There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll

by Robinson, Lisa

  I had smoked enough pot in my life to know that all it did was make me want to eat a cake and go to sleep. Like every girl I knew in the 1960s, I took Dexamyls so I would be thin enough to wear Betsey Johnson and Rudi Gernreich minidresses and dance at discos like Arthur and Ondine all night. I’d take the gentle tranquilizer Miltown (sadly, no longer made) to fall asleep. I took mescaline once in the ’60s, looked in the mirror and my face turned into a cat. It was a horrendous experience; I was ill for twenty-four hours after the hallucinations wore off and never took it again. In 1970, I must have been unknowingly dosed at a press party with either very strong hash in a brownie or acid, because right afterwards I went to a movie theater to see a restored version of Pinocchio and I started screaming, “He’s a real boy! He’s a real boy!” Richard had to practically carry me out of the theater. I was the drug prude on the 1973 and 1975 Led Zeppelin tours and on the entire 1975 Rolling Stones summer tour. And with just about any other band that took drugs—which is just about any other band. I never indulged in any of the available free cocaine. Frankly, it wasn’t even a temptation. To me, everyone sounded like a babbling idiot on cocaine. I talked enough as it was. This abstinence often allowed me to remain invisible while present. I could observe.

  *

  When the Stones’ 1975 tour first began, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman were suspicious about giving a journalist access to their inner circle. Keith Richards was completely oblivious to my presence. Newly added guitarist Ronnie Wood, who I’d previously interviewed with the Faces, was delighted to have someone around who paid any attention to him at all. The band took rooms on entire floors of hotels where only those in the official touring party were allowed to stay. Mick’s alias in the hotels was Michael Benz. Keith’s was Keith Bentley. Looking back now at the room lists from that tour, only four people are still with the Stones today: Mick, Keith, Woody, and Charlie. Dead are Ian Stewart, Billy Preston, Ron Wood’s guitar tech Chuch Magee, and publicist Paul Wasserman. Except for Charlie, all of the band members have different wives. Peter Rudge has gone on to do other things. Annie Leibovitz is still Annie Leibovitz. The other tour photographer, Christopher Simon Sykes, a friend of Mick’s by way of various Ormsby-Gores, emerged from the experience unscathed and is now a respected photographer and author. At the time, the tour seemed so big, so important, so major. Whatever tour you’re on feels like it’s the center of the universe—whether it’s the Rolling Stones or a small band slogging across the country in a van to play clubs. In the case of the Stones or Zeppelin, there was a police escort. Without that escort, it’s just a bunch of guys going somewhere. In retrospect, it was just a tour. And, compared to the big-business, corporate-sponsored, soulless tours of today, it was rather like the way Mick described his own 1964 performances to me, “ingenue.”

  *

  By 1975, there had been other female rock journalists—Ellen Sander, Lillian Roxon, Gloria Stavers, Ellen Willis, Janet Maslin—but there were no other women journalists on that Stones tour. The rock world always was, and still is, predominantly a boys’ club. Often, I was the only woman in the room and certainly the only one who wasn’t sleeping with any of them. I wanted to keep everything professional, to get the stories. For me, the lure was always the music. But if you’re not having sex with someone on a tour, or participating in the drugs, you really are on a different tour than everyone else. I took an occasional hit off a joint or from a water pipe in Keith Richards’ rooms a couple of times. Or I’d take one of the prescription tranquilizers I carried to calm me down during flights. But over the course of the summer, Mick—who was always coming up to me backstage to ask if I had any extra Miltowns—depleted my supply.

  *

  Frankly, as far as I knew, the tour wasn’t really all that wild. Maybe some of the more explosive stories that had come out of the Stones’ 1972 tour were told by those enjoying their first taste of the sybaritic rock and roll road life. Perhaps I had seen this world two years earlier through the eyes of Led Zeppelin, who certainly were more flamboyant about their excesses. Years later, Keith and I discussed Cocksucker Blues, the Robert Frank–directed, unreleased, grainy black and white, X-rated “documentary” of the Stones’ 1972 tour. It showed Keith shooting up in a hotel room and groupies engaging in sexual activities on the band’s plane. “You have to really want to see it to see it,” Keith said. “It’s like watching the only copy of The Birth of a Nation. The legend is bigger than the actual movie.”

