Kerouac, born March 12 1922: "Last night my father was back in Lowell"

Of his friends and girlfriends and cross-country exploits Jack Kerouac wrote much, and made the Duluoz legend a never-ending odyssey whose narrator never reached home. Kerouac never was easy at home, and the periods when he felt obligated to stop traveling were made even more uncomfortable by the fact that he was a father.

Jan Kerouac, born in 1952, met her father only twice. By all accounts -- including hers -- marriage and fatherhood were adventures he never cared to discuss. He never acknowledged Jan as his daughter with his first wife, Joan.

This estrangement adds support to one of the more honest assessments of Beat writers that for the most part they formed a boys-only club. If he wasn't guilty of outright misogyny, as some claim, Kerouac's attitudes became a hallmark of his relationships and his writing. His books, as much as they are equally praised and reviled in their diary-like inclusiveness, avoid mention of much life that would reflect Kerouac "at home," other than in a round of sexual exploits and their inevitable consequences.

It's a surprise that Kerouac's early relationship to his own father was not as strained and faulty. He doesn't write much about his old man -- in his Book of Dreams, where Jack allows himself his darkest misgivings, Leo appears as "so mysterious and un-Kerouac." Leo's gradual dissolution and drinking after a series of setbacks were aspects of his own adult character that Jack obviously came to dislike, however.

In the eternal way all men turn into their fathers in some aspect, Kerouac admits "maybe this is me" in the haunted life of his dreams as early as 1960 and probably earlier. Kerouac would have turned 89 today, March 12, and it turns out that even in his dreams Kerouac couldn't avoid becoming the shade of his father: sitting with nowhere else to go, reading the paper in Memere's house, with his father Leo's "lost and distant air" about him:

LAST NIGHT MY FATHER WAS BACK in Lowell --- O Lord, O haunted life --- and he wasnt interested in anything much---He keeps coming back in this dream, to Lowell, has no shop, no job even---a few ghostly friends are rumored to be helping him, looking for connections, he has many especially among the quiet misanthropic old men---but he's feeble and he aint supposed to live long anyway so it doesnt matter---He has departed from the living so much his once-excitement, tears, argufying, it's all gone, just paleness, he doesnt care any more---has a lost and distant air---

We saw him in a cafeteria, across street from Paige's but not Waldorf's---he hardly talks to me---it's mostly my mother talking to me about him---"Ah well, ah bien, he vivra paslon temps ce foi icit!"---"he wont live long this time!"---she hasnt changed---tho she too mourns to see his change—-but God Oh God this haunted life I keep hoping against hope against hope he's going to live anyway even tho I not only know he's sick but that it's a dream and he did die in real life--ANYWAY---I worry myself ... (When writing Town and the City I wanted to say "Peter worried himself white"—for the haunted sadness that I feel in these dreams is white---)

Maybe Pop is very quietly sitting in a chair while we talk---he happened to come home from downtown to sit awhile but not because it's home so much as he has no other place to go at the moment---in fact he hangs out in the poolhall all day---reads the paper a little---he himself doesnt want to live much longer---that's the point---

He's so different than he was in real life---in haunted life I think I see now his true soul---which is like mine---life means nothing to him---or, I'm my father myself and this is me (especially the Frisco dreams)---but it is Pa, the big fat man, but frail and pale, but so mysterious and un-Kerouac---but is that me? Haunted life, haunted life---and all this takes place within inches of the ironclouds dream of 1946 that saved my soul (the bridge across the Y, 10 blocks up from 'cafeteria'---) Oh Dammit God—

This is a darkness that is not often acknowledged in Kerouac's work, but biographers who do comment on it cite the tough working-class neighborhoods of Lowell and the alcoholism he shared with his father. It balances the decades-long image of the freewheeling beat writer whose "first thought, best thought" impressions became a template for an entire generation of writers. It is a darkness that Kerouac struggled with and never reconciled in his lifetime or in his relationship with his own daughter.

