You may be high
You may be low
You may be rich
You may be po’
But when the Lord gets ready
You got to move
As the last note from Keith’s National clanged into silence, Wyman started thumping heavy bass notes for “Under My Thumb.” Many of the early Jagger/Richards songs (except the ones about Mick’s mother) were about girls they met at debutante balls. This one seemed to be no longer in favor with Mick, but Keith liked his guitar part and didn’t have to sing the words.
Under my thumb’s a squirming dog who’s just had her day
Under my thumb’s a girl who has just changed her ways
. . . It’s down to me, the change has come, she’s under my
thumb
Coming with a crash after the gospel truth, the song appeared to draw the audience toward the stage by levitation. Jon and Gary were driven backward, while Pete, incredibly, still ambled down front, bantering with girls in the aisle. Without pausing the Stones went into “I’m Free.” Before the first chorus ended, Jon and Gary had been pulled onstage, Ronnie had run backstage with the crowd snapping at his heels, and even Pete had gotten out of the way.
The New York newspaper critics would judge this concert a failure, not as a musical performance but as a riot. “The biggest surprise at the Garden last night,” the Post reporter wrote, “was that the Stones gave us a nice concert, no more and no less. Did Mick Jagger really think he was going to get busted for inciting to riot in a hall that was built for cigar smoke and the ringing echo of fight announcements?”
If Mick expected arrests and riots, he had said nothing about it; and if a little old riot were all anybody had wanted, things would have been simpler. But the Stones’ last American tour had started with a riot on the East Coast, and there were more than enough sadistic elements floating around to confuse pudgy newspapermen. Sixteen thousand people listened to Mick sing
We all free
if we want to be
You know we all free
and the song ended with a surge of energy that seemed too strong for the Garden to contain. The Stones and their audience were following decent impulses toward a wilderness where are no laws, toward the rough beast that knows no gentle right, nor aught obeys but his foul appetite.
The lights went out, we heard a drum roll and soft, almost whimpering, harp sounds. Three spots, white-red-white, streaked through the arena’s blackness to where Mick, crouched on the purple carpet, was asking, “Did you hear about the Midnight Rambler?” Mick made you feel all the madness and the terror as he purged the demons. The song was the soul of relentlessness: Everybody got to go.
“When suddenly the police move in, it’s very disturbing and you begin to wonder just how much freedom you really have,” Mick had said while awaiting his first trial. Mick talked of freedom, the newspapers talked of riots. Who was more correct? Stay tuned and hear the sad story. But is it freedom a man wants who sings
I’m called the hit-and-run rape her in anger
The knife-sharpened tippytoe
whirling, hands high on small of back, ribs and lips thrust out, then kneeling, swinging his metal-studded belt like a whip. What could he want—and what could they want, those who shriek in ecstasy at his song? And what did I want, watching them, taking notes? Whatever we wanted, it wasn’t what we would get.
Hot orange lights seared the air. Mick, himself again, just having a romp, was saying, “Thank you, now we gonna do one that asks the question, Would you like to live with me?” To which Janis Joplin, backstage left, shouted her rude reply. In front of the stage, a blond girl in a gold vest, a redhead in a rose T-shirt and suspenders, and a brunette wearing a gypsy scarf looked on, gone with the wonder. Keith was shaking his head, lost in the music. Tony was crouching by the piano, alert to snatch Mick from the tidal wave of bodies. “We’d like to see you,” Mick said, and the house lights came on as “Little Queenie” began. A boy by the stage, hands in air, was drumming on heaven’s door. Jagger was grinding his hips, making eye contact with a girl in a petticoat dancing before the stage, his mouth open wide in a big orgasmic smile. Hendrix was smiling, as if saying to himself, This is it, the real rock and roll soup. I couldn’t see anyone who wasn’t smiling. Keith, his eyes closed, was controlling with nods and shakes the rhythm of the entire building—Charlie’s rhythm and through him Bill’s and so little Mick’s and Mick’s and all the way to the back of the Garden.
