I mean there are some of us devoted but simple folk who have been really trying for years for some sort of personal encounter with Mick and in walks this Radziwill woman on the arm of Truman Capote, no less. There she is in Kansas City and New York and God knows where else. Hasn’t it all become too chi-chi with a real live princess and who the hell is Tony? Lee, dearest, the next time you run into Mick Darling, do give him my fondest. And—ride on, baby.
BOB CHRISOPHER, OF LAKE OSWEGO, OREGON,
IN A LETTER PUBLISHED IN “ROLLING STONE”
“Southern stops here. ‘Ee’s out.” Peter Rudge sighs softly the next day, ignoring the blinking red button on his phone that informs him there’s a message in his name waiting down at the desk. “It was out of hand in Texas, yes, I grant you that.” Rudge picks a piece of tobacco off his teeth with a fingernail and leans back into the pillow on his bed. The red light keeps on blinking. “Too many people hoppin into limos like they owned ‘em. But . . . c’est fini. We got changes to make.”
It’s a well-steamed, uneasy breeze that blows off the coffee-colored Mississippi River, down by the Jax Brewery in old New Orleans. Outside Rudge’s hotel room, a line has commenced to form, writers and photographers with metaphorical hats in hand being asked to explain why they should not be sent back to from where they came. The Texas debacle has hit the S. T. P. organization from top to bottom, and action will be taken.
Terry Southern, an obvious scapegoat, will be the first to catch it. For what Ethan Russell calls the “Unpardonable sin . . . getting too close to one of the principals,” he will be asked to leave the tour. Ethan will as well. As will this writer. And maybe even Capote and Beard. Up on the hotel’s alabaster white rooftop, Stan Moore watches an orange sunset behind skyscrapers under construction and mutters darkly, “I might be goin home Monday mahself. Yeah. Because I can really get down if I have to and I want Peter to have confidence in me. Like . . . I can do my job, man.”
Chris O’Dell sleeps away the day. Every time she shows her face lately, someone asks her when she plans to leave, which is kind of awkward since she doesn’t. Mick and Keith absolutely need someone around like her to take care of the small things, and all these people acting in the Stones’ name make Chris really annoyed. It’s not like it was when she worked for the Beatles at Apple. People ripped the Beatles off right and left, but at least when they walked into a room, they commanded respect. People treat the Stones like children. Like this New Orleans purge. The Stones don’t even know about it. No one’s even asked them what they think. This party is getting to be a drag. Chris sleeps on.
“Anyway,” Peter Rudge says, taking time out from a series of consultations with Jo, who hated Texas and is only now getting locked back in to rushing in and out of rooms and talking away quickly in a series of extravagant can be seen “pumping them nymphomaniacally” on stage as he edges “as near to the stars sweating under the spotlighted blaze” as possible.
And those are just his notes. But, in the month between Capote’s little fete in New Orleans and the climactic three concerts that end the tour in New York, this remarkable thing happens. He appears on both the Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett late night talk shows. He discusses drug intake on the chartered plane, mentions Bobby Keys as a good ole boy from Texas, itemizes the ingredients of a tequila sunrise, and just generally does the kind of advance publicity for the Stones that money cannot buy.
Although he does refer to the band as the “Beatles” two or three times on the Carson show (“The Stones, right?” Johnny says helpfully. “I thought that’s what you meant.”), everything Capote has to say is more or less complimentary and he makes the whole shebang sound like a great adventure.
Asked about it some months after the tour ends, he says of the Stones, “They’re complete idiots. Mick Taylor is pretty, a little Jean Harlow blond-type, but dumb, and totally uninteresting. What I like is something beyond my imagination that (pop! snap of his fingers) sets me off. A vision. Nothing on the tour was even remotely like that, and I had no insight into any of it that any other half-sensitive person who was along could have had.”
As a matter of fact, Capote hardly has a good word for anyone associated with the thing. Nicky Hopkins he finds “has the mark of death upon him. Not interesting but obviously a very sick boy.” Jim Price is “that little blond boy from Texas, a nothing.” Bobby Keys is “either better or worse than the Stones; I can’t tell which, but certainly totally undisciplined and headed for disaster.
“Intuition tells me they’ll never tour this country again and in fact will not exist in three years. They are evanescent people who are not important. There’s no correlation at all between Jagger and a Sinatra . . . Jagger accents, “it’s over.” The phone rings and Rudge lifts the receiver to his ear.
“Who? Yes, of course, Troubey,” Rudge croons, smiling down the wire Troubey, we know you’re giving us a dinner. What can we say? We’re overwhelmed. You are too? Perfect. Troubey bay-bee, constrain yourself . . . Mick Taylor is in 416. I’ll send you a room list and you can make your invitations from that. Certainly yes, bye-bye.”
