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 driven to the Aware Inn, a restaurant on Sunset, by Mimi, the girl who hadn’t shown up to meet me when I arrived at the airport. Her performance then was typical, because she did pretty much as she liked even if she chose to show up, tall, skinny, barefooted, rat-faced, really like a rat, a face flat on both sides concluding in a sharp and most often displeased nose, seemingly displeased just to be there. On this tour we would have many idiosyncratic drivers, including me, but none quite so bored, so butch, or so belligerent as Mimi. If she showed up when she was not needed she made it no secret that she could be having a better time elsewhere, and if she was needed her attitude was about the same. While most drivers would, if your luck held out, get you to your destination and wait or come back to pick you up, Mimi would if she cared to, and she cared to, accompany you wherever you went, so that she sat down to eat at the Aware Inn with Charlie and me, both of us struck numb by the violent chicness of the place. We were, it was clear, barely worthy of being accepted as customers – in fact the Japanese waiter poured wine on me to put me in my place – while Mimi, perfectly not to say blissfully unimpressed, somehow managed to chew gum and rattle her car keys throughout dinner. Charlie and I gulped a few bites and escaped, but the management was superciliously slow to take our not-with-it money, and we both registered disappointment when, once outside, we saw our car, left by Mimi at the curb, being towed away by an L.A. county sheriff’s department tow truck.
‘Isn’t that our car?’ Charlie asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Mimi, engaged as assiduously in smacking her gum and rattling her car keys as a Hindu mystic in the tintinnabulation of his little prayer bell.
‘Well, tell them to stop,’ Charlie said.
‘Hey, stop,’ said Mimi, as the car was pulled into the swiftly moving traffic to disappear in the night. A white Jaguar stopped at the curb before us, and we moved aside to let some aware people enter the Inn. It was late Sunday evening on the Strip, the sidewalk busy with kids who looked so strange that the police, walking by in pairs, gazed blankly into space trying not to see. ‘Maybe you’d better do something,’ Charlie told Mimi.
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