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      J.P. Alley: Hambone’s Meditations

      ONE

      Something about the curious wanderings of these griots through the yellow desert northward into the Maghreb country, often a solitary wandering; their performances at Arab camps on the long journey, when the black slaves came out to listen and weep; then the hazardous voyage into Constantinople, where they play old Congo airs for the great black population of Stamboul, whom no laws or force can keep within doors when the sound of griot music is heard in the street. Then I would speak of how the blacks carry their music with them to Persia and even to mysterious Hadramaut, where their voices are held in high esteem by Arab masters. Then I would touch upon the transplantation of Negro melody to the Antilles and the two Americas, where its strangest black flowers are gathered by the alchemists of musical science and the perfume thereof extracted by magicians . . . (How is that for a beginning?)

      LAFCADIO HEARN: in a letter to Henry E. Krehbiel

      She was sitting on a cream-colored couch, pale blond head bent over a red-jacketed book, legs crossed, one heel resting on the marble coffee table. Behind her in the picture window there was a thick green hedge and then, far away below, the City of the Angels, bone-white buildings reaching out to where, this being a fairly clear day, the Pacific Ocean could be seen, glinting in the sunlight through the poison mist that the land and sky became at the horizon. There were other people on the matching couches of the room, the lobby of that motel-like mansion, and more coming in now, but she did not look up, not even when I said ‘Excuse me’ and stepped over her extended leg to sit down next to her husband, Charlie Watts, one of the Rolling Stones.

      ‘Do you remember him, Shirley?’ he asked.

      A fast glance. ‘No.’

      ‘A writer. You remember.’

      ‘I hope he’s not like one who came to our house,’ she said. Then she looked at me again and something happened in her green eyes. ‘You’re the one.’ She closed the book. ‘You wrote about me in the kitchen.’

      ‘Somebody else,’ I said. ‘You’re reading Priestley? Prince of Pleasure. Do you know Nancy Mitford’s books?’

      ‘You said I was washing dishes. I have never been so insulted.’

      ‘But Shirley, you were washing dishes. What else could I say?’

      ‘You should have made something up.’

      ‘Where was this?’ asked Bill Wyman, another Rolling Stone, sitting with his girlfriend, Astrid Lindstrom, the Swedish Ice Princess, far away from me at the end of the couch. ‘Great bass sound, ennit?’ A portable phonograph in a corner of the room was playing 1930s records by the Kansas City Six.

      ‘Yeah, Walter Page, really good,’ Charlie said. ‘An American magazine. They had it at the office.’

      ‘Was it about all of us? We never saw it,’ Astrid said. Wyman kept scrapbooks.

      ‘I shouldn’t want to, if I were you,’ Shirley said.

      ‘Never get a sound like that with an electric bass,’ said Wyman, a bass player whose hands were too small to play the acoustic bass.

      ‘The electric bass is more flexible,’ I said, trying to help divert the conversation. ‘You can do more things with it.’

      ‘You can’t do that,’ Wyman said. ‘Can you, Charlie?’

      ‘Never,’ Charlie said as Page’s bass and Jo Jones’ brushes blended with Freddie Green’s guitar, their rhythm steady as a healthy heartbeat.

      ‘Sorry,’ I said.

      ‘We’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.’

      ‘I read it on the way in.’

      ‘Was it bad?’

      ‘It 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, ‘Charlie and 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.

      ‘Yeah, I got it,’ he said. ‘There are some things we have to change. Tell your agent to call me.’

      ‘He says he’s been trying to get you. There’s not much time.’

      ‘I know,’ Ronnie said, his voice a fend’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?’

      ‘I’ll play,’ Wyman said.

      ‘Here, 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.’

      ‘What did Gleason say, exactly?’ Charlie asked me.

      ‘He 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, dead-green 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 rattlesnake.

      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 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

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