Dear Promoter
We know it doesn’t happen in America, but in rather barbarous outlands [sic] of Europe we have encountered many dressing rooms which lacked towel and soap … It would be nice to know we do not have to worry about the same problem. A clean group is a happy group.
Amenities to be provided in backstage changing area:
Two bottles per show of Chivas Regal, Dewars or Teachers Scotch.
Two bottles per show Jack Daniels Black Label.
Two bottles per show tequila (lemon quarters and salt to accompany).
Three bottles iced Liebfraumilch.
One bottle per show Courvoisier or Hine brandy.
Fresh fruit, cheese (preferably not plastic), brown bread, butter, chicken legs, roast beef, tomatoes, pickles, etc.
Alka Seltzer.
Yours sincerely, the Rolling Stones
The tongue-in-cheek humility and room-serviced arrogance concealed genuine trepidation. Two years had not distanced Altamont’s horrors: in one way or another, the Seventies were turning out to be almost nonstop Altamont. The temper of the time was such as to make even Mick Jagger fear the reaction he might generate, by design or accident. ‘Don’t say I wasn’t scared, man,’ he told a reporter at the end of the 1972 tour. ‘I was scared shitless.’
Jagger had wanted to return to America with a show that would tacitly apologize for the Altamont shambles by confining itself to small theatres where everyone could see and nobody need get killed. Unfortunately, it was too late for the Stones to beat the economics they themselves had largely invented. To make a major rock tour of America economic in the early Seventies, the gross had to be around $2 million. There was no alternative to major cities, giant arenas and audiences among whom it was now commonplace to snort cocaine, smash up sets and throw bottles at the band.
Rehearsals took place in Montreux, Switzerland, close to the clinic where Anita Pallenberg was undergoing treatment for heroin addiction prior to the birth of her second child by Keith Richard. A baby girl, Dandelion, entered the Rolling Stones’ world on April 17, apparently unscathed by the drugs Anita had continued to absorb until the fifth month of pregnancy.
In Los Angeles, Peter Rudge, the Cambridge graduate – graduated now to first class honours in the rock travel business – was already constructing an operation whose complexity was based on the simple premise that nothing whatever must be left to chance. The Stones were to travel this time with their own stage, built and maintained by Chip Monck: a vast white proscenium, surmounted by intertwined cartoon sea serpents, backed by a 40 by 16 foot mirror and six 1500-watt Super Trooper spotlights, and lubricated with a solution of water and 7-Up to make it more danceable. The equipment, light cables, gantries, forklift trucks, would travel overland by theatrical pantechnicon. The Stones, and the pick of their fifty-strong tour staff, would travel by private Lockheed DC-7 jet, the fuselage of which had been decorated with Mick Jagger’s mouth and lapping tongue. Peter Rudge’s schedules, and the multifarious and subtly graded backstage passes issued with his countersignature, bore the artless letters STP – Stones Touring Party.
By the time the Stones flew in to Los Angeles to rehearse on a sound stage at Warner Brothers studios, sales of Exile on Main Street were touching 800,000. In Detroit, 120,000 applications had been received for the 12,000 seats at Cobo Hall. In Chicago, 34,000 tickets for the two shows at the International Amphitheatre sold out in five hours. Around Los Angeles the black-market price of a $6.50 concert ticket was $75 or its equivalent in hashish.
Two flamboyant rock music publicists, Gary Stromberg and Bob Gibson, had been hired to blitz the nation’s press with Stones stories while simultaneously making Mick Jagger the most unattainable interviewee since Greta Garbo. Every major magazine wanted to cover the tour and was vying with its competitors by nominating big name writers meant to appeal to what was dimly recognized as Jagger’s literary side. The Saturday Review offered William Burroughs (conveniently a heroin addict as well as a magisterial novelist) but were forced to substitute Terry Southern. Rolling Stone commissioned Truman Capote in hopes of a non-fiction drama equalling In Cold Blood. The tour was to be filmed by Robert Frank, whom Jagger knew as a highly respected still photographer. Literary as well as social snobbery was to pervade the Stones’ dressing room, even though, in the end, the combined literary talents would contrive not one sensible or original word about the tour in print.
