‘That’s Tony,’ Kaufman said. In his graded-tint shades and purple tie-dyed T-shirt, Tony looked like a Hollywood dream of a Black Panther, shapely and cool and slightly less colossal than King Kong.
Tony peered in at us, said ‘Secret agents twenty-seven, thirty-nine, and forty-five,’ and opened the gate. As we drove past he said, ‘Man, it’s really a mess up there.’
‘What?’ Phil said. ‘Why?’
‘They forgot to open the chimbley and the fire smoked up the house.’
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘Yeah, and some creeps got in.’
‘What happened, you throw them out?’
‘No, when I got there they was all havin’ a party.’
Most of the people at the house were outside because inside the big fireplace was still filling the air with smoke. In the kitchen Phil Kaufman’s quadroon girlfriend Janet was serving onto plates spaghetti with what appeared to be cocoons floating in it. Meals at the Oriole house were not very festive, but this one was about as cheering as a cremation, though not as warm.
‘Are we getting rid of the smoke?’ Jagger asked Phil, standing before the fireplace.
‘Yeah,’ Phil said. ‘We’re moving to Topanga Canyon.’
‘We are getting it together, right?’ Mick said, not smiling.
‘Yeah, right,’ Phil said. He and Sam Cutler stared up the chimney, trying to look competent.
Jagger went into the rehearsal room in the rear of the house and started playing an acoustic guitar. Charlie started playing drums, Bill picked up a bass, and Mick Taylor, a guitar. Jagger told Janet to tell Keith they’d started. She found him smoking languidly in a chain-suspended wicker chair out by the pool. ‘Keith,’ she said, ‘they’ve started.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ he said, not moving. ‘Tell them they’re sounding great.’
But in a few minutes Keith came in through the back door of the little rehearsal room and soon chaos became tuning, became a chord, a pattern, a riff, a twelve-bar blues that collapsed after a couple of minutes. Jagger put his guitar down and looked over a list of tunes. ‘How many are there?’ Mick Taylor asked. ‘Eighteen,’ Jagger said. ‘“Carol,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Bad Boy”—’
‘“Bad Boy” – that goes back a ways,’ Wyman said.
‘Let’s do it,’ Keith said, and they did it, a blues to inflame every girl-child within hearing: ‘I’m a bad boy, come to your town—’
Next they did ‘Street Fighting Man.’ From the big Altec speakers sound was pounding this coffin-shaped room, built to take abuse: lined at the top with fiberglass home insulation mats, the walls covered with carpet pads and one oriental rug.
When the song ended, Keith said, ‘We should have the black light come on next—’
‘And police come on with truncheons, clubbing each other,’ Jagger said. ‘To be followed by showers of petals.’
Jagger said the Stones would open their shows with ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash,’ the song they released the week of Brian’s final arrest, but now they played it with difficulty and finally it fell apart. Keith told Mick Taylor, ‘On that one you’ll want to use the Flying Arrow—’
‘Lying farrow,’ Jagger said.
‘Mia Farrow,’ said Keith.
Mick Taylor said, ‘Well, we can just take all the guitars onstage and see which we want—’
Jagger laughed. ‘Horrible thought.’
Then Wyman had an idea – for an invention, an instrument that could be attached to a guitar and would light up when a string was in tune. Jagger and Keith insisted it was impossible. Charlie said it was possible and so did I. Keith was down on the whole idea. ‘Use your ears,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ said Jagger. ‘That’s what you’ve got your god-given talent for.’
‘Actually I was thinkin’ of it for you, man,’ Bill said to Keith. ‘I don’t have any trouble stayin’ in tune, you’re the one.’
As they started to play ‘Monkey Man,’ Phil Kaufman called me to the telephone. Pete Callaway was calling, a friend from Georgia. Later Pete and I had lived together in New Orleans, where he was a student and I was a dropout at Tulane. Now he was married and inching toward a Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia while sometimes getting his head cracked by police at student demonstrations.
I took the call in the kitchen. We had a short version of the same phone conversation we had had every few months for years, a ritual of private jokes to let each other know that we were still ourselves, nothing had changed. Pete’s little sister Nicole was with him. She told me hello and asked me to come see her when I was in town with the Stones. She was twenty-two, had just left graduate school without taking a degree, and was living in Greenwich Village. The last time I saw her she was a ravishing seventeen. Because of the way she sounded, a certain quality in her voice, on my fatal yellow pad I wrote her number.
The rehearsal room was a charging freight of sound. Jagger was the key – when he was sailing, screaming or moaning, he couldn’t do anything in between, the Stones sailed; when he stopped, the music disintegrated.
‘On “Sympathy for the Devil” we’ll need another drum, some congas,’ Mick said. ‘Maybe we can get some sort of black person to come along and do it.’
Mick was trying to decide whether ‘Sympathy’ should be ‘quite short or very long,’ his voice shaky, insecure. I had the feeling it might have to do with me, watching them in this small room. Mick’s voice dragged until one by one they stopped playing. None of them looked at the others. Then Mick Taylor played a few notes, Keith played a chord, another chord, a bright pattern of notes, and everyone was playing, Mick singing at the end of the room, his back to me. They sounded like Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five, except that Mick Taylor was playing horrible Bo Diddley noises and Keith was playing a solo with a scream lost in it. Finally Mick sat down on the piano bench, Keith stopped, they all stopped: ‘Still falls down at the end,’ Mick said.
Waiting to go to what would be a dull party in Bel Air, we lounged around the house. Jagger and I were sitting with Wyman on the black leather couch, looking out the big window at the black hills of Halloween. Wyman said it was a holiday for kids, mostly, and Jagger disagreed: ‘They’re real, those spirits, and the people to come after us will know about them.’
‘If the world survives,’ I said.
‘We’ll blow it up eventually,’ Mick said. ‘That’s inevitable.’
David Sandison woke me in the middle of the morning, carrying his bags out of the Oz room as he left, jaw firmly set, for England. I told him goodbye, showered, and dressed. On the coffee table in the living room was a magazine with a cover photo of Jagger and a story that ended, ‘The Rolling Stones are in town and everyone seems to be waiting for something to happen.’ The lead story was about the Beatles’ financial problems with Allen Klein.
A young man from Newsweek was sitting on the back terrace
