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Topic: Rock Journalist Al Aronowitz dies (SSC) Return to archive
August 2nd, 2005 06:40 PM
Gazza Early rock journalist, friend of stars Al Aronowitz dies

By GEOFF MULVIHILL
Associated Press Writer

August 1, 2005, 7:00 PM EDT



Al Aronowitz, a pioneer of rock journalism who introduced Bob Dylan to the Beatles, died Monday at 77, his son said.


Aronowitz, who was born in Bordentown, N.J., grew up in Linden and Roselle and lived his last years in Elizabeth, died of cancer at Trinitas Hospital in Elizabeth, said his son, Joel Roi Aronowitz.

Al Aronowitz became a journalist after studying at Rutgers University in the mid-1950s. It was at the New York Post in 1959 that he wrote a 12-part series on the "beat" movement, work that friends say helped sway journalism and his life.

In reporting the series, he became a friend of such early counterculture luminaries as poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist Jack Kerouac. "He really fell into the whole lifestyle," said Gerry Nicosia, author of the Jack Kerouac biography "Memory Babe."

The pieces have been described as early examples of participatory journalism, a technique perfected by better-known writers such as Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson,

Soon, Aronowitz was a music scene-ster. He claimed that Bob Dylan wrote "Mr. Tambourine Man" in his kitchen. And there was the 1964 summit of the Beatles and Dylan, which came about as Aronowitz was covering the British band for the Saturday Evening Post.

"The Beatles' magic was in their sound. Bob's magic was in his words. After they met, the Beatles' words got grittier, and Bob invented folk-rock," Aronowitz once wrote.

Aside from some celebrity in the rock world, Aronowitz did not benefit financially from making the connection, his son said.

"My father was instrumental in a lot of people's success, introducing the right people in the right combinations," Joel Aronowitz said. "He was never able to benefit from it financially himself. He always thought money would end up in his pocket, too, but it never did."

Aronowitz's life unraveled in 1972, the year his wife Ann died of cancer and he was fired from his job writing the "Pop Scene" column at the Post.

By then Aronowitz was struggling with drugs, Nicosia said. He disappeared from the public view until the mid-1990s, when he launched a Web site, "The Blacklisted Journalist," which gave him a place to post writings of his own and of writers he admired.

In his last years, Aronowitz self-published two books, "Bob Dylan and the Beatles" and "Bobby Darin Was a Friend of Mine" and was working on another, "Mick and Miles," about Mick Jagger and Miles Davis, when he died.

In addition to his son Joel, he is survived by children Brett Hillary Aronowitz, Myles Mason Aronowitz and a longtime companion, Ida Becker.

Joel Aronowitz said graveside service is planned for Thursday in Newark and that there will later be a public memorial.



AP New Jersey
www.newsday.com
August 3rd, 2005 12:46 AM
Monkey Woman
quote:
Gazza wrote:
In his last years, Aronowitz self-published two books, "Bob Dylan and the Beatles" and "Bobby Darin Was a Friend of Mine" and was working on another, "Mick and Miles," about Mick Jagger and Miles Davis, when he died.


R.I.P. Now we may never know if and when Aronowitz managed to introduce Mick Jagger to Miles Davis...

I saw this tantalizing article posted on Shidoobee some time ago (possibly here too but I don't remember). It's a bit long but a good read:

--------------------------

Mick and Miles (A Musical in Several Parts)
Al Aronowitz, The Blacklisted Masterpieces of Al Aronowitz, 1981

A remarkable personal reminiscence of the night the author took rock star Mick Jagger to meet jazz star Miles Davis turns into rock/jazz history and a psychological thriller.

"Dj'ever meet Miles?" I asked.

"No," he said.

We were in his suite at the St. Regis, a hotel where the lights were too dim to see the elegance fading. Big ornate brass doorhandles. Brown stately couches grown matronly with bulges. Carpeted floors beginning to tilt. A tiny elevator lobby with long waits, waspy faces and stuffed shirts. Old New York's aristocratic creaks. In the ancient days I'd go talk to famous artistic movie makers like Otto Preminger or Billy Wilder at the St. Regis. Now rock stars were camping there. Mick's suite had exactly the same layout as the one John and Yoko'd occupied for months, turning it into a film editing lab. Mick's bedroom had sliding glass doors that didn't meet. He kept dancing from room to room, looking at jewelry, sorting clothes, leafing through books, shuffling tape cartridges, punching buttons on his casette deck. He was always fidgeting with something while we talked.

