But at the close of the 1920s, Furry told me, “Beale Street really went down. You know, old folks say, it’s a long lane don’t have no end and a bad wind don’t never change. But one day, back when Hoover was President, I was driving my cart down Beale Street and I seen a rat, sitting on top of a garbage can, eating a onion, crying.” Since 1923 Furry had worked at times for the City of Memphis, Sanitation Department, and he kept on sweeping the streets.
Furry and I adopted each other. “Me and him just like brothers,” he told people, pointing at me. Several years after I wrote it, “Furry’s Blues” was printed in Playboy and won an award. Furry went on to make many albums, to appear in a Burt Reynolds movie, to be visited by celebrities from Joni Mitchell to Allen Ginsberg, to be honored by the Rolling Stones (who refused to go onstage in Memphis in 1978 until Furry had played), and to heaven in 1981, but he is still with me, saying, “Give out but don’t give up.”
I found Furry with the help of my friend Charlie Brown, who ran a Memphis coffeehouse called the Bitter Lemon, where old blues players sometimes appeared. Charlie took me to Furry’s apartment, on Fourth Street half a block off Beale—I had been near there to visit welfare clients—went with me to watch Furry sweep the streets and hired Furry to play at the Lemon so I could watch him work.
The year before, Charlie Brown had come up with the first grass I’d seen since 1961, when I’d scored in North Beach and brought it—half a lid—back to Memphis. Charlie also had the first LSD I ever took, and I took it with him. I was somewhat prepared for the experience by reading Aldous Huxley, R. H. Blyth, and the haiku poets, and I had even eaten a large number of Heavenly Blue morning glory seeds, which didn’t exactly free me from the temporal sphere—but on LSD I saw Charlie Brown change, become all races, all ages, I felt myself die, turn to damp clay, felt breath, air, come back into my body, was filled with a tender care—a new sense of the value, the preciousness, of life. When we could navigate, we drove CB’s 1949 Ford that was rat-colored like Hazel Motes’ down to an all-night eatery for a mild repast, marvelling at the city lights reflected in the raindrops on the windshield. At the café there was a cop, all dark blue, black leather, and menacing devices. He was sitting at a table with a cup of coffee, talking to someone on a walkie-talkie. There had been a burglary at a warehouse in a black neighborhood. The burglar was a black teenage girl. The cop said he’d be right there, his tone loaded with sex and sadism. The only way he could be intimate with a black girl was to punish her. After he left, the place still reeked with his lust, if you had taken acid.
At the end of March and into April, the Stones toured Europe, including Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris—where Brigitte Bardot came to their hotel to meet them, a rather embarrassing scene since only Mick spoke French, and her beauty made him speechless. On the next day the Stones played Marseilles, and Mick’s forehead was gashed by a chair thrown from the audience. “They do it when they get excited,” Mick told reporters.
In April Aftermath was released in the United Kingdom, and “Paint It, Black” was released in the United States. Years later Charlie would recall how Brian “sat for hours learning to play sitar, put it on Paint It, Black’ and never played it again.” The new single was amazing, a nihilistic outburst that would be a number one popular record. The Stones performed the song on The Ed Sullivan Show, and Mick, interviewed by the Associated Press, said that teenagers in the United States had changed, were asking more questions of their elders, becoming more independent in their thinking. “When we first came here in 1964, the kids wanted to be what everyone wanted them to be. . . . They were all satisfied by convention. They gave each other rings. They never thought about whether politically anything was right or wrong.”
At this time, London was the most fashionable city on the planet. The Beatles, James Bond novels and movies, photographs by David Bailey, clothes by Mary Quant, haircuts by Vidal Sassoon, all contributed to a period of great international popularity of things British. Headlines about the Stones were changing. Mick and Keith had been photographed by Cecil Beaton, who said they reminded him of Nijinsky, of Renaissance angels. For years Keith kept a newspaper clipping of one of the Beaton photographs of himself with the caption, “Wonderful Head and Torso.”
Time magazine had a cover story dated April 15, 1966, titled “London, the Swinging City.” It shared space in the magazine with news of the increasing intensity of U.S. bombing attacks on North Vietnam. The Rolling Stones’ music was the most “In” now, Time said, making it official.
