We sat in the balcony, or we sat downstairs; wherever we sat, my sight lines weren’t impeded. I’m short and saw everything that happened, and a lot did and didn’t. Opening for the Stones, Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles, which was how she was billed, as a girl band. In their ice blue, space-age costumes and feather headdresses, with Patti’s big voice and their choreographed moves, they rocked. But the audience was indifferent. Stones fans were sullen like the band, and also we were there only for them. Patti must have been onstage an hour, and the audience grew restive. When the set ended, the group received some applause, but they didn’t get an encore. They were really fine; we were just lousy for the Stones.
Then nothing, and nothing, and time went by, and no one came on stage, and nothing, and we were waiting and waiting. After a while, someone in the audience roared something, or there was an outbreak of off-the-beat white people’s clapping, and a few dispirited, feeble calls for the Stones. Waiting, we turned more sullen.
Where were the fucking Stones.
Forty-five, maybe 50 minutes passed. I don’t know how long it was, but still nothing. We were angry already; it didn’t take much to make us angrier. Where were the Stones. Where were the Stones. The question was our breath.
People had slumped and settled into their lumpy seats, passive and aggressive both, because there was nothing to do but wait or leave, so we were trapped because we wanted the Stones. Wanting was hell, and while existentially waiting is all there is to do, we didn’t like it. There was no clapping now, no sudden shouts for the Stones, just enraged sedentary bodies.
Then they walked out. They just walked onto the stage, as if they were going to the men’s room. They had no affect. There was no jumping or dancing or mugging. They walked onto the stage and plugged in their instruments and took their positions. They didn’t look at us, not once, except for Mick. Mick came to the front of the stage and sort of said, “Hello, New York.” He tried a little, but the rest of the band didn’t care. They didn’t want to be there, and they ignored us. Mick made another pathetic effort, that’s all it could be: “Hello, New York.”
Brian Jones sat down on the floor. He was stage right, his head down, blond hair splayed over his face obscuring him further, his instrument lying in his lap. Maybe it was his Vox teardrop guitar or a Vox Phantom. He never looked up, the group didn’t look at us, they looked bored, and only Mick exerted himself a little, threw off some energy, but he didn’t try long. We were angry, deadened, too, and quickly Mick accepted defeat. Listlessly, the Stones started their first number. Probably they were very stoned.
A matron stood at the edge of the stage, on the same side as Brian, but at the top of the stairs, which was the only way up there, except for leaping. She was a heavyset black woman, about 30—I don’t remember any black people in the audience — and she wore some kind of theater or usher uniform. She faced the audience, grim and solemn, with her arms crossed over her chest. The Stones were playing, and Mick was singing, Brian was sitting on the floor, head down, and I don’t remember what Keith was doing, but he wasn’t crouching the way he does now and uncoiling like a rattlesnake to strike. Charlie Watts was Charlie Watts, steady, imperturbable, playing the drums the way he’s always played the drums, and Bill Wyman was himself, unmoving and dour.
There was a kind of stasis on stage, and in the audience. Into the third song, a hefty, dark-haired girl made a run for the stage, and up the stairs. But when she reached the top of the stairs, the matron blocked her. She gave her the hip. The girl flew down the stairs. One move, down she tumbled. The girl landed on the floor, stood up, and walked back to her seat. That was it, that was our resistance. The matron crossed her arms over her chest again and glared at us. The audience became more frustrated. The Stones hadn’t even noticed, and nothing happened again, and not one of us yelled or stood up, either, and soon the atmosphere turned solidly against the band.
The Stones played eight songs, the songs were three or four minutes each. They were onstage less than half an hour. They finished their set and walked off the way they’d walked on. They just walked off. No one clapped or shouted, everyone was fed up, pissed off, let down. We’d become the anti-audience, and rose, grabbed our jackets, left our seats and filed out. There was no fighting, no talking. We’d all been rebuffed, like the hefty, dark-haired girl. The audience spilled onto 14th Street, a morose confederacy of rebels. It was early evening.
I suppose my friend and I went out for something to eat. Or maybe I went home and ate sliced beets and broiled chicken wings. Life continued, but something had changed: the Rolling Stones had played New York.
By now, the Stones have changed a lot. Brian drowned, murdered, it’s alleged, by his assistant; Mick Taylor quit, so Ron Wood plays lead guitar; Darryl Jones plays bass, since Bill Wyman retired; and Mick’s, Keith’s and Charlie’s faces are cross-hatched and filigreed with event and experience. I’ve changed, too. For one thing, I have stopped eating wings exclusively, though I eat chicken. I still love beets, but now fresh and roasted, and order them whenever they’re on a menu. I still like to wear a uniform of sorts, but now I buy six or seven pairs of the same, usually black pants, about that number of the same all-cotton, long-sleeved T-shirts, and many of the same linen, rayon or silk blouses. I buy everything in different colors. Life isn’t as bleak, with some variety.
Underworld
“Bigness is theoretical domain at this fin de siècle: in a landscape of disarray, disassembly, dissociation, the attraction of Bigness is its potential, reconstruct the Whole, resurrect the Real, reinvent the collective, reclaim maximum possibility.”—Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL
Contemporary writers worry about the place of writing the cultural space for books. The novel is an endangered species, as fiction faces down confessions and “real-life” stories. “True” today means “actually happened,” and invention and imagination are dirty words, viewed as suspiciously as communism in the 1950s. More fiction and nonfiction books are published, but most vanish without a trace, so not only writers, but also publishers and editors are depressed. The phrase “return of 1996,” the industry’s LA earthquake (when books were returned to publishers in record numbers), is repeated like a mantra. The picture is not getting better: “The latest survey from the Association of American Publishers shows that net sales of hardcover books are down by 12 per cent per year to date and books are being returned to publishers at an average rate of 45 per cent,” reports The New York Times. The context in which books are written and published is unstable, unpredictable, and who knows how to account for taste, anyway.
In the 1950s, when Don DeLillo’s new novel Underworld begins, there was a notion — the great American novel. It has disappeared and in its place, probably under Reagan, great became big. Publishers publish big or little books: authors are big or little, midlist or midcareer. Big, mid, little don’t measure page-length, but how the book will be positioned. Marketing determines “big” or “little” more than the way the book is written, its ideas, length, cost. What it’s been paid, the advance, is a variable, but a book with a small advance may become “big,” depending upon how it’s seen in-house, whether editors and salespeople think it can “break out.” If a little book sells, it can become big, the surprise publisher and authors make money from. Martin Amis is reported to have called our big books “Big Macs.” In fast-food America, everyone agonizes about fat, but wants to be a big, fat deal. Undoubtedly, we’re a nation of size queens.