Six months earlier in New York, a concert for the Bangladesh refugees, organized by George Harrison (with Allen Klein) and featuring Harrison onstage with Bob Dylan, Leon Russell, Ringo Starr, and others, had given rock a tenuous dignity. All that, and more, was about to be undone by the Stones Touring Party.
It was the summer when Governor George Wallace of Alabama was gunned down and crippled for life at a Maryland shopping centre; when Arab guerrillas in tracksuits penetrated the athletes’ village at the Munich Olympics and annihilated two-thirds of the Israeli weightlifting team; when the sectarian slaughter in Northern Ireland was extended to policemen, milkmen and teenage boys. It was the summer when the Seventies suddenly focused on an age of terrorist warfare, waged in streets, department stores, restaurants and airport lounges, against bystanders whose innocent deaths were proving a better attention-getter than any UN resolution. It was a time when merely standing in a crowd seemed foolhardy enough. To stand above the crowd, in any context, was automatically to enter the rifle-sight of a hundred homicidal grievances.
The same question would be asked of Mick Jagger time and again as he stood waiting to go on in his pink-sashed purple jumpsuit and his fish-shaped mascaraed eyes: ‘Mick – aren’t you ever afraid of getting shot?’
‘Yeah,’ Jagger would answer levelly. ‘Yeah – I am.’
The current terrorist craze for aircraft hijacking added further rich deposits of paranoia. On June 5, en route for the traditional Canadian warm-up concert, the Stones’ private DC-7 was denied permission to land in Vancouver because of an inadequately filed flight plan. Marshall Chess managed to get a telephone call through to the Canadian prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, but to no avail: the Stones had to land in Washington state and, braving US Customs, cross the border in a fleet of hired limousines.
That night, in Vancouver’s Pacific Coliseum, a more traditional form of warfare reasserted itself. Two thousand non-ticketholders stormed the front entrance, throwing bottles and lumps of rock and iron. Thirty policemen were hurt before a relief column of Mounties reached the scene. A single backstage door dividing the Stones from the mob was held shut only by bodyguards’ shoulders and piled-up metal garbage skips.
There were those who had wondered if the Stones would pull it off this time, gnarled as they were in their later twenties, and beset on all sides by adolescent phenomena like the Osmonds, the Jackson Five and David Cassidy. In a world that did not blink at the high camp of David Bowie and Marc Bolan, nor at Elton John’s outsize Lolita sunglasses, what was there left for Mick Jagger to do? Jagger had grown accustomed to questions about the date of his retirement. ‘There’s a time when a man has to do something else,’ he admitted. ‘I can’t say what it’ll definitely be. I don’t want to be a rock ’n’ roll singer all my life. I couldn’t bear to end up like Elvis Presley and sing in Las Vegas with all those women coming in with their ’andbags … it’s really sick.’
The Jagger of the 1972 tour was a Jagger resolved to scotch all rumour that his body had in any way deteriorated. On his order, the first dozen rows at every concert were kept free of press and VIPs, so that those who mattered, the eighteen-year-olds, could best compare him with themselves. The one-piece jumpsuit, with its dangling pink sash, clung shinily to wishbone hips and buttocks as tiny as twin collar studs. It became ritual in each night’s performance for him to inch open the frontal zip, past the undeveloped nipple and the crucifix, down to the very shadow of his overstuffed codpiece – or was it a mound of Venus? There was still none remotely able to portray that dancing paradox of athlete and str
ipper, that perpetual indecision between predatory satyr and timid, glitter-eyed fawn.
On June 4 the Stones recrossed the US border to play the Seattle Coliseum. That same day in California, Angela Davis, the black power activist, was found not guilty on patently trumped-up charges of conspiracy to murder. ‘Who got free today?’ Jagger asked his Coliseum audience. ‘Angela Davis got free today. Fuckin’ great …’ The Stones played Sweet Black Angel, a song dedicated to Angela Davis and, for many, the pièce de résistance of Exile on Main Street. Radical politics were then forgotten in the tour’s first party, back at an opulent hotel on Puget Sound where the traditional sport among visiting English bands was to bait lines with room-service steaks and fish for mud sharks out of the window.
