A Prince Among Stones (16 page)

One of the aspects of touring that I had to bring to the band's attention was the cost of the exercise. On the early tours I was particularly struck by how extremely professional the Stones were onstage and how quickly they were able to radiate that elusive star quality. The atmosphere was very good. Of course, achieving that atmosphere came with a price tag attached.

Whenever I held business meetings with the band I would invite the relevant lawyer and accountant to attend so that any figures or contractual points could be gone through there and then. I was always very careful to make my estimates quite conservative, and I would point out to the band facts about the costs, about which they had not the faintest idea.

Before a tour, I would need to be quite clear: ‘This is what it will cost to mount this production, which means you will have to have at least twenty gigs making x amount of profit to clear off the production costs before you see one single penny.' I tried to encourage them to reduce the expenses in certain ways, for example not letting the entire tour personnel stay in the grandest hotel in town.

Having all the people they employed or whom they simply liked travelling with on the tour and staying in five-star hotels was madness. The tour party would already be paid a per diem, the daily amount for living expenses. On top of that, at a five-star hotel getting one shirt laundered might cost ten dollars instead of fifty cents at the local laundrette, and an orange juice or gin and tonic five times the normal price. Saving those expenses could make a huge difference. ‘You do realise who's paying for them,' I would reiterate. ‘
You
are paying for them, and you have no need to do so.'

One day, quite out of the blue, I was contacted by the manager of a theatre company which included actors of the stature of Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. He said, ‘You'll think this rather strange, but I have been told by somebody I know that you run these tours for the Rolling Stones. Would you be prepared to run a tour for
us
?'

I said I would love to do that, and asked him a couple of questions: ‘What sort of hotels do you stay at?' ‘Oh, the cheapest you can find. And we make people double up in the rooms.' I said, ‘You mean Gielgud and Olivier are prepared to double up?' ‘Yes, that's all right, they'll muck in.' ‘And what about per diems?' ‘Per diems, what are they?' ‘They are the daily expenses we pay the tour entourage so that they can get something to eat and drink.' ‘Well, all that the actors need is a sandwich and a half pint of beer.' I was highly amused by that and relayed the conversation to the Stones with great gusto.

I also tried to make sense of the hierarchy within the touring party. In the past, all the personnel who were working on the tour would be able to come into the tour room, have some drinks, relax by playing pool, all using one badge. There was another badge to get into the caravan or the dressing rooms of the artist. Over the years we refined this to something approaching an art form.

I made a note in a journal I kept during a later tour: ‘One guest on tour was amazed by the efficiency and hierarchy of the organisation. Just like a court: rivals, whispering, grades of status granting access with others being used to fetch and carry. Others do everything for one including guard, protect, transport, feed and flatter . . . and perhaps poison as well.'

As well as attempting to reduce the unnecessary costs, I also turned my attention to improving the income from touring. I saw that tours could be converted into moneymaking operations as opposed to the band simply ‘working the album' for the benefit of the record company. Working the album meant that the band were told they were touring as part of a promotion to raise the profile of their latest album and increase sales, because the money was going to come from the sale of records. As far as the tour was concerned the record company would pay a very modest sum as ‘tour expenses'.

In the early days the Stones had undertaken a number of tours, the first few organised by Andrew Oldham, the later tours under the control of Allen Klein after he had come on board. The remarkable thing about those tours was that, although people loved going to the shows and the band gained an enormous amount of publicity and goodwill from touring – and the girls screaming and shouting were undoubtedly highly ego-enhancing for the band – no money ever came into their pockets.

In 1969, shortly after I had first met Mick, the Stones were keen to do a new tour but they did not want it to be in Klein's hands. Mick discussed this with me, and I told him, ‘As you well know I have not done any tours before, but let me think about this and see how it could work.'

The person who wanted to organise the tour was a nephew of Allen Klein's, Ronald Schneider. I met Ronald a few times and came away thinking that he at least had the advantage of being Klein's nephew, he knew the American market and understood both rock'n'roll and the Stones. Of course he had the distinct
dis
advantage of being Klein's nephew as well . . . However, given the circumstances, Mick and I decided that we would allow him to run the tour but that I would control the money. I felt it was vital that we used high-quality auditors, and so we went to Arthur Anderson, who were Leopold Joseph's auditors. Ronald Schneider was living in Miami at the time; Arthur Anderson's office in London informed me that the company had a branch in Miami and that they were sure the branch could handle matters perfectly efficiently.

The tour took place and went extremely well, with all the tickets being sold out, but at the very end, in December 1969, there was the Altamont free concert, where violence between members of the crowd and the Hell's Angels who were ostensibly in charge of security led to the death of eighteen-year-old Meredith Hunter. The band knew the mood offstage was menacing, but were unaware that this young man had been stabbed and killed.

A couple of days after the Altamont concert I had been scheduled to meet Mick in Geneva to work out the band's foreign bank accounts as part of all the financial arrangements we were gradually putting in place for them. When I heard what had happened in California, I contacted Mick's secretary, Jo Bergman, whom I liked very much and trusted, to ask if Mick was still coming. ‘Oh yes,' she said, ‘he'll be arriving on this flight, and I'll be with him.' Of course, the papers interpreted this by saying that Mick had fled California for Switzerland . . . When Mick arrived there were two main topics for discussion: the financial arrangements and the appalling killing at Altamont.

