True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (57 page)

“They should do it like they do it onstage or change it completely,” I said, as if I knew.

On take twelve, with the song still sounding bad, Dickinson and I went to the Holiday Inn. I filled Dickinson in on what had been happening, called the girl in New York, and we drove back to the studio, coming in for the playback of take nineteen or twenty, the master take. “The new album's underway,” Keith told me. “Listen to this. Play it for him.”

Something had happened while we were gone, a Rolling Stones record had been created out of chaos, each of them had found his own way to the song. Keith, unsatisfied with the terrible raspy sound of playing the steel National with a bottleneck, had chosen instead a twelve-string guitar that sounded much worse. Charlie and Mick Taylor had worked out patterns that emphasized the stark melody line, and so had Bill, though he'd had to leave the bass for the electric piano, where he could take cover in the jangling overtones. Listening to Mick singing, “When the Lord gets ready, you got to move,” I thought of the playback of “Midnight Rambler” when the Stones were mixing the album back in Los Angeles (what seemed a very long time ago) and I felt that my question about the Stones had been answered. They were not good or evil, they were for better or for worse artists, and all they wanted was to do their work; for this reason they were now working through the middle of the night in northern Alabama, after their tour was over, their money made. They never wanted to stop me or anybody else from doing his best. Mick and Keith were sitting in the middle of the studio on folding chairs, Mick playing “Brown Sugar” on the guitar, teaching it to Keith as he wrote the lyrics, not stopping till he had its three verses finished.

The next night around eight o'clock the Stones were back in the studio, getting ready to record. Just before leaving the Holiday Inn I had received a phone call from Ahmet, who was at the studio, worrying about the police. “I think there may be a bust,” he said. “A couple of the musicians from the studio have been busted twice. We just flushed a quarter pound of shit.”

“Sorry to hear that,” I told him, knowing that nothing would make Keith change his ways. I didn't mention the call to anyone, and when
we got to the studio the first thing Keith did was light a joint and walk past Ahmet to hand it to Mick. Ahmet didn't lose his composure, but his eyes rolled up, the slightest flicker in the direction of a faint.

Mick was sitting at the piano, playing and singing “Loving Cup,” a song that was never to sound as good again. “We got a good track of this one in the can,” he said to me as I stood nearby listening. “We might try to put voice on it—oh, we don't have the tapes.”

Jimmy Johnson was putting Keith's amplifier into the mid-studio toilet, setting it next to the John. “This gives you a real shitty sound,” he said.

“Pardon?” said Keith, who hadn't heard him.

“This,” Jimmy said, indicating with a nod the toilet, “gives your guitar a real shitty sound—y'know? Get it?”

“That's the way I like it,” Keith said, smiling.

During the day, Ahmet had produced a recording session with R. B. Greaves, an Atlantic rhythm & blues singer, and some of the regular studio musicians and a couple of their wives were lingering, trying to appear as if they didn't care about getting a good look at the Rolling Stones.

Inside the control room, Mick was asking the bass player's Southern belle wife, who was dressed as if she were going to church, where he could get some sleeping pills.

“I have some tranquilizers and muscle relaxers, they'll put you to sleep,” she said.

“Can't I just get some sleepers?”

“You could see the doctor tom—”

“Or can't you get them in Muscle Shoals, aren't you supposed to sleep?”

“He'll fix you up tomorrow.”

“I can call him. If you give me the name of a couple doctors, I can do it, it's very simple. . . .” Then he decided to forget it and went out to begin rehearsing “Brown Sugar” with the band. It sounded bad. “No, no, the tempo's all wrong,” Mick said. “It's not—not so bouncy. It should sound fucking
dirty.”

Stu, playing piano, was complaining: “I do wish Keith knew something about chords. I'm tone deaf, I couldn't tune a guitar if I had to. I can hear changes but not what they are. Bill pulls a lot of things together because he has a good ear and knows chords. So I wait for him to get the tune together and get the chords from him. Keith gets upset if you ask him about chords because he plays three notes of a chord and doesn't know what it is.”

When they managed to get a provisional track and came into the control room to hear it, Mick said to Jimmy Johnson, “We might need some background singers on this one, some black chicks.”