"Ya wanna meet 'im?"

Mick didn't answer. He was playing chess with the bottles on a room service tray so he could pour himself a glass of Perrier water. There'd be a risk for Mick to meet Miles. Mick'd heard stories. Miles had a reputation as a mean motherfucker. Mr. Nasty. Catch him in a foul mood and he'd shit on you no matter who you were, or maybe because of it. The first time I'd met Miles, I was introduced to him by no less a legend than Billie Holiday, jazz's lady saint for junkies, and still he came on as charming as a piranha, as cordial as a sandpaper massage. That was at Birdland at the turn of the '50s into the '60s, some months before Billie died. We went into the john and I asked Miles what he thought of the Beat Generation. "Just more synthetic white shit!" he growled, taking a piss. He'd just come offstage with his sax players, John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly, who was taking a piss in the next stall, and he was playing Mr. Cool with me, a corny, fat newspaper reporter, as a sideshow for his sidemen. Except I later learned that Miles didn't need an audience to abuse you. Cutting you at your juglar was his way of showing affection. In the men's room at Birdland he was treating me gently, with restraint. And I didn't hear the half of it. Miles had a permanent case of laryngitis. He couldn't rasp louder than a whisper. He sounded like static on the radio with a few croupy squeaks. That's why he'd never book himself onto talk shows. When I got to know him better, he told me his unstrung throat was a trumpet player's occupational hazard, like Louis Armstrong's. "I blew my voice out playing for the people," Miles said. He also hollered too loud at a club owner too soon after a polyps operation on his vocal chords. When you talked to Miles, you had to keep asking, "What'd you say? What'd you say?" Once I apologized for making him repeat everything and he answered: "Thass okay. If you didn' keep askin' what I said then I'd know you wasn't listenin'."

Mick kept ignoring my question.

"Leh's do some more o' tha', eh?" he said.

It wasn't only my stash we were doing, it was my twenty we were doing it with. Mick came over to the coffee table I was hunched at. I rolled up the twenty.

"How come y'don' like coke?"

"I li' cocahyne, Ih's jus' tha' m'motor's aaalways runnin' too fahst ennnyway. I don' nee' a lift. I jus' nee' t'geh euphoric."

"Well, I c'n getya summathatoo, 'fy'wannit."

Mick stood up and took a loud snort of air. I followed him into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed. I was getting cozy.

"So wouldya like t 'meet Miles?"

"Miles 'oo?"

A paranoid flash jelled in my back the way a cat's hairs get stood on end recoiling to a threat. Miles who? C'mon, Mick Motherfucker, you knew who. Mick had his own style of nasty.

"Miles Davis."

The name got out of my mouth through a wall of slightly clenched teeth. All these pop stars thought they were King Shit. Mick was standing with his profile to me as he stared straight ahead through the windshield of his thoughts.

"Oh, Miles Dahyyyyvis! " he said finally. "No, I never meh 'im. There was this bloke 'oo said 'e was goin' t' bring me over t' this playce where Miles'd be one time, because 'e knew Miles, but 'e never did. Turned out maybe 'e didn' know Miles after aaall."

"I'm gonna give Miles a call 'n a little while. I'm s 'posed t' go up there. Y'wanna come along?"

Still Mick didn't answer. His mouth made an o. He walked over to the casette and punched it on. The tape was a Stones track without the vocal on it yet. Mick danced into the sitting room, the backs of his hands against his hips. Miles'd loomed as a legend since Mick was a kid. But Mick'd always been disillusioned meeting his idols. Your mind dreams up gods and they turn out to be men. Like when he'd gone to get introduced to James Brown backstage at the Apollo Theatre up on 125th Street in Harlem, another overrated romance of a place. That'd been back in the '60s when Mick still had some innocence left to lose. James'd used the occasion to try to belittle Mick, to try to pry a bigger tribute than the simple homage of Mick's visit. James'd wanted Mick to confess the Stones were just a limp ofay cop. That historic meeting'd degenerated into a boasting match.

"We hotter, man."

"No you aint, man!"

