True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (20 page)

Next they spent a day in the studio cutting song demonstration tapes for Andrew, who had returned from France. That night they played once again at the Richmond Athletic Club for auld lang syne. The following day they went to Swindon, where Andrew took physical-culture photos of himself in one of those three for a half-crown machines. On the next day, November 22, 1963, the Stones taped an appearance on the television show
Ready, Steady, Go!
in Manchester. Because of the time difference, they were finishing their performance about the time I walked in the graduate students' cafeteria at Tulane University in New Orleans. The Canadian girl who worked there came out of her office and asked, “Have you heard?”

“ ‘Papa gone buy me a mocking bird'?” I said, making the conversation conform to the lyrics of the song “Bo Diddley.”

“President Kennedy's been shot.”

“No, he hasn't,” I said, because in those days such things didn't happen. Then from the office radio I heard Walter Cronkite's voice, and he wasn't kidding. The Stones were upstairs at the television studio having a drink when they heard the news on the radio. That night in Manchester they played on the same bill with the group of black American girl singers called the Shirelles. “I remember them crying onstage,” Keith said.

The Stones went on playing nearly every night, sometimes twice a night. In December they played four dates second on the bill to Gerry and the Pacemakers. The third of the shows was at Fairfield Hall in Croydon. According to plan, the Stones closed the first half of the show. Then the audience stomped for fifteen minutes until the Stones did a two-song encore. All but about five hundred of the three thousand in attendance left without seeing Gerry and the Pacemakers, who must have been pleased to end their association with the Stones the next night.

Life on the road, Keith said, “drives you completely crazy,” but it did have its compensations. Bill's diary entry for December 12 reads: “Liverpool, Locarno dance hall, Exchange hotel for night, first colored birds.”

On December 14 the Stones visited Carshalton Hospital, where there
were many children with fatal diseases. “It was nice to go and see them,” Stu said. “I think Bill went back later on by himself. Most of them looked perfectly normal. Their faces lit up something awful.” Keith and Brian got the giggles.

At Guildford the Stones played a rhythm & blues concert with the Graham Bond Quartet, the singer Georgie Fame, and a band called the Yardbirds, who before they were a band would come to the Richmond Crawdaddy Club each time the Stones played. Each of the future Yard-birds would watch the Stone who played his instrument, ask him questions, and by the time the Stones stopped playing at Richmond the Yardbirds knew their whole act. Giorgio Gomelsky was their manager.

On Christmas Eve night the Stones played the town hall in Leek. It was snowing, Mick and Andrew were two hours late, and the Stones did a single one-hour set instead of two shorter ones. At 4:00
A.M.
Brian called Windsor and asked Linda Lawrence's father to come pick him up. Then he asked Stu to take him home. At seven o'clock Christmas morning, Linda's father was still in London looking for Brian.

The Stones played each night except one from Boxing Day through the end of the year. On New Year's Eve, they played a ballroom in Lincoln, and later, with the other Stones in the Trust House Hotel (from which the Stones were later banned—Brian again—and still later the place burned down), Charlie fast asleep after having talked for hours on the telephone to Shirley, Bill in bed also but not asleep and not thinking about his wife, and Mick and Keith up writing songs, Brian, along with Stu and somebody else (who is the third that walks beside you?) went in the dead of night to visit Lincoln Cathedral. Alone in the darkness outside the locked, deserted church, they heard the organ playing, a long sustained wail. “Just one note—very creepy,” Stu said. “Just a trick of the wind, I imagine, but very frightening. At least it scared me and the other bloke with us, I remember. It didn't seem to bother Brian.”

At any rate he calls us to come outdoors; Dionysus calls us outdoors. Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land. Out of the temple made with hands; out of the ark of the book; out of the cave of the law; out of the belly of the letter. The first tabernacle in Jerusalem; the second tabernacle the universal Church; the third tabernacle the open sky. “Only when a clear sky looks down through broken ceilings will my heart turn again toward the places of God.”

