True Adventures of the Rolling Stones

by Stanley Booth

  Michael and some of his friends were in the room he and I were supposed to share but wouldn’t because Michael was staying with another girl. After belittling Michael for his womanizing, here I’d been doing the same thing. Michael danced around the room, telling me about Cecil Beaton taking photographs of Mick while I was out. I started to make a few notes, but as I began to write, the call came that we should go downstairs and board the limousines.

  They were from a company called Head Limos, which catered mostly to rock stars and was supposed to supply dope and the latest eight-track stereo tapes for your en route entertainment. The car that Michael, Ethan, Tony, and I rode in had no dope, three tapes (Blind Faith, Chicago, Gladys Knight and the Pips), and a vague driver who missed the turn to the Lincoln Tunnel and had to U-turn to get back on the trail. I dozed on the way to Philadelphia, noting only the giant chain-fenced complex with huge signs—USAF Spacetrack Aero Defense Command and RCA Defense Electronic Products—and thinking that to compete with this sort of thing you really need big amplifiers.

  The Philadelphia Spectrum was one more giant basketball arena, seating seventeen thousand. There were swarms of girls around the back entrance, where big metal doors opened for the limos. Inside, the back-stage was dark, with big men in dark suits standing around, giving the place a precinct-boss smell. Michael and I walked down a narrow hall to B. B. King’s dressing room. B.B. and his band were there, the musicians sitting and standing around, drinking beers from a picnic cooler, B.B. operating a new Sony tape recorder he had bought in Memphis. As we talked he recorded several voices around the room, then played them back. The musicians, hearing their voices, laughed like aborigines.

  I watched B.B.’s set from the press box, where a few hippie types were smoking dope. Then I went downstairs and took up a position by the right side of the stage. When the Stones came on and started to play the entire crowd started to jump, and I jumped along with them. During the first couple of songs I found myself dancing with a pretty blond girl, but the crowd surged forward and she went backstage. I climbed up and stood behind Keith’s amplifiers. The atmosphere was becoming frantic as the kids tried to give themselves to the Rolling Stones. Down front a girl fainted and was lifted onstage, where she opened her eyes and waved to her friends. Just across the amps from me, a rent-a-cop, about to throw a boy back into the crowd, was stopped by Tony, who helped the boy climb down.

  The show was hard and fast without “I’m Free,” but it seemed, in spite of all the action, like an old-fashioned rock and roll show of the fifties, people having a good time within the imposed limits. Ripping up seats expresses frustration, but it doesn’t change much besides the seats. As the lights came up and “Honky Tonk Women” started, I felt close to despair—it seemed that the tour had lost its focus; I didn’t know what the Stones were trying to do, and I didn’t know what I was trying to do. Whatever it was, it had something to do with love and something to do with death—and rape, murder, suicide. But it seemed that what was happening on the tour was not the transcendent expression of our feelings, but our attempt to have a good time, express the energies of our youth, in spite of the disadvantage of terrain. Onstage there were beefy men in light cotton jackets and Hush Puppies, Jon Jaymes’ special security force, though I didn’t know that yet. As the kids were crashing the stage full force and the evening was reaching its most hectic point, Jon grabbed me, yelled, Keep this till I ask you for it, and from his left armpit handed me a blue steel .38 caliber revolver. I slipped it into my jacket pocket, and as the last notes of “Street Fighting Man” rang in the rafters and the rose petals Mick had thrown floated down on the sweating ravers, we ran out the back, climbed in the cars, and roared out into the night.

  Five limousines spread out on the turnpike at a hundred miles an hour. The show had revived us; there was no way you could fail to be excited by the great rush of energy. We talked loudly about music, sang Jimmy Reed’s “Baby, What You Want Me to Do” and Fred McDowell’s “You Got to Move” in the middle of which we heard the moaning siren of the State Patrol—on the New Jersey Turnpike in the wee wee hours.

  All five limos whipped to a stop on the road-apron. I started to get out, and the driver said, Better stay in the car. I opened the door and looked out to see the cop reining his motorcycle and a man in a golf jacket, one who had been onstage, getting out of a limo. He hit the ground running toward the cop, taking something from his back pocket, holding it up—I saw the glint of a badge—and the patrolman waved him away, cranked his bike, sped off, and we were back on the road at a hundred miles an hour, passing the cop, gone like a cool breeze.