"We badder!"

"No you aint"

The telephone rang in the sitting room. The phones never stopped in Mick's suite. One in the sitting room and one in the bedroom, and he'd have somebody waiting on the one in the bedroom while he talked to somebody on the one in the sitting room and vice versa. As soon as he'd put the receiver back in its cradle, it'd jump with the next call. The hotel operators were supposed to screen Mick's calls, but just to make sure nobody faked them out he'd answer sometimes in a funny cockney squeak as if he was the butler. "Aylo! 'Oo shall aye sigh's caaalling?... No such pehhsson 'ere!... No, no, 'e's nah ' ere.'... Y've gah th' wrong room." and he'd throw me a conspiratorial look that was as good as a wink, his thick rubbery lips stretching beyond belief into his famous horse grin, full of teeth and boyish mischief, like a kid thinking of going over to the hospital to pull out respirator plugs. You couldn't get through to Mick's suite unless you knew the password, the name he'd be registered under at the desk this particular trip. He'd check in letting only a couple of friends know but in a few days his phones'd need a secretary. He'd have to shut off all calls when he wanted peace. For a while, he'd register under Michael Phillips, his real name. Nobody ever heard of Michael Phillips. Who'd even think to ask for him under his real name? Then he branched out into crazier ones like Dr. Lorenz or Mr. Igor or a character from one of J. P. Donleavy's novels, The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar, for which Mick'd bought the movie option.

"Mr. Balthazar, please."

"Who's calling, please?"

"Mr. Aronowitz."

"'Ello?"

"Mick?"

When he was touring with the Stones, he'd usually pick a name that was an inside joke between him and Keith, the Stones' guitar genius. Otherwise, he'd pick a name that was an inside joke between him and his old lady, Bianca. It was Bianca calling now.

"Where are you?... I'm nah supposed t'be there for three weeks... Why'ncha stigh there and I'll catch up t' y'... But I'll be gone fr'm 'ere by then... You cahn' keep track o' me? I cahn' keep track o' you.'... Whah'd y' 'ear?... 'Oo tol' y' tha'?... Well y 'know y 'cahn' buleeve ennnythin ' 'e tells y'... Well I'm weird... I've always been weird... You knew tha'... Well I've gah a weird sex life... I'm tellin' y' I've gah a weird sex life..."

I knew Mick had a weird sex life. Everybody knew Mick had a weird sex life. Didn't Bianca know it? Mick seemed to be taking for granted I'd already met Bianca but I couldn't remember that I had. I'd seen Mick with so many different bitches through the years, each one a certified fox, a thoroughbred beauty, groupie royalty, usually models with cover-girl faces, high-fashion mannequin types splashing colors and hipness but spoiled by what their pussy power bought them, society snow queens melting with sex but still out of the frozen bread department, snake-skinny twitches wired with upper-class airs and connections. Mick seemed to lean toward blondes, which Bianca wasn't. I could only remember seeing her in the newspapers and magazines, but she had more fire in her face than any of the other chicks I'd ever noticed with Mick. Could that've been Bianca with Mick the time I'd hung out with him in some New York tower suite the night before he was hopping a plane for London a few years back? Wasn't he running around with Marianne Faithful then? No, that'd been even before Marianne Faithful. My history was swimming in dope. That'd been back in the '60s during the crazed ego wars between the Stones, the Beatles and Bob Dylan, with me caught in the crossfire. In London, Dylan'd shit on them all, kept them waiting, stood them up, put them down, kicked them out. He'd been savage claiming his crown of temperament, heavyweight champion of the trip they were on. To me, he wouldn't let up with his smoldering scorn for Mick. He'd laugh at the way Mick'd bury his vocals in the mix on the Stones' records. "I c'n never hear what he's singin'," Bob'd snicker. He knew I was seeing Mick. They all used me as a go-between in their head games and my own head was getting riddled. They were all playing mystic gunslingers in a B Western with a cosmic script and Dylan'd keep trying to spook me into some kind of mental shootout with Mick.

"You ask ' im if he's psychically armed." Bob'd demanded. "Go ahead.' You ask 'im that! Ask 'im if he's got the ammunition! Ask 'im if he's psychically armed!"

