True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (37 page)

Keith, Charlie, Mick Taylor, and I sat around the living room listening to the blues while the sun shone. I tried to think of notes to make, but nothing was happening. Mary (of Kathy and Mary, the Dynamic Duo) had gone to fetch Wyman. Finally we decided to leave and let him meet us at the taping. We started out to the cars—being joined by
Michael Lydon and his bosomy red-haired girlfriend—as Mary drove up with Bill and Astrid. Standing beside the purple Continental, I said hello to Bill, sitting in the back seat close enough to touch, if he weren't behind a pane of glass, and he rolled his eyes toward heaven and appeared to pass out. Astrid, lowering her window, said, “Bill is seeck.” We went back inside, Bill stretched out on the couch, and Jo called a doctor. The development seemed to have cheered Mick up, he was smiling.

“He's been taking antibiotics,” Astrid said, sounding amazed at the peculiar little man she lived with. “He gets so afraid and starts imagining things—”

Jo told Mary where to take Bill and away they went. We went, Kathy driving the Stones, me driving Michael and his girlfriend, whose name was Lilith Leonards, out to TV City, a great grey building in the middle of a huge parking lot. Kathy drove to the gate, and I pulled up beside her. A guard told us there was no room to park inside; park outside and walk in. “I'm not walkin' any fuckin' place. Drive in,” Mick said. Kathy did, and I followed, but there really was no place to park. I started to back out, nearly running over Mick, who was walking behind the car and slapped the trunk with his hand. We frowned at each other.

Inside TV City, we went past a desk, down a hall, and into the studio, passing men in rubber-soled shoes carrying small pine trees. Inside sound stage 31 there were a small audience, four Norelco color cameras, and lurking technicians. A little man wearing black lace-up shoes, white socks, gray slacks, a blue cardigan sweater, and horn-rim glasses said, “Mick, I'm Bob, your stage manager.” He showed the Stones the way to makeup, and Michael, Lil, and I sat in the audience with Kathy, who told us more about herself. She had been living with Mary since she'd left Mary's brother, her husband, the father of her little girl. She and Mary had really got into rock and roll bands, and they'd known a lot of them. She gave us a long list including the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Terry Reid, but for two years they had wanted Mick Jagger. They'd be with a guy and then split and say, He was cool, but he's no Mick Jagger. When they finally got picked up by the Stones and were at the house, Mick went upstairs to bed, then came back down throwing Floris Sandalwood perfume on Kathy and Mary and asked Kathy, “Want to come upstairs?”

“My girlfriend has to come too,” she said. (The Dynamic Duo had sworn to stick together.)

“Okay,” Mick said.

“We were really disappointed,” Kathy said. “He was so bad. When he's being himself, he can get it on. Fair. But we were just laughing at him. He tried to come on like Mick Jagger, all sexy—when he's himself, he's fair. When we came downstairs from Mick's room, we said, ‘Well, he
was cool, but he's no Mick Jagger.' We had to get Mick to get it out of our systems.”

The Stones had returned from makeup and camera angles were being tested. Keith's gaunt face filled the monitor screen. “But it's Mr. Richards I really want,” Kathy said. “He talks to Anita for like five hours every couple of days—their baby looks just like him, he has all these pictures of him. Anita puts the baby up to the phone and Keith talks to it and listens to him gurgle for hours.”

While Kathy was talking, the background for the Stones had been set up: a lot of aluminum-foil-covered rectangles which looked—purposely out of focus on the monitor, with prismatic light-reflections—dreamy and rainbow-studded. Glyn Johns came in and came over to say hello. He had had a big hassle at the front desk trying to get in. “I told them, ‘I have the Stones' backup tapes, if you don't let me in, they can't go on—'”

He went to set up the tapes, and Kathy continued: “Mick is so different from what I thought he'd be like— Sometimes he wakes up and says, ‘Oh, Kathy, I feel so fragile this morning. Sometimes you feel butch and sometimes you feel fragile, and this morning I feel terribly fragile.' And I'd think, ‘Wow, where is the Mick Jagger I used to dream about?' Mick drags himself up, shaves, puts on perfume, it takes him an hour to get up and then he usually doesn't say anything for an hour. Keith gets up, scratches his head, says, ‘Hiya, Kathy,' bounces around—

“Mick says he used to playact and tell everybody to fuck off—'Now I'm being myself, and everybody tells me to fuck off.' He's great, so natural and sweet when we're alone, he'll tell me something he's going to tell Jo and ask me how it sounds, does it make sense, and I say, Sure, and I don't know what he's talking about. I mean, he's asking me, I can't believe it. But then one other person can come in and he's completely different; you can't communicate with him at all.”

