Andrew told reporters that the first of the Decca-financed Stones movies would be made within the next six months, but that it was “too early to say” what the movies would be like. Mick snarled at one reporter, “We’re not gonna make Beatles movies. We’re not comedians.”
The Stones went back to work, doing three television appearances in four days, playing Dublin and Belfast on the weekend. The Dublin concert was stopped when part of the second show audience at the Adelphi Theatre leaped over the orchestra pit onto the stage. Mick was dragged to the floor; three boys were throwing punches at Brian while two others were trying to kiss him. Wyman was crushed against a piano at one side of the stage. Keith managed to get offstage, and Charlie sat playing the drums, his face expressionless. In Belfast the audience tore up the seats and threw them at the stage. As the Stones tried to leave, fans covered their car, but they got away with another collapsed roof.
The next morning they flew to Los Angeles for a few days to record at RCA their new single release, “Get Off of My Cloud.” The Jagger/Richards song, not about love or even love/hate, but about the frustrations of the modern world, was in the same vein as “Satisfaction,” though not as memorable. But “Satisfaction” was the most popular song in the world, and it would have taken an airplane crash to stop the Stones now.
They returned to England, played a concert on the Isle of Man, were the hosts for a special edition of the television show Ready, Steady, Go! On September 11 the Stones began a tour of five German cities. Teenagers broke through a police cordon at the Düsseldorf airport when the Stones’ plane touched down. About two hundred fought their way, breaking windows, wrenching phones off the walls, smashing doors, to an airport waiting room where the Stones were to give a press conference. Police cancelled the conference, and the Stones drove to Münster. Newspapers there described the show as “hell broken loose” and “a witches’ cauldron.”
Next day the Stones played the Gruga Halle in Essen and the day after that the Ernst Merck Halle in Hamburg. While six thousand fans rioted inside the Gruga Halle, two thousand rioted outside. The ones inside had the advantage of not being ridden down by mounted police. In Hamburg also there were police on horses with clubs and hoses keeping out the kids who were trying to get into the Stones’ show. Cars were overturned, and kids were trampled by horses.
On September 14, with Melody Maker listing “Satisfaction” at number one for the second week, the Stones played Munich. Anita Pallenberg, the girl the Stones had met backstage at the Olympia Theatre in Paris, was there. She had some amyl nitrite poppers, and Brian was the only one of the Stones who would share them with her. He went home with her, but Mick and Keith had said something to him that made him cry all night.
The next day the Stones went to West Berlin and played to twenty-three thousand in the Waldbühne, where Hitler used to appear under the open sky. The following day, off to Vienna and then home to London. They took six days off, the British version of Out of Our Heads was released, and then they opened a four-week English tour at the Astoria Theatre in Finsbury Park. In a corner of the dressing room Brian sat alone, playing on his Gibson guitar Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour.” Keith and Charlie were talking with friends, Bill was beside the stage watching the Spencer Davis Group, and Mick was talking to reporters. The Stones performed a new sequence of songs, with Brian playing organ on “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” playing with people who had humiliated him and reduced him to tears, and as he heard the screams of ecstasy from the audience in the darkened hall, Brian threw his head back in the spotlight, laughing.
At Liverpool thirteen girls were injured as they tried to climb over the canvas-covered orchestra pit to the stage. Theatre officers lowered the curtain, and the Stones accused them of panicking. In Manchester Keith was knocked unconscious by something somebody threw. He was carried offstage, woke up, and came back to finish the show. Mick was cut by something, probably a coin, and had to wear a plaster under his left eye for most of the tour. Brian was struck on the nose by a half-crown.
The tour ended on October 17, “Get Off of My Cloud” was released in Great Britain on October 22, and on October 27 the Stones left Heathrow Airport for New York City. The next day they held a press conference in the penthouse of the Hilton. To protect the Stones from the fans around the hotel, their limousine was driven onto the hotel’s freight elevator, and they were carried to the top. Most of the Stones’ fans in the United States at this time were quite young girls who thought that anything English was exotic and adorable, but a writer at the Hilton press conference said the Stones looked “like five unfolding switchblades,” adding, “I left with the terrible feeling that if Kropotkin were alive in the 1960s he would almost certainly have had a press agent.”
