True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (18 page)

The interviewer was in a tizzy: “I've got a deadline, I can't wait around here. I've got to answer to ABC in New York. What's with Mick, where's he at, should I pack up and go home, or what?”

“We'll do the interviews tomorrow,” said Ronnie Schneider, standing in the hall, talking to Jagger on the office phone. “Here's the movie deal: they pay for all the film and equipment and you own the film, If they do it and you see it and you don't like it, that's it.

“Also—about the photographer—he wants us to pay all his expenses, which will probably run a thousand a week, that's pretty expensive. Do you like him that much that you want him to do all the pictures? . . . Yeah. Okay. I understand. Well, we can probably recoup the expenses from the deals he makes with magazines and things.

“If you say that you'll give all the proceeds, the donations, to charity, Pete Bennett says that Nixon will endorse the free concert.” Ronnie hooted with laughter. “Yeah, well, you can't donate it to the Marijuana Grower's Association.”

Arranging the interviews was complicated by Mick's tonsilitis or “tonsilitis.” Charlie said it was a nervous complaint that Mick got when he had to sing. “Like Maria Callas, that sort of thing. I get it too, before we go on, it affects my feet, at first I don't feel my feet will work right, but with him it's his throat.”

Later I drove to the Stones' rehearsal with Jo, first stopping by a tie-dye establishment in the woods, where Jo was taking some of Wyman's and Taylor's clothes and picking up some of her own, and where, outside a cabin near the tie-dye shack, bouncing on a brown canvas trampoline, was Ken Kesey. A girl stood by the trampoline talking to a boy who was holding a football as Kesey bounced, his expression like that of a serious hard-working three-year-old, curly, blond, and plump.

Jo and I went down to the tie-dye place, where things were smoking in galvanized buckets. I didn't like it, stepped outside and here came the football, sailing past the house and the trees to end up in the creek. I stepped down and from the rocks in the creek bed threw it back. It sailed up through the trees, I couldn't see anyone, then Kesey jumped into the air and caught it. He tucked the ball under his arm, we met at the tie-dye porch, said hello. I thought of Kerouac and their mutual friend Neal Cassady, who died last year, but what was there to say?

When Jo got her clothes we went to the Stones' rehearsal. It was five o'clock. Keith came onto the ballroom set riding a bicycle with a sign on it saying
PROPERTY DEPARTMENT,
carrying a sign that said
RESERVED PARKING FOR KIRK DOUGLAS
. He put the sign in front of Jagger's mike and cycled away.

The band was tuning up, making their usual awful squawk, and Mick was away at the back of the soundstage talking to Jo, beating the first two fingers of his right hand into his left palm, looking directly into her eyes, hypnotizing her. She was nodding, nodding. She left him and walked toward me. I felt the approach of doom, as if the ground were falling away behind the steps of her small, tightly shod feet.

“Mick says you have to have a deal together by Friday,” she said.

“What does that
mean?”
I shouted, over the dense music. Mick, walking past, heard me, as I intended him to, cupped his hand round my ear and shouted, “Got to get it together.”

“Get
what
together?” I asked.

“Get a
deal
together,” he shouted.

“I'm
getting
a deal together,” I said in a tone that asked, What's it to you?

“By
Fri
day,” Mick said and was gone to the microphone. I sat down, sweating a little, though it was not warm. On his way across the ballroom floor Mick passed Astrid and patted her gently on the seat of her black suede slacks.

Suddenly the Stones were playing “Jack Flash,” Mick's tonsils jumping, his hips bumping. Things were moving faster, the order of songs was set and they did each only once. There would be just one more rehearsal.

In the middle of “Satisfaction,” Jagger jumped up, threw the bottle of Löwenbräu he was holding through the air to clatter without breaking on the cement floor. The music was soaring. They finished with “Honky Tonk Women” and “Street Fighting Man” and then Mick and Keith at the piano performed an impromptu “Tallahassee Lassie.” I had been standing behind the drums, listening. Charlie, wiping his sweaty face on his shirttail, said, “This is ridiculous.”

