“I left technical school when I was fifteen. I did three years of art school. I was just starting the last year when Mick and I happened to meet up on the train at Dartford Station. Between the ages of eleven and seventeen you go through a lot of changes. So I didn’t know what he was like. It was like seeing an old friend, but it was also like meeting a new person. He’d left grammar school and he was going to the London School of Economics, very heavily into a university student number. He had some records with him, and I said Wotcha got? Turned out to be Chuck Berry, Rocking at the Hop.
“He was into singin’ in the bath sort of stuff, he had been singin’ with a rock group a few years previous, couple of years. Buddy Holly stuff and ‘Sweet Little Sixteen,’ Eddie Cochran stuff, at youth clubs and things in Dartford, but he hadn’t done that for a while when I met him. I told him I was messin’ around with Dick Taylor. It turned out that Mick knew Dick Taylor because they’d been to grammar school together, so, fine, why don’t we all get together? I think one night we all went round to Dick’s place and had a rehearsal, just a jam. That was the first time we got into playing. Just back-room stuff, just for ourselves. So we started gettin’ it together in front rooms and back rooms, at Dick Taylor’s home particularly. We started doing things like Billy Boy Arnold stuff, ‘Ride an Eldorado Cadillac,’ Eddie Taylor, Jimmy Reed, didn’t attempt any Muddy Waters yet, or Bo Diddley, I don’t think, in that period. Mick laid a lot of sounds on me that I hadn’t heard. He’d imported records from Ernie’s Record Mart.
“At this time the big music among the kids was traditional jazz, some of it very funky, some of it very wet, most of it very, very wet. Rock and roll had already drifted into pop like it has already done again here because the mass media have to cater to everybody. They don’t have it broken down into segments so that kids can listen to one station. It’s all put together, so eventually it boils down to what the average person wants to hear, which is average rubbish. Anyway, that was the scene then, no good music coming out of the radio, no good music coming out of the so-called rock and roll stars. No good nothing.
“Just about the time Mick and I are getting the scene together with Dick Taylor, trying to find out what it’s all about, who’s playing what and how they’re playing it, Alexis Korner starts a band at a club in the west of London, in Ealing, with a harmonica player called Cyril Davies, a car-panel beater at a junkyard and body shop. Cyril had been to Chicago and sat in with Muddy at Smitty’s Corner and was therefore a very big deal. He was a good harp player and a good night man; he used to drink bourbon like a fucking fish. Alexis and Cyril got this band together and who happens to be on drums, none other than Charlie Watts. We went down about the second week it opened. It was the only club in England where they were playing anything funky, as far as anybody knew. The first person we see sitting in—Alexis gets up and says, ‘And now, folks, a very fine bottleneck guitar player who has come all the way from Cheltenham to play here tonight’—and suddenly there’s fucking Elmore James up there, ‘Dust My Broom,’ beautifully played, and it’s Brian.”
5
If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.
—WILLIAM BLAKE: Proverbs of Hell
IT WAS AFTER ELEVEN in the morning when I clawed my way down the hall toward the fresh fruit salad in the refrigerator, hoping it would cure the headache left me as a souvenir of last night’s cocaine. David Sandison, coming out of the office, loomed before me, his face mournful as a basset hound’s. He asked if I’d just got up and I said brusquely, “That’s right,” wanting the thick apple juice, cold strawberries, pineapple and orange slices—they might try to steal from you, but they’d never starve you—and he said, “Then you haven’t heard about Kerouac.”
“What about him?”
“He’s dead.”
“Where’d you hear that?” I asked, because you never want to believe these things.
“It’s been on the radio this morning. He died last night. He was living in Florida. Did you know that?”
