Thinking of the Band, the group of musicians brought together by Ronnie Hawkins, the Arkansas Flash, that had been rustled from him by Bob Dylan and had then left Dylan to go on their own, Wexler recalled the session he’d produced not long ago with Hawkins in Muscle Shoals. Hawkins had come into the dry Alabama county in his private plane with his private case of booze and dope and Miss Toronto. “I got my pot, my pills, and my pussy,” he said. “Let’s go to work.” Wexler played some of the tracks as we talked.
The Wexlers had seen things the likes of which would never be seen again, and I lusted to hear about them. They had gone to Café Society Downtown when they were too young to be served liquor. They’d been there the night Tallulah Bankhead came in and watched Billie Holiday’s first set (Billie in the spotlight, trademark white gardenia in her hair) and then the two great ladies went into Billie’s dressing room and didn’t come out for the second set.
We were waiting for Wexler’s mother to arrive so we could have dinner. Anita showed up with her boyfriend Jimmy, stayed briefly and left. The Wexlers’ son Paul was in from some kind of experimental college in California, Norman Mailer on its board of directors. Finally Wexler’s mother arrived, a small grandmother-shaped lady with darkened hair. She had just come from seeing an osteopath who’d given her an adjustment. “But I can’t say what kind of adjustment.”
“Sure you can,” Wexler said.
“A coccygeal adjustment. And no more backaches.”
Wexler sat her down and gave her a glass of sherry. She had taken a cab from the train station because Wexler’s limousine driver was sick. Shirley called the driver to see if he could take Mrs. Wexler and me to the train later. The man’s wife said he was still sick. “If he’s sick, he’s sick,” Shirley said in Long Island double-talk.
“I’ll see nobody misses the train,” Wexler said.
Lisa, the Wexlers’ younger daughter, fifteen, had joined us. Dark-haired, with shapely high cheekbones, she cast demure but intense glances from dark, long-lashed eyes. “I’d be glad not to ride in the limo,” she said.
“Lisa hates the limo,” Wexler said. “She makes the driver let her out a block from school.”
Lisa made an elegant, feline shudder.
When it was time for dinner I lingered in the sitting room to telephone Jon Jaymes. “Be sure, you bastard, I can get in—put my name on the backstage pass list. I don’t want to be standing outside in the fucking snow.”
“You got your button? Nothing to worry about.”
We ate goose, broccoli, potatoes, and drank fine red wine while Ronnie Hawkins sang “Down in the Alley” and other good songs. Wexler talked about how much he enjoyed recording with Southern musicians. “I’ve always wished my kids could grow up in the South,” he said.
“My God, whatever for?” his mother asked. In spite of her years, she was, Wexler had told me, quite active on the political left—always out leafletting shopping centers, that kind of thing. She would call Wexler to tell him where she was going so he could bail her out if she got arrested.
“Because the good people in the South understand bwotherhood better than anybody else in this country,” Wexler said, but his mother looked skeptical, knowing how fallible he was, her son the record millionaire.
Soon after dinner Wexler’s mother and I said goodbye to Shirley and the kids and Wexler drove us to the station. Wexler and I made plans to meet at the Stones’ show the following night.
On the train I heard how Wexler had made his mother suffer. Once again—or still—slightly drunk, I had been telling Mrs. Wexler what a great man her son was in the history of American music, and she said, “Do you really think so?”
“It ain’t what I think, it’s what’s so. Haven’t you seen all them interviews?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was very worried about Gerald when he was younger. He wanted to be a writer and I wanted him to be one—sent him to journalism school in the Midwest. . . .” She told me that Wexler didn’t knuckle down and work hard in school and she finally had to come out to Kansas and extricate him from the clutches of the shiksa he was shacked up with and bring him back to New York where she locked him in his room to write. “But he started fooling around with music, and I guess he’s done well enough at it.” A worrier, like all good mothers.
At Penn Station I saw Mrs. Wexler safely to a taxi and walked around to the back door of the Garden. The streetlights were shining on the piles of dirty snow in the gutters and on the sidewalks. Outside the door long-haired boys and girls in warm coats crowded around a folding chair where sat a white-haired, ruddy-cheeked Irish cop. I showed him my flag badge and it meant nothing to him; just as I’d expected, I was a fool standing out in the cold with a GOD BLESS AMERICA button.