On October 29 the Stones flew to Montreal, handing over the passports in a bundle so the customs officers wouldn’t notice that Keith’s was missing. There were eight thousand in the audience at the Forum, thirty reported injured. The Stones flew back to Syracuse, New York, played the next afternoon to six thousand students at Ithaca College and played that night to eight thousand at an auditorium in Syracuse. On Halloween they played to thirteen thousand at the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, fighting fifty-knot head winds to get there, sneaking Keith over and back. In Rochester the next night thirty police and thirty ushers could not control the crowd of thirty-five hundred at the Community War Memorial Auditorium. The Stones did six songs, during which the curtain came down four times. Finally Keith, furious at the treatment of the crowd by the police, shouted, “This is a hick town. They were twice as wild in Montreal. They won’t get hurt. You’re too rough with them.” The police chief stopped the show, but “Get Off of My Cloud” was the most popular record in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
The Stones played Providence, New Haven, the Boston Garden, the Academy of Music in New York in the afternoon, and Convention Hall in Philadelphia the same night, the Mosque Theatre in Newark, Reynolds Coliseum in Raleigh, taped an appearance on the television show Hullabaloo, played Greensboro, Knoxville, Charlotte, and on November 17 came to the Memphis Mid-South Coliseum.
A teenager in the 1950s—I was twelve years old in 1954, the year Elvis Presley made his first recording—I had been given a new sense of life by rock and roll, a sense that diminished as the quality of the music diminished. Now musicians my own age, like the Stones, again were taking up the music. Christopher and I went to see them.
The audience consisted almost entirely of pubescent girls, some with Mom and Dad, all white, shrieking at the tops of their piping little voices. The Stones’ show was not a concert but a ritual; their songs, compared in content or manner of performance with the material of other popular musicians, were acts of violence, brief and incandescent. Mick threw a tambourine into the audience, and hundreds dived for it. Years later I would get the Stones’ autographs for the girl who caught the tambourine, its sharp-edged cymbals slicing her hands so badly that she had to be taken to a hospital emergency room and stitched together.
Four of the Stones left the next day for Miami, and Wyman stayed in Memphis. Cindy Birdsong of Patty LaBelle and the Blue Belles, one of the other acts on the tour, stayed there too. Wyman went to the Club Paradise and saw Big Ella and the Vel-Tones, but he didn’t get to be such good friends with Cindy Birdsong as he would have liked. Anita Pallenberg flew to Miami to visit Brian. Anita and the Stones, staying at the Fontainebleau, rented motorboats from the hotel and floated in the ocean off Miami Beach until late afternoon. When they came in, there was no sign of Brian. Then they saw him, under a line of seagulls, a tiny dot in the sunset, headed out to sea. The hotel sent a boat after him, because he hadn’t enough fuel to make it back. “I was chasing the birds,” he said.
The tour resumed, to Shreveport, Dallas, Fort Worth, Tulsa, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Dayton, Chicago, Denver, and Phoenix, where the Stones stayed in Scottsdale and went riding on the desert. This was the first Stones tour with Allen Kle
in and Ronnie Schneider. The Stones would meet in Ronnie’s room before an outing. Better call Brian, he’ll be left, Ronnie would say. Don’t call him, Keith would say. Even Charlie don’t like him. If Charlie don’t like him there must be something wrong with him.
Anita would be meeting Brian at the end of the tour in Los Angeles, where the Stones planned to record an album. On the cover of the English Disc Weekly for the week the tour ended there was a photograph of Brian and Anita and the headline, BRIAN JONES WEDDING? Brian, telephoned during the tour, said that he had been going with Anita for about three months. “Anita,” he said, “is the first girl I’ve ever been serious about.”
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Charles Bolden, a musician, of 2302 First Street, hammered his mother-in-law, Mrs. Ida Beach, in their house yesterday afternoon. It seems that Bolden has been confined to his bed since Saturday, and was violent. Yesterday he believed that his mother-in-law was drugging him, and getting out of bed, he hit the woman on the head with a pitcher and cut her scalp. The wound was not serious. Bolden was placed under a close watch, as the physicians stated that he was liable to harm someone in his condition.