Well now. Just because some people have stepped over the line and had their wrists slapped is no reason for everyone to enter a monastery. After all, one must have a minimum of social intercourse. And what could be more fun than a dinner party thrown by Truman Capote, the man who tossed the party of the sixties, the black and white ball at the Plaza Hotel that The New York Times published the guest list for the very next day. Pete Hamill, columnist for the New York Post, was so outraged by it all, he wrote an entire column, alternating paragraphs about the party with paragraphs about guys on a Vietnam battlefield getting shot at and chopped and chewed to ribbons by Vietcong mortar and small-arms fire. Everybody in New York without money loved that column. It was an angry blast at a country where people went to parties while its young men were being shipped home from war in aluminum caskets.
But the sixties are over now, and Capote is still going strong. Although he’s been around the tour for only four days he’s already decided which of the S. T. P. crew are professionals, and which are rank amateurs. For instance, he considers Gary Stromberg a “rude New York person.” In the copious notes he takes for an article he later decides not to write, Capote describes his “. . . grassy eyes shifting behind aviator shades, his hair-framed lips painfully producing the supplicant, boot-licking smile so indigenous to his image.” Also on Capote’s list is Marshall Chess, the very man who conceived the idea of having him on the tour. Chess has “fat little legs” and can’t sing, his voice is not in the least charming, he can’t dance ... he has no talent save for a kind of fly-eyed wonder. He will never be a star. That unisex thing is a no-sex thing. Believe me, he’s about as sexy as a pissing toad.
“He could, I suppose, be a businessman. He has that facility of being able to focus in on the receipts in the middle of ‘Midnight Rambler,’ while he’s beating away with that whip. Maybe it’s his financial advisor, the Prince, that he’s whipping....”
Despite the way he feels about it all once it’s over, during the life of the tour, Capote is so absolutely polite and well-mannered that no one can tell if he likes or hates them, and some people are very concerned about which it is.
So the tremors that run through the S. T. P. hierarchy when it’s learned that Capote is throwing a dinner party and has his own guest list are considerable. The Tac Squad is quite taken with Troubey, as Rudge calls him; he’s a breath of civilization out here in the boondocks, an authentic arbiter of American taste who is on the road with the Stones, so that must say something about everyone else who is fortunate enough to be along.
Here’s how the party at Arnaud’s in the French Quarter looks. Capote down at one end of the table with his coat over his shoulders like an Italian film director. Jo Bergman to his left, then Charlie Watts. Bill Wyman next, with his lady Astrud next to him, Ahmet Ertegun, who’s flown into town earlier in the day on his private jet, and Peter Beard. On the right, a visiting promoter who’s a friend of Rudge and Jo Bergman, Mick Taylor, Annie Leibovitz, and Peter Rudge. Mick and Keith and Bianca are still in transit.
Just east of New Orleans, Cynthia Sagittarius stands waiting for a ride on a narrow, two-lane country road. She stands there for a long, long time until what looks like a guy and his wife pick her up. The guy has some kind of speech impediment and he talks really slowly and very spaced out, as though they’ve been feeding him institutional Thorazine for a long time. In halting sentences, he tells Cynthia that his wife, who’s driving, has just come out of a mental institution where she’d been sent for cutting her parents into small cubes with a butcher knife. Only he knows all these details that only the person who did it could know. Then he starts wrestling with the lock on the glove compartment. He says there’s a butcher knife in there that Cynthia should see. His wife tries to pull over to the side of the road, but he grabs the wheel out of her hand, jams his foot down on hers on the accelerator and keeps it there until they are careening out of control at a hundred miles an hour.
Someone tells a story about the Shah of Persia, and the waiter brings white wine. Down at their end of the table, Ahmet and Peter Beard are keeping the conversation going by disagreeing over everything. Ahmet’s known Peter forever, from back East, and they seem to really get on with each other.
It’s not very long afterward that Cynthia gets picked up by a guy driving alone who doesn’t talk much and stares straight ahead, and right away she knows she’s in trouble. When he turns off the main highway onto a side road, she’s sure of it, and she asks the guy to let her out. He refuses, and keeps on driving, and Cynthia yanks on the handle and opens the door. In a car doing over forty, opening the door usually freaks the driver into slowing down. This guy goes to the floor of the car and comes up with a snub-nosed revolver in his hand. He points it at her head and tells her she can jump out now if she wants. Cynthia leans out, about to do it, wondering how bad it will be hitting the asphalt at that speed, when something takes hold of the guy. He slams on his brakes and lets her out.
