Life (45 page)

Meanwhile, they’ve got me and they’ve got nothing. I was traveling clean. They’d gone through me with a fine-tooth comb. I’m presuming that Bobby is now definitely in the clink. There’s no way you can have a syringe come flying out and get away with it. I need a phone call, because I know Bobby’s going to need a lawyer. So I’m going through pains to call Frisco, LA, to get him a mouthpiece. Finally they let me on the next connection to Frisco. I get in the queue to get on the plane, and who’s fucking there ahead of me but Bobby bloody Keys! What the fuck are you doing here, baby? They just put me through the goddamn grinder! How come you’re here before me? Says Bobby, “I made a phone call.” “You made a phone call? Who to?”

“To Mr. Dole.”

Bobby:
This man Mr. Dole was the big pineapple exporter, the Pineapple King of Hawaii. You ever opened up a can of Dole pineapples, you know who he is. And he also owned the franchise of a professional football team of the World Football League. And Keith and I somehow had run into his daughter when we played Hawaii on the way to Australia. And she invited us up to the house for an afternoon with her and some of her friends, lovely, lovely ladies, all tanned, tanned and rich. Everything was nice and friendly, and phone numbers were exchanged, and we had an enjoyable evening that went on into the night, and I got real friendly with Mr. Dole’s pretty daughter and I’m sure we drank lots of pineapple juice. This was before security; we were let loose on the world on our own then, so all sorts of shit happened. We’re here Dole-ing it out at the mansion, and in the morning Mr. Dole comes in and there’s this sort of embarrassed, “Oh, Daddy!” He sees this bacchanal scene in his lounge, with Keith Richards and me. And his daughter says, “Let me introduce you to my new friends.” Keith’s just out the door like a shadow, but Mr. Dole, instead of calling the dogs and saying, “Eat these people!,” says, “Very happy to meet you.” Daddy is actually gracious. This is uncomfortable as hell, because I’m screwing the Pineapple Princess. Mr. Dole gives me his card, saying, “Well, obviously you’re my daughter’s friends. If there’s ever anything I can do for you if you’re passing through Hawaii, give me a call. Here’s my private number, goes straight through.” So I take Mr. Dole’s card, put it in my wallet and don’t think any more about it.

Now, on the verge of many years of hard labor in the Texas sun, I have my one phone call and I don’t have any numbers to contact anybody. Nobody from the Stones party knows where the hell we are. Then I find Mr. Dole’s card in my wallet, the only card I have and the only number I have. So I call this number, and I amazingly get through to Mr. Dole. And I say, “Mr. Dole, do you remember that scantily clad guy and that half-dead-looking Englishman who were in your living room the other day? Well, this is half of them.” “Oh hello, Bobby, how are you?” I say, we’ve had a little problem here. They found this and that, and syringes, and… we don’t know what to do. And he says, “Where are you, what happened exactly? What flight were you on?” And I tell him, and he says, “Well, I’ll see what I can do,” and he hangs up. I don’t know what’s happening to Keith but I’m scared to death. I thought we were really going to Leavenworth. I was just waiting for the guys to come with the chains and take us away. So I’m sitting back there, partitioned off by this mirrored glass from these clowns that have booked us. And all of a sudden the phone rings at this guy’s desk, the one who’s been talking all this shit at us, and you can tell, just by the change in his posture, that something has got him going. He looks back at me, looks back at the phone, hangs the phone up, and he just kind of shakes his head very slowly and tears up the charge sheet. They give the shit back, put us on the plane and say, “Don’t ever do this again!” And we fly happily off into the sunset.

But it doesn’t finish there. We get on the plane, and I’m going, fuck, man. Better make some phone calls to get some shit for Frisco when we get there. Know anybody in Frisco? Who do we call? Now, for some reason I pull out my wallet, I immediately feel these two unfamiliar bumps under its skin. Unmistakable. In there are two double-O caps full of smack, which is a damn good whack of pure heroin. The caps came from the chicks in Adelaide, our Sheilas. Customs had been through me like a dose of salts, they’d searched me, they’d been up my ass! If I’d been busted I would never have got back in the country again. How did they miss them? You find that a lot with customs people. If you think you’re clean, you are. And I was totally convinced I had cleaned out my shit. So I immediately went to the bathroom. And suddenly everything went rosy. We’ll share one cap now —snort it because we don’t have any needles. That will keep us going and then we can make phone calls when we get there. Another close shave. The dog that didn’t bark in the night.