Jan Kerouac (1952-1996)

The doubts and fears followed him to the end, though he kept writing. At the last, in October 1969, he was sitting at home, drinking malt liquor and whiskey at 11 am, and scribbling notes about his father's print shop in Lowell. After a prolific writing career that revealed the history about everything else in his life, Jack was at last thinking about a novel of the "old man" whose drinking had led to his death in 1946 at the age of 58.

When he himself died of cirrhosis on October 21, 1969, Kerouac was 47. Jack was then living with his third wife Stella and his devoted mother, Gabrielle, who was 74. As one reviewer notes, Memere "held a tight grip on her son's life, and was rather cantankerous to almost any outsider who dared to come between herself and her son." This mother's-protectiveness may have even extended to family: In 1967 at the age of 15, Jan Kerouac was in Mexico, living as far away as possible from any family life with the Kerouacs.

James Joyce's "Ulysses" gets a graphic novel and an (uncensored) app

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan can now safely come down from his tower with his robe ungirdled. It appears as though James Joyce's Ulysses, after having won the battle for literary expression in 1933, is continuing to win the war -- this time on the web, and nearly 90 years after its first publication.

Ulysses Seen, the graphic novelization of Ulysses (online, with an accompanying reader's guide, and created by illustrator Robert Berry) ran into trouble when it was submitted as an iPad application. According to business manager Chad Rutkowski at Throwaway Horse, "I don't think the Apple representative that I first spoke with even knew what Ulysses was."



Apple, apparently, at first decided the graphic novel was a little too graphic and requested Throwaway Horse remove several offending panels depicting partial nudity ("partial nudity," of course, is a salacious, tantalizingly vague oxymoron from an era of more delicate sensibilities). Throwaway Horse complied.

Then representatives at Apple -- after having received the modified app -- looked again at Ulysses Seen and reversed their previous decision. Now both apps are available, and readers can move on to now to another perplexing choice: which print edition of Huckleberry Finn to read.

In the same spirit, Apple has agreed to publish a graphic novelization app of that other succes d' scandale, "The Importance of Being Earnest," by Oscar Wilde. Molly Bloom would doubtless approve, and waits breathlessly.

Yes.

(images from UlyssesSeen, rendered by Robert Berry at Throwaway Horse, LLC)

"Everything's better in Poland": three books of poetry

Stanley and Stella Bromberg, grandparents, Pittsburgh PA

In America it's easier to anticipate what's coming next rather than to appreciate what came before. The rapidity of our collective memory loss means that history becomes a timeline not only of ideas but of images (the American Revolution, say, is a painting of three beat-up soldiers we imagine playing "Yankee Doodle": a piper, a drummer, and a flag.)

As fast as we learn to forget, the past takes a long time to remember. As simple as we like to pretend "the good old days" really weren't, imagine in fifty years (all right, make that one hundred) how obvious the present will seem in all its current calamity and distress.

Many families came from other countries to the United States in their own times of need and opportunity. My own great-times-2, Stanislaw, decided in 1905 that the Russians next door were making too much noise -- a minor revolution was in progress, threatening to once again prove the truth of the old Polish proverb "Trouble comes from the east": Zmartwienie przyjechał z wschód.

He himself went west across the Atlantic to the U.S., to Pittsburgh, and brought the rest of his family over, one by one, in the next twelve years. Twelve years! Imagine that kind of patience these days. My father was born in Pittsburgh in 1919 and went to a primary school where Polish was the first language.

Linda Nemec Foster

Leonard Kress's essay in Artful Dodge 46/47 "Wszystko lepiej w Polsce (Everything's Better in Poland)" reviews three books of poetry that echo the immigrant experience as it deepened into American cities -- Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, New York -- and became the new story for generations born in the 20th century. Even as the Polish language progressively became a memory of the old country, it functioned almost as a lullaby that resonated with time:

As I drifted of to sleep at night, I often heard

my parents talk about the neighbors in hushed whispers.

Kosmarek the Drunk,

Polumski the Wise Guy and the Barking Dog.

Horvath the Creep.