In Tuscaloosa, Jo-Anne gets arrested. Her clothes are in bad shape by now. She’s got crabs and fleas and lice in her frizzy blonde hair. She’s been raped a couple of times while hitching and when the cops collar her outside the hall and put her into the paddy wagon for loitering, she just breaks down and starts to cry, like a little girl.
Yes, Mick Taylor tells Annie, the architecture in L.A. is weird, especially when you consider that they could have planned it. Annie’s amazed at the way these little soirees work. For instance, the promoter sitting down the table from her has more than once instructed his security guards to get her to move her ass off the stage while she’s trying to shoot some concert and now they’re politely making small talk over the escargots. The promoter asks her to pass the water. She does.
After the dinner is over, everyone converges on a warehouse at 748 Camp Street where Ahmet is hosting his own little party. Everyone’s been invited to this one, and the warehouse is both a recording studio and the kind of place Mike Hammer used to get himself trapped in, with bare beams and dusty floors, and one fan whirring way in the back where the red neon light from a First National City Bank shines through a window. Ahmet knows that for the Stones, New Orleans means black music. Black music is where they’re from and they are scholars on the blues. Charlie Watts is one of the world’s great jazz freaks, and this is his first visit to the city of Rampart Street and Bourbon Street, of Kid Ory and George Lewis. Ahmet knows that if the Stones go wandering down the French Quarter, they may catch some old character like Raymond Burke playing, but a real legend, like a man called Perfesser Longhair, might be working out in Algiers, which is two hours away.
So with the ease of a wealthy man who has become wealthier by pursuing a business he loves, Ahmet makes some phone calls and rounds up Roosevelt Sykes, a fat, balding black man from Chicago who recorded “Night Life” in 1936 and is known as the “Honeydripper” “Snooks” Eagelin, a blind black guitarist and singer, who many people think is dead; and Longhair himself, whose proper name is either Roy or Roland Byrd. Byrd is a black man of indeterminate age with a compressed narrow face and skin like fine parchment left too long in the sun. Ahmet first “discovered”Longhair in an all-black town in the middle of the Louisiana prairie in 1948. Even then Longhair was famous for his songs and for playing the piano while blowing a mouth harp and working the drums with his feet. A frightened taxi driver took Ahmet and his white business partner out to a muddy field in the middle of nowhere, pointed them toward the lights, and told them to follow the music. It sounded like the entire Fats Domino band blowing and Ahmet had to fast-talk the black proprietor of the all-black honky-tonk into believing that he and his partner were from New York, writers for Life magazine, out to do a story. Why else would white men come to a place like this?
After the set, knowing that he was in the presence of an authentic primitive genius, his pants still wet from slogging through muddy fields to find him, Ahmet approached Longhair and said, “We ain’t from Life. We’re from a record company. We wanna make records with you.”
To which Longhair replied, “I signed with Mercury yesterday.”
Longhair did records for Ertegun and Atlantic during the fifties and had a hit with “Tipitina.” Mainly he just kept on playing in small towns and black bars around New Orleans and in the country, as New Orleans became a big music town (Fats Domino, Clarence “Frogman” Henry, Lee Dorsey) and then declined. With the rise to popularity of a young white piano player who calls himself Dr. John (real name Mac Rebbenack, a session man who worked on Sonny and Cher records) and his recording of an album of Longhair’s kind of music, some interest in the old man has been revived.
Now he sits playing for the friends of the Rolling Stones. An old black man wearing a crushed hat sits behind the drum kit doubling up on everything, playing over the top, using only the snares. Longhair doesn’t like most people who try to play with him and that goes for the drummer. Longhair’s got these crazy rhythms that keep changing with no time signature that you can write down. “Gotta Whole Lotta Lovin For You” follows “Everyday I Got The Blues/’ which is followed by the back-alley anthem, “Stagger Lee.” “I was standin’on the corner/When I heard my bulldog bark/It was Stagger Lee and Billy/Two men who gambled late/Stagger Lee threw seven/Billy swore that he threw eight.”
When these old black men die, their music goes with them. As America changes into one big city joined by television signals and^tiperhighways, it’s native artists, the black bluesmen are going to vanish. The party is a flashback to a by-gone age. These old men can still boogie, and by midnight people are sweating and dancing, laughing and slapping five, sniffing coke off the backs of their hands, saying, “My, isn’t this a bitch?” and “Ooo-ee, sure is hot.” Then they slug down some pink champagne and jump back on the floor to sweat it out. Richard Elman’s there. So’s Terry Southern. So’s Ethan Russell. Everyone is getting down, and when Mick and Keith and Bianca sweep in, with Bianca looking as though she’s just stepped off Tennessee Williams’ front porch in a big hat with a black net veil, a southern floozy’s roadhouse red-checked blouse and a black shiny skirt, nobody has the time to worry how they are. People are taking care of their own business.
