On the second night after the Stones started back to work, they played the Queen’s Hall in Leeds, a place that once had been a tram garage, but now was a concert hall with a revolving stage. “It was in the center of the hall, and they had to run for it,” Stu said. “And again it was Brian who got left behind, because they had it all worked out, a gang of bouncers round them, and they just ran. Four of them got themselves together in and amongst these bouncers. Brian’s fuckin’ about onstage, ’arf asleep, doin’ something or other, and all the bouncers take the four off the stage, and all the kids go after them, and there’s Brian still on the stage with his guitar and just me, pickin’ up instruments and fuckin’ about. Brian realized, Ah, they’ve gone, and panics: ’Do something,’ and of course within seconds the kids realized he was still there, and ka-pow. Brian destroyed again.”
Brian was by now a father once again—Linda had given him another son named Julian—and at times he seemed to like it. “There was one time when Brian and Linda were gonna get married,” Shirley Arnold said. “They actually told people that they were going to get married. This was after the baby—they were still living in Windsor. Whenever they came in town, I looked after the dog, a white poodle called Pip. One day they came to the office, and they said they were gonna get married, and Brian was all excited. Maybe he did want to marry, maybe he wanted to settle down and know where he belonged. But he never quite made it. I was a friend of Linda’s, and they were rushing around, Brian saying, You’re gonna be chief bridesmaid. Linda and I went out that afternoon; she was looking at wedding dresses and I was looking at bridesmaids’ dresses—and I don’t remember what happened after that. They just split up. She decided to stay at home with her mum and they left each other again.”
All this happened with a near-nightly chorus of screams and attacks of varying intensity. One night in London, while the Stones recorded, Stu and I talked about the time the Stones played Blackpool: “July 24, 1964, which was very nearly the date on my gravestone,” Stu said.
“They got out, and you had to stay there, right?”
“Yeah, but they only just got out, believe me. I’ll tell you roughly, what happens is this, that this city up in Scotland called Glasgow, which is the roughest city in the world—”
“In the world?”
“Yeah. I’ll guarantee that. They’ll thump-up anybody, these people, they’ll take on the U.S. Marines, anybody, put ’em away without any difficulty at all, because they just live for fighting. They’re not cowardly about it, they don’t have to do it in gangs, one guy’ll take on three any time he feels like it. In Glasgow, all the factories and all the construction companies shut down the same fortnight of the year. This is what’s called the Glasgow Fair. In that fortnight, they move out of Glasgow. Glasgow shuts down, literally, and the rest of the country trembles.
“One of their pet places is Blackpool. A lot of them have run out of money by the end of the fortnight, but those with money spend all of it on the last night on drink. They get drunk themselves—Scotch, beer, Scotch, beer, like that—and anybody ’oo ’asn’t got any money, they buy drinks for. Once they’re outside of Glasgow, they all stick together—and if one guy ’as a go at a bloke from Glasgow, then they all jump ’im. So, unsuspecting, we agree to do this dance at the Empress Ballroom, which holds about six thousand people.”
“You didn’t know of these folkways at the time?”
“We knew what they were like, but we didn’t connect the end of the Glasgow Fair and Blackpool. We get into the town, and it’s absolutely full of these ravers from Glasgow, and I thought, Oh, this should be fun. It’s the last night, and so they all, or as many as possible, or as many as were still sober by eight o’clock at night, and many who were drunk, crowd into this Empress Ballroom. There was some sort of funny agreement whereby police in uniform were not allowed inside the ballroom, some sort of thing between the people that operated the ballroom and the police. The police stayed out of sight backstage, and they were bloody trembling.
“The only thing that saved us was the stage was about six feet high, and these people from Glasgow are pretty small. They’re rarely much more than five foot six or seven. In Germany they call them poison dwarves, because they’re so little, and they do so much fuckin’ damage. All these Glasgow regiments, like the Black Watch, in Korea and in the last war, they gave them all the deadliest jobs going, because nothing’s too much for them, they never run away, they just go straight, they love it.”
