True Adventures of the Rolling Stones

by Stanley Booth

  The show was now tight, no flat spots. When Mick sang “I’m Free,” all around the front of the stage were gum-chewing kids with glazed eyes, their arms held high, fingers in V-signs. One dark-haired girl, her large shapely bosom in a red and black gypsy blouse, was holding aloft her middle finger, considerably more appropriate. Kids were on the chairs, in the aisles, and in back people were yelling “Sit down.”

  “We’ll all be standing soon,” Mick told them, as Keith, hunching his back, lowering his shoulders, started “Live with Me” with peculiar whawhawha chords. By the time “Satisfaction” began, the room was once again a sea of bobbing bodies, one boy with his shirt off somehow hovering over the crowd, dancing. As “Street Fighting Man” neared its conclusion, Keith opened up his amps all the way and Mick, who’d been scampering along the edge of the stage waving with both hands, snatched up the basket filled with rose petals and scattered them—red rose petals flowing from his hands as if borne along on a breeze of guitar notes—then hurled the wicker basket out twenty yards in a graceful arc, petals drifting slowly down, clapped his Uncle Sam hat on his head and away we went, back to the hotel in limousines. This time I was the only person I knew in the car. For a mad moment I thought we were being kidnapped, but we went back to the hotel. I stretched out on my bed but couldn’t get any rest because people kept coming in, editors and anthologists, literary flotsam, and Cynthia kept phoning, but I wouldn’t take the calls. I lay in bed thinking about Nicole and how she had kissed me at the concert, and how I’d see her tonight at Gore’s.

  Then I was back at the Garden, sitting in section A, row 8, with Wexler’s children, Lisa and Paul, and some of their friends. Michael Lydon and I took an early taxi because we wanted to see B.B., but the show was running late. The lights were still on and we waited, smoking grass. I put some mescaline tablets on my notebook and passed them around. I was taking them not to get high but to stay awake, the speed was running down. We sat through Terry Reid’s loud and boring set, then a long delay, during which we smoked more dope, our silent vigil broken into once by Chip Monck, who said, “We’re recording tonight as well, and it’s complicated, please bear with us.”

  At last B. B. King came out in a blue suit, hands folded together on chest, making his little Afro-Oriental bow. He picked up his guitar Lucille, strapped her on, and sang “Every Day I Have the Blues.” Everybody’s fatigue seemed to fade away as B.B. played. I had seen him at a number of places the year before, among them the Fillmore in San Francisco, the day after Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, and the Club Paradise in Memphis, the city where Martin Luther King was assassinated earlier in the year. In the early fifties B.B. had created the archetypal electric blues guitar style. You could hear his life in his playing—the cows he’d milked, the fields he’d plowed, the streets he’d played on, the miles and years he’d had to travel to get to this night.

  Alone, except for the drummer keeping time on the snare-rim, B.B. played a long ride that became a riff that started to shake as the band came in for “Little Bit of Love.” B.B. played music that got all worried into tight note-cluster knots, then started to boogie and worked its way out of its trouble to ecstasy, perfectly expressive of human hopes, desires, fears, exhaustion, and beauty. Coming back for an encore, B.B. said, “This song is dedicated to you and to the stars of tonight’s show, the Rolling Stones—because without them you wouldn’t have heard B. B. King.” He sang and played the same song he’d dedicated to Bobby Kennedy’s ghost that night in San Francisco, the song that begins, “I don’t even know your name, but I love you just the same—”

  Jerry and Shirley Wexler showed up as B.B.’s set ended and I was headed backstage to speak with him. In the dressing room B.B. seemed tired and sad, and I went out to stand with Mick and watch Tina; this was our last chance to see her on this tour. By the time Mick slunk off to change we had been severely reminded that we were just two skinny white boys.