On the monitor, under the lights, behind Mick and Keith, both of them in black shirts, the tinfoil was glamorous. “But Terry Reid is the greatest,” Kathy said. “He's ten times better than Mick.”

The Stones had gathered around the drum kit, waiting to rehearse, nothing happening. Then the stage manager said, “Here we go, gentlemen,” and the band track for “Honky Tonk Women” started. Mick skipped to the microphone, turned and started to sing. The others pretended to be playing, Keith taking all the solos. The record ended, Mick stopped singing and said, “Thank you, Mr. Sullivan, yes, we'll do another one, Mr. Sullivan,” shaking hands with Sullivan, who wasn't there. But then, as if on cue, he was there; as they started taking the set apart and putting up another for the second run-through, Ed Sullivan appeared, a man resembling a fire hydrant, lighting a Winston, shaking the stage manager's hand. In Ed Sullivan's day there was hardly a comedian on television who didn't imitate his strange inflections, his
unpredictable grinding of consonants, his stiff, spastic movements. Going from person to person, shaking hands, he seemed to be propelled by a silent mechanism that soon sat him down in a—chairr, to watch the changing of the—
tssett!
The tinfoil was being replaced by large flame-shaped pieces of plywood, painted white. Mick, laughing, leapt in the air, trotted over to us, and said, “D'you see that
set
?”

Sullivan, rising from his chair, asked, “Is Mick here?”

Mick stepped to Sullivan's side—one step—they shook hands and walked away together, Sullivan talking.

Michael and Lil were going to the Farmer's Market for a bite to eat, and they asked me if I'd like to come along. I wondered about getting back in, but I was hungry, and we walked across the parking lot to the Market. There were many stalls where they sold all kinds of vegetables and flowers and prepared food of different nationalities. We ate delicious Mexican and kosher food and went back to TV-Land. At the desk a woman asked us if we were on a list, and we said we were with the Stones and had just been out for lunch, so she quite reasonably let us pass. We went down the hall the same way we'd come out—but the place was so big and there were so many great orange doors that we forgot which way to go. Two guards, one old and tall, the other younger and squat, were coming down the hall. “Where you going?” the short one asked.

“We were with the Rolling Stones and we've sort of lost them,” I said. “Just went out to lunch and lost our way back.”

Neither of the guards said anything, and I turned to the tall one to see if I could make contact with him. “Could you show us the way to soundstage 31?” I asked, and suddenly like in a dream he grabbed my arm, saying in a light, dry, intense old-man's voice, “I'll show you the way you're going—you're going right back out the way you came.”

I was frightened by this old lunatic who was tugging at my sleeve, trying to drag me away, and I started to pull away from him, all this happening in the underwater silence that seems at times to accompany violence. As I twisted my arm free, he started attacking me with his fists; weird, light blows like falling leaves, weightless as his voice, started raining down on my head. I was so embarrassed, humiliated, at being in this predicament, attacked by a mad helpless old man in a guard suit, that I threw my hands over my head and huddled against a wall. A puff of smoke would have toppled the guard, who stood flailing at me, his silly old hands flopping around my head and shoulders as Lil screamed in piercing tones, “Stop it! Stop it!”

Finally he stopped. “If you don't believe us, come to the front desk,” Michael said to the other guard, who appeared a bit embarrassed himself.

I was trembling with the desire to throttle the old geek, but he was a weak old maniac and no great boot to destroy, and I knew if I did
him in I probably wouldn't get to write the next scene. So I said, “You're an old man, you ought to know better than to behave like that.” And he, lost in his mad fantasy of defense, like the last raving Confederate soldier, said, “I seen you swing at me. Come on! Come ahead! See what you get! Come at me!”

The other guard cleared his throat and said, “Well, if you are who you say you are, soundstage 31 is through the second door yonder.”

“Well, we are,” Michael said sincerely.

“Come on, let's get out of here,” I said.

