True Adventures of the Rolling Stones Read Free

blended with Freddie Green’s guitar, their rhythm steady as a healthy heartbeat.
    â€œSorry,” I said.
    â€œWe’ve had you on the defensive since you got here,” Charlie said. “Did you happen to bring the paper with Ralph Gleason’s column? We haven’t seen it.”
    â€œI read it on the way in.”
    â€œWas it bad?”
    â€œIt could have been worse, but not much.” Once I asked Charlie how he felt about the many press attacks on the Stones, and he said, “I never think they’re talking about me.” And Shirley had said, “Charlieand Bill aren’t really Stones, are they? Mick, Keith, and Brian, they’re the big bad Rolling Stones.”
    Charlie smiled, pulling down the corners of his mouth. “I always liked Gleason’s jazz pieces. I know him, actually. I mean I met him, the last time we played San Francisco. I’d like to ask him why he’s become so set against us.”
    A man with receding black curly hair and bushy scimitar sideburns was coming into the room from the open doorway at the far end, wearing white shorts, carrying two tennis rackets and a towel. “Tennis, anyone?” he asked in a voice it would hurt to shave with.
    I had never seen him, but I knew his voice from suffering it on the telephone. He was Ronnie Schneider, nephew of Allen Klein, the Rolling Stones’ business manager. Almost before I knew it I was standing between him and the door. “Did you get my agent’s letter?” I asked after telling him who I was.
    â€œYeah, I got it,” he said. “There are some things we have to change. Tell your agent to call me.”
    â€œHe says he’s been trying to get you. There’s not much time.”
    â€œI
know”
Ronnie said, his voice a fiend’s imitation of girlish delight. He gave me a bright smile, as if I had just swallowed the hook. “Doesn’t anybody here want to play tennis?”
    â€œI’ll play,” Wyman said.
    â€œHere, this one’s warped.” Ronnie handed him a racket shaped like a shoehorn, and they went out across the patio and the juicy Saint Augustine grass to the tennis court. I watched them through the glass door as they walked; then I noticed that my hat was in my hand, and I decided to sit down and try to relax.
    Serafina, the Watts’ eighteen-month-old daughter, came in with her nanny, and Shirley took her out to the kitchen for something to eat. Astrid went along, possibly to chill the orange juice. The Kansas City Six were playing “Pagin’ the Devil.”
    â€œWhat did Gleason say, exactly?” Charlie asked me.
    â€œHe said the tickets cost too much, the seating is bad, the supporting acts aren’t being paid enough, and all this proves that the Rolling Stones despise their audience. I may have left something out. Right. He also said, ‘They put on a good show.’ ”
    The back door opened and in walked a gang of men. Tall and lean and long-haired, they stood for a moment in the center of the room as if posing for a faded sepia photograph of the kind that used to end up on posters nailed to trees. The Stones Gang: Wanted Dead or Alive, though only Mick Jagger, standing like a model, his knife-blade ass thrust to one side, was currently awaiting trial. Beside him was Keith Richards, who was even thinner and looked not like a model but an insane advertisement for a dangerous carefree Death—black ragged hair, deadgreen skin, a cougar tooth hanging from his right earlobe, his lips snarled back from the marijuana cigaret between his rotting fangs, his gums blue, the world’s only bluegum white man, poisonous as a rattle-snake.
    From his photographs I recognized Brian Jones’ replacement, Mick Taylor. He was pink and blond, pretty as a Dresden doll beside Jagger and Richards, who had aged more than a year in the year since I’d seen them. One of the others, with dark hair frosted pale gold