At the time, such self-aggrandizement seemed risky for a band returning to the homeland of rock ’n’ roll after three years off-road and still noticeably out of practice. Mick, in particular, resisted what he initially saw as a sacrifice of dignity rather than a masterstroke of preemptive branding. “It was a stupid epithet . . . like we were a circus act,” he would recall, strangely for the late ringmaster of a “rock ’n’ roll circus.” “I used to say [to Cutler], ‘Plee-ase don’t use that. It’s too embarrassing.’ ”
For America, he had wisely not packed the white flouncy dress, but instead put together a look that mixed androgeny with irony: a scoop-necked black T-shirt and stud-seamed trousers, set off by his bondage dog collar and belt and a trailing pink chiffon scarf, the kind that garroted the great Edwardian dancer Isadora Duncan when it entangled with the wheels of her open Bugatti. Tipped back on his head was an outsize red, white, and blue top hat, as worn by America’s Uncle Sam.
Far more than their palmy Hyde Park gazebo, Fort Collins Sports Arena’s giant stage revealed the strange contradiction in the Stones’ new lineup. Until then, there had essentially been two kinds of rock band: those from the fifties and early sixties who jigged around and enjoyed themselves like the Lovin’ Spoonful or Freddie and the Dreamers, and the modern kind, like Pink Floyd and Soft Machine, who conjured forth their vast electronic symphonies and cacophonies without seeming to move a muscle.
Yet here were both elements together; a front man who never stayed still—tossing his hair and pink scarf, inflating and deflating his outsize lips, pumping his elbows like a small boy playing trains—while his sidemen competed with one another in studied lack of motion or expression. Keith, once so smiley and jiggy, now had a brooding menace, only intensified by thick-caked mascara. Curly-haired, child-faced Mick Taylor, eyes downcast on his guitar fretboard, might have been some shy Victorian girl embroidering a pious sentiment on a sampler. Bill Wyman had never moved or cracked a smile anyway. Only Charlie, in his nest of smashed cymbals, showed any animation, even if it never got as far as his sad turtle face.
In contrast with the twenty-odd minutes of yore, their performance now lasted a stupendous one hour, fifteen minutes. Most bands who’d come up earlier in the decade despised their early hits and refused to play them live. But the supposedly supercool, unsentimental Stones did oldies without even having to be asked. Their set thus ranged from the sunny good times of “Little Queenie” and “Carol” to the dark places of “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Gimme Shelter” from the soon-to-be-released Let It Bleed, and, climactically, “Midnight Rambler,” when Chip Monck drenched the stage in blood-red light and Mick beat it senseless with his dominatrix belt. Mephistopheles, rape, and murder then melted into hippie benevolence. “We’re gonna kiss you good-bye” were his farewell words, “and leave you to kiss each other good-bye.” And the nine thousand dispersed as peaceably as if Hyde Park had come to the Rocky Mountains.
The real test of America’s welcome was the tour’s second gig, two nights at the eighteen-thousand-capacity Los Angeles Forum, where advance ticket sales of $260,000 had broken the Beatles’ box-office record from any venue. California was the epicenter of “serious” rock, to be witnessed as well as listened to with studious earnestness. As Mick stood ready to chug out into Chip Monck’s crosshatched spotlight beams, a Forum official warned him, “Don’t expect them to scream.”
But at first sight of an ironically tilted Uncle Sam topper and trailing pink scarf, they screamed as dementedly as if rock’s past six cerebral years had never been. Screaming gave way to a wholly new kind of approbation in “Street Fighting Man,” when they stood and punched air in time with the “marchin’, chawgin’ feet—BOY!” Among the newspaper critics present was Albert Goldman, in later years the most malevolent of rock biographers. Goldman’s New York Times review, written in a caricature German accent (“Ja, mein kamerads, dot’s right . . .”) likened the show to a Nazi rally at Nuremberg and characterized Mick as “the Leader,” exhorting his latter-day storm troopers to mass masturbation. In L.A., he also taped a performance of “Honky Tonk Women” for The Ed Sullivan Show, which was transmitted without an edit mark from the censors who’d once thrown up their hands at “Let’s Spend the Night Together.”
