True Adventures of the Rolling Stones

by Stanley Booth

  Two shows were scheduled, and Terry went on to start the first one. The auditorium was not filled, and no one in it was black. Terry was booed during his first song, and some members of the audience yelled requests for irrelevant country songs. A few people stood and applauded when Terry went off, but it was a cold crowd on a cold night, and still no Stones and no Chuck Berry.

  Then the back door opened and Chuck Berry came in with a white girl and my friends Jim and Mary Lindsay Dickinson, Jim carrying Berry’s guitar. Berry’s band was already present, and while he was on and I was talking to the Dickinsons, the door opened again and the Stones came in, all chilled from spending three hours aloft in an un-heated DC3 that leaked air, “freezing our asses off over the Mississippi Delta,” Keith said.

  Jagger, taking the weather as a personal affront, was reconsidering the idea of visiting the South between the halves of the tour: “If the South’s going to be like this, I don’t want to visit it, I thought it was warm in the South.”

  Friends of mine from Georgia had come to the show, and I was running low on marijuana, so I asked Keith if he had any to spare. He told me to let him know if I found some because the band had none left. Jagger, hearing me mention that my friends had come to the show, said, “It’s not gonna be very good. The crowd’s not good, and I’m not going to sing much, I’m fucking hoarse. And you have to have a night off sometime.”

  They did seem to rush through the show, it was the weakest one yet, no question of singing “I’m Free” under these circumstances. The hall was half full, and though the Stones played hard the place didn’t shake.

  Between shows I swapped the luggage from the car I’d been driving to another one, because I would be staying in Columbus tonight, and the others would be flying to Illinois. The Dickinsons and I sat in the car and smoked part of my dwindling dope. They had come in with Chuck Berry because they happened to stay at the same motel as Berry in Columbus, and Mary Lindsay had knocked on Berry’s door and asked him if he knew where I was. Berry had been in the shower when she knocked, and his girl, Elizabeth, had let Mary Lindsay in. Berry came out of the bathroom and talked to Mary Lindsay while lying on the bed face down, nose buried in Elizabeth’s crotch. But he did agree to take the Dickinsons to the show if they would guide him there. They had to stop for directions only once. “One of you Caucasians better do the asking,” Berry said at an Alabama gas station.

  The first show had been late, and the second show was already so late that Terry Reid was cancelled. The Auburn Special Events people were upset because the coeds had to be in their dorms by midnight. The girls here were not groupies or even fans, just coeds with Friday night dates, and the reason there were not more of them was that a lot of the boys were saving their money to take them to the big football game tomorrow night.

  Berry started the second show with his first hit, “Maybellene,” interpolating “Mountain Dew” at boring length. Then someone—a boy from Memphis whom I knew slightly and had given a ticket to the second show—called for “Wee Wee Hours,” the B side of “Maybellene” and the first Chuck Berry blues. Berry, looking surprised, asked, “You want to hear some blues?” A small band of enthusiasts shouted “Yes!”

  “You asked for it,” Berry said and played “Wee Wee Hours” and then “Dust My Broom.” The bad band was forgotten, and for about ten minutes the room was transformed. Then Berry went back to his old rock and roll songs, singing obscene lyrics to some of them and doing such other songs as “My Ding-A-Ling,” a childish dirty ditty. He went on and on, as the Stones waited, Stu becoming outraged, threatening to turn off Berry’s electricity. Finally Jett Campbell went onstage and thanked Berry, who left at last.

  Jett, who had been on the phone with some higher authority, made the announcement that the Auburn coeds had been granted what he called “When-over permission,” meaning that they could stay out until the concert was over. “While the Rolling Stones are getting ready to come out, let’s hear a great Auburn cheer,” Jett said, leading the crowd in a crescendo: “Warrr-EAGLE!”

  I went backstage, where Stu was passing around tiny bottles of airplane Scotch. Alcohol was prohibited at the University, but Jett and Mike made an exception in our case, because we were exceptional. Jo was on the telephone, trying to reach the Stones’ London office. Wyman, perfectly relaxed waiting to go onstage, told me that transportation and hotel problems always happen, no matter how well prepared you are.

