Old Gods Almost Dead (21 page)

Anita was also connected in London: she knew the whole scene, the club-hopping aristocrats Tara Browne and Mark Palmer, whose mother was a lady-in-waiting to the queen, and the Chelsea Set artists, handsome young photog Michael Cooper, Robert Fraser and Chrissie Gibbs. In Paris, she knew Donald Cammell through Deborah Dixon. Anita was white-hot all over, an incandescent light in any room. Her magazine image appeared all over Europe in the futurist clothes of the day, and she was already working in experimental films with the German director Volker Schlöndorff.

Anita: “When I first bumped into the Stones, they were like schoolboys. Brian was so far ahead of them you wouldn't believe it. Here are Mick and Keith up onstage trying to learn how to be sex objects, and Brian already had a bunch of illegitimate children! Brian was
very
well spoken, soft-spoken, spoke German as well. He captivated me with the way he moved, his hair, his soft manner. He wanted to capture your attention when he was speaking. He was sensitive, highly strung, totally ahead of his time. And also part of
another
time, the dandy with his clothes and all of that.

“As I got to know Brian, I really fell for him. He was so talented and found everything so easy. He had time to be interested in other things, wasn't narrow-minded like the others. I dare say that, but . . . yeah! Brian was a pain in the ass and very vulnerable to a lot of shit, but he was
way
ahead of his time.”

How's Yer Paranoia Meter Runnin'
Now?

Late in September '65,
the Rolling Stones started a British tour to promote the U.K. version of
Out of Our Heads,
mostly soul music covers. Brian wore all white, sporting the fleecy lining from a coat he'd gotten in Sweden, setting a big trend for shaggy caveman vests—the Neanderthal look—throughout the rock and roll world. Bill Wyman noted the thunderous applause at every show when Brian Jones unstrapped his Gibson Thunderbird guitar and moved to the organ for “Time Is on My Side.” Mick was swinging his mike stand, thrusting it like a weapon, and doing new dance moves he'd picked up from black soul stars.

As the band careered through England, they started to get hurt by the hail of debris that rained onstage. Keith got knocked out by a flying seat in Manchester. In Stockton-on-Tees, a shilling hit Mick in the face, cutting him over his eye. The crowds were almost all children and got really wild as Brian's slide guitar and wailing harp on “I'm Movin' On” whipped them into foam. Keith got knocked cold by an armrest in Northampton: Brian waved the curtains shut while Bill cut the power, and they stopped the show for fifteen minutes until Keith recovered.

In October, “Cloud” was released and performed on
Ready Steady Goes Live.
It reached no. 1 and reigned for three weeks. Brian bought a white Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud (from George Harrison) which came with the plate DD 666. Right away the girls who hung around Brian's door (who were occasionally allowed in to tidy up and do the dishes) decided the DD stood for Devil's Disciple.

On October 26, Mick and Keith recorded their version of “As Tears Go By,” with Mick singing the ballad alone with an orchestra arranged by Mike Leander. (They also cut a version in awful Italian, “Con Le Mie Lacrime.”) But for Keith's nimble acoustic guitar, it was Mick Jagger's first solo recording, produced by Andrew as a copy of Paul McCartney's “Yesterday,” leading John Lennon to publically remark that the Stones did everything the Beatles did, six months later.

In fact, the fall of 1965 saw a critical repositioning of the Rolling Stones by its songwriters, Mick and Keith. They had begun as an R&B group and changed into a rock and soul band. Now, the Stones turned into the first avant-garde rock band, blending R&B with “underground” culture and folk rock trends from Southern California, where they made their records. It was an instinctive move that consciously veered away from the Beatles' act and established the Stones on the dark side of the bulging baby boom youth movement, hairy prophets of sexual freedom, chaos, and drugs.

                

To New York
to begin their fourth U.S. tour in late October 1965. Looming over Times Square like a vengeful Olympus was an enormous billboard with a David Bailey image of the Stones in uncommonly sullen and dark mien, promoting their upcoming American album,
December's Children (and Everybody's).
Andrew was really beating the drums now: even the Beatles never had this. Their agency announced the Stones would make $1.5 million on this tour.