  When we arrived at the Plaza the limos let us out at the back, where the doors were locked. The Plaza’s not what it used to be, I said. It’s not so bad, Mick said. Scott Fitzgerald used to like it, I said, but that was a long time ago. They didn’t lock the back door at night when he liked it, Mick said.

  We walked around the block in the icy cold. Inside, I went to Jon Jaymes’ room and gave him his gun back. Tony stopped by to tell Jon that he wanted two things: a knife and a blackjack. You’ll get them, Jon said.

  We assembled—the five Stones, Tony, Sam, Ronnie, Astrid—in the lobby, preparatory to going out for something to eat. “Are you going?” Charlie asked me as we went out. “I hope you behave yourself.”

  “Come on in,” Mick said, opening the limousine door. “Too bad you missed last night’s concert, it was good. Here’s a tape.”

  Mick turned up the volume control of a portable tape recorder he was holding on his lap. “Who made it?” I asked.

  “A kid. It was confiscated.”

  “By Schneider?”

  “Yes,” Mick said. “He’s awful.”

  “I saw you on The Ed Sullivan Show” I said. “That was very amusing.” The show had aired only two nights ago, but it seemed a very long time. A track had been added to make it sound as if the Stones had been accompanied by an unceasing barrage of screams.

  “Topo Gigio was very good,” Mick said. Topo Gigio was a puppet-mouse who did a comedy routine with an Italian ventriloquist.

  “Eddie Albert, too,” I said. Eddie Albert had recited a prayer for the nineteen-seventies, very depressing.

  We went to Reuben’s, a delicatessen that stayed open late for show business types and crapshooters. Nick and Nora Charles had eaten there once in The Thin Man. The sandwiches on the menu were named after famous folk, one of which, the #32, was the Ed Sullivan. I pointed it out to Keith. Yeah, he said, the Ed Sullivan, I’d love to eat him—and coming from preposterous-looking Keith the statement had more of a cannibal than a sexual connotation. The walls were decorated with autographed pictures of celebrities and glum-looking stuffed fish on wooden plaques. A weary little old waiter schlepped around the long table taking orders, trying to explain the kosher menu to Tony. When the food finally came, it was terrible, canned orange juice, stale toast, cold soup.

  As we ate, Ronnie wondered aloud how we were going to get from Miami to the West Palm Beach Pop Festival, where the Stones would play Sunday night, the last date of the tour. There were no planes from New York to West Palm Beach, all the planes stopped in Miami. Ronnie had looked into renting a plane for the last half of the tour, but the price was prohibitive.

  “Jerry Wexler has a yacht down there,” I said. “We could go from Miami to West Palm on his yacht.”

  “How big is it?” Keith asked.

  “Big enough to take us.”

  “But we’ve still got all that equipment, guitars and stuff,” Keith said, “and we’ll need something that can take us out afterwards—”

  “Where we going afterwards?”

  “It’s a secret,” Keith said, “but we’re going to the Deep South.”

  “Oh, yeah? And what in your opinion is the Deep South?”

  “Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Goin’ down there to record for a few days. Ahmet set it up.” Ahmet Ertegun was the president (and Jerry Wexler the vice president) of the Atlantic Recording Cor
poraton, the biggest independent record company in the business, a great rhythm & blues success story. “We’ll be down there four days,” Keith said, “but don’t say anything about it, to Michael or anyone in the press, ’cause it really is a secret.”

  Mick and Ronnie were talking about record companies, how to make the best deal—Ronnie was always discussing deals because that was how he made his living. “Why do you have to deal with them other motherfuckers at all?” Tony asked. “Why mess with record companies and distributors? Why don’t the heads put out their own shit?”