  The Stones’ second set was better than the first; they were looser and warmer and the audience, War Eagles or not, were warmer too. Someone down front threw something at Jagger, who said, “You missed me with that joint.”

  “We love you,” someone else shouted, and Jagger, tossing his long red scarf over his shoulder, said, “Thank you, sir—a man down here says he loves me.”

  When the lights came up for the last three songs, I went down into the crowd and danced before the stage. Wyman saw me and smiled, making one of his rare onstage changes of expression.

  “It might happen,” Mick said, “even in the streets of Auburn—”

  Everywhere I hear the sound of marchin’,

  Chargin’ feet, boys

  The Stones had come here through freezing cold for $35,000, out of which they would pay the other acts and all their own expenses. They could have made much more money someplace else, but they had chosen to play at Auburn University before a herd of fraternity pins. Though there were not even any campus police to be seen, most of the crowd were not dancing, and the Stones’ brave effort seemed too weak to make a real difference.

  At the end of the show, out the back way again, the Stones going to fly from the frozen South to Champaign, Illinois, where they would play another university tomorrow night. I drove with the Dickinsons to the motel in Columbus, hired a room and went to bed, leaving a call for nine o’clock in the morning. It was a long drive across Alabama and Mississippi to Memphis, and I wanted to get started as early as possible. But the call didn’t come; I woke up after eleven, called the Dickinsons, and by the time we left it was afternoon. As we walked out through the lobby, a television set, tuned to Saturday cartoons, said, “Wait! It’s not the giant pussy!”

  I was eager to get home and see Christopher, but Dickinson drove slowly because today was his birthday and he was superstitious. My impatience was not lessened when, just past the Tallapoosa County Memorial Gardens, a cemetery in which several Jersey cows were grazing, we ran out of gas. Dickinson pulled onto the grassy shoulder and started to write HELP on a piece of paper. That message seemed a bit vague for the motorists of Alabama, so he made another sign saying GAS. I took it and tried to thumb down cars, but they sped up as they passed. Then an Alabama State Patrol car came along and stopped about thirty feet behind us. I walked back to the big grey Pontiac with the state outlined on the front doors and told the man in his grey twill shirt and sunglasses, “We just did the dumbest thing you can do.”

  “You run out of gas,” he said.

  Mary Lindsay joined us, and the trooper asked, “Is that a girl or a boy driving the car?” Jim’s hair was quite long.

  “That’s my husband,” Mary Lindsay said in her most mature tones. The trooper explained that he didn’t want to leave two women alone on the highway, but that Mary Lindsay and Jim could stay and he would take me to where I could buy enough gas to make it to Birmingham.

  As we rode along I was thinking that things were not as bad as they might have been; we could have waited a long time for someone to stop and help us. I noticed the trooper’s name, Pilkington, on the black plastic nameplate pinned over his shirt pocket, and it occurred to me that I was carrying drugs that even in modest quantity could get me put away forever in Alabama. Pilkington looked serious, and I looked out the window, serious too, when the giant pussy came to my aid. I remembered the cartoons and knew there had to be football on a cold Saturday afternoon in November.

  “Who’s winnin’ the game?” I asked.

  Pilkington relaxed, grinned, said
, “Ole Miss whippin’ hell out of ’em.”

  As we drove, hundreds of thousands of people marched in Washington, D.C., demanding an end to the Vietnam War. Not until the summer of 1982, when a greater number demonstrated in New York’s Central Park against nuclear weapons, would such a gathering occur. But the wars would go on, and so would the weapons.

  Off the highway, down a winding asphalt road, at a crossroads with a post office and one gas station, we waited for Junior to get back with the truck, because the gas can was on it, but he showed up, and Pilkington drove me back to the car and wished us good luck. I was sorry I couldn’t help him by telling him what a nice arrest I’d be, but I was in a hurry.

  Dickinson drove slowly on, explaining things to me, for which I kept him around. “The Stones are trying to tour without a big agency booking them because they’ve been fucked by agencies,” he said. “They didn’t trust house PAs or equipment rental agencies, and they felt they should give audiences a record-quality sound, so they got their own PA and a mixing board. They’re controlling their own tour. They haven’t booked the typical cow palaces—some, enough to make money—but they’re in the revolution, they’ll play places the Beatles wouldn’t. They wind up hiring their friends who are actually incompetent. My God, they were late. Only acts of God excuse musicians.” I made a note to ask about that.