Turned down by the Warwick Hotel, they took over two floors of the City Squire Motor Lodge; the lobby was besieged by eager young women and girls for the duration. Edgy press conference with reporters unnerved by the glaring, chain-smoking Stones, especially Charlie Watts's Cro-Magnon look and murderous level stare when asked a stupid question. Then there was the slept-in hair, the unsmiling mugs, Keith's icy gaze.
Hey! You!
Jagger called out of the radio, sinister as a switchblade,
get offa my cloud!,
as this new rant made him into the most potent rock vocalist on earth. And it hardly ever got any better than this, this new kind of song where the lyrics didn't matter. The music was all about attitude anyway.

Opening acts on the Stones' shows were variously Patti Labelle and the Bluebells, the Vibrations, and the Rockin' Ramrods from Boston. Watching over things on tour dates in Canada and New York State was the formidable Pete Bennett, Allen Klein's song plugger, who rammed “Cloud” onto radio playlists and into the charts within days of its release. Bennett (Benedetti) had deep connections in both the Democratic Party and the Five Families. The Stones dubbed him their Mafia promo man. They also got a new road manager, Mike Gruber, and a traveling accountant, Ronnie Schneider, Klein's nephew.

Performing in sports jackets, tight jeans, and checkered trousers, with Mick and Brian sporting white Capezio ballet shoes, the Stones continued on through Rochester, Providence, New Haven, and Boston Garden, playing their American set, starting with “Everybody Needs Somebody,” Mick standing over the footlights,
I want you! You! You!
They played fewer soul covers in America, only “Mercy Mercy” and “That's How Strong My Love Is” (with Brian on organ) and more jams like “Around and Around” and “The Last Time.” A fast and furious “Cloud” came before “I'm All Right” and “Satisfaction.”

                

November 6.
Brian was blasted on pills, downs and ups, recovering from two shows in Newark, real screamfests. He was having a hard time on the tour. In addition to his stage wounds, a girl had hit him on the head with a beer bottle when he got rough with her in his hotel room. A couple nights earlier, someone had hassled him at a club called the Phone Booth, and Brian had broken a glass and slashed the guy's face. They'd hustled Brian out and he'd gotten away with it so far, but he was paranoid about being arrested for the attack.

He was headed across town from a party in his chauffeured blue Cadillac when the lights went out.

Brian looked out the window. The lights were out everywhere. New York was dark, and the only illumination came from the bright full moon and the headlights of cars in the chaos of the streets. Brian started to freak and reached for his asthma inhaler and his pills. The entire northeastern United States had lost power, the famous blackout of '65.

They gave Brian a candle in the lobby of the Lincoln Square Motor Inn (where the Stones had moved after the City Squire, annoyed by fans crowding the lobby, asked them to check out), and he climbed the five floors to his room. Total blackout. Paranoia. A few hours later, there was a knock on the door. Brian froze! He cracked open the door with the chain on. In the gloom of the hall he made out Dylan's craggy face.

“Hey, Brian,” Dylan sneered. “How's yer paranoia meter runnin'
now
!” Brian opened his door. In came Dylan, Robbie Robertson, Bobby Neuwirth, other people. “It's an invasion from Mars,” Dylan announced. “Let's turn on, man. What better time—the little green men have landed!” They all jammed for the rest of the evening, the famous “Lost Jam” because there was no electricity to record it. Brian blew harp till his lips were bloody.

Eventually Dylan had enough of Brian's hyperparanoia. Late one night at Max's Kansas City on Park Avenue South, goaded by Neuwirth, Dylan started to attack. He told Brian the Stones were a joke, told Brian he had a lousy voice, no wonder they didn't let him sing; told Brian he was the
weak link
in the fuckin' chain, man. Brian, Dylan insisted, had the wrong image, and the Stones oughta get rid of him sooner rather than later. It was a game Dylan and Neuwirth had, pushing a person to the precipice—Dylan had savaged Warhol at the Ondine disco a few nights earlier—but it was all too horribly true and Brian cracked like an egg. He broke into drunken tears, which made Dylan and Neuwirth goof on him even more for his emotional state.

“Aw, come on, Brian,” Dylan finally drawled. “You can always join
my
band.”

December's Children

November 1965.
The tour headed south, to Greensboro, North Carolina, where Brian scored a mountain dulcimer, chiming lyre of Appalachian folklore, which he had long desired after hearing one played by Richard Farina. Within a few hours, Brian was playing it like a hillbilly, but two days later in Baltimore, someone stole the dulcimer from the Stones' unguarded dressing room during the day's second show.