Plans for the Stones’ film, supposed to have started in April, had changed again. The film was now to be taken from a novel called Only Lovers Left Alive, by Dave Wallis, about England taken over by teenagers after a nuclear attack. Mick told Melody Maker, “I can’t see, for instance, Ringo with a gun in his hand and being nasty in a movie and going to kill somebody. It just wouldn’t happen. But I don’t think you’d think it was very peculiar if you saw Brian do it.”
In the same interview, Mick had further thoughts on the United States: “Vietnam has changed America. It has divided it and made people think. There’s a lot of opposition—much more than you think, because all the opposition is laughed at in American magazines. It’s made to look ridiculous. But there is real opposition. Before, Americans used to accept everything, my country right or wrong. But now a lot of young people are saying my country should be right, not wrong.”
Mick was living in a furnished flat in Baker Street, and Keith, the papers stated, had bought Redlands. Wyman had bought a house at Keston, near Bromley, Kent, three months before. Because of the Stones’ schedule, Keith would not actually live in Redlands until the fall. In June Aftermath was released in the United States, and they went back for their fifth tour. Fourteen New York hotels, fearing the fans, refused to have the Stones as guests. Allen Klein made a show of threatening to sue all fourteen for $5 million, claiming the Stones were discriminated against because of national origin. They solved the immediate problem of shelter by renting a yacht at the 79th Street Boat Basin.
The tour opened at Manning Bowl in Lynn, Massachusetts, with a riot in the rain. Eighty-five police held back fifteen thousand fans until the opening notes of the last song, “Satisfaction.” Fans broke through the police cordon, and cops threw tear gas that the wind blew away from the crowd and back toward the stage. The Stones beat it for their two limousines, but the fans caught up with the cars, which were nearly torn apart. As the cars took off, one girl, clinging to the rear bumper, lost two fingers. “Brian, Brian,” she screamed, not knowing that her life—or at least her hand—had been changed forever.
The Stones’ shows lasted little more than half an hour and consisted mostly of their hits: they did ten songs, “Not Fade Away,” “The Last Time,” “Paint It, Black,” “Stupid Girl,” “Lady Jane,” “Spider and the Fly,” “Mother’s Little Helper,” “Get Off of My Cloud,’ “19th Nervous Breakdown,” and “Satisfaction.” They played in Cleveland; Pittsburgh; Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; Hartford; Buffalo; Toronto; Montreal; Atlantic City; the Forest Hills tennis stadium in Queens, New York; Asbury Park; Virginia Beach; and Syracuse, where at the War Memorial Stadium Brian tried to steal an American flag that had been spread out backstage across a chair to dry, and a stagehand snatched it back, creating a small scene and a few headlines. It wasn’t the time to kid around with the American flag.
The atmosphere on this tour was more friendly, not just because Mick and Keith and Brian were now, like many of their generation, smoking grass. (An album of the Stones’ hits had been in release in the United States since March; it was called Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass). Charlie, a jass player, smoked marijuana now and then, and Wyman had tried it, but it made him ill.) The Beatles came to the United States for their last tour this summer, 1966, and after talking and listening to them at a press conference, I had the feeling that we were all of us in the same struggle, all of us who wanted to (the slogan had appeared) make love, not war.
The Ston
es’ tour continued, with little regard for geography, to Detroit, Indianapolis, Chicago, Houston, St. Louis, Winnipeg, and Omaha. At the next stop, Vancouver, the police, alarmed by the forward surge of screaming youngsters in the Pacific National Exhibition Forum, even though there was a riot fence between the audience and the stage, shut off the sound system. The Stones, police told reporters, then “began making obscene gestures that incited the crowd even more.” In Seattle the next day, Mick denied inciting the crowd: “What’s an obscene gesture? I don’t know any American obscene gestures. They’re different all over the world.”
