other Stones arrived, stumbling across the back lawn. Keith was wearing snakeskin boots, a red snakeskin belt, and a rose-colored shirt, torn off like most of his shirts above the kidneys to keep the tail out of the way of his guitar playing. The reporter dutifully followed the telegram – How do you feel about touring again – and received minimal answers. He asked what happened to Brian, and Keith said, ‘We couldn’t figure it out. He was getting in touch with musicians, trying to get a band together—’
Newsweek didn’t press any points, no interviewers did with the Stones, they hung back from the dark places in the Stones’ past. The Stones had learned that nothing of any interest was likely to happen in the presence of interviewers and managed with near-perfect success to ignore them.
When the Newsweek talk ended and the reporter left, we all decided to have lunch together on the Strip. Charlie and I went inside for a minute and came back to see the other Stones driving away in a turquoise Continental. ‘Really, they are the rudest people,’ Charlie said.
Later, at Shady Oak, while the Stones rehearsed, Gram Parsons and I stood out back, leaning against his iridescent blue Harley-Davidson motorcycle, the hills dark behind him as he talked, seemingly against his will, about the Okefenokee country. Gram was born in Florida but grew up in Waycross, going hunting and fishing in the Swamp with his father. After his mother remarried he learned about other places, attended Harvard for a while. ‘You might say I was lucky,’ he said. ‘I got both sides of it.’
I said nothing. Anyone who heard Gram sing ‘Do You Know How It Feels to Be Lonesome’ had an idea how lucky he was.
Gram was going to play with the Burritos tonight, and I wanted to hear him. He wished I could, only he had to carry a lot of instruments and equipment, his roadie, equipment handler, in his car – but Sam Cutler wanted to come too, and Sam Cutler was not to be denied. So we commandeered the station wagon, the roadie loaded it, and I was nominated driver because the others couldn’t believe I drove as badly as they did. Waiting a few minutes in the wagon for Sam and Gram, who were inside, Gram’s roadie was bitching about what a drag Gram was to work for, unreliable, not punctual, his rich step-father gives him a tremendous allowance –
The servant’s grumbles subsided as Gram and Sam came out and we set our course south on the freeway for a club called the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach, but soon the roadie told me that if I was going to drive this slow I’d better get in another lane. Yeah, but it’s driving funny, I said, and we had to drive for miles, the left rear end wobbling worse all the time, until we could stop at a gas station. Phil Kaufman’s girlfriend Janet, now they tell me, had a flat tire, changed it herself, the wheel had never since been tightened, and had almost cut through the lug nuts. The station attendant said he didn’t have any lug nuts, and we tightened 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
