said, ‘they erect a plaque. They were absolutely shocked. She said, “On houses where famous men have lived they put up plaques saying Charles Dickens 1860, or whatever, I don’t see why you shouldn’t put up a plaque in the electrical department saying Brian Jones worked here in 1962, I can’t see any reason why you shouldn’t.’”
SEVEN
During the entire trip my dreams stubbornly followed the tactic of ignoring Africa. They drew exclusively upon scenes from home, and thus seemed to say that they considered – if it is permissible to personify the unconscious processes to this extent – the African journey not as something real, but rather as a symptomatic or symbolic act. Even the most impressive events of the trip were rigorously excluded from my dreams. Only once during the entire expedition did I dream of a Negro. His face appeared curiously familiar to me, but I had to reflect a long time before I could determine where I had met him before. Finally it came to me: he had been my barber in Chattanooga, Tennessee! An American Negro. In the dream he was holding a tremendous, red-hot curling iron to my head, intending to make my hair kinky – that is, to give me Negro hair. I could already feel the painful heat, and awoke with a sense of terror.
C. G. JUNG: Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Instead of sneaking past the office door as usual, I went in this morning to tell Jo Bergman that I needed to use one of the numerous limousines or rented cars. She asked where I was going and I said, playing it close to the vest, Got to run some errands. Jo said she had to look at a house for Bill Wyman on Beverly Boulevard, and I could use a car while she was there if I would take her (Jo didn’t drive) and come back for her. So I cruised in an Oldsmobile down Santa Monica and up Beverly, dropped Jo off, doubled back to a Xerox copy shop on Santa Monica and waited, jingling the car keys, probably making even slower the bovine matron who operated as deliberately as the giant machine that hummed and flashed and finally spat out grey speckled copies of the Stones’ letter. I paid the b.m. a dollar fifty for them, drove to the post office, sent the original air mail special to the literary agency and one copy home to Memphis. I went out past the blind man’s cigaret stand to the Olds and headed down Sunset Strip, looking for a telephone booth. I didn’t see one on the street, so I stopped across from the Playboy Club, ran inside like a man in a spy story and asked the bunny lady who greeted me if I might use the phone. It was only about 11:00 a.m., no other customers yet, but she was all decked out – a young blond, God knows what she really looked like – in the sadomasochist high heels, blue satin up the crack, pushed-up bosom (as if her breasts were two poisonous fruits, delicious but untouchable, offered on a tray to tantalize), and bunny ears. I’m working on a story for Playboy magazine, I told her, and I need to call my agency. It sounded convincing, the last time I was in Hollywood I had been working for Playboy, and she called someone upstairs in the Byzantine hierarchy to see if it was permitted to let a writer use the phone, then gave me the receiver and walked discreetly a few steps away, her fluffy white bunny-tail bouncing.
I sat on her little greeting stool, called the agency, and told the number-one assistant agent that the fabled letter was on its way, that Schneider should be avoided like a school of sharks, and that the book contract should be sent to the Oriole house in a plain wrapper. Then back up to the house on Beverly Boulevard, whose red bricks, shrubbery, and oriental carpets Jo thought would do for Bill and Astrid. Something about it seemed sinister to me, but that could have been just a negative reaction to Jo, talking on the way back to Oriole about her nervous rash and her herb doctor while she chain-smoked cigarets.
At Oriole I ate white cheddar sandwiches and drank beer for breakfast. Charlie was going to Sunset Sound, and Sandison was coming along, something about seeing a writer from the Saturday Review. I joined them. A limousine took us there, and we went down the little alley and through the many gates and doors, locking each one behind us, to the control room, a carpeted capsule containing a large console with hundreds of lights, buttons, switches, levers, a vast dark window before us, giant speakers mounted on the wall over the window, tilted toward our heads, exploding with sound.
Keith, sitting at the console, was wearing a fringed leather jacket of the kind then popular. But Keith, true to form, was wearing the worst-looking one I had ever seen, the leather faded yellow, cracked and dry, the lining ripped out. His ear-tooth was dangling, a big yellow joint was in his left hand, in his right hand the red knob that boosted the intensity of his guitar track. The tracks were stacked eight deep on the wide plastic tape wheeling through the recording machine, a sound engineer watching seven of the tracks, Keith watching his own. Jagger stood behind them, dressed in tight blue slacks, blue open-throated pullover, left hand on hip, right elbow tight to side, right hand palm up holding a joint the size of the average Negro basketball player’s putz, which he was smoking not like Joan Crawford or even Bette Davis but like Theda Bara, eyes closed, lips pursed, then mouth slightly open, smoke hanging luxuriantly in thick open lips, soft sucking inhale.
Keith was grinning, showing bad teeth, making deep wrinkles around his eyes as his guitar lick came around and he turned the knob to make it scream, boosting the pain each time like men drunk in bars at the turn of the century twisting the knobs of an electric shock machine, five cents a shock – except that Keith was doing it to get your attention, just giving you a little high voltage to bring your mind around to what was being said: Did you hear about the Midnight Rambler? – Jagger’s harmonica and Keith’s guitar whining and bending, swooping together, just about to jump the garden wall – Says everybody’s got to go
We were locked up in the studio not because of the dope but because the Stones, lacking work permits, were not supposed to use American recording studios. What they were doing was illegal, and they were enjoying it very much. In the middle of the song, the one you never seen before, two men came into the control room, one in a silk suit that changed from blue to green like automobile enamel, a cigar in his leaden jaw, glossy machined-looking black hair, Pete Bennett: ‘I’m the best guy in the world to have pushin’ ya record fa ya.’ With him in Hush Puppies and a yellow T-shirt, looking, though only in his thirties, old and grey and sort of like Jack Ruby with cancer, was the legendary Allen Klein, who I realized had failed to squash my plans for a book like a bug under his Hush Puppies only because, so far, he hadn’t got around to it. I was frightened that he would notice me and step on me, and I scooted around to the front of the console, sat on a couch, and buried my face in a magazine. It contained an interview with Phil Spector, who when he was twenty-one became famous as rock and roll music’s first teenaged millionaire. In the course of the interview Spector ridiculed almost everyone in the music business, including the Mafia, but of Allen Klein he would say only, ‘I don’t think he’s a very good cat.’ I huddled lower on the leatherette. The song was building to some insane climax, message of fear riding on waves of harmonica and guitar – faster and faster, breathless, frantic, and I wondered what the hell I was doing with these mad English owlhoots, and what were they doing that they needed Allen Klein, who scared Phil Spector, a man with so many bodyguards and fences and so much bullet-proof glass that he ridiculed the Stones for getting arrested; even Spector seemed afraid of this pudgy glum-faced accountant in his bulging yellow T-shirt. But what scared me most was the knowledge that whatever they were up to, I had to know about it. No matter if Klein took my book, took my money, had me killed, I had to try to stick around and see what happened. I had to do it – to do something – for Christopher, but I had liked Brian and wanted to know him better. Also, I had the feeling something was going to happen, something I shouldn’t miss. The song had slowed down now to excruciating little bird calls between harp and guitar, Mick and Keith exploring the poetry of the last breathless moments as the blade rides, and Mick groaned in the voice of someone who told you he was not the Boston Strangler.
As I sat on that Naugahyde couch, in crazy sixties-end Los Angeles, roaring from the speakers were such sounds, such lowdown human groans and cries not new, old as time, almost, but never on a record had they seemed so threatening. I had heard such sounds before, heard them as a little boy lying in bed in the wiregrass country of south Georgia, heard the sounds of animals crying far off in the woods, heard the sounds the black woods hands made
