The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. Stanley Booth
in the Mojave Desert. (The subject of funeral arrangements had come up during a conversation between Gram and Phil some months before the night – in September 1973 – when Gram overdosed on morphine and alcohol.) As I started to light one of the joints, I noticed that the others were putting theirs away. Chip Monck, who had been flying around for the last few days, checking light and sound conditions at the concert locations, and who was now sitting across the table from me asleep, his head lolling to one side, woke up, saw me holding a joint and a burning match, said that there would be no dope on this tour, and if you got arrested with any, you’d be on your own. Then he fell asleep again. I thought he sounded silly, but I put the joint in my pocket.
As Keith was coming back from the toilet, a man and woman passed behind him, and the woman, seeing his ragged black mane, said in a loud drunken voice, ‘You’d be cute if you put a rinse on your hair.’
Keith turned, smiling, showing his fangs. ‘You’d be cute,’ he said, ‘if you put a rinse on your cunt.’
Some of the group, led by Jo Bergman, were singing ‘Happy Birthday.’ Ronnie Schneider was twenty-six today. I was twenty-seven. I did not sing. Neither did the Stones.
After dinner we went in a fleet of Cadillacs to the Ash Grove, a small club where the old blues singer Big Boy Crudup was sharing the bill with the young blues singer Taj Mahal. The place was too crowded to see if you were sitting, so some of us were standing in the aisle when a tall redheaded cowboy kid with freckles came up and told us he was Taj’s road manager, and he was happy the Stones were in L.A. because he remembered how good the Stones were to them when they were in London. We got grass, coke, Scotch, wine, anything you want backstage.
We were in the aisle again, Crudup was singing ‘That’s All Right, Mama,’ with Taj’s band, two black men, two white men, and one Indian playing together, and I was feeling each vibration of the music with every spidery tracing of my nervous system when the road manager said to me, ‘You know, it’s hard, workin’ for niggers.’
I didn’t know what to say to that. He nodded at the rest of the band: ‘And that bass player and guitar player and drummer may look like, uh, Caucasians, but in they hearts they niggers.’
I didn’t know what to say to that either. Then he completed the thought: ‘But you know, you can have more fun with niggers than anybody else in the world.’
TWO
Music’s music. Talkin’ ’bout puttin’ on a show in New York, I’m gone be like the monkey, I ain’t gwine. There’s so much shootin’ and killin’ and goin’ on now. These places, all the folks be all crowded, you don’t know what’s gone happen. Ain’t I’m right? You can’t tell how these guys is, fella. Pshaw, man, they’s snipers everywhere. I don’t mean hidin’. I can recall three or four fellas was killed dead for playin’ music. Me and you partners – I got you wid me – we playin’ – you see what I’m talkin’ ’bout. Well, we over dem. I ain’t gone call ’em, dey dead now. Poisoned one and kilt the other. They done it ’cause he could play better than they could. I’m tellin’ you what I know, now. I wouldn’t kill nobody ’cause he could beat me doin’ anything. That’s right. Ain’t I’m right? Anybody gone kill me, ’cause you and me can do a little better than they can. They callin’ on us all the time. Ain’t callin’ on them. Me and you goin’, say we goin’, let’s go. We play over there, jump up an’ mess you up. Mess you up, boy. Another thing, you be around these places, don’t do much drinkin’. Drop a spool on you. Don’t drink much whiskey. Keep on playin’. They drop a button on you, boy, ’fore you can be sure. They got a gang, now. You try it. Mess you up, boy. Buck Hobbs – some friends I ain’t gone call they names – he could play, they couldn’t play like him. The same song I play ’bout Frankie and Albert, all them old songs, ‘John Henry,’ he could play. Others couldn’t beat him. One hit him ’cross the head one night with a guitar, ’cause they couldn’t beat him. It didn’t make him no difference. He just rock right on. Got down and stopped playin’, he got hold of a drink, he was dead. Buck Hobbs. They kilt him. I think about all that. I don’t want to leave here. House full. Fightin’. Over in our home where I was born, up in Pleasant Hill, that’s where they done it. Just near Pleasant Hill. In the grove.
