True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (16 page)

The
Time
lady said that everything is inflated here, it's a matter of the difference between countries, advertising in America is very exaggerated compared to that in Britain, everything in Britain tends to be understated.

Yeah, Charlie said, but how do you know about all that if you're a kid, gesturing at
Los
Angeles outside the window.

If you come from here you know about it, she said, and Charlie said, Yeah, but—

Sandison, peeved at being sent home, warned me that no matter what I wrote, Mick would say that he had never seen me. “One of the publicity agents he talked to this week asked Mick about an interview with him in the
Playboy
that's out now, and Mick said he'd never even spoken to anyone from
Playboy.”

Charlie was going up to the Laurel Canyon house to rehearse, and I went along with him, in a station wagon driven by Phil Kaufman. We rode down Doheny to Sunset, up Laurel Canyon Drive to Shady Oak,
and stopped at a wide metal gate. A big black young man was coming toward the car. “That's Tony,” Kaufman said. In his graded-tint shades and purple tie-dyed T-shirt, Tony looked like a Hollywood dream of a Black Panther, shapely and cool and slightly less colossal than King Kong.

Tony peered in at us, said “Secret agents twenty-seven, thirty-nine, and forty-five,” and opened the gate. As we drove past he said, “Man, it's really a mess up there.”

“What?” Phil said. “Why?”

“They forgot to open the chimbley and the fire smoked up the house.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, and some creeps got in.”

“What happened, you throw them out?”

“No, when I got there they was all havin' a party.”

Most of the people at the house were outside because inside the big fireplace was still filling the air with smoke. In the kitchen Phil Kaufman's quadroon girlfriend Janet was serving onto plates spaghetti with what appeared to be cocoons floating in it. Meals at the Oriole house were not very festive, but this one was about as cheering as a cremation, though not as warm.

“Are we getting rid of the smoke?” Jagger asked Phil, standing before the fireplace.

“Yeah,” Phil said. “We're moving to Topanga Canyon.”

“We are getting it together, right?” Mick said, not smiling.

“Yeah, right,” Phil said. He and Sam Cutler stared up the chimney, trying to look competent.

Jagger went into the rehearsal room in the rear of the house and started playing an acoustic guitar. Charlie started playing drums, Bill picked up a bass, and Mick Taylor, a guitar. Jagger told Janet to tell Keith they'd started. She found him smoking languidly in a chainsuspended wicker chair out by the pool. “Keith,” she said, “they've started.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, not moving. “Tell them they're sounding great.”

But in a few minutes Keith came in through the back door of the little rehearsal room and soon chaos became tuning, became a chord, a pattern, a riff, a twelve-bar blues that collapsed after a couple of minutes. Jagger put his guitar down and looked over a list of tunes. “How many are there?” Mick Taylor asked. “Eighteen,” Jagger said. “ ‘Carol,' ‘Jumpin' Jack Flash,' ‘Bad Boy'—”

“ ‘Bad Boy'—that goes back a ways,” Wyman said.

“Let's do it,” Keith said, and they did it, a blues to inflame every girl-child within hearing: “I'm a bad boy, come to your town—”

Next they did “Street Fighting Man.” From the big Altec speakers sound was pounding this coffin-shaped room, built to take abuse: lined
at the top with fiberglass home insulation mats, the walls covered with carpet pads and one oriental rug.

When the song ended, Keith said, “We should have the black light come on next—”

“And police come on with truncheons, clubbing each other,” Jagger said. “To be followed by showers of petals.”

Jagger said the Stones would open their shows with “Jumpin' Jack Flash,” the song they released the week of Brian's final arrest, but now they played it with difficulty and finally it fell apart. Keith told Mick Taylor, “On that one you'll want to use the Flying Arrow—”

“Lying farrow,” Jagger said.

“Mia Farrow,” said Keith.

Mick Taylor said, “Well, we can just take all the guitars onstage and see which we want—”

Jagger laughed. “Horrible thought.”

Then Wyman had an idea—for an invention, an instrument that could be attached to a guitar and would light up when a string was in tune. Jagger and Keith insisted it was impossible. Charlie said it was possible and so did I. Keith was down on the whole idea. “Use your ears,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Jagger. “That's what you've got your god-given talent for.”