This litany in English would ultimately drift

into one in Polish: dzika, swinia, brudna swinia,

dziki Amerykanin. Wild Pig, dirty pig, Wild American.

("The Old Neighborhood", Linda Nemec Foster,

in Amber Necklace from Gdansk)

As Kress notes, many poems are filled with "the three P's" -- polkas, parades, and pierogies --hallmarks of the Polish pride that first generations felt in their new homeland and shared with their children. Yet there's more than just sweet memory of nostalgia here in Kress' review of these poems. There is also the sharp edge of politics, the sardonic view of the politically displaced for whom life had to be better here than back home, even as the scrub pines of New Jersey were stand-ins for those on the banks of the Vistula: Ach, sosnowe powietze, najlepsze na swiecie. ("Oh, the pine air / the best in the world.")

Karen Kovacik

This idea of a better life regardless of other hardships and deprivations was passed on as the immigrant generation raised their families, and as the household appliances multiplied in their kitchens. By the 1960s the Cold War brought the sons and daughters political realities unimagined by their parents. For a while it seemed possible that electric blenders and built-in dishwashers could conquer the Soviet empire, although Nikita Khruschev has the final word here when East meets West:

But how can he persuade this slender American,

this shy stranger who probably has never laughed at a party,

except when a camera is pointed his way?

Nikita waves his arms but no sound comes out.

He imagines Nixon late at night, lonely under a circle

of kitchen light, with a wife and appliances

spinning in the background. He sees Nixon

hunched over a pink teacup, blowing on his fingers,

afraid of everything he can't admit he fears.

Lev Tolstoy had it right, he thinks: It is difficult

to tell the truth and the young are rarely capable of it.

("Nixon and Nikita in the Kitchen," Karen Kovacik,

in Beyond the Velvet Curtain)

Georgia Scott

And there is the poetry of Georgia Scott, who teaches at the University in Gdansk, in which the immigrant generation seems to have come full circle. The insistent longing for home that provided immigrants with their memories, here gets turned on its head: Scott, living in Poland, writes poems like telegrams back to the adopted country. Twenty years after the shipyard revolutions of Solidarity, with its sweeping political possibilities, the cultural reality seems an echo of the country that Scott left behind:

I am not in prison

I have no cause to lie awake

refurnishing rooms as I remember them

the positions of cushions and toothbrushes

smells of sink cleaner, sausages, flowers

the graffiti in the hall

"Dead Kennedys" and "1984"

schoolboys singing soccer and Solidarity songs

roller skates whirring behind the rag 'n bone man's cart

the bows on the little girls' heads like the blades of helicopters

a tank left in the park, children swinging from the gun

the cries of mothers to come home

("In America," Georgia Scott, in The Good Wife)

Memory has a powerful pull no matter what the culture holds; it's in the images that we imagine we remember, more so than the long-gone and often painful reality we choose to forget. In the meantime, I'm wondering the cost of a new subscription to my father's weekly and regular delivery of the Narod Polski newspaper.

"As Country Was Slow," Les Murray, from Taller When Prone

As Country Was Slow

for Peter

Our new motorway
is a cross-country fort
and we reinforcements
speed between earthworks
water-sumps and counterscarps,
breaking out on wide glimpses,flying the overpasses—

Little paper lanterns
march up and down dirt,
wrapped round three chopsticks
plastic shrub-guards grow bushes
to screen the real bush,
to hide old towns
behind sound-walls and green—

Wildlife crossings underneath
the superglued pavement
are jeep size; beasts must see
nature restart beyond.
The roads are our nature
shining beyond delay,
fretting to race on—

Any check in high speed
can bleed into gravel
and hang pastel wreaths
over roadside crosses.
Have you had your scare yet?—
It made you a driver
not an ever-young name.

We're one Ireland, plus
at least six Great Britains
welded around Mars
and cross-linked by cars—
Benzene, diesel, autobahn:
they're a German creation,
these private world-splicers.