I never did ask Mick if he was psychically armed. When Dylan wanted to know why not, I told him I didn't think I was psychically armed enough to ask. But Dylan was God and I was letting myself be his tool in those days. What I did for Dylan that night in the tower suite too long ago for me to've met Bianca was to say to Mick:

"Well, t'morrow, while I'm still sufferin' here 'n this cockroach city, still servin' time in this salt mine, y'll be flyin' back home over the ocean aboard a luxurious airliner with powerful jet engines, we hope, 'n no other defects or bombs or any thin' else that might make the plane go down, 'cause the water's too cold t' sustain life f'r more 'n a few minutes... "

"Naw, naw, naw," Mick'd calmly interrupted. "We 'II 'ave none o' tha'."

I'd found him charming that trip, going out of his way to be friendly while I wasn't. He always knew the right story to tell to get a laugh while I was being drugged, paranoid and catatonic. Mick'd never stop working for his edge over people. I was jealous. When I'd first met the Stones, I'd been the one who always knew the right story to tell.

"Well, I've gah a weird sex life!" he kept saying to Bianca. He'd raise his voice talking to her on the phone but he kept grinning. He was playing to me as much as to her, improvising the dialogue in his instant sitcom. The Mick And Bianca Show, with a cast that supported the telephone company. Half the time the two of them seemed to be at opposite ends of the jet set earth, dug into some exclusive glamor hole, each hanging out with different cliques of famous names and pretty faces. I was curious about Bianca. I'd read about her, about her and Mick. I'd heard gossip about them from friends passing through. Of all the bitches Mick'd been with, why Bianca? Wasn't she just another groupie? Mick was a star stud. He didn't have time for all the chicks who wanted to cop his joint. Not for all the chicks and not for all the boys, either.

"I've gah a weird sex life..." he kept telling Bianca. You'd really have to be a nurd not to know Mick had a weird sex life. He advertised it every way he could. The way he advertised it onstage was what made him so famous. My own sex life was as weird as I could handle, but I wished it could be as weird as Mick's. Everybody had a weird sex life, or as weird as he dared. Mick dared more than others. What I hadn't seen for myself about Mick's sex life, I could guess. Anyway, Brian'd told me a lot. Brian Jones, who'd invented the Rolling Stones. Brian'd told me he'd made it with Mick. Out of friendship, he'd explained. The past. It kept swimming in dope. When could I've met Bianca without possibly noticing her? I'd heard so much about this chick, a Nicaraguan fireball with a short Latin fuse, dark and foxy, slim and sexy, acclaimed by the hip as maybe the baddest thread witch in the world. She must've stunk like a bakery the way Mick's nose was attracted by bread. The story was she'd been discovered on a diplomatic passport by Peter Sellers, that great dirty old man of the movies. She'd met Mick on the mattress where the jet set trysts. When she'd homed in on him like a heat-seeking device, Mick'd liked the explosion. When she'd got knocked up, Mick'd married her. The wedding'd been the French Riviera's biggest circus that summer. When the wedding was over, the circus never stopped. Their act took up all three rings, a marriage as transparent as the new see-through fashions that year, as open as the tattloid centerfolds that kept being cluttered with pictures and trivia about their flings, romances and separate nights out. I could see them gayly lying their way through interviews, trying to manipulate the media and each other with spicy deceptions that gave only a taste of how hot the unseasoned truth really was. Since TV, everything'd turned into a performance. Mick and Bianca seemed to be playing out their marriage in public as if that was the only reason for it, to dazzle their jetty pals with their melodrama like a couple of actors who'd found each other as the perfect partners to impress a workshop with a scene.

"I gah a weird sex life?" Mick said, hanging up. "She's the one 'oo's gah a weird sex life!"

He was still grinning. She'd spent almost a half-hour's worth of nickles lecturing him from someplace between the St. Regis and Timbuktu, but Mick wasn't going to let me know if she'd stung him. I figured it was love that kept them together. Companionship. A man's first mistake was to figure everybody needed somebody to talk to.

"D'ya wan' t'do some more o' tha'?" he said.

I reached into my pocket for the twenty and the stash.

"She's th' one 'oo's gah th' weird sex life!" he said once more chuckling.