  In one of our interviews, talking about sex on the road, Mick said, “People have a lot of different ways of letting out their inhibitions. Like, they fuck a lot, or destroy rooms. One takes it out on a lot of people. I personally don’t think that’s the best way of doing it. Sex is quite important, sex does give you a lot of release. I get a lot of release of tension, just physically anyway, onstage. If I was just standing like Bill, I think I’d go mad.”

  In reviews, Bill Wyman was always described as having the demeanor of a friendly undertaker. He was smart, had a dry sense of humor, but it appeared to me that the rest of the band didn’t really like him very much. Everyone thought he was a very good bass player. But he just didn’t seem to . . . swing. (Imagine my surprise years later when I discovered just how much he did swing in the female department; he’d apparently been quite the ladies’ man for years.) His then-wife Astrid and son Stephen accompanied Bill on the entire 1975 tour, and he was obsessed with making videotapes of old Laurel and Hardy movies. Onstage, he stood perfectly still. He didn’t move a muscle except to chew gum and play bass. I’d often stand in the photographers’ pit—down in front of the stage between the barricade that separated the stage from the audience—and make faces at Bill, trying to get him to crack a smile. Sometimes it worked; usually it didn’t. But he was always fair game for a joke at his expense. One night we were all backstage and the band was about to go on. Bill was across the room, wearing a truly dreadful pair of shoes. I muttered to Mick, “He’s not going on in those shoes, is he?” To which Mick promptly yelled across the room, “OH BILL, LISA WANTS TO KNOW IF YOU’RE GOING ON IN THOSE SHOES????”

  • • •

  On May 30, 1975, a bus was parked outside Peter Rudge’s office on West 57th Street in New York City. It would take the TOTA touring party to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, where the band’s jet (affectionately called the “Starship”) was waiting to take us to New Orleans and the start of the tour. Carly Simon, who was rumored to have had a fling with Mick, just happened to walk by the bus, wearing a striped dress and carrying a Henri Bendel’s shopping bag. (A well-known music-business lawyer once told me, “If Carly could live in an apartment above Bloomingdale’s, she would.”) I scribbled on one of the pink Beverly Hills Hotel pads that I used for notes: “Three months. What did I get myself into?” And so, the tour began.

  Keith arrived at Teterboro two hours late with Ron Wood. Then, we couldn’t take off until Ronnie and the lawyers went over some papers. The Stones’ plane was the same 707 I had traveled on with Zeppelin in 1973 and 1975. They had thought it was elegant. Mick took one look at the maroon shag carpeting, gilt-covered bar, vinyl sofas, black-fur-covered bed in the back bedroom and muttered to me, “It’s so tacky.”

  In New Orleans we checked into the Royal Orleans Hotel—where I had first interviewed Led Zeppelin in 1973. After the dress rehearsal in Baton Rouge we went back to the hotel, and Mick wanted to read the article I was going to send to the NME about the start of the tour. He came into Peter’s office, sat down next to me on a sofa, and I handed him my typewritten pages. He started to read aloud in a campy, exaggerated falsetto, and after a few sentences, he just cracked up laughing. “You have a much harder job than I do, dear,” he said. He never asked to read anything I wrote again.

  It was eighty-four degrees in New Orleans, which, in 1975, was considered sweltering. The following afternoon, Mick was in the elevator, holding a copy of Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen. He told me he had to wait too long for room
service and was considering getting a hot plate to cook his own eggs. (Years later, soul singer Solomon Burke told me tales of how he always cooked his own food on hot plates in hotels. And Martha Reeves told me about how, when the Motown acts toured in the 1960s and had no money and slept on their bus, they used to cook eggs on the radiators in their tiny dressing rooms.) In the lobby of the hotel, Geraldo Rivera, who was there to interview Mick for his local New York City television show, signed autographs. Later, Atlantic Records president Ahmet Ertegun told me Geraldo was an asshole. I had become friends with Ahmet—the suave, cosmopolitan son of a Turkish diplomat—on Led Zeppelin tours. He, along with his extremely chic wife Mica, was a familiar presence on New York’s music scene as well as a member of what was then called “the jet set.” As a young man, Ahmet went to jazz clubs in Harlem and started Atlantic Records, where he worked with Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett, and then, in quick succession, signed the bands that started coming from England: Cream, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and various others. Ahmet would go to any basement or to any penthouse—you just couldn’t take him anywhere in between.

