True Adventures of the Rolling Stones Read Free Page A

and a classic country and western outfit from Nudie the Rodeo Tailor, I remembered seeing on television and record covers—he was Gram Parsons, and he came, so I’d heard, from my hometown, Waycross, Georgia, on the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp. We had not met, but I had reviewed his band the Flying Burrito Brothers’ new album,
The Gilded Palace of Sin.
I had no idea he knew the Stones. Seeing him here, finding another boy from Waycross at this altitude, I sensed a pattern, some design I couldn’t make out, and I got up to speak to Gram Parsons, as if he were a prophet and I were a pilgrim seeking revelation.
    But as I stepped around the table Jagger turned, and for the first time since he came into the room we were facing, too close, his eyes like a deer’s, large, shadowed, startled. I remembered reading on the plane out here a
Time
magazine report of a study showing that when two people look at each other, the one who looks away first is likely to dominate the situation. So I gave Mick a friendly smile, and he looked away, just like the dominant people in
Time.
I had the feeling I’d lost a game I was trying not to play, but then I was past Mick, saying to Gram, “Good to see you.”
    â€œYeah,” Gram said reasonably, “but who are you?”
    I told him, and he said, “I dug what you wrote about our band.”
    â€œI’m from Waycross,” I said. He peered at me for a second, then handed me the joint he’d been smoking. We walked out onto the narrow front lawn (as we went out, Keith was saying to Charlie, “Did you see what your friend Gleason said?”), sat on the grass beside the hedge, and talked about people and places in Georgia. Gram said he had no intention of going back. I remembered my mother telling me that after Gram’s mother and father had divorced, his father, a man called “Coon Dog” Connor, had killed himself, and Gram’s mother married a New Orleans man named Parsons. I wouldn’t know until later, when people started writing articles and books giving Gram belated credit for creating a new form of music, that his mother, whose father had owned Cypress Gardens and most of the oranges in central Florida, had died of alcoholic malnutrition the day before Gram graduated from high school. Even the house in Waycross where Gram lived had been sold and moved off beside the main southbound highway.
    From where we were sitting, high in the sky over Sunset Boulevard,it seemed that by facing the east we could see, except for the smog, all the way back to Georgia. But if the smog had gone, what could we have seen except the people who make the smog? Gram inhaled deeply on the joint, an Indian silver swastika bracelet hanging on his wrist, his eyes opaque pale green, like bird’s eggs. “Look at it, man,” he said, as if he had heard my thoughts. “They call it America, and they call it civilization, and they call it television, and they believe in it and salute it and sing songs to it and eat and sleep and die still believing in it, and—and—I don’t know,” he said, taking another drag, “then sometimes the Mets come along and win the World Series—”
    With all the revelation I could handle for the moment, I spun back through the house to the patio, where most of the people who were here already and some new ones who had arrived were breaking up a powwow, leaving Jagger talking upward to a very tall young man with a Buffalo Bill mane and red side whiskers. “Now, Chip,” Mick was saying (so I knew he was real, this man who called himself Chip Monck), “we can’t
do
audience-participation things. I mean, I appreciate your suggestion, and we do want to get them involved, but we can’t
play
‘With a Little Help from My Friends,’ and—what do they
know
? You can’t expect people to sing along on ‘Paint It Black.’ Rock and roll has become very cool