True Adventures of the Rolling Stones

by Stanley Booth

  In minutes we were aloft and headed for Las Vegas. I sat back for the flight. Mick was standing in the aisle beside me with an open suitcase, trying to take his pants off. “It’s really hard to move a slow audience like that,” he said. “You feel as if you’re moving a great weight.” He put on a black-and-white checked suit and a gray tweed cap, an outfit that made him look like a parody of a music hall performer. “We can’t get the old things together. People at the Forum want the most hip things, the things off the new album, but it’s hard to move more remote audiences. They want to hear the hits—but we’ve had trouble getting them together.” He closed the suitcase.

  At the Las Vegas International Airport, we saw next to the gate as we entered a row of slot machines being fed by an airman and two drunks in business suits who bellowed and whistled at us as we passed. Four taxis took us to the Strip, among the hotels, nightclubs, casinos, with their dazzling neon signs that impoverished the stars, luring the average Depression-bred American with the promise that he could make things better overnight. The taxis stopped and Jon Jaymes beckoned us into the Circus Circus. Outside, fountains were spouting and crashing; inside, fun mirrors were waiting to distort your image. As we collected, stewardesses too, in the lobby, lined with photographs of celebrities staring into flashbulbs, James greased our way in, asking a Circus Circus host if they’d like the Stones as guests. “Certainly,” the man said. “We’ll put their picture on the wall.”

  A spiral staircase led down into a giant circular room, decorated in red, with circus acts going on all around. Halfway down the spiral we saw on a stage below us a sword balancer wearing black tights and a white blouse. Keith saw him, his glittering rhinestones, his greasy hair, and smiled; a light, tiny but intense, flashed from Keith’s eyes. The swordsman’s eyes flashed back. “Hey! I know jew!” he said. “I seed jew in the movies, yes?”

  “Yeah,” Keith said.

  Leaning backward, closing his eyes, gesturing palms up with both hands, the sword balancer said, “Man, you out of sight.”

  “So are you, baby,” Keith said, turning away.

  “Stay—stay and see my show.”

  But Keith, heading down the stairs, did not look back. At the bottom were slots, various kinds of tables, the croupiers, dealers, all in red and white candy-striped shirts, staring at us. We attacked the tables and machines. Above us the sword balancing act began, two swords held by their points in the man’s teeth, nobody watching. At a table above the slots, four women who looked like grandmothers were asleep. Mick and Keith played blackjack. Up a few stairs, black curtains hid an alcove under a sign saying Adults Only Sleeping Beauty Ball Toss. I couldn’t stand the suspense and stepped past the curtains to find a young man behind a counter where baseballs were stacked inside billiard racks. About fifteen feet behind him was a green metal disc a few inches wide. Farther back, displayed on a couch under a rose-colored light, behind a gauze curtain, was a girl wearing tiny rose-colored panties and a chiffon shawl.

  “What happens?”

  “Try and see,” she said, so I bought three balls for a dollar and hit the disc with the second. Music started and up she rose, a big strong girl who in quieter times might have gone to bed at sundown and got up in the cold morning to jerk warm milk from cows, but who was in Las Vegas twisting her pelvis for a stranger who hit a target with a baseball.

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “Too long,” she said, twisting.

  On the public address system a sultry female voice said, “Gather ’round the Dingaling Room, where lots of fun is starting to happen with Kay King and the Yum Yum Reunion.” The voice broke the spell. The Stones party regrouped and left the Circus Circus, followed by a man wearing a tuxedo, carrying a camera, asking, “Stones? Photograph? Which ones—”

  Outside, no taxis, someone suggested we go to the International, a great hulking pyramid far away, so we walked, strung out like the wedding party in Madame Bovary, past the inhuman glitter. Once there, we were stared at by men in mohair suits and women in fur coats. More gambling, some winning, not much, but nobody lost much. Back to L.A. before five o’clock, asleep before dawn.