I didn’t answer because in my mind I was riding on a Trailways bus from Waycross to Macon, Georgia, Lumber City just ahead, reading a story in a book I had borrowed from the Okefenokee Regional Library, since Waycross did not have a bookstore, if you discounted a place where they sold Bibles. In the story a Mexican girl was singing to a young American man a Piano Red song we used to play on the jukebox at the lake where my high school friends and I danced and drag-raced and made love in cars. I had never read a story like this one. The people in it drove fast and made love in cars, and that made my life seem more like something you might read about, or as the song said, “If you can’t boogie, you know I’ll show you how.” Then I remembered that the only work I had an actual contract to do was a story for Esquire about Kerouac. Waiting to hear from the Stones, I had postponed going to Florida for an interview. The thought jolted me back to the present, sitting on a couch in the living room, still hungry. My mood had changed, and I made a ham sandwich and drank a beer.
Mick, Mick, and Keith had arrived, Jagger in the office with the door closed, Keith playing tennis with Mick Taylor, then displaying in the pool what he called “the form perfected over six years lounging on the beaches of the world.” Only six years a Rolling Stone, and he looked a hundred. How old had Kerouac looked? Sandison grimly watched Keith swimming. Before going into the publicity racket Sandison was a reporter for a small-town English newspaper. Both his body and his prematurely balding head were pear-shaped; Kerouac had lived the vagabond life unknown to the pear-shaped. Sandison really felt as if something had been taken away from him. He told Keith about Kerouac, and though Keith had never read him, he sort of swam more seriously for a few strokes.
When Keith had dressed again and we were heading back to the house, I remembered to tell him that I had written the letter. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll speak to Mick about it,” plunging me again into gloom, things seemed never to get past this point, but I went to my Oz room and got the famous letter. A minute later, when I got back, Keith was gone. Jagger was in the living room on a couch with Jo Bergman, talking business, frowning. I looked in the backyard and saw nobody, then went out front and found Mick Taylor alone. I did not say, Where the hell is Keith? but airily remarked, “Insane business, people running about.” It was the first sentence I could remember saying to Mick Taylor. He smiled simply and said, “I don’t mind the business part as long as I don’t have to do it.” Then I said, “Where the hell is Keith?”
“He and Charlie just left for the studio.”
I went inside thinking, To hell with it.
Then as I passed, Jagger looked up and said, “Isn’t there a letter or summink somebody wants me to sign?” Now we both were frowning. I produced the letter and he signed it, Jo behind the couch not even thinking about not reading over our heads.
I had typed the Stones’ names in the order—Jagger, Richards, Watts, Wyman, Taylor—that I wanted to collect them, because I knew that once Jagger and Keith had signed the others would; so I rode with the two Micks past the Whisky-à-Go-Go and Hollywood High School to Sunset Sound Studios, where they were finishing their new album. I asked Keith, slumped on a couch in front of the recording console, to sign the letter and he did, in the wrong place. “Doesn’t matter,” I said, and though Mick Taylor was at the bottom of the list he was sitting next to Keith, so I passed him the paper and pen, and he signed. Charlie signed leaning over the console. That made four out of five. I went to an office and called Wyman at the Beverly Wilshire, where he and Astrid were still living and were not happy about it. He said he was not coming to the studio, but he’d be over to the Oriole house for dinner about seven-thirty and he’d sign it then. “That’ll be all right, won’t it,” he asked, and I said sure. But I wanted to get the letter out tonight. The tour was starting soon, I expected big expenses, and I knew in my bones that it would take forever to get a publishing contract and even longer to get paid.
When I went back to the control
room Charlie and Mick Taylor were leaving, and I rode with them back to the Oriole house. Wyman and Astrid were coming over for dinner because they were bored with eating out, and we were going out because we were bored with eating at home. I had nothing to worry about except that we might leave before Wyman arrived, so I worried about that. But they came in and sat down to dinner just as we were leaving. I laid the letter beside Wyman’s plate and asked him to sign it. He perused it, taking his time. I had already waited longer than I wanted to. “Right there,” I said, handing him a pen. Wyman picked up the letter and asked, “You don’t mind if I read it, do you?” I said sure, go ahead, it’s just one sentence, no big deal. “Still got you on the defensive,” Charlie said, but Bill signed, I put the letter in my notebook, and out we went.
The next step was to make copies of the letter and mail the original to my agent, but I wouldn’t be able to do that till tomorrow. Still, I had the letter, the letter was signed, it was in my notebook, my note-book was in my hand. We were rolling in a limousine past expensive houses on streets named after birds.
