The Stones, carrying on without Brian, drove four hundred miles from Dayton to Louisville, Kentucky, in a bus, played two shows at the Memorial Auditorium, sent their equipment back to Chicago, slept in Louisville, and followed the equipment the next morning. The Stones had scheduled two shows at the Aire Crown Theatre in McCormick Place. “The Aire Crown Theatre’s got one of these stages that rise out of the pit,” Stu said, “so Brian decided he was all right, and he was gonna leave hospital, and we thought it’d be groovy if we didn’t make any announcement, we just came up out of the pit with Brian playing, and the kids all went stark raving out of their minds.”
The Stones flew the next day to New York City, where they had their picture taken for the cover of Cashbox and were taken to lunch, to nightclubs, saw a rough cut of the T.A.M.I. show. Then back to England and the release of a new single, “Little Red Rooster,” a song done earlier by master bluesman Howlin’ Wolf. News, no longer new, of the Wattses’ marriage appeared, with Charlie denying it. It was a small lie; the Stones hardly had any time to be at home. There were plenty of girls if you wanted them, but very little home life.
“Brian finished with Linda,” Shirley Arnold said, “but he didn’t actually finish, full stop. They used to go back and finally when they did finish there were lots of girls.”
Brian seldom heard from Pat, the girl who had left him after Jagger had been with her, and their son. “Brian had a few letters,” Shirley said, “which meant I had a few, ’cause any letters that were sent to them came to me and I dealt with them. I think he was paying her some money every week. She sent a letter one year with a photograph of the baby—well, he was growing up then—he was the image of Brian. It wasn’t a very nice letter. It was Christmastime and she said, ‘This is a photograph of your son. Would you send him a typewriter—a kid’s typewriter?’ I told Brian about it and he said, ‘Okay, you can send it, but say that you opened the letter and that you sent it.’ So we did that.”
On January 6, 1965, the Stones flew to Ireland, did interviews, a television show and two concerts in Dublin, “another of these occasions when Brian got separated from everybody else when they were trying to get out of the theatre and got lost in the crowd,” Stu said.
“He used to really dig being mobbed,” Keith said. “He’d be dead scared of it, but he used to really dig it, too. He used to demand to be surrounded by heavies, and he’d take his jacket off, and ‘Now. Now. Now. Now!’”
From Dublin the Stones took cars to Cork, one hundred and fifty miles, passing people with donkeys, like going back centuries. The number of centuries was revealed when they stopped at an “old clothing shop, sort of army surplus, in a little village on the road to Cork. We went in,” Keith said, “and this old Irishman grabbed hold of Brian’s balls and dragged Brian outside and pointed to the church tower, there’s these huge holes in it, and he said, ‘Cromwell’s balls did that, now let me see what I’m gonna do to your balls.’ So Brian got his cock out and pissed all over his old overcoats and everything. We all went haring out of the shop and leapt in the car, and—he was very old, this cat—and suddenly he leapt up across the street and onto the bonnet of the car and started kickin’ the windscreen with his huge boots.” Andrew nicked the man’s hat and they careered off toward two shows in Cork.
Next day back in England, and the day after, the Stones played the Hammersmith Commodore on a bill with Marianne Faithfull. Two television shows done, and the Stones left for a tour of Australia and the Far East, stopping over in Los Angeles to record “The Last Time,” taken by Mick and Keith from an old gospel song.
They left L.A. early in the morning for the eighteen-hour trip to Sydney Airport, where hundreds of fans, most of them little suntanned girls in tight shorts, were crashing over police barricades to see the Stones. In Sydney Mick met relatives he hardly knew existed, people with names like Shopp and Pitts. His aunt, whose last name was Scutts, and whom he had met when she visited England last year, had a letter from Mick’s mother saying, “I solemnly advise you to take earplugs, because after the last concert I saw, my doctor had to treat me for perforated eardrums.”
The Stones had an entire floor at the Chevron Hilton, with an excellent view of Sydney Harbour and the fans outside. “That’s where you stay in a Hilton hotel and the staff send the birds up to you instead of trying to keep them out,” Stu said.