“I wonder why they’re like that.”
“I think it’s just the awful deprived way—it’s just Glasgow. Glasgow is one big mistake. They built these fantastic tenements that they all live in. But unlike most slums—I mean, a slum house in say Baltimore is usually leaning over and ready to fall down, but the tenements weren’t. They were built of granite during the industrial revolution, and they’ll still be standing yet. They’d have a hell of a job knocking them down. No hot water. In fact, no running water at all in the actual living accommodations, only on the hallways. One toilet to maybe three flats. Hopelessly underpaid. Very susceptible to slumps, because Glasgow’s built round ship-building and heavy industry, and in a slump, that just goes. That’s the way these people are brought up. You go into Glasgow and you see a bus queue of men coming out of a factory, they’ve all got scars, all been cut, all had their noses pushed in. Horrible place.
“This night there was a bit of an anti-Stones thing going on, not really quite sure what, and they were all very drunk, and the feeling was getting nastier and nastier, and you could tell it. They were really looking for bother, and eventually some of the ones—”
“What was the distribution of the crowd? Were there some little girls?”
“No. These guys had their girls with them, but they weren’t the sweet little big-eyed, long-haired fans from London. The girls carry the knives. The Stones’d play a number, and there’d be big cheers and claps and things, and a little bit of screaming, but there’s also a lot of derisive cheering as well. No cops, no bouncers. There was the Stones on this stage and a couple of old retainers in uniform at each corner of the stage. Another thing about these people in Glasgow, they won’t normally just walk up to a guy and hit him. They need a spark—you got to detonate them. I think this kept them off the stage, ’cause they could have come up anytime they felt like it. Some of the guys in the crowd, some of the ones that had been booing—Keith can’t stand being booed, anything like that, he was sayin’ ‘Aw fuck you’ to them and they could hear him. So they started spitting, and eventually Keith is literally covered by these cobblies at the front spitting at him.
“I could see all this going on. I was standing on one side of the stage nearest to Keith, and Keith and these guys started exchanging words. I thought, ‘Right, they’ve got one more number and they’ll be off if they’re lucky.’ There was one guy right in front, he was a bit taller than the rest, and he spat at Keith, and Keith just kicked him in the head. And that’s it. Good night. The whole hall just ee-rupted. One of their people had been kicked, and that was the spark. These guys’ reactions are pretty quick, he probably got out of the way all right. I’m surprised they didn’t get hold of Keith’s leg and pull him off the stage. He wouldn’t be here now, if they had. Keith still thought he was God and that he could kick one of these guys and get away with it, but I was next to him—the other guys already turned, realizing they’re gonna have to get off the stage—I just pushed him, said ‘For fuck’s sake get out of here while you’re still alive,’ and I went off as well.
“The cops got rid of them all right, and luckily between the backstage area and the rest of the hall there were some fairly heavy doors. We could hear cymbals going through the air, thumps as all the amps got smashed up, and then there was the most glorious fucking crash of all time—there’d been a grand piano on the stage. The cops stood it long enough and sent for reinforcements. And they wouldn’t go near them. They wouldn’t look at these guys. After there was about fifty o
f them, they went in with truncheons. By this time a lot of the steam had gone out of it. Charlie wasn’t using his drums, he’d borrowed a drum kit off this guy, and the guy was sitting there crying, his lovely Ludwig kit—we never saw it again, got one cymbal back. They didn’t steal them, they just smashed them. Of the amplifiers, there was bits of wood, and I think we got one loudspeaker chassis. Without any cone in it, and that was all. Everything else was totally mangled. They took about a dozen people to hospital. Not having been able to get hold of the Stones, they started fighting amongst themselves.
“We’d booked a hotel in Preston, which is about twenty miles up the road. We drove to the police station, the boys had their own cars at the police station. Cops walked round and round the hotel all night.”
