True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (17 page)

The atmosphere was that of a deserted carnival, overarching beams braced by orange and red pilings topped with female figures of gilded stucco, draped in low-cut ancient Greek gowns, carrying gilded baskets of fruit and playing gilded trumpets. At one end of the ballroom set were bleachers, with this sign above them:

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HOW LONG WILL THEY LAST
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DAYS          COUPLES   HOURS          DAYS
Remaining   Elapsed

In front of a row of amplifiers—twenty-five of them, courtesy of the Ampeg company, twenty-one in operation—Mick Taylor and Keith were tuning their guitars, and in the center of the ballroom, beneath a huge mirror-chip sphere, Mick Jagger was singing Chuck Berry's “Carol”:

I'm gonna learn to dance
If it takes me all night and day

Charlie was playing hard and tight, all business. Mick Taylor knew the song but was having some sort of trouble, playing in fits and starts, shaking his head. After “Carol,” they did the Jagger/Richards songs “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Midnight Rambler,” and “I'm Free,” Jagger singing with his arms folded, then in the instrumental breaks walking to the far end of the ballroom floor to listen. They played each song three or four times, and finally, on his own “Stray Cat Blues,” Jagger began to show a little enthusiasm, doing microphone monkey-shines, spinning the mikestand like a baton, throwing it up in the air and catching it. None of the others seemed to be having fun except Keith, who played louder and louder. They kept stopping to diddle with the amplifiers, and Stu, who had a new blue station wagon loaded with equipment parked right center stage, talked to Mick Taylor in hushed tones. When they started again Keith turned his amp all the way up and, standing in the movie set's leftover confetti, made god-awful loud noises on a clear plastic guitar. In a world with guitars made from all different kinds of woods, stainless steel guitars, tortoise-shell guitars, guitars inlaid with gold and ivory, Keith chose to play one that looked as if it were made of hardened unflavored gelatin.

Next the Stones played Chuck Berry's “Little Queenie” and more Jagger/Richards songs: “Satisfaction,” “Honky Tonk Women,” and “Street Fighting Man,” the song banned last year in Chicago during the riots at the Democratic national convention. Keith, a concave figure, eyes nearly closed, bent over his ugly guitar, was making a deafening mad racket. I remembered seeing, back at the Oriole house, an interview
in an old issue of a music magazine with Jim Morrison asking the interviewer, “You were in Chicago—what was it like?” and the interviewer saying, “It was like a Rolling Stones concert.”

When the Stones took a break, Charlie came over and asked me, “What do you like about this band?”

“That's a very hard question to answer,” I said.

“Do we sound—like one of those bands at the Whisky? I mean, Mick's something more than that, and Keith is, but the rest of us . . . do we sound like one of those bands?”

“No,” I said.

The Stones had rehearsed all the songs in the show except three old blues that Mick and Keith would do without electric guitars. They started one, sitting down, Keith playing a National steel-bodied guitar, but Keith said, “We can't do it.” “It's a wank,” Mick said.

“Right, Mick,” Keith said, standing up. “It's a wank, everybody.” He put on his fringed leather jacket and purple bug-eye sunglasses, and everybody left except Charlie and me and Stu, who would give us a ride home as soon as he finished packing up the guitars. “Really,” Stu said, putting the guitars in their velvet-lined cases into the station wagon, “I never heard the like. A musician told me his amp was
too loud.
I simply told him Keith Richards is a very strong guitar player, and if you don't play as loud as he does, you'll be just as well off playing rhythm.

“I'm getting so fed up,” Stu muttered to himself as we got into the station wagon and headed out. “You get them new amps, new guitars, new everything, and it still goes wrong, then what do you do?

“Mick asked what I'd wear onstage and I suggested what about dressing like this” (golf shirt, blue jeans, and Hush Puppies) “and he seemed to think that was completely laughable, not to be taken seriously at all.” Stu was quiet for a moment, as if even he could not believe what was coming next: “It seems I'm to wear a white tuxedo.” After another moment of pregnant silence he said, very matter-of-factly, “It's going to cost them a bloody fortune to have me play with them” (Stu who knew hardly any chords by name and was reluctant to ask Keith since Keith didn't know their names either and would just as soon have people think he did) “. . . and even more if I have to wear a tux. Cash every night one thousand dollars, two thousand with the tux.”

