True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (21 page)

“I was much more involved with politics before I got into music,” Mick said. “At the London School of Whatsis I was always in arguments, pounding on tables—which is what you do at college.”

“But when you wrote ‘Street Fighting Man,' ” said
The New Yorker,
“you must have been involved in the politics that was happening at the time.”

“But you're always involved with what's going on around you,” Mick said, beginning to mutter. “There is a certain political, I suppose, content to that song—”

“But it's just a song,” I said.

“Right,” Mick said, and knowing an exit line when he heard one, he escaped.

The magazine writers left, and I went at Jo Bergman's request to the Sunset Boulevard offices of Solters and Sabinson, the public relations people, to pick up copies of the tour itinerary. There I met David Horowitz, who could have been the “Under-Assistant West Coast Promo Man” of the Jagger/Richards song, except that he was not wearing a seersucker suit. But he did have horn-rim glasses and a suit that looked as if it had become shiny from lying on the couches of expensively upholstered psychiatrists. Jagger had hired Solters and Sabinson after talking to several firms, lying to them all to test their stupidity. For five hundred dollars a week, Horowitz told me, Solters and Sabinson were going to handle the Stones' media conferences, being careful to include the underground press. “We are aware that the Stones know the under-ground press are their friends. Our job in the case of an act like this is not to make news, the Stones are news, a tour like this is big news. We see our job as facilitating the dissemination of that news as widely as possible.”

But when Horowitz's secretary gave me the itineraries and I thanked her, saying, “I have to send my wife one of these, so she'll know I'm not lost,” Horowitz broke into little beads of sweat and refused to let me have the itineraries until he had approval from the Stones, so alarmed was he at the prospect of all this big news being in the hands of somebody's wife. He telephoned Jo, who told him to fork over the paper, and he did.

Back at Oriole, nothing much was happening. There were left-about signs of the times, managers' ads in the daily
Variety
saying “No groups please,” and screenplays (“star vehicles”) sent for Jagger to read, such as
The Adventures of Augie March
and another called
Children at the Gate:
as its first scene opened, Theresa, sixteen, climbing back into her cotton underpants, said to her naked nineteen-year-old brother, “God damn you, Angelo! How many times do I have to tell you not to hang your God-damned tie on the God-damned cross?” Scripts we never finished reading.

At nightfall Jagger showed up again to check some last-minute details
with Jo, who told him that for the big L.A. opening show at the Forum they needed more free tickets than had been reserved for press and friends. “They'll be free to the press or free to your friends, that's the choice.”

“Why is
that
the choice?” Mick asked, and paid for the friends' tickets himself.

Dinner with the Wattses, the Schneiders, Jo, and a few other people, was pleasant, even though tomorrow would be Friday, and the odds were not getting any shorter. Afterwards, with the doors locked against the cool air and the Midnight Rambler, Charlie and I were sitting on a couch in the living room, listening to a Columbia collection of 1920s records (“Varsity Drag,” “Black and Blue”), when Schneider approached, wielding a deck of cards, asking us to take one, any one. Charlie said, in his deadly honest way, “When I started out playing, I played weddings and that sort of thing, where there was always someone interrupting with card tricks, just like that.”

Looking through the wide windows of the President's Club at Continental Airlines in Los Angeles International Airport, under an ocean of smog, we seemed to be, but weren't, in the very early morning. The President's Club had low tables, quiet couches, solitary chairs, like a waiting room in a nondenominational mortuary.

Keith, wearing sunglasses with giant purple bug-eye lenses and a moldy green leather military greatcoat, was listening to Sam Cutler: “We've got all sorts of makeup and two very nice little hair dryers—”

“Good boy, Sam,” Keith said.

In an alcove where a man in a dark suit watched, eyes wide, Mary was sitting on Kathy's lap, stroking her gently.

Keith, who had gone to see Bo Diddley last night and got to bed at six
A.M.,
said, “Sam, bring me a vodka.”

“But you said you didn't want nothing till you got on the plane,” Sam said.

As if he were speaking to himself Keith said, “Must get used to my—unpredictability.”

Several men wearing dark suits came in together and signed the guest list. I ambled over and did a little reading. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston, Texas. I went back and sat on a couch with Keith and Mick, no time to worry about contracts today. Keith, having finished his vodka, was adding teaspoons of sugar to a cup of coffee, one two three four five. Jagger and I read the ads for inflatable party dolls in the back of
Cavalier.
Keith got up for a bit of a stroll, coattails trailing.

Bill and Astrid, sitting near us, were joined by one of the men in dark suits, who sat on a table beside Astrid. Deeply tanned and, now I
notice, deeply drunk, he thrust a ball-point pen and a piece of paper toward Astrid and said, “Little lady, would you sign my thing?”