On through the South, Mick and Keith—missing their girlfriends—wrote feverish, conflicted, lovesick songs in their shared hotel suites, in the back of the plane, in dressing rooms in Oklahoma and Wisconsin. Anita flew in from London and spent a week traveling with the Stones, which fueled rumors, published in London and Paris, that she would marry Brian—with Dylan as best man. The other Stones were jealous, deeply impressed, intimidated by Anita's obvious intelligence, radiant vibe, her predatory international cool. She was sharper than any of them and could put down even Mick with a look or a cutting remark. She was the ultimate rock star's girlfriend, emitting as much white light as her lover. The two of them, Brian and Anita, even looked alike after she dyed their already blond hair an even lighter color. They were a pair of incestuous, impossibly glamorous twins. Brian became more difficult when she was around to renew his confidence. Now he played “Popeye the Sailor Man” all the time, in the middle of everything. “It didn't matter anymore,” Keith recalled. “Nobody could hear shit anyway, with a load of thirteen-year-old girls wetting themselves.”

                

At Memorial Auditorium,
Sacramento, Keith Richards was almost killed. The first show went great. Twenty minutes into the second, Keith touched an ungrounded microphone with the neck of his guitar as he tried to swing it into place so he could sing the chorus of “The Last Time.” There was a horrible electric buzz, and a blue bolt of light surrounded Keith. He collapsed like a rag doll, flat on his back. There was a bad smell in the air, and the shocked girls in the first ten rows thought Keith was dead.

The band stopped playing. Bill rushed over and unplugged Keith's guitar. Keith didn't move, and the whole scene was frozen disbelief. The curtain crashed down. After a few minutes, a policeman came out and told the hushed crowd to stay calm, that Keith was alive and on his way to the hospital, where the doctors told Keith that the rubber soles of his new Hush Puppies had saved his life. Later Stu showed Keith the guitar: three strings had burned open, like blown fuses.

                

December's Children (and Everybody's)
was released in December in the United States, another dark album cover with a black-and-white photo of the Stones framed by Dumpsters. It was a powerful but ramshackle sampler of old and new material, starting with the raw, atomic R&B of “She Said Yeah,” cut at RCA the previous May in the speedy mod-beat style of the Yardbirds and the Who. Then into the “shuffle and eighths” of “Talkin' 'Bout You” and some older blues and R&B material from 1963. “Cloud” started side two, and both sides ended in the Dionysian live tracks from the spring '65 British tour, “Route 66” and “I'm Moving On.”

The Stones didn't like the album, which they regarded as disparate tracks randomly assembled for the U.S. tour. Keith later described the album as something they couldn't have gotten away with releasing in England. Brian Jones called it “an album of rejects.”

December's Children
carried Andrew's bleak, Burgess-like liner notes about the unquiet times—the Vietnam War, the murdered Kennedy, the Watts riots—and references to Dylan and Elvis. The ragtag sampler still came off as a blue, shadowy work that seemed to explore emotional undertones and maturing ambivalence. The core of the album was four recent and related songs, all in a rolling, acoustic style. “The Singer Not the Song,” “I'm Free,” “Gotta Get Away,” and “Blue Turns to Grey” were all folk rock jams, Keith's melodies and vocal harmonies, with ringing guitars and marimba vibes in an easy, loping groove. Adding the orchestral “As Tears Go By” made it the softest of the band's albums to date. “I'm Free” was the only one of these songs played by the Stones onstage. Beloved by its teenage audience for its aggressive arrogance, “I'm Free” stayed in the Stones' live show for years, and still occasionally rears its cocksure head as an anthem of compressed adolescent yearning. “I'm free . . . to do what I want . . . any ol' time.”

                

The California shows
were the last of that long tour. The West Coast was the epicenter of the political earthquakes that would soon rock America, with turbulent student protests spreading through various universities. The Vietnam War was still heating up. The civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King, conducted sit-ins and demonstrations. The Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley had galvanized college students into thinking about issues of social control.
I can't get no satisfaction
was a rallying cry, despite Mick's deliberate refusal to write overtly political songs. In many ways, the Rolling Stones' indirect social protest in their songs was more subversive than clumsy, folk rock anxiety anthems like the current hit record “Eve of Destruction.”