Then this old-time New Orleans street band struts across the floor, with a magnificent old black man in the lead, promenading in a black hat, white gloves, and a white-starred sash across his white shirt and black jacket with a stuffed pigeon dangling off one shoulder, people are up and walking in time behind the band, waving handkerchiefs, and bopping to that second line. Everything is fine! Hmmm my my my! Got to be!
These old cats have been making music all their lives without much reward, without ever becoming pop heroes or culture symbols. Even most blacks prefer the whiter sounds of big city R and B, or the polished urban blues of men like B. B. King, and these old cats don’t even know who the Stones are. “Mick Jagger? Which one is he?” one asks, as Ahmet writes out a check for him in the corner. They’re just glad to be getting paid for the gig. And somehow that gets through to everyone. It’s like a syringe full of sanity that normalizes things and makes Texas seem like something out of the distant past. So that the next day, without much discussion or fanfare, everyone who was off is back on the tour.
Immediately before the plane is due to leave for Mobile, early Tuesday afternoon, June 27, Robert Frank sits eating breakfast. Grizzled. Unshaven. Razor packed away somewhere. Bags under his eyes. A waitress drops a dish cover and the sound clatters through his brain. He winces like a muscatel-soaked refugee from Skid Row. “I have never,” he says quietly, “been on anything like this before. I have been on trips with extraordinary people, but nothing that so totally excludes the outside world. To never get out, to never see anything ... I am not used to it.”
Hotel corridors and hotel lobbies. Coffee-shop breakfasts and all-night parties and forty minutes in the afternoon to see the sights. The sharpest people don’t even bother. Even within the S. T. P. party the Stones are again once removed from the outside world. After Texas, they become nearly invisible. They stay in their rooms until just before the limos leave, then sweep through the lobby and are gone. They dress in special backstage rooms where only the Inner Circle is welcome. The only time they’re in plain sight is on the plane. They are total strangers in a strange land, operating on their own time schedule, and after nearly a month on the road, everyone around them is starting to count the days until the four-day break that precedes the July Fourth concert in Washington, D.C.
All they have to do is get through Alabama and they go on vacation. The last time the Stones worked there, at Auburn University in 1969, the house was about three-quarters full, the hair short, and the biggest cheer of the evening greeted an announcement that curfews for women had been suspended. But the Stones have recorded some of their finest music in Muscle Shoals, so Alabama is another place where they have spent a lot of time without really seeing things.
Perhaps Alabama is a hard place for any outsider to know. You come in with all these myths in your head and then see them outside the hall, with stomachs bulging over their ammo belts, .38 Magnums hanging obscenely off their hips, “nigger” sticks in their hands, baby-blue riot helmets covering their faces. Four cops refuse to work inside the hall when told they will have to remove their guns.
Earlier in the day Stan Moore meets with the local police captain. “By golly,” the captain says in a high, whiney, funny cracker voice. “They tole me there was gonna be a colored boy to talk to us.”
“Yessiree,” Stan says, “I am the colored boy.”
“By golly,” the captain says, “I think they’re gonna take this place apart. Stand on the chairs, and just take it apart.”
The promoter assures the police that if the kids do stand on chairs, the building will not automatically fall down. The promoter is a colonel in the state militia and has a signed picture of Guvnah George Corley Wallace hanging in his office.
In the parking lot, the cops stand around in twos and threes, nervously whipping and cracking their riot batons into the light poles, jousting with each other like medieval knights getting loose before a big one. “I heah they been causin’ hell everywheah they go,” one cop says. “They bettah know we mean biziness heah.”
Over at the motel where the stage crew is staying, they’ve drained the pool so that the longhairs don’t foul the filtering system. They’re demanding that people come down to the desk and pay in advance for local calls.
But the guy selling Sno-Cones in the parking lot has a beard, and he’s tripping off some THC a kid from Louisiana laid on him. He says things aren’t as bad as they used to be, but the cops come down on you whether you’re black or white. The cop outside the stage door is fat and has gray razor-cut sideburns. He looks like a cartoonist’s version of an Alabama sheriff and his given name is Joe Don. “You can’t like this kind of music, can you?” I ask him.
“Ah tolerate it,” he says kindly. “Hell, ah been separated from mah ole lady foah more’n three years now . . . you go somewheah foah a drank, it’s all you heah.”