Interviewed after Blackpool, the Stones called it the most sickening night of their lives, but what difference does it make whether one is torn apart by one’s enemies or one’s friends? One week after Blackpool, the Stones went to Ireland. “The first time we went to Ireland,” Stu said, “we did this thing in Belfast and the whole city turned out, they couldn’t get near the Ulster Hall to get in. And when they got in they couldn’t defend the stage. The stage stretched the full width of the hall. There’s kids everywhere. Lots of kids hurt that night. Bloody horrifying. Show lasted twelve minutes. Cops didn’t want it to go on in the first place. There was space for seating up behind the stage, and they were getting on the stage at either side and going up behind the Stones, more and more were doing this till the Stones just got surrounded. Quite a night. Never been nearer. We should have got mangled that night.”
On August 7, 1964, the Stones went to TV House, Kingsway, London, where they appeared on Ready, Steady, Go! Twenty policemen and more on motorcycles tried to control the mob waiting outside, but girls broke through the police lines after the show as the Stones ran for their limousine. One policeman climbed off his motorcycle and onto the Stones’ Austin Princess to stop fans getting in. As the chauffeur drove away with the Stones, one of the car doors came open, knocked down a policeman, struck a lamppost, and the fans tore it off its hinges.
The Stones flew to Holland for a concert in The Hague. There were police onstage, but after three songs the fans attacked and it was closing time, gentlemen. Back in England at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton, a ballroom on top of a tower, “the stage was so high that they had to use a block and tackle to get the gear up there,” Stu said. “The kids were pressing the front, getting underneath the stage so they couldn’t see anything, and the trouble started.” Two hundred fainted, and about fifty were thrown out for fighting. A girl pulled a switchblade on two guards who were trying to subdue her two escorts, and four guards were required to disarm her and carry her out of the hall.
In the next place the Stones played, the Palace Ballroom in Douglas, on the Isle of Man, the only police dog on the island was onstage to protect them from seven thousand teenagers, but the dog got excited by the music and the screaming and was led away, snarling at the crowd and the Stones. “I thought he was going to take a bite out of me,” Mick said.
At the ABC Theatre in Hull, two dozen rugby players formed a line in front of the orchestra pit, but when Mick walked along the edge of the pit shaking his maracas, a girl grabbed him, arms around his legs, and he fell into the pit. He crawled back onstage unhurt.
Part of the Stones’ charm was that they lived in an atmosphere of danger, and one came near them at one’s peril. Near the end of this tour, at the Gaumont Theatre in Ipswich, Stu watched as “the barrier in front of the stage collapsed and a girl got a broken back. I saw her go down and I heard her back break. But a lot of them you never heard about. They were in the local papers the next day and that was all.”
Charlie Watts and Shirley Ann Shepherd barely had time to get married (secretly, by a Bradford registrar) before the Stones were off for Belgian and French television appearances and their first appearance at the Olympia Theatre in Paris. “Even as late as this,” Stu said, “Brian was thinking of himself as a leader, ’cause he wanted a bigger amp than Keith’s, the day before we went to Belgium I remember driving down especially to get him the same size amp the Beatles used, just to keep his little Welsh mind happy.”
With a successful Paris concert behind them—a spokesman for the Olympia said that the theater had suffered £1400 worth of damages—the Stones came home and had a day to pack before leaving for their second assault on the United States. About this time the Stones had four records on the British charts, including a new EP, “Five by Five,” recorded at Chess. Wherever there were popular-record charts, the Stones’ records were on them.
Trying to make up for the mistakes of their first U.S. tour, the Stones began this one by appearing, after rehearsing for two days, on The Ed Sullivan Show. “We’d got it into our heads that Ed Sullivan was the thing to do,” Stu said. “The only thing worth doing.” The Ed Sullivan Show, in the beginning called The Toast of the Town, every Sunday night for twenty years was the phoenix of vaudeville, bringing to U.S. television the most various collection of acts that could be imagined, the finest ballet dancers and opera singers doing two and a half hot minutes, comedians, jugglers, animal acts—all stars who had reached the top, because in its time and place, the Sullivan show was the top.
