True Adventures of the Rolling Stones

by Stanley Booth

  A thin, dark-haired girl, fifteen at most, asked me, “Would you tell Keith something for the girl who was crying?”

  Keith had mentioned an acid-freaked girl peeking in the trailer windows, crying “Keith, Keith.” Thinking this girl was a friend of hers, I said, “There’s nothing to be done for her, he talked to her already, she shouldna took all that acid.”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “It’s me, please tell him. . . .” She started crying.

  “Did you see that child, little con artist?” I asked Keith when I was back inside on the bed.

  “Yeah, she couldn’t say anything, just ‘Keith, Keith, is it you, are you real?’ I couldn’t do anything for her.”

  Mick and Gram were leaning out the door, talking to people. Gram was wearing brown suede pants and a rhinestoned Nudie shirt with Thunderbirds on the front, Indians on the deltoids, a dancing brave on the back. A little while later Mick and I tried to walk around and see some of the show—Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were playing—but there was no way, it was too crowded, you couldn’t move in the crush and what you could see you didn’t want to be close to. Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas came into the trailer bearing tales of how the Angels were fighting with civilians, women, and each other, bouncing full cans of beer off people’s heads. Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the San Francisco psychedelic manufacturer, known as Owsley, was giving away LSD, the Angels eating it by handfuls, smearing the excess on their faces. It didn’t sound good but there was no way to do anything about it, nothing to do in the center of a hurricane but ride it out.

  Wyman’s helicopter was late, so we waited. Gram and I sat on the bed, smoking and singing Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb songs, until he said, as I was attempting to remind him of the words to “Filipino Baby,” that he thought I had given up music for writing some time ago.

  In the last light of day Wyman and Astrid arrived with a girl who had done some office work for the Stones in Los Angeles.

  “He’s really very nice, you know,” Charlie said to me, talking about Gram. “I’ve been talkin’ to him about San Francisco, and the hippies and all that, and he’s got standards, he goes just so far and no farther. And when that girl came in, he stood up just naturally without thinking about it.”

  Soon we went out to a large yellow canvas tent a few yards away where the guitarists would tune. Jo was still trembling and I walked with my arm around her. The Stones had planned to go on at sunset, but the light was gone. Hell’s Angels were guarding the tent. Inside, on a cardboard table, were a box of Ritz crackers and a chunk of yellow cheese. Keith and Bill and little Mick started tuning. All around the tent, people were trying to peek in. A boy looked into a slit in the canvas and an Angel reached through and pushed his face back.

  I sat on the grass in a corner of the tent with Gram, who was talking as if we were about to leave high school forever. “I really liked what you wrote about our album. Would you write me a letter sometime, I’d sure like to have a letter from you.”

  “Sure, soon as I get the chance,” I told him. I never got the chance.

  “The lines you quoted about not feeling at home anywhere—that was really good, it was really where I was at when we did that album.”

  Jon Jaymes waddled in, giving the Angel at the tent flap a sad look, and I eased over to hear his news. “There are four Highway Patrol cars,” he told Mick. “Those are the only ones available to take you to the airport. We can have them right at the back of the stage, so when you come off—”

  Mick was shaking his head. “Not with the cops,” he said. “I ain’t goin’ out with the cops.”

  “I knew you’d say that,” Jon said.

  For some reason, as he stood surrounded by Hell’s Angels in the world’s end of freakdom denying the only safe way out, I was proud to know Mick Jagger, and I put my arm around his shoulder, on his orange and black satin batwinged outfit, nodding my head in agreement. We looked at each other and began to laugh.

  “Where’s the stage?” Mick asked. We went to the back of the tent and peered out between two folds of canvas at the hastily constructed wooden platform about thirty yards away.

  “Would you mind taking this guitar out there for me?” Keith asked me.

  “Pleasure,” I said. I didn’t mind, and it would give me a chance to get a good position onstage.

  Keith handed me his twelve-string. As I started out, an Angel, very short, maybe five-five, Mexican-looking, oily black curls, straggly whiskers, drooping greasy mustache, said, “I’ll take you there.” I appreciated his help. Night was upon us, and I wouldn’t have wanted to fight my way through the dense backstage crowd. Trucks were parked behind the stage, a narrow passway between two of them. People were everywhere, exhausted, bewildered, lost, expectant. I followed close behind the Angel to the stage, where I handed the guitar to Stu, who looked worried.