I asked the cop to check for my name on the guest list, and he went inside and returned to tell me that nobody knew nothing about no list. He was polite and unperturbed and in my frustration I had to admire his cool.
On that crest of mixed feelings, the door opened and Jon Jaymes beckoned me inside. I went down the hall to the Stones’ dressing room, where for a moment I was alone with the concrete block walls and hard benches. I heard voices and in came the Stones with Jimi Hendrix. They were followed by the Maysles brothers, tape and film rolling.
Jagger took off his shirt and walked around; Albert followed him, filming. Mick Taylor and I sat on a bench with Hendrix, who seemed subdued but pleasant. I told him about seeing Little Richard, and he said, smiling as if it cheered him up to think about it, that once when he was with Richard, he and the bass player bought ruffled shirts to wear onstage, and Richard made them change: “I am the beauty! Nobody spoze to wear ruffles but Richard!”
Mick Taylor handed his guitar to Hendrix and asked him to play. “Oh, I can’t,” he said. “I have to string it different.” Hendrix was left-handed, but he went ahead and played the guitar upside down, a wizard he was.
As Hendrix played I went into the bathroom, where Jagger was putting mascara on his lashes. Hendrix had tried to take Marianne Faith-full away from Mick, who wasn’t about to stand around and listen to him play, upside-down or sideways. I told him about my afternoon with Wexler. He seemed distracted, I figured because he was about to go onstage. I didn’t know that in the distance a black girl was telling him she was going to have his baby, and a blond girl (who two weeks ago had been threatening to join the tour) was telling him goodbye. Back at the Plaza in a few hours, Jo would write in her notebook, “Tried talk Mick imposs—concert fantastic—Mick better but must keep his mind on necessary things.” He listened politely, or appeared to, till I finished talking about Atlantic and the Magrittes; then, with the Stones changing into their stage drag, I went out to see the show.
In the hall I saw another of the next year’s ghosts, Janis Joplin, heading for the Stones’ dressing room. Because I’d heard that something I had written about her had made her angry, I avoided her. The next day, when I came into the Garden for the afternoon show, Bill Belmont told me that Janis, being stopped at the Stones’ door—because, as nobody got a chance to tell her, they were mostly naked—stuck her head in and gave the middle-finger salute to what must have been a surprised bunch of Rolling Stones. I think she was drunk, not an unusual state for her. Later tonight, when Jagger, onstage, sang “Don’t you want to live with me?” Janis would yell, “You don’t have the balls!”
It was cold in the Garden, under the high arches and giant mushroom spines. Terry Reid and B. B. King had already played and Tina Turner was onstage singing the Otis Redding song, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” her sleek red beauty shimmering in a black dress, back arched, legs bowed, one arm thrust out, testifying as she had been for years to drunks in juke joints and cuttin’ parlors. Ike was standing back from the spotlight, small and black and nasty, eyeballs glowing under his shiny processed Beatle cut, chopping chords as if in anger. This afternoon Wexler, who often saw the Turners when they were in New York, said, “He’s really got the fear of God
in her.” As you watched them, you couldn’t help wondering if Mother Nature were married to the Devil.
Tina sang “Respect” and “Come Together,” eyes bleached out in the spotlight, her pupils swimming white slits. When the band geared up for “Land of 1000 Dances,” Janis Joplin stepped onto the rear of the stage, stomping with delight, and Tina called her to the front. Janis looked for once in her life completely happy; it was plain that she would love to nose around in Tina’s crotch all night long. “Roll over on your back—y’know I like it like that,” they sang together, Ike’s guitar whipping them, and Janis pulled off her little crocheted cap and threw it into the air.