At Oriole there was nothing in the house to eat, so Charlie and I were driven to the Aware Inn, a restaurant on Sunset, by Mimi, the girl who hadn't shown up to meet me when I arrived at the airport. Her performance then was typical, because she did pretty much as she liked even if she chose to show up, tall, skinny, barefooted, rat-faced, really like a rat, a face flat on both sides concluding in a sharp and most often displeased nose, seemingly displeased just to be there. On this
tour we would have many idiosyncratic drivers, including me, but none quite so bored, so butch, or so belligerent as Mimi. If she showed up when she was not needed she made it no secret that she could be having a better time elsewhere, and if she was needed her attitude was about the same. While most drivers would, if your luck held out, get you to your destination and wait or come back to pick you up, Mimi would if she cared to, and she cared to, accompany you wherever you went, so that she sat down to eat at the Aware Inn with Charlie and me, both of us struck numb by the violent chicness of the place. We were, it was clear, barely worthy of being accepted as customers—in fact the Japanese waiter poured wine on me to put me in my place—while Mimi, perfectly not to say blissfully unimpressed, somehow managed to chew gum and rattle her car keys throughout dinner. Charlie and I gulped a few bites and escaped, but the management was superciliously slow to take our not-with-it money, and we both registered disappointment when, once outside, we saw our car, left by Mimi at the curb, being towed away by an L.A. county sheriff's department tow truck.

“Isn't that our car?” Charlie asked.

“Yeah,” said Mimi, engaged as assiduously in smacking her gum and rattling her car keys as a Hindu mystic in the tintinnabulation of his little prayer bell.

“Well, tell them to stop,” Charlie said.

“Hey, stop,” said Mimi, as the car was pulled into the swiftly moving traffic to disappear in the night. A white Jaguar stopped at the curb before us, and we moved aside to let some aware people enter the Inn. It was late Sunday evening on the Strip, the sidewalk busy with kids who looked so strange that the police, walking by in pairs, gazed blankly into space trying not to see. “Maybe you'd better do something,” Charlie told Mimi.

“Right,” she said, went back into the Inn, and vanished. Charlie and I spent what seemed a long time standing first outside the Inn, then outside a place where they sold beads and drug paraphernalia, finally outside a closed boutique as we sought shelter of increasing darkness from the kids who approached, their eyes weirdly peaceful wastes of drug-ridden urban madness, saying, “Wow, you're Charlie Watts, far out.”

Charlie listened to them with kind dismay. One girl said that San Francisco was much better than Los Angeles because around Haight Street you could get all the speed you wanted, and you could sit on the sidewalk and roll joints and nobody would bust you, and you could go to the Family Dog at night and drink this great punch that's usually filled with acid, it's great, you know, it's a great place. How old are you? Charlie asked her, and she said, Seventeen.

When we made it back to Oriole, the phone was ringing. Jo was
already talking to Jagger on another line, so I answered it and found myself talking to the popular music critic of
Esquire
magazine. He told me that he and
The New Yorker's
pop critic, a girl with whom he had been living for some time, were coming to interview Jagger. “Actually we're not together anymore,” he said. “I don't know if you've heard about all this.”

“Not really,” I said. Jo was saying goodbye to Mick.

“We're going to have a joint interview with Jagger where we'll try to patch things up between us. Is Jo Bergman there?”

“Yes,” I said. “Talk to Jo. Please.”

Next day I sat out in the sunlight with Charlie, Shirley, and Serafina Watts. Serafina held out her arms with delight to Charlie and me.
“Two
daddies,” she said. Since coming to California Serafina had begun to learn to walk, and now she started across the lush lawn toward us, her plump little legs getting farther apart until, bottom-heavy, she sat with a plop.

Shirley was writing a letter to a friend in England. “I'm saying that I'm going to meet Mae West tomorrow.”

“Are you?” Charlie asked.

“I'm being taken to the set of
Myra Breckinridge,
and even if I don't meet Mae West I shall say I did.”

I went inside, smiling in this soulless house for a change, and saw Ronnie Schneider coming in with suitcases, wife Jane, and infant baby boy. I stopped smiling.