“Actually I was thinkin' of it for you, man,” Bill said to Keith. “I don't have any trouble stayin' in tune, you're the one.”

As they started to play “Monkey Man,” Phil Kaufman called me to the telephone. Pete Callaway was calling, a friend from Georgia. Later Pete and I had lived together in New Orleans, where he was a student and I was a dropout at Tulane. Now he was married and inching toward a Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia while sometimes getting his head cracked by police at student demonstrations.

I took the call in the kitchen. We had a short version of the same phone conversation we had had every few months for years, a ritual of private jokes to let each other know that we were still ourselves, nothing had changed. Pete's little sister Nicole was with him. She told me hello and asked me to come see her when I was in town with the Stones. She was twenty-two, had just left graduate school without taking a degree, and was living in Greenwich Village. The last time I saw her she was a ravishing seventeen. Because of the way she sounded, a certain quality in her voice, on my fatal yellow pad I wrote her number.

The rehearsal room was a charging freight of sound. Jagger was the key—when he was sailing, screaming or moaning, he couldn't do anything in between, the Stones sailed; when he stopped, the music disintegrated.

“On ‘Sympathy for the Devil' we'll need another drum, some congas,”
Mick said. “Maybe we can get some sort of black person to come along and do it.”

Mick was trying to decide whether “Sympathy” should be “quite short or very long,” his voice shaky, insecure. I had the feeling it might have to do with me, watching them in this small room. Mick's voice dragged until one by one they stopped playing. None of them looked at the others. Then Mick Taylor played a few notes, Keith played a chord, another chord, a bright pattern of notes, and everyone was playing, Mick singing at the end of the room, his back to me. They sounded like Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five, except that Mick Taylor was playing horrible Bo Diddley noises and Keith was playing a solo with a scream lost in it. Finally Mick sat down on the piano bench, Keith stopped, they all stopped: “Still falls down at the end,” Mick said.

Waiting to go to what would be a dull party in Bel Air, we lounged around the house. Jagger and I were sitting with Wyman on the black leather couch, looking out the big window at the black hills of Halloween. Wyman said it was a holiday for kids, mostly, and Jagger disagreed: “They're real, those spirits, and the people to come after us will know about them.”

“If the world survives,” I said.

“We'll blow it up eventually,” Mick said. “That's inevitable,”

David Sandison woke me in the middle of the morning, carrying his bags out of the Oz room as he left, jaw firmly set, for England. I told him goodbye, showered, and dressed. On the coffee table in the living room was a magazine with a cover photo of Jagger and a story that ended, “The Rolling Stones are in town and everyone seems to be waiting for something to happen.” The lead story was about the Beatles' financial problems with Allen Klein.

A young man from
Newsweek
was sitting on the back terrace with a notebook and a telegram of questions from his bosses in New York. Charlie and I joined him, Bill and Astrid showed up, and finally the three other Stones arrived, stumbling across the back lawn. Keith was wearing snakeskin boots, a red snakeskin belt, and a rose-colored shirt, torn off like most of his shirts above the kidneys to keep the tail out of the way of his guitar playing. The reporter dutifully followed the telegram—How do you feel about touring again—and received minimal answers. He asked what happened to Brian, and Keith said, “We couldn't figure it out. He was getting in touch with musicians, trying to get a band together—”

Newsweek
didn't press any points, no interviewers did with the Stones, they hung back from the dark places in the Stones' past. The Stones had learned that nothing of any interest was likely to happen in the presence
of interviewers and managed with near-perfect success to ignore them.

When the
Newsweek
talk ended and the reporter left, we all decided to have lunch together on the Strip. Charlie and I went inside for a minute and came back to see the other Stones driving away in a turquoise Continental. “Really, they are the rudest people,” Charlie said.