  In Mississippi, as it was getting dark, I asked at a gas station if I might make a collect call to Memphis, and the man there said, “This a business phone.” I turned around without saying anything more, and he said, “They a pay phone about a quarter-mile down the road.”

  “I can find a phone,” I said. Down the road, at a pay phone leaning against a cow skeleton, I called Christopher. The situation was typical; for years we had been together, happy in the New York snows and the Caribbean shadows, but as time had passed we had run more and more on separate schedules. Christopher would come in from work and go to bed while I wrote, like the drunk man in the Don Marquis poem, “falling upwards through the night.”

  “What’d you tell her?” Dickinson asked.

  “That I’d be home about nine.”

  “We’ll be there sooner, you shouldna told her that.”

  But it was nine o’clock when I got home. I didn’t know it yet, and it would have seemed insane, knowing as I did what I had been doing, but it was possible to suspect a man on the road with the Rolling Stones of having a real good time. And not without justice. We were very close. She knew I was guilty before I knew it myself.

  21

  At the beginning of the 20th century there were only six reliable and effective pharmaceutical preparations, namely digitalis (still helpful in many kinds of heart disease), morphine, quinine (for malaria), diphtheria antitoxin, aspirin and ether. Two other successful means of chemical intervention were also available: immunization against smallpox and rabies. This pharmacopeia remained basically unchanged until about the time of World War II. Since then, drugs and other substances that can, if employed wisely, usefully affect the chemistry of life have been produced in startling numbers.

  SHERMAN M. MELLINKOFF:

  “Chemical Intervention,” Scientific American

  ON DECEMBER 5, 1965 , after forty-two days, the Stones ended their fourth tour of the United States at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. In a month and a half they had made two million dollars. They stayed in L.A. for the next week, recording at the RCA studios a single record and Aftermath, the first album composed entirely of Jagger/Richards songs. Then the band went their own ways, all of them returning to England for Christmas except Brian, who was in the Virgin Islands with Anita and a tropical virus. But he made it back to play Ready, Steady, Go! on New Year’s Eve.

  I had left Tulane and was in Memphis, working for the Tennessee Department of Public Welfare, an outfit that confirmed every fear I’d ever had about the social system. I would come out of a house that stank with the ammonia smell of poverty, start my car, turn on the radio—there was interesting music on the car radio for the first time since 1957—hear the Beatles or the Supremes and have to turn the radio off. The happiness of popular music was unbearable at such times, but I could always listen to the Stones. I sensed the strong blues truth that underlay their music.

  The new single, “19th Nervous Breakdown,” contained what may have been the first reference in a popular song to what were called psychedelic, mind-changing, drugs. Mick and Keith, moving with the times, were no longer having people thrown out of dressing rooms for dealing dope. Marijuana, heroin, and cocaine were associated—in popular legend, at least—with black ghettos, jazz musicians, and beatniks. In the middle 1960s, with the white man’s burden heavy again from Vietnam to Birmingham, Alabama, and Birmingham, England, adolescent whites began to display sympathy for what many of them saw as the colored victims of white men, and old wars were fought again in living rooms between disturbed parents and uncommunicative offspring wearing long hair and Indian headbands. The situation was complicated by the increased use among the young of certain substances, such as the peyote cactus (active ingredient, mescaline) and “magic mushrooms” (psilocybin), that had been in limited use among tribal “medicine men” and religious mystics for centuries. The easy availability of substances like these and many synthetic analogues (among them LSD, DMT, STP) far more potent than anything of the sort occurring in nature, alarmed parents and other authority figures. Taking such substances could cause, for minutes or days, sense impressions to overpower the mind. The generation that had fought World War II and had created the postwar baby boom found the use of such drugs dangerous and made it as illegal as possible. They knew in their calcium-deprived bones that you can’t be too careful.