Mick said, ‘We will have to have a serious think about what this means for us.' I replied that I thought that in so far as there was any publicity it would demonstrate the gigantic operation that the tour was, how strong Mick and the band's performances had been and that, apart from that one tragic and untimely incident, the people who had gone to the shows had been happy. We both spoke to people that we knew, and the idea came to Mick and myself that releasing a film of the tour would be fascinating since it would show the truth of the matter. That, of course, was the Maysles brothers' film
Gimme Shelter
, which was excellent – the best tour film the Stones ever made, I think, not least because it had a serious point to make. It showed that there was concern about these huge gatherings, and, given the death of this young man, that there had to be some form of order and proper security brought to bear on similar events.

I spoke to an American friend of mine, whom I had known socially before, and who had an association with the cinema side of Warners. ‘I've got to ask you something very odd. I want you to look me in the eye, and tell me that you will make sure, because of our old friendship, that the interests of the Rolling Stones will be looked after since I do not yet have the experience of the true costs of film production.' He replied, ‘That is an amazing request to the other side in a deal, but I do see what you mean.' So during the course of the film production I at least knew that I had an ally within the film company.

Arthur Anderson produced their report. There was very little money because we had to stump up some funding for the film production before it happened and although Albert and David Maysles were very talented, they had nothing to contribute financially. I had a terrible battle trying to get our side credited and paid the infinitesimal amount of money that there was, but it worked out and the film had a great
succès d'estime
, and in fact focused my mind on thinking that touring was clearly an area where the band could make money.

By 1972, locked in the interminable legal wrangling with Allen Klein, it was no longer appropriate to have his nephew Ronald involved, even though he had been a success on that previous tour. I asked Mick and Keith (it was Keith who had picked Ronnie Schneider) if they could now think of anyone else they would like to have as a tour director. Amongst other names they suggested Peter Rudge, who had already fulfilled that role for The Who, and whom they knew and liked. Peter, it transpired, was interested in expanding his activities away from working solely for The Who, and took up our offer.

While Peter Rudge was directing his first tour, the Hell's Angels wanted to handle all the security. Peter later regaled us all with long stories about the Hell's Angels crowding in on him in a hotel in New York, taking him and dangling him bodily out of a window on the fiftieth floor to make sure he took their advice. Fact or fiction, the stories did put us on our guard and reminded us all that we had to be incredibly careful not to do anything foolish. There were two main areas where one would expect foolishness to occur: being caught taking drugs and being found taking cash without a contract, thereby trying to avoid taxes, especially as we had to remember that tax rates both in the States and England were still vertiginously high.

Previously, unaccounted cash delivered to the band and their management in a paper bag had been the norm. Any cash business is a fertile breeding ground for crime and corruption, of course. Bands were only too delighted to receive parcels of money but failed to realise they were thereby participating in a huge tax fraud. That was something I was rigorously determined to see changed.

Slowly but surely we were able to alter how tours operated, but even on the tour which took place in 1978 at the time of
Some Girls
, an album which generated exceptionally good record sales and very strong ticket sales at the major venues in Los Angeles and New York, somebody, an accountant or one of the tour personnel, came up and asked me, ‘What do we do with the $50,000 in this paper bag?' I said, ‘You give it straight to the auditors.'

I summoned the Stones and told them, ‘This is the most dangerous thing that you have had to deal with, apart from the drugs busts in London. A tax fraud in the United States could really halt your career, so I am afraid the paper bag of dollar bills will have to go back into your taxable income. But there we are.' We could not be party to receiving undeclared income.

Scalping tickets – the reselling of concert tickets – was another area of great concern. I had noticed that tickets were being scalped, but everyone I spoke to about it said, ‘There's nothing you can do about that. That's the promoter's business. Do you want the Stones' children to be kidnapped? You should be aware that you are dealing with difficult and potentially dangerous people.'

One of the worst examples of scalping came when we worked with Bill Graham, the West Coast promoter who had made his name with the Fillmore West and Winterland in San Francisco during the late sixties, at the height of the Summer of Love. Graham, in my eyes, was an old-fashioned mythomaniac. He would tell bands, ‘If you want to be popular and have a lasting career in this business, you need to give the people the chance of getting cheap tickets', which, of course, went down very well with the Stones, thinking that they were helping the less well off listen to their music and come to see the act. Promoters behaved in a very crude way by playing up to bands' wishes to give young people who had no money access to their music.

What Bill Graham always omitted to tell the Stones – but which I realised early on – was that the cheaper the face value of the ticket the more money could and would disappear into the pockets of various associates of the promoter when the tickets were subsequently scalped for up to $100 or more.

On a nightly basis we would be checking with our auditors that we had accounting for all the tickets sold and delivered. But that did not and could not show the level of scalping. If a ticket was scalped at $50, $10 or $15 of that amount would have gone to the local promoter, and a tour director might take the same amount to bring the ‘amount received' down to the face value of the ticket.

Scalping was endemic, all-pervasive. Touring, at the time, was essentially a deeply corrupt business. At one point, out of the five main promoters in Germany, three had received jail sentences and two were under investigation.

Record companies were equally complicit in the scalping: they needed tickets to bribe the disc jockeys to give singles airtime and record stores to stock the releases, and were constantly trying to persuade us to provide free tickets, which they would then sell on and pocket the cash. I remember a conversation with one executive at CBS when the Stones were on that label.

The executive complained, ‘This is ridiculous. We are buying your records. Don't you understand that we've got to spread a few tickets around?' I said, ‘Yes, but if reading is also one of the gifts that you gained from your education, then in your contract you will see that you can get the amount of tickets you want, and at the designated price.' He got highly agitated about the fact that we didn't give them as many tickets as they thought they should receive. But I did enjoy that conversation.