“We use Southern Comfort, three girls from down here,” Jimmy said.

“I don't care how they sing long as they wear those silver shoes,” Mick said. After listening to the track, he said, “That's the way the song goes but it's much too jangly and simple. Everybody needs to bring his part out to make it a good record.”

Mick Taylor, standing beside Mick, looking well pleased with what he'd heard, said, “That's what makes a good rock and roll record, simplicity.”

Jagger glanced at the ceiling and didn't answer. He and Keith went back into the studio. Bill was already there, sitting holding his bass. In the control room, Charlie stood up to leave.

“Can't you do something about the drums?” Stu asked. The tom-tom was out of tune with the bass drum, and Stu was exasperated, not to say disgusted, that no one, not even the drummer, seemed to notice.

“What can I do?”

“You could
tune
it, couldn't you?”

“I never tune my drums,” Charlie said, starting out of the room.

“Wait a minute. What do you
mean,
you never tune your drums?”

“Why should I tune something I'm gonna go out and beat on? After I hit it a few times it'll change.”

He knew what he was talking about. Several hours and many repetitions later, the song was getting better. Ruining takes had earned Stu the Golden Pullover, Charlie a Pullover and a Dingleberry, and another Dingleberry for Bill. While the Stones were working, the studio phone rang and Ahmet answered. “Hello? Mick who? Who is this?” It was Jo, calling from San Francisco. She had been shopping at Saks and I. Magnin's and was now a bit cheered up. Sam, Chip, Rock Scully, and Emmett Grogan had been looking for sites for the festival. Sears Point Raceway was still under consideration, and Ronnie would soon be in town. This was just the sort of information Mick needed when he was trying to make a record. After the call the Stones listened to another playback, and Mick said, “Somehow it's not . . . relentless enough.”

While they played the song some more, I stood in the hall talking about the size of recent music festivals with Ahmet, who mentioned, as if it were a curious biological fact, which perhaps it was, that “Black music is the most popular music of all time—and has been since it got started good, about 1921.”

In the control room, Jimmy was rolling back the tapes. The Stones had at last made the take they wanted. “When you got a good groove,” Jimmy said, “it's lak hittin' a ball over a fence.”

They had the band track, but Mick was too tired to sing any more tonight. “All right,” he said, “bring Lemon in, see if he can sing it.”

One of the studio musicians, still hanging around, said, “Who?”

” 'At's Blind Lemon Jefferson, y'know,” Charlie said.

• • •

When we woke up it was Thursday, our last day in Muscle Shoals. The Maysles brothers, who had been in San Francisco filming the negotiations for the free concert, were now with us, and so was Jerry Wexler, who had flown in from Los Angeles to see the Stones and to talk to Dickinson about coming to work for Atlantic with his band, the Dixie Flyers. Wexler and I drove to the studio together, packing a load of bootleg whiskey through the dry county.

Keith opened bottles of beer and Jack Daniel's and poured them together in a paper cup. “Mix it up,” he said, “saves ya the trouble.”

Ahmet opened a beer and passed it to Mick, who said, “It's great to drink illegally, it's a completely new buzz for me.”

A minute later Mick was on the telephone with Tony: “You were? Followed you all the way? What do his feet look like? You can tell over here by their shoes—come back out here and see what happens.”

Keith, Charlie, and Dickinson were swapping stories about playing on the same bill with Bo Diddley and his maracas player, Jerome Green. “Jerome could play a fucking waltz, couldn't he, Charlie,” Keith said.

“Sure,” Charlie said. He and Stu, great admirers of a Joe Turner album Wexler had produced, asked for tapes of outtakes, and Wexler promised they'd get them. Including Mick in the compliment, because he knew who made the deals, Wexler told the Stones he'd enjoyed seeing the last Madison Square Garden show. Earlier he'd told me that he and his wife had left early because the crowd was too rough.