The Stones’ return to San Francisco on June 6 was their first since fleeing the Altamont debris. Promoter Bill Graham had booked them for shows at his 5,000-capacity Winterland arena with no guarantee they would escape a tongue-lashing for their behaviour on the ’69 tour. Mick Jagger took the initiative, walking up to Graham with hand outstretched and saying ‘Hello, Bill, how are you?’ The promoter thawed, admitting generously that he himself, in 1969, might have been ‘not the nicest person around’.
To discourage any offensive acts by Hell’s Angels, disillusioned flower children, or friends of the murdered Meredith Hunter, the Stones were immured given security like visiting heads of state. At Winterland, Bill Graham employed a special force of seventy-five police to ensure that no one with a motorcycle came anywhere near the auditorium. Two all-out Stones shows gave them absolution in Graham’s eyes and, apparently, in San Francisco’s. No hint of trouble occurred until they boarded their jet for Los Angeles and a female writ-server in hot pants managed to push a sheaf of legal papers relating to Altamont under Mick Jagger’s nose. Seconds later, the writ-server staggered down the aircraft steps, gasping ‘He hit me – the sonofabitch …’ while Keith Richard hung out of the door flinging her subpoenas after her.
In San Diego, fires made from police barricades were started during the Stones’ performance. That and the heat reminded Jagger of a Scottish date, long ago, when they thought the place had caught fire – actually, steam was rising from the audience. Tucson, Arizona, had thoughtfully equipped police at the Civic Arena with tear gas. In the eddying smoke, affecting officers as much as rioters, three hundred arrests were made. One patrolman hurled a rock through a car windscreen, shattering the nose of the seventeen-year-old girl inside.
In Denver, Robert Frank filmed Keith and his friend the saxophonist Bobby Keyes throwing a TV set out of a tenth-floor window in their hotel. Keith mentioned other pastimes for bored musicians on Sundays, like ramming a room-service trolley through the TV screen or dropping a firecracker with a waterproof fuse down the toilet, in hopes of blowing up some other guest’s toilet three floors below.
In Chicago, at least, offstage security was assured. The Stones had been invited to stay at the mansion of Hugh M. Hefner, founder and publisher of Playboy magazine. For three days, between shows at the International Amphitheatre, they and the Stevie Wonder band enjoyed the run of the Hefner mansion’s salons and saunas and jacuzzis and private pinball arcades, the white-gloved servants, the twenty-four-hour kitchen, and other singular amenities, which had enabled Hefner not to set foot out of doors for almost a decade. Every couch in every room – to quote a bystander – ‘pulsed with women’; Bunnies from Playboy clubs or Playmates, pneumatic and glossy as the pages they adorned. The Stones were invited to join Hefner in the private pool under his bedroom but found, to their disappointment, that it was only for a bath.
Another disappointed member of the party was Bobbie Arnstein, Hefner’s one-time girlfriend, now his personal assistant, and, for coincidental reasons, a sufferer from anorexia nervosa. Reacting against several days’ self-starvation, Arnstein ate an enormous dinner, finishing with cheese and onions and a slice of Black Forest gateau, which she took with her up to her room. Shortly afterwards, she answered a knock on her door and was amazed to find Mick Jagger there, dressed in tight-fitting white leather trousers. For several uncomfortable seconds, Arnstein tried to succumb to Jagger’s advances while simultaneously trying not to let him smell her oniony breath or see the plate of Black Forest gateau reposing on a chair. Caught off balance as he turned away, Jagger stumbled back against the chair and, in his white leather trousers, sat straight down on the Black Forest gateau.
The most fun at the mansion seems to have been had by Charlie Watts, talking to Hefner’s cook about his days as a driver for the Chicago mobs. ‘I don’t sleep on tours,’ Charlie says, ‘’cause I got no one to sleep with. So I talk to people – and I draw.’
In Kansas City, author Truman Capote joined the tour to write about it for Rolling Stone magazine. A dwarfish, squeaky-voiced figure in shades and a white fedora, Capote had brought along his own entourage including Princess Lee Radziwill, sister of Jackie Onassis. Alas for Rolling Stone’s editors, who had hoped Capote might produce a chronicle rivalling his non-fiction novel about a mass murder in rural Kansas. There, for all his outlandish appearance, Capote had won the confidence of farmers and deputy sheriffs, producing a classic of objective reportage. But turning him loose among the tawdry butterflies of rock produced no such magic chemistry. His article for Rolling Stone would get no further than some scurrilous notes about minor figures on the tour. Having initially welcomed him as a prestigious literary camp follower – bringing along a princess to boot! – Jagger became suspicious of Capote, too often his backstage rival as the centre of attention. Capote himself expressed disappointment with Jagger, both onstage and off, describing him as ‘a scared little boy’ and ‘about as sexy as a pissing toad’.