“Amazing number of birds there,” Keith said. “In Melbourne, too, in that weird motel, all glass. Bill on the phone to the hall porter, ‘Send me up that one in the pink.’ Nine in one day he had, no kidding, he just sat all day long in his bedroom looking out the window, and he’s right in with the hall porter, ‘No, not that one, the one with the blond hair, not that ‘orror.’ Used to tell him off for sending up uglies. It was in Melbourne we kept calling up that blind DJ and asking for songs like ‘I’m Beginning to See the Light.’ “
The Stones’ first Australian shows went well, and they left for New Zealand. They arrived at Christchurch in a downpour, had a press conference and went to the best hotel in town, which was terrible. “Our hotel has too few bathrooms,” Mick said to the audience next day at the Theatre Royal, “so you can’t blame us if we smell.” They hired three bodyguards for New Zealand, but lost one in Christchurch when a police dog bit him, lost a second when his arm got jammed in a door, and the third couldn’t guard all of them by himself, and so he left.
At 7:30 A.M. the Stones flew to “Invercargill, the arsehole of the world,” Keith said. “The southernmost town in the world.”
“You could put your bed in the middle of the street at five o’clock in the afternoon and nothing would disturb you,” Stu said. The audience at the Civic Theatre was as dead as the town, and the Stones cut their performance short.
They were in New Zealand ten days, in near hundred-degree weather, being refused admittance to hotels, watched in stony silence by the crowd at Dunedin, pelted with eggs by the exuberant fans in Auckland, and with Brian and Bill carrying on a competition among the suntanned legs.
“They were the only two who used to actively go out looking,” Stu said. “Bill would usually be the first one to find summink, and then Brian would move in.”
“Bill had an absolute compulsion,” Keith said. “He had to have a bird, otherwise he couldn’t sleep, he’d get homesick, he’d start shaking, really, he’d collapse completely if he didn’t have something in bed with him, no matter what it was.”
The Stones returned to Australia for more shows in Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth. At a party after one of the Adelaide shows Bill picked up a girl and again Brian nicked her away. She had been in Bill’s room at the Akabar Motel, but she went away with Brian, leaving her coat and jumper. When she came back for them the next morning Bill told her to look off the balcony. Her clothes were in the ground-floor rock pool.
Next day, in Perth for the last shows of their first tour of Australia, Bill, whose suite adjoined Brian’s, came in through the connecting doors to Brian’s bedroom, where Brian was already in bed, about to be joined by a girl who was sitting on the side of the bed in her bra and panties. Bill greeted them cheerily, sat beside the girl in the dark room, whispered in her ear, and away they went together. Those girls couldn’t give themselves up fast enough, but to have one taken out of your bed was funny, and people made sure Brian knew how funny it was.
Returning to L.A. by way of Singapore and Hong Kong, where the Stones played concerts, Charlie met Shirley, who was waiting for him; Mick re-recorded his singing of “The Last Time”; Wyman flew back to England, and soon they all went their various ways. The day before “The Last Time” was released in England, the Stones reunited there to do a live television broadcast of the song. Millions of viewers saw Mick dragged by fans from the rostrum, twisting his ankle, getting stabbed by stiletto heels.
The Stones took almost a week off before starting a new tour, their fifth of England, with both “The Last Time” and The Rolling Stones No. 2 high in the charts. The tour ended in one
of their finest moments, Wyman’s Weakness versus a certain garage in Stratford. “Nothing would have come of it,” Stu said, “if it hadn’t been for some local super-zealous idiotic youth club leader who happened to be getting his little Morris 3 fart-box filled up with a gallon and a half of paraffin.”
After another scant week off, the Stones started a short Scandinavian tour, flying to Copenhagen, where they had the entire nineteenth floor of the Grand Hotel. “And I’m afraid,” Stu said, “the Grand Hotel, which is still the best hotel in Copenhagen, ever since that week will not have anybody who even looks as if he’s got long hair inside the door. Nineteen floors up, they were throwing empty bottles out the window. To the fans down below.”