  He put the guitar on its wire stand in front of one of Keith’s amps. I stood behind the amps, looking around. People were all over the stage, most of them Angels and their women. The Angels were pushing off everybody who wasn’t an Angel or part of the stage crew. I had seen Angels before, and en masse they were just as lovely as I’d expected, filthy boots and jeans or motorcycle leathers, one bearded specimen wearing a bear’s head for a hat, looking as if he had two ferocious grizzly heads, one on top of the other.

  On the PA system Sam was saying, “The reason we can’t start is that the stage is loaded with people. I’ve done all I can do. The stage must be cleared or we can’t start.” His voice sounded dead tired and flat and beyond caring.

  An Angel—President Sonny Barger of the Oakland chapter, I believe—took the mike and said, in a voice not unlike Howlin’ Wolf’s, “All right, everybody off the stage including the Hell’s Angels,” and people started to move. Angels were on top of the trucks, behind the stage, on the side of the stage, on the steps to the stage. I was holding my notebook, thinking, God, where to begin, when I was wheeled around—All right, off the stage. Looking to see what had me, I found his body to my left, dressed in greasy denim, but no head. Still, he picked me up by the biceps so quickly and brought me with such dispatch to his eye level that I couldn’t complain about losing lots of time. His eyes were hidden under the lank rat-blond hair that fell over his grime-blackened face. There they were, glints in the gloom, but they were not looking at me or at anything, he was so high he was blind, eyeless in Gaza.

  Eyeballs rolling like porcelain marbles in their sockets, jaws grinding, teeth gnashing saliva in anger, “Off the stage” he repeated in mild admonition, gentle reproof. It was that ever fresh, ever new, ever magic moment when you are about to be beaten to a pulp or to whatever your assailant can manage. This one, unlike the old last of the Con­federates cop at the Ed Sullivan show, could, at least with his comrades, pound me into tapioca. I was in midair, still holding my notebook, thinking that I could reach up and thumb his eyes, I could put my hands behind his head and bring my knee up fast, depriving him of his teeth, or I could shove two fingers into his nostrils and rip his face off, but a little bird on the hillside was telling me that the moment I did any of these things, hundreds of Angels would start stomping. I don’t remember what I told him. My next clear memory is of being alone again behind the amps. I wasn’t even wearing any badges. Earlier today, on the way to the helicopter, Ronnie had been talking about newspapermen calling for press passes, not believing there weren’t any. It’s free, he told them, just come. Free at last. Well, not exactly.

  “I just talked to one of the Angels,” Michael Lydon said, appearing at my side.

  “So did I.”

  “I asked him if he liked the Rolling Stones’ music.”

  “Did he?”

  “He said, ‘Yeah, I dig them.’ ”

  The Stones were coming up the four steps between the trucks onto the stage, a brightly lit center in the black fold of hills. The crowd, estimated by the news media at between two and five hundred thousand, had been tightly packed whe
n we struggled through them about five hours ago. Now they were one solid mass jammed against the stage. There were eager-eyed boys and girls down front, Angels all around, tour guards trying to maintain positions between the Angels and the Stones. A New York City detective at Altamont was a long way off his beat. The expressions on the cops’ faces said they didn’t like this scene at all, but they’re not scared, just sorrowful-eyed like men who know trouble and know that they are in the midst of a lot of people who are asking for it. Against the stage, in the center of the crowd, a black cop with a mustache watched, his expression mournful, his white canvas golf-hat brim pulled down as if he were in a downpour.

  Sam came to the singer’s mike and in an infinitely weary voice said, “One, two, testing,” then with a glimmer of enthusiasm, “I’d like to introduce to everybody—from Britain—the Rolling Stones.”