“What is?” I asked.

“All this,” he said. “It's fuckin' ridiculous.”

Charlie and I needed a ride, but Stu couldn't help because he had to go to a music store. Charlie said, “We'll get a ride with Bill.” Then we noticed that everyone had left except Bill, who was getting into his Continental with Astrid. “Did you ask him?” Charlie asked me.

“No, did you?”

It was out of their way, they told us, but they'd take us. A warm group. As we rode Bill was talking about Jagger: “He keeps turning around and looking at me like this, like I'm playing bad notes or I'm out of tune, and I'm not—”

Bill missed his seven-year-old son Stephen, who was in boarding school: “A very nice one, a hundred boys, an old house with a very good telescope and eighty-two acres of playing grounds for sports. Most of the boys are older; Stephen's one of the youngest. The older ones show the others how to play cricket and things. It's quite nice, they have little dormitories with about six beds in them, little flowered bedspreads and matching curtains. It's quite lovely, actually I wish I were going there—”

At Oriole Charlie and I found ourselves alone on the couch, smoking.

“I played with Benny Goodman once,” he said. “Do you want to hear about it?”

“Please.”

“When I was with Alexis Korner we played a party in Park Lane. If you know London, that's the rich bit. It was at a friend of Prince Philip's—he was there—and Benny Goodman came in and played a bit with us. We were just terrible behind him, but he played four or eight bars that were incredible—”

Below us were the lights of Los Angeles. I thought about what Mick had said. I had heard nothing from my agent and didn't expect to have anything together by Friday.

A little later, Shirley joined us. We were discussing the frantic business machinations of the ones she called “the bought people,” and Shirley said, “And it's just a tour, after all, just a group of people going around getting up on stages and playing music for kids to dance.”

“If you don't put that in your book, I'll kill you,” Charlie said.

Every folk song is religious in the sense that it is concerned about the origins, ends, and deepest manifestations of life, as experienced by some more or less unified community. It tends to probe, usually without nailing down definite answers, the puzzles of life at their roots. The real issue, for example, in the Jesse James song-legend is not that a “dirty, little coward” shot Jesse when he was defenseless; it is to ask the question why it is allowable that a thing like this can happen, especially to a man with a loving wife and three brave children. The fact that Jesse had killed defenseless people while robbing banks and trains is not part of the song-legend's ethical system, although such facts are reviewed. In essence, the only point to be settled at this particular juncture is, What kind of a world will permit the rank injustice of Jesse's death by obvious cowards? At heart, it is a religious question.

J
OHN
L
OVELL,
J
R.:
Black Song

B
RIAN WAS STILL SICK
the next night with an asthma attack—“He used to just collapse,” Keith said—and the Stones played their regular Wednesday night at the Eel Pie Island club with Stu on piano. At seven the following morning Brian left in the van with the others, going
to do a television show in Manchester. That night Bill wrote in his diary about being “mobbed” by fans at the television studio and afterwards at a nightclub. “Mobbed,” Bill said, meant that you lost some hair or part of your clothing.

The Stones played a club in Manchester on Friday and a ballroom in Prestatyn on Saturday. On Sunday, when they came back to London to play first at the Studio 51 Club and then at the Crawdaddy, Brian, who controlled the band's money, advanced £3 to each of them, because they were all broke. By Wednesday night Brian was sick again, reacting to some medicine that had been prescribed for him, covered with blotches, “decomposing before our eyes,” Keith said. Brian left the Eel Pie Island club in the interval, and the band again finished the show without him.

About this time, September, the Stones left Edith Grove, Mick and Keith going to live in a flat with Andrew, Brian moving into a house in Windsor with Linda Lawrence, a girl he'd met at the Ricky Tick Club, and her parents. They all lived together for years, Brian and Linda in one bedroom, Linda's parents in another. Brian had more than the comforts of home and never paid any rent.