As “Satisfaction” began, Mick sat down holding a hand mike, one preaching finger waggling overhead. The audience began crashing onto the stage, two girls and a boy coming aboard at once, Sam, Tony, and one of Jaymes’ men running to pick them up and set them gently down on the floor again. The loose women in the crowd helped on the high notes of “Honky Tonk Women,” as Mick requested, and at the end of “Street Fighting Man,” with Keith turning it up all the way and everybody in the place going mad, I started once again to hear over all a high singing sound like the Angel Choir, ringing up in the smoky, metal spines of Madison Square, a noise that much later, as I waited to be locked up, I could hear still ringing and ringing over the sounds of everything else. Down front a man was holding up a (stunned, it appeared) baby for a look. The audience was undulating like one giant creature.
Great red jugs of acid-laced Kool-Aid were being passed around, onto the stage and back into the crowd. The amplifiers were giving off heat and the smell of old-fashioned radios. Keith rested his guitar against his thigh, ripping it up and down like a gunfighter drawing faster and faster, over and over. Mick, by the edge of stage right, started moving backward in reverse-motion picture fashion and sailed the basket of red rose petals high out over the crowd where they hung for a moment, as the Stones unplugged and ran, and then started slowly to descend, floating on the high ringing howl.
We wheeled out of the Garden, stopping to honk at a saw horse somebody had left in front of the exit. A teenaged boy ran out with us, so fast that he kept up for three or four blocks. A few boys and girls followed in cars, not many, but we drove as if we had just robbed the Deadwood stage and, bouncing along, tore off our muffler so we really sounded terrible, racing through town in a limo full of bodyguards, wall-to-wall muscle, loving every second of it.
At the hotel we gathered in Keith’s suite. Wyman went away with Astrid, and Mick went to a party at Jimi Hendrix’s, where he would make off with the lady of the house and bring her to the Plaza for a few days to console him in his woman troubles. (Her name was Devon Wilson; Hendrix’s closest female companion, she was reputed to have an appetite for all kinds of drugs and sex. She would die a few years later of an unexplained fall from a window of the Chelsea Hotel.) At the Plaza I had a stack of messages from Cynthia, but Keith, Charlie, little Mick, Sam, and I went to Slug’s, a jazz club in the East Village that The New Yorker called “a frabjous sort of place, in a somewhat vorpal neighborhood.”
On the way downtown I mentioned that Michael Lydon had told me about B. B. King going off by himself and getting drunk in Philadelphia because he thought he’d done a bad show.
“It’s good that he still gets so upset,” Keith said. “You got to be able to do it every night, and it ain’t easy. Especially if you ain’t done it in three years.”
After driving around several wrong blocks we found Slug’s. The neighborhood was dark, but inside the place was crowded and noisy with the sounds of the Tony Williams Lifetime—Williams on drums, John McLaughlin on guitar, and a white organ player. “Is there somebody who can get us a table?” Keith asked. I shoved up to the bar and said to the light-skinned, leading-man-style black bartender, “The Rolling Stones are here, could you have somebody get them a table—”
“Man,” he said, drawing a beer, “we don’t—”
“Cater to Rolling Stones?”
“That’s right,” he said—so hip and aloof that I was delighted—saying with a shrug that it may count for something uptown, all that popularity and screami
ng and money, but down here the only thing that counts is musicianship, mother.
“If you stay as straight as you are, you’ll go to heaven,” I said, and not looking up, still drawing beer, he smiled.
“Do you sell them drinks?” I asked.
“Sure, man,” he said. I gave him an order and he said he’d send them to our table, there ought to be some space down front, and sure enough there were a couple of small tables. The Lifetime were starting another song, or whatever it was they played for half an hour at a time: sometimes melodies, sometimes noises, Williams sweating, doing things for sound effects—putting a mike inside his hi-hat cymbal and pulling it out as he closed it with an odd swipp! Lost chords strayed up from the organ, McLaughlin played weird noises on guitar. The music had little emotional appeal but they played with energy and enthusiasm, and it held your attention if only because it changed completely every couple of minutes. At one point Williams played a bopshoobop! bopshoobop! boogaloo pattern and Charlie said, “That’s the only thing he’s played all night that I play myself, actually.”