  Journalists sat around in the lobby of the Royal Orleans Hotel discussing whether the Stones were still relevant while they waited to talk to Mick. That night, much to my dismay but to the delight of the crowd, Mick initiated his incredibly corny shtick of hitting the stage with the belt during “Midnight Rambler.”

  • • •

  Although for the most part we stayed in really nice hotels, Mick made a big point of not wanting to stay in expensive hotels. “Why should I pay a hundred dollars for a suite?” he said to me. “It’s a waste of money. We have a very large party, so obviously we get reduced rates. But the rates have to be lower than the Holiday Inn rates, and I think that’s pretty wise, because what’s the point of spending your money in these hotels? They’re all the same, they’re all bad. Except for maybe in two or three towns. It’s the same with limousines—some bands may need that for their egos, but we don’t—maybe because we’ve been through it. We’ve never been that oriented toward luxury. I mean I don’t want to stay in flea-bitten rooms, but I don’t need the best suite in the hotel. It just isn’t worth it for me.”

  *

  I love hotels. Put me in a Red Roof Inn on a highway outside of Pittsburgh after driving seventeen hours in a van with a “baby” (young, new) band, or the Beverly Wilshire in L.A. with the Rolling Stones, or the Royal Monceau in Paris with U2, and I’m happy. Obviously I’m happier in the Beverly Wilshire or the Royal Monceau, but the escape value is the same. There are no responsibilities. It’s private, anonymous. In most cases, there’s room service. And in the 1970s, when I went on tours with Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones and Patti Smith and the Clash and Aerosmith and the Who, it really was an escape from real life.

  When you’re on a big tour with a big band and you’re there for a reason but are not one of the principals (a member of the band, or a manager), you need to feel your way. When a private plane is involved, you’re not really sure who you should sit next to on the plane. If it’s a day off, you don’t always know if anyone has anything planned, or who you can hang out with or have dinner with that night. Or if there is anyone you can have dinner with that night. Or, if it’s a show day, whether you’re welcome in one part of the backstage and not another. Then there’s always some waiting and wondering about what’s happening after the show, if anything is happening after the show, and if you’re invited to whatever is happening after the show. On tour with the Rolling Stones, there was always that unspoken but constant anticipation: would Mick show up, when would he show up, how long would he stay, who else would be there? At first, it was exciting just to be in the room. Then, after you got into the room, all those rooms were pretty much the same. Except for some Ahmet Ertegun–hosted parties or spontaneous hanging out in Keith’s room. But often, whether it was a hotel ballroom in Minneapolis, or a nightclub in Chicago, we sat around at tables with the same people we saw every day on the plane or backstage at the shows. In New York or Los Angeles, celebrities showed up. But then, they always sat in a corner, often at a roped-off table, and talked to each other and Mick. We all drank, maybe had something to eat, and went back to our rooms around four a.m.

  *

  Laundry was always a big problem on the road. Unless you stayed in a hotel for a week, say, in L.A., Chicago or New York, you couldn’t send your clothes to be dry-cleaned at the hotel. You weren’t there long enough and “same day service” was always a risk. Plus, those of us who had to pay our own “incidentals” didn’t want to waste money on laundry. If there was a washer/dryer in the hotel, you could do a wash there, but by the time you arrived at the end of a long night, or woke up late, or had a day off, laundry was the last thing on your mind. Still, there are numerous entries in my diaries from that 1975 summer tour with the Stones that simply read, “Laundry!” or “Unpack!”