Bobby and I seem to be lucky in combination, especially at airports in those years. Once, going through security in New York, Bob was taking care of the baggage. One bag of mine had to go in the hold; it couldn’t go through checks. It had a shooter, my .38 special, in it, with five hundred rounds of ammunition. I used to carry a lot of heat. None of my guns were legal. I’m not allowed to own firearms; I’m a convicted felon. In the hold it would have been cool as part of the general baggage. And Bobby got it fucking wrong, and I saw the bag with the shooter in it going through the X-ray. Fuck! No! I yelled out, “BOB!” and everybody that’s looking at the machinery turned round and looked at me and took their eyes off the screen. They didn’t see it go through.

I
went straight back to
J
amaica,
where I’d left Anita and the children. We stayed in Mammee Bay that spring of 1973. It was already getting a little rough in some ways. Anita was beginning to act in unpredictable ways; she began to suffer from paranoia, and during my absence on tour began to collect a lot of people who took her hospitality for granted—a bad combination. Even when I was there we had a pretty rowdy house. Without realizing it, we were shocking the neighborhood. White man with a big house and everybody knew that Rastas were round there every night, recording, playing music. The neighbors wouldn’t have minded
over the weekend
or something. But not on a Monday or a Tuesday. We were starting to do it every damn night. And also the pong coming out of that house! These guys were burning weed by the pound in the chalice. The smoke would go for a mile. It didn’t suit the neighbors. I learned later that Anita had also sorely pissed a few people off. She’d been warned a few times, and she’d been excessively rude to the constabulary or anyone who complained. They were calling her rude girl. They called her, more comically, Mussolini, because she spoke Italian. Anita can be rough. I was married to her (without being married to her). And she was in trouble.

I left for England, and the cops hit the house at night, almost before I’d landed in London—many cops in plain clothes. There were shots, one of them apparently fired by an Officer Brown when Anita threw a pound of weed past him into the garden. They took Anita, after a lot of struggling, to jail in Saint Ann’s and left the kids. Marlon was barely four and Angela was one year old, and Marlon, at least, watched this. Scary shit. Me, I’m in London finding out what’s happened. My immediate reaction was to take the first flight back to Jamaica. But I was persuaded that it was better to put the pressure on from London. If I’d gone there they’d have probably popped me too. The brothers and sisters had taken the kids and whisked them up to Steer Town before the authorities had thought, “What are we gonna do about these two children?” And they lived up there while Anita was in jail, and the Rastas took perfect care of them. And that was very important to me. It was a huge relief to know they were safe and protected, safer than if they’d been whipped off to a foster home. Angie and Marlon up there with their playmates—who still remember them, who are now great big guys. Then I could concentrate on springing Anita.

There are myths and rumors about Anita in jail, mostly originated by Spanish Tony and his tabloid ghostwriter in Tony’s book about me and copied faithfully by other book writers. That Anita was raped in jail, that I had to pay a very large sum of money to spring her, that it was all a conspiracy by the white nabobs of Jamaica and so on. But none of this happened. The cells in the Saint Ann’s slammer weren’t nice—there was nothing to sleep on, Anita was barely allowed to wash, and it was crawling with cockroaches. None of which did much to calm the bouts of paranoia and hallucination that she suffered then. And they mocked her—“rude girl, rude girl.” But she wasn’t raped, and I didn’t have to pay a bribe. The bust was simply punishment for ignoring their warnings. All this was explained to the lawyer, Hugh Hart, who came to spring her. He discovered that the police were relieved to be rid of her. They didn’t know what to do with her. They hadn’t yet charged her with any offense. Hart got her out by promising to get her off the island. So she was driven home to collect the children and then to a plane for London. Anita was not making a lot of the right moves at the right time. At the same time, Anita’s Anita. You don’t take her on for nothing. I still loved her and she was the mother of my kids. I don’t let go; I have to be kicked out. But Anita and I were starting to be no good together.

