Stardust Memories

by Ray Connolly

  ‘We’re now into other things. There’s not a great deal of energy in dope. It’s moved now to the occult or militancy.’

  Since he first came to Britain last December with The Grateful Dead and Hell’s Angels and those Harley Davidsons and egg-nog, he has become quite an Anglophiliac. England is the holiest place he’s ever been, and Stonehenge is the ‘heaviest’, he says.

  ‘We’ve traced our way back right from the West Coast to the New England colonies and right back here, and Stonehenge is the oldest place we can find. We’re going down there for the summer solstice, to see the sun come up between those great pillars that are as big as two Buicks.

  ‘And then we’ll get my bus over here and go off to the cathedral at Chartres and Dachau and the Wailing Wall and the Great Pyramids. I haven’t seen those places but I figure that any place that took so much in human endeavour to build must be a very heavy place to be.’

  He goes on rapping: ‘One of the troubles with all that drop-out scene was that at the same time as throwing away all of the bad things of the past and the environment, they also turned loose a lot of the good stuff too.

  ‘But right now I think that a lot of young people are just sitting around and waiting and watching. Most people think that whatever’s going to happen will be a bad thing, but I don’t believe that. I think something is going to happen and it will be a good thing.’

  Something like the millenium, or cargo cults?

  ‘Maybe a cataclysm that will sink California and New York by earthquakes and blow out all the old tubes,’ he answers.

  He’s also here to make a record in a spoken word series for Apple. But since their economy measures he’s found himself without an office or co-operation. He’s a little bitter about it, but he’s carrying on with making the tapes anyway.

  ‘I write a lot. I just haven’t written anything that pleases me for a long time. Nothing I’ve done communicates as well as tape does for me.’

  He’s a great Peter Pan of a fellow, quick witted and very funny, and driving around London in his cowboy hat and windcheater he looks like some leftover from Bonanza.

  And later when Dilly Disciple is still on about her Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne we go to find a chemists. Down Finchley Road into a side street, and there’s nowhere to park. Without a moment’s hesitation Kesey charges the pavement. The great Cadillac bucks and jumps on its hydraulics and down the pavement we go between shops and lamp-posts, coming to rest half on and half off the road and lodged at a forty-five degree angle to the kerb.

  A little old butcher carrying a meat chopper rushes from his shop and makes insane motioning gestures towards the Cadillac’s twin wafer-thin fins. ‘Shall I chop a bit off?’ he says. And Kesey laughs. He always laughs.

  POSTSCRIPT I thought for a time in 1976 that Ken Kesey had become super-lucky when the movie of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest grossed over fifty million dollars at the box office and picked up five Academy Awards. Not so. No sooner had the awards been announced than Kesey was all over the papers claiming that he had been robbed, was penniless and was suing the film’s makers for nearly a million dollars. The last time anyone heard of him he was living up in Oregon in the backwoods licking his wounds, and presumably looking forward to his twice yearly publishing cheques from reprints of his one brilliant book.

  July 1969

  Charlie Watts

  There are two brands of Rolling Stones: there are the big, bad ones, who sometimes appear to have been created for the specific benefit of the Sunday newspapers; and there are the others.

  Brian Jones appeared, I suppose, to be the biggest and the baddest of them all, and Mick Jagger and Keith Richard are cast in the same die. But that image does not fit the new Stone, Mick Taylor, or Bill Wyman or Charlie Watts at all.

  Bill is a member of the Royal Horticultural Society, has an enormous butterfly collection and is, in effect, a virtual recluse in his Suffolk castle. And Charlie — well, Charlie’s Charlie, the man who commutes to his job as a Rolling Stone on the Southern Region — Lewes to Victoria Station: Charlie, the happy family man (‘although I have my days’), the artist, the jazz fanatic, and the obsessional collector.

  ‘What I like about money,’ says Charlie, in his slow and slightly lugubrious way, ‘is that if I want to buy a pound of peaches I don’t have to buy half a pound. I can have the pound. And that’s nice, isn’t it? I don’t spend a lot really, apart from on things I’m collecting, but it’s just nice to know I can if I want to.’

