Old Gods Almost Dead (24 page)

Everybody must get stoned!

                

The American version
of
Aftermath
(with “Paint It, Black” as lead track) was climbing the charts but didn't look to make no. 1. On June 24, the band held a tense, sullen press conference aboard Allen Klein's motor yacht anchored in the Hudson.

Reporter: “What's the difference between you and the Beatles?”

Mick: “There's five of us and four of them.”

Reporter: “I want to do a piece about the reality of being a Rolling Stone.”

Mick: “The reality of being me? It's fucking nasty today.”

Boston was the first stop of the tour. The most Anglophile of American cities, Boston craved English bands and was a main beachhead of the British Invasion. The Stones played the Manning Bowl in Lynn, about twenty miles north of town, in the rain before fifteen thousand zealots. Cops dosed the stampeding crowd with tear gas during “Satisfaction,” and there was panic, trampled kids, plenty of arrests. Drunken fans surrounded the limos and tried to smash the windows. Others chased the band all the way to the airport.

Back in New York, the Stones' gear was stolen out of the equipment truck, including custom-built Vox guitars and Brian's electric dulcimer. Playing their noir rockabilly anthems in a new soul band style, they sold out shows in Washington, Baltimore, Buffalo, Hartford. The McCoys and the Standells were opening shows. Allen Klein added dates to the tour daily, often two shows a day.

At Marine Ballroom, Atlantic City, a nineteen-year-old poetess from Pitman, New Jersey, named Patti Smith was crammed up against the stage:

“Mick ripped off his flowered shirt and did a fandango. Satisfaction. Tambourine on head, he strutted like some stud . . . this was no TV, this was real. I could enter the action. I got set to out-stone-face Bill Wyman, the cornerstone of the Stones, relentless as Stonehenge, as a pyramid. Any hard-edged kid took to him. He was onstage right to catch some spit from Mick. Then hell broke. Handkerchiefs folded like flowers, a million girls busting my spleen. Oh Baudelaire! I grabbed Brian's ankle and held on like a drowning child. It seemed like hours. I was getting bored. I looked up and yawned. Bill Wyman cracked up. Brian grinned. I got scared and squeezed out and ran.”

On July 2, the Stones played the Forest Hills tennis stadium in Queens. Cops waded into the crowed with nightsticks and deployed tear gas. The band flew back to Manhattan by helicopter, then motorcaded to the Cafe Wha? on MacDougal Street to see a new guitarist that Linda Keith had hooked up with. He was this black hippie from Seattle, an ex-paratrooper, who turned up like a psychedelic Martian in Greenwich Village playing left-handed Fender Stratocaster, upside down, in a group called Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. The Rolling Stones' collective jaw plunged as they first beheld Jimi Hendrix, a few months before his arrival in London, already controlling an improvised arsenal of blues licks and feedback developed in the road bands of Little Richard and the Isley Brothers. To the Stones' horror and delight, Hendrix deconstructed some Dylan songs and “Wild Thing” and blasted out an incendiary new music that threatened to make them all obsolete within months.

Linda, somewhat to Keith's consternation, was crazy about Hendrix. She even took one of Keith's new Stratocasters and loaned it to him. But Hendrix was involved with someone else and the vibes were weird. Keith was concerned about Linda, and didn't like her scene with this flaming black warlock.

War Memorial Arena, Syracuse, July 6. The Stones flew in on their private turboprop. Radio people came on board for snapshots and interviews with Brian and Mick. Brian was wearing his flamboyant lemon/ pink/blue-striped blazer. As the band entered the hall, Brian saw a big American flag stretched out to dry and grabbed it for a souvenir, inadvertently dragging it on the ground. This sent the stagehands into apoplexy. Their brothers were dying for this flag over in Vietnam! There was a scuffle, some angry curses, and the cops threatened to bust the Stones for insulting the Stars and Stripes. Klein and Andrew forced Brian to apologize. The Stones played a shortened set and left town quick.

Back in New York City, Keith and Brian met an LSD dealer named David Schneiderman, aka the Acid King. Dude had a briefcase full of Blue Cheer, Windowpane, Purple Haze. Keith invited him to drop by when he was in London.