Dinner at a trendy, surly restaurant was not much fun, but afterwards we met the other Stones at the Whisky-à-Go-Go to hear Chuck Berry.
On the Strip, on the corner, past the tense, remote loungers at the entrance, into the darkness, the land of dreams, where it was hot and smoky and crowded, a big barn with a small elevated dance floor, the bandstand high in a corner, unfamous people looking for famous people, famous people looking for each other, the Rolling Stones sitting at tables in the corner not looking for anybody. I sat with Jagger, Keith, and Wyman, an odd combination. Young girls, two or three or seven together, kept walking by our tables, passing maybe six times before they got up the nerve to ask for the Stones’ autographs. The waitresses hovered around us, dollar bills folded lengthways between their fingers.
Onstage were four white musicians, loud and incompetent. A light show was playing on two walls, one covered with Jello-colored liquid globs and swirls, the other showing salmon leaping up a small water-fall, one clip repeating over and over, intercut between scenes from a Japanese movie featuring a giant beast come from the sky to devour the world. The eating of Tokyo blended perfectly with the rest of the action in the room, where people who had grown up surrounded by crazy images—like the girl on the dance floor dressed in black leather, looking mean in her boots and wrist guards—tried to be as real as Batman or Wonder Woman or Zontar, the Thing from Venus, shuddering there on the wall.
But then a lean, high-cheekboned, brooding-eyed black man came onstage, wearing his guitar low as a gunfighter’s gun, stroking it with obscene expertise, and even Keith’s image—the worst image in the room, Indian, pirate, witch, the image that grins at Death—reverted to what he was when he first heard Chuck Berry, a little English schoolboy in his uniform and cap. A few years passed before Keith could see Chuck Berry in person, because Berry was in the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute for taking a fourteen-year-old Indian whore across a state line for the wrong reasons, but Keith and Jagger both learned Berry’s trademark duck walk from the film Jazz on a Summer’s Day, which Keith saw fourteen times. Later, when Chuck Berry was out of prison and Mick and Keith were Rolling Stones, they met him, and unlike many of their musical idols, he snubbed them repeatedly, so that they respected him all the more and were trying to hire him for the present tour.
And now as Berry played “Sweet Little Sixteen,” playing sloppily with this punk band, not even playing the right changes, still from time to time in the breaks there was a flash of the magic of his guitar, and Keith, once more the schoolboy who wore tight pants under his baggy ones, leaned across the table to Wyman, because Wyman used to go to dances in two pairs of pants, a baggy pair over tight ones, they wouldn’t let you in the door wearing tight ones (it is possible that the single most powerful unifying social element for this generation has been that we all, girls too, grew up wearing pants that clearly showed our sexual organs, straining right there against the denim), and to Wyman, a tiny man with the face of a funny gargoyle, who started a groupie empire, in fact, the groupie empire (“It originated with Bill,” Keith said. “He screwed thousands. He marked it all down in his diary.” Actually he stopped counting after, I think, 278), Keith said, “He’s not doin’ much, that band’s so bad, but every once in a while, wow—”
Wyman, watching Berry, who had let nothing, not even prison, stop him from singing about sixteen-year-old pussy, smiled and said, “Yeah,’e’s great, inne—”
When Berry’s set ended we left the Whisky (our leaving, like all our arrivals and departures, swift and dramatic, everyone staring at the Stones as we swept out into limousines at the curb) and rolled, four carloads of us, down the superhighway toward the Corral, a night-club in Topanga Canyon, to hear Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers.
Along the miles and miles of highway, we (the Wattses, Bill and Astrid, two or three others) were talking about music—Shirley who loves old-time rock and roll very elated about seeing Chuck Berry—when for the first time on this tour we encountered Wyman’s Weakness. Bill told the driver to stop at a gas station, got to go to the loo, and we rolled on and no place was open, and Bill again said, Hey, you gotta stop somewhere, gotta go to the loo, and the driver said, Doesn’t seem to be any place open. Well, stop at one that isn’t open, Bill said, just let me out of the car, and Charlie reminded him that “It was you got us in trouble like that the time before, Bill.”
