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It was quiet in the car, the morning after the gig of the night before. I’m still wondering what we are going to do about a cover, and, as with the journey north, a good deal of my attention is consumed wondering if I’ll survive, when I look out the window and see huge cement blocks thrusting randomly out of acres of black ooze. A totally surreal sight, it reminded me of the monolith — the slab — from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. But we were traveling so fast that the shapes vanished almost immediately. I turned my head quickly to catch a last glimpse.
At the next roundabout, Pete says, “Well, do you have any ideas?” And 1 say, “Well, there were these shapes back a few miles, and. . .” Townshend spins the wheel of the Mercedes, and the entire caravan follows, and again at 130 we careen back toward these shapes, screeching to a halt. The Who and entourage step out of their cars. (We are looking — I am later to discover — at a slag heap, a collection of almost solid industrial waste into which concrete pillars are thrust to keep the waste from shifting.)
I pick up my cameras and we all walk out onto the dark reef of the slag. The sky is still gray as occasional drops of rain fall. At first I direct them to react to the slab as Kubrick’s apes and astronauts react in 2001: approaching cautiously, arms upraised, almost touching it. But this is too much a re-creation, and somebody, probably Pete, walks up to the slab and starts to piss on it. The others follow suit. Those unable to urinate on cue are aided by little film cans filled with rainwater. The gray sky is a little dull so it is replaced with the sunset from the Land Rover photograph. (FROM AN AMERICAN STORY)
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