Brian stayed sick for the next three days, while the band played ballrooms in Deal, Lowestoft, and Aberystwyth. On the way to Aberystwyth, Bill had a girl in the back of the van and didn't get carsick, so the others tumbled, and after that they took turns riding in the front with Stu. At Aberystwyth there was a skirmish backstage with a man from the local musicians union, because the Stones weren't members. They promised to join, did their show, and drove all night to Birmingham, where they were to make their second appearance on the popular music show,
Thank Your Lucky Stars.
When they arrived at the television studio, the night watchman, the only person there at that hour, told them they couldn't come in: “We don't open until nine o'clock.” Finally he relented, the Stones slept a bit in the viewing room and then, joined by Brian, who had come up from London by train, performed “Come On,” which they disliked and refused to play on their shows, giving Andrew high blood pressure. The Stones shared billing on the show with such acts as the Searchers, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, and Craig Douglas, who had a weekly television program where he plugged his own records, some of which became hits. Douglas, who before going into show business had been a milkman, was very rude to the Stones, refusing to speak to “those scum.” They left outside his dressing room door a milk bottle with a note in it saying “Two pints, please.”

Then they drove back to London. Stu would usually take Bill home last, and sometimes afterwards he would wake up alone by the roadside in some totally irrelevant part of town. A couple of days later, Andrew
Oldham, walking down Jermyn Street on his way to the Studio 51 Club, where the Stones were rehearsing, was accosted by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who were making their way in a cab from the Dorchester, where the Variety Club of Great Britain had given a lunch in the Beatles' honor. Andrew mentioned that the Stones were having difficulty recording a second release, and along to the Stones' rehearsal come Lennon and McCartney—“who are by that time very much into hustling songs,” Keith said. “Everybody was doing Beatles' songs and they were going straight into the charts.” McCartney played on the piano part of a song he and Lennon were writing. The Stones liked it, so Lennon joined McCartney at the piano and in a few minutes they had added the middle eight bars, finishing “I Wanna Be Your Man.”

On this night the Stones played the ballroom of the Thames Hotel; Bill, broke again, was advanced £10 by Brian. The next night they played at Eel Pie Island, and on the next at a place they'd never been, the Cellar Club in Kingston, where the audience was friendly, but once the show was over and the people had left, the promoter told the Stones, “You've got five minutes to get out.” They thought he was joking and paid no attention, but he went into his office and came back wearing one boxing glove, raging: “I said, Tack up!' ” As they drove away the man came outside brandishing a shotgun.

It was an auspicious send-off for a busy weekend. On Friday, September 13, the Stones played to an overflow crowd at the California Ballroom in Dunstable. On Saturday their second appearance on
Thank Your Lucky Stars
was aired, and they played afternoon and evening shows at two ballrooms in Birmingham. On Sunday something called a Pop Prom took place at the Albert Hall, the Stones opening the show, the Beatles closing it. The show carried more prestige for the Stones than any in the fourteen months since they started their professional career by filling in for Alexis Korner at the Marquee Club. One of the music papers printed photographs of the Stones and another of the evening's acts, Susan Maugham, the most popular girl singer of the year in Britain: Susan in her permanent wave, her satin evening dress, Brian sucking a harp jammed against a microphone in his cupped hands, Mick howling, shaking maracas high at his temples, all the Stones in black leather vests, looking like sex killers from a Spanish Western of the future, grinning in an orgy of rhythm.

A part of their lives was ending; none of them knew exactly where they were going, but they could feel themselves taking off. One afternoon in late September, after paying the band £20 each for the past week, Brian went shopping with Bill and bought fifteen blue shirts for the Stones to wear on their first national tour, coming up in less than two weeks, with the Everly Brothers and Bo Diddley.

Within the week the Stones played the last of their regular club dates
at Windsor, Eel Pie Island, the Studio 51, and the Crawdaddy. As the tour approached, the fast pace of their lives quickened. They played a ballroom in Morecambe, the coldest place they'd ever been, got back to London about one o'clock the next afternoon after driving all night, and that evening played what Stu recalled as “a riot” at the Waltham-stow Town Hall. Next day they rehearsed and did two shows on the opening date of the Everly Brothers-Bo Diddley tour of the Rank Cinema Circuit.