It became obvious that Bob was maintaining his performance level with the help of amphetamines. The boys and I were familiar with uppers—dexies, bennies, even black beauties—but these particular pills Bob had were said to be much smoother; you didn’t get too wired or edgy. Half the pill was an upper and the other half a downer, so it was supposed to be more balanced. Nonetheless, in time all of this shit catches up with you.
I started feeling protective of Bob. This tour ran at a grueling pace, and though we were young enough to handle it, every day I saw him getting a little more run-down. It was upsetting, but beyond trying to get him to eat, there wasn’t much I could do or say. In our circle we maintained a coolness about this sort of thing. You didn’t express concern directly; you mostly walked and talked around it.
It didn’t help that the disapproval of the audiences seemed to be growing with each show from Denmark to Ireland, Wales, and England. When we launched into “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” in Liverpool, a lot of the pain and frustration of touring came pouring out of my guitar. At one of the shows, where the stage wasn’t much higher than the seating of the audience, a girl stormed the stage with scissors in her hand. Security grabbed her in time, but it was a close call. I couldn’t tell whether she wanted to give Bob a trim or stab him. A kind of madness was percolating. We had to be constantly on alert. The whole atmosphere was heightened. I adjusted the strap on my Telecaster so I could release it with a quick thumb movement and use the guitar as a weapon. The concerts were starting to feel that unpredictable.
At the same time, the band was getting better and better. I remember listening to the tape of the Birmingham show and thinking Rick and Mickey had established a strong footing and a solid foundation, which allowed the rest of us to dance on top. Sometimes we could hear ourselves quite well because of the acoustics in a particular hall, and all the more so if Richard Alderson could find a sweet balance.
As we made our way through the British countryside, our wonderful driver, Tom Keylock—a World War II veteran who’d been driving the Rolling Stones for the last year and answered every request with “I’ll look into it,” which meant it was as good as done—stopped the bus at a beautiful old inn for lunch. He said this place was known for its tasty food, but this was 1966 and British cuisine left something to be desired. The restaurant staff looked wary of us before we even sat down. Our bizarre traveling roadshow, with film crew and all, had come to a place where weird had no limits: Pennebaker in his top hat, cameraman Howard with his British curved smoking pipe and black beard, Bob in his flowered shirt and shock-proof hair, Richard with his Adam’s-apple goatee. I kept auditioning antique eyeglasses, each pair looking more old-mannish than the last. Rick, smoking some strange apparatus you might find in Timbuktu, ordered a bowl of umbrella soup.
The waiter asked if he wanted that plain or with carrots.
Rick implored, “For God’s sake, man, plain! I want nothing to stand in the way of the pure umbrella flavor.”
The waiter answered, “Oh, you said umbrella, sir. I thought you meant something else. We don’t have that variety here.”
“I thought this was England. How can you not have umbrella soup?”
Someone else interjected, “But you have sheep’s-head soup, correct?”
“I’ll check with the kitchen, sir.”
—
When we played the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, our guns were fully loaded. We had no idea when we hit the stage that this would go on to become the most bootlegged show of the tour. Between songs the crowd would yell and holler insults about the music, and Bob would murmur and mumble into the microphone. I looked at Rick and was surprised to see him laughing, either out of embarrassment or simply because everything was so strange that all you could do was laugh. This was the concert where someone in the audience yelled, “Judas!” and Bob answered, “I don’t believe you,” which was the name of one of the songs we had played. Then he called out to us, “Play fucking loud!”—like we needed to be told. I don’t know why, but that particular night I especially enjoyed playing. You never know when that muse is going to sneak up on you and spread her wings.
