Stranded in the Jetstream

BOOKS

by Ed Ward

Stranded in the Jetstream

S.T.P. A Journey Through America With The Rolling Stones By Robert Greenfield (Saturday Review/Dutton)

DIARY OF A ROCK 'N' ROLL STAR

By Ian Hunter (Panther)

If you’ve read this far in the issue and aren’t sick of the Rolling Stones (or “Mick,” as somebody referred to them at a party the other night), perhaps you’d best skip this review and rush right down to your local bookstore and get a copy of S.T.P. It’ll finish the job for sure.

A rock journalist faces a tremendous problem these days, and that is to make what has come to be a pretty standard story interesting. Gone are the days when a bunch of friends would motor from one gig to another in a beat-up van with their equipment or, if they were stars, in a Greyhound bus with a converted interior. Today, the rock tour is a cleanly polished product; even the tour of a lesser-known band goes so smoothly it seems oiled. And the rock journalist, primed by the PR firm, the record company bio, and escorted to the scene by the local promo man, has much of his hard work done for him in front. Most of it — he still has to reshape the same old elementsof a guy, a guitar, and a hotel room into something his assumed public wants to read, something that won’t offend the star or his agents or record company, and something that won’t render him comatose at the typewriter. It’s hard. Of course, the more time you spend with your subject, the better the story’s going to be. Robert Greenfield spent the entire 1972 tour with the Rolling Stones. He got one hell of a story.

See, the trouble with the Rolling Stones, as I see it, is that they, probably more than any other group, took the roll out of rock. After Brian died, the Stones became, through some process, “safer.” Their popularity was on a strong upswing with the chic Satanism of “Sympathy For The Devil,” was checked momentarily at Altamont, and reached its high point on the ’72 tour. Not only did your mother not care if you went to see them, but she’d probably cop to wanting to go herself. Mick had married that darling Nicaraguan Brahmin, signed a contract with the terribly fashionable Ahmet Ertegun’s label, and was all set to be lionized by the Very Rich as Our Own Darling Decadents.

At the same time, all the people around the Stones were hellbent on taking any uncertainty out of the 72 tour. Never mind that the baby — spontaneity — was thrown out with the bathwater, nobody was gonna get killed on this tour. Except maybe at the hotel, but that was another matter. The decision to package and market the tour made, the personnel divided into two cliques: the Stones (and hangers-on) and the S.T.P., the Stones Touring Party, which included roadies, stage personnel, and so on. It was a class line as much as anything else, you better believe, meaning the Stones partied with Hefner while the S.T.P. camped at a hotel thirty miles away (although democracy finally prevailed).

Sure you do.

Touring does strange things to people, as does fame, and the Stones had an overdose of both. The boredom, the endless partying, and the sex and dope take their toll after a while, and one of the best-rendered scenes in the book is the “truth session” after one of the beefy bodyguards punches the shit out of a dope dealer who’s been travelling with Keith. Nearly everybody in the book emerges as morally corrupt, turning discreetly away in the face of ugliness, but egging it on if it looks neat.

Greenfield started out as a Stones fan, but it is clear this tour disillusined him — to the extent he had any illusions left. He reports the facts, and they speak for themselves. About the only folks who come out of the book smelling anywheres near clean are Charlie Watts, introverted family man who hates touring and avoids parties, Bill Wyman, who looks at it as a gig, I guess, nnd Robert Frank, filmmaker and old beatnik whose humanity shines through. The job of reporting in this book is incredibly fine, and the few scenes where something actually happens — like the famous Rhode Island bust — read like the best fiction. Or real life, which is better.

Best of all, Greenfield communicates “... the way it felt. Desperate and futile; with people going around in circles and getting nowhere except more confused; empty and directionless, like a circus with no center ring; and very, very sad, like a wake where the mask of false gaiety hides the real grief. It felt like something had died. All that remained was to find someone who could identify the corpse.” You bet.

It’s a mighty long way down rock and roll to the level that Mott the Hoople was on for their 72 tour, but Ian Hunter’s diary of the trip will show you how the other half does it. This is still a little slick for rock and roll (the tour was arranged by Bowie’s MainMan organization, after all), but it tells a story in a way that nobody else could. When you’re a sturggling band riding a semihit like “All The Young Dudes” you don’t worry about security so much or get partied so much but you still get assaulted by groupies and other parasites on the road, and naturally you experience a much more typical rock tour. Ian, being in a position where he can’t have the store manicured for him by the auxiliary personnel, and being predisposed to telling a pretty unvarnished view of the truth, has produced a really charming book. Half of its charm, in fact, lies in his ingenuous writing style — he’s no writer, and he knows it, so the book reads rather like a long letter from a friend. It is one of the most disarming and pleasant books to come out of the rock world, and you should search a copy out. (At the moment, it’s not available in the U.S., but it apparently is in Canada). If nothing else, it’ll reassure you' that not all rock musicians are amoral thugs, and some of them really do care about what they’re doing.

Ed Ward

Off The Wall

MONSTERS by Leonard Wolf (Straight Arrow):: Nothing here that T. H. White (The Bestiary) or Jorge Borges (Book of Imaginary Beings) or even Wolf himself (A Dream of Dracula) hasn’t done better. Cute writing, horrible design, and five bucks?

WINNERS GOT SCARS TOO - THE LIFE OF JOHNNY CASH by Christopher Wren (Country Music/Ballentine):: It starts slow, because Wren insists on recording every minute detail, significant or not, of Cash’s childhood. But the book picks up from the time Johnny hits Memphis, and from there on out it’s filled with good stories about Sun Records, motel-wrecking adventures that would make Keith Moon blush, Cash’s prodigious pills appetite, and profiles of the people around him, like Carl Perkins. Regardless of what vou think of his work, Cash is a unique force *5. both musically and socially — in his field; he knows it and so does Wren.

John Morthland

ACAPULCO GOLD by Edwin Corley (Warners Paperback Library):: Easily one of the year’s most unintentionally hilarious books, this tells the story of a hard-core macho ad exec who gets thrown the top secret account for the first legal marijuana cigarettes. A broad, natch, gets included with the deal on some pretext, and by the time you get to the surprise ending, you may be reconsidering the potential psychedelic effect of martinis.

THE GRANOLA COOKBOOK by Eric Meller & Jane Kaplan (Arco):: Over 400 recipes for everything from soup to nuts, all utilizing granola. I suppose it was inevitable...

Ed Ward