We went through the door and slipped into our seats beside Kathy. Nearly all the seats in the audience, maybe three hundred, were filled now, mostly with kids. Wyman had come in from the doctor's. He was smiling, he looked fine, wearing a red shirt, red suede pants, and a little brown suede vest of the sort he was partial to. Astrid sat down next to us. “He's still pale and trembly,” she said. “The doctor gave him a vitamin shot, but he's very shaky. He'll talk to Stephen in the morning. That'll help him. He was the same way when Stephen was in South Africa with his mother. Bill had fever, he was all trembly—people can't understand him.”

Coming in to sit in the row behind us was Little Richard (Penniman), the Georgia Peach. Richard was in green velvet, ropes of pearls on his bosom, hair puff-coiffed, got him a
do,
honey, Sheaffer Thinline mustache, cocoa makeup—he called himself “The Beauty.” He was with two handsome black friends, a man and a lady. I said hello to Richard and told him that I was from Macon, where I did in fact graduate from high school. “Honey, you are jokin'! Did you know Otis Reddings?”

“Yes,” I said, “Just before he died, we—”

“I give him his start! I give Otis Reddings his start! I was his idol! I give—you know Jimi Hendrix? I give Jimi Hendrix his start! He started out playing guitar with me in my band! I give the Beatles their first tour! I give the Stones their first tour! In England! Mick digs me, he came to see me—Mick! Come here!”

Mick loped over, shook hands, “ 'Ello, Richard—”

“Why don't you tell the man to have me on his show, honey? Tell him he's had Liberace, now he can have the bronze Liber ace—”

“Ohhh, Richard,” Mick said.

“Rolling Stones insert, take one,” a voice called over a loudspeaker, and Mick said, “I gotta go.”

The lights changed and Ed Sullivan was barking at the camera: “You y'ngs'ers know, and of course your parents also, the Rolling Stones are the sensations of the of the of the—of the
world,
actually. Their last date with us was January sixteenth, 1967, with Pet Clark, Allan Sherman, and the Muppets. So let's have a big hand for the Rolling Stones! 'S 'ear it!”

And the Stones mimed while Mick sang “Gimme Shelter” to a backing track. As the song ended, Sullivan walked into camera range and shook hands with Mick: “Wonderful to have you here, and what are you gonna sing now?” Mick gazed into the sky as if he'd spotted a blue-bird and said, “We're gonna go put on our flimsies and sing ‘Love in Vain' and ‘Honky Tonk Women.' ”

The voice on the loudspeaker said, “Shelter—take two—stand by.” Mick stood by, fidgeting thumbs across fingertips.

In the audience there were a boy in a red and green leprechaun suit and a fake long white beard and a tall, tanned, big-bosomed, blond girl, naked except for a few scraps of buckskin. She was dancing and clapping as Mick started to sing again. Kathy saw me watching her and said, “Mick saw her before you came back in and said, ‘Go's that
cow
?' ”

On the monitor Keith grimaced, striking his guitar, ear-tooth shaking. “That Keith Richards is really a funky-lookin' cat, ain't he,” Richard said.

When the second take ended, the Stones went to change. Richard asked me if I worked for the Stones, and I told him I was writing a book, travelling with them. He asked if my wife was with me, and I said, “No, she's at home.”

“And you out here carryin' on, misbehavin'—”

“No, I'm bein' have,” I said.

“You should get the Stones to promote your book for you! They should carry it around with them wherever they go! Listen to me! They can help you with that! Ed Sullivants came all the way out here from New York just to tape the Stones! Mick didn't want to go to New York, he and Keith wanted to stay out here and write music and rest, so Ed Sullivants had to come all the way out here!”

The Stones were back, wearing different clothes. Sullivan greeted them. “Mick, it's great to have you here with us, and what are you going to sing?”

“Ah, we're gonna sing ‘Love in Vain,' ” Mick said.

“All right,” the loudspeaker voice said. “Let's take it.”

A camera rolled in and Sullivan said the same thing. Mick started to repeat himself too, but it was silly answering the same question the same way, and Mick laughed.

“Cut,” the loudspeaker said.

“Ed Sullivants offered Mick fifty thousand dollars to be on this show!” Richard said. “Mick don't care about the money, he just want to entertain the people!”