The uncle who farmed our place
was an Arab of his day
growing fuel for the horses
who hauled the roads then.
1914 ended that. Will I
see fuel crops come again?
I'll ride a slow vehicle

before cars are slow
as country was slow.

"As Country Was Slow" is from Les Murray's new book of poems Taller When Prone, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Charles Gatewood's "Sidetripping": William Burroughs, the loup-garou of Mardi Gras

Today is Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday. In New Orleans or Metarie, and from Jefferson Parish to Baton Rouge, the krewes and their kings will be parading until long after sundown. Revelers are urged to beware loup-garou, who as Cajun children all know, is the werewolf who is always out to snare them. Tomorrow begins the 40 days of fasting and pennance before Easter known as Lent in the Catholic church. Until the streets are cleared of their final guests at midnight, laissez bon-temps rouler!

In the early 1970s photographer Charles Gatewood compiled a book of images he titled Sidetripping, 90 photographs that capture the oblique angles of human nature: glimpses that more often require a second look, a quick scene captured out of the corner of the eye that one may have only imagined. The book was republished in a new edition by Last Gasp in 2002.

Here is an excerpt from Gatewood's memoir, Dirty Old Man, about his frustrating attempts to get the book published. On assignment in London with Rolling Stone writer Robert Palmer to do a feature story on William Burroughs, in 1972, Gatewood approached Burroughs with the assembled photographs. The literary loup-garou agreed to write Gatewood an introduction to the book, and the photographer was overjoyed.

On the last day of our visit, I showed William Burroughs my Sidetripping book-dummy. He liked my bizarre photos, especially the naked “St. Sebastian” boy being led away by uniformed cops at Mardi Gras. He also liked my photo of a drunk fraternity boy pissing on Bourbon Street. “Wild boys,” said William. “Fine work.”

I knew Burroughs believed in verbal sorcery and the power of word-magic. Certain word combinations could be deadly, he said. Words had power. Words could kill.

“I want to make photographs that kill,” I told him.
“When Sidetripping is published,” said Burroughs, “viewers will die, for sure.”
My palms got all sweaty. “Would you write an introduction to the book?”
“Why certainly,” said William. “I’ll be delighted.”

Oh my! William S. Burroughs would introduce my book! Never mind that I didn’t have a publisher — I would certainly find one now!

In April, 1972, Burroughs sent me his three-page introduction to Sidetripping. I read the text with great excitement. It began splendidly, with a sly carny come-on:

"Step right up for the greatest show on earth. The biologic show. Any being you ever imagined in your wildest and dirtiest dreams is here and yours for a price. The biologic price you understand money has no value here … "

After quoting from New Scientist magazine (a piece about brain research), Burroughs continued:

"Charles Gatewood the sidetripping photographer takes what the walker didn’t quite see, something or somebody he may have looked quickly away from and the photo reminds him of something deja vu back in front of his eyes."

Burroughs went on to compare photographers to thieves — a nice touch. He also told how a writer named Dunne in his 1924 book An Experiment With Time found that some incidents in his dreams referred to future time:

"Point is he discovered that his dream referred not to the dream itself but to the account and photos in newspaper."

This was a cool observation — I’ve experienced pre-cognitive dreams too, many times. ... Sidetripping ends with a frat boy pissing in the street as his drunken friends watch:

"Look at the boy’s face. Smiling in the ruins. Dying? So what? We shall overcome. Ambiguous familiar in his face death child with a wide grin ambiguous familiar. AH POOK PISSED HERE."

What kind of ending was that? And who the hell was Ah Pook?

I really couldn’t criticize William’s text — could I? After all, he’d written it as a courtesy, for free. It was all I had. It would have to do.

I cut the Burroughs text into sections, and plugged the text into my Sidetripping book-dummy. There were gaps, for sure, plus that weird ending — but the surreal text did bounce off my raw photos in some powerful ways. At any rate, William Burroughs’ name now graced the cover of my book, and that was a big step forward. ...