After Tina and Janis finished there was a delay during which the audience had contact flashes from what they had seen and the recording equipment was prepared for the Stones. How can they follow this, I asked myself, as I did at almost every show. After watching Tina in Oakland, Mick had said that he wasn’t cocky anymore; but he was still following her. I went backstage, and Mick was wandering among the Coke bottles and folding chairs, looking rather lost and forlorn. The others kept their distance. He was about to be consumed, and there was a reverent silence between them. With his blue-beaded moccasins and black pants with silver leg buttons (only back here you can see they’re not silver, just shiny in the spotlight), little black jersey, his scarf dragging, hair hanging limp, chin slumped over gold-medallioned choker, Uncle Sam hat in hand, Mick seemed not bored but not comfortable, making little sounds under his breath as if to say, What a dumb thing this is, waiting.
As time passed and nothing happened, I went out front again into the smoky darkness. No one seemed to mind the wait. “Ain’t nothin’ any good without it has some grease on it,” Tina (the former Annie Mae Bullock, of Brownsville, Tennessee) had said, and she and Janis had left the audience greased and pleased. There were guards, but they weren’t wearing togas, and the few police didn’t seem intent on ruining a good time. The atmosphere was, if not relaxed, at least secure—perhaps because we were on an island in a giant tin can, concrete and metal shell, and no apparent threat to anybody.
Stu, walking across the stage to check a microphone, dressed in his pale-yellow tuxedo with shiny satin lapels, caused a ripple of applause, which he answered with a V-sign—very satirical, Stu. Then the stage was deserted and out of the stillness a disembodied cockney voice mused, “Everyone seems to be ready, are you ready?”
Yesss, the crowd answered in a snow-slide’s whisper-roar, Yesss.
“For the first time in three years,” Sam Cutler said, getting louder, “the greatest rock and roll band in the world, the Rolling Stones!”
The big yellow-blue-white spot bleached out Jagger as he came on-stage, twirling overhead his Uncle Sam hat, not smiling, gaze fixed on fate. In a breathless rush of silence the Stones came out, Charlie settling onto the drums, the others, quick and businesslike, plugging their guitars into the amplifiers, twisting dials, setting levels, until Keith hit the opening chords of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” Mick started to howl about being born in a crossfire hurricane, and the kids all stood up and screamed. Glyn Johns stopped me in the corridor at the Plaza the next day to say that he had been backstage in a sound truck and the truck was jumping on its springs. “So I got out to see who was shaking it—I thought there might be some kids on top of it—but there was nobody there, the truck was just picking up the vibrations from the house, the whole bloody building was shaking.”
As “Jack Flash” ended, Mick, buttoning his trousers, said by way of greeting, “Think I busted a button on me trousers, hope they don’t fall down. You don’t want me trousers to fall down, now do ya?”
Yesss, the crowd answered, as Keith started “Carol,” standing beside Mick in the spotlight, surrounded by a glimmering halo of rhine-stones on his Nudie shirt.
“We are making our own statement,” Brian had said in one of the interviews the publicity office arranged to keep him from feeling left out. “Others are making more intellectual ones.”
What message would you get if you were fifteen years old, standing in a cloud of marijuana smoke inside a crowded, cavernous hall, face reflecting the red and blue and yellow lights, watching Charlie hit the drums as hard as he was able, Bill slide his tiny hands over the skinny neck of his erect light-blue bass causing a sound like booming thunder, little Mick stare with wide eyes as if he were hearing an earthquake’s faint premonitory quiverings, Keith bend over his guitar like a bird of prey, Jagger swoop and glide like some faggot vampire banshee, all of them elevated and illuminated and larger and louder than life? A few years later, a New Yorker writer would observe, “The Stones present a theatrical-musical performance that has no equal in our culture. Thousands and thousands of people go into a room and focus energy on one point and something happens. The group’s musicianship is of a high order, but listening to Mick Jagger is not like listening to Jascha Heifetz. Mick Jagger is coming in on more circuits than Jascha Heifetz. He is dealing in total, undefined sensual experience of the most ecstatic sort.”
By the time that was written, Mick had sung “Midnight Rambler” in pink top hat and tails; after Altamont, the Stones would for reasons of self-preservation turn toward comedy. But in 1969, few people at Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving Day thought that what the Stones were doing was a performance.