N
ORMAN
O. B
ROWN
:
Love's Body

T
HE WORLD
, beyond the hedge outside the bathroom window, was once more invisible, shrouded by dense, dirty gases. Scrubbed and scraped as if I could wash away the poisons that surrounded us, I walked the length of the house to the kitchen. The office and the living room were aswarm with people I tried not to see, but in the kitchen I had to look around to find food, and there at the Formica-topped counter was Jane Schneider, holding a big red-yellow pomegranate, turning it over and over, looking for the zipper. She asked if I knew how to open these
things, and of course I did, being from the South and all, so I went to work on the pomegranate with a paring knife and soon my cuffs were spattered with the rose-colored juice of the clear red kernels inside, each with its little white seed. “I don't think that'll come out,” Jane said cheerfully. Pete Bennett, also in the kitchen and looking, as usual, like Murder, Incorporated, was talking about the uncanny attraction he exercised over famous people and photographers. “I was at a party at the White House,” he said, “and somehow I didn't know, they didn't tell me, that everybody would be in dinner clothes, and I was wearing a regular”—anodized uranium—“business suit. It was terrible, like a bad dream, and then this photographer asked me to be in a picture with President Nixon and Neil Armstrong. Stuff like that keeps happening to me. Did you see the picture of me and Elvis Presley in
Cashboxl
I was in Vegas, see, and Presley is in Vegas, and he never sees anybody—”

“I know,” I said.

“—and never has his picture taken with anybody. The club manager asked if his wife and daughter could have their picture taken with Elvis, and Colonel Parker said that Elvis would be happy to do it for five thousand dollars. So I ask to see Elvis backstage, and the club manager says, ‘He won't let you in, he's got this Memphis Mafia, you'll just be embarrassed.' I say, ‘I'm Italian Mafia, tell him I'm here.' Presley invites me into his dressing room for about three hours, and I get a picture taken with him that later comes out in
Cashbox.”

Standing in the kitchen doorway munching toast, looking over the menagerie in the living room, I wondered whether the mail had come and if so, who had it? I had nothing to do but take notes and wait for my contract. Today was Wednesday. On Friday, my deadline, the tour would begin.

The place was swarming because Jagger had chosen, so the Stones could concentrate on rehearsing, to postpone the pretour interviews until today and tomorrow. All of the Stones except Wyman were in the living room, talking to radio people (after the bushy-haired ABC love-rock interviewer left, Jagger said, “You can't tell by looking anymore, can you?”), periodical press and book writers. Keith, talking to a hungry-looking interviewer from an “underground” newspaper, said as I passed, going to sit on the couch, that the Stones' contracts stated that no uniformed police were to be allowed inside the arenas where the Stones would play: “Uniforms are a definite bad scene.”

I sat beside Kathy and Mary, two blond locals who had been driving the Stones' cars for the last few days. “The Dynamic Duo,” they called themselves. “We drive the Stones around and fill in during the lulls.” They got up to go out to the kitchen as Sam Cutler sat down, nodding at Kathy: “I've screwed that girl ten times today,” he said.

Finally the swarm buzzed off and so did we, a bit earlier than usual, to the last rehearsal. Gram Parsons showed up, wearing a furry brown
beaver ten-gallon hat. We stood atop a wooden tower facing the marathon ballroom set. The music was so loud we couldn't talk, so we smoked Gram's marijuana and felt the floor patting our feet.

Talkin' 'bout the Midnight Rambler

A few days ago in Memphis a young man named George Howard Putt was arrested for the “sex-slayings” of five women. Still at large were Northern California's Zodiac killer and the killer or killers who this past summer had terrorized the Los Angeles area with bloody massacres like the one at the home of the actress Sharon Tate. Murder seemed to be in the air these days, like the scent of flowers in the spring.

The Stones, under the glittering mirror-chip ball and the gold-fringed red hanging lights, looked like a ghost band playing to a deserted ballroom. I remembered the line they tell you when you lose at the carnival: “At least you got to hear the band play.”