At rehearsal, with the first concert, the Stones' Return, four days away, just two more rehearsals after this one, a general depression prevailed. Jagger, the emotional barometer of the group, was having little physical problems, a toothache, sore throat, and dozed sadly in a chair, then lay prostrate on the amp covers, spread out in front of the bleachers. Finally he dragged himself up to say, “All right now, not too loud, we'll do the whole thing, I'll shout out the titles.” Suddenly the band was playing “Jumpin' Jack Flash” deafeningly loud, Mick croaking, doing little handclaps for Keith's playing. The next song, “Carol,” started at a decibel level well above the human pain threshold. “Bit loud,” Keith said, turning his amps down slightly. He was playing crisp Chuck Berry licks on his plastic guitar, Mick with two fingers in the air, “gonna learn to dance—”

Then Charlie got up from his stool to talk to Stu and they switched a cymbal. “Come on,” Mick said, “we're tryna get this fuckin' show together.” With the new cymbal in place they did “Sympathy for the Devil” and then “Stray Cat Blues,” Jagger lowering the age of the girl in the song from fifteen to thirteen. Charlie was hitting the drums as hard as he could with the wrong end of the sticks.

A copy of the
Los Angeles Times
was lying on a folding chair, showing the front-page summary of national news: “Assassination: A report by the National Violence Commission said the threat of assassination seems to be growing and urged protection for all public officials believed to be in danger. View of Abortion: A majority of American doctors questioned in a poll say that a woman should be able to have an abortion if she asks for one. Most also said that discreet homosexual acts between consenting adults should be permitted without legal restriction, but the doctors overwhelmingly rejected the idea of legalized marijuana.”

“Midnight Rambler” was ending, Mick dancing in front of the bass drum, chanting to Charlie “Fasterfasterfaster—” Next Mick sat down to sing “Love in Vain,” a blues Keith found on a bootleg Robert Johnson album, and then, still sitting, Mick sang “I'm Free,” seeming tired and glum again. He stood up to start “Let It Bleed,” but it sounded bad and he said in a parody north-of-England accent, “Noo noo noo, lads, all oota toon.” Mick and Keith talked about whether they should do the song. “Either it's out of tune or it's just a mess,” Mick said, but they tried it again and it worked, Mick did little kicks and bumps and grinds. While singing “Satisfaction” he leapt and spun, sick throat forgotten. The band cooked through the next two songs, “Honky Tonk Women” and “Street Fighting Man.” Then Mick and Keith kicked Bill, soiling the seat of his white trousers. Bill retaliated by kicking Jagger as soon as he turned his back, but Mick's trousers were black anyway and he said, “Go right ahead, dear, you can put it up there anytime.” Bill appeared uncertain how to respond and wandered a few steps away, tuning his bass.

Keith, using a Sinex inhaler, answered Mick's question, “What'll we do?” with “Under My Thumb.”

“ ‘Under My Thumb,' ” Jagger mused. “Some people think that's quite nice.”

“Rather quiet,” Keith said.

“Must be joking,” said Mick Taylor.

“It doesn't matter what we decide to do,” Jagger said, “once we get onstage all the plans go by the board anyway.”

After supper at Oriole we sat, a little band of strangers, around the coffee table in the living room. Jane Schneider, a pretty girl with dark eyes and dark auburn hair, was telling me about an antique Rolls-Royce she and Ronnie had recently bought: “It's really gonna be a fun car. It's in a show in Boston this weekend, and if it takes first prize we get our names in the book, which I hope.”

Her mother, Jane said, had the world's largest collection of china shoes, and her friend, who had marketed a special rack to hold recipe index cards, was now selling her latest idea, a key chain with your
loved one's picture. “I had another friend,” she said proudly, “who made a pile on jigsaw puzzles with your own picture.”

When she returned to the book she was reading I noticed that it was the best-selling pornographic novel
Naked Came the Stranger,
written as a hoax by a group of writers, each of whom did a chapter without consulting the others. She saw me looking at the book and said with a shrug, “It doesn't matter what you read these days, it's all trash.”

When I woke up in the morning, the first person I saw was a tall young man who had a big circle of black curly hair and was here to interview Jagger for ABC radio. With him was an engineer who told me that he usually worked on things like basketball games, but the ABC stations were programming “a kind of love-rock, and they want to interview Mick and insert clips from the interview in their programming. It's really very effective.”