Being on the road in America proved much the same as three years before, only bigger, louder, and grosser. There were still the same glowering cops, drab gray-brick dressing rooms, and anonymous hotel and motel bedrooms. There was still the same avalanche of young women with un-British white teeth and peachy complexions, out to sleep with Mick Jagger and ready to do the same with any of the road crew who might facilitate it. Competition among groupies had grown so intense that some resorted to novel methods to attract their quarries’ attention. The most famous was Cynthia Plaster-Caster, who memorialized every top-echelon rock star she bedded by making a cast of his erect penis, using a substance usually employed for dental molds. Her subjects included Jimi Hendrix, Eric Burdon, and Wayne Kramer of MC5 but—despite frequent invitations—never Mick. In later life, Cynthia would recognize female emancipation by making casts of breasts also, and still later, run for mayor of Chicago.
Before the Dallas show, Ron Schneider was approached by a young blond woman who introduced herself as “the Butter Queen” and said her handbag contained a pound and a half of butter which she wanted to spread over Mick’s nude body, then lick off. Any other Stone would do equally well, she said, but time was short, as she had to collect her young son from school. Sam Cutler excused them en bloc by saying they were all vegans, unable to tolerate animal products even in poultice form, so she had to be content with buttering up a few roadies.
At New York’s Madison Square Garden, two nights in a row, capacity audiences of 18,200 screamed as instantly and unanimously as at the L.A. Forum. There was also a guest appearance by Janis Joplin, white rock’s nearest reincarnation of Bessie Smith, who was to follow the Brian Jones path and die of heroin and alcohol abuse at the same age, twenty-seven, less than a year later. So sure was Mick of his crowd control that he positively invited stage boarders, switching back to lascivious Cockney again: “I think I bust a button on my trahsers. I ’ope they don’t fall down. You don’t want my trahsers to fall down now, do yah?” When he sang “Live with Me,” a smacked-out and sozzled Janis yelled: “You don’t have the balls!”
Later, he was stopped on the street by a gray-haired, grandmotherly woman who said she had a photograph she wanted to show him. It proved to be of herself, lying on a bed, naked, with legs spread wide. When Mick showed distaste, the vintage vamp grabbed his hair and pulled him to the ground. Two or three of the NYPD minders had to work quite hard to disentangle them.
Provocativeness onstage gave way to extreme circumspection at press conferences whenever tricky political questions came up. On November 15, the so-called Moratorium Rally brought 250,000 marchers to Washington, D.C., for the biggest-ever protest against the Vietnam War. To TV interviewers in Australia, Mick had not hesitated to call the war “awful and wrong,” but now all references to the subject were fobbed off with smiling faux-Cockney banter. What sympathy did he have to offer America in the continuing trauma of seeing its air force bomb straw huts and its young men brought home in body bags? “Just get over it as soon as you can.” Did the Stones have a message for the revolutionary young who regarded them as leaders? “We’re with you . . . right be’ind you.”
Those who tried to involve him more directly in the “Year of the American Revolution” got equally short shrift. In Chicago, his backstage visitors included Abbie Hoffman, leader of the Youth International Party, or Yippies, and one of the Chicago Eight awaiting trial for conspiracy and incitement to riot following the ’68 Democratic Party convention. Hoffman asked Mick to help fund his defense, but met the usual Jagger equivocation. “He didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no,” the perplexed Yippie said later. In Oakland, California, militant Black Panthers demanded a pledge of personal allegiance from Mick, citing
his past sympathy for black radicalism and the fact that black acts were on the tour. No such pledge being forthcoming, security had to be stepped up, for black performers as much as white. Though protected by armed bodyguards, Ike and Tina Turner still did not feel safe and took to carrying their own handguns.
The tour saw the birth of another Stones tradition, unwittingly based on the old vaudeville axiom “Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry . . . but above all, make ’em wait.” Shows took to starting half an hour late, then an hour, and eventually two. The pop-festival era, in any case, had accustomed audiences to long interset vigils caused by shambolic staging and the performers’ Mediterranean disregard of time. For the Stones’ audiences, this tardiness was not the slackness or slight it might appear, but part of the fuck-you attitude that made the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band so ineffably exciting and enviable. The waiting masses were quite happy to imagine them delayed by some great party, which they would eventually condescend to bring onstage and share.
