True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (68 page)

I did a version of this myself, going to an Arkansas Ozark cabin for the better part of a decade. Like my contemporaries, I tried to forget about saving the world. But I had this story, this burden to carry, and I couldn't let it go. I believed it was, in spite of everything, a story of lasting value, but telling it, in the face of clinical depression, drug addiction, domestic upheaval, nearly killed me. So torn was I that at times I begged for death and for years tempted death almost constantly, at last throwing myself off a North Georgia mountain waterfall onto the granite boulders below, smashing my face, breaking my back. It was an accident. I think.

The
I Ching
tells us that the superior man is like a gentle breeze that never stops blowing in the direction of his fate. (Desperate for guidance in those years, sometimes I consulted the
I Ching
so often that I would get the reading that says, in effect, Stop bothering me.) No matter how many times I lost my bearings, I came back to my story. At times, when hardly anything else did, it seemed to make a kind of sense.

The French film director François Truffaut once uttered a kind of zen koan by saying that films should not say anything and replying, when asked whether it was possible for a film to say nothing, that it was not. Hemeant, of course, that films should show, not tell. This is also the task of rendering in prose—to show, not tell. There also it is impossible. A number of readers complained about the epigraphs to the chapters, of which I
remain rather fond. I intended the epigraphs to present or at least indicate a companion story, the exemplary tale of legendary jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden, among others, to show that the Stones had precursors, they were part of a tradition. I also tried with the quotes from Brown, Freud, Lovell, Nietzsche, and so on to place this tradition within Western religious and intellectual history. No wonder people complained. But I felt, and still feel, the use of the quotes was justified. On the one hand the story was about a few people traveling around playing for kids to dance, as the noted philosopher Shirley Watts observed. On the other hand it seemed, if nothing else because of the numbers involved—millions of people cared about the Stones to some degree, at least enough to pay them money—that there was a larger meaning.

The war in Vietnam, the assassinations, the riots, the demonstrations, the drug war, were all part of the fabric of the period, the background against which the narcissism of rock and roll played out its (ultimately petty, perhaps) dramas. But the contrasts were so strong—characters like Brian Jones, Gram Parsons, and John Lennon, coexisting with Nixon and his cronies Spiro Agnew and John Mitchell. The bad guys were so easy to identify.

Then everything seemed to change around. The war, an obvious and ugly mistake, went on for more than another half decade. President Carter at least recognized the malaise of American life in the second half of the seventies, but could do little to change it. Who changed it was Reagan, giving the country what it craved, namely denial.
Death Valley Days
rerun as
Morning in America.
Meanwhile many of us kept on taking drugs to numb the pain of loss. We had lost loves, friends, goals, faith. That we survived is a miracle.

Part of the reason the book remains to this day little more than a rumor is the way it was published, as a sort of cross between a fan rag and serious cultural history. If it's well written, let people find out later, I advised, not being optimistic enough to believe that many readers, certainly the ones who had any interest in the Rolling Stones, purchased books based on the quality of the writing. I have read that in my happy native land three percent of the people buy hardback books. What minute part of that three percent reads for style? There were actually a couple of print ads for the book, its publisher making an enormous investment of faith. The ads appeared in the
Times
of New York and Los Angeles, newspapers read daily by all Stones fans, I don't think. Not even a classified in
Rolling Stone.
For the price of the ads in those two prestigious bicoastal papers, you could have bought at least a modest-size ad that someone who cared about rock and roll might have seen. But the book's editor, who'd been a high school sophomore when Jimi Hendrix died, had for whatever variety of reasons a disdainful attitude toward
Rolling Stone's
founder, Jann Wenner, and proudly rejected the idea of buying ad space from him. This did the book little good with music fans.

My idea had been to have signings in convenience stores, 7/Elevens, airports. A concept greeted with a total lack of comprehension on the part of the publisher. The Stones were a mass phenomenon, so why not go where their fans were? Once again I was oversimplifying what smart folk had complicated for their own ends. Here's what I learned: the mass-market paperback racks are a quarter inch too small to accommodate trade paperbacks, even small ones. You are assigned a fate.

In England, where the business was not quite so perverse, the book was promoted ably and intelligently—by Susan Boyd, wife of novelist William Boyd—and appeared on the
London Times
bestseller list. From the beginning—even before it was finished—the book was a critical success. That is, people who write good books themselves, such as Mikal Gilmore, Harold Brodkey, and Robert Stone, read it and praised it highly, making me feel as if my time wasn't completely wasted.

I tried as consciously as I was able to write a book about famous people as if they were completely unknown to the reader, so that a hundred years later, say, someone could pick up the book and read it simply for the story, the working out of the characters' destinies. Naturally, I did not succeed entirely, but I have to admit I'm not ashamed of the attempt.

“This book tells you far more about Stanley Booth than you ever wanted to know,” a reviewer in Chicago wrote. He was not alone in that opinion. In fact, the German translation left out an entire chapter, I'm sure because it wasn't about the Stones. But my objective was to write something more complex than a traditional biography.

The book possesses, as few have remarked, a highly deliberate form. Its three sections are preceded by scenes of Altamont, the location of the story's climax. That climax comes just after we topple (mentally) with Shirley Arnold into Brian Jones' open grave. From the outset I had the sense that telling Brian's story and the story of the 1969 tour in alternating sequence would make for a powerfully emotional ending. After Altamont we find ourselves back again where we were thirty chapters previous, in
Chapter 2
, Brian's parents' living room with Jinx the cat. The poem on Brian's grave was a gift to the writer from God, along with the rain and the sunlight shining on the hills. Nothing left to do after that but go home and rest.