  He is not the most publicity conscious rock and roll star in the world. Rather he is shy and reserved, and it came as a total shock this week when he rang the Rolling Stones’ PRO and said wasn’t it about time someone interviewed him.

  ‘He’s never done it before. We can’t think what’s got into him,’ said the PR man. ‘Maybe he feels he’s doing his bit for the Stones while Mick is away in Australia.’

  Charlie and Shirley Watts and their baby Serafina live in what in the thirteenth century was a hunting lodge for the Archbishop of Canterbury. It’s a higgledy-piggledy smallholding of nine hundred years of different architectural styles, one bit having been added as another was knocked down. At the back there are various barns and a cottage and walled gardens so that it’s rather difficult to tell exactly where the house ends, and the outbuildings begin. A couple of friends are living in the cottage part of the house.

  There are more than forty acres in all, some of it farmed, some of it as pasture for Shirley’s six horses and donkey, and then there’s a very big garden which keeps one man busy full time. It’s an exceptional home, where every day you’re likely to discover something new. If you can imagine a place where a thousand years of English culture and architectural style has all been accumulated on one plot then this is it.

  Charlie doesn’t drive so Shirley brought him to meet me at the local pub. Alcohol gives him a headache, so he drank tomato juice, chatting with the landlord and me about the Test score. ‘Fancy the Kiwis doing so well,’ he kept saying over and over all day.

  Back at his home he took me on a guided tour. He’s strangely embarrassed by the whole affair of being interviewed because he doesn’t want to appear flash in the papers. ‘I suppose I ought to say that Princess Margaret or someone comes to see me,’ he jokes. ‘I always seem to give the wrong impressions. I don’t want people saying, “See what he’s done with his money.” I don’t really think it concerns them. So you won’t write too much about the house, will you?

  ‘I’m an obsessional collector. If I were Paul Getty I’d just keep buying things. My favourite collection is my guns.’ (They’re mainly from the American Civil War.) ‘But I collect everything.’ And to prove it he takes me off to a sale in Lewes in the afternoon. It’s his first time at a sale as he usually buys from antique shops, and he is mortified about having to share his new experience with a reporter.

  In a month or so it will be time for the Rolling Stones to go back on the road after a break of more than two years, performances all over Europe and America having been lined up.

  ‘Until the last two weeks or so we’d been recording practically every day all this year. I’m not really looking forward to going back on the road because I never ever liked it. I used to enjoy playing in clubs best. When we decided to make our comeback, Mick wanted three hundred thousand in Hyde Park and I wanted to play in Ken Collyer’s to about twelve hundred.

  ‘I like the actual playing but I hate the living out of suitcases that goes into it. Before the Hyde Park concert I was only nervous that the band would fall apart at some time, not nervous at all about playing in front of all those people. I used to like it when there were riots. We’ve always been a crash and wallop group, and I used to get excited when we weren’t able to carry on after three numbers.’

  Before he became a Rolling Stone, he and his wife (who is a sculptress) were at Hornsey Art College, and some years ago he drew and wrote an excellent little book as a tribute to his idol Charlie Parker — Ode
to a High Flying Bird. Was he ever sorry, I asked, that he hadn’t continued his career in art?

  ‘No, never. I can do all that now. We have our own studio here and we can do what we want. I work at it in phases. I’m not doing much now. But I have my drums in the studio, too, and I practise on them just about every day. Being a drummer with the Stones is much more creative than a lot of people think. If Keith writes a song then I can turn it into a samba, maybe, or a waltz or anything. And if he likes it then that’s fine. But in some other types of music if a song is a waltz then you can’t do anything about it. The dots are there on the paper and you just have to play it as it’s written.

  ‘I suppose I find it difficult to justify to myself everything I have, and because of this I’m at a crossroads between grandeur and straight living. Everything I have means a lot to me, of course, but it’s not really as good as a good laugh, is it?’