Charles Gatewood, 2001

As it turned out, the images in Sidetripping were more confrontational than even the mysteries in Burroughs' text. In a 1996 interview Gatewood explained to Joe Donahoe:

I decided to do a photography book that would show all the madness and ask the basic question "Who is really crazy here?" I've got straight mainstream types, like here's a business man and his wife drunk at Mardi Gras, just regular folks [the "regular folks" stagger inanely, the man has the plastic rings of a Budweiser six-pack looped through his belt support, the woman plows into him with an unnatural looking motion, both have the expression and appearance of rural serial murderers]. Here's a couple of hippies drunk on Bourbon Street [two hippie kids appear out of the dark. Madness can't be said to have claimed them. Two more well mannered young people you couldn't ask for]. Here's some policemen beating up a Yippie. Here's some hard hats out to kill some freak.

There's an old Dylan song that goes "You write for your side, I'll write for mine." So I just wanted to put it all down and let others sort it out. I put a lot of Mardi Gras stuff in here. That's an event where people can get together and celebrate their deviance. That's where I first saw heavily tattooed and pierced guys.

Gatewood writes in a postscript at the RealityStudio site: "In 2011 am producing a deluxe William Burroughs book with Dana Dana Dana editions in San Francisco. It will be a handmade artist’s book containing all the best photos from our 1972 shoot, plus previously unpublished photos of William Burroughs with Jimmy Page in 1975. The book will be similar to A Complete Unknown, my limited edition artist’s book about Bob Dylan. Only 23 copies of (the Burroughs book) will be produced."

Loup-garou

However you celebrate, enjoy Mardi Gras 2011 and don't let loup-garou get his paws on you! For a French-Canadian folktale about the night prowler beast, here's a link to Rowland Robinson's 1894 book of stories, Danvis Folks.

"West of Here": Jonathan Evison appearing in Decatur on Thursday, March 10

Jonathan Evison's new novel about the Pacific Northwest, West of Here, is a comic and sprawling story that is equal parts Edward Abbey and Ken Kesey. It's the fictional tale of events in the town of Port Bonita over the course of one hundred years as the townsfolk try to reclaim the land from the effects of a dam across the Elwa River, an ecological history of the Olympic Peninsula told with an evolving cast of characters.

The book is populated with a wide assortment of idealists, ex-cons, adventurers, politicos and romantics. In the fictional town of Port Bonita there is the very real story of the Pacific Northwest struggling to reconcile the past with the present. Evison himself could be one of the more colorful characters in the book: in a 2010 interview he says his previous jobs include "gardener, laborer, roadkill-hacker-upper, bartender, tomato-sorter, water-meter-checker, courier, telemarketer, busboy, barista (or is it baristo?), production assistant, production coordinator, producer, director, columnist, screenwriter, talk radio host. There’s gotta’ be a dozen more. Oh, vintage clothing dealer, cook, ice cream server, dishwasher. Wait, I know I’m forgetting a few: journeyman cabinet maker, auto detailer, errand boy. ... I started working when I was twelve–bussing tables for my waitress sister, who paid me out of pocket."

Evison will be at the First Baptist Church (Decatur) on Thursday, March 10 at 7:00 p.m. in an appearance sponsored by Georgia Center for the Book. Here is an excerpt from West of Here, which is published by Algonquin Books.

footprints, september 2006

Just as the keynote address was winding down, the rain came hissing up the little valley in sheets. Crepe paper streamers began bleeding red and blue streaks down the front of the dirty white stage, and the canopy began to sag beneath the weight of standing water, draining a cold rivulet down the tuba player's back. When the rain started coming sideways in great gusts, the band furiously began packing their gear. In the audience, corn dogs turned to mush and cotton candy wilted. The crowd quickly scattered, and within minutes the exodus was all but complete. Hundreds of Port Bonitans funneled through the exits toward their cars, leaving behind a vast muddy clearing riddled with sullied napkins and paperboard boats.

Krig stood his ground near center stage, his mesh Raiders jersey plastered to his hairy stomach, as the valediction sounded its final stirring note.