  “Because it’s too complicated,” Keith said. “There’s too much involved. You’d have to do all the pressing and distribution yourself, have to own a fleet of trucks. That’s the problem. Phil Spector tried it, he cheated and bribed and did everything he could to get started, and that’s cool, but he couldn’t do it, it didn’t work.” He paused for a moment, then said, “Still it must be possible. How do bootleg records get around, how does grass get around, that’s the way it’s got to work—”

  When we got back to the Plaza it was nearly five o’clock in the morning, and the New York Times for Wednesday, November 26, was in a stack by the elevators. I put a dime on the stack and took a paper, but the elevator man, coming to take us up, said, “That’s fifteen cents,” and I saw a little handwritten sign, PAPERS 15¢—a 50 percent price increase for the privilege of getting the bad news in the lobby of the Plaza. I said good night to the group and went up to my room. The park was wreathed in grey morning mist. There were gilt-wrapped chocolate mints and a fresh carnation on the nightstand, sheets turned back, a whole set of attentions you don’t get at the Holiday Inn. I lay back on the bed and looked at the paper.

  According to a story on the front page, in March 1968 in a village called My Lai in the South Vietnamese province of Song My, a twentysix-year-old First Lieutenant named William Calley killed or caused to be killed one hundred and nine civilians. There were several related headlines: “Laird [Secretary of Defense] Says Top Army Officials Knew about Alleged Massacre . . . Thirteen Villages near Song My Razed in a Week . . . Ford [House Republican Leader] Charges the Previous Administration ‘Covered Up’ Vietnam Report . . . Laird ‘Shocked and Sick’ Over the Story.” On page two, “A Beatle Returns Award as a Protest. London, Nov. 25. John Lennon, one of the Beatles, has returned his award of Member of the British Empire as a protest against Britain’s role in the Nigerian Civil War and British political support of the United States in Vietnam.”

  At each Rolling Stones concert there were indications that we were fighting for something tender and lovely and free, but what a hell of a world we had to fight, when the land of the free and the home of the brave was sending its sons out to slaughter women and children, and the sons, men my age and younger, were doing it. As I sank toward sleep I made my last note of the day: God bless all children & old people everywhere. But as I closed my eyes, my last thought was that Jon Jaymes had handed me that revolver like a promise.

  24

  Buddy Bolden . . . had played himself out in a few years. Accustomed to earning only a few cents a day as a barber, he had begun to make real money, which he spent like a drunken sailor. Lack of sleep, liquor, women, hot music, gradually sapped his strength.

  Only at certain moments did he still sound like the great King Bolden; at other times his sidemen noticed that he played his cornet as if mad. Possessed themselves, they came to fear this insane music which attacked their minds. Finally, in 1914, it became known that Bolden had to be put into an asylum.

  ROBERT GOFFIN: Jazz

  IN SEPTEMBER OF 1968, I went to England to write about the Rolling Stones. I did not know that taking place on my second day in the country would be Brian Jones’ second—and, as it turned out, his last—drug trial. During the trial, Brian glanced into the spectators’ gallery, and I looked into his eyes. A few days later, Brian and I walked in Kensington Gardens and beside the Serpentine, where Peter Pan landed, and Brian gave me a photocopy of an essay that he intended to use as liner notes for an album of music he had recorded in Joujouka, a village in the Moroccan Rif valley, where the word reefer comes from. The essay, by Brion Gysin, was titled “The Pipes of Pan.” I knew then what I had seen in Brian’s eyes—or whom I had seen looking out of them—but I knew nothing about what had happened the year before in Morocco between Brian and Anita and Keith, how Brian had come to this music. You could have written a book about what I didn’t know.

  But at the end of 1966, Christopher was working for Omega Airlines, living in an apartment with her mother. Omega’s peculiar employee schedules made it possible for her to lie to her mother at times and spend the night with me. I was trying to do the impossible—to start making a living by writing before my savings from eight months with the State ran out. Some people liked my writing, but no one would buy it. The New Yorker, on returning “Furry’s Blues,” said, “The enclosed has a pleasant tone, we felt, but. . . . ”

  Christopher and I wanted to be together, but I wanted to wait until I was making some money. I also thought that if marriage wasn’t good enough for James Joyce or Pablo Picasso, it wasn’t good enough for me. That is, I shared their disregard for the convention that makes love the business of bureaucrats. Christopher and I compromised. We had our blood tested (“premartial,” the receipt said), bought a marriage license, and on December 20, Charlie Brown married us. He signed the license with the name of a parson I had invented. Before he signed the paper, Charlie asked us if we loved each other. We said yes. “You’re married,” he said.