So it’s not that easy to figure. One thing is for certain though. The hair in Mobile, a breezy little city just across the border from Mississippi, is shorter than anywhere else on the tour. Kids have come from the entire southern tier of states, from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Kentucky, and the guys have their hair styled, one crinkle at the neck, one ripple over the ear, right on the borderline. It’s hair that does not offend, that says, “Hey, buddy? I work down at the garage. Do lube jobs on Saturday mornin and get black under my fingernails. So take your action somewhere else.”
Kids file respectfully down the street and obediently form lines in the soft, honeyed twilight. Kids in starched summer cottons and freshly pressed pants, kids in polished loafers, with Old Spice on their faces and Vitalis on their hair. The summer is about to open up in front of them, and some of them have come from as far away as Atlanta and Lexington. They pass by a row of peeling, ramshackle wooden houses without so much as a glance at the old black men in suits and ties who sit rocking on porches next to chipped white washing machines, waiting for the evening breeze. Little black girls in hand-me-down dresses scurry through the line and down the street, girls just beginning to sprout, with nicknames like “Skeeter” and long skinny legs and pigtails.
At 220 Lawrence Street, three black women sit on the porch. One rocks slowly with a baby in her arms and pink rubber curlers in her hair.
“Do you know who’s playing tonight?” I ask her.
“Mmmmmmmm-ehhhhh,” she shakes her head, wiggling shyly in the chair.
“Oh shoah,” one of her braver friends says. “It’s that Little Stevie Wondah.”
“My,” the one with the baby says. She smiles, and when she does, you can see that she’s younger than anyone else on the porch. “Stevie Wondah,” she says. “Ah knew it was someone good.” Her arm jerks forward like an arrow loosed from a bow and she shakes a bottle of milk into her baby’s mouth. “Ah shoahly would lahk to go,” she says, touching a girlish hand to her curlers, as though to make certain they can be out by showtime. “But ah heah they awl sold out.”
Backstage, the Assistant Mayor and Chief of Police of Mobile, Robert (“Call me Bob”) Doyle (“It’s a good Irish name”), has come to present the Stones with the key to the city. Keys to cities are something they have more or less stopped handing out, except to astronauts. But here is the assistant mayor in a gray suit, with a tie tack in the shape of a hand gun holding his tie in place, sonorously intoning, “Some of mah consuvative frens have said to me, ‘Bob, what are you doin’. Have you gone crazy?’ “ The two newspaper photographers who swirled in with the assistant mayor go snap-crackle-pop with their flash bulbs to record the moment. The assistant mayor blinks, then continues. “But ah say we got eleven thousand people out there tonaght and we got to make them happy too.” He solemnly hands out five gold keys and five leather-bound certificates to the Stones, who are standing in line like polite children on prize day at the academy. “With that and a dahm,” the assistant mayor grins, “y’awl can get a cup of coffee. Now ah’m goin home and lissen to mah Guy Lombardo records.”
The Stones are used to this kind of stuff, having been feted by mayors on their earliest tours, introduced to their giggling daughters, given plaques, then been told to leave town as quickly as possible. It’s the kind of American tomfoolery they love, and no sooner do they get out the door than they start acting like the Monkees, biting the keys to check on their gold content.
Bobby Keys and Terry Southern have ignored the entire ceremony in one corner of the room, trying to out-Texas each other. First it’s Crystal City, the spinach capital of the world, the town so funky it has a statue of Popeye in the town square, then it’s Keys twanging “Sheeyut” in an accent so thick you can ride a Palomino across it.
Terry responds with “Fuyuuuck,” but Keys walks off with honors by stringing, “sheeyitfuuckdamn” together then striking a match off his thumbnail, country-style, and shouting, “Elsie? Elsie? You keep that dawg away from me now, you heah? Ah’U kill him if you don’t, ah sweah.”
Southern looks at him with authentic respect when he finishes and even Keys seems a little surprised at what he’s pulled out of the hat. “Ah, yeah,” he says. “Must be one of those black pills you gave me.”
“Shoo, boy, ah wouldn’t trust you with one a them pills, you’d likely go cray-zee.”
“Ah am raght now,” Keys says. “Outta my rabbitass mind.” He picks up a nearby bottle of Chivas Regal and takes a healthy snort. “And about to get snot-flyin dronk too.”
Keys, a West Texas boy, from the mesquite and cotton country outside of Lubbock, has been on the road, more or less, for seventeen years. He has played his saxophone in Caspar and Laramie and Butte, in Twin Ridges and Helena, in dancehalls where fist fights spread like fire in a stand of dry timber. He has been in dozens of bands, ingested incalculable quantities of various chemical mixtures and come to believe in and live his own myth . . . the last of the all-out rockers.