My Jamaican roots, by contrast with Anita’s expulsion, would only get deeper, even though I wasn’t able to get back there for a few years. Before Anita’s bust I had already realized I needed a little more protection, that we were getting exposed on the beach at Mammee Bay. I already loved Jamaica enough to look for a really nice house there. I didn’t want any more rent-a-houses. So we went touring with our landlord at the time, Ernie Smatt, who showed me Tommy Steele’s house tucked away up in the hills above Ocho Rios. Its name was Point of View and I still own it to this day. This house had a perfect location, sitting on a small cliff looking out over the bay, in fairly dense hillside woodland. Its location had been picked with the greatest care by an Italian prisoner of war called Andrea Maffessanti, who had been shipped out to Jamaica with a bunch of other Italian POWs. Maffessanti was an architect, and while he was a prisoner he was also looking around for perfect spots to build houses. And he either got them made or he sold his drawings, because many houses there are attributed to him. He was there for two or three years, studying wind and weather, which is why the house is slightly L shaped. During the day you get the breeze off of the sea, from the front, where you’re overlooking the harbor. At six o’clock in the evening, the breeze changes and comes down from the mountain. He had it shaped so the cool breeze comes down past the kitchen, from the land. A brilliant piece of architecture. I got it for eighty grand. The house was kind of dark, with air-conditioning machines, which I tore out immediately. Because of Maffessanti’s design, the house is naturally ventilated. We just put some more fans in, and it’s always worked that way since then.

I bought it and left it on the vine. It was a very busy period, and also I was on the dope.

W
e toured
E
urope
in September and October 1973, after the release of
Goats Head Soup
. The lineup now included, almost permanently until 1977, Billy Preston playing keyboards, usually organ. He’d already had a meteoric career, playing with Little Richard and with the Beatles almost as a fifth member of the band, and writing and churning out his own number one hits. He was from California, born in Houston, a soul and gospel musician who ended up playing with almost everybody who was good. We now toured with two trumpets, two saxophones and two keyboards—Billy’s organ alongside Nicky Hopkins’s piano—as sidemen.

Billy produced a different sound for us. If you listen to the records with Billy Preston, like “Melody,” he fit perfectly. But all the way through a show with Billy, it was like playing with somebody who was going to put his own stamp on everything. He was used to being a star in his own right. There was one time in Glasgow when he was playing so loud he was drowning out the rest of the band. I took him backstage and showed him the blade. “You know what this is, Bill? Dear William. If you don’t turn that fucking thing down right now, you’re going to feel it.” It’s not Billy Preston and the Rolling Stones. You are the keyboard player with the Rolling Stones. But most of the time I never had a problem with it. Certainly Charlie quite enjoyed the jazz influence, and we did a lot of good stuff together.

Billy died of complications brought about by various kinds of overindulgence, in 2006. And there was no reason for him to have gone that way. He could have gone up and up. He had all the talent in the world. I think he’d been in the game too long; he’d started very young. And he was gay at a time when nobody could be openly gay, which added difficulties to his life. Billy could be, most of the time, a bundle of fun. But sometimes he would get on the rag. I had to stop him beating up his boyfriend in an elevator once. Billy, hold it right there or I’ll tear your wig off. He had this ludicrous Afro wig. Meanwhile, he looked perfectly good with the Billy Eckstine look underneath.

I was taking a pee with Bobby Keys in Innsbruck, just after a show, and Bob usually has a joke or two at these moments. But he’s very quiet. And he goes, “Ah, I got bad news.… GP’s dead.” It was like a kick to the solar plexus. I looked at him. Gram, dead? I thought he was straight, I thought he was on the ups. Story later, says Bobby. All I’ve heard is that he’s dead. Oh, my man. You never know quite how it’s going to affect you; it never hits you at once. Another goodbye to another good friend.

We heard later that Gram was clean when he went overboard. He took a normal-sized dose. “Oh, just one…” But cold turkey had already wiped out his body’s resilience against it, and
boom
. There’s that fatal mistake with junkies. When you’ve cleaned up, the body’s just been through that shock. They think, I’ll just use one little hit, but they give themselves the same shot that they were taking the week before, to which they’ve built up a tolerance in amazing proportions, which is why the comedown is so heavy. And the body just says, well, fuck it, I give up. If you’re going to do things like that, you should try and remember the amount you took the first time you ever took it. Start again. A third less. A pinch.