When the well-rehearsed Stones were on the Sullivan show, the reception from fans inside and outside the theater was so enthusiastic that Sullivan said he’d never book the Stones again. The Stones were pleased, knowing that probably meant they would be invited back. The next day they flew to Los Angeles. They played Sacramento, then took a day off, noticing that in the five months they had been away, the men had grown their hair longer.
After rehearsing for two days at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, the Stones appeared on the Teen Awards Music International (T.A.M.I.) show, recorded before an audience by a new process called Electrono-vision. The Stones closed the show, following, among others, the Beach Boys, who wouldn’t speak to them; Marvin Gaye; the Supremes; the Miracles; Chuck Berry, who was pleasant, talked with them and even gave Wyman a pair of cufflinks; and, ultimately, James Brown, who said he would make the Stones wish they’d never left England. The Stones had never seen James Brown. “The kids were eating out of his hand,” Stu said. “Mick and them were trembling, having to follow this. But they did it, they got canned and bowled on and did it.” It was one of their most spirited performances; even Wyman moved a bit.
In the next few days, the Stones did shows in a couple of Southern California towns, recorded six songs at RCA Studios in L.A. with Jack Nitzsche, who worked with Spector and conducted the stage orchestra for the T.A.M.I. show, and then they left for Cleveland. They were preceded by an address on Cleveland radio from the local mayor, advising the citizens that the Rolling Stones gave immoral performances and that no teenagers should be allowed to see them. In spite of this the show was poorly attended, perhaps because on this night Lyndon Johnson was elected president of the United States by the greatest percentage of the popular vote in the country’s history. Next, New York City, the Astor, then to Providence and a cinema where no live act had ever played. The management had covered the orchestra pit with thin plywood, and when the Stones started playing, girls ran down the aisles, jumped onto the plywood and disappeared into the pit.
The Stones went back to Manhattan that night by train, getting out at Grand Central Station, where the black porters yelled, “Are you the Beatles?” and the Stones yelled, “Are you the Harlem Globetrotters?”
They were in New York City for the next two days, but did no more concerts. They had a new single, “Time Is On My Side,” from a new album, 12 × 5, on the U.S. charts, and they paid a friendly visit to London Records. That night Brian and Bill went to a jazz club in Greenwich Village where they met Julian Adderley, called “Cannonball” because of his rotundity, a man of enormous appetites, considered by some musicians the greatest alto saxophonist since Charlie Parker, and the man after whom Brian had named all
his sons.
At midnight of the next day the Stones flew to Chicago, where they would spend most of the next week, and Brian would spend all of it. On their first day the Stones went back to Chess Studios and cut five tracks. Among the tracks they finished, Stu said, “there was a thing called ‘Stewed,’ on which Brian didn’t play. He was pissed. But I don’t think that was ever released, it was just an instrumental. And I think the great mysterious ‘Key to the Highway’—we know we did it, but we can’t find it. I can hear it in my head. But nobody’s got a copy of it, and it was never released, and Decca say they ain’t got it. I remember playing on it.”
For the next four days, mostly doing interviews, the Stones were in Chicago, except for a drive to a press reception in Milwaukee to promote the shows there. Brian didn’t make it to that pair of concerts, nor to the one the next night in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on a bill with the Shangri-Las and a band with green hair, nor to the one after that, in Dayton, Ohio; Brian was in Chicago at the Pasavant Hospital with a temperature of 105 degrees, delirious, the doctors said, from bronchitis and extreme exhaustion.
“He was certainly ill, all right,” Stu said, “but he didn’t do anything to help himself, he aggravated it by taking too much of something, and generally behaved very stupidly. I tell you what, he nearly got hoofed out there and then. He hadn’t really contributed anything on those record dates. He was either stoned or pissed or just sick, and they got fed up with him.”
True Adventures of the Rolling Stones Page 21