True Adventures of the Rolling Stones

by Stanley Booth

  Scully was wearing Levi’s and a plaid cowboy shirt, and with his beard and his bright eyes, he appeared a pleasant open-faced charming western guy. He was talking about the proper way to give a free concert, how it might be done, with whose help. The Dead had done this sort of thing many times, and Scully might actually have known how to give a free concert in, say, Golden Gate Park. The Be-In, a mass gathering, had taken place in the park with no unpleasantness. The Hell’s Angels, who had attended the Be-In, had acted as security at some Grateful Dead concerts, and it was natural (not to say organic) to have the Angels help you do your thing, or so it seemed to Rock Scully. He was saying, sitting on a couch in that oblong room where our destinies were being formed, though we were too tired to give much of a shit, “The Angels are really some righteous dudes. They carry themselves with honor and dignity.” He was so wide-eyed and open about it, it seemed really convincing. Nobody was even particularly paying attention, but I noticed the way he used the words honor and dignity, these high-flown words here but you know what I mean.

  Uppermost in people’s minds in the dressing room was Bill Graham and what an ass he was. Keith was furious, and when Keith was furious, everybody else had better be at least indignant. Scully was running Graham down for being a capitalist pig, and Keith was saying that Ralph Gleason was obviously “Graham’s bootlicker. Why don’t he go on writin’ about Art Blakey and Monk and people like that, he’s just an opportunist who’s climbed on the rock bandwagon.” The poster of Graham above the banquet table was spattered with thrown cheese dip.

  Jagger came in, still in his black stage garb, opened a bottle of champagne, and sat down on the floor. “I’ve been watchin’ Tina,” he said, “and she is so good, she’s fucking fantastic, the way she is onstage. I mean, she’s so cocky. I used to be cocky, but I ain’t anymore.”

  Ike and Tina burst in, and Mick got up to greet them. “Tina, you were fantastic.” They talked briefly, Ike and Tina left, then Tina looked back in to say to Mick, “Watch it with the Ikettes. Last time, we got ready to go, and no Ikettes.”

  “Whaddya want me to do?”

  “Do what you want, but be cool.”

  “I haven’t done anything yet,” Mick said, sounding like a little boy. B. B. King had missed the first show and was late for the second, scrambling the show’s order. Ike and Tina went on first, followed by Terry Reid, then B.B. The shows, supposed to start at 6:30 and 10:30, started at 6:50 and 1:15. It was nearly 2:30 A.M. when the Stones took over the stage. In 1966, the last time the Stones had played San Francisco, the audience had been twelve-year-olds, kicking seats over and wetting their pants. Tonight, just across the Bay, there were anarchists passing out a manifesto. And the Stones just wanted people to dance.

  But after the fast early numbers and the acoustic blues interlude, when the band was playing “Little Queenie,” as Mick was saying, “Come on, San Francisco, let’s get up and dance, let’s shake our asses,” Bill Graham was crouching before the stage, pointing to kids who were dancing, shouting, “Down! Down!” Finally he took his cameras and left, as the crowd surged to the stage. There was no feeling of violence, only the desire to get close and boogie. “Street Fighting Man” ended at 3:45 A.M. The Oakland Coliseum was ringing with the same sound I had heard the last two nights. It was not the band, not the crowd; it was a third sound. I didn’t know what it was, but I liked it.

  The days were starting to have a uniform strangeness; they all took place in the dark, we lived from dark to dawn. Each night we went someplace new and strange and yet similar to the place before, to hear the same men play the same songs to kids who all looked the same, and yet each night it was different, each night told us more. In three days, the Stones had played to nearly eighty thousand people. None of the shows had been without problems, and yet the screams got screamed, the sweat sweated, the shows done. That might be the whole point, the only victory might be in simple survival. Or so it might seem if Mick didn’t keep leaning out over the stage each night, singing, as if it were a Sunday School song, “I’m free—to do what I like, justa any old time—and I ain’t gonna give you no bullshit—ain’t gonna give you no lies—we’re free—you know we all free.” It never sounded true. If it were true, true just once, if ever you had the feeling that you could let go, jump up, sing “Honky Tonk Women,” dance, do what you like, without the fear of a cop’s club or Klein’s mop-handle against your skull—that would be a victory. As long as Mick kept saying “we all free,” that was what he had to achieve. If he wouldn’t say that, if he’d settle for less, then maybe victory would be easier; maybe there was a simpler and easier victory. Maybe.

