True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (11 page)

At Oriole I ate white cheddar sandwiches and drank beer for breakfast. Charlie was going to Sunset Sound, and Sandison was coming along, something about seeing a writer from the
Saturday Review.
I joined them. A limousine took us there, and we went down the little alley and through the many gates and doors, locking each one behind us, to the control room, a carpeted capsule containing a large console with hundreds of lights, buttons, switches, levers, a vast dark window before us, giant speakers mounted on the wall over the window, tilted toward our heads, exploding with sound.

Keith, sitting at the console, was wearing a fringed leather jacket of the kind then popular. But Keith, true to form, was wearing the
worst-looking one I had ever seen, the leather faded yellow, cracked and dry, the lining ripped out. His ear-tooth was dangling, a big yellow joint was in his left hand, in his right hand the red knob that boosted the intensity of his guitar track. The tracks were stacked eight deep on the wide plastic tape wheeling through the recording machine, a sound engineer watching seven of the tracks, Keith watching his own. Jagger stood behind them, dressed in tight blue slacks, blue open-throated pullover, left hand on hip, right elbow tight to side, right hand palm up holding a joint the size of the average Negro basketball player's putz, which he was smoking not like Joan Crawford or even Bette Davis but like Theda Bara, eyes closed, lips pursed, then mouth slightly open, smoke hanging luxuriantly in thick open lips, soft sucking inhale.

Keith was grinning, showing bad teeth, making deep wrinkles around his eyes as his guitar lick came around and he turned the knob to make it scream, boosting the pain each time like men drunk in bars at the turn of the century twisting the knobs of an electric shock machine, five cents a shock—except that Keith was doing it to get your attention, just giving you a little high voltage to bring your mind around to what was being said:
Did you hear about the Midnight Rambler?
—Jagger's harmonica and Keith's guitar whining and bending, swooping together, just about to jump the garden wall—
Says every-body's got to go

We were locked up in the studio not because of the dope but because the Stones, lacking work permits, were not supposed to use American recording studios. What they were doing was illegal, and they were enjoying it very much. In the middle of the song,
the one you never seen before,
two men came into the control room, one in a silk suit that changed from blue to green like automobile enamel, a cigar in his leaden jaw, glossy machined-looking black hair, Pete Bennett: ‘I'm the best guy in the world to have pushin' ya record fa ya.” With him in Hush Puppies and a yellow T-shirt, looking, though only in his thirties, old and grey and sort of like Jack Ruby with cancer, was the legendary Allen Klein, who I realized had failed to squash my plans for a book like a bug under his Hush Puppies only because, so far, he hadn't got around to it. I was frightened that he would notice me and step on me, and I scooted around to the front of the console, sat on a couch, and buried my face in a magazine. It contained an interview with Phil Spector, who when he was twenty-one became famous as rock and roll music's first teenaged millionaire. In the course of the interview Spector ridiculed almost everyone in the music business, including the Mafia, but of Allen Klein he would say only, “I don't think he's a very good cat.” I huddled lower on the leatherette. The song was building to some insane climax, message of fear riding on
waves of harmonica and guitar—faster and faster, breathless, frantic, and I wondered what the hell I was doing with these mad English owl-hoots, and what were they doing that they needed Allen Klein, who scared Phil Spector, a man with so many bodyguards and fences and so much bullet-proof glass that he ridiculed the Stones for getting arrested; even Spector seemed afraid of this pudgy glum-faced accountant in his bulging yellow T-shirt. But what scared me most was the knowledge that whatever they were up to, I had to know about it. No matter if Klein took my book, took my money, had me killed, I had to try to stick around and see what happened. I had to do it—to do something—for Christopher, but I had liked Brian and wanted to know him better. Also, I had the feeling something was going to happen, something I shouldn't miss. The song had slowed down now to excruciating little bird calls between harp and guitar, Mick and Keith exploring the poetry of the last breathless moments as the blade rides, and Mick groaned in the voice of someone who told you he was not the Boston Strangler.