  From the Stones’ point of view, things were not so simple:

  On our first trip I tried so hard

  to rearrange your mind

  But after ’while I realized

  you were disarranging mine

  On February 4 “19th Nervous Breakdown” was released in England. It hit the New Musical Express singles chart at number 2 on February 11. That day the Stones flew to New York to tape an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, refused to be photographed at the airport, and nearly got into a fight with the photographers. They split up for their New York stay, hoping to avoid fans, or at least to spread them out. Mick and Keith stayed at the Essex House on Central Park South, while Brian, Bill, and Charlie stayed at the Regency on Park Avenue. No decent New York hotel would accommodate them all together. On February 16 the Stones flew into Sydney, where about three hundred kids were waiting in the rain to welcome them at the start of their second tour of Australia. The tour had been sold out in all the state capitals for days and extra matinees added to meet the demand. Mick sent a report to Disc magazine dated February 21, datelined Brisbane, saying that it had rained every day, the shows had been better than on the last tour because they had appeared then with Roy Orbison and drawn mixed crowds, the food was bad, the birds were all pretty and suntanned, but that Brian had asked him to say that he, Brian, was still in love.

  The Australian tour lasted through February; on March 3 the Stones reached Los Angeles, where they stayed four days, long enough to record the Jagger/Richards song, “Paint It, Black.” It was to be their next single. The comma was Andrew’s idea. On March 13 all the Stones except Brian arrived in London. They had two weeks off before starting a European tour. When Brian returned to London, he said that he’d been delayed four days after the other Stones because the clubs in New York stay open twenty-four hours a day. He arrived at his Earl’s Court Mews apartment wearing rose-tinted spectacles and carrying a dulcimer.

  One bright, cold morning in March of 1966, I sat on a brown Naugahyde couch in the Welfare Workers’ lounge, on the seventh floor of the M&M building in Memphis, at the corner of Beale and Main streets, reading the New York Review of Books. The week before, after working eight months for the Tennessee State Welfare Department, I had given my two weeks’ notice. This morning I came into the o
ffice, left at once, went for a walk and decided that I couldn’t take another week. Now, waiting for lunchtime, when the supervisors would go out and I would sweep downstairs, clean out my desk and disappear, I came upon an advertisement. At first I assumed it was for the Famous Writers’ School, but then I saw that it was for Playboy. All firm-jawed and one foot in front of the other, it said something like, We’re Looking for Men Who Eat and Sleep Writing.

  Years later I would find in my old Welfare Worker’s notebook the remains of the letter I wrote to Playboy that morning. I suggested writing for them about cars, airplanes, and sound equipment (because I had read Playboy and had an idea of what they would want their serious writers to take seriously), but the only specific subject I proposed to Playboy, back in ought 66, was the Rolling Stones. No wonder they didn’t hire me.

  On Beale Street, half a block from the Welfare Department, was Reuben Cherry’s Home of the Blues Record Shop. Reuben kept a rubber snake to scare people in the store, and Elvis Presley would come in, get the snake, take it out on Beale and scare the people in cars as they drove down the street. “The boy’s a menace,” Reuben used to say of Elvis, back when they were both alive, as Reuben had been the day he sold me a Folkways album recorded in 1958 by a Memphis street sweeper named Furry Lewis.

  When I left the Welfare Department I took with me this note from Furry’s Welfare file (which showed that he had been turned down twice): “Mr. Lewis has a pawn ticket in the amt. of sixteen dollars ($16) from Nathan’s Pawn Shop 194 Beale Street which he states is for a guitar. He states he was an entertainer of some kind, as well as his work for the City of Memphis.”

  In the first few months after leaving my job I wrote a novel about poor people and some stories, one of which was about Furry. During the heyday of Beale Street, when the great Negro blues artists played and sang in the crowded, evil blocks between Fourth and Main, Furry, a protégé of W. C. Handy, was one of the most highly respected blues musicians. He was also one of the most popular, not only around the saloons and gambling dives of Memphis but in the medicine shows and on the riverboats all along the Mississippi. In Chicago, at the old Vocalion studios on Wabash Avenue, he made the first of many recordings he was to make, both for Vocalion and for RCA Victor’s Bluebird label.