  Tonight we were going to San Diego, a big service town where they burned the dope seized at the Mexican border. It was Monday, and my contract hadn’t arrived. I knew it took some time to prepare a contract, but I didn’t know how much time I had left.

  As I was going to bed this morning, Jon Jaymes was in the living room on the telephone to New York, having a tantrum. I couldn’t make out all the details, but it was clear that Jaymes, the president of something called Young American Enterprises, was being called home by his mother, back to New York, and he was getting all red-faced and blustery about it, like a child who doesn’t want to leave the party while there’s still all that ice cream and cake. As we left for the Burbank airport, Jaymes was still with us, and besides Gary Stark he now was accompanied by an older man and a woman with black permed hair and lacquer on her lips and nails as bright as fresh blood. She looked the same age as Jon, twenty-odd going on fifty, and he introduced her to me as Grace, so it was not until Jo told me that I knew she was Jon’s mother, come out here, no doubt, to look over the ice cream and cake.

  The Stones met at the Golden West charter flight service. Jagger was with a girl who looked just like Jean Harlow. Kathy and Mary were along, too, Kathy angry because Sam hit her earlier today. As we walked out in the chilly air to board the little gold and white jet, she was saying to me, “They’re just going to have to get another girl to drive. This is all fun and everything, but believe me, the novelty wore off the first week.”

  We arranged ourselves, about a dozen of us, among the plane’s twenty seats. I was sitting behind Mick and Harlow, who had taken her hairbrush from her purse and was brushing Mick’s hair, to his obvious displeasure. His hair was all greasy and parted; he washed it when it needed it and not before, sometimes a day or two after.

  Soon we were 4500 feet above L.A., as the pilot told us in his low western drawl. We could see fifty miles around, all fifty miles alive with darting lights of traffic. We were over Anaheim, the pilot said, and “In two minutes you’ll be able to see Disneyland.” That brought cheers from some of the passengers. Encouraged by the enthusiasm, the pilot gave us a bit more local color: “We’re flying just outside the four-mile restricted area around the West Coast White House. You’ll be able to see it, the blue lights all in a clump to the left of the plane.” Our silence on receiving this news made him add, probably remembering that these were Englishmen, “That’s Nixon’s West Coast residence.” After which more silence.

  It took only about half an hour to reach San Diego. The door of the plane opened and there on the tarmac were four black limousines. “Looks like a funeral,” Kathy said. We all piled in and rode to the San Diego International Sports Arena, where a big sign read ROLLING STONE TONIGHT, like a menu advertising the plat du jour. The Arena was smaller than the last two halls, capacity about ten thousand, and it was not filled, though there would be only one show. B. B. King was playing when we arrived. The arena seemed cold, the audience distant. The place smelled like an old pea coat.

  When the Stones came on I stayed behind the stage. People yelled and applauded but stayed in their seats. I looked around and saw standing beside me a woman wearing a white blouse and a blue serge skirt. Her overseas cap read Tipton Patrol and she was carrying an oiled billy club over two feet long. I went out front, found a seat, and sat down.

  It was a dr
eary night in San Diego, but it wouldn’t last long, Jagger had already sung “Under My Thumb” and was starting “I’m Free.” In this atmosphere it seemed less true than ever, a man saying he wouldn’t give you any bullshit telling people they were free. But they were kids mostly and loved it and may even have believed it. Mick sang “Live with Me,” and at the line, “Don’t you think there’s a place for you—in between the sheets?” there was a rush forward, the children all dancing. “Little Queenie” was next, then “Satisfaction.” A girl who had fainted down front was being lifted onto the stage—but she was awake, a Mexican girl, looking around wildly, rolling her head, and then I realized that she was blind. She was lifted onto the stage and led away.