It was a habit that soon brought Mick into conflict with America’s foremost rock promoter, Bill Graham. As operator of two legendary San Francisco music venues, the Fillmore and Winterland, and New York’s Fillmore East, the famously volatile Graham had considered himself a natural choice to mastermind the whole Stones tour, but had been allotted only a few West Coast dates. He was mortally offended that such a plum should have gone to a newcomer like Ron Schneider, resentful of the sums he had to pay Schneider up front; above all, disgusted by what he saw (even if neither side concerned did) as the Stones’ contempt for their paying customers.
Mick did not encounter Bill Graham until the double-show night Graham presented at the Alameda County Coliseum in Oakland. There was, fortunately, no incursion by the Black Panthers, but backstage conditions were more than usually bleak and during the first of the two shows the in-house equipment repeatedly malfunctioned. Afterward, Graham got into a furious row with Schneider and Sam Cutler, then burst into the Stones’ dressing room, shouting that he’d cancel the second house. Mick—who was applying cosmetics at that moment—put aside Dixie and Cockney to greet him with the stinging offhandedness of some English theatrical grande dame: “Didn’t I speak to you on the phone once? You were rude to me. I can’t stand people who shout on the phone. It shows the most appalling manners.” He then turned back to the mirror and went on with his maquillage.
His imperviousness to the allure of Cynthia Plaster-Caster and the Butter Queen, of course, had nothing to do with being faithful to Marianne. With his penchant for beautiful black women, he had taken an instant shine to Claudia Lennear, a backup singer with the Ike and Tina Turner Revue who was not only stunning but blessed with a voice almost the equal of Tina’s. Claudia was seen with Mick constantly offstage, despite a warning from Tina that the philandering, wife-beating Ike Turner also had designs on her. It was some consolation for being apart from Marsha Hunt, who had gone to Denmark to make a feature film—and would shortly become the first black woman ever on the cover of American Vogue. Back in London, meanwhile, Marianne received regular phone calls and letters from Mick, saying how much he loved and missed her and giving her little tasks so that she’d still feel included in his life, like scouring the Chelsea Antiques Market for the belt with which he lashed the stage in “Midnight Rambler.”
While Mick felt free to indulge in any amount of midnight ramblings on the road, it never crossed his mind that Marianne might do the same. But when the tour reached Dallas, he learned that she was having an open affair with the Italian photographer Mario Schifano. To add yet another twist to the Mick-Keith sexual labyrinth, Schifano was a former boyfriend of Anita Pallenberg; indeed, Marianne would always suspect Mick-unfriendly Anita of setting her up with Schifano by asking her to let him crash at Cheyne Walk when he was visiting London. The UK press reported that they’d decamped to Rome together, taking Nicholas with them, and quoted Marianne as calling Schifano her “Prince Charming.”
Such a thing would be a terrible blow to any young man’s pride, let alone one accustomed to appearing, nightly in front of thousands of shrieking females to whom he was the most fanciable thing on two legs. Even so, the Tyranny of Cool—not to mention economics—exerted an iron grip. There was no question of interrupting the tour and returning to London to find out whether Marianne was serious or merely trying to get his attention. One night, at University Coliseum in Auburn, Alabama, the top-hatted, pink-scarfed, head-tossing, either-way sex god appeared onstage as per program.
The Stones’ last official tour gig (for $100,000) was the West Palm Beach Music and Arts Festival at West Palm Beach International Raceway on November 30, headlining a bill that included Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone, the Byrds, Johnny Winter, King Crimson, and Grand Funk Railroad. The event was atrociously organized, with insufficient catering, sanitary, and medical arrangments for the forty thousand crowd; there were 130 reported drug overdoses and a teenage boy died after being accidentally run over by a truck. The Stones didn’t go onstage until 4 A.M. on December 1, eight hours behind schedule, by which time it was so cold that spectators had chopped up many of the three hundred portable toilets for firewood and Keith had to play swathed in a blanket. Even so, the vibe remained miraculously good.