  Two days later, Charlie was arrested for selling a small amount of marijuana—an ounce, I believe—to an old high school acquaintance who informed on him. He had been in the county jail for a couple of days before I heard about it. By the time I managed to get him out, it was Christmas Eve night. There was snow on the ground. Charlie and I walked from the jail to the bailbond company—Charlie kept falling on icy places and getting up with a big smile, happy to be free to fall down—and then I drove him to his apartment. The front door was unlocked. Just inside, a search warrant lay on the floor. The air stank with gas. We went through the rooms, opening windows and closing valves. The police had turned all the heating outlets on and left them unlighted in the hope that Charlie would come in and light a cigaret. In their search they had knocked holes in the walls, poured chemicals into all the liquids in the place, broken almost everything that would break. Charlie looked at the wreckage, then walked to an overcoat hanging on the bedroom door, reached into a pocket and took out some grass. We sat on the broken bed and smoked and thought about things.

  In January, Christopher and I flew to New York City on an Omega Airlines Honeymoon Pass. Each day I would wake up and leave calls for editors. Esquire had “Furry’s Blues,” and I had heard they wanted a story about Elvis Presley. Each night Christopher and I would go out, and the next day we would sleep till noon, missing any phone calls. Finally, on our last day in New York, I conferred with an Esquire editor at a Chock Full o’ Nuts and came home with the Presley assignment.

  The Rolling Stones were in New York for another Ed Sullivan appearance to promote a new single record. (The Stones’ new album, Between the Buttons, was also a January release.) The problem this time was that Sullivan refused to let Jagger sing the title words to one of the songs on the new single, “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” There were news reports that the Stones might refuse to appear on the show. I kept hearing bits of the squabble on taxi radios. Finally the Stones went on and did the song and Jagger didn’t sing the title words, just sort of hummed and mumbled.

  The Sullivan show was broadcast on Sunday, January 15. The day before, there had taken place, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the Human Be-In, where the Hell’s Angels had been, as Rock Scully would tell us in Oakland, such groovy security.

  The Stones flew back to London to prepare for the next Sunday, when they would appear for the first time on The London Palladium Show, British television’s equivale
nt of The Ed Sullivan Show. That is, the Palladium show presented variety and watered-down nightclub acts, polite and ingratiating, for the Sunday evening of the English masses. The Stones had always stayed away from the Palladium, and when the booking was announced, a newspaper commented that “pop groups can no longer rely on teenaged viewers alone to get TV bookings, but must appeal to a wider audience.” To which Jagger said, “Times are changing, and with the changing times comes a different market—one market. We think the Palladium is ready for the Stones, and the Stones are ready for the Palladium.” He was wrong.

  In the last year, as the pop “counterculture” had become more aware of itself—pacifist comrades of illegal sacraments—Mick, Keith, and Brian had grown closer. Oldham used illegal sacraments, too, but he was very fearful of being arrested and would smoke hashish while leaning out of the rear window of his office so he could drop it if the cops came bursting in. He was married, had a two-year-old son, and was quite devoted to making money. He had called the Rolling Stones, in a full-page Billboard ad, “the dividing line between art and commerce,” but he told a reporter, “I want to produce good, progressive pop music, but music which is still commercial. I’m not interested in this psychedelic trash, or taking trips.”

  After the Stones came to the Palladium, things were never the same between them and Oldham. Keith and Brian arrived for rehearsal two hours late, both of them crammed with LSD. Brian, wearing a combination of his and Anita’s clothing, played piano on one song and insisted on placing a large hookah on top where no one could fail to see it. Not trusting the television sound engineers, the Stones brought a tape recording of their instruments, in violation of a musicians’ union ban of taped music. But the main issue was the roundabout, the Palladium’s revolving stage, where each week’s acts gathered at the end of the show to wave and throw kisses at the audience. The roundabout was a great English show-business tradition. Jagger had told the newspapers that the Stones would play the Palladium show, but they wouldn’t go on the roundabout. At the end of rehearsal, Jagger and the Stones refused to revolve. Oldham told the show’s producer, who said that they had to do it, they had no choice. Oldham agreed with the producer and called the Stones’ behavior “atrocious.” Jagger yelled at Oldham, who walked out, saying he didn’t need the heartache.