As Bobby tells it, his life was changed that day they opened the new Humble station down the block in Slaton, Texas. Keys was eleven years old then and there was this skinny kid with glasses playing an electric guitar by the name of Buddy Holly. Buddy was in high school then, and from that day on, Keys knew he had to become a musician. By the time he was thirteen, he had a saxophone and was working Catholic weddings with someone named Stinson Baylen, who made most of his money as a plumber. Then he joined Tommy Hancock and the Roadside Playboys, who played clubs where they served real liquor. Keys was so young, he had to stay on the bandstand between sets.
“On mah thirteenth birthday’ Keys says, “a bunch of mah frens took me to Devil’s Lake, about twenty-five miles from Del Rio, Texas, and down to a whorehouse in Mexico. They got me drunk and bought me a fahv-dollah whoah. It was truly a red-letter day in mah life. Ah thought, hell, this beats shit out of Pony League baseball and the Methodist Youth Fellowship, of which ah was vice-president at the time. That got gone in a hurry.”
By the time he was fifteen, Keys had been hanging around outside the garage door watching immortals like Jerry Allison, Glenn D. Hardin, Don Guest, and the great Buddy Holly pick and sing for nearly four years. One day Allison called to say that Buddy Knox, of ‘Tarty Doll,” “Hula Love,” and “Think I’m Gonna Kill Myself”fame needed a sax player. Keys took the offer and spent the next seven years playing six nights a week at clubs throughout the Midwest. Leaving right after shows, Keys and the other four Rhythm Orchids would drive straight through to the next town and pull into a rented motel room to clean up. You hung your stage suit up on the bathroom wall while you took a shower so the steam would take the wrinkles out. Your pants went in between the mattress to get pressed and you used white shoe polish to hide the grime around the collar of your shirt. Buddy, the star, traveled separately, in his own Cadillac.
“Ah was always the youngest in the band,” Keys says. “So ah always had to drink more, take more pills, and get more pussy to prove myself. Or else have to faght all the tahm. Lahk ah was always the one who had to unload the truck, set up the lights and the P.A. and then get Knox’s suitcase out for him.”
After three and a half years with Knox, Bobby joined Bobby Vee’s band. Vee, who made “Run to Him,” “Rubber Ball,” and “Take Good Care of My Baby,” hailed from Fargo, North Dakota, and one day while Keys and the rest of the band were rehearsing in a hotel in Moorhead, Minnesota, Fargo’s twin city, this kid came in, asking for a gig as a piano player. He said his name was Eldon Gunn and he liked playing Hank Williams’ stuff. Everyone in the band was into wide silk ties, high-collar shirts, and Aqua-Net to keep their James Dean hairdos in place, and the kid just didn’t fit. So they told him to go home and practice some more and come back when your act’s together, and instead he went to New York and became a folksinger by the name of Bob Dylan.
Vee and the band worked the Dick Clark caravan, playing behind acts like Freddy Cannon, Gene Pitney, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Little Eva, Billy Stewart, Frankie Avalon, Reparata and the Del-Rons. At the Teen-Age World’s Fair in San Antonio, Texas, in 1963, they were on the bill with an English band named the Rolling Stones.
“Ah was amazed,” Keys says. “They were the first band ah’d ever seen who didn’t wear uniforms on stage. Before the show, ah remember Brian Jones sayin, ‘Look everyone else changes before they go on/ So they all switched their shirts around and they still weren’t wearing the same thang. Then Jagger said, ‘Excuse us, but the fuckin amps keep goin out.’ Ah went, ‘Huhhh . . . ? He said fuck. Did you hear that? He said . . . fuck.’ It won mah heart foahevah.”
Keys left Vee’s band and went to Hollywood, where he lived on popcorn and Kool-Aid for a while then took the closest gig he could find, which was in Sioux City, Iowa. He played there half a winter, drifted to Denver, worked with an all-black band, then decided to give Hollywood another shot. He hooked up with Levon Helm, one of Ronnie Hawkins’ old drummers, and began playing in a blues band with Leon Russell, Jesse Ed Davis, Gary Gilmour, and Jimmy Markham. One gig led to another, and a year and a half later, Keys met up with Delaney Bramlett, late of the Shindogs.
Delaney then met Bonnie, who’d been singing in bowling alleys. They found Bobby Whitlock, got a contract with Stax Records, and began forming a band. Keys joined, as did Jim Price, a Bible-reading Christian Scientist trumpet player from Texas. Delaney and Bonnie toured a lot, playing raw, funky rock and roll that attracted people like Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and Billy Preston —all of whom sat in at one time or another.