  POSTSCRIPT Charlie Watts at forty-three is generally regarded to be the most contented man in rock and roll. After a tax sojourn in France in the mid-seventies he moved back to England and a large house near Gloucester where he and his family keep eleven dogs and ten horses. As one would expect he is still happily married. While he claims to like rock and roll for the money he still prefers listening to Woody Herman albums at home and performing in small jazz clubs with his old friends Alexis Korner and Ian Stewart. He is a lucky man.

  August 1969

  Elvis Presley

  ‘Sometimes when I walk into a room at home and see all those gold records hanging around the walls I think they must belong to another person. Not me. I just can’t believe it’s me.’

  This is Elvis Presley talking: the legend himself. The man who virtually started the rock and roll group as we know it today, who changed the course of pop music, and in so doing helped change the course of social history.

  Because that, and exactly that, has been the influence of Elvis Presley — the boy from Tupelo, Mississipi, who has had more hit records than anyone else in the world. (At the last count it was well over seventy — with fifty of those selling more than a million copies.)

  Elvis is appearing in Las Vegas for the next month in the very grand and brand new International Hotel. This is his comeback to the stage and live performances after nine years of making only films and records. Nine years in which his hits have become fewer, but the devotion has lingered on.

  Getting through to Presley is practically impossible. Security guards with guns and walkie-talkie sets shadow him day and night, and it took an interminable amount of dealings with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, to be given the VIP treatment and meet the man they created into a legend.

  But when one does get through, how does one speak to a legend?

  He is sprawling on a red Spanish sofa in the sitting-room of his back-stage suite, sipping a soft drink from a bottle. The walls are plastered with good-luck telegrams, including one from the Beatles. He’s wearing the black karate-style suit designed for his season at the hotel, and his hair, dyed pitch-black as always, is swept back off his face in the style he created fourteen years ago. His side-boards are now very long and spiked. He is certainly handsome, with reputedly the best film profile since Rudolf Valentino. Fittingly enough, he would pass for a stereotyped Las Vegas gambler in a movie. But, he says, he never gambles himself.

  He rises to greet guests with an almost athletic enthusiasm, then rubs his great wide rings which are heavily clustered with diamonds against a silver wrist bracelet bearing his name. He looks ever so slightly nervous.

  The room is scattered with aides and friends. There are no women present. Priscilla Presley, the Memphis girl Elvis married two years ago, is up in their thirtieth floor penthouse suite. Their baby Lisa, eighteen months old, is at one of their homes in California. The Colonel watches his creation like a cautious mother, only interrupting when the question of money arises. There is a story, it may be a myth, that says that he takes fifty per cent of what Elvis earns. If that is true, he must be a multimillionaire by now.

  ‘We didn’t decide to come back here for the money, I’ll tell you that,’ laughs Elvis. ‘I’ve been wanting to perform on stage again for the last nine years, and it’s been building up inside of me since 1965 until the strain became intolerable. I got all het up about it, and I don’t think I could have left it much longer.

  ‘The time is just right. The money — I have no idea at all about that. I just don’t want to know. You can stuff it.’

  ‘Can we just say this,’ says the Colonel, all homespun, folksy humour. ‘The Colonel has nothing to do with Mr Presley’s finances. That’s all done for him by his father, Mr Vernon Presley, and his accountant.’

  Mr Presley Snr, a fatter and greyer version of his son, nods at the formal third person way of speaking and takes another beer from the bar.

  ‘He can flush all his money away if he wants to. I won’t care,’ the Colonel adds.

  Presley’s decision to show himself to his devoted following came as a shock. Most people had given up their idol for lost as a string of crummy, cheaply-made movies came out of Hollywood, always with Presley in the thinnest role. Invariably, the biggest expense on the film budget would be the million dollars requested for Elvis.

  ‘We’ve now completed all the deals I made when I came out of the army in 1960,’ he says, almost apologetically. ‘And from now on, I’m going to play more serious parts and make fewer films.