  Wandering around backstage waiting for the Stones to go on, I noticed a great many heavyset security men. Now, in addition to the stop-sign buttons and the road-sign buttons and the GOD BLESS AMERICA buttons, there were red buttons and white buttons and green buttons. Jo, headed for the Stones’ dressing room wearing all these buttons, said, giving me a green button, “Here, this is Italian power, it’ll take care of you. Jon Jaymes says this is the only one that counts.” Jon was fond of saying that the purpose of his organization was to make people aware that Columbus had discovered America. The Garden had lost the humane atmosphere it had possessed last night and was less freaky but no less tense than the Forum had been. The rear halls were full of strange beef and the audience was already down front, so I stayed behind the stage. When the Stones came out, Jo and Ronnie with them, I joined the tight little group moving on a raft of security men past the backdrop curtain, up the stairs to the stage. But as I climbed the stairs, two men I’d never seen before grabbed me and started to throw me off.

  “Hey! Wait a minute!” I yelled, no time to reason with them. They were shoving me off the side of the stairs, I grabbed their arms, trying not to fall—and Ronnie and a couple of our familiar security men stopped them. “God, you people are rude,” I told the gentlemen who’d been trying to break my neck.

  “Buddy, this is my livelihood,” one of them explained.

  The big clock at the end of the hall said 12:01. It was the first thing everybody saw coming onstage. “I’ll turn into a pumpkin,” Mick said. “Sorry you had to wait—okay, babies.”

  “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” began, and there was that feeling again—the tour was a drag, but when the music started it was all right now. The esthetic of this music—and its morality—demanded that when certain code-patterns of rhythm and melody were achieved, the only decent thing to do, in Joujouka or Congo Square or Madison Square, was to dance. Michael Lydon and I looked at each other, gave mad Indian war whoops and started to dance like medieval believers possessed by the spirit. Everybody was doing it; Mick was dancing like a demonic sprite. The very air was crazy; in spite of the icy smell of Mafia, the place seemed awfully hot. Mick was dripping wet when, at twenty past twelve, he said “Stray Cat.” Sam, bent over like a graverobber, slipped onstage to put a Coke on the drum stand where Mick could reach it, sticking his head under Charlie’s crash cymbal, and Charlie, seeing him, hit it harder. Mick and Keith did the blues songs devoutly, hunched over on their stools with a halo of light around their heads. From the rear of the stage I could see the audience, everybody listening, and the people backstage, nobody listening. “Under My Thumb” and “I’m Free” were very fast, Mick turning his back to the audience, lips curled, making faces at Charlie as if to say, Play harder. Jo, sitting on an amp stage right in an orange lace dress, looking like an eighteenth-century character, clapped time with “Midnight Rambler.” As Mick said, “I’d like to ask you a question—would you like to live with me?”, up the stairs came Leonard Bernstein with his wife, son, and daughter. Somehow Bernstein in his black turtleneck seemed to relax the atmosphere. Ronnie and one of our security men grabbed me—“Who’s this? He’s not with us! Let’s throw him overboard!”—picked me up, both giggling madly, and rushed to the edge of the stage. I was laughing too, suddenly it was a huge party, not so threatening, just another show, the Stones were getting away with it again.

  The lights went up for “Little Queenie,” revealing thousands of lovely berserk kids. During “Satisfaction” somebody in the crowd was waving a crutch overhead. There was that sound again, the high keening wail over all the other sounds, a wild shrieking howl that seemed like the winds of change and joy—but things are seldom what they seem.

  Mick, laughing, jumping straight up in the air, pointed to Charlie: “Charlie’s good tonight, inne?” As “Honky Tonk Women” began, kids were washing onstage, Mick being attacked by a girl in a lavender crushed velvet dress, smiling as Sam and Tony rescued him. Right in front a tall black girl was looking at him, licking her lips. Behind the amps Leonard Bernstein and his family w
ere listening, his son dancing. Keith, turning up his amps, saw me watching and started hitting his guitar strings harder, as Mick threw the rose-petal basket out into the rising wail.

  Then back to the Plaza from the Garden in the limos for the last time. I went out again, to Gore’s party. Nicole was waiting there for me. We went to her apartment and slept very little. In the morning I made it back to the Plaza in time to catch a plane to Boston with the Stones and the Maysles brothers.

  There were news people with tape recorders and cameras waiting as we walked out of the terminal building at Logan Airport. One man, stepping close to Mick, thrusting out a microphone, asked, “Mick, will this be a free concert?”