After Seattle the Stones went to Portland, Oregon, where they refused to talk to reporters at Portland International Airport. United Press International reported, “Mike Gruber, from the Stones’ New York-based publicity agency, said interviews ‘would ruin their image.’ ” As the Stones started back up the steps of their chartered plane, a television cameraman asked the Stones’ business agent, Ron Schneider, to stop blocking his camera. Schneider and Gruber ordered the cameraman off the field. From inside the plane the Stones yelled, “Give ’im a knuckle sandwich, Mike.”
The end of the tour was approaching, and the madness increased. In Sacramento the Stones threw desserts all over a motel room and each other. Schneider gave a hundred dollars to a maid and asked her to clean it up. Then, dripping with whipped cream, they all went out and jumped into the pool. The manager came out, furious. Send us a bill, they told him. They played Salt Lake City, Bakersfield, and the Hollywood Bowl. Charles Champlin, the Los Angeles Times critic, reviewed their performance as if it were some kind of art, calling them “talented and inventive musicians,” and referring to Brian as “lead guitarist.” On July 26, Mick’s twenty-third birthday, they played San Francisco, then flew to Hawaii, where they ended the tour and spent eight days waiting for an air strike to end. Then they went back to L.A. and recorded “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow,” at RCA Studios with Dave Hassinger engineering as usual. They also recorded most of the tracks for Between the Buttons, the album that would come out in the USA and England in January 1967.
After the recording sessions were over, the Stones went on holiday. Mick and his girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton were reported in a car crash in Great Titchfield Street near Marylebone, both shaken up but no real damage done. On September 2, the story appeared that Brian Jones, “lead guitarist of the Rolling Stones pop group,” had broken his left hand while on holiday in Tangier. When the Stones appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show to perform “Have You Seen Your Mother,” Brian’s hand was bandaged. On the sleeve for the new single the Stones were pictured dressed in women’s clothing, looking like five matrons of the day, Keith a gossipy birdwife, Charlie a leggy policewoman, Bill a crippled WAC in a wooden wheelchair, Mick a Harlem housewife with white plastic cat’s-eye glasses, Brian a blond WAC looking like Judy Holliday. They were posed in front of a window with a gold star sticker indicating a World War II death in the family. It was a remarkable picture to appear on a sleeve designed to be sold to schoolgirls by the millions. The English music papers added another classic headline to the Stones collection: HAVE THE STONES GONE TOO FAR? The answer was, not quite yet.
It was announced in the papers on September 14 that the Stones had added £231,000 to the profit of Decca in the last fiscal year. They had not received Orders of the British Empire, as the Beatles had, but people who were making that kind of money for a small country with a bad balance-of-payments situation would have to go a ways before they could be said to have gone too far. Still, they were heading there as fast as they could.
Brian and Anita were living together in a large flat in Courtfield Road, near the Gloucester Road tube station. With their circle of friends, they were a center of activity in “Swinging London.” Soon Keith started living with Brian and Anita, all of them friends, taking lots of drugs, going down to Redlands for the weekends, not looking back.
At the end of September the Stones toured England with the Yard-birds and Ike and Tina Turner. They still went onstage in whatever they happened to be wearing, but on the day they opened the tour at the Albert Hall Mick happened to be wearing an orange shirt, white bell-bottom trousers, black sequined Chinese-style jacket, and Brian wore silver-grey velvet trousers, a purple velvet jacket, a red silk shirt, and a white cravat.
In October, while the English tour was going on, Decca announced that the Stones movie would start shooting in November. It was to be the first film solely financed by a record company. The Stones would earn from it, the newspapers said, a million dollars. On October 11, “Have You Seen Your Mother” started down the charts. It had hit at number 6, climbed to 4, and now at number 5 it was going down and out. It was the first Stones single after six straight number ones not to reach the top. There were some empty seats on the tour, but when it was over, Keith and Brian told Melody Maker that it was “an enormous success.” They seemed to think that this was partly due to their having purged the ranks of their followers. “In the ‘It’s All Over Now’ era,” Keith said, “we were in danger of becoming respectable!”
The Stones’ movie naturally did not start shooting in November. On November 14 the London papers carried pictures of Brian in a Nazi uniform with Anita kneeling in front of him. “These are . . . realistic pictures,” Brian said by way of explanation. “The meaning of it all is there is no sense to it.”