  We had been to Fort Collins, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego, Phoenix, and after taking today off we would leave for Dallas, Auburn University in Alabama, the University of Illinois at Champaign, and the Cow Palace in Chicago, then back to L.A. We would be four days on the road. I called Christopher, who was coming to the show at Auburn with the Dickinsons, and she told me that she wouldn’t be there because she was sick. I told her that I’d skip the show at Champaign and ride to Memphis from Auburn with the Dickinsons. Christopher was still working, and my book contract still hadn’t arrived.

  Mick came over in the afternoon to talk with Jo and Ronnie about the free concert. Rock Scully was coming down from San Francisco soon to help make plans for it. Mick mentioned that he and Keith were going to see Little Richard at a club tonight, and I told him I might see them there, but Jo went to dinner with me, and after we came back I sat up talking to Stu, so I was not at the club when Little Richard, toweling himself dry in his dressing room after his show, made to Mick and Keith what seemed a happy prophecy: “The angels will be watching over you.”

  19

  August 2, 1965

  Dear Keith,

  We watched you on TV the other night and the first thing that grabbed our eyes was your lovely Hampton Wick. After that we did little besides studying it. We’re not kidding; you’ve got a very fine tool, as a friend of ours puts it. From the way your pants project themselves at the zipper, we figure you’ve got a beauty of a rig. Sometimes we hoped you’d whip it out or something, but they don’t have TV cameras that could focus anything that large, do they? Hey, tell Mick he doesn’t have to worry about the size of his either; we noticed that already (well, who could help but?). Our favorite names for you are Keith the Giant Meat and Hampton Mick.

  Keith, we’re serious; we judge boys primarily by their Hamptons because they’re so exciting to look at and contribute so much to a healthy relationship. We can hardly wait till you come into town in November, maybe then we can find out more about what’s inside your pants.

  We hope you don’t think we ought to receive head treatment or be put away before we attack men or something. We hope you sympathize with us and agree that sex should be openly appreciated just like all other works of beauty and ingenuity. We like to say what we really think while other people just sit there all cringed up and in­hibited inside, afraid they’d offend someone if they told them something complimentary about their Hampton or, as in your case, their shoulder boulders.

  Would you like to write us back and confirm our beliefs about your Hampton Wick? Would you say, aside all humility, that it is as spectacular as your pants have led us to believe? Do you always wear your rig on the right side because you’re right-handed or doesn’t it make any difference? What is the first thing YOU look for in GIRLS?

  If you’re interested, drop by awhile, why don’t you, when you’re in Chicago or give us a ring. We’re both 18 and like to wear tight-fitting sweaters. We think a girl should wear things tight on top to please a boy, and that a boy should do the same on the bottom to please us.

  So please don’t forget to answer us. And keep pleasing us by wearing those pants good and tight.

  Reach us at:

  Cynthia Plastercaster

  Chicago, Ill.

  AFTER PARIS the Stones had three days in London to get some sleep and pack their bags again before flying to Montreal, leaving a trail of screamers on the tarmac at Heathrow, for their third tour of North America. In Montreal they played to six thousand fans, some of whom attacked the stage, adding a familiar but always seductive element of danger. At the “Y” Auditorium in Ottawa, the next city on the tour, thirty police onstage, unable to keep back the audience of four thousand, pulled out the amplifier cords and told the Stones never to come back.

  The crowd control force in Toronto were not so par
anoid, and the Stones played to fourteen thousand at the Maple Leaf Gardens. The next day they drove three hours to the Treasure Island Gardens in London, Ontario, where the police, alarmed by the spectacle of three thousand people having a good time, stopped the show during the fifth song, inspiring the audience, many of whom had driven all the way from Detroit, to riot.

  The following day the Stones went to New York City to stay a week and a half. They went to parties, saw Wilson Pickett at the Apollo Theatre and played in Worcester, Massachusetts, with the house lights on and the police constantly prowling. They played in the after­noon at the Academy of Music and that night at the Convention Hall in Philadelphia topped a bill including Bobby Vee, Little Anthony and the Imperials, and Freddy “Boom-Boom” Cannon, who had said, after his recording of “Tallahassee Lassie” sold over a million copies, that he had never been to Tallahassee but now thought he might like to go. The Stones taped their second appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, took the next day off, had dinner at the Playboy Club, saw Dizzy Gillespie at the Village Gate, visited a radio talk show. On May 4, they flew to Atlanta, almost missing their plane, whose brakes failed as they landed in great clouds of smoke and fire. The plane was towed in, they took another to Savannah and drove under pines and oaks with long grey tresses of Spanish moss to the Georgia Southern College Auditorium in Statesboro, where the sound system, not surprisingly, was wretched. They spent the night in a Savannah motel (Charlie went to Fort Pulaski in the morning to look at Civil War relics), flew to Tampa, and drove to Clearwater, Florida.