  If I stayed in a hotel for more than one night, I unpacked. It always made me feel more settled. I adopted the Keith Richards style of art direction and tossed scarves over the lamps. I asked the hotel maids for extra hangers and towels. The first thing I always did (and still do) when I entered a hotel room was to turn on the TV. It cut down on the loneliness. And it can get lonely. In 1975, there was no remote control, no cable, no CNN, no ESPN. So, you’d turn the dial to some game show, or soap opera, or, if you arrived in the middle of the night, an old black and white movie or even a test pattern—just to have something on. I’d take the Bible out of the drawer and put it under the bed or leave it outside the door. I wasn’t against the Bible, I just resented—and still do—the fact that it was assumed that I would want one in a hotel room.

  Except for the fancier hotels, in 1975, room service always left a lot to be desired. There were “Cheese Festivals”—slices of Kraft American cheese, provolone or the occasional Swiss, garnished with a strawberry or some sad-looking grapes. There was “hand-breaded shrimp.” Tomato and egg wedges on a bed of iceberg lettuce. Except for two hotels that had twenty-four-hour room service on the 1975 tour, room service usually stopped at midnight—even at luxury hotels like the Beverly Wilshire in L.A. and the Ambassador East in Chicago—and often, at six p.m. Sometimes I would order something in the afternoon so I’d have it in the room when I returned, ravenous, after midnight. The concept of ordering fresh fruit—except for grapefruit before ten a.m. because it was considered a “breakfast item”—was totally alien to American hotels in 1975. Minibars filled with little bottles of liquor and wine were rare. In the hotels of Detroit, Kansas City, Milwaukee or Buffalo, before food became such a big deal in the U.S., before there ever was a cheese section in an American supermarket, food was often a problem. (Even in the 1990s, traveling with a “baby” band in a van, to come across a Denny’s on a highway would be a treat, an Olive Garden a thrill. Many times, I stopped at a Kroger’s supermarket and purchased French’s mustard to spread on pita bread. That, choked down in a parking lot, often was my food for the day.) However, when you were with the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin, there were catered meals on the plane or backstage.

  In Buffalo, an invitation to the Stones from Harvey Weinstein, who was then the local rock promoter with Harvey and Corky Productions, read: “You are humbly invited to a buffet dinner, Sunday, June 15th at 7:30 p.m. in Buffalo Memorial Auditorium Party Room. The dinner has been specially prepared by Vincent, the head chef of Mulligan’s Private club, for your enjoyment. We know what it is like to be on a hectic tour, and we hope you can find a few minutes to unwind and relax under our care. The menu: Spinach Salad, Homemade French bread, Seafood Platter—including Clams Casino, Shrimps, Oysters, etc—Lobster, Veal Oscar—the specialty of the house. Dessert—a Mulligan’s Mud Pie (a Buffalo favorite) and fresh strawberries. Vincent will be on hand for your dining pleasure.”

  This sort of backstage spread was put on only for a band of the stature of the Rolling Stones, which meant it w
as only done for the Rolling Stones. Then again, it might have been billed to the band, which could have been the reason that Led Zeppelin never indulged in this sort of backstage culinary excess. When Mick was involved, good wine was involved. (Mick and I once had lunch in a hotel restaurant in Chicago while a teenage girl hysterically screamed to him from outside the window. Eventually, she was taken away by security guards, but Mick was unfazed. He sat there throughout the screaming, perusing the extensive wine list with not the slightest sign of annoyance or acknowledgment. He was used to it. “What am I supposed to do?” he asked me.) The promoter Bill Graham always went all out, food-wise. He took over the Trident restaurant in Sausalito after the band’s San Francisco show. Backstage at Madison Square Garden, Bill brought in hot dog carts and egg cream stands. To some of us who just a few years earlier had been going to press parties for the free food, this display was very exciting. However, it soon wore off. Half of these backstage events went unattended; the band couldn’t be bothered. And by the time anyone who had actual work to do went to eat before the show, the spinach salad was wilted and the seafood had drawn flies. I always felt slightly sad for these cooks who went to such great lengths to prepare special meals for the Rolling Stones, who never showed up. (Some of the chefs, of course, promoted these jobs on the menus for their own restaurants: “Private chef to the Rolling Stones” and such.) The only band member that I recall ever going and thanking these guys on any kind of regular basis was Mick. But I don’t remember any of the band eating anything at all at a venue before the show. And after the show, the band did what the British called a “runner”—which meant race to the cars and beat the traffic while the audience was still screaming for an encore.

  • • •