Brian and Andrew stayed out all night with three black courtesans who cruised Manhattan in a Rolls-Royce. At 3
A.M.
Brian took Andrew to see Max Jacobson, legendary Dr. Feelgood. The doctor treated Andrew's raging case of herpes, then shot them both up with the powerful amphetamines for which he was notorious.

On through the American Midwest and out to California. High times as everyone was stoned on good Mexican pot, and a hazy, unfamiliar air of unity took over. Everyone was getting along, and even Brian was doing relatively okay. They were playing like demons every night. “Under My Thumb” raged with an explosive Memphis drive. “Cloud” was taken fast, with Brian's metallic sitar licks. “Not Fade Away” was a jungle rave, Brian on harp. “19th Nervous Breakdown” was a dual-guitar orgy, with Keith doing great vocal harmony. Deafening screams from the girls during “Time Is on My Side” and “Lady Jane.” The Stones gave “Satisfaction” a fuel-injected trajectory, usually with Stu on piano, and a cool, stop-time ending amid the mayhem.

The Rolling Stones were now giving the hottest, most exciting shows of their careers. Mick was bumping and grinding, wiggling his can at the fans, stirring them into estrus. Many shows were attended by violence: cops were beat up, dozens of arrests, multiple injuries.

Los Angeles in the summer heat. The Stones only went out at night. Brian and Anita moved through the clubs and parties like movie stars, only they were the real thing. Brian told friends he was dazzled by the Cadillacs prowling the Strip, and loved the big Hollywood Hills houses, with their pools shimmering in David Hockney blue. He'd like to live there, he said, except for being constantly mobbed on Sunset Boulevard, hassled by both locals and tourists.

The Hollywood Bowl show on July 25 (opened by Buffalo Springfield) packed 17,500 fans and got rave reviews, no problems, and a great vibe as the band played a perfect set in front of huge photographs of themselves from the
Aftermath
album. The 1966 American tour ended in Hawaii on July 27, where the (dateless) rest of the band got annoyed with Bill for scoring a pair of pretty sisters. Wyman and Keith both finished their American adventure with a sexually transmitted disease caught from a beautiful flower child in Los Angeles, and both ended up on penicillin. Wyman's long-suffering wife, Diane, had to have the shots too.

Brian Jones would never play music for an American audience again. It was his last American tour.

                

Keith Richards:
“In those days, Mick and I were into a solid word/music bag, unless I thought of something outstanding that could be used in the title. I would spend the first two weeks of the tour [on writing songs], because it was done on the road, all of it was worked out . . . an American tour meant you started writing another album. After three, four weeks, you had enough and then you went to L.A. and recorded it. We worked very fast that way, and when you came off a tour, you were shit-hot playing, as hot as the band is gonna be.”

Three versions of “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?” were recorded between August 3 and August 7 at RCA, involving different instrumental tracks. The Stones' next single was pure murder: using electronic feedback, distortion, and battle-hardened fuzz guitar (only weeks after their obviously influential encounter with Jimi Hendrix), “Mother, Baby” was both a demolition of constipated pop song formats and a Rimbaudesque declension of the shadow world of illicit sexuality. The wildly experimental song suggested not only maternal prostitution and incest but fraternal lust as Jagger asks if you've seen your brother standing in the shadow too.

He might well have asked if you'd seen yourself. “You took your choice at this time,” he sings: “The brave old world, or the slide to the depths of decline.” The song ends in an echo of Jimi Hendrix's slashing “Wild Thing” chords.

The Stones left L.A. “with pockets full of acid” (Keith) and took the rest of the summer off. Mick and Keith went to Acapulco to write the rest of the new album. When Mick returned to London, he smashed up his new Aston Martin in a car wreck. Both he and Chrissie Shrimpton were uninjured. Keith called Linda's parents and told them she was in a bad scene in New York. Her father brought her back to London, and friends thought it probably saved her life. Keith went to see her, but came away knowing it was all over between him and the beautiful, adventurous Ruby Tuesday.

                

Late in August,
Brian and Anita arrived in Tangier and checked into the luxurious Hotel El Minzeh, where they met their friend Christopher Gibbs.

“Brian was a very difficult person to spend a lot of time with,” Gibbs recalls. “He was a willful, spoiled, demanding, heroically selfish and self-centered being with a lot of sweetness and charm. And part of that charm was this glorious musical gift, of being able to pick up any instrument from any culture in the world and fiddle about with it until he could make it do what it was meant to do.