As I sat on that Naugahyde couch, in crazy sixties-end Los Angeles, roaring from the speakers were such sounds, such low-down human groans and cries not new, old as time, almost, but never on a record had they seemed so threatening. I had heard such sounds before, heard them as a little boy lying in bed in the wiregrass country of south Georgia, heard the sounds of animals crying far off in the woods, heard the sounds the black woods hands made having what they called church, far off in the woods, the all-night drums, like the heartbeat of the dark swampy woods,
boom
dada
boom
dada, and heard the sounds that I could not identify—the really frightening ones. I had not been so frightened since I was a boy lying slender and white and frail in the dark bed, finding a sound in the night, losing it, waiting for it again, a soft sighing sound that might have been the wind easing through the tops of the long-needle pines, or might have been cattle lowing a long way off, but always came back to sounding most like a simple human exhalation right outside the rusty screen of my bedroom window, the quietly released breath of a man standing quietly, just watching, waiting. I loved the woods but for years I lay awake at night fearing that sound. When I was old enough to have a rifle I would sometimes hear the sound, the wind, the distant animal call, the careful breathing in the dark, and I would lie there as long as I could stand it and then take my rifle and slip out of the dark house, not waking anyone, and look around outside, crouching low, breathing with my mouth open to keep from making the fearful telltale sound. It was the same feeling I had now, as the sounds, the awful wails of guitar and mouth harp, pitched and blended together. The feeling came partly from the music and partly from the presence behind my back of this man Klein, a full-blood Jew they would call him in the
Swamp, a man of great power, to me almost incalculable power, a man who did not know me, who cared nothing for me. I did not know yet how good or evil the Stones were, but of Klein I was simply afraid, because even though I had a letter from the Stones, a magic piece of paper, there was still the tour, this gauntlet I had to run, and a man like Klein could, I sensed, stop me any time he wanted to take the trouble. But when I was twelve, standing in the dark outside my grandfather's house, frightened nearly to death, I was still, in some part of my mind that is a gift from my father who got it from his father who got it from God knows where, calm and ready, I think, to do what had to be done. If there had suddenly appeared before me one of the men my grandfather worked with and whom I loved so much, loved their voices and their looks, their yellow eyeballs and smooth bulging black muscles, transformed by poison whiskey (it had happened; my grandfather was nearly stabbed with a sharpened three-corner file) into a mad death-wielding animal, I could have stayed calm enough and steady enough in my terror to shoot him. So I stayed calm and steady in my terror, sensing the craziness of the Stones, of mad Keith, and knowing that what the Stones had already done had killed one of them.

Sandison came in—I hadn't noticed that he'd left—with a girl, and they sat beside me on the couch. She was wearing blue jeans and carrying a notebook. The song track was so loud as to preclude introductions. I spoke into her ear: “You must be from the
Saturday Review.”

“Yes,” she shouted back. I read her lips. “Who are you?”

This was giving me something to do besides get scared. “Jann Wenner,” I said.

She looked at me as if I were crazy, which I had just been thinking about becoming. Then she turned to Sandison and in a second he answered her, speaking my name so loudly that I heard it. If I heard it, could Klein hear it? If he heard it, would he recognize it? If I had known more about Klein, I would be even more worried. But he had not heard; when I looked around, he was going out the door with Mick. They went into the studio, leaving the door open, light from the hall falling into the big high-ceilinged room, dimly illuminating Mick at the piano bench, Klein sitting backwards around a folding chair. Mick was erasing with the back of his hand something Klein had said. Big as Klein was, this skinny foppish young Englishman could stand him off, deny him the tour and get away with it. It was almost enough to make you afraid of Mick, of the Stones.

When they finished talking Klein left, Pete Bennett with him, and Jagger came back into the control room. For the moment the tapes were still, and Sandison introduced the
Saturday Review's
girl re­
porter to Mick. She looked sleepy, hypnotized by Mick's presence like a chicken by a snake. Then she remembered something. “Oh!” She picked up her carpetbag and took out a bunch of marijuana plant-tops. “I brought you some flowers.”

“Oh, thank you,” Mick said, taking the boughs and throwing them on the couch. “That's very nice.”