During rehearsal at Odense, Mick received an electric shock while holding two microphones and fell into Brian, who fell into Bill, who was knocked unconscious. They all recovered, and the show went on. After more concerts and television appearances and more girls and eviction from a Gothenburg hotel, the Stones returned to England. They spent a few days without working, did a television show and closed the New Musical Express Pollwinners’ Show at Wembley Stadium. On the sixteenth of April they flew to Paris to play the Olympia Theatre. The Stones had played there before, and Paris was not especially exciting. Diane Wyman and Stephen came along with Bill. Brian was with a French model named Zouzou. After one of the shows, a girl came backstage. She said in a German-sounding North Italian accent that her name was Anita. She was a model and had acted in Italian films. A few years before, when she was seventeen, she had gone to the United States and had lived in a house in Greenwich Village where the poets Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg also lived; at the time, she had been scared to death. Now she was no longer seventeen, no longer scared to death. Brian knew nothing about her and had no thought that he would die loving her.
18
Nearly everyone who wrote about Bolden followed . . . in saying that he was a barber, and in addition that he edited a scandal sheet called The Cricket. These unsubstantiated facts became part of the legend. . . . Buddy’s widow, Nora, said that “. . . he did not run a scandal sheet and was not a barber, although he drank a lot and hung out at barbershops.”
DONALD M. MARQUIS: In Search of Buddy Bolden
STEPPING INTO THE OFFICE to find out when we would be leaving for tonight’s show, I collided with Schneider, who asked, in a tone more abrasive than usual, whether I’d talked to my agent. “If you don’t get something together by tomorrow, you’re not going any farther with the tour.”
“I ’spect Mick will have something to say about that,” I said, eyeing his neck, reminding myself that to throttle him would likely cause trouble.
“When did you talk to Mick?”
“Every day.”
“Well, it’s getting expensive carrying everyone around.”
“I’ll be happy to pay my bill.”
“No, but there are all these people talking about deals, and the deals don’t get together.”
“I am not one of those people.”
“Then why isn’t it getting together?”
I said that these things take time and went into the living room to seethe. Months later, when he was drunk in the underwater atmosphere of a mod London basement restaurant called Barracuda (lit by tanks of green water containing lazy, cool-eyed killer fish), Ronnie would explain that his business technique derived from classic high school sex moves: outside the bra, inside the bra and so on. I saw him cruising, waiting to rend off hunks of my book.
In a corner of the room a television set was giving the news, sending into the room horrors of oriental wars, zodiac killers. Charlie, on one of the couches, was watching, smiling his pleasant amazed smile.
Ronnie came into the room from the office, where he had been screeching into the telephone, and sat in the chair next to mine. “Why can’t I get your agent on the phone?” he asked. “He doesn’t return my calls.”
The last time Ronnie told me this, I said, “He never returns my calls either.” But now, pushing back, I asked, “What do you do for the Stones, Ronnie? Or is it Klein? Who do you work for?”
“I don’t do anything for Klein,” Ronnie said. “I work for the Stones.”
“What do you do for them?” I asked, sounding like Mr. District Attorney.
“I’m a groupie,” Ronnie said, getting up and talking over his shoulder as he left the room. “I crave their bodies.”
When he had gone, Charlie asked, “Don’t you like Ronnie?”
“Do you like him?”
“He’s not so bad, really.”
He was bad enough for me.
At the Burbank airport we had to wait because the plane (borrowed for us by the redoubtable Jon Jaymes) wasn’t ready. Everybody except me joined the Stones in the restaurant. I didn’t want to be with Jagger where he could be influenced by Schneider.
In the waiting area, a man in a business suit, carrying an attaché case, said to another man outfitted the same, as he pointed out a tall blond young man standing ahead of them in a line to the ticket counter, “He’s Jagger, the singer with the Stones.”
“Oh, yeah?” said the second business suit. “The Gallstones?”
As I was writing this dialogue in my notebook, Jo Bergman appeared at my side. “I thought you hadn’t made it,” she said.
“No, here I am.”
“Have you—what’s going on with you and Ronnie?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Ronnie doesn’t understand and doesn’t care what I’m trying to do, and I am not going to discuss it with him.”