  “Ask the promoter,” Mick said.

  At the sidewalk, as we were getting into the limos, a large black woman came up and said, “I want yawlses autographs.” Nobody paid any attention to her; everybody piled into the cars, and just before the doors closed she said, “I never will buy no mo’ Rollin’ Stones records.”

  We were driven to the Madison Hotel, which was attached to the Boston Garden, that night’s venue. Up seventeen floors in a funky old elevator, down the badly vacuumed halls, we entered the Rolling Stones’ quarters for the evening, three bedrooms and a suite. I lay down on the first bed I came to. The Maysles brothers were in the same room, dumping their equipment on the floor, talking about how much they loved Boston, their home town; they’d come up on Thanksgiving for two hours just to have breakfast here. Mick came in and sprawled across the bed.

  “I’m sick,” he said, “I ain’t gonna do a whole show, I feel too bad. I hurt in the head, stomach, crotch, and feet. We used to do twenty minutes, we’d do five songs in a show—take the money and run—we didn’t know any better, didn’t know at all what we were doing. We’d play like Savannah and there’d be two people diggin’ it, so we thought what the fuck.”

  Sam came in to tell Mick, who’d asked for soup, that the hotel had no room service. It’s grotesque, how you have to live once you’ve left home, but there it was, no room service. Mick asked Tony to go out to a restaurant for some soup. “Doesn’t matter what kind as long as it’s warm.”

  Tony exited stage right as from stage left, the sitting room door, in came Jon Jaymes, bringing news from the southern front. On the first page of notebook number nine I began writing about the battle of West Palm Beach, where the police had built stockades to contain hundreds of drug arrests. The governor was making arrests personally. Billy Graham had visited, disguised in a fake beard, talking to drug-crazed children in the crowd. The National Guard, on alert, was ready to move in—as were the Stones, ready to move in tomorrow, only now they weren’t so sure they were going, if the things Jon had said were true.

  “I have a friend there,” I said. “He can tell us what’s happening.” I called Charlie Brown in Coconut Grove, left word at the bike shop where he worked, in five minutes the phone rang, Ronnie answered and gave it to me. I told Charlie that I was with the Stones and that we intended to go to the festival.

  “Well, you can go down if you want to,” Charlie said, “but I wouldn’t advise it. I was down there, and I came back up here. It’s all muddy down there and the cops are busting people.”

  “But the Stones got to play a gig down there tomorrow,” I said.

  “Oh, you have to. How are you going in? Are you going to fly to Miami and drive down?”

  “No, we’re going to fly into West Palm.”

  “He doesn’t need to know that,” Sam said, as Ronnie rasped, “He doesn’t need to know that.”

  “Don’t tell him,” snarled Keith, who’d come in at the end of Jaymes’ caveat, making fun of them both.

  “Well, I wouldn’t advise you to come in holding.”

  “That’s not a problem,” I said. “We’re taken care of there.”

  “What is it?” Ronnie asked.

  “He said not to come in holding,” I said.

  “We don’t care about that,” Sam and Ronnie said in unison. I was about to suggest they try for harmony.

  “We’re just worried about the kids,” I told Charlie.

  “Yeah,” Keith said, taking long strides across the room, “if they’re putting kids in a stockade, the kids are going to go wild, and the cops’ll go wild, and then we can’t help but go wild—”

  “So what’s happening to the kids down there?” I asked Charlie, as Keith went on: “The kids’ll look to us for support, and if you can’t give ’em that, what can you give them?”

  “Look,” Charlie said. “Call the sheriff’s department of West Palm Beach County person-to-person, ask him what’s going on, he’s the local jurisdiction. Also you could call Governor Claude Kirk in Tallahassee, except he’s in West Palm Beach at the moment, I don’t know where he’s staying. Call the Miami Herald city desk, maybe they could tell you that.”

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “Fine. I’ve written a poem about Kerouac I’d like you to hear when we get the chance.”

  “Great. See you later.”

  I hung up. “We’ll call down there,” Keith said, “and if they’re doing all that shit we’ll tell them we’re not coming. We don’t want to start any trouble—but if that kind of thing is happening, we can’t help but go berserk and start yelling things—”

  “I’ll call them,” Ronnie said, going into the sitting room.