The Stones had first come to the United States in 1964, fewer than six years before. They had done five U.S. tours in three years, then were stopped for almost three years. Since then they had become world-famous idols, outlaws, legends, relics, and one was now a corpse. They had been more than lucky to find a guitarist who was docile and played, though not as Brian once had, excellent bottleneck. One problem they’d had preparing to tour was choosing songs that Keith and Mick Taylor could play. Hence “Carol” and “Little Queenie,” Keith’s Chuck Berry specialties, and hence the difficulty Jagger had mentioned of getting the old things together. The old things had featured, as Stu said, “two guitar players that were like somebody’s right and left hand.”
The people inside Madison Square Garden on this Thanksgiving had, most of them, lived through a time of cold war, hot war, race riots, student riots, police riots, assassinations, rapes, murders, trials, waking nightmares. But Keith, Mick, Charlie, Bill, and the new guitar player were impersonating the Rolling Stones, and the audience were impersonating their audience, both of them at the moment a great success. Dancing under the circumstances (“Oh, Carol! Don’t ever steal your heart away—I’m gonna learn to dance if it takes me all night and day!”) seemed to have a transcendent value. Many people thought then that dancing and music could have a major role in changing the structure of society. They may have been naive, but they were much more interesting than the sensible people who came along later. The Stones would tour the United States every three years for a long time to come, and the value of dancing would never be less than transcendent, but at Woodstock, only a few months before and a few miles away, music had seemed to create an actual community. There was—at this time, for many members of this generation—a sense of power, of possibility, that after Altamont would not return.
When “Sympathy for the Devil” began and it became clear that nobody was going to sit down, I went around back and climbed the stairs to the stage. Hendrix was sitting behind one of Keith’s amplifiers. Keith was a twisted figure, torturing his guitar strings in the red spot-light, his blistering solo saving the song now as it did on the record. The lyrics were ponderous, but they were written by a man who’d done some thinking on the nature of evil.
So if you meet me
have some courtesy
have some sympathy
and some taste
Use all your well-learned politesse
or I’ll lay your soul to waste
While Keith played, Mick took long drinks from a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and a can of Stauffer’s beer. Ten feet in front of the stage Jon Jaymes and Gary Stark were trying to hold back the crowd, among them a tall, electric-haire
d boy in a bow tie, chewing gum with big open-mouthed smacks. A couple of yards to the rear Pete Bennett prowled, cigar in jaw, smiling, nobody going near him.
Because they had gone on to release three albums of new material during the three-year layoff, the Stones had for this tour many songs never performed in public. There was nothing in the set from Their Satanic Majesties Request, an album done, as Jagger said, “under the influence of bail.” It was futuristic and introspective and, because Brian was devastated by the events of his life, lacked guitar interplay. By the time the Stones recorded the next album, Beggar’s Banquet, Keith had learned bottleneck. The band had stopped depending on Brian for anything; if Keith could have played bottleneck and rhythm at the same time onstage, they would never have needed another guitar player. The current set consisted of four songs from Banquet, four from Let It Bleed, two by Chuck Berry, two early Stones songs that featured Keith’s guitar, the last three singles, and “Satisfaction.” As Stu said, “If Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, and myself had never existed on the face of this earth, Mick and Keith would still have had a group that looked and sounded like the Rolling Stones.”
“Sympathy” ended with the aisles packed, the air filled with shrill cheers. As the Stones had changed from social misfits to satanic majesties, the stupid girls grown up wrong had become stray cats. “Bet y’mama don’t know you can bite like that.” Jagger took off the black choker hung with gold coins, tossing it behind him, leaning across the stage-front, shaking his ass at the stray cats, his red scarf swirling.
Learning bottleneck had led Keith, and so the Stones, deep into country blues. Mick sang the opening lines of “Love in Vain” in a blue spot, and as Mick Taylor’s bottleneck answered, the Stones were caught by seven blue spots, two each on Mick and Keith. The next two songs, “Prodigal Son” and “You Got to Move,” had been too intimate (“It’s a wank”) to rehearse. Keith and Mick did them alone, perched on stools, the rock and roll audience listening intently, nobody sitting down, to the songs of old black men too poor to put glass in their windows.
True Adventures of the Rolling Stones Page 34