  There was a small cheer from the crowd—they seemed numb, not vibrant like the audiences in the basketball gyms after Tina Turner—whoops and yells and shrieks but not one great roar. Bass-thumps, guitars tuning, drum diddles, Mick: “All right! Whooooh!”—rising note— “Oww babe! Aw yeah! Aww, so good to see ya all! Whoo!” Last tuning notes, then the opening chords of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

  But it’s all right, it’s all right

  In fact it’s a gas

  Some people were dancing, Angels dancing with their dirty bouffant women. A pall of wariness and fear seemed to be upon the people who were not too stoned to be aware, but the music was pounding on and though the drums were not properly miked and the guitars seemed to separate and disappear in places and you couldn’t really hear Wyman’s bass, it was hanging together.

  “Ooh, yah,” Mick said as the song ended. He stopped dancing, looked into the distance, and his voice, which had been subdued, now began to sound pacific, as he glimpsed for the first time the enormity of what he had created. One surge forward and people would be crushed. Half a million people together, with neither rules nor regulations as to how they must conduct themselves, can through sheer physical weight create terrible destruction. “Oooh, babies—” low motherly tone “—there are so many of you—just be cool down front now, don’t push around—just keep still.” He laughed as if he were talking to a child, looking down at the pretty stoned faces before him. “Keep together—oh yah.”

  Keith tested the first three notes of “Carol,” unleashed the riff, and Mick leaned back to sing

  Oh, Carol! Don’t ever steal your heart away

  I’m gonna learn to dance if it takes me all night and day

  The sound was better, drums and bass clearer, guitars stronger. At the end Mick said, “Whoo! Whoo! Aw, yes!” He hoisted a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that was sitting in front of the drums. “I’d like to drink, ah, drink one to you all.”

  Keith set out on “Sympathy for the Devil.” As Mick sang, “I was around when Jesus Christ had his moment of doubt and pain,” there was a low explosive thump! in the crowd to the right of the stage, and oily blue-white smoke swirled up as if someone had thrown a toad into a witches’ cauldron. People were pushing, falling, a great hole opening as they moved instantly away from the center of the trouble. I had no idea people in a crowd could move so fast. Mick stopped singing but the music chugged on, four bars, eight, then Mick shouted: “Hey! Heeey! Hey! Keith—Keith—Keith!” By now only Keith was playing, but he was playing as loud and hard as ever, the way the band is supposed to do until the audience tears down the chicken wire and comes onstage with chairs and broken bottles. “Will you cool it and I’ll try and stop it,” Mick said, so Keith stopped.

  “Hey—hey, peo-ple,” Mick said. “Sisters—brothers and sisters—brothers and sisters—come on now.” He was offering the social contract to a twister of flailing dark shapes. “That means everybody just cool out—will ya cool out, everybody—”

  “Somebody’s bike blew up, man,” Keith said.

  “I know,” Mick said. “I’m hip. Everybody be cool now, come on—all right? Can we still make it down in the front? Can we still collect ourselves, everybody? Can everybody just—I don’t know what happened, I couldn’t see, but I hope ya all right—are ya all right?” The trouble spot seemed still. Charlie was making eager drum flutters, Keith playing stray notes.

  “Okay,” Mick said. “Let’s just give ourselves—we’ll give ourselves another half a minute before we get our breath back, everyone just cool down and easy—is there anyone there who’s hurt—huh?—everyone all right—okay—all right.” The music was starting again. “Good, we can groove—summink very funny happens when we start that numbah—ah, ha!”

  Keith and Charlie had the rhythm pattern going, tight and expert, and Mick asked again to be allowed to introduce himself, a man of wealth and taste, but not about to lay anybody’s soul to waste. Keith’s solo cut like a scream into the brain, as Mick chanted, “Everybody got to cool out—everybody has got to cool right out—yeah! Aw right!”