Later, at Shady Oak, while the Stones rehearsed, Gram Parsons and I stood out back, leaning against his iridescent blue Harley-Davidson motorcycle, the hills dark behind him as he talked, seemingly against his will, about the Okefenokee country. Gram was born in Florida but grew up in Waycross, going hunting and fishing in the Swamp with his father. After his mother remarried he learned about other places, attended Harvard for a while. “You might say I was lucky,” he said. “I got both sides of it.”

I said nothing. Anyone who heard Gram sing “Do You Know How It Feels to Be Lonesome” had an idea how lucky he was.

Gram was going to play with the Burritos tonight, and I wanted to hear him. He wished I could, only he had to carry a lot of instruments and equipment, his roadie, equipment handler, in his car—but Sam Cutler wanted to come too, and Sam Cutler was not to be denied. So we commandeered the station wagon, the roadie loaded it, and I was nominated driver because the others couldn't believe I drove as badly as they did. Waiting a few minutes in the wagon for Sam and Gram, who were inside, Gram's roadie was bitching about what a drag Gram was to work for, unreliable, not punctual, his rich stepfather gives him a tremendous allowance—

The servant's grumbles subsided as Gram and Sam came out and we set our course south on the freeway for a club called the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach, but soon the roadie told me that if I was going to drive this slow I'd better get in another lane. Yeah, but it's driving funny, I said, and we had to drive for miles, the left rear end wobbling worse all the time, until we could stop at a gas station. Phil Kaufman's girlfriend Janet, now they tell me, had a flat tire, changed it herself, the wheel had never since been tightened, and had almost cut through the lug nuts. The station attendant said he didn't have any lug nuts, and we tightened up the worn ones and rolled slowly with our fingers crossed through Huntington Beach to the Golden Bear.

While Gram and the Burritos were getting ready to play, the proprietor, George Nikos, a courtly man, not young, invited Sam, Gram's roadie, and me into his office, gave us glasses of red wine, and Sam called Hertz about the wagon. He'd asked me to call them and I'd advised him that Americans would do anything for a person with an English accent. “Not one loik moin,” Sam said, but I explained that in California they didn't know the difference. He finished the call and sat back like a lord in his library after dinner, the blaze on the hearth,
and talked about his experiences with bands as if they were military campaigns. “But the Stones are the best,” he said. “They're the best because they're the scaredest: they're the most worried band I've ever seen.”

I spent the night drinking wine and watching Gram sing. His step-father was there, soft and prissy, with a large table of guests. Everybody got drunk—during the last set it seemed that Gram, his hair-frost glistening, would fall out of the spotlight. But he glowed. He was radiant. He was covered with star-frost like Elvis Presley in his white suit on
The Jackie Gleason Stage Show
in 1956.

I started out younger
At most everything
All the pleasures and dangers
What else could life bring?

“You all are really gone be a success,” I said after the first set.

“I think we already are,” Gram said.

We went out back to smoke a joint, where it was not cool at all, Gram said, they love to bust you for dope down here. There's a garage down this alley, I'll go first and you follow me in a minute.

The garage was open and empty, with a dirt-and-cinder floor. I smoked while Gram peed in the alley, then he smoked while I peed, then we both smoked. Though we both tried to be cosmopolitan as hell, Gram, whose adrenalin was pumping from being onstage, was declaiming in the manner of Eugene Talmadge: I know one damn thing, I love the Rolling Stones and Keith Richards. We were both staggering pretty good, but I paid close attention.

What it comes down to, Gram said, is a man and a woman. I've got a little baby girl, beautiful, she's with her mother—I passed him the end of the joint and he said, What we got to have in this world is more love or more slack.

Late the next afternoon, the Stones rehearsed at the Warner Brothers movie lot, on soundstage four, copped by Al Steckler, who'd dangled before the Warner record company the Stones' soon-to-expire recording contract. Past the gates, down the central drive (wide concrete, lined with firs and palms), the soundstages all looked abandoned, their exteriors cracked and faded mauve. Inside soundstage four the Stones, minus Wyman (who wasn't coming: “Nobody told me what time”), were rehearsing on a partially dismantled set, a marathon dance ballroom on a pier, made for the film of Horace McCoy's
They Shoot Horses, Don't They?,
a reproduction of a place where people danced themselves to death.