  Charlie was lost without Shirley and had to be told to change his clothes and wash his hair. Bill and Brian had their girls (their only other mutual interest was in science fiction), and Keith and Mick, when they were not performing or sleeping, were writing songs. In England the Stones had two LPs, two EPs, and six singles in release. Each single after the first had contained a song—the last had two songs—by the Stones. The Rolling Stones, Now! and “The Last Time,” the Stones’ latest U.S. album and single releases, were at numbers 5 and 9 in their respective charts, but still Keith and Mick had not managed to write a hit song that was truly characteristic of them, though their song “Play with Fire,” released as the B side—the side not expected to be a hit—of “The Last Time,” was while very English as threatening as a Muddy Waters record, sexually threatening in a most un-English way. In Clearwater the Stones played on a stage built above second base of the baseball stadium and finished four songs before the fans swarmed over three rings of police onto the stage.

  Back to the motel, nothing to do in Clearwater but sit by the pool. Charlie wished he were home with Shirley. Bill and Brian were with two girls they had carried into the South like prospectors taking extra canteens into the desert. Mick and Keith were working on a song that had developed from their failure, the last time they were at the Chess Studios, to record Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Streets.” Keith didn’t like the new song because the guitar figure was simple-minded, but the song expressed real feelings in strong, direct terms. While Mick and Keith wrote “Satisfaction,” Brian quarreled with his girl, an airline stewardess, hitting her, and one of the road managers slugged him, cracking one of his ribs.

  Taped together, Brian went with the Stones the next morning to Birmingham, played another stadium, and flew to Jacksonville, arriving at the Thunderbird Motel there at 5:30 A.M. That night they played the Jacksonville Coliseum, the next day flew to Chicago and went to the Sheraton Hotel for a press conference, but for an hour and a half were prevented by the fans from entering the hotel. The Stones kept phoning the hotel from a bar a few blocks away, trying again to get into the hotel, then going back to the bar.

  They played the Aire Crown Theatre that night, and the next day spent eleven hours at Chess recording four tracks: “Have Mercy,” “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” “Try Me,” and a Nanker Phelge song based on the chord changes of “Fannie Mae” by Buster Brown, called “The Under-Assistant West Coast Promo Man.” The song, inspired by a London Records publicity man, about “the necessary talent behind every rock and roll band,” years later would be brought to mind by David Horowitz.

  The Stones tried but failed to record “Satisfaction,” flew the next day to Los Angeles, went the day after to the RCA Studios, started working at 10:00 A.M. and by 2:15 A.M., more than sixteen hours later, had recorded six new songs, one of them “Satisfaction.” They went back to their hotel, slept a few hours, then Andrew and RCA engineer Dave Hassinger returned to the studio and began mixing the tracks. At 1:00 P.M. the Stones showed up to re-record certain parts, Bill, Charlie, and Brian leaving at 9:00 P.M., Mick and Keith staying at the studio adding vocals till nine o’clock the next morning. They had a new album and a single that would be the most popular they had ever done.

  They spent the rest of May 1965 in the United States. They played in San Francisco, San Bernardino, San Diego; they did a Shindig television show and brought Howlin’ Wolf as their guest. I saw the show and thought, Whoever these people are, if they have the Wolf with them they got my attention. They played Fresno, San Jose, and Sacramento, having in all these places the usual struggles with crowds, but in Long Beach they had one of the struggles of their lives. “Scaredest I’ve ever been,” Keith said. There were eight thousand in the Long Beach Arena, and the show was tolerably mad. Two girls dropped twenty feet from the balcony to the stage. The Stones did five songs—they were approaching the height of their take-the-money-and-run period—and ran out the back way into a limousine, Mick and Brian in the front seat, the others in the back. Before they could leave, the car was covered with bodies, the roof collapsing, the Stones holding it up as the driver tried to inch the big car forward through the crowd. Finally cops with clubs climbed on the car, beating the kids back, hurting many of them. Once past the crowd, the Stones raced to a waiting helicopter. The crowd like locusts covered the car again and the Stones watched the car being torn apart as they ascended.