During the couple of days we had off in London, a lot of incredible musicians came calling at the Mayfair Hotel. The front desk got used to sending Brian Jones or Keith Richards up to the suite for a hello. I’d hung out with Brian in New York with Bob and found him to be a really sweet guy who loved American music with every bone in his body, and he played the part of an English rock star as well as anyone. One night there was word Johnny Cash was on his way to pay Bob a visit, and the film crew swung into action to capture the moment. Johnny showed up looking back over his shoulder as if someone was following him. He shut the door behind him like it needed to be double-bolted. He was trembling and smoking, as if on the back end of an all-nighter. Ronnie Hawkins knew Johnny, and we had crossed paths with him on the club circuit, so I knew what a tremendous presence and talent this man had. Bob and Johnny were on a wavelength that actually matched: “high-voltage madness.” Suddenly, as Johnny flinched and twitched, there was a knock on the door. He bolted out of his chair. “If it’s June, tell her I’m not here.” And with that he disappeared into the other room and hid in the closet, yelling, “I’m not here!”
I answered the door, and it was room service. “Hey, John, the coast is clear!” we yelled. No answer. Neuwirth finally rescued him from the closet with the assurance that he wasn’t in the doghouse, at least for now. Bob grabbed a guitar and started playing the chords to the Hank Williams song “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Johnny started singing along, and within moments magic was stirring. Chill bumps: hearing that voice that could make you cry. I felt bad for Johnny when he left, knowing that he was probably going to get scolded later.
The next morning I walked through the streets of London Town, looking for things you couldn’t find in the States or Canada. I found silk from India my mother might enjoy—a different kind of Indian. After a while I ran into Mickey Jones, out on his own mission. He pulled a hat out of a shopping bag and put it on his head. I swallowed hard as Mickey grinned at me, wearing a Nazi helmet. Mickey meant no harm; he just thought it was wild you could buy one here. He wore it proudly back at the hotel until Albert pulled him aside and said he didn’t want anyone working with us wearing Nazi gear.
In Paris we stayed at the Georges V Hotel—by far the most glorious place that we’d stayed on the tour. The food, the style, and the service—everything was tremendously elegant. As was his custom, Albert took great pleasure in giving the Parisians a hard time, with some help from photographer Barry Feinstein. They started at the hotel, making impossible requests—hey, we all get our kicks in different ways. Local singers stopped by to greet Bob, starting with Hugues Aufray, a terrific guy who so appreciated Bob’s lyricism that he’d translated his songs (quite an undertaking) and sang them in French. The breathtakingly beautiful singer Françoise Hardy also came by to say hello, statuesque, thin, with long brown hair and bangs drifting across her face.
“Don’t you just love France?” I asked Bob. “They don’t have singers in all of North America that look like her. She could be a world-class model. She can’t be a good singer as well, can she?”
Bob answered, “She sounds fantastic. You should hear her.”
—
The next day would be the start of something special that would change the course of my life. We were driving through the city and Bob and Albert had invited someone they knew to join us, a very good-looking French guy in a white suit. Then Neuwirth shouted, “Hey, stop! Look, there’s Mason.” The driver pulled over and Mason Hoffenberg, an American expat who’d cowritten the sexy bestselling novel Candy with Terry Southern, jumped into the car. He greeted everybody as he settled into the jump seat beside the guy in the white suit. After he shook hands with us, he looked at Mr. White Suit, leaned over, and gave him a big, long kiss on the mouth. “There,” he said. “Now I feel better.”
“Mason
, what’s happening over here?” Bob asked. “What are you doing?”
He replied, “I’m staying with Jimmy Baldwin, trying to see what trouble we can get in together.”
The driver dropped us off and we rambled down the avenue, stopping to peer into various clothing stores and antique shops that piqued Albert’s interest. Up ahead we saw a little crowd of people fussing about. We couldn’t tell what was going on until the person at the center of this commotion started waving at Bob.
“Oh, it’s Johnny Hallyday,” Neuwirth said. “ ‘The French Elvis.’ ” Bob and Johnny greeted each other on the street and our little entourage traded “hellos” and “bonjours.”
I immediately noticed in the group two fantastic-looking girls. Damn, I thought, the French have got it going on. While Bob and Johnny were chatting, I moseyed over to the girls, wondering if they spoke English, but they seemed distracted, taking it all in. Finally, I got their attention and asked what they were up to. They answered in broken English that they were journalists from Montreal, writing about the music world in France.