I waited for some juicy details. C'mon and tell us, Mick. But the phone in the sitting room rang. Mick picked it up. Then the phone in the bedroom rang. I was crushing the stash on the back of a glass ash tray with my Swiss Army knife. Already talking to someone, Mick motioned for me to get the bedroom phone.

"Is Mick there?"

"Whoozziss?"

"Paul Morrisey."

I knew Paul, Andy Warhol's long-time counter-culture camera-cranker and another of Mick's New York buddies. Mick was tight with Andy's crowd. Andy was the artist who designed the Stones' album with the zippered crotch on the cover. Andy was a famous queen. I rapped with Paul a while until Mick got off the other phone. Good. Now I could call Miles in the sitting room while Mick talked to Paul in the bedroom. Except the sitting room phone rang before I could get to it. Damn! I'd arrived at Mick's suite in the p.m. but now it was almost dusk and getting duskier. I had to call Miles. When I picked up the sitting room phone, a chick was on the other end. I couldn't catch her name. A foreign accent. Apple something. I told her to hang on.

"I like the 'ouse," Mick was saying to Paul. God knew what they were talking about. Mick didn't tell me everything. I sat in the matronly embrace of the couch and looked through a book about the Druids which Mick'd scored that day. He was always buying stacks of books to gobble down whole in one gulp the way the wolf ate grandma in Little Red Riding Hood. The only time Mick'd sit still was when he was alone reading, aside from the time he'd be sitting still writing lyrics. The phones kept Mick busy and me waiting for maybe another 40 minutes. Because I kept answering the phone he wasn't on, I wound up in the bedroom with the Druids when the phones suddenly stopped ringing. It was like an air raid'd just ended. Mick, at the phone he'd just hung up in the sitting room, looked at the phone in the bedroom as if waiting for it to summon him. Like it wasn't safe to move until the drone of the raiding planes'd faded. Then he got up, walked over to the couch and sat down in front of the coffee table, where the stash was lined up, waiting. I put the Druids down on the bed and joined him.

"We were goin' t' 'ave s'more, weren' we?" he said.

It'd taken Mick and me years to start to get to know each other. I'd never been too swift. Me, I was the kind of simp who needed eons to figure things out. We'd met back in 1964, the night of the Stones' very first Carnegie Hall concert, when they'd hit shore riding the trough behind the Beatlemania wave. Like when Avis was No. 2, the Stones had to try harder. They'd got themselves barred from some English pop TV show because of their nastiness and'd kept running through London, drumming up all kinds of headlines to prove their sympathy with the devil. They tried to make the Beatles look like cherubs with pink asses and powdered faces. The Beatles were no angels. The Stones came on punk not only because it was fun to act arrogant but also because they needed to get noticed.

When I opened the auditorium door of Carnegie Hall that night, it was like somebody splashed a bucket of sound in my face. The Stones'd already started playing when I walked in. The sound was so thick I had to push a path through it just to get down the aisle. I'd already been hanging out with the Beatles, nailing them when they'd first stepped off the plane at Idlewild so I could write a cover story for the Saturday Evening Post. But the Stones were something else. Not better, but different. Any group which dug Marvin Gaye's 'Can I Get A Witness?' enough to put it on their album two times had to be cool. The Marvin Gaye record was a pet of mine and Dylan's, too. He'd stayed up until dawn listening to it over and over again while he wrote 'Mr. Tamborine Man' one night. Bob couldn't believe this English rock hype, this Beatlemania bullshit. I kept telling him about the Beatles but he'd just put me down. He thought he was the only thing happening. Then he'd gone to England and'd come back raving about this new group he'd caught at a concert in Hyde Park or someplace in London, raving about how free they were. That's the word he kept using, free. They were free, loose, uninhibited, fresh. That was my word for the Stones. Fresh.

Onstage at Carnegie Hall, I'd notice how Brian Jones, with his orange-gold hair, kept stepping up to the footlights to tease the teenyboppers into defying the cops stationed there, tempting them to jump the stage and grab him. After the show, I'd walked across Seventh Avenue to the Park Sheraton with my wife and Gloria Stavers, a skyscraper-tall beauty queen type with a Southern accent that'd grown hip on New York's jazz circuit. Gloria amused herself by being the first to score each new young sexy rock star for an interview in her role as editor of 16, the magazine that was cashing in on the prepubescent void by merchandising pinups of these cutieboys to diaperrashes learning desire.