After the rehearsal Charlie and I rode with Stu to Oriole, where a long-haired, blue-jeaned reporter from the
New York Times,
Michael Lydon, was listening to stagehand Bill Belmont set the scene: “Two towers . . . three trusses . . . Supertroupers . . . Chip Monck directs an
ambience.
No psychedelic crap. No ‘blue spot on the slow songs, red spot on the fast songs.' ”

Lydon nodded soberly. Then he heard Jane Schneider telling me, “The Stones' third tour, when I was eighteen, opened my eyes to—everything.”

I hate to ask questions, but “Everything?”

“Men with men, girls with girls, I walked into this room and all these people were fornicating, right out in the open. I didn't know about anything like that, and I was knocked out. I'm blushing, Ronnie's saying, ‘Do you want to leave?' ” Lydon tiptoed away to get something to write with. I made a note myself, of something I heard Ronnie say on the telephone this afternoon: “He did the worst thing you can do to anybody. Sure you know what that is. He turned him in to the Internal Revenue.”

Keith said that I didn't need Klein's or Schneider's approval to write a book. Mick said I had to have a deal by Friday. Every day Schneider said that he couldn't get in touch with my agent and asked me about the contract. Every day I liked this place less.

The morning was foul, surf breaking just the other side of the hedge. I staggered through another lobby crowd to the kitchen. A glass of orange juice gave me the strength to walk to the hearth and sit facing the fire, my back to the room. Michael Lydon, appearing at my elbow, wanted me to meet a man dressed in rumpled brown corduroy trousers, a blue shirt with buttondown collar, a wrinkled silk necktie, and glasses with tortoise-shell rims. He looked like a parody of a 1957 college
student, and he was, I was told, the correspondent from
Esquire.
I returned to my orange juice and the fire, the licking blue flames. After a while I noticed
Esquire
still beside me.

“How're you doing?” I asked him, just to make a noise.

He shook his head like a movie actor showing despair. “It's over.”

“Oh?” I said, wondering what could be over so early in the day.

“It's hopeless,” he said, looking toward the couch where a girl who resembled Emily Dickinson with leukemia stared into smoggy space.
The New Yorker.
“Sorry to hear it,” I told
Esquire.

What must readers believe, when writers for periodicals regarded as standards of sophistication could believe Mick Jagger so purified the air around him that in his presence they would receive absolution for their past lives? It like to overcome me, being as it was a cloudy day, and I went to the Oz room for help. I came back to find Jagger, in a white velvet suit, reclining on a couch, discoursing. “Been on the musical stage since I was foive,” he was saying in a broad cockney accent, “and I've missed it for the past few years. So I said to meself, ‘Back to the boards where we belong—' ”

Someone asked whether the Stones' music was nothing more than imitation black blues. I was lighting the reefer I got from the Oz room. “We're an imitation, certainly,” Mick said, “but so is black blues—of
some
thing—but by being derivative, a new music results.” He could get away with talking like this because on stage and records he seemed to be the Prince of Darkness. I passed the joint to him. Between hisses he said, “When we started, we'd go in clubs, they'd say, ‘You don't play blues, you play rock and roll.' We said, ‘Yes, fuck it, we play rock and roll.' We never thought we'd be big. Thought we'd do blues for fanatics. When we heard ‘Love Me Do'—” Smiling now, he passed the reefer to
The New Yorker,
who took it as if it were a torch. “ ‘Love Me Do,' right, we thought we might have rock and roll hits, because it was obviously changing.”

“May I ask a question?” I asked.

“If it's good,” Michael Lydon said.

“He always asks good questions,” Mick said. I was almost—but am never—too surprised to talk. “Do you ever think about the effect of what you're doing on kids—I mean, the effect of the awful things you do on children?”

“Can't think about that,” Mick said, laughing.

“I don't blame you,” I told him. The reefer had come back to me. The press conference had become a conversation. Someone asked about the days of drug-induced musical unity.

“The era of playing on each other's records was a joke,” Mick said. “We may be all one, but we're not all alike.”

This inspired
The New Yorker,
who was sitting well apart from
Esquire,
to ask about the Stones' politics.