entering . . . agreement with publishing house . . . Rolling Stones will share in the proceeds . . .’
‘Or is it thirteen?’ Sandison asked.
‘. . . we further agree that the final text will be cleared with the Stones and their management . . .’
‘Doesn’t matter, it’ll probably change again tomorrow,’ Sandison said, coming back from the bar as I slipped the letter into my shirt.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised at anything,’ I said, going out into the hall, where I came face to face with Schneider.
‘I’ve been looking for you,’ he said. ‘We need to talk about our deal. First of all, I think the boys should get half.’
‘Talk to my agent,’ I said, planning to tell my agent not to talk to him. ‘I don’t know nothing about that stuff.’
Earlier this afternoon I had driven out of Memphis, Tennessee, where I lived, along the wide, tree-lined streets, oaks arching over the road out of town, the old town center within the Parkways, on the way to the airport. Farther out along the road there was a wide strip of land that had been, ten years ago when I first came to Memphis, a row of three or four farms, with a mule in the field, an unpainted cabin or one wrapped with imitation redbrick tarpaper, an old Ford disintegrating in the front yard, an old black man in overalls sitting on the front porch smoking a pipe, all of it laced over with poverty and honeysuckle, all of it now gone; as I passed there was only a flat expanse of mud, little puddles standing in it, a television picture tube sunk like a fossil in the timeless ooze. I had to pass the mud-colored office building where Christopher, who if she wants can be one person after another, who – allow me to show you this blue-eyed watercolor unicorn – was teaching our cat Hodge the alphabet, had for the last four years taken reservations for Omega Airlines. She had a sweet disposition, and her manners were just as nice. ‘Rats and mice,’ she would say when she wanted to curse. But the work at Omega was hard on her, and so on us. For the last three years, since Christopher and I had entered what passed for married life, I had taken flights at family rates to research the stories I wrote so slowly that no one could imagine how desperate I was for the money.
Later twenty of us, the Stones and company, lazed around a sunken, white-clothed table at the Yamato-E, a Japanese restaurant in the Century Plaza Hotel, waiting for dinner. It took a long time, and someone – Phil Kaufman – passed around a handful of joints. Kaufman, from Los Angeles, a dwarfy German type with a yellow mustache, hung out with Gram and had been hired to help take care of the Stones while they were in town. He had done time on a dope charge at Terminal Island Correctional Institute, San Pedro, California, with someone named Charlie Manson. The rest of us had not heard of Manson yet, although we soon would, but it would be several years – four – before Kaufman made the news by stealing Gram’s dead body from a baggage ramp at the L.A. airport and burning it in the Mojave Desert. (The subject of funeral arrangements had come up during a conversation between Gram and Phil some months before the night – in September 1973 – when Gram overdosed on morphine and alcohol.) As I started to light one of the joints, I noticed that the others were putting theirs away. Chip Monck, who had been flying around for the last few days, checking light and sound conditions at the concert locations, and who was now sitting across the table from me asleep, his head lolling to one side, woke up, saw me holding a joint and a burning match, said that there would be no dope on this tour, and if you got arrested with any, you’d be on your own. Then he fell asleep again. I thought he sounded silly, but I put the joint in my pocket.
As Keith was coming back from the toilet, a man and woman passed behind him, and the woman, seeing his ragged black mane, said in a loud drunken voice, ‘You’d be cute if you put a rinse on your hair.’
Keith turned, smiling, showing his fangs. ‘You’d be cute,’ he said, ‘if you put a rinse on your cunt.’
Some of the group, led by Jo Bergman, were singing ‘Happy Birthday.’ Ronnie Schneider was twenty-six today. I was twenty-seven. I did not sing. Neither did the Stones.
After dinner we went in a fleet of Cadillacs to the Ash Grove, a small club where the old blues singer Big Boy Crudup was sharing the bill with the young blues singer Taj Mahal. The place was too crowded to see if you were sitting, so some of us were standing in the aisle when a tall redheaded cowboy kid with freckles came up and told us he was Taj’s road manager, and he was happy the Stones were in L.A. because he remembered how good the Stones were to them when they were in London. We got grass, coke, Scotch, wine, anything you want backstage.
We were in the aisle again, Crudup was singing ‘That’s All Right, Mama,’ with Taj’s band, two black men, two white men, and one Indian playing together, and I was feeling each vibration of the music with every spidery tracing of my nervous system when the road manager said to me, ‘You know, it’s hard, workin’ for niggers.’
I didn’t know what to say to that. He nodded at the rest of the band: ‘And that bass player and guitar player and drummer may look like, uh, Caucasians, but in they hearts they niggers.’
I didn’t know what to say to that either. Then he completed the thought: ‘But you know, you can have more fun with niggers than anybody else in the world.’
TWO
Music’s music. Talkin’ ’bout puttin’ on a show in New York, I’m gone be like the monkey, I ain’t gwine. There’s so much shootin’ and killin’ and goin’ on now. These places, all the folks be all crowded, you don’t know what’s gone happen. Ain’t I’m right? You can’t tell how these guys is, fella. Pshaw, man, they’s snipers everywhere. I don’t mean hidin’. I can recall three or four fellas was killed dead for playin’ music. Me and you partners – I got you wid me – we playin’ – you see what I’m talkin’ ’bout. Well, we over dem. I ain’t gone call ’em, dey dead now. Poisoned one and kilt the other. They done it ’cause he could play better than they could. I’m tellin’ you what I know, now. I wouldn’t kill nobody ’cause he could beat me doin’ anything. That’s right. Ain’t I’m right? Anybody gone kill me, ’cause you and me can do a little better than they can. They callin’ on us all the time. Ain’t callin’ on them. Me and you goin’, say we goin’, let’s go. We play over there, jump up an’ mess you up. Mess you up, boy. Another thing, you be around these places, don’t do much drinkin’. Drop a spool on you. Don’t drink much whiskey. Keep on playin’. They drop a button on you, boy, ’fore you can be sure. They got a gang, now. You try it. Mess you up, boy. Buck Hobbs – some friends I ain’t gone call they names – he could play, they couldn’t play like him. The same song I play ’bout Frankie and Albert, all them old songs, ‘John Henry,’ he could play. Others couldn’t beat him. One hit him ’cross the head one night with a guitar, ’cause they couldn’t beat him. It didn’t make him no difference. He just rock right on. Got down and stopped playin’, he got hold of a drink, he was dead. Buck Hobbs. They kilt him. I think about all that. I don’t want to leave here. House full. Fightin’. Over in our home where I was born, up in Pleasant Hill, that’s where they done it. Just near Pleasant Hill. In the grove.
MISSISSIPPI JOE CALLICOTT
The 11:45 a.m. train from Paddington Station (£3 2s 5d return and Who is the third that walks beside you?) rolled west from the drab blocks of flats at the outskirts of London to the May-green fields around Reading and Didcot, with trees, hedges, pink pigs, black and white cattle, tractors, thatch-roofed barns and houses under heavy white clouds.
I sat facing forward, trying to read the biography of Hemingway that William Burroughs recommended during one of our talks about Brian Jones, earlier in the spring, when my life, as Brian’s had, was beginning to come apart. I was reading to find out how Hemingway kept going after he lost Hadley.