Sandison was speaking to Mick, who emitted a tiny guffaw apropos of nothing Sandison was saying and threw a slow-motion pitch toward the girl's left tit. She slowly managed to react; as his hand barely missed her breast she threw the same sort of punch back at him, but its aim was uncertain, she couldn't very well hit him in the balls and it was pointless to strike his flat chest. Also, in the midst of the act, the sense of it seemed to come to her—she was returning a playful punch Mick Jagger had made at her tit, her tit had become more popular than she ever expected—and this was not stupid, he really was a star, his potency existed in the room, her hand stopped in mid-air, opened, fluttered like a shot bird to her side.

Mick took her up to a chair beside the control board and told her to ask him some questions. She began to ask tiny
Saturday Review
questions, and he gave brief, smiling replies. Al Steckler arrived with the pictures for the concert programs, showed them to Mick and asked, What about text? I don't know, Mick said, Keith, what about a text? Yeah, Keith said, something short, just— Maybe we can get Sam to do something. Hey, Mick said, looking at me. Ah, Keith said.
You
're a writer, Mick said.

“What— what— all right, what do you want?”

“Something for the program,” Mick said. “Not very long. Something lighthearted.”

“How long, Al?”

“A hundred and eighty words.”

“A what? How do you know?”

Al shrugged. “That's long enough.”

“You know,” Mick said. “Something lighthearted.”

“I need it as soon as I can get it,” Al said.

I figured I'd better go home and start writing. Sandison was leaving, so we went together. There were no cars at the studio, but we expected to get a cab on Sunset. Once we got out, the doors locked behind us, there were of course no cabs, this was Los Angeles. We walked along, thinking we'd find a cab in each block. Two with fares passed and then none, but I didn't mind, it was a pleasure to walk toward the sunset on Sunset. There were all sorts of signs around, a machine that took your fifty cents and dropped into your hot hand a map to the homes of Hollywood stars, and just a step away another machine selling the
L.A. Times,
whose headline read
I WANT HELP, SAYS ZODIAC
KILLER.
We passed Ralph's Pioneer House, the Vienna Hofbrau, Father Payton's Crusade for Family Prayer, and a man who was walking along reading the newspaper. (I want help!) On his back he was wearing a battery-powered machine with a mask that fit over his mouth and nose, allowing him to breathe the polluted air. Across the street was the Apocalypse, a store specializing in pornographic books and notions. Sandison had “never been in one in America,” so I went in with him. Kama Sutra Oil, plastic vibrating dildoes, inflatable vaginas, posters of men, boys, women, girls, and various animals, separately and in combinations. The books were equally various:
Hot Snatch, Pedophilia, The Story of O,
all manner of porn for all persuasions. By the time we left the store the books had become in my mind one giant volume called
The Return of the Son of the Curse of the Vengeance of the Giant Vaginas.

Night fell, the lights came on, cars buzzed around us, the mist filled our lungs. We found a taxi in the deadly romantic murk and made it back up to Oriole.

While I was wandering around the house trying to get high enough to write 180 words, Steckler gripped my biceps, gave me the high beam from his baby blues and said “Please.” I told him if he wanted his fucking text to leave me the hell alone. Bowery Boys Routine #87, the Artist. I went back to the bedroom and tried to write. A few minutes ago I had been in the office with Sandison and his friend Sharon, from United Press International, who told me that Kerouac's wake had been going on since two o'clock that afternoon. He would be buried tomorrow. Sandison had read aloud selections from the pornography he'd bought, and now as I sat on the Wizard of Oz bedspread I could think only of phrases like “Keith's proud nipples stiffened.” There was an idea at the back of my mind, certain words kept flashing:
Stones, Apocalypse, I want help,
but it was too heavy, not lighthearted. Finally I told Steckler that there was nothing new to be said about the Stones in 180 words.

“That's all right,” he said. “I never thought it needed words.”

At the present time Buddy Bolden is made out to be an epochal figure, his importance in the history of jazz seems to be overwhelming, and legends are woven about his person: he was somewhat of a scoundrel and sot, he never paid his musicians, he delighted in regaling or shocking his audience by singing obscene couplets, his instrumental talents and his powers of improvisation earned him the soubriquet of “King” Bolden; he used to place himself near the open window and blow his horn like a maniac, he could be heard miles away across the river, and all within range, attracted as if by a magnet by this clarion call, would flock around the great cornetist. We are witnessing the birth of an epic of our own times.