  Billboard first listed “Satisfaction” on its Hot 100 singles chart at number 60 on June 4. In the next two weeks the Stones, back in Britain, did two television shows and a four-day Scottish tour June 15 through 18, in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, and Aberdeen. By the time they played Aberdeen “Satisfaction” was on Billboard’s singles chart at number 4.

  26 Alnwickhill Road

  Edinburgh 9

  Dear fantastic “Stones,”

  I thought I must congratulate you on your fab performance at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, on Wednesday 16 it was terrific in fact I cannot find words to describe it.

  Tell BRIAN that he was stupendous when he played the tambourine, it sent me in a whirl.

  All my love,

  Jane

  A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, two movies starring the Beatles, and Don’t Look Back, not so much a movie as some film about Bob Dylan, had been released. Expecting Andrew to help them dump Easton and movie stardom to strike them like lightning, the Stones were playing only short tours. On June 23 they made their first trip to Norway. The fans who came to the Oslo airport to welcome the Stones were met by fire trucks knocking them down with high-pressure water hoses. The Stones played to three thousand at the Messehallen, while police with clubs knocked down those who didn’t stay in their seats. One girl made it onstage, embraced Charlie, and fainted.

  The Stones played Pori, Copenhagen, Malmo, and flew back to London. Their movie was postponed again, and except for a three-day English tour in the middle of the month, the Stones did next to nothing in July. On the first of August they starred in a show they had booked themselves at the London Palladium. New Musical Express reported police and ushers using “Gestapo-like methods” on girls trying to get near the stage, but outside Mick kicked a girl who attacked his date.

  Their latest British EP, titled “got LIVE if you want it,” recorded at performances in Manchester, Liverpool, and London, was selling well, so it was not until August 20, after “Satisfaction” had been number one on Billboard’
s singles chart for three weeks, that it was released in Britain. The Stones did some television appearances and radio interviews to promote the record, which had caused Newsweek to describe the Stones as “tasteless” and “leering.”

  The Stones had, unbelievably, scheduled another show in Blackpool,but at the request of the local police and public safety committee the show was cancelled, and the Stones played Scarborough instead.

  A few days later the London papers printed the news that Decca would in the next three years spend at least £1,700,000 to finance five films starring the Rolling Stones. It was also announced that an American, former accountant Allen Klein, thirty-one, had taken over the Stones’ business management, replacing Eric Easton, who received “a golden handshake.”

  “He’d served his purpose—we’d done as much as we could in England,” Keith said. “We could get a grand a night, and that’s as much as you could earn, in those days. You think, What the fuck do we need him for . . . because that was the way it was. Onward.”

  The Stones’ comanager Andrew Oldham, the papers said, would work with Klein as “creative manager.” The papers didn’t say that Klein was Andrew’s discovery; he had lived in an orphanage and in poverty with his grandparents, been in the army, become a certified public accountant on the G.I. Bill. He did record-company audits for some entertainers, keeping half of any underpayments he found, and he found plenty. He did an audit at RCA Victor for Sam Cooke and became Cooke’s manager, but Cooke was shot and killed in a motel scrape with a whore in Los Angeles. Cooke, whose first fame was with the gospel group the Soul Stirrers, was a popular symbol to black Americans, and it was as natural for the Stones to sign with Cooke’s ex-manager as it was for them to record at Chess, or at the RCA Studios in Los Angeles, where Cooke had recorded. One of the songs on the Stones’ latest album release in the United States, Out of Our Heads, was Cooke’s “Good Times.” The English papers did say that the Stones’ reason for hiring Klein was “to further the group’s financial success.”