Stoned Wheat Thins

TONY SANCHEZ USED TO hustle drugs for the Rolling Stones. Not for Charlie Watts, of course, who only gets high on his backbeat, or Bill Wyman, who only got in the band because he had a good amp in the days when equipment was scarce--in a way, they've always been more out of the band than in it. But the Glimmer Twins, Mick and Keith, and, in the early days, Brian, always knew where to go for "a little c-o-k-e." A lot of the contraband that has kept the Stones in and out of court-rooms and tabloids all over the world came from the man they called "Spanish Tony," who carved his little niche of rock and roll history on the original Beggar's Banquet album cover: "Spanish Tony Where Are You," scrawled on a drainpipe by Keith Richards. Sanchez was a groupie, heroin was his pudendum, and $250 his weekly reward as drug conduit and fall guy for the Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World.

The result, since Sanchez abandoned his chores for the slightly less honorable vocation of gossip-monger, is Up and Down with the Rolling Stones, expensive at $17.95 and no bargain at any price. Excerpts have appeared in Playboy and the New York Post, which should tell you something. A good biographer should have the ability to disappear, to close the observer/observed rift; Sanchez's egotism transforms biography into autobiography. This is not "The Inside Story" but "The Sanchez Story." Unfortunately, the life of a drug connection is not much more interesting than the story of a guy getting drinks for the 13-year olds at a bar mitzvah. Whatever shock value remains in an anecdote about cocaine evaporates after page one, and the reader is left with Sanchez's photographs, many of which are very good.

There is some historical interest in Up and Down--Sanchez includes some fascinating anecdotes and hitherto unreported incidentals. He tells us, for example, that Ronnie Wood met his wife Chrissie while listening to the Stones play at the Crawdaddy. He tells us how Marianne Faithfull, actress, singer, and onetime "good friend" of Mick Jagger, originally wouldn't sleep with either Jagger or Richards because of their zits: "She didn't think she could ever bring herself to kiss a man with zits." Sanchez reveals how the "water rats" line in "Live With Me" stems from an actual rat-shoot out at Keith's estate, and how the previously indecipherable "Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out" is actually a homophone for a recurrent voodoo phrase. On the subject of black magic, there's a great quote from Richards gleaned from the Daily Mail, which deflates Sanchez's allusions to the Stones' warlockery and epitomizes to the Stones' flippant attitude toward the press:

We've become very interested in magic, and we're very serious about this trip. We're hoping to see this magician who practices both white and black magic. He has a very long and difficult name which we can't pronounce. We call him Banana for short.

BUT THESE ARE WEDDING AND engagement rings lost in the drawer amidst the underwear. And it's all told in a style that might most charitably be called ungrammatical. Rock and roll writing should match the energy that defines that medium; Sanchez's prose sags and limps like a fat whore caught in a rumble. Perhaps Sanchez learned English as a second language. Certain words, like "fey" and "gossamer," become all-purpose modifiers, salt for his nouns--evervone in this book is at one time or another, "gossamer." But Sanchez's style doesn't come to full efflorescence till he describes the Stones' (or his own) women. Consider his paean to the physiognomy of Marianne Faithfull:

It was the face of an angel, with its big, blue, innocent eyes, soft, pouting lips and a frame of blond hair that glowed like the sun with youth and health. It was a face that stopped all talk whenever she entered any gathering of people--a face that subjugated all men to her will.

Marianne Faithfull, it should be pointed out, looks like a basset hound.

Sanchez has his own line on the Stones: they are not nice people. His Jagger is a megalomaniac trampling over his friends, even members of the band, to achieve millionaire respectability, a pseudo-hipster who never outgrew his banal suburban upbringings and mother-love. His Keith Richards is a vicious junkie, a coward, a racist, a cruel manipulator. Richards exploits Sanchez throughout, to smuggle drugs or take the rap for auto accidents or whatever. Since he was paying Sanchez a grand a month to do almost nothing, it doesn't seem all that reprehensible.

Sanchez's animus stems from the puritanical morality of the ex-junkie. There is nothing so tedious as a converted man and his born-again morality:

I had always been wary of hard drugs. They destroyed the mind, killed people... The swinging sixties had been a time when all that mattered was instant pleasure regardless of dire warnings and danger; now, it seemed, we were to pay for our hedonism.

At one point Sanchez uses the phrase "permissive society," a sure sign of brain death. Living with the Stones seems to have taken its toll on Sanchez--he's already gray--and now he's looking for somebody to blame.

OF COURSE, SANCHEZ made his own life, chose to live with the Stones, chose heroin the way Keith did, and Jagger didn't. But assume the Stones did ruin Sanchez's life, even the lives of people like Robert Fraser or Marianne Faithfull. What of it? It doesn't matter if nobody wants Keith Richards living next door. The Rolling Stones exist on stage; it's the persona, not the person, that's germane to art, and "kiss-and-tell" histories like Up and Down are supremely irrelevant. As Jagger once told Chet Flippo, "It's the attitude." The endless "Midnight Rambler," rambling forever on Get Yer YaYas Out; those spectral opening chords in "Gimme Shelter," music of nothingness played on the frets of your intestines; the way a song like "Sweet Virginia" talks about the shit on your shoes, there is shit on your shoes, shit on everybody's shoes, but you can scrape it off with your records. It's the redemptive quality of rock and roll. Mick and Keith brought the world rock and roll, and if the Stones ruined the lives of people like Sanchez, they saved the youth of millions of kids, kids doing homework to the time of a Spiro Agnew watch till they heard "Brown Sugar."

What has Tony Sanchez given the world? Nothing but this book of gossip and history lifted from Roy Carr's Illustrated Record, a book that won't give anybody joy or save anybody, a crotchety little book by a wasted old man. I don't like it.