The Stones were throwing a party at the Park Sheraton, where they'd checked into adjoining rooms. They couldn't afford suites yet. The first thing we saw when we walked in was Mick sitting on a bed surrounded by a flock of elegantly styled chicks fluttering as if they all wanted to rub his body. That's what one of them was doing. OK. Mick'd discovered room service. Like the ball-carrier, the lead singer always got to be the star. Immediately, Gloria and my wife tried to get into Mick's action. I couldn't hack it. What beaconed me was Brian Jones' dayglo-like hair. He was standing in Carnaby Street's last word, up to his neck in mod, a drink in his hand, hopping with energy as he talked to Bill Wyman, the Stones' bass section. Brian was like a Fourth of July sparkler, spraying excitement. When we plugged into each other, it was as if we had a million things to rap about. We ducked into the adjoining room.

"It's not simple to get those coloured blues recohrds 'n England," Brian was saying. "I 'ad t' go searchin' everywhere. But that's all the group does's coloured blues. We just give our own feelin' to it..."

Suddenly my wife was next to me again.

"Boy, is he conceited!" she said about Mick.

"Whatsamatter?"

"I went up to him and told him I liked the show. And he said, 'Should I be flattered?'"

That'd soured me on Mick. He judged books by their covers. I liked my wife. The Stones were babies in those days. They didn't even smoke pot. Eight years later at the St. Regis, I watched as Mick hunched over the coffee table with the rolled-up twenty. I always let Mick take the lion's share. I figured he needed it.

"Jus' b'cause we gah married, whah'd she think tha' w's goin' t' chaynge?" he said. "In eyether one 'f us?"

He kept making remarks about Bianca as if I was supposed to understand. I didn't understand why they'd gotten married in the first place, except there wasn't a man alive who didn't have a number some chick was going to get. Did Mick marry her because of the baby? Brian'd left bastards all over the place. Didn't Mick already have one or two? Marriage was a bitch's trick that made lawyers rich. Mick would've liked Bianca to stay home in England with their daughter. Jade, but why should she? He'd keep fantasizing about having a permanent crib somewhere, just a little cottage on a few hundred acres, but he knew he couldn't stay in one place for more than a few months. He couldn't even sit still in one chair for more than a few minutes. Bianca wasn't going to stay nailed down either.

"I really gotta go soon. I tol' Miles I'd come up 'n see 'im tonight. I gotta call 'im."

With a silent laugh on his face, Mick sprang from the couch and walked into the bedroom. He moved like Bugs Bunny, with a little bit of antelope.

"Oy hah his owlb oy hanh yathear!" Mick called out.

What? I couldn't decipher what he was saying. When I walked into the bedroom, he was putting a dub on the turntable. All these rock stars made sure somebody scammed together a hi fi for their suites when they checked in. Mick smiled with a grim uncertainty, like he expected to be judged about something. By me? The needle hit and the scratch hissed from the speakers. It was a Stones cut I'd never heard. But it was Stone Age Stones. Prehistoric.

"These are aaall ou' takes, cu's we never released," Mick said. "Because they weren' very goo'. They didn' make ih. Now they aaall soun' s'orribly dahyted."

I listened while Mick danced, mugged, smiled and jabbed a finger in the air, bomp-bomp, bomp-bomp! He mouthed the words, then sang on top of the record.

"Yes, I'd much rather be with the boys than with girls like you..."

Like he told Bianca, Mick had a weird sex life. Is that what this song was all about? A piece of bubblegum with a double twist? I chewed on it but there wasn't much taste. Probably the Stones'd recorded it when they were trying to gross everybody out and shock their way to the top.

"Andhrew 'ad a 'and 'n writn' ih. Andhrew'n Keith. Th'aiymed t 'wards th' chaaarts. Blayme 't on Andhrew."

Andrew'd been the boy wonder hype genius who'd masterminded the campaign that tried to make it seem the Beatles were just running interference for the Stones. Like me, Andrew'd started out a journalist, but he'd become the Stones' manager and producer after a coup against Brian in the '60s.

"'T's nah too ba', actchilly. I mean ih's nah grea', or we'd'a released ih, buh ih cooks. Coul' do w'th improvemen' 'n th'stohry. Ihd'll never win enny lyricists' awaaahrds buh ih's cute. 'N outrayjious tune f'r ih's tiyme."