  Mick was still lying on the bed, bottom lip stuck out, staring at the ceiling. “I’m not gonna change,” he said. “I’m goin’ on dressed like this—” He was wearing green slacks and a red wool sweater.

  Sam, standing at the foot of the bed, leaning to one side, grey-faced, a constant three-day stubble like little insects over his jaws, mustache drooping, eyes worried and motherly, said gently, “Yes, you are, man.”

  “No I’m not,” Mick said.

  Sam took a drag of his cigaret and, hands on hips, peered at Mick through the smoke. “Now I know, man,” he said softly, “that about five minutes before you go on you’ll think, Right, better change—”

  “No I won’t,” Mick said.

  “Yes you will, man,” Sam said, going out.

  And in a few minutes Mick went into the bathroom and coming out asked Sam, who’d returned, “Where’s the makeup?”

  “Come in this bedroom,” Sam said, leading him away.

  Mick came back in uniform, and soon we went down on the antique elevator—its cables slipped, we fell several feet, the white-haired elevator operator looked up at the ceiling with a sad and droopy eye—and went into the Garden, to a small dressing room where the only refreshments were a few Cokes. While the guitars were being tuned, I checked out the arena, saw too many cops, didn’t like the feel, and went back upstairs to take a nap. Just as I was going to sleep, Jo called, wanting to talk to Mick. Before I fell asleep again the doors burst open and in came the Rolling Stones and company, back from the wars. Ronnie was the first in and I told him about Jo’s call as he passed, the steely glint of his sharkskin knifing the gloom. Mick hurled himself face-down onto the bed beside me.

  “Was it a drag?” I asked with complete absence of tact.

  “I couldn’t care less,” Mick mouthed into the pillow.

  “Did you see that Re-elect Wyman to Congress sign?” David Maysles asked.

  “What about that guy with no legs,” Ronnie said. “He came onstage, Sam started to throw him back, lifted him up and from the waist down he wasn’t there. He wanted Sam to set him up on the amplifiers.”

  Taking several sheets of accounting paper from his briefcase, Ronnie sat down on the bed between Mick and me. “This is for the first half of the tour,” Ronnie said, pointing to a figure. $516,736.63. “That’s just through Chicago. I figure you’ll each take home a hundred Gs.” He really said “Gs.”

  “More like ninety,” Mick said.

  “What were those reporters at the airport asking you?” David Maysles asked. “If this was going to be a free concert?”

  “I wanted to do the whol
e tour free,” Mick said, “till I talked to my bank manager. They tell you you’re doing great, you’ve got all this money, until you want to buy something, some chairs or something, and then you discover you don’t—you only give me your funny pay-pah.” He sang the last line.

  “We could take home what we’re grossing if we’d had time to book it ourselves,” Ronnie said. “We could have got eighty-twenty instead of sixty-forty.”

  “The accountant’s dream,” Mick said, waving his fist in a jerkoff gesture. He stretched back on the bed. “We could have done a lot of things, but we only had a week. If I hadn’t gone to Australia we’d never have made it, the Bureau of Immigration took so long to approve us.”

  Tony came in with Chinese food, little paper cartons of bamboo shoots, peapods, beef, rice, but no plastic forks or spoons or chopsticks; instead, popsicle sticks, very tricky to eat with.

  Mick was sitting up in bed, shoes off, socks in different shades of blue, trying to spoon up wonton soup with popsicle sticks.

  “Why don’t your socks match,” Ronnie asked.

  “It’s lucky they’re the same color,” Mick said.

  David Maysles, standing at the foot of the bed trying to eat Chinese chicken, began to swoon.

  “ ’Scuse my feet, man,” Mick told him.

  “Funky,” David said. He moved away, blinking, threw me a glance (how pungent) and I started to laugh. At that moment Sam came in, stopped arms akimbo by the bed, took a deep breath and said, “Cor, your feet don’t arf smell.”

  “I’ve been jumpin’ about onstage for an hour and an arf, that’s why,” Mick growled.