“And of course he was
very
rough with the ladies. Once Brian and Anita and I went to Tangier, staying at the Minzeh. On the second day, Brian had a fight with Anita and went to strike her. She managed to duck and he hit his fist on the iron frame of the window. I had to take him to the Clinic California, where they put his arm in a cast.”

Brian sent a telegram to Andrew Oldham in London on August 31, saying he'd broken two bones in his hand while climbing in the mountains, and would be unable to play guitar for two months. Before he left Tangier, he spent some time with Brion Gysin, an expatriate artist and writer who was a key member of the Tangier Beat-expat scene. Gysin started to tell Brian about a mysterious village of master musicians up in the Moroccan mountains, in a place called Jajouka. Wild music, dancing boys, plenty of
kif,
stay up and rave all night. Brian Jones, bored to death with the Rolling Stones, was intrigued and made Gysin promise to take him to Jajouka someday.

The Ultimate Freak-Out

September 1966.
Tom Driberg, righteous, somewhat bohemian Labour M.P., spoke on the Stones' behalf in Parliament after a Scottish judge gratuitously insulted the band while sentencing some poor kid to the workhouse. It was the first inkling that the judiciary class had it in for the Rolling Stones. The judges, the cops, the law: they couldn't wait to get their hands on the band.

Mick and Keith were at IBC Studios working on a horn track for “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby?” Brian and Anita returned from Morocco on September 4 so Brian could begin work on the sound track to Volker Schlöndorff's new film,
Mord und Totschlag,
about to begin production and starring Anita in her first feature film.

Anita: “It was called
A Degree of Murder
in English. They needed a German-speaking face. I auditioned in Paris and got the part. Then the director asked Brian to do the music, and it became a big thing for us. The Stones movie wasn't getting made, so Brian got into it on his own.” Brian's injured hand prevented him from playing. His band included Jimmy Page, Small Faces drummer Kenny Jones, and ace London studio musician Nicky Hopkins on piano. The music was dark and gloomy, to go with a script about a waitress who accidentally kills her ex-boyfriend and goes through changes while disposing of his body.

                

After finishing
their new single in Los Angeles, the Stones gathered in New York on September 9. Dressed in high-retro World War II women's clothes and wigs, with heavy makeup supervised by a stunning transvestite Brian, they posed for a series of drag photos on an East Side street on a quiet Saturday afternoon. Brian pushed a distastefully retarded-looking Bill Wyman in a wheelchair for an extra dash of contempt. After the photo shoot, they repaired to a bar, still in drag. Keith: “Hey, let's go and have a beer. But what voice do you do? We sat there and had a beer and watched TV and no one said anything, it was just so outrageous.” Later, while shooting Peter Whitehead's drag promo film for “Mother, Baby,” Brian yawned, smirked wickedly, lifted his skirt, and started masturbating. The camera kept rolling. Mick Jagger rescued this bit from the cutting room floor and played the footage for his dinner guests for years.

The Stones appeared on Ed Sullivan's show the next day, September 10, doing “Paint It, Black,” “Lady Jane,” and “Mother, Baby.” Mick, in a floral shirt, sang with a live mike to prerecorded backing tracks because of Brian's injured hand. Brian, in vestal white, sat down and smiled while pretending to play the sitar. Keith stood at the piano during “Mother,” wearing a provocative Wehrmacht field jacket. The Stones had bought loads of Nazi uniforms and memorabilia in L.A. at the end of the U.S. tour. Around this time, Anita dressed Brian in a black SS uniform with a swastika armband and had photos taken of him stomping on a baby doll. In November, another shot from this series, with Anita kneeling submissively in front of Nazi Jones, ran in London papers to universal distaste, since no one “got” this supposed antifascist protest.

A couple days later, “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?” was released in the U.S. and the U.K. as a horn-driven, wall-of-noise attack on motherhood and apple pie. Keith Richards was unhappy with the record, claiming it was rushed out before it had been finished, and that the wrong mix was released, one that buried the rhythm section. The flip side was a nasty psycho-blues, “Who's Driving Your Plane?,” recorded over the summer in L.A. with Brian blowing harp over a slow, metal guitar riff.