If Mick wanted me to agree with him, I didn't know whether to say I loved it or I hated it. I would 've left it in the can for the fly speck analyzers, but it had all the Stones' malicious jubillance. As the dub played, I smiled in my stupor and bounced in time with the music. Mick kept jabbing his finger like a maestro.

"Klein wan'ss t' pu' these cu's ou' on 'n album. On 'is own laybel, ABKCO. "E 'asn' even palhd us enny 'f th' rohyalties 'e owes us on our other recohrds f'r two years."

Mick knew I sometimes hung out with Klein, the Stones most recent ex-manager. Klein'd stopped managing the Stones after he'd started managing the Beatles. He'd told me that Mick'd quit him because Mick was jealous. But Mick'd told me he fired Klein because he couldn't pry his own money out of him. The disagreement'd been turned over to Blind Lady Justice and an army of legal fees. Klein's fin'd gotten famous in the pirate waters where the music business fished for treasure. I never could understand his deal with the Stones. He must've bought them early to get them so cheap, with only his accountant's ear. Was everybody else deaf? Klein could recite lyrics, but he couldn't sing. He'd memorized the words to every song ever written, but he wouldn't try a melody. How'd he ever get the rights to release the Stones' outtakes on his own label?

"C'n he do it?"

"'E's doin' ih. Tha's wha' th' cayse's aaall abou' 'n all them lauhyers. Tha' 'n' a loh 'f other things. Tha's why I'm ihn Neew Yohhhr'. One reas'n, ennyway."

Mick let the dub play on. His nose made a P.U. sign at one of the cuts. It stunk. I kept losing track of the music. The dope was doing its dastardly deed. Except something was bothering me.

"I gotta call Miles."

I said it as if I had to take a piss.

"Okigh."

Mick started to poke through a dresser drawer. "I gah some goo' poh 'ere tha' somebody laid on me... 'F'ya feel li' smokin'... 'F I c'n find ih."

I was a sucker for pot.

"Yeah!" I said.

He couldn't find the reefer in the drawer. Lord knows, we didn't need it. He started rummaging through a suitcase. I was wondering if I should just give up and go see Miles myself. This whole idea of bringing Mick with me'd been born in some lowly manger in my head. I mean if it'd been divinely conceived, I didn't start out thinking so. Like I say, I was a little dim, like the lighting, a sanctimonious nurd but a willing turkey. I guess I just wanted to show off. I wanted to dazzle Mick with my power. The idea's nobility grew. Mick'd been such good company the night before that I wanted to reward him. I wanted to give him Miles as a gift. It'd expand Mick's psyche. It'd expand Miles', too. My own psyche started exploding with the possibilities. A psychic ammunition dump blew up in my head. It'd be a famous night.

Once the idea'd been born, it was like nuclear fission, there was no stopping it. Either that or Jack's beanstalk. The idea had a taste to it, a taste so delicious that I ate my way into it. Pretty soon the idea was tasting me. It'd swallowed me whole. Suddenly I was consumed by the idea that I had to go down in history as the one who introduced Mick Jagger to Miles Davis.

© Al Aronowitz, 1981

--------------
August 3rd, 2005 02:27 AM
MrPleasant Thanks for posting that, Monkey Woman, with thanks to Aronowitz (R.I.P.).

I enjoyed some of his columns, especially the ones about Dylan. Good, insightful memories. Some examples:

MY DYLAN PAPERS:
PART 1---THE WOODSTOCK FESTIVAL
http://www.bigmagic.com/pages/blackj/column48.html

MY DYLAN PAPERS: PART 2
THE ISLE OF WIGHT
http://www.bigmagic.com/pages/blackj/column49.html

About the Stones (this was first posted in this board by VoodooChileInWOnderl):

MICK AND THE PRESIDENT (A "FOUND" MANUSCRIPT)
http://www.bigmagic.com/pages/blackj/column30.html
August 3rd, 2005 03:03 AM
Monkey Woman Great stuff, Mr Pleasant!

quote:
"Yew'n John Lennon're th'two biggest gossips I know!" he [Mick] once told me.

"But you're biggern bo'f us!" I answered.


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