New Orleans Daily Picayune, 1906
LATE LAST NIGHT Stu and I went out to a café, and I ate an omelet while he told me that he’d like to make a record of “Silent Night” with Keith on bass, Jeff Beck on guitar, himself on organ, Mick on harp—but you can’t get them together. I slept, awoke, and all too soon, Shirley and Serafina Watts were leaving in the morning sunlight for England. The Stones and most of the rest of us were going later this afternoon to Texas. All long-faced, Charlie, Shirley, and I said goodbye.
Last night Stu said that they used to come to the United States, stay in hotels and with one Englishman and one American tour twenty or thirty cities. “That’s a tour,” he said. “When you start renting houses and putting people like Jo Bergman in them, you’re going to have trouble, because that’s their business.” So we arrived after dark at the Hyatt House in Dallas to find our rooms already rented. Securing rooms was Bill Belmont’s job, and as we rode to a Quality Court Jagger told Schneider that Belmont should be hauled on the carpet. It occurred to me that we were travelling across the country without one grownup person.
I went up with my suitcase and came back down to find Belmont and Michael Lydon leaving in a limousine for the Moody Field House at Southern Methodist University. Schneider had, clearly, spoken to Belmont, who said, “I don’t have to take this dogshit! They’re snobs, they don’t care. I haven’t talked to Jagger in three days, and I don’t intend to. They think they’re fucking gods. They started it all, but the crew might go back to the Fillmore and enjoy life. If I say, ‘Let’s ride,’ they’ll all walk out.”
Belmont was operatic, but at the auditorium there was much to be done, and the crew stayed. I went upstairs to the Stones’ dressing room, its walls decorated with photographs of SMU football and basketball players. Terry Reid was there, preparing to open the concert; he was twenty-one years old today. I watched his act from the balcony. The place was crowded, people sitting in the aisles and on the floor. I saw no police, just university campus cops. The crowd was throwing Frisbees, colorful little plastic saucers skimming over their heads from the floor to the balcony and back again. They cheered good Frisbee tosses at least as much as Terry’s songs.
When his set ended I went back to the dressing room to wait for the next act, Chuck Berry. This would be the first show he had played on the tour, replacing Ike and Tina as well as B. B. King. But one of the promoters, a man in a brown suit, came into the dressing room and said that Berry wouldn’t go on until he was paid $3000 in cash. I told the man he’d have to wait for Schneider.
The crowd, occupied with the Frisbees, didn’t seem to mind waiting. Soon Schneider and the Stones showed up, and Berry went on. He was wearing white shoes that looked like albino alligators. He had the same bad white band that was with him at the Whisky-à-Go-Go, but he duck-walked, played with his guitar upside down and in various phallic positions and got a big ovation at the end of his set. In a minute he was in the Stones’ dressing room, asking Jagger, “Where this gig tomorrow?”
“Um, Auburn,” Mick said.
“Auburn University,” Berry said. “I want to be sure, ’cause I ain’t gone do no lookin’ ‘round, I’m goin’ straight to that gig.”
When Sam Cutler announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Rolling Stones,” the crowd stood and cheered. Jagger tipped his Uncle Sam hat. “Very nice smells down here,” he said, referring to the aroma of the marijuana being smoked in the front seats that went almost all the way up to the stage. The show was brisk. Even the line in “Sympathy for the Devil,”
I shouted out, Who killed the Kennedys?
passed without a ripple, nobody paying mind to Mick’s heavy lyrics.
One girl, kneeling before the stage, kept yelling, “Take it off!” Jagger lashed her into silence with “Midnight Rambler,” swinging his belt overhead, crashing it down onto the stage. There were shrieks in the darkness as Mick crawled on all fours, looking stark mad in a red spot.
As “Little Queenie” started, Mick said, “If you can move”—the place was packed—“why don’t you shake your asses?” By the end of the show the place was rocking, ringing with that sound, like great organ chords. It was a good crowd, a good show, no hassles, no “I’m Free.” We ran out, piled into limousines. Schneider, who happened to be in the car I caught, was carrying two rolls of movie film.