  As “Street Fighting Man” started, Mick said, perhaps sensing the militarism of the town, “Sometime we may have to get up against the wall.” Mick was making a V-sign with each hand as Keith ripped the opening chords: “Everywhere I hear the sound of marchin’ chargin’ feet, boys.” I had left my seat and was by the stage, a helmeted cop beside me putting his fingers over his ears, grimacing. In the roar, the keening, as the song ended, Mick danced along the rim of the stage just out of reach of the clutching hands, skipping along like Little Bo Peep, throwing rose petals from a wicker basket. When the petals were all gone he threw the basket, it arced high over the crowd, we hotfooted it out of the arena, jumped into the limos, raced back to the plane.

  Not a particularly good show, it was brief and it was over. We were headed home. A sort of camaraderie was beginning to grow among those of us who had sat around the L.A. houses too long with too much hype raining down on us. On the earlier Stones tours, a small group battled the world. Now that we were starting to be a small band against the world of cops and promoters, striving to make the gymnasiums of America flower with savage young passion, we were starting to enjoy each other’s company. When we got into our seats Keith held aloft a fifth of Old Charter and said, “Cocktails, anyone?” Jagger took a long swallow and leaned over Shirley’s seat back to say, “Shirley Ann Shepherd, faithful Stones fan, follows her heroes from Halland to San Diego.”

  Seven hundred years ago, Halland was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s hunting lodge. Now it was where Charlie and Shirley lived their pastoral life, with Merlin and Belle, the horses; Louise and Blackface, the cats; and Jess, Tru, Jake, and Sadie, the Welsh collies. Halland to San Diego was a long way to go in one lifetime.

  As we taxied out, Ronnie Schneider, all lapels and crinkly sideburns, leaned over the back of the seats where Mick and Keith were sitting and asked, “Do you want to do another show in Detroit?”

  “Yes,” Keith said without hesitation.

  “How fast did they sell out?” Mick asked.

  “About a week.”

  “No, not if it took them a week,” Mick said.

  “But it sold out with no promotion,” Schneider said. “The guy’s guaranteeing a full house.”

  “It’s the first date of the second half,” Keith said. “We need the two shows to get into it.”

  “The guy’s guaranteeing a full house—”

  Mick still looked doubtful. “If there’s one empty seat we won’t go on,” Keith said.

  With the Fasten Seat Belts and No Smoking signs lit we started to ascend. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the pilot’s fine voice said, “we are now leaving the San Diego airport—” and most of the people in the plane hooted for silence. We could tolerate that stuff on the way down, but now we couldn’t abide life at the intercom level. Jaymes, sitting in the front, leaned inside the open cabin door to ask, “Could we dispense with that, please?” It was so quiet then that even Jagger took pity: “Poor guy, he already had that speech thought out. Tell him we love him. We love you!” We were reaching the top of our climb to flying altitude, and Keith called, “Is it cool to smoke?” The No Smoking light went out and at once half a dozen joints were circulating in the tiny cabin, where the air space was so limited that everybody must soon have been stoned, including the pilots. Mick was talking about the blind girl who was lifted onstage. “All those kids are so stoned” he said. It was true, the Stones were for the first time playing to kids who were under the influence of dope, almost all of them stoned every night.

  Mick handed me a reefer that I soon passed to Charlie, reaching him in the window seat around Shirley, who did not indulge but who had to breathe like everybody else, so that she turned her glazed lovely eyes to me and asked, “Will you dedicate your book to me?”

  Jo had told me that Keith and Mick were thinking about going south for a few days between the halves of the tour. She suggested that I might “get it together,” so I talked to Mick about it. He said that if they had only a couple of days off, because of coming back to L.A. to record, then they’d just want some rest, man, you know what I mean? I suggested Mountain View or Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

  “What kind of music do they like?”

  “Old mountain fiddles, handmade cherry wood dulcimers, in Mountain View they have community sings every Friday night.”

  “Would it be cool? Would there be any trouble?”

  “No, I’ve never had any trouble, it’s cool.”

  “I mean physical violence,” Mick said, leaning closer. “That’s the kind of trouble we get into.”

  I started to ask why—then gazed past Mick to see, sitting beside him, head lolling on chest, bottle cradled over crotch, joint dangling from mouth, the grandson of Gus Dupree. “Oh. Yeah. Keith.”

  “Y’see wot oi mean?” Mick said, laughing. “I mean, ’e always travels with a gun, y’know?”