Finally it was getting on toward dawn and the driver, who’d come in to listen with us, went out and brought the car around, and we went back to the hotel. “I’d never play anything like that,” Keith said as we were driving along, “but it’s good to go hear it.”
At the Plaza Keith and I told Charlie, little Mick, and Sam good night and went to Jon Jaymes’ room because Keith didn’t have his key in his no-pockets pants. Jon came to the door in his white boxer shorts, hair rumpled, face rumpled. Keith told him to call a bellman while I went in and pissed in his—not his hat—his toilet, swaying a little, drunk and so tired, hadn’t slept right since I didn’t know when. We left Jon’s and went down to sit on the rug in the corridor outside Keith’s room. In a minute or two here came a little worried-looking Italian bellman. He let us in and I bribed him, because Keith had no cash, to go somewhere in the New York night—no room service at this hour—and fetch us back one cheeseburger, one hamburger, two Cokes, and one pot of tea.
“I’ve got something in here that might interest you,” Keith said when the bellman left. Going into the bedroom, sitting down on the bed, he opened a drawer of the bedside table and took out a couple of capsules filled with white powder.
“No, not me,” I said.
“Huh?” Keith said, looking up. “I’ve seen you do coke.” Then he saw I was joking and opened the caps into two piles on a small tray.
“This is heroin,” Keith said. “I don’t do it very often, just take it when you get it—keep it around, you get hung up on it.” He split each pile in two and sniffed two up, using the gold bamboo he wore on a gold chain around his neck, then handed me the tray and bamboo and headed for the living room. I inhaled the other two mounds of bitter powder and followed. Keith was in a corner threading a tape into his recorder, which was old and grey and looked like something John Garfield would use to call Dane Clark in a World War II jungle picture.
“Got something I want you to hear,” he said. “Memphis Minnie—and some other things.” The tape started, indecipherable. “Ah, it’s not wound properly.” Keith shook the recorder and it rattled as if it were about to fall apart. After a couple of shakes it was working fine, playing a tape of blues from the twenties and thirties—Minnie Douglas, Curley Weaver, Butterbeans and Susie. I went into my much-rehearsed speech about how the old bluesmen had been ripped off.
“This is a great song,” Keith said.
“You can go to college, you can go to school,” Washington Phillips sang, “but if you ain’t got Jesus you’s an educated fool—”
The bellman arrived with our food and I was so relaxed and vaguely nauseated from the heroin that I took one bite of my hamburger and put it down. Keith didn’t eat either. Lucille Bogan sang “Shave ’Em Dry,” which begins, “I got nipples on my titties big as the end of yo’ thumb, I got somethin’ ’tween my legs can make a dead man come—” and goes on from there to get dirty. We talked about the kids who came to the shows night after night, wondering how they really felt, a mystery to all of us. I thought of Mick onstage waving to the crowd with one hand in a V-sign, the other making a clenched fist. “I don’t think they understand what we’re trying to do,” Keith said, “or what Mick’s talking about, like on ‘Street Fighting Man.’ We’re not saying we want to be in the streets, but we’re a rock and roll band, just the reverse. Those kids at the press conferences want us to do their thing, not ours. Politics is what we were trying to get away from in the first place.”
The tape ended and whipped around in the machine till the spinning ran down. Outside it was dawn, rose-gold light filtering through the long Plaza windows. We were both exhausted, eyes closing. “I think I’m gonna zonk, man,” Keith said.
“Me too, if I can just make it to bed.” I thanked Keith, went up to my room, undressed looking out at Central Park in the morning mist, lay down on the bed, manfully intending to make some notes, and fell asleep with my notebook on my chest, good night.
26
And when the curtains part, and you see a flailing mass of waving arms, it just does something to you. Right inside. There’s a swaying and a roaring. Screams? I’ve heard some groups say they don’t like them. Well, okay for them. But we like the screams. It’s all part of it, the whole proceedings, do you see? That two-way thing all over again. Sometimes that atmosphere gets real tight. It feels as if it could snap.