The phrase to blow minds, meaning to astound, was current. Brian and Anita were into blowing people’s minds. In an interview with Melody Maker after the last English tour, Brian had said, “My damaged hand is mending well. It has worried me a lot, but I am now able to leave the bandages off although I am still a bit limited in my little finger.”
At the time of the accident, the newspaper stories had said that Brian had hurt his hand in a fall down a hillside, but years later Anita told me that Brian had broken his hand on her face, during a fight. “He always hurt himself,” she said. “He was very fragile, and if he ever tried to hurt me he always wound up hurting himself.”
22
The only way to avoid murder is by ritual murder.
NORMAN O. BROWN: Love’s Body
AFTER EIGHT HOURS I woke up with just enough time to repack and leave for Chicago, where I would rejoin the Stones. I drove with Christopher to the airport. She sighed, looking out the Mustang windows.
From O’Hare Airport I phoned Jo at a hotel that called itself the Ambassador East. Jo told me to meet them at the International Amphitheatre, where the Democratic Party selected a presidential candidate last year, an occasion that provided much sport for the police. A cab driver, an old man in a grey cap, told me about the place: “Down by the stockyards. Built it for a cow barn. Three blocks long.” McCormick Place burned last year, and while it was being rebuilt, the Amphitheatre was being used, the driver said, “for conventions and shows.”
I arrived primed for a battle to get in, but there was no one in sight, and the back door was open. Inside, only the stage crew was on hand. Bill Belmont showed me around. Belmont always looked the same, dressed in Levi’s and a blue shirt with a button-down collar, black-haired, dark-eyed, and he was always ready to show you around. Belmont would talk to anybody. (Much later I learned that Jon Jaymes had passed from Belmont to Chip Monck’s manager and met the Stones with cars at the Los Angeles airport after the Fort Collins shows.) He didn’t leave the tour until the stage was clear of corpses. This part of the Amphitheatre, where the Stones would play, was the Arena. On the rear wall, a painted sign said HOME OF THE INTERNATIONAL LIVESTOCK EXPOSITION. In this dusty old rust-colored barn the obligatory U.S. flag was huge, hanging in the dead center of the room. If it fell rows of customers would smother.
I found the ambience a mite oppressive and went backstage to the dressing rooms, really just the business offices of the Amphitheatre, with filing cabinets, shabby desks, and tables. On the walls hung a couple of paint-by-number still lifes, Cake with Rose and Vegetable Plate. One desk was brightened by a bouq
uet of dusty blue plastic flowers. Thumb-tacked to another wall was a list of this year’s Amphitheatre attractions: a Jehovah’s Witnesses convention, wrestling bouts, livestock shows, roller derbies, the Boy Scouts of America Fun Fair. On a table in a back room were a few packages of pre-sliced American cheese, Saltine crackers covered with plastic wrap, and some apples. The Jehovah’s Witnesses probably hadn’t even got that much, a point (with just exactly whom we are dealing, here) emphasized when Stu came in and I asked him, because Dickinson had told me that performers’ contracts include fines for lateness, whether the Stones had been fined so far on the tour.
“No promoter would fine the Stones because they’re too big,” he said. “They could tell all the English groups not to work for this or that promoter and he’d have no acts.”
The Stones hadn’t arrived, and once again Chuck Berry, who was due onstage, refused to start his set until he was paid $3000 in cash. Stu went to Berry’s dressing room, returned with a receipt signed by Berry and gave it to me for safekeeping. Ten minutes later, with the crowd stamping in eagerness, Berry went on. In the dressing room, I heard the crowd cheering as Berry started to play, and I decided to go out and watch him. But as I opened the door, there were the Stones, Jo, Schneider, Sam, Tony, David Horowitz, Michael Lydon, and Jon Jaymes. Mick and Keith asked how was Memphis, and how could I tell them?
Schneider asked me for Berry’s receipt. Business as usual. Yesterday the Stones played two shows in Champaign-Urbana at the University of Illinois Assembly Hall. At least this place was not another basketball gym. Behind the stage curtains a small neon sign read, SIRLOIN ROOM NEXT DOOR.
True Adventures of the Rolling Stones Page 26