The book was written in various media. First on the midget legal pads I'd jam into the front of my jeans before swinging up onto the stage to seek refuge behind Keith's amps. Later on regular legal pads used three or four at a time, rewriting passages on first one and then another, arriving finally at an acceptable version. The body of the book was created on a Royal upright typewriter using legal-size paper in much the same way that Kerouac, one of the book's principal style guides, used teletype paper. (The book's other stylistic heroes are Vladimir Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh, and—
most of all—Raymond Chandler. I tried to make every sentence one that could be spoken by Chandler's detective narrator Philip Marlowe.) Ultimately I typed the pages on an Adler, which I understand is the kind of typewriter Hitler had, a very good one.

The draft on legal pages was single-spaced, without capitalization or punctuation except for dashes here and there, as impenetrable as I could make it. There was a reason for my doing this. The book's original contract called for an advance of $51,000, a goodly sum in the sixties. On signing, I was paid $10,000. But soon afterward, a previous Stones book, a paperback, basically a clippings job by a British newspaper reporter, was republished with new photos and an updating through Altamont. The publisher for what became
The True Adventures
took umbrage, saying they expected an exclusive, and proposed cutting the advance to $26,000. By that time I'd spent the first ten and needed money to live on. My agent suggested I accept the lowered advance. In a lifetime he might do hundreds of books with the publisher, a few or maybe even only one with me. I, desperate, went along, handing over half the manuscript and receiving another eight grand—and that was pretty much the extent of my fiduciary compensation for telling this tale.

After the betrayal by my agent and some trouble with the law, I faded into the Boston Mountains of the Ozark Plateau. Back at my house in Memphis for a visit some years later, I received a letter from the agency informing me that the publisher had formally requested delivery of the manuscript, a preliminary to demanding return of the advance. My response was to go into the kitchen for a butcher knife, get a pillow from the bedroom, slice it open, take a handful of feathers, fold them into a sheet of typing paper, stuff it into an envelope, and send it to the agency. Then I went back to the hills, where I made the manuscript as close to unreadable as I could out of paranoia—maybe—because I would rather have died than let go of it before it, not I, was ready. I thought it might be the last thing I ever did, if I ever managed to do it, and I wanted it to be right, or as close as I could make it.

When at last the book was done, I wound up publishing it elsewhere and paying back the original would-be publisher. The advance, $20,000, enabled me to do that and pay my new agent—with nothing left over. But hey, I got to hear the band play.

A note on the title of the first hardback edition—I'd called the book
The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones
all the (considerable) time I'd been writing it. Some genius at the publisher's got the inspired notion of calling the first hardback edition
Dance with the Devil.
(Editors don't generally give a damn what writers think their books should be called, and in any case are without exception frustrated writers themselves, desperate to demonstrate what they sincerely believe to be their superior creativity. Young, unpublished writers should consider yourselves warned.)

Well, that edition came and, owing to the publisher's marketing skills,
disappeared
muy pronto.
Because the book did quite well in the U.K. under its real title, the American paperback was called
The True Adventures.
The funny part is, a few years later the same publisher put out a novel by the actor Kirk Douglas, and it was called
Dance with the Devil.
Somebody at that publishing house really likes that title and may keep on calling books that until one is a big success.

In spite of everything, the book won the Deems Taylor award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. (Deems Taylor was the Second World War Leonard Bernstein. Leonard Bernstein was—never mind.) With that came other problems. A friend gave me a party at the St. Regis, attended by Harold Brodkey and a lot of other people, including Jerry Wexler, the only one with sufficient manners to call the next day and thank me for inviting him. “Jerry,” I said, “I need to talk to you.”

“Baby,” he said, “Let's have brunch at the Friars on Saturday. They have all the latest lox and bagels.”

When we met (the Friars was swell, great food, Buddy Hackett was there) I told Wexler about being booked on a global TV show that repeated four times over four days, seen by millions internationally. They'd called me around noon one recent Monday, told me they wanted me to do the show, and I'd asked them to call my publisher and set it up. “Please call me back,” I said. After that the phone didn't ring for hours. Around five, I started calling the publisher's publicity office. No answer. At nearly seven, I called my editor's assistant, the one man in the building I knew I could trust. “Mark,” I said, “would you please walk down the hall and get somebody in Publicity to pick up the phone?” He said he would.

“Hello?” a publicist answered, moments later.

I introduced myself. “Have you heard from the interview show?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, good. Did you work everything out?”

“We told them there was a conflict in schedule.”

“You told them what?”

“They want you to do the show, they'll do it whenever you want to.”

“Call them back. Apologize, and say we'll do it whenever they want.”

“You haven't done anything to apologize for.”

“
I know that.
”

Writers can't get on television. That's the rule. At that point, 1985, only Truman Capote and, rarely, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal could wangle airtime. William Styron, Philip Roth, James Jones, Kurt Vonnegut, everybody else could forget it. I had been offered a literally golden opportunity that my publisher's publicity people had simply tossed into the waste-basket. I told all this to Wexler.

“You're fighting,” he said, “what I call the battle of the building.”

“But Jerry,” I said, full of my ignorant self as usual, “if these people promoted this book, it might make some money. Why wouldn't they want
to make money?”

“What you're saying does not obviate the truth of my contention,” Wexler went on placidly. “Somewhere in that building there is a man. And the man has not done
this.”
He demonstrated with a mighty nod. “If that man should make that gesture, these people who you think are so incompetent would amaze you with their ability to take care of business.”

That did it. I knew I was sunk for the length of that contract. Nothing to do but go home and write another book.

Fourteen years later the publisher let the book go out of print, making this new edition possible. In all that time they paid me not a dollar of royalties. I made no royalties on the paperback edition because the hardback had been published so unsuccessfully. The book sold many thousands of copies and generated a great deal of income, but not for me. Children, beware.