Keys and Price left Delaney and Bonnie to join Joe Cocker’s “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” tour, an act consisting of thirty or so people that quickly became an authentic circus, with lots of talented people struggling for recognition and pushing for room on stage. Careers were created and destroyed in six weeks, and the full-length color “documentary” of the tour reveals none of it. Not too surprisingly, Keys emerged as one of the few memorable characters in the movie and throughout the Stones’ tour, Robert Frank feels him pushing to get his face and voice in front of the lens.
“Ah’U tell you about that Cocker tour, man,” Keys says. “We were given the idea everyone loves everyone, everyone works for everyone . . . but the things that were done to Joe Cocker during it ... and especially since, are criminal. He has been used, abused, and stepped on, and he is such a beautiful cat, man, who ah love. On that tour, he was used to promote Leon Russell.”
After the tour ended, Keys began to do a lot of session work with the Stones, who discovered in him an incredible energy source, and an authentic link to the old rock and roll that Keith, in particular, feels heir to. On both the European and English tours, wherever Keys was there was a party, and sooner or later, they found something broken or had to call the manager to keep the noise down.
Being with the Stones gave Keys top-level stature in the rockbiz. Opinions as to how good a musician he really is vary, but his session rates become astronomical and people keep on calling him with work. Like anyone who comes from a town of less than seven thousand in West Texas, and finds himself being discussed on national television by Truman Capote, Keys'life becomes a mixture of the real and the calculated, the myth and reality.
“I love to play, man/’ he says. “That’s what I am. Music is me. I go crazy on the road, sure, but what the hell, man, you might as well have a good time doin it. I like to stretch out a little. After seventeen years, I figure I deserve it ... get high and what the hell ... I live for today, man. That’s all.”
Keys on the road is like no one else, with the possible exception of Keith, but when so many weird and twisted things happen, it’s a life style worth considering. After the concert in Mobile is over, the plane returns to New Orleans and the band goes looking for something to eat in the French Quarter. The gurus of America, who come out at night are most easily found in jails, parking lots, all-night laundromats and restaurants that don’t close. At four in the morning, a high-stepping black man carrying a paper cup of beer comes into where the Stones are sitting.
“Evenin,” he says, looking the table up and down and giving no sign that he’s recognized anyone. “You people all on somethin, ain’t you? I can tell. Ah’m a musician mahself. Blew a concert in be-flat this mornin myself.”
No one knows what that means, so Charlie Watts tells him to sit down and have a beer. “Yeah,” the cat sighs. “Dig it. Ah come down heah to play New Year’s Eve and got so high ah ain’t left since. Can you imagine? They even used to let you have real glasses to carry the beer down the street, but it’s paper now. You can buy it on Sunday but you can’t get no light bulbs, dig?”
No one does.
“Like this. They got a law on it. If your lights go out, you in the dark for the weekend but feelin’ fine fine fine. On the otha hand, if you in Georgia you all right, more or less. Lightbulbs to spare, but no beer to be seen.”
“Who you play with, man?” Charlie asks.
“Aw, me? Play all kinds a shit. Philly Groove, the Tonics, ‘La-la means I Love You’ ... ah play with Isaac Hayes, man. Thirty-five pieces, two trumpets who can read and no filibusterin. Charts, you dig? You ever make it to the Apple, check out Orry’s on a Hundred and Twenty-Fifth. Man will cut you some bad vines.”
“Wot’s ‘ee talkin’ about?” Bill Wyman says helplessly. Charlie shrugs his shoulders and leans forward, fascinated.
“With Isaac now we open on this bald head in the spotlight, everyone thinkin it’s Ike only it ain’t. Chick who’s gone clean shaven like him. The music comes in, da-da-da-da-da-da. . . .”
“Wot’s ‘ee doin bass lines for?” Wyman says. “Why do they all do bass lines?”
“Who’s the drummer then?” Charlie asks.
“Shhh. Not now, man. I’m just gettin to the part where Ike comes in.” He raps it down for another fifteen minutes or so, smiling pleasantly, bobbing his head, laying down an open palm every now and then for a pound.
“Aw, man,” he says, reluctantly getting to his feet. “It’s been so fine bein wit you cats tonight. Wit musicians it’s always cool. You kin always ree-late right away. You dig?”
“Haven’t got a clue,” Wyman shrugs, going back to his clams.
“Well, I can’t imagine who’s going to be there,” Truman Capote says very quietly in the hotel lobby the next morning. “Tuscaloosa’s only three hundred miles from Mobile and school’s been out for two weeks. You know, my grandfather was president of the university there for twenty-two years.
“Peter and I are leaving, yes . . . but we will see you all in New York.”