"There is a future," Jared Thornburgh said from the podium. "And it begins right now."

"Hell yes!" Krig shouted, pumping a fist in the air. "Tell it like it is, J-man!" But when he looked around for a reaction, he discovered he was alone. J-man had already vacated the stage and was running for cover.

Knowing that the parking lot would be gridlock, Krig cut a squelchy path across the clearing toward the near edge of the chasm, where a rusting chain-link fence ran high above the sluice gate. Hooking his fingers through the fence, he watched the white water roar through the open jaws of the dam into the canyon a hundred feet below, where even now a beleaguered run of fall chinook sprung from the shallows only to beat their silver heads against the concrete time and again. As a kid he had thought it was funny.

Jonathan Evison

The surface of Lake Thornburgh churned and tossed on the upriver side, slapping at the concrete breakwater. The face of the dam, hulking and gray, teeming with ancient moss below the spillway, was impervious to these conditions. Its monstrous twin turbines knew nothing of their fate as they hummed up through the earth, vibrating in Krig's bones.

Standing there at the edge of the canyon with the wet wind stinging his face, Krig felt the urge to leave part of himself behind, just like the speech said. Grimacing under the strain, he began working the ring back and forth over his fat knuckle for the first time in twenty-two years. It was just a ring. There were eleven more just like it. Hell, even Tobin had one, and he rode the pine most of that season. Krig knew J-man was talking about something bigger. J-man was talking about rewriting history. But you had to start somewhere. When at last Krig managed to work the ring over his knuckle, he held it in his palm and gave pause.

"Well," he said, addressing the ring. "Here goes nothin', I guess."

And rearing back, he let it fly into a stiff headwind, and watched it plummet into the abyss until he lost sight of it. He lingered at the edge of the gorge for a long moment and let the rain wash over him, until his clinging jersey grew heavy. Retracing his own steps across the muddy clearing toward the parking slab, Krig discovered that already the rain was washing away his footprints.

For more information: www.westofherethebook.com/

"The Rolling Stones on Tour" (1975): coke spoon not included

Bill Wyman. looking blue

They weren't on top of their game musically -- Goats Head Soup and It's Only Rock'n'Roll had been noisy but less-than-spectacular follow-ups to Exile On Main St. at the time. But by 1975 the Stones were at their most glittering and decadent on the road: the "Tour of the Americas" was a huge and extravagant undertaking (huge elephants! giant stages! inflatable props! Andy Warhol!) that set standards for stadium shows, both on- and off-stage. Released in 1978, the 12-inch-square format of The Rolling Stones on Tour -- the damn hardback thing's big and heavy -- almost matches the flash and excitement of the live events themselves.

About the only thing that's missing is the coke spoon.

Is bigger better? Well, by the mid-70s the Stones were tax exiles to avoid paying the British government the lion's share of their earnings, and facing competition that their own extravagance had created. Robert Frank's 1972 documentary with the unprintable title had been such an over-the-top fiasco that the band refused to release it. (Imagine that.) But according to Marshall Crenshaw in the book Hollywood Rock, "the resulting movie was crowded with scenes of the Stones nodding out, roadies balling groupies, and assorted tour hangers-on shooting up." Mick was so embarrassed by this slice of real-life boredom-on-the-road (or so Allen Ginsberg claims of Jagger's solo bathroom antics) that Frank himself had to secure the rights from the Stones to show it -- which he does, once a year.

Still: it was the 1970s, and the extravaganza must go on. This particular party might have been a little slow in coming together: the tour took place seven months after the release of It's Only Rock'n'Roll. Atlantic Records, no slouches, released the Made in the Shade compilation so the band would have something to promote, at least a souvenir that would recoup some of the tour costs.

Stones Alamo'd, 1975

Rolling Stone magazine commissioned Annie Leibowitz and Christopher Sykes to follow the larger-than-life Stones onstage in big, color close-ups, as well as the private moments in hotel rooms and backstage in black-and-white candid shots. Accompanied by daily jottings from Terry Southern -- himself even then a living legend -- and a brief note from Mick Jagger, the book is a great, oversized memento of rock in the mid-70s.