It was March 18, 1965, the last night of the Rolling Stones’ fifth tour of England. The tour had lasted two weeks, fourteen consecutive nights of playing movie houses, two shows nightly. It had not been especially eventful. Three shows had been recorded for a concert album. In Manchester, at the Palace, a girl fell fifteen feet from the upper circle of seats into the stalls. The fall went almost unnoticed as 150 screaming girls stormed the stage when Mick sang “Pain in My Heart.” The girl ran away from attendants attempting to take her to an ambulance and was later seen outside the stage door, still screaming, “Mick, Mick.” At Sunderland, where the Stones played the Odeon, fans wanted to buy the water the Stones had used to wash their hair, and someone sold their fag ends, cigaret butts, for a penny each. At Sheffield, a grown man seeking an autograph pulled Charlie off his stool while he was playing. At the Leicester Trocadero, another girl fell out of the upper circle, losing her front teeth. “We were scared,” Mick said later. “You know how these things catch on. We could easily end up with an outbreak of people swan-diving from their balconies and somebody killed.”
At the Rochester Odeon, which they would remember as one of the worst theaters in England, the stage door watchman wouldn’t believe, because of the way they looked, that the Stones were the Show, and refused to let them in. Keith shoved him down and they went in anyway. At the Sunderland Odeon, while Charlie was announcing the song “Little Red Rooster,” a girl leapt onto Mick’s back. He calmly carried her to the edge of the stage and set her down.
On the last night of the tour, March 18, after two shows at the ABC Theater at Romford, the Stones headed for London in Mick’s Daimler. Before he reached home, Wyman needed to urinate. As their road manager Ian Stewart described the situation, “Really, if you sit in a dressing room all night, drinking Coca-Cola, go onstage for about thirty minutes, leap about like idiots, drop your guitar to run out into a car in the bloody cold weather, you’re just about ready for a quick tiddle.”
Mick turned the big, black car into a Francis service station in Rom-ford Road, Forest Gate, east London. It was about eleven-thirty. According to the station attendant, forty-one-year-old Charles Keeley, “a shaggy-haired monster wearing dark glasses” got out of the car and asked, “Where can we have a piss here?” Keeley told Wyman that the public toilets were closed for reconditioning, which was a lie, and then denied him access to the staff toilet. Wyman’s behavior, according to Keeley, “did not seem natural or normal.” He was “running up and down the forecourt, taking off his dark glasses and dancing
.” Then “eight or nine youths and girls got out of the car.” Mr. Keeley, “sensing trouble,” told the driver of the car, Mick Jagger, to get them off the forecourt. Jagger pushed him aside and said, “We’ll piss anywhere, man.” This phrase was taken up by the others, who repeated it in “a gentle chant.” One danced to the phrase. Then Wyman went to the road and urinated against a garage. Mick Jagger and Brian Jones followed suit farther down the road. According to Mr. Keeley, “Some people did not seem offended. They even went up and asked for autographs.” One customer, however, told the Stones their behavior was “disgusting.” At this the Stones “started shouting and screaming.” The incident ended with the Daimler driving away, its occupants making “a well-known gesture with two fingers.”
Mr. Keeley took down the license number. The customer who had spoken out against the Stones was one Eric Lavender, aged twenty-two, secretary-warden of a Forest Gate community youth center. “If the police do not prosecute, I will press a private prosecution,” said the indignantly alliterative Lavender.
At the police prosecution of the affair, the Stones told a different, and much shorter, story. Wyman testified that he had said nothing more to Mr. Keeley than “ ‘May I use the toilet?’ I never swear.” Being refused, they got back in the car and drove off. Mick also denied any insulting behavior and said that he had never sworn at school, university, or since. Brian said he was not the type of person to insult anyone—“I am easily embarrassed.” The court sided with Messrs. Keeley and Lavender, and the Stones were ordered to pay fifteen guineas costs, in spite of Wyman’s plaintive statement: “I happen to suffer from a weak bladder.”
True Adventures of the Rolling Stones Page 6