Free True Adventures of the Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth

Taylor, Jimmy Reed, didn’t attempt any Muddy Waters yet, or Bo Diddley, I don’t think, in that period. Mick laid a lot of sounds on me that I hadn’t heard. He’d imported records from Ernie’s Record Mart.
    â€œAt this time the big music among the kids was traditional jazz, some of it very funky, some of it very wet, most of it very,
very
wet. Rock and roll had already drifted into pop like it has already done again here because the mass media have to cater to everybody. They don’t have it broken down into segments so that kids can listen to one station. It’s all put together, so eventually it boils down to what the average person wants to hear, which is average rubbish. Anyway, that was the scene then, no good music coming out of the radio, no good music coming out of the so-called rock and roll stars. No good nothing.
    â€œJust about the time Mick and I are getting the scene together with Dick Taylor, trying to find out what it’s all about, who’s playing what and how they’re playing it, Alexis Korner starts a band at a club in the west of London, in Ealing, with a harmonica player called Cyril Davies, a car-panel beater at a junkyard and body shop. Cyril had been to Chicago and sat in with Muddy at Smitty’s Corner and was therefore a very big deal. He was a good harp player and a good night man; he used to drink bourbon like a fucking fish. Alexis and Cyril got this band together and who happens to be on drums, none other than Charlie Watts. We went down about the second week it opened. It was the only club in England where they were playing anything funky, as far as anybody knew. The first person we see sitting in—Alexis gets up and says, ‘And now, folks, a very fine bottleneck guitar player who has come all the way from Cheltenham to play here tonight’—and suddenly there’s fucking Elmore James up there, ‘Dust My Broom,’ beautifully played, and it’s Brian.”

5
    If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.
    â€”W ILLIAM B LAKE:
Proverbs of Hell
    I T WAS AFTER ELEVEN in the morning when I clawed my way down the hall toward the fresh fruit salad in the refrigerator, hoping it would cure the headache left me as a souvenir of last night’s cocaine. David Sandison, coming 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.”
    â€œWhat about him?”
    â€œHe’s dead.”
    â€œWhere’d you hear that?” I asked, because you never want to believe these things.
    â€œIt’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 jukeboxat 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