“Where’d you get that?” Michael Lydon asked.
“Some kid with a camera,” Schneider said. “We’ll develop it and see if there’s anything good and use it in a documentary if we make one.”
“You’re going to develop that?” Lydon asked.
“No,” Schneider said. “I’m going to expose it and wear it around my neck.”
“You mean you just took it?”
“Tell him you’re a thief, Ronnie,” I said in exasperation, “so he’ll understand.”
At the Quality Court, where room service was closed, no one wanted to go out again, but I was hungry and went across the street to a steak and egg café and ate a hamburger. On the way back to my room I stopped by to see Jon Jaymes and ask what time we’d be leaving tomorrow. Jon was naked to his fat, hairy waist. With him were two girls, one dark-haired and quiet, one big and blond and loud. She was wearing plastic bracelets of red, blue, gold, yellow, and green, earrings that were each three great gold hoops. Jon was on the phone to Schneider, who sent the girls to him and who had another bevy of girls with him now. The blond had told Schneider that she had a pound of butter in her purse, and she wanted to spread it over Jagger’s body and lick it off. Schneider had tried sending her to Sam.
“I saw him,” she said, “he fucked me, he’s a pig.” She was angry, talking about the girls who were with Schneider: “I really hate those chicks. I really do, especially that one. She told a lie about me and if I go down there I’d probably knock the fuck out of her.” Wrestling the phone away from Jaymes, she said, “Ronnie, do you know those girls are underage? What about Keith or Charlie or Bill? You can have Mick Taylor,” she said to her companion. “It doesn’t matter, I’m not choosy, I just want one of their bodies, and I want it now. I can’t wait around forever, I have to go pick up my little boy.”
I gave up, went to bed and slept—to be awakened at 9:30 by a call from Jo, who told me to go back to sleep, we’d be leaving at 2:45 P.M. on a commercial flight to Montgomery, Alabama. Almost at once Ethan Russell called with the message from Jon Jaymes that the press should be in the lobby and ready to leave in fifteen minutes. Cursing, I got out of bed. I showered quickly and was shaving when the phone rang again. It was Jaymes, who said, “You and the rest of the press and your gear, downstairs, now.” I gripped the phone, sputtering, then threw it back into its cradle. I finished shaving, dressed, and went down with my bags to find, as usual, plenty of time to lean and wait before we left—Jo, Stu, Michael Lydon, Ethan Russell, and I. The Ston
es were still sleeping and would take a later plane.
I rode to Atlanta with Jo sitting beside me as I got drunk on bourbon. Chip Monck, she said, saw Brian onstage last night, playing tambourine for about three minutes at the end of “Under My Thumb.” I kept on drinking.
In Atlanta we rented a car, nobody tipping the black porter who loaded a half-ton of luggage into the trunk, and drove away, heading down to Auburn. I drove the car, a blue Dodge Charger, past pine woods and rolling Georgia fields. “Looks very much like Scotland,” Stu said. “Very pleasant.” But as we went deeper into the country, passing signs—DON’T LOSE YOUR SOUL BY THE MARK OF THE BEAST, JESUS WILL SAVE U—Mo-Jo gas stations, and tarpaper shanties, two banks of slate-colored clouds engulfed the sun, so that we entered Alabama under a morose blue-green sunset, and Stu said, “What a stupid place for a rock and roll concert.”
“Apollo Twelve is three and one-half hours out at six forty-five P.M. Auburn time,” the radio said. Men were going to walk on the moon for the second time in history, and none of us could be bothered. I was driving ninety miles an hour through the Alabama backwoods, but the sky had turned black by the time we reached Auburn, and it had begun to snow. As we drove onto the campus, the wind was whistling, snow whirling in the headlights. We parked behind the auditorium and ran to the back door, which we were happy to find unlocked.
Inside we were greeted by the head of the Auburn Special Events Committee, a graduate assistant who taught math and whose name was Jett Campbell. His helper was Mike Balkan; both of them were sober young white men with tidy haircuts. Terry Reid was here, but the Stones’ whereabouts was unknown and there was a rumor, Jett told us, that Chuck Berry was not coming.
True Adventures of the Rolling Stones Page 24