  ‘I wouldn’t be honest with you if I said I wasn’t ashamed of some of the movies and the songs I’ve had to sing in them. I would like to say they were good, but I can’t. I’ve been extremely unhappy with that side of my career for some time. But how can you find twelve good songs for every film when you’re making three films a year? I knew a lot of them were bad songs and they used to bother the heck out of me. But I had to do them. They fitted the situation.

  ‘I get more pleasure out of performing to an audience than from any of the film songs. How can you enjoy it when you have to sing songs to the guy you’ve just punched up?’

  How does he combine marriage and show business? He pauses and smiles: ‘Very carefully — just very carefully.’

  Did his wife object to his returning to being a sex symbol?

  ‘No. We plan a big family. When you’re married you become aware of realities. Becoming a father made me realise a great deal more about life.’

  But marriage hasn’t reduced the sexiness of his act. On stage his guitar still becomes a sort of phallic tommy-gun, while occasionally he appears to simulate an act of rape — with the microphone. And then there are his off-the-cuff comments, full of ambiguities. ‘Don’t pull my cord, lady,’ he says, as a fan reaches for the microphone lead.

  On the first night of his performance a woman in the audience began stripping, overcome by the excitement. Another took off her panties to mop the sweat from his brow. He gratefully accepted them, buried his face in them, and then tossed them back. It was this threat of sexuality which fourteen years ago promoted clergymen to call for his banning and imprisonment.

  His life-story is almost classically American. Born in the South, his twin died at birth and he became the idolised only son of a poor white couple, Gladys and Vernon Presley. At nineteen, when working as a truck driver, he was discovered by a small record company when he asked to make a private recording for his mother’s birthday present. By the time he was twenty-one he had sold millions of records, and created a new-style teenage anti-hero. His clothes were of gold, like his Cadillacs, and his image was one of unchained anti-authoritarian youth.

  If you want to go any way at all towards understanding the music and corresponding sub-cultures of the under-thirties, you have to know about Elvis Presley. He was the beginning of the rock generation. And after the startling impact he made in 1956, nothing could ever be the same again.

  Today, pop music can be dated and categorised neatly into pre-Presley and post-Presley. The rock and roll that Hendrix, The Who, or the Beatles are recording today beg
an in a more primitive form with Presley. He was the one greatest original force that pop had thrown up. And his following still witnesses this.

  In England the fans have been particularly avid. ‘I don’t know why they’ve been so loyal,’ he says. ‘They’ve really been fantastic to me. I still can’t believe all the letters that come in after all this time.

  ‘I know I’ve been saying for years that I must visit Britain, and I will, I promise. But at the moment there are personal reasons why I can’t. I shall be doing more shows in America now. I’m very satisfied with the reaction I’ve had here in Vegas. That’s what the business is all about for me. There will be films, too, but of a more serious nature, and I’ll be making another television show for NBC.’

  At thirty-four, he is thinner now than he’s been for years and the work-out he does every night on stage is bringing his weight down even more. He looks like a man in his early twenties.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said, in his slow deep drawl. ‘People keep telling me I look young. I don’t know how I do it, either. I got very heavy at one time when I was in all those movies, but I lose weight very quickly, you know.’

  Apparently a shy man, he claims to have few friends in show business. ‘I guess I’m just a boy from the South. I’ve never been connected with show people. I have my own friends.’

  POSTSCRIPT This interview is included in this collection not because Elvis said anything remarkable, but because just to get through to Elvis was considered remarkable in itself. One would have wished for longer to talk to the man, and he appeared quite willing to answer the questions which Don Short, Chris Hutchins and I put to him, but the Colonel cut short the interview after a bare twenty minutes. I have to be honest and admit, however, that due to stark terror on my behalf, the questions were not particularly intelligent. I suppose I always regard this piece as an opportunity thrown away, which is fitting really, since Elvis’s whole career was a case of talent being thrown away. In 1969 he had such hopes for serious movies and tours of the world, but by 1977 he was dead, a gross, drug-wasted junkie. Who knows, perhaps without the Colonel’s bad deals and the toadying of his entourage, he might have lived up to our expectations. As it was after 1969 he did nothing but disappoint.