Step Across This Line (11 page)

Heavy Threads

EARLY ADVENTURES IN THE RAG TRADE

In the summer of 1967, which I do not recall anyone calling the Summer of Love back then, I rented a room in a maisonette directly above a legendary boutique—legendary, I mean, at the time; there was something about it that was instantly recognized as mythic—called Granny Takes a Trip. The maisonette belonged to a woman called Judy Scutt, who made up a lot of the clothes for the boutique, and whose son Paul was a university friend of mine. (They were members of a family famous in medical circles for having six toes on each foot, but in spite of the psychotropic spirit of the age they insisted, disappointingly, that they themselves were not Six-Toed Scutts.)

Granny Takes a Trip was at World’s End, at the wrong end of the King’s Road in Chelsea, but to the assorted heads and freaks who hung out there, it was the Mecca, the Olympus, the
Kathmandu
of hippie chic. Mick Jagger was rumored to wear the dresses. Every so often John Lennon’s white limo would stop outside and a chauffeur would go into the shop, scoop up an armload of gear “for Cynthia,” and disappear with it. German photographers with platoons of stone-faced models would arrive once or twice a week to use Granny’s windows as backdrops for their spreads. Granny’s had famous windows. For a long time there was a Warhol-style Marilyn painted over the glass. For a further long time there was the front end of a real Mack truck bursting out of a painted Lichtenstein-y explosion. Later, every boutique on the planet would boast an imitation-Warhol Monroe or a Mack truck exploding from its shopfront, but Granny’s was the first. Like
Gone With the Wind,
it invented the clichés.

Inside Granny’s it was pitch dark. You entered through a heavy bead curtain and were instantly blinded. The air was heavy with incense and patchouli oil and also with the aromas of what the police called Certain Substances. Psychedelic music, big on feedback, terrorized your eardrums. After a time you became aware of a low purple glow, in which you could make out a few motionless shapes. These were probably clothes, probably for sale. You didn’t like to ask. Granny’s was a pretty scary place.

Granny’s people were scornful of the brash boutique-land of the “right,” Sloane Square end of the King’s Road. All those Quant haircuts and thigh-high “snakey boots,” all that shiny plastic, Vidal Sassoon, England-swings-like-a-pendulum-do palaver. All that
light.
It was almost as uncool as (ugh) Carnaby Street. Down there people said “fab” and “groovy.” At Granny’s, you said “beautiful” to express mild approval, and, when you wanted to call something beautiful, you said “really nice.”

I started borrowing my friend Paul’s bedspread jackets and beads. I started nodding my head a lot, wisely. In the quest for cool, it helped that I was Indian. “
India,
man,” people said. “Far out.”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “Yeah.”

“The Maharishi, man,” people said. “Beautiful.”

“Ravi Shankar, man,” I said. At this point people usually ran out of Indians to talk about and we all just went on nodding, beatifically. “Right, right,” we said.
“Right.”

In spite of coming from India, I was not cool. Paul was cool. Paul was what a girl in a teen movie had called “straight from the fridge.” Paul had access to endless long-limbed girls and an equally endless supply of dope. He had a father in the music business. It would have been easy to hate Paul. One day he persuaded me to pay twenty pounds to take part in a photo session for aspiring male models that was being run by a “friend” of his. He said I could wear his clothes. The “friend” took my money and was never seen again. My modeling career failed to take off.

“Wow,” said Paul, first shaking, then nodding his head philosophically. “Bad scene.”

At the heart of our little world was Sylvia. (I never knew her last name.) Sylvia ran the shop. She made Twiggy look like a teenager with a puppy-fat problem. She was very pale, probably because she spent her life sitting in the dark. Her lips were always black. She wore mini-dresses in black velvet or see-through white muslin: her vampire and dead-baby looks. She stood knock-kneed and pigeon-toed after the fashion of the period, her feet forming a tiny, ferocious T. She wore immense silver knuckle-duster rings and a black flower in her hair. Half Love Child, half zombie, she was an awe-inspiring sign of the times. I had been there for several weeks without exchanging a word with her. One day I plucked up my courage and went into the shop.

Sylvia was a dim purple presence in the bottomless depths of the boutique.

“Hi,” I said. “I just thought I’d drop in and introduce myself, since we’re all living here, you know? I just thought it was time we got to know each other. I’m Salman,” and at this point I kind of ran out of steam.

Sylvia loomed out of the dark, coming up close and staring, so that I could see the contempt on her face. Eventually, she shrugged.

“Conversation’s dead, man,” she said.

This was bad news. This was like heavy.
Conversation
was
dead?
Why hadn’t I heard? When was the funeral? I was and am a talkative sort of fellow, but I stood before Sylvia’s scorn, stunned into silence. Like Paul Simon in “The Boxer,” I was enthralled by the tribes of “ragged people” of whom Sylvia was clearly a dark princess, I wanted to be among them, I was “looking for the places only they would know.” How unfair that I was doomed to be excluded from the inner circles of the counter-culture, to be banned forever from where it was at, on account of my chattiness. Conversation was dead, and I didn’t know the new language. I slunk tragically out of Sylvia’s presence, and barely spoke to her again.

