The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. Stanley Booth
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 stepfather 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.
The atmosphere was that of a deserted carnival, over-arching 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:
| ? HOW LONG WILL THEY LAST ? | |||
| 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 godawful 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