afterward, a previous Stones book, a paperback, basically a clippings job by a British newspaper reporter, was republished with new photos and an updating through Altamont. The publisher for what became The True Adventures took umbrage, saying they expected an exclusive, and proposed cutting the advance to $26,000. By that time I’d spent the first ten and needed money to live on. My agent suggested I accept the lowered advance. In a lifetime he might do hundreds of books with the publisher, a few or maybe even only one with me. I, desperate, went along, handing over half the manuscript and receiving another eight grand—and that was pretty much the extent of my fiduciary compensation for telling this tale.

  After the betrayal by my agent and some trouble with the law, I faded into the Boston Mountains of the Ozark Plateau. Back at my house in Memphis for a visit some years later, I received a letter from the agency informing me that the publisher had formally requested delivery of the manuscript, a preliminary to demanding return of the advance. My response was to go into the kitchen for a butcher knife, get a pillow from the bedroom, slice it open, take a handful of feathers, fold them into a sheet of typing paper, stuff it into an envelope, and send it to the agency. Then I went back to the hills, where I made the manuscript as close to unreadable as I could out of paranoia—maybe—because I would rather have died than let go of it before it, not I, was ready. I thought it might be the last thing I ever did, if I ever managed to do it, and I wanted it to be right, or as close as I could make it.

  When at last the book was done, I wound up publishing it elsewhere and paying back the original would-be publisher. The advance, $20,000, enabled me to do that and pay my new agent—with nothing left over. But hey, I got to hear the band play.

  A note on the title of the first hardback edition—I’d called the book The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones all the (considerable) time I’d been writing it. Some genius at the publisher’s got the inspired notion of calling the first hardback edition Dance with the Devil. (Editors don’t generally give a damn what writers think their books should be called, and in any case are without exception frustrated writers themselves, desperate to demonstrate what they sincerely believe to be their superior creativity. Young, unpublished writers should consider yourselves warned.)

  Well, that edition came and, owing to the publisher’s marketing skills, disappeared muy pronto. Because the book did quite well in the U.K. under its real title, the American paperback was called The True Adventures. The funny part is, a few years later the same publisher put out a novel by the actor Kirk Douglas, and it was called Dance with the Devil. Somebody at that publishing house really likes that title and may keep on calling books that until one is a big success.

  In spite of everything, the book won the Deems Taylor award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. (Deems Taylor was the Second World War Leonard Bernstein. Leonard Bernstein was—never mind.) With that came other problems. A friend gave me a party at the St. Regis, attended by Harold Brodkey and a lot of other people, including Jerry Wexler, the only one with sufficient manners to call the next day and thank me for inviting him. “Jerry,” I said, “I need to talk to you.”

  “Baby,” he said, “Let’s have brunch at the Friars on Saturday. They have all the latest lox and bagels.”

  When we met (the Friars was swell, great food, Buddy Hackett was there) I told Wexler about being booked on a global TV show that repeated four times over four days, seen by millions internationally. They’d called me around noon one recent Monday, told me they wanted me to do the show, and I’d asked them to call my publisher and set it up. “Please call me back,” I said. After that the phone didn’t ring for hours. Around five, I started calling the publisher�
��s publicity office. No answer. At nearly seven, I called my editor’s assistant, the one man in the building I knew I could trust. “Mark,” I said, “would you please walk down the hall and get somebody in Publicity to pick up the phone?” He said he would.

  “Hello?” a publicist answered, moments later.

  I introduced myself. “Have you heard from the interview show?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, good. Did you work everything out?”

  “We told them there was a conflict in schedule.”

  “You told them what?”

  “They want you to do the show, they’ll do it whenever you want to.”

  “Call them back. Apologize, and say we’ll do it whenever they want.”

  “You haven’t done anything to apologize for.”

  “I know that.”

  Writers can’t get on television. That’s the rule. At that point, 1985, only Truman Capote and, rarely, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal could wangle airtime. William Styron, Philip Roth, James Jones, Kurt Vonnegut, everybody else could forget it. I had been offered a literally golden opportunity that my publisher’s publicity people had simply tossed into the waste-basket. I told all this to Wexler.

  “You’re fighting,” he said, “what I call the battle of the building.”

  “But Jerry,” I said, full of my ignorant self as usual, “if these people promoted this book, it might make some money. Why wouldn’t they want to make money?”

  “What you’re saying does not obviate the truth of my contention,” Wexler went on placidly. “Somewhere in that building there is a man. And the man has not done this.” He demonstrated with a mighty nod. “If that man should make that gesture, these people who you think are so incompetent would amaze you with their ability to take care of business.”