Some weeks later, however, she taught me a second lesson about those unusual times. One day—I think it was a Saturday or Sunday, and it was only around noon, so naturally nobody was up, and the shop was shut—the doorbell rang for such a long time that I struggled into a pair of red crushed-velvet flares and staggered downstairs to the door. On the doorstep was an alien: a man in business suit and matching mustache, with a briefcase in one hand and, in the other, a copy of a glossy magazine open at the page on which a model was wearing one of Granny’s latest offerings.

“Good afternoon,” said the alien. “I have a chain of shops in Lancashire . . .”

Sylvia, naked beneath a rather inadequate dressing gown, cigarette dripping from her lips, came down the stairs. The alien turned a deep shade of red and his eyes started sliding around. I retreated.

“Yeah?” said Sylvia.

“Good afternoon,” the alien finally managed. “I have a chain of shops in Lancashire selling ladies’ fashions and I am most interested in this particular garment as featured here. With whom would I speak with a view to placing a first order for six dozen items, with an option to repeat?” It was the biggest order Granny Takes a Trip had ever had. I was standing a few paces behind Sylvia, and halfway up the stairs, now, was Judy Scutt. There was a tingle of excitement in the air. The alien waited patiently while Sylvia considered matters. Then, in one of the defining moments of the sixties, she nodded a few times, slowly,
fashionably.

“We’re closed, man,” she said, and shut the door.

Where Granny’s stood, opposite the World’s End pub, there is now a café called Entre Nous. I have lost touch with Judy Scutt, but I do know that her son Paul, my friend Paul, became a serious casualty of the sixties. His brains fried by acid, he was working, when I last heard of him, at simple manual jobs: picking up leaves in a park, that sort of thing.

Recently, however, I met a man who claimed not only to know Sylvia but to have gone out with her for years. This was genuinely impressive.

“Did she ever speak to you?” I asked him. “Did she actually
have
anything to say about
anything
?”

“No,” he said. “Not a bleeding word.”

October 1994

In the Voodoo Lounge

Clap your hands, Mick Jagger commands Wembley, and seventy thousand people obey. It looks like one of those mass calisthenics demonstrations the Chinese used to go in for. Yeah yeah yeah WOO, he prompts us in the middle of “Brown Sugar,” and yeah yeah yeah WOO we reply. “You’re in good voice tonight,” he flatters us, and for a moment we feel as if we’re all in the band. When I was twenty I was “volunteered” from a student audience to ding a cowbell for Robin Williamson and Mike Heron’s Incredible String Band, but on the whole it’s better singing back-up vocals for the Rolling Stones. In a successful stadium rock show, the audience becomes the event as much as the performers or the set, and Jagger knows that. So for two and a half hours, while Keith plays his monster riffs and kisses his guitar, and Charlie lays down the law on his drums, Mick plays us.

What’s that
like,
facing tens of thousands of people and working them like a small room? A couple of years ago (never too early to begin your research) your correspondent found himself, for a few minutes, up on the Wembley stage with U2, and is accordingly able to offer a brief report.

Light surrounds you like a wall. You can just about see beyond the bouncers to the first rows of upturned faces but, beyond that, zilch. The space feels almost intimate; then the invisible crowd roars like a sci-fi beast and you, well, if you’re a novelist who has somehow strayed out here, you panic. What are you supposed to do with an audience this big?
Sing
to it? But—as in all the best nightmares—you can’t sing a note. At which point, the authentic Rock Star takes charge. Standing next to the Star, watching him coax, caress, and control the invisible Hydra out there, you feel more than impressed. You feel grateful.

I had met Bono a few times, but when I looked into his face on the Wembley stage I saw a stranger there, and understood that this was the Star-creature that normally lay hidden in him, a creature as powerful as the big beastie it sang to, so overwhelming that it could be let out only in this cage of light. The Star-creature in Mick Jagger was rampant at Wembley on Tuesday night. It had been going a lot longer than U2; it was old and huge and brilliant.

All the old-age jokes have been trotted out this past week: Rock ’n’ Wrinkle, Crock ’n’ Roll. I sat next to a man who remembered seeing the Stones on their first tour, September 1963. Thirty-two years ago—
thirty-two years!
—I saw that tour, too; as a sixteen-year-old schoolboy I skived off from school on the bus. My neighbor and I couldn’t agree on who had topped the bill that autumn: one of those guys who died in a plane crash, he thought, while my vote was for Gene Vincent singing “Be-Bop-a-Lula.” But we were both wrong. It was the Everly Brothers and Bo Diddley. The Stones have been going so long that their original audience’s memory has started playing tricks;
that’s
how long.