“Wow, you’re from Canada?” I said. “I’m from Canada too—from Toronto!” They didn’t look very impressed, and then it hit me that English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians were on opposite sides of the wall during this period. One of the girls, Chantal, was blond and very pretty, with a beautiful sunny smile—immediately likable. But it was the other girl, Dominique, who completely intrigued me. With dark hair and a fire behind her dark eyes, she beamed a radiant energy. I couldn’t help being drawn to her. Even her teeth fascinated me: they weren’t perfect; they were a piece of art. There was nothing cutesy about Dominique’s walk. She moved in a manner direct and determined, with an intelligent French motion that made me want to follow. Here we were, meeting on the street, in Paris, in the springtime, like a song—how could I resist? All this in thirty seconds. That’s all it took.
I mustered up all the charm I could, offering to get them tickets to the show and inviting them to Bob’s press conference the next day at the Georges V. The girls spoke to each other in French, then said, “Tomorrow, yes, see you. Merci.” I realized that between them we might only be able to communicate in broken English, one sentence at a time at best. I didn’t care. Just the chance to breathe in a little more of Dominique was worth it to me.
—
We had been transporting an enormous American flag with our equipment, and Albert had been waiting for just the right moment on tour to break it out. Now he suggested hanging it as the stage backdrop for our concert at Paris’s Olympia theater—he thought this might stir things up with the Parisians. Bob seemed amused and went along with Albert’s provocative idea.
The following day at the press conference, Bob decided to bring out a new ventriloquist dummy for the occasion. Quite hilarious watching these serious French journalists trying to get a handle on what this American provocateur was all about.
“Why do you have a puppet?” they asked.
“He followed me here,” Bob responded.
Afterward, Bob and I invited Chantal and Dominique up to his suite. The girls were still going on about how bizarre the press conference had been with the dummy on Bob’s knee. Bob picked up the puppet and said, “Here, do you want it? I don’t need it anymore.” Dominique wasn’t sure how to respond to the gesture, but thought it was very funny. Chantal said, “Sure, we’ll take it, why not?”
I invited them to stay for dinner. Bob tended to be a little uneasy about having journalists in our midst, so I took them to the suite I was sharing with Richard and Rick. Before too long Rick was joking and laughing with Chantal. I think Richard tried to ask them if they knew anybody with some pot or hash. When they finally understood what he was getting at, they laughed and said, “No, but we would like some too!” They’d decided that covering the next night’s show and hanging out with us could be the makings of a good story for their newspaper. Dominique’s fiery energy hypnotized me, and even though I’d just met her, I said they should come to the shows in London too. She and Chantal talked it over in their French-Canadian argot. “I don’t know. Maybe,” she said. “We’ll have to see.”
Rick jumped up. “That would be great! I hope it works out. And in London we will have zee hashish.”
As they were leaving, Dominique and I shared a long, slow hug, which she later told me seemed to last forever. “Bonsoir,” I said, and when they turned to go I couldn’t help notice what a strange sight it was to see the two of them walking out carrying a dummy in a tuxedo.
The next day—the day of the show—happened to be Bob’s birthday. During our sound check at the Olympia, the crew hung up the huge American flag; it covered the whole back of the stage. At this point nothing seemed far-fetched or out of context. What else could happen? Well, that night we found out. Thanks to the big, glaring Stars and Stripes, the audience was already pissed off before Bob went out to do his acoustic set. We might as well have sent Mickey Jones out there in his Nazi helmet.