BRIAN JONES
IN THE MIDDLE of June 1967 Brian Jones and Andrew Oldham —both of them drifting and being pushed out of the Stones’ circle—were in California at the Monterey Pop Festival, hearing music by Otis Redding and Jimi Hendrix that was far better than any the Stones were then able to produce. Brian, dressed in layers of velvet and lace from the Chelsea Antique Market, stupefied with drugs, in films of the festival looks blurred, almost transparent. “Dying all the time/Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind,” Mick had sung on the B side of the last single, “Ruby Tuesday,” on which Brian had played ethereal, not to say haunting, flute. The last thing, Stu said, Brian ever did for the Stones.
In Chichester, on June 27, Keith and Mick appeared before Judge Leslie Block at the West Sussex Quarter Sessions, Mick in an applegreen jacket and olive trousers, Keith wearing a navy frock coat and a lace-collared shirt. Mick’s case was considered first, with Malcolm Morris, Queen’s Counsel, leading for the prosecution and Michael Havers, Q.C., for the defense. Chief Inspector Gordon Dinely, the first witness, testified that on February 12, at about eight o’clock in the evening, he and eighteen other police officers, three of them women, went to Redlands and found there one woman and eight men, among them Michael Philip Jagger.
Sergeant John Challen of the police party testified that in searching the premises, “I first went into the drawing-room and then went upstairs to a bedroom. There I found a green jacket, in the left-hand pocket of which I found a small phial containing four tablets. I took the jacket downstairs and Jagger admitted the jacket belonged to him and that his doctor prescribed them.” Challen asked Mick who his doctor was, and Mick said, “Dr. Dixon Firth, but I can’t remember if it was him.” Asked what the tablets were for, Mick said, “To stay awake and work.”
Called by the defense, Dr. Firth testified that the tablets, which were amphetamine, had not been prescribed by him, but that Mick had told him he had them and asked if they were all right to use. The doctor remembered this conversation as having taken place sometime before February and his having advised Mick that they were to be taken in an emergency but not regularly.
The doctor and the prosecutor exchanged opinions as to the propriety of telling Mick he could have the drugs and whether Mick’s conversation with the doctor amounted to a prescription. Judge Block said he had no hesitation in saying that it did not, and that the only legitimate defense, a written prescription, was therefore not open to Michael Jagger. “I therefore direct you,” he told the jury, “that there is no defense to this charge.”
Within five minutes the jury came back with a guilty verdict. Judge Block granted Mick an appeal certificate and remanded him in custody at Lewes Prison. The London Times reported: “Mr. Jagger was driven from the building in a grey van with others prisoners on remand. Just before the van was driven out, about a dozen schoolgirls banged their fists on the closed yard gates, tried to scramble over them, and screamed, ‘We want Mick.’ ”
On the second day of the trial, Keith, in a braid-trimmed black suit, met with the same judge and counsels before a new jury and pled not guilty to letting Redlands be used for smoking cannabis. The proceedings began with submissions concerning the relevance of certain evidence. Judge Block ruled that, within limits set by Mr. Morris, certain parties should not be named but the evidence should be submitted. Mr. Morris explained to the jury that it was necessary for him to prove that Keith had willfully and knowingly allowed cannabis to be smoked. The evidence would show, he said, that incense was being burned at Redlands to cover up the odor of cannabis. “That there was a strong, sweet smell of incense in these premises will be clear from the evidence,” Morris said, “and you may well come to the conclusion that that smell could not fail to have been noticed by Keith Richards. There was ash—resulting from cannabis resin and smoking Indian hemp—actually found on the table in front of the fireplace in the drawing room where Keith Richards and his friends were. The behavior of one of the guests may suggest that she was under the influence of smoking cannabis resin in a way which Richards could not fail to notice.”
The English newspapers, including The Times, ran photographs of Marianne Faithfull near the unnamed female guest part of the story. Years later she would confirm that the green velvet jacket and the amphetamines Mick was jailed for having were hers. The trial ruined whatever shred of good repute she might have had.
True Adventures of the Rolling Stones Page 35