  Keith, who had appeared to be asleep, stood up and was grappling over the seat back with Charlie, who was sitting in front of him, trying to protect his chest. “The nipple-pincher returns!” Keith cried.

  “After three years,” Charlie said, dodging.

  Shirley was saying, “You may put in your book that Mrs. Watts was once again brutally manhandled by a security guard.” She had been sitting with Astrid, and as they were going backstage when the aisles started to fill up, a guard knocked her to the ground, then went to get a helmeted cop to throw her out. The cop recognized her and the guard apologized, saying, “I didn’t know who you were.”

  “That’s no way to treat any girl,” Shirley told him. I was properly indignant over the abuse to Shirley’s person, but I couldn’t help thinking that any red-blooded cop might make such a mistake. Shirley loved rock and roll music and got excited and when she did she might have been any pretty teenager, and that was enough to make a cop want to hit her, to strike out at her pretty pleasure which had nothing to do with him or anything like him.

  Then the Fasten Seat Belts sign was on and we were back in L.A. I rode home with Charlie and Shirley and Bill and Astrid. Bill was talking about the sound-balance problem which afflicted poor Mick Taylor, who wouldn’t turn up his amplifiers. “In order to get a little more reaction out of ‘ooever’s diggin’ it, Keith turns up so loud at the end that you can’t hear the notes. When Brian was there, he’d turn up louder than Keith and balance it, but now Mick Taylor says it’s too loud, and Keith says, ‘Yeah,’ lookin’ at me. So what you do is pretend to turn down and Keith does turn down and it’s cool.”

  Shirley, staring at Bill as if she were thinking of something else, said, “I read something that said all that’s left for the Stones now is to die before they’re thirty, and I thought it was terrible, I was very upset, and then I remembered Bill’s already thirty, so that’s all right.”

  At 6:00 A.M. I called home and woke Christopher. “So far, so good,” I told her.

  “Can I buy a new dress?” she asked.

  Then I went to bed. When I woke up, trouble was waiting.

  17

  De old bee make de honeycomb

  De young bee make de honey

  De Good Lord make all de pretty gals

  An’ Sears Roebuck make de money

  FURRY LEWIS

  “I GOT SETTLED in my office, and they were away, wh
ich was probably America, and I was thinking, Ah, how many days before they come back and I get to see them,” Shirley Arnold said. “By this time the fan mail was ridiculous, stacks—you know a post office sack, we had about eight of those in the office unanswered. We used to ring up the GPO, and they would come round in a van and take the letters back. I think we had about sixteen thousand fan club members within about three months, so when we sent the newsletter out we had to have members in to help address envelopes. Fans were coming up to the office, and I was all excited, ’cause I was there and I was working for the Stones, and then they came back, and they came into the office and said, ‘Hello, how’s it going?’ They sat and talked to me, and I thought, This is me, sixteen, working for who I want, really loved them, and there are all the fans that come to me with their problems and that write me letters, so I just sort of changed. When I first went I was more interested in working for the Stones than in anything else, and then I realized that I was working for the fans. I got fond of the fans and was really interested in them, which was a good thing. The fans used to say, Who’s your favorite? And I’d say I haven’t got a favorite, and I think that’s why they liked me, ’cause if a Mick fan walked in and I said Mick’s my favorite, she would have hated me, ’cause I was inside, working for them. My money was quite good, and there were fans who had no money and I used to give them money, and take them to lunch, and buy them coffee. I really loved them, I wasn’t doing it for someone to say thank you, but it was just nice, because I was a fan, and I think that was the greatest thing, because I was a screamer, that’s why I understood the fans.”

  Returning from the United States, the Stones drove from Heathrow Airport to Oxford for a booking at the university, made a year ago, “and don’t think they didn’t try to get out of it,” Stu said. They slept all the following day and met the day after with a solicitor to discuss forming a limited company and having the bass player’s name legally changed from Perks to Wyman. Two days later they played an all-night Welcome Home show with at least fifty other performers, not much fun, and “It’s All Over Now,” their version of the song Murray Kaufman had given them, was released. Then they took two weeks off, and before the holiday was over Melody Maker had the record listed as the best-selling single record in England, the Stones’ first number-one single.