“He might surprise you,” Jo said.
“In a dark alley,” I said.
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
The plane was ready: it was a giant plane for our group (even though the group tonight included friends, cooks, groupies, and Mick’s Ikette), a Boeing 707 from Air California, with 115 seats and three stewardesses in orange ruanas, all ours till six A.M. After the show in Phoenix we were going to Las Vegas for some late-night action.
Jagger and Keith huddled with Sam Cutler in the rear of the plane, then Mick joined the Ikette a few seats back of me and offered her a small drift of snow on the back of a magazine. “Try it, you’ll like it,” he said and sniffed through a rolled-up twenty.
Schneider came forward, talked to Mick for a few minutes, then came to me and rested one hand on the arm of my seat. “Mick says you got to get it together,” he began. I dropped my notebook and grasped his lapels, looking deep into his eyes, thinking how much I would enjoy throwing him off the plane. “Ronnie,” I said, “leave me alone.”
I let go of him and went to speak to Mick.
“Don’t worry about it, man, don’t listen to him. In a funny way he wants to get it together for you. I mean, he wants it to happen.”
“So do we,” I said, hoping I was right, “but we want to do it right. I don’t want you to think I’m bullshitting you—”
“I know you’re not bullshitting me.”
As we came down the steps of the plane in Phoenix, the cool night air brought with it the strong odor of fresh cow manure. The Sports Arena had a rodeo feeling, with earth, not ice, under the floorboards, and I was starting to relax. I stepped over a rope stretched across the doorway to the dressing rooms, but Ronnie stopped me. “What did Mick say?” he asked.
“Listen, Ronnie, this is a small matter to you, but to me—”
“No, it’s not small, but your agent is no good, he’s not getting it together.”
I started to answer, but he went on: “I know somebody at your publishers, so I’ll know what kind of deal you’ve got.”
There was no way to tell when he was bluffing, but to me he was a total bluff. He was trying to stop me from doing my work, and I had to remind myself once again not to scrag the bastard. He must have seen something in my eyes then, because he said, “You shouldn’t take anything I say personally.” It was true, I shouldn’t, any more than a cheerleader in high school should have taken it
personally when he grabbed her tit. I walked away. Ronnie had nothing and I had everything to lose.
We arrived late and missed the opening acts, Terry Reid and Ike and Tina Turner. Now the lights were down and Sam introduced “From England—the Rolling Stones.” Mick strutted a tour of the stage, waving his Uncle Sam hat, then clapped it on his head and began singing “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”
The show—just one tonight—went quickly. I had spoken to Jo about the badness of “I’m Free,” and on the drive to the airport, Glyn Johns, on the tour to plan a live album, was complaining about it: “Mick’s recently come across the word messianic, and he’s quite fascinated with it. It’s in this new song, ‘Monkey Man,’ you know. He can be as messianic as he wants, but as far as I’m concerned, when he says we’re all free, he’s talkin’ out his arse.”
On the plane to Phoenix Jo told Mick and Glyn told Keith that the shows seemed to drag and suggested cutting “I’m Free.” Keith’s reaction was negative—“Bollocks,” he said—but they left out the song, and it seemed to help. The show’s pace was steady, even though the crowd seemed quiet, almost docile. When they stood up and the guards, blue-uniformed and beefy, started sitting them down by making head-knocking gestures with flashlights, Mick said, “Why can’t they stand up? It’s all right, you can stand up if you want to.” So for the last few songs the crowd was jumping and swaying together, girls were riding their boyfriends’ shoulders, people were shouting and dancing, it was a rock and roll revival. Mick congratulated the crowd down front. “You did it,” he said.
Through a slit in the back curtain a cowpoke wearing a straw hat poked his sunburned head, looking at the crowd with wonder, as if he were sitting on a church steeple watching a cattle stampede. It ended with the petals falling as we ran out the back. Jon Jaymes, swinging his arms, directed us into the Phoenix collection of rented cars, and we raced teenagers and motorcycle cops to the airport.
True Adventures of the Rolling Stones Page 22