Before returning to Britain in unquestionable triumph, they were to appear at a second festival—for free, like Hyde Park—at which conditions promised to be far superior to West Palm Beach Raceway’s. While arrangements for this were finalized, the band had a recording date at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Sheffield, Alabama, following in the footsteps of great soul artists like Aretha Franklin and the Staple Singers. There, galvanized by his recent second spoonful, Mick finished off “Brown Sugar” at top speed, writing one verse per page of a yellow legal pad. He also handed “Wild Horses” to Keith, who was feeling some of the same pain of separation from his new baby son, Marlon.
There were some communication difficulties with the Muscle Shoals studio crew, whose Alabama accents the Stones sometimes found impossible to understand despite long conditioning to Jagger Dixie-speak. The Alabamans in turn were frequently baffled by the whiskeyand dope-slurred tones in which Keith now addressed the world. To avoid misunderstandings, Mick would repeat everything his Glimmer Twin said, like instantaneous translation at the UN.
The two nailed “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses” on the last night in just two takes per track, sharing a microphone and swigging from the same bottle of bourbon. Afterward—as he had at every previous session—Mick destroyed all the outtakes so there could be no bootleg versions.
IT IS THE darkest of all rock legends: how at a Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, California, in December 1969, an inoffensive audience member was stabbed to death by Hell’s Angels while, a few feet away, Mick Jagger sang “Sympathy for the Devil,” as usual not giving a fuck. And how the magic decade which the Beatles had defined with melody, charm, and laughter was seen off by him and his band amid violence, chaos, and callousness. Almost everything in the legend is untrue, especially the part about Mick’s attitude. In fact, the horrible Altamont episode only came to pass because he did give a fuck.
While the tour had delighted its audiences without exception, it had created a backwash of resentment among promoters like Bill Graham, who’d been forced to dance to the Stones’ tune, and media commentators to whom Mick seemed altogether too pleased with himself. To both camps, he was probably at his most insufferable at a press conference in New York’s Rainbow Room on November 25, when a matronly woman journalist quoted his so-wicked 1965 hit to ask if he was more “satisfied” by America now. “D’ you mean foinancial-ay?” he replied in his best mixture of Cockney barrow boy and college debater. “Sexual-ay? Philosophic-lay?”
Among these disgruntled promoters and disapproving journalists, one complaint recurred time and again: that ticket prices for Stones shows throughout the tour had been set at an extortionately high level. The San Franciso Chronicle columnist Ralph J. G
leason—who happened also to be a founding editor of Rolling Stone—made it into a positive crusade, repeatedly asking just how much money the band needed to squirrel away to “Merrie England” and suggesting that, despite this supposed avalanche of dollars, their black supporting acts were being shamefully underpaid.
In reality, despite the Stones’ urgent need of capital, top seat prices at prime venues like the Los Angeles Forum were $8.50, just a dollar more than to see Mick’s archrival Jim Morrison with the Doors. In planning the tour, Mick had insisted on proscenium shows, where the whole audience got a frontal view, even though in-the-round venues could sell as many as 25 percent more tickets. While raking in $260,000 from the Forum, he’d accepted just $35,000 for the gig at Alabama’s Auburn University. And Ike and Tina Turner and B. B. King, far from being exploited, were receiving their biggest career boost in years.
Clear as Mick’s conscience was, Gleason’s constant harping had started to get to him. “We aren’t doing this for money,” he told another media levee at the L.A. Beverly Wilshire, with what can only be called breathtaking disingenuousness. “We just wanted to play in America and have a lot of fun. We’re not really into that sort of economic scene. I mean, you’re either gonna sing and all that crap or you’re gonna be an economist. We’re sorry people can’t afford to come. We don’t know that this tour is more expensive. You’ll have to tell us.”
In the tour’s closing stages, however, a chance came along to answer Ralph J. Gleason and all those other accusations of greed and exploitativeness. Six days after the Stones’ last official gig, California was to have its own Woodstock-style free festival, aimed at equaling, or surpassing, the original four months previously, but this time, in truer hippie style, organized by the musicians themselves. The idea had come from the Grateful Dead, supported by Woodstock co-headliners Jefferson Airplane, Carlos Santana, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The one-day event would take place on December 6 in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, an easily accessible public space with all the facilities for large crowds that Woodstock had so sorely lacked.
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