MISSISSIPPI JOE CALLICOTT
The 11:45 a.m. train from Paddington Station (£3 2s 5d return and Who is the third that walks beside you?) rolled west from the drab blocks of flats at the outskirts of London to the May-green fields around Reading and Didcot, with trees, hedges, pink pigs, black and white cattle, tractors, thatch-roofed barns and houses under heavy white clouds.
I sat facing forward, trying to read the biography of Hemingway that William Burroughs recommended during one of our talks about Brian Jones, earlier in the spring, when my life, as Brian’s had, was beginning to come apart. I was reading to find out how Hemingway kept going after he lost Hadley. For the first time in almost ten years – it was 1970 – I was a single man; that is to say, alone.
Past Kemble, after the Swindon change, there were hills, horses on hillside fields in the sun. To the left of the track the land dropped away, green treetops down in the valley reminded me of the foothills of middle Georgia. Outside Stroud, as we were crossing a stream moving quickly through young willows, I saw ducks rising together and schoolchildren on a narrow dirt path leading under a small brick bridge, one boy waving a Union Jack at the train. Two seats ahead of me, a woman was telling her little boy and girl to stop singing ‘Yellow Submarine.’
After Gloucester, where the land is flat again, the train heads north to come to Cheltenham. The official guidebook still called it Cheltenham Spa, though the ‘healing medicinal waters’ that attracted ‘the elite of many generations’ went bad some years ago. Exactly how many years ago the guidebook didn’t say. It didn’t matter. I didn’t come here to take a bath.
Taxis were parked outside the redbrick train station, but because I always do things the hard way, I let them leave with other passengers and started walking, with a black nylon flight bag – too small to hold clothes, a tape recorder, and the book about Hemingway – slung on a strap from my shoulder, the book like a circuit rider’s Bible in my hand. There are back streets in Cheltenham that look like back streets in Queens, New York, or Birmingham, Alabama, Depression-era apartment buildings and houses with lawns where no grass grows. The book and the bag were both getting heavy by the time I reached the center of town. Cheltenham was built mostly during the Regency, and the stately columns of the Municipal Center regard, across the broad Promenade and its tree-darkened side-walks, the Imperial Gardens, bright with red, mauve, and yellow tulips planted in neat curves and rectangles, sparrows dancing about, pigeons whirling and coursing overhead.
I walked on to a side street, found a phone kiosk, and from its picture in the yellow pages chose the Majestic Hotel on Park Place. It looked like the hotel where W. C. Fields would stay when he was in town. It was also between where I was and Hatherley Road, where Brian Jones grew up.
I had walked far enough to welcome, if I had any sense, a ride in a taxi, but I was not ready for that. I wanted to walk past the fine shops of the Promenade and the neat houses under the manicured trees. Cheltenham was designed to be a nice place, and it is a nice place, up to the point where they decide you are not so nice. Some of Cheltenham’s nicest people had not spoken to Brian Jones’ mother and father in years, while others stopped speaking to them only when Brian was buried in consecrated ground, his final outrage. You can listen close and hear the clippers clipping the hedges of Cheltenham.
The Majestic Hotel loomed like a faded ghost among apartment buildings going to seed. The desk clerk was in a little glass case like a ticket booth. The bartender leaned on his elbows in the empty cocktail bar, wrinkling the sleeves of his starched white jacket. The elevator smelled as if it had been closed since the 1920s. Slowly it took me to the third floor, to my single with a sink. The room was loaded, as are all single hotel rooms, with intimations of loneliness and death, of killing the night in loneliness. I lay down on the salmon-colored bedspread.
My feet rested for a few minutes, but my mind didn’t. No book is any help against loneliness, and no drug can touch it. After she left him, Brian must have