when Brian, who had started the band, left it because, he said, of ‘musical differences’ with the other Stones. Less than a month later, Jo Bergman called me in the middle of the night to say that Brian had been found dead, drowned in his swimming pool.
After some weeks Jo sent me a letter for the Stones, offering their cooperation subject to agreements between the Stones, the publishers, and me, but you can’t do good work that way. You have to write the best you can and share control of nothing, neither the manuscript nor the money. Any other arrangement produces not writing but publicity. Finally Jo turned the book matter over to Ronnie Schneider for Allen Klein, widely considered the most powerful agent in show business. In self-defense, I hired an agent, Klein’s literary equivalent. He sent Schneider a letter to sign for the Stones. But Keith said I didn’t need Klein. Then why did Jo tell Klein, or his nephew Schneider, about my book?
Jo sat in a swing and swung slowly back and forth. It was, as I would learn, typical of the Stones’ manner of doing business that I didn’t know exactly what Jo did for them, and neither did she, and neither did they. She had consulted an astrologer in London who had told her that I would write this book, but that it would cost me everything except my life. She did not know the details – that while writing it I would be assaulted by Confederate soldiers and Hell’s Angels, would go to jail, be run over by a lumber truck on the Memphis-Arkansas bridge, fall off a Georgia waterfall and break my back, have epileptic seizures while withdrawing from durgs – but if she had known, she would not have told me. She didn’t tell me about the astrologer until much later, when there was no way to turn back. Now, eager, I climbed a swing chain with my hands – climbed it easily, for months I’d done nothing but write Basic English letters to the Stones and lift weights. As I reached the top and started down, my scarf fluttered up, my left hand clutched it around the chain, the silk was like oil, and I crashed to the ground, searing my hand, mangling the little finger, shocking it blue-white, with great crimson drops welling up where the flesh was torn away from the nail, dropping in the dust. ‘I thought you’d do that,’ Jo said, and I thought, Where am I, what is happening to me? I was in California, being punished for wearing a scarf.
I walked away from the playground with a kind of psychic limp. Al Steckler, a promotion man from the Klein office in New York, was arriving at the back gate, carrying an attaché case. We’d met in London. I told him hello and went inside to sit on the couch and suck my little finger. The next thing I knew, Jagger was sitting beside me, asking, ‘What about this book?’
‘What about it?’ I looked around the room. Steckler and a few other people were there, Jo sitting on the floor with a Polaroid camera, taking a picture of Mick and me.
‘Those books are never any good,’ Mick said.
‘That’s true,’ I said, assuming that he meant books like My Story by Zsa Zsa Gabor, as told to Gerold Frank. ‘But I’m not going to write one of those books.’
‘What would your book be about?’
‘About?’
‘You know, what would be in it?’
‘What will be in your next song?’
‘A girl in a barroom, man, I don’t know. It’s much easier to write a song than a book.’
‘I am hip,’ I said. ‘I am fucking cognizant, Bucky.’ He laughed so pleasantly that I said, ‘Well, maybe I can give you some idea.’ I gazed into the gloom, frowning, and Mick said, ‘You don’t have to tell me now, you can give it some thought if you like—’
‘Naw, if I think about it too long I’ll get bored.’
Mick laughed again. The others were quiet, watching us. Jo was waiting for the photograph to develop.
‘Maybe I can make a comparison,’ I said, and I told Mick that I had written a story about a blues singer who had swept the streets in Memphis for more than forty years, but he’s more than just a street sweeper, because he’s never stopped playing, if you see what I mean. I didn’t look at Mick to find out whether he saw. You write, I told him, about things that move your heart, and in the story about the old blues singer I wrote about where he lives and the songs he sings and just lists of the things he swept up in the streets, and I can’t explain to him, Furry Lewis, what it is about him that moves my heart, and I can’t tell you what I would write about the Rolling Stones, and so, well, I guess I can’t answer your question. No, he said, you answered it, and for the first time since I thought, long months ago, of writing this book, I felt almost good about it. That should have warned me.
Jo showed us the photograph. It was too dark, Mick and I were dark isolate heads, like Mount Rushmore as a ruin. Steckler opened his case to submit for Mick’s approval the cover for the Stones’ concert program, featuring a girl wearing an Empire hairdo, a cloudy cape blown back to reveal her zaftig figure, and a surprised expression. Mick approved. Keith and Gram came in from the tennis court (none of the Stones could play tennis, and they lost balls, can after can of balls, day after day; you’d come up Doheny toward this place, on Oriole Drive, and tennis balls would pass you, headed toward Sunset) and sat down at the piano. Mick sang along with them. The afternoon lengthened. It was one of those Scott Fitzgerald Sunday afternoons in Hollywood that go on and on.
Just a kid actin’ smart
I went and broke my darlin’s heart
I guess I was too young to know
The force of romantic poetry, its details cribbed by Coleridge and Wordsworth from the writings of William Bartram on the country and the legends around the Okefenokee Swamp, had landed Mick and Keith (whose dog Okefenokee I would later meet), the two English rhythm & blues boys, at the piano with a Georgia country cracker singing Hank Williams songs. Mick didn’t look sure he liked it.
Steckler was saying to the telephone, ‘A week from now is no good. We must have extra lines in by tomorrow . . . Would it help if I called the governor? . . . I’m quite serious, dear.’
I’ll never see that gal of mine
Lord, I’m in Georgia doin’ time
I heard that long, lonesome whistle blow
Just off the living room in the office (I told you this place was like a motel), yet another promo man, David Sandison from England, was pounding out a press release that, as I read it over his shoulder, said nothing about Brian Jones, only noted that this tour ‘marks the American debut with the Stones of Mick Taylor.’ It condemned, without naming him, Ralph Gleason’s attack on the Stones, assuring the press that ‘everyone will get to see and hear the group to best advantage.’ The release also said the tour ‘will take in 13 cities’ and then listed fourteen cities where the Stones would play. I was glad to see that I was not the only one who didn’t quite know what was going on.
In an alcove of the office there were a bar and a refrigerator. ‘Want a beer?’ Sandison asked, fetching one for himself.
‘No, thanks,’ I said. The office was not bad as offices go, with bookshelves around the walls and a large desk cluttered with papers.
‘At first they were going to play three days each in three cities,’ Sandison said, opening the green Heineken bottle and filling a glass. ‘Then there were seven cities.’ He took a long drink and I saw, there on the desk, partly covered by other papers, the letter I’d heard about but not seen, from my agent to ‘Mr Ronny Schneider.’
‘Now there are – how many? Fifteen?’ Sandison asked.
‘Dear
