Free True Adventures of the Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth Page A

a couch in the living room, still hungry. My mood had changed, and I made a ham sandwich and drank a beer.
    Mick, Mick, and Keith had arrived, Jagger in the office with the door closed, Keith playing tennis with Mick Taylor, then displaying in the pool what he called “the form perfected over six years lounging on the beaches of the world.” Only six years a Rolling Stone, and he looked a hundred. How old had Kerouac looked? Sandison grimly watched Keith swimming. Before going into the publicity racket Sandison was a reporter for a small-town English newspaper. Both his body and his prematurely balding head were pear-shaped; Kerouac had lived the vagabond life unknown to the pear-shaped. Sandison really felt as if something had been taken away from him. He told Keith about Kerouac, and though Keith had never read him, he sort of swam more seriously for a few strokes.
    When Keith had dressed again and we were heading back to the house, I remembered to tell him that I had written the letter. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll speak to Mick about it,” plunging me again into gloom, things seemed never to get past this point, but I went to my Oz room and got the famous letter. A minute later, when I got back, Keith was gone. Jagger was in the living room on a couch with Jo Bergman, talking business, frowning. I looked in the backyard and saw nobody, then went out front and found Mick Taylor alone. I did not say, Where the hell is Keith? but airily remarked, “Insane business, people running about.” It was the first sentence I could remember saying to Mick Taylor. He smiled simply and said, “I don’t mind the business part as long as I don’t have to do it.”
Then
I said, “Where the hell is Keith?”
    â€œHe and Charlie just left for the studio.”
    I went inside thinking, To hell with it.
    Then as I passed, Jagger looked up and said, “Isn’t there a letter or summink somebody wants me to sign?” Now we both were frowning. I produced the letter and he signed it, Jo behind the couch not even thinking about not reading over our heads.
    I had typed the Stones’ names in the order—Jagger, Richards, Watts, Wyman, Taylor—that I wanted to collect them, because I knew that once Jagger and Keith had signed the others would; so I rode with the two Micks past the Whisky-à-Go-Go and Hollywood High School toSunset Sound Studios, where they were finishing their new album. I asked Keith, slumped on a couch in front of the recording console, to sign the letter and he did, in the wrong place. “Doesn’t matter,” I said, and though Mick Taylor was at the bottom of the list he was sitting next to Keith, so I passed him the paper and pen, and he signed. Charlie signed leaning over the console. That made four out of five. I went to an office and called Wyman at the Beverly Wilshire, where he and Astrid were still living and were not happy about it. He said he was not coming to the studio, but he’d be over to the Oriole house for dinner about seven-thirty and he’d sign it then. “That’ll be all right, won’t it,” he asked, and I said sure. But I wanted to get the letter out tonight. The tour was starting soon, I expected big expenses, and I knew in my bones that it would take forever to get a publishing contract and even longer to get paid.
    When I went back to the control room Charlie and Mick Taylor were leaving, and I rode with them back to the Oriole house. Wyman and Astrid were coming over for dinner because they were bored with eating out, and we were going out because we were bored with eating at home. I had nothing to worry about except that we might leave before Wyman arrived, so I worried about that. But they came in and sat down to dinner just as we were leaving. I laid the letter beside Wyman’s plate and asked him to sign it. He perused it, taking his time. I had already waited longer than I wanted to.