On your way to a galaxy-sized rock supershow like
Voodoo Lounge,
you must pass through meteor showers of facts and factoids. As well as all the age stuff—did you know their average age is higher than the cabinet’s?—you hear, once again, the old yarn about Keith Richards having all his blood changed; from a disgruntled hatter who failed to gain Jagger’s favor you learn that the great man has a “really tiny head”; it is even suggested—is there no respect anymore?—that Mick has a penchant for exaggerating his assets by shoving assorted fruit and vegetables down the front of his leggings. We also know, by now, that even though the tour is sponsored by Volkswagen (“Stones Team Up with Beetles”), Mick drives a Mercedes; and that, in spite of all their rebellious postures, they’re just social climbers, really, in it for the money and the swank. We know that the Ramones are retiring and have advised the Stones to do the same, and that they won’t, not while the megabucks are pouring in. We have heard that squillions of dollars are raining down upon our heroes.
What can a poor boy do ’cept to sing for a rock ’n’ roll band?
Maybe, these days, they should be singing “Diamond Life” instead.

Even a thirty-two-year devotion to the Rolling Stones can fray, under such a bombardment, into irritability, especially when the Canadian mafia in charge of seat allocation bungs you behind a pillar, and it takes a friendly stadium security officer to get you a seat you can actually see the show from. I’ll admit to sharpening a few adjectives while waiting for the dinosaurs to appear.

Then came dragon-fire, and all carping became instantly redundant. Mark Fisher’s “Cobra” set came to life: the high-tech serpent head in the sky belched flame. Fisher, also responsible for the recent Pink Floyd and Zoo-TV stages, is currently the man to call if you want to spend a fortune turning sports stadia into futureworlds. The show’s promoters like to compare the tour to a military operation, but that misses the mark. What’s more astonishing is to reflect that all this theatrical gigantism—“250 personnel, four days to construct, three different steel crews leapfrogging around the country, 8 miles of cable, the world’s largest mobile Jumbotron video screen, 56 trailers, 9 buses, and a Boeing 727, 3,840,000 watts of power produced by 6,000-horsepower generators,” it says here—is being employed in the cause of mere fun.
Only rock ’n’ roll, but I like it.
Good to know that pleasure has its armies, too.

And from the moment the Stones launched into “Not Fade Away” to the single encore of “Jumping Jack Flash,” there was pleasure, two and a half hours of it. The set was a pyrotechnic marvel, cascading with light, erupting into fireworks, and conjuring up, during “Sympathy for the Devil,” those marvelously eerie giant inflatables—Elvis, a snake, a Star Child, a Hindu goddess—who danced like huge voodoo dolls, slaves to the rhythm, above Jagger’s Baron Samedi capers. And the sound was good too, every note rich and clear, every word audible and resonant; and the high-definition video screen was the best I’ve seen. But none of this is the point.

The point is that the Stones were amazing. Their force, their drive, the sheer quality and freshness of Mick’s singing and the band’s play-ing (Keith Richards, during “Satisfaction,” seemed at one point to be mouthing “I love this song”); Mick’s athleticism and grace of movement (once he would Walk the Dog and do the Funky Chicken the way Tina Turner showed him; now there’s something almost Oriental in his dancing, like a Bharat Natyam dancer with 3,840,000 watts of power coursing through him); and Keith, planted front and center with his feet wide apart, whanging his guitar in classic rock-god style, Keith with his ruined–Mount Rushmore head, effortlessly dominating the stage while Mick skipped, leapt, and zoomed. Keith does not run. He leaves that to his mate. (He should probably leave the singing to Mick, too. At the very least he should not tempt fate and the critics by singing songs called “The Worst.”)

By their second song, “Tumbling Dice,” it was clear that the new “engine room,” in which Charlie Watts had been joined by the bass guitarist Darryl Jones, was as tight and potent as ever. It was also evident, from her duet with Mick on “Gimme Shelter,” that the backup vocalist Lisa Fischer was a bit of a star herself. Not content with having come onstage in what looked like leather underwear, and fuck-me stilettos with bondage straps all the way up her calves,
*9
she also unfurled a rich, sexy voice with sustained high notes that could spear you in the heart.

The new songs just about held their own against the wonders of the back catalog, but it was the classics that really got us going; inevitably, because this music—the “Satisfaction” riff, the dirty genius of “Honky Tonk Woman”—has sunk so deep into our blood that we may even be able, by now, to pass the knowledge on genetically to our children, who will be born humming “how come you dance so good” and those old satanic verses, “pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name.” And how satisfying that the Stones haven’t fallen into the Bob Dylan trap of murdering their old songs. As a result, Wembley was full of kids bopping happily to songs that were older than they were but felt new. This is not a nostalgia show; these songs are not museum pieces. Listen to Keith’s guitar playing on “Wild Horses.” These songs are alive.

There was a gray-haired geezer in a pink T-shirt and jeans—still crazy after all these years—who got himself frog-marched out by a squad of Meat Loafs. There was a dark-haired girl in an outfit that seemed to have been painted onto her body who stood up in the posh enclosure and danced so voluptuously, during “Sweet Virginia,” that people (men) turned away from the stage to watch her. There was some mutual nipple kissing between Mick and Lisa Fischer that got our attention back. There was an ovation for Charlie Watts. You couldn’t have wished for more. The Rolling Stones may not be dangerous now, they may no longer be a threat to decent, civilized society, but they still know how to let it bleed. Yeah yeah yeah WOO.

July 1995