Quite an amusing interlude this PM, when Mick received what can only be described as a "billet-doux," or mash-note, from top-rated dancer Rudi Nureyev -- requesting (among other things!) "as many S/M nudie pics as you can spare!" Of course, this proposition did not go down too smoothly with a certain M. Jagger, as his fans can well imagine. "It's not my bag, man," he protested as Quid (tour manager Peter) Rudge started to press him, saying repeatedly: "There's P.R. milage aplenty in this, me lad! I'm laying it on, so be good enough to get your bloody act together!" By grand good chance, Andy Warhol happened to be "visiting" ("'lurkin' about' is more like it," said Keith later) the estate, and hearing about the mot from Rudi, he was quick to don his Sunday Leathers and volunteer his services as "poet of the lens.''

What follows in the next few pages is Mick in various stages of undress, or, as Southern describes it, "a few 'tasteful' photos which resulted from this extraordinary collaboration": Warhol snapped in action by Leibowitz, and a hand-tinted Warhol portrait of Jagger that would eventually lead to Warhol's cover artwork of 1977's Love You Live.

Elton and Billy, Honky-(tonk) cats

Here's a sample bit of unexpected phone conversation as recorded by Terry Southern "with my trusty Sony 130" the day of the band's L.A. Colosseum show:

M: Hullo.

E: Hi! It's El!

M: Wot?

E: Mick! It's Ellie!
M: Who ...
E: Ha-ha-ha! Ellie, you great ninny!

Elton John!

M: Oh. Hullo.
E: Listen! Guess what? I'd simply love to be on
the stand with you tonight!

M: Tonight?

E: At the concert, for heaven's sake!
M: Oh, yeh. Well, the thing
is, El, we've got it already all sort of worked out,
if you know what I mean.
E: Oh, don't be such a silly-billy!

Just one little number! Oh, puh-leeze, Mick,
I'll simply die if you don't!
M: Uh-huh. What did you have in mind, actually?
E: Well I only know Honky Tonk Women!
M: Uh ... well, that's our opening number ...

E: Oh, don't I know it! Tant mieux!!
M: (sighs) Yeah, well, just the one number, okay?

E: Oh! Of course darling! Afraid I'll steal the show?

Later, Mick reflected on it : "We should've kicked him off the stage, but we didn't. It's because we're both English -- we're too polite ... I mean, if he had been an American, like Stephen Stills, someone like that, we'd have kicked him off straightaway." They left it to Billy Preston to tell Elton his time was up.

Life on the road with the Rolling Stones: excitement, frustration, lotus-shaped stages, boredom, groupies, hotel rooms, security, gilt and flash, Steve Ford and Bianca Jagger at the White House ... yeah, of course The Rolling Stones on Tour is monstrous and druggy, overstuffed and even (depending on your viewpoint) bloated and verging on self-parody. Rock ages fast -- by the end of 1975, while the Stones were cavorting at the Alamo, the Ramones were blasting a hole in the ozone over CBGB's. Yet the Stones are still here, and still touring, even if "the boys" are more of an industry than a rock band by now.

Silly-billy Mick's joined Ellie in knighthood, for services rendered to the British crown (read:still bringing in buckets of money). Time may not be on their side at this late date, but still: if these pictures are anything to go by, the old saying is true. What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger. Amazing, wot? -- although we can only hope that the inflatable known as "Tired Granddad" for its inability to get it up every night on the tour doesn't wind up on eBay.

Note: The Rolling Stones on Tour has been out of print for many years; I found a copy in a library book sale for a dollar. In 2007, Christopher Sykes and tour manager Peter Rudge issued an expanded, re-edited deluxe limited edition without the Leibowitz photos, leather-bound, hand-assembled, and even more over the top than ever. (Coke spoon still not included.) Got 350 quid to spend? Head over to genesis-publications.com. Feeling even more flush? Amazon has a copy for almost $2000.00