“Leonard Bernstein- was there,” Mick said. “He came to the hotel, all flash in a black cloak, and he said—pushin' back his hair—'These people have asked me to write a symphony and they want me to do it with the Association, but I want to do it with the Rolling Stones.' I asked him, ‘What's the matter, have you run out of melodies? Anyone can write a three-chord melody, why don't you ask Paul McCartney?' Which he probably has and's been turned down. But he really had been listening to our records. He knows ones I'd forgotten, awful ones, twelve-bar things. But why should they play our music? We can play better rock and roll than the New York Philharmonic. They shouldn't play our music and we shouldn't play theirs. ‘Im an' 'is cloak—I've got a better cloak meself.”

Ahmet, who was considered by some the greatest living proponent in high and low society of the perfect gesture, touched Mick's shoulder lightly to tell him that he had finished talking and said: “The last time I heard Billie Holiday was at the Hollywood Bowl, a jazz thing, she had a nice group backing her, and Lenny was there. She sang a lot of old things like ‘Billie's Blues,' and afterwards Lenny went up to Shelly Manne and said, ‘You wasn't playing blues drums on that blues,' and Shelly says, ‘Man, lissen, you stick to Bach and I'll stick to boogiewoogie.' ”

Having the floor, Ahmet went on, talking as he and Wexler liked to
do about smoking marijuana before it was illegal. Well-known as a jazz lover when he was still a boy, Ahmet said that one day Lionel Hampton, seeing him talking to Mezz Mezzrow, had said, “What are you doing with that cat, he's a drug pusher.”

“But he used to play with your band,” Ahmet had said, and Hampton had told him, “We had to hire him or we couldn't get the real good shit.”

“They used to call it mezz,” Wexler said, adding a footnote.

It was getting a bit too historical in the control room for Keith, who took the Jack Daniel's out to the piano and began singing country songs, “Your Angel Steps Out of Heaven” and “Say It's Not You.” Dickinson sang “Amelia Earhart,” after which Mick, who had joined the group around the piano, said, “Right! Let's go on, Keith.”

“What do you want to do?” Keith asked.

“You must have hundreds,” Mick said.

“Yeah, I got some.”

“Tell us about it.”

“I'll have to get it together, just need some solitude for a few minutes.”

“Go in that office up front,” Mick said, “and holler when you're ready.”

While Keith worked on his song, Ahmet, in another office, worked on Mick. Wexler and Dickinson and I went out to get a hamburger. We talked about doing a series of blues records that never happened, and Wexler and Dickinson agreed to meet in Memphis in January to talk further about the Dixie Flyers. I had bought a Nashville
Tennessean
out of a vending machine, and I looked at it while we waited for our hamburgers. On the front page there was a picture of a man the police said they considered responsible for the murders of Sharon Tate and her houseguests and the LaBianca family. His name was Charles Manson, he had long hair and a beard, and my first impulse was to think that he was probably innocent.

Back at the studio, we learned that Jo had called with bad news about the free concert. Ronnie had met at the Fairmont Hotel with three men from Filmways, the company that owned the Sears Point Raceway, and in twenty minutes the price had gone from five thousand to four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. “But it's for charity, Vietnamese war orphans,” Ronnie had said, and the head man from Filmways had said, “I don't give a shit.” Filmways also wanted film and sound rights to the show. Ronnie had called in Melvin Belli, one of the most flamboyant American lawyers, and now they were all—Ronnie, Jon, Sam, Jo, Rock Scully, Emmett Grogan, Chip Monck—trying to find a place for the party. “They can't stop us,” Keith said. “We'll have it in a parking lot. They can't get as many people as we can because they ain't as popular as we are.”

In the control room, Mick said, “We'll need a keyboard player on this one.”

Wexler suggested calling one of the studio musicians, and Mick made a face. “I'm a keyboard player,” Dickinson said.

“You'll do,” Mick said. He turned to Jimmy Johnson, asked if the studio had an autoharp or a dulcimer, and said, “But we lost our dulcimer player, don't have nobody to play that anymore.”

They went into the studio, where Dickinson discovered that the piano was out of tune, not with itself but with the present tuning of the Rolling Stones.

“There's a tack piano in the back,” Jimmy Johnson said. Dickinson nodded but didn't move. His chance to play with the Rolling Stones had come and the piano didn't work. I pressed a few keys on the tack piano, hearing the clinky ragtime sound tacks give an old upright.