Because of the turmoil in the audience, Albert, Victor, and I walked with Bob to the side of the stage as he made his entrance. The crowd erupted, yelling every insult imaginable. Albert smiled at me like So far, so good. Bob launched into “She Belongs to Me,” and after a couple songs he stopped to tune his guitar. But the more he tuned it, the worse it got. Then he thought it started to sound pretty close, but when he blew a note on the harmonica, the guitar was completely out of tune with it. Almost ten minutes had gone by, and the crowd was beyond impatient and restless. Bob kept tuning, but it wasn’t coming together. Victor and Albert looked at me nervously, as if urging me to do something. I told Victor to get Bob to come to the side of the stage for a minute. He waved at Bob and led him over. I asked him to play a note on the harmonica and tuned the guitar quickly. He headed back out to the mic after this twenty-minute tuning break and played the rest of his set to jeers and a handful of cheers from the crowd.
By the time we went out for the electric set, it felt like the whole night had been laced with psychedelic mushrooms. Right then all I cared about was whether Bob was okay to get through the show. He looked drained and weary. After we played “Maggie’s Farm,” the crowd started yelling out scornful remarks in French and waving their arms in revolt. I stepped over and whispered to Bob, “Happy birthday, and many happy returns.”
He laughed out loud. “Yeah, great birthday, isn’t it?” Garth played a few quiet notes of “Happy Birthday.” The guys all had a little chuckle and we launched into “One Too Many Mornings.” Bob belted out the rest of the songs in a rage but looked like he was running on fumes.
At the end of this rough night, I again invited Dominique and Chantal to join us in London; they said that they would have to ask their boss to get the okay. “Please do,” I said. “It would be great. It’s the final shows of the tour, and I know we would have a terrific time.”
Back at the Mayfair in London, Victor got a message that the Beatles wanted to come by. They asked if we had a good record player so they could play their new album for us, so he quickly arranged for a little hi-fi system to be sent up to Bob’s suite.
The four Beatles and their road manager, Mal Evans, showed up full of humor and high spirits. Bob was acquainted with them; there was a story floating around that Bob and the journalist Al Aronowitz had turned the boys on to weed in New York at the Algonquin Hotel. The first thing I couldn’t help noticing with the Fab Four was that they all wore the same boots: black, with a bit of a raised heel and a zipper down the inside. They actually called them “Beatle boots” and asked if we wanted to have some made for ourselves while we were in London. Their English accents were strongly Liverpudlian, so different from those in London. It was like when you first met someone from the South in the U.S.—there was a whole different rhythm to how they spoke, and they used it in a very humorous way.
John Lennon and Bob were quick to start throwing funny little jabs at each other. Bob teased them about playing for screaming girls and
asked if that was still “going well.”
“If you can’t hear what you’re doing,” Paul McCartney responded, “it can frustrate the hell out of you.”
“We’re waiting until all this blows over,” said John, adding that some of the tunes on their new record would be hard to scream to. “What about you, Bobby? The girls still screaming for you?”
“Oh yeah, the girls and the boys are screaming at what we’re doing, but not in the same way as for you.”
Watching the Beatles interact with one another was a sight. They were almost like characters in a Buster Keaton movie: their movements seemed sped up a touch, and playful. They had a cosmic energy that seemed to flow from Paul. John brought a sharp, edgy wit, and Ringo had a wonderful animated quality. George’s engaging grace brought pure joy into the room. The group had a balance to it, with everyone playing their part. They had transitioned out of their early period, when they had seemed innocent and sweet, especially in comparison to the world we had come out of. But seeing them here, even seeing the artwork on their new record—it all added up to a new, powerful musical direction.
You could tell Paul was excited about their new album and eager to get it on the record player. What caught my ear immediately was the use of the recording studio as a musical instrument—incredible experimentation with sounds and effects, quite the opposite of a Bob Dylan record. The range of songwriting on this album went from pure British flavors like “Eleanor Rigby,” with that indelible chorus of “all the lonely people, where do they all come from?” to “Taxman,” which George said he wrote because their tax bracket in the U.K. was so extreme. The influence of East Indian music came through as well. Ringo said George kept showing up all the time with different Indian instruments until there was no way not to use them. The tune “Here, There and Everywhere” showed Paul’s ability to go “classic standard songwriter” at the drop of a hat.
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