With Capote gone, the tour has to look to itself for a new source of gossip and conversation and the leading subject is the doctor. In a time-honored tradition that has always surrounded the Stones, he is being sucked deeply in the vortex of the rock madness. People who usually get crazy near the Stones do so because of unlimited access to drugs. The doctor, however, is spacing out on ladies, who are only too happy to accept his invitation to go back to the hotel and meet the boys. For someone who’s grown up in the antiseptic, slightly puritan suburbs of America, being out on the road with the Stones is like having the key to the candy store. It doesn’t stop, and they come in all flavors.
Stumbling toward Nashville, with that four-day break shining up ahead like an oasis. The Tuscaloosa concert is jam-packed, with dope-smoking, pony-tailed kids who must have come out of the hills somewhere, but it’s no more than a quick flash. The goal is to get out of Alabama and back to civilization without anything untoward happening.
The S. T. P. bus gets stuck in a snarl of traffic outside the hall after the concert. When Rudge tries to get a cop to help, the cop drawls, “Ah doan give a fuck if you make yoah plane or not. You the same to me as anyone else.”
Incompetence. Rudge is surrounded by it. As heat lightning cracks in the blue black sky and the bus stands mired, Rudge can almost hear the jet straining its engines for take-off at the little airport outside town. He shouts, “Driver, use the other lane. I’ll run out in front and clear it for us.” Rudge hops off the bus and runs pell-mell into the crowd. The bus begins inching down the street. Rudge leaps back on, smiling, and no sooner does the bus get free of traffic than the driver notes, “Ah believe ah got me a flat.”
“No you don’t,” Rudge says.
“This isn’t happening,” Jo Bergman says, secretly glad because it’s starting to feel a little like a rock and roll tour again.
“C’mannnnn,” Willie the baggage man says in that tone Manhattan taxi drivers use to explain illegal left turns to helpless pedestrians. “You got plenty more tires where that one came from. Keep drivin.”
“Ah believe it’s gone to smokin on me,” the driver says quietly.
He coasts it into a gas station by the side of the road and everyone piles out and sure enough one rear tire is crushed and mangled and smoking like crazy and this is it. Rudge and his S. T. P. machine have been stopped dead. A breakdown in procedure. Stranded in an Alabama gas station. People start playing with the robotlike machine that dispenses the barbecue chips, looking at the grease rack and digging on how the weird green neon light distorts your face and makes it all runny and whooshy. Rudge takes one look at the pack of drugged somnambulists he’s carrying around and runs off down the highway for help.
“Oh, wow,” somebody oh wows. “We’re okay now. The cops are here.”
Tires screeching, red beams whirling, two Alabama State Police cars pull into the station. With S. T. P. immunity, as though they were hailing taxis outside the Plaza, everyone jumps in and the cars pull out for the airport. “Think they’ll legalize marijuana soon?” Robert Frank asks the cop who’s driving his car.
The cop driving the other car has just come on to the midnight shift after spending the day pushing his rig back from Florida. He’s got a bull neck, ox arms, razored sideburns, and weighs a good 240 pounds. Donald Nathan. Used to run to Los Angeles, make it in three and a half days, keepin eyes wide open, stickin to the back road so he wouldn’t get weighed, forty-four thousand pounds of lumber at 107 miles an hour ooo-whee rammin it to the floor pushin the limit and they’d take him down in Texas regular for it.
Ole Donnie runs his wildcat rig all day then reports in for work on the graveyard shift as an officer of the law. A man’s got to make some side money these days, he says.
“Bet you eat a lot of them white pills, hah?” someone says, getting smart.
“What?” Donnie says.
“I said, I bet. . . .”
“Ah heard what you said, boy. Say it again and you be standin by that store watching me drive by. The po-leese is here to help people. You remember that.”
Yessir, yessir, Yes Sir. We all gonna get our minds right real soon. We promise.
“Hey,” Gary Stromberg says helpfully. “What kinda truck you drive? A Mack?”
The police cars storm into the airport and slam to a stop one behind another. Lightning is crackling, thunder booming, and great drops of rain are about to soak the green fields and red mud around the landing strip.
Rudges arrives last, hair streaming wet, in an open Chevy truck, having run into the first bar he could find for help. Long hair, funny accent. “Excuse me, I’ve got a group of people who’ve done a concert and are stranded. I wonder could you help?” and half the place turned out to lend a hand.
The plane taxis into the rain and lifts off and it’s as though some kind of victory has been won. Charlie Watts grabs Alan Dunn’s ankles and together they go tumbling head over heels down the center aisle of the plane. High-school gymnastics at nineteen thousand feet and the next time Mr. Watts comes down the aisle he is looking very cool and dignified.
“Alan?” he says, with the aplomb of a young Ronald Colman. “Alan? I say . . . apparently we’ve been asked to leave this place.” The first half of the tour is over.