The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. Stanley Booth

out of the office, loomed before me, his face mournful as a basset hound’s. He asked if I’d just got up and I said brusquely, ‘That’s right,’ wanting the thick apple juice, cold strawberries, pineapple and orange slices – they might try to steal from you, but they’d never starve you – and he said, ‘Then you haven’t heard about Kerouac.’

      ‘What about him?’

      ‘He’s dead.’

      ‘Where’d you hear that?’ I asked, because you never want to believe these things.

      ‘It’s been on the radio this morning. He died last night. He was living in Florida. Did you know that?’

      I didn’t answer because in my mind I was riding on a Trailways bus from Waycross to Macon, Georgia, Lumber City just ahead, reading a story in a book I had borrowed from the Okefenokee Regional Library, since Waycross did not have a bookstore, if you discounted a place where they sold Bibles. In the story a Mexican girl was singing to a young American man a Piano Red song we used to play on the jukebox at the lake where my high school friends and I danced and drag-raced and made love in cars. I had never read a story like this one. The people in it drove fast and made love in cars, and that made my life seem more like something you might read about, or as the song said, ‘If you can’t boogie, you know I’ll show you how.’ Then I remembered that the only work I had an actual contract to do was a story for Esquire about Kerouac. Waiting to hear from the Stones, I had postponed going to Florida for an interview. The thought jolted me back to the present, sitting on a couch in the living room, still hungry. My mood had changed, and I made a ham sandwich and drank a beer.

      Mick, Mick, and Keith had arrived, Jagger in the office with the door closed, Keith playing tennis with Mick Taylor, then displaying in the pool what he called ‘the form perfected over six years lounging on the beaches of the world.’ Only six years a Rolling Stone, and he looked a hundred. How old had Kerouac looked? Sandison grimly watched Keith swimming. Before going into the publicity racket Sandison was a reporter for a small-town English newspaper. Both his body and his prematurely balding head were pear-shaped; Kerouac had lived the vagabond life unknown to the pear-shaped. Sandison really felt as if something had been taken away from him. He told Keith about Kerouac, and though Keith had never read him, he sort of swam more seriously for a few strokes.

      When Keith had dressed again and we were heading back to the house, I remembered to tell him that I had written the letter. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I’ll speak to Mick about it,’ plunging me again into gloom, things seemed never to get past this point, but I went to my Oz room and got the famous letter. A minute later, when I got back, Keith was gone. Jagger was in the living room on a couch with Jo Bergman, talking business, frowning. I looked in the backyard and saw nobody, then went out front and found Mick Taylor alone. I did not say, Where the hell is Keith? but airily remarked, ‘Insane business, people running about.’ It was the first sentence I could remember saying to Mick Taylor. He smiled simply and said, ‘I don’t mind the business part as long as I don’t have to do it.’ Then I said, ‘Where the hell is Keith?’

      ‘He and Charlie just left for the studio.’

      I went inside thinking, To hell with it.

      Then as I passed, Jagger looked up and said, ‘Isn’t there a letter or summink somebody wants me to sign?’ Now we both were frowning. I produced the letter and he signed it, Jo behind the couch not even thinking about not reading over our heads.

      I had typed the Stones’ names in the order – Jagger, Richards, Watts, Wyman, Taylor – that I wanted to collect them, because I knew that once Jagger and Keith had signed the others would; so I rode with the two Micks past the Whisky-à-Go-Go and Hollywood High School to Sunset Sound Studios, where they were finishing their new album. I asked Keith, slumped on a couch in front of the recording console, to sign the letter and he did, in the wrong place. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said, and though Mick Taylor was at the bottom of the list he was sitting next to Keith, so I passed him the paper and pen, and he signed. Charlie signed leaning over the console. That made four out of five. I went to an office and called Wyman at the Beverly Wilshire, where he and Astrid were still living and were not happy about it. He said he was not coming to the studio, but he’d be over to the Oriole house for dinner about seven-thirty and he’d sign it then. ‘That’ll be all right, won’t it,’ he asked, and I said sure. But I wanted to get the letter out tonight. The tour was starting soon, I expected big expenses, and I knew in my bones that it would take forever to get a publishing contract and even longer to get paid.

      When I went back to the control room Charlie and Mick Taylor were leaving, and I rode with them back to the Oriole house. Wyman and Astrid were coming over for dinner because they were bored with eating out, and we were going out because we were bored with eating at home. I had nothing to worry about except that we might leave before Wyman arrived, so I worried about that. But they came in and sat down to dinner just as we were leaving. I laid the letter beside Wyman’s plate and asked him to sign it. He perused it, taking his time. I had already waited longer than I wanted to. ‘Right there,’ I said, handing him a pen. Wyman picked up the letter and asked, ‘You don’t mind if I read it, do you?’ I said sure, go ahead, it’s just one sentence, no big deal. ‘Still got you on the defensive,’ Charlie said, but Bill signed, I put the letter in my notebook, and out we went.

      The next step was to make copies of the letter and mail the original to my agent, but I wouldn’t be able to do that till tomorrow. Still, I had the letter, the letter was signed, it was in my notebook, my notebook was in my hand. We were rolling in a limousine past expensive houses on streets named after birds.

      Dinner at a trendy, surly restaurant was not much fun, but afterwards we met the other Stones at the Whisky-à-Go-Go to hear Chuck Berry.

      On the Strip, on the corner, past the tense, remote loungers at the entrance, into the darkness, the land of dreams, where it was hot and smoky and crowded, a big barn with a small elevated dance floor, the bandstand high in a corner, unfamous people looking for famous people, famous people looking for each other, the Rolling Stones sitting at tables in the corner not looking for anybody. I sat with Jagger, Keith, and Wyman, an odd combination. Young girls, two or three or seven together, kept walking by our tables, passing maybe six times before they got up the nerve to ask for the Stones’ autographs. The waitresses hovered around us, dollar bills folded lengthways between their fingers.

      Onstage were four white musicians, loud and incompetent. A light show was playing on two walls, one covered with Jello-colored liquid globs and swirls, the other showing salmon leaping up a small waterfall, one clip repeating over and over, intercut between scenes from a Japanese movie featuring a giant beast come from the sky to devour the world. The eating of Tokyo blended perfectly with the rest of the action in the room, where people who had grown up surrounded by crazy images – like the girl on the dance floor dressed in black leather, looking mean in her boots and wrist guards – tried to be as real as Batman or Wonder Woman or Zontar, the Thing from Venus, shuddering there on the wall.

      But then a lean, high-cheekboned, brooding-eyed black man came onstage, wearing his guitar low as a gunfghter’s gun, stroking it with obscene expertise, and even Keith’s image – the worst image in the room, Indian, pirate, witch, the image that grins at Death – reverted to what he was when he first heard Chuck Berry, a little English schoolboy in his uniform and cap. A few years passed before Keith could see Chuck Berry in person, because Berry was in the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute for taking a fourteen-year-old Indian whore across a state line for the wrong reasons, but Keith and Jagger both learned Berry’s trademark duck walk from the film Jazz on a Summer’s Day, which Keith saw fourteen times. Later, when Chuck Berry was out of prison and Mick and Keith were Rolling Stones, they met him, and unlike many of their musical idols, he snubbed them repeatedly, so that they respected him all the more and were trying to hire him for the present tour.

      And now as Berry played ‘Sweet Little Sixteen,’ playing sloppily with this punk band, not even playing the right changes, still from time to time in the breaks there was a flash of the magic of his guitar, and Keith, once more the schoolboy who wore tight pants under his baggy ones, leaned across the table to Wyman, because Wyman used