Nevertheless, Capote was allowed to watch the show from onstage, taking voluminous notes for the article he would eventually abandon. Princess Lee Radziwill also played at music journalism, flitting around the breeze-blocked backstage corridors as if attending a UN reception. Keith refused to be impressed by this lofty personage and, after the show, was to be observed outside the Princess’s hotel room, shouting ‘Princess Radish – c’mon, you old tart, there’s a party goin’ downstairs!’ Capote having proved equally unresponsive to cries of ‘Wake up, you old queen!’, Keith and Gary Stromberg – dimly realizing his fame as an investigator of mass murder – smeared the outside of his door with tomato ketchup.
Capote was also permitted to ride the ‘Lapping Tongue’, as the Stones’ private jet was nicknamed, and to enjoy its non-stop bar and buffet and the attentions of stewardesses ‘Ruby T’ and ‘Brown Sugar’. So were Terry Southern and Robert Frank, the latter assiduously shooting scenes for yet another Stones film destined never to see the dark of cinemas. Among Robert Frank’s doomed inflight vignettes was the stripping naked of a groupie by road crew members while Mick Jagger and Keith Richard danced down the aisle playing bongoes and a tambourine. According to Capote (whose interest in such things was perforce severely limited), the so-called tour doctor then made love to the girl, strapped on his lap by the safety belt. When the plane landed, the doctor still had not managed to put on his trousers again, and disembarked holding them in one hand.
In Washington, appearing on the Fourth of July, the Stones were dissuaded from giving an afternoon performance with fireworks and Jagger in Revolutionary War breeches and tricorne hat. In Indianapolis, a pet hanger-on of Keith’s was found to be shaking down drug dealers for a percentage, and was scientifically beaten up by one of the black security guards. In Detroit, Chip Monck and Gary Stromberg hid a chicken leg in the bowl of rose petals that Jagger scattered over the audience at the end of Street Fighting Man. In Philadelphia, the rose petals concealed a lump of raw liver, at the next show, it was a whole pig’s foot.
In Montreal, one of the equipment trucks was dynamited by French separatists. While bomb squads searched the stage area for three other charges reportedly hidden there, 3,000 victims of forged concert tickets rioted out in the street. Disembarking at Warwick, Rh
ode Island, en route for Boston, Keith Richard hit a local press photographer who had been annoying Jagger. In the ensuing scuffle, Keith, Jagger, Marshall Chess, Robert Frank and a black bodyguard named Stan Moore were all arrested. At 8 p.m. that night, as 15,000 people streamed into the Boston Garden arena, Jagger, Richard and their companions were still locked in police cells at Warwick, sixty miles away. Boston’s mayor, Kevin White, arranged for the five to be released on bail and rushed to the Garden with a police escort, five hours late.
In New York, Peter Rudge attended a secret meeting with some Hell’s Angels desirous of ‘straightening out’ the Altamont affair, which, they claimed, had cost their brotherhood $60,000 in legal fees. When Rudge refused to compensate the Angels, a spate of anonymous death threats were made against the Stones. As a precaution the band checked into separate hotels under aliases – Mick and Bianca as Mr and Mrs Shelley, Bill and Astrid as Lord and Lady Gedding, Keith as Count Ziggenpuss. All the party were advised to order no food from room service in case it was poisoned.
The final concert was at Madison Square Garden on July 26, Mick Jagger’s birthday. Custard pies were thrown onstage, and the 17,000-strong audience sang ‘Happy Birthday to You’. Afterwards there was a party at the St Regis Hotel, attended by Andy Warhol, Princess Lee Radziwill, the playwright Tennessee Williams and other members of the new rock elite. In the centre, at a table covered with so much luxury it approached squalor, Jagger sat with his white satin lapels flat on his meagre chest, eating voraciously while Ahmet Ertegun spoke into his ever-attentive ear. He was twenty-nine – the age at which Nijinsky appeared in public for the last time.
Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The Page 43