The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. Stanley Booth
charter a plane for the tour. Nobody knew yet, but it might not be a bad idea, Stu said; Keith was banned from Alitalia ‘for stayin’ in the restroom from Rome to London punchin’ that crazy Anita.’
At eleven P.M. I flew to Memphis with a quiet planeload of tired old people returning from a synagogue-sponsored vacation in Singapore. Christopher met me at the gate. ‘Are you a child or an adult?’ people have asked her. Christopher is four feet eleven and a half inches tall, but like Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘though she be but little, she is fierce.’
Today Christopher worked for Omega Airlines from three o’clock till midnight, talking to machines and people, and her eyes, that change like the sea, looked tired and red.
When I met Christopher, the great-granddaughter of a Mississippi River steamboat captain, family fortune gone, she and her mother were living like ruined Russian royalty in a federal housing project in Memphis. Her mother and father separated before she was born, and she never knew her father. They had lived in the project since Christopher was a little girl. Her mother, having neither the breeding nor the inclinations of a servant, did not cook or clean. They ate at a place called Mae’s Grill, or else ate tuna sandwiches and Vienna sausages at home. When she was very young, Christopher went to a private day school in much the same way that Fanny Price went to Mansfield Park. One day – she was about five years old – her father called the school and told Christopher that he was coming to get her. He never came, but she was terrified.
Christopher grew up in perfect ignorance of men. She saw photographs in books of Roman statues wearing fig leaves and thought men were made that way. She never had a date in high school, but she read Thackeray, Henry James, Jane Austen. She knew more about life then than I do now.
I was nineteen when we met, and a more arrogant young fool never drew breath. Without the handicap of learning or experience, I saw no reason not to become equal to Poe or Melville. (Not Mark Twain – I didn’t foam at the mouth.) I was also a great and cynical lover. Christopher forgave me.
Nearly ten years had passed. Christopher had worked her way through college and freed her mother from the housing project. She had been a private tutor, ward clerk in a hospital, secretary at a savings and loan company. I had taught karate, been a state welfare worker, a Pinkerton operative, lived off my parents, and tried to learn to write. Now I was something called a journalist. Christopher had wanted to work for an airline so she could travel. We had travelled, but Omega changed Christopher’s schedule every few weeks, giving her jet lag when she’d been nowhere. We both worked constantly, but the only money we had saved was $2000 from the Saturday Evening Post, hoarded against the Stones tour.
Christopher handled money strangely. Coins poured from her purse. I would find them in the car (we lived in a little white house, whose door would be kicked in by Detective J. J. Wells of the Metro Narcotics Squad, and drove a maroon Mustang) and ask, ‘What’s this?’
‘People throw money at me.’
Later I would come home from England to find Christopher gone and only a cold wind in her closet, and when I found her and asked where she had been, she would say, ‘The birds and the animals keep me warm.’
But on this night I was drunk and happy, full of good news and romance. Frowning, Christopher touched with her doll-like fingers the swell of her belly, now fubsy, once perfect as a peach. She had a stomachache and didn’t want to play ducks and fishes, and who could blame her?
On Friday, while Christopher was working, I had dinner with my mother and father. I felt good because my agent’s first lieutenant had told me on the phone today that the contract with the publisher would soon be ready. My mother offered me turnip greens, my father passed the cornbread. If I could keep Klein and Schneider out of the deal, and if the Stones would let me work, then after the tour Christopher and I would go to England and be happy ever after. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I didn’t think the Stones cared about the money. My father slid the platter of fried chicken toward me, and I saw in his eyes, the eyes of a man who started out in the world plowing a Georgia mule for fifty cents a day, a sad, wise look, a look that said, Nobody doesn’t care about the money.
Saturday morning I went to the bone doctor to see if I had broken my little finger on the swing-chain last Sunday in L.A. The fat girl at the reception desk asked what’s wrong, I told her in complicated terms, and she wrote, simple but eloquent, ‘injured in fall.’
The waiting room was nearly filled with patients, mostly young. One beefy high school football player, in a cast from ass to ankle, was talking about how he wanted to get back out there. The doctor X-rayed my hand, glanced at my chart, said ‘You’re a writer?’ and tried to enlist my help in saving the world from ‘the Chinese Reds.’ He began by asking whether I was an optimist or a pessimist, but he couldn’t wait to tell me that he was a pessimist and couldn’t see any better solution than bombing ourselves back to the Stone Age and starting over.
I told him something Margaret Mead had said about the current younger generation being the first global tribe and that these new kids didn’t believe in military solutions, half a million of them spent three days in the mud at Woodstock without so much as a fist fight. The doctor, a polite man for all his bombing plans, did not mention the half-million American boys in Indochina fighting the longest war in U.S. history.
‘I hope you’re right,’ he said. ‘Myself, I don’t see any hope.’ He looked at the X-rays, said nothing was broken, my finger should be all right in a few weeks or months, and prescribed some pills I never took.
On Sunday, when Christopher was at home, our friends Jim and Mary Lindsay Dickinson came to see us. Dickinson was one of the last musicians to record on the Sun label of Sam Phillips, who made the first recordings of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner, and Charlie Rich, among many others. We had known each other since college, and every now and then we would get together, listen to music, take drugs, and talk. This time we took sky-blue mescaline tablets – not Christopher, who again said she was not well, touching her stomach once more. I was worried about her, but she and Mary Lindsay left for Overton Park, Memphis’ central park, Mary Lindsay’s eyes dancing circles as they went out the door. Jim and I listened to a special history of rock and roll radio broadcast and I told him what I had done in California. He was so pleased that when Mary Lindsay came back he would tell her to quit her job, thinking I suppose that we would all soon be rich and famous. Christopher and I were proceeding with care, acting like white people, always a mistake.
‘I just want to live through this tour and see what happens,’ I said.
‘You got to go to the top of the mountain and see the elephant,’ Dickinson said.
On the radio Ike Turner was talking about Phil Spector: ‘Sometime he use fo’-fve drums, twelve guitars, twenty-five or thirty voices, the guy is, uh, really a genius, you know.’ I thought of Spector’s statement, in the interview I’d read at Sunset Sound, that English musicians have soul like black folk because soul comes from suffering, and when you see a little English kid in a World War II newsreel, it’s probably Paul McCartney – which sounded silly, but there was something in the image, blackout, a child, screaming firebombs.
I remembered when I was very small, waking in the winter morning from a dream of Mickey Mouse to hear on the radio Grady Cole’s doleful tones and a country song, ‘Hiroshima, Nagasaki’ – the syllables whose meaning I didn’t know, the cold morning, dressing for school, filled me with dread. That fear was part of our lives; we had come into the world when, for the first time in history, man had achieved such power that any child, no matter where, no matter who, could lie in his bed and be afraid for his life.
We knew in our cribs that something was wrong. Now some of us by acting together were beginning to defy the forces that made war and to get away with it. With the grandiose sweep of mescaline vision, it seemed that the Rolling Stones might be part of a struggle for the life or death of the planet.
TEN
One of the most popular of these combinations . . . was a company of boys, from twelve to fifteen years old, who called themselves the Spasm Band. They were the real creators of