  Sounding like one instrument, a wild whirling bagpipe, the Stones chugged to a halt. But the crowd didn’t stop, we could see Hell’s Angels spinning like madmen, swinging at people. By stage right a tall white boy with a black cloud of electric hair was dancing, shaking, infuriating the Angels by having too good a time. He was beside an Angel when I first saw him, and I wondered how he could be so loose, nearly touching one of those monsters. He went on dancing and the Angel pushed him and another Angel started laying into the crowd with a pool cue and then a number of Angels were grabbing people, hitting and kicking, the crowd falling back from the fury with fantastic speed, the dancer running away from the stage, the crowd parting before him like the Red Sea, the Angels catching him from behind, the heavy end of a pool cue in one long arc crashing into the side of his head, felling him like a sapling so that he lay straight and didn’t move and I thought, My God, they’ve killed him. But they weren’t through. When he went down they were all over him, pounding with fists and cues, and when he was just lying there they stood for a while kicking him like kicking the dead carcass of an animal, the meat shaking on the bones.

  The song was over and Mick was saying, “Who—who—I mean like people, who’s fighting and what for? Hey, peo-ple—I mean, who’s fighting and what for? Why are we fighting? Why are we fighting?” His voice was strong, emphasizing each word. “We don’t want to fight. Come on—do we want, who wants to fight? Hey—I—you know, I mean like—every other scene has been cool. Like we’ve gotta stop right now. We’ve gotta stop them right now. You know, we can’t, there’s no point.”

  Sam took the microphone. “Could I suggest a compromise, please.” He was a bit more awake now and the soul of peace and reason. “Can I ask please to speak to the—” He stopped then because the logical conclusion was, “—to the Hell’s Angels and ask them please to stop performing mayhem on people.”

  “Either those cats cool it,” Keith said, “or we don’t play. I mean, there’s not that many of ’em.”

  It was a fine brave thing to say, but I had made up my mind about fighting the Hell’s Angels while one of them had me in the air, and probably the rest of the people present had concluded some time ago that the first man who touched an Angel would surely die. Even as Keith spoke an Angel was ripping into someone in front of stage left. “That guy there,” Keith said, “if he doesn’t stop it—”

  There was a pause while another Angel did slowly stop him. Still another Angel yelled to ask Keith what he wanted. “I just want him to stop pushin’ people around,” Keith said.

  An Angel came to the mike and bellowed into it. “Hey, if you don’t cool it you ain’t gonna hear no more music! Now, you wanta all go home, or what?” It was like blaming the pigs in a slaughterhouse for bleeding on the floor.

  Horowitz was leading some of the women in our group back to the trailer. Michael Lydon asked me, “Can I use your notes later? My old lady’s had a bad acid trip and she cut her foot and I need to get her out of here.” Later Michael wrote of the Angels, “Their absolute solidarity mocks
our fearful hope of community, their open appetite for violence our unfocused love of peace.” At the time I thought, Notes? He thinks I’m taking notes?

  Stu, in his blue windbreaker, was at the mike, saying in a cool but unhappy voice, “We need doctors down here now, please. Can we have a doctor down here now to the front?”

  You felt that in the next seconds or minutes you could die, and there was nothing you could do to prevent it, to improve the odds for survival. A bad dream, but we were all in it.

  I looked around, checking my position, which if not the worst was not good, and saw David Maysles on top of a truck behind the stage. Ethan Russell and Al Maysles were up there with their cameras, and more people, including a couple of Hell’s Angels sitting in front dangling their legs over the side like little boys fishing at a creek in the nineteenth century.

  “Hey! David!” I said.

  “You want to get up here?”

  “Sure.” I stuck my notebook behind my belt and swung aboard, being careful not to jostle the Angels. At least now I would be behind them, instead of having it the other way round, which had given me worse chills than the wind did up here. It was cold away from the warm amps but this was, I hoped, a safer place and better to see from.

  Hunkered behind the Angels, I noticed that only one wore colors, the other one in his cowboy hat and motorcycle boots was just a sympathizer. Sam was saying, “The doctor is going through in a green jumper and he’s just here—” pointing in front “wavin’ his hand in the air, look.” The mass, like a dumb aquatic beast, had closed up again except for a little space around the body. (The boy didn’t die, to my—and probably his—surprise.) “Can you let the doctor go through please and let him get to the person who’s hurt?” Someone in front spoke to Sam, who added wearily, “We have also—lost in the front here—a little girl who’s five years old.”

  Charlie was playing soft rolls, Keith was playing a slow blues riff. “Let’s play cool-out music,” Keith said to Mick.