Astrid looked at Bill as if the least he could do was to challenge this madman to a duel. Bill smiled and said nothing. He was in Black-pool the night the audience tore the whole auditorium apart. Two others in dark suits came over and said, referring to the drunk, “You
need
this guy. He's a full-blood Indian harmonica player. You ought to hear him.” I asked them if they really worked for NASA and they said sure. What are you doing, I asked, going to Mars?

“That's where we're headed,” one of them said. “Just waiting for Nixon to turn us on.”

I looked out at the fog, said, “I don't think he's going to turn me on,” and the NASA men stopped smiling.

Across the room a middle-aged woman who had been reading
Palm Springs Today
looked up and asked Kathy and Mary, who were following Keith, “Are there girls in the group?” The girls smiled like the sisters of Dracula, and the woman asked, “Which one had the two babies with two different women in this month's
Cosmopolitan?”

Whirling to face the woman, Keith said, sounding like Bea Lillie, “You talkin' 'bout me babies?”

“Are you the one in the magazine?” the woman asked.

“You read too many goddamned magazines,” Keith said in the same high voice.

“I know
he
's not the one,” the woman said. And she was right, Keith was not the one, the magazine article could only have been about Brian. But Keith growled, “Try me sometime, baby.”

“Why are they so goddamned hostile?” the woman asked her husband, who was staring at the
Los Angeles Times,
pretending that he was alone on a tropic island. “I'm not hostile, am I, Chuck?”

Then, without warning, at 12:00 noon, only forty minutes late, our plane was ready. We boarded what the plump blond Passenger Service Director called over the intercom “The Proud Bird for Denver and Kansas City” and were airborne, headed for the out-of-town opening, our first contact with what was to come. Jagger, across the aisle from me, was pushing away, back to Schneider, a movie contract. “I can't read it,” Mick said.

“It's in layman's language,” Schneider said.

“I can read legal Latin easier,” Mick said, putting on a pair of headphones. I put on a pair also and dialed the same channel, to hear Otis Redding. “Nice,” I said, but Mick said, “Bad karma for a plane ride.”

We were flying eight hundred miles over the Colorado River, Lake Mojave, across the Continental Divide, into the heartland of America. Over the Grand Canyon we heard Count Basie; Stan Getz accompanied
us in the blue sky above clouds that brushed the dark snowcapped Rockies. All at once there was Denver, sunny and, so the P.S.D. said, sixty-six degrees Fahrenheit. The last time I was in Denver I was nineteen, stole poems from the library and a Bible from the YMCA, met girls in parks and bums in bars. As we touched down John Lee Hooker was singing: “Losin' you to my best friend.”

In the Denver airport there was a Mercury Cyclone GT on a pedestal. All around were characters in cowboy boots and hats. Outside the weather was, sure enough, clear and cool. Parked at the curb were two limousines for the Stones, rented cars for the rest of the party. I selected the fastest one, a Dodge Charger, raring to fly into the dry brown flat fall.

After the urbanity, the flash, the cheap stylishness of L.A. it was awesome, the rurality that surrounded us: dry corn fields, barns, leafless trees, fields plowed under for winter. We were driving a hundred miles an hour a straight sixty miles to Fort Collins, where the Stones would play at Colorado State University. On the radio a nineteen-year-old man or boy was being sentenced for selling amphetamine. Along the road, passing pickup trucks and station wagons, we saw Black Angus cattle huddled around silos, a motel with two-hour prices, mobile homes, a spreading junkyard, a dog-racing track, haystacks, many signs: Green River Wyoming, Foaming Gorge Creek, National Forest. . . Looking? Ft. Collins has it . . . Bacon Hill Pig Farm, little Quonset huts by the road. . . .

At the turnoff (Ft. Collins I-25, Prospect I-14), a girl in blue jeans waving from the roof of a barn welcomed us to Fort Collins. As we entered the city we saw the magic American names, Rexall, Coke, Gulf, 7-Eleven, Safeway. In the distance we could see the Rocky Mountains, just as we were passing a grade school, bicycles parked outside, a chubby little girl riding past on a bicycle delivering newspapers, the whole town like a painting by Norman Rockwell.

Away from the downtown area, among modern, monolithic buildings, we pulled into a parking lot at the rear of the campus, a guard showing us outsiders, show folk, where to park. The sun was a red ball just starting to drop beneath the rim of the purple mountains.

Students in blue jeans and sweaters watched us, the carny bunch, enter a metal door with a sign saying
NO ADMITTANCE FOOTBALL ONLY ACTIVE PERSONNEL
. We walked down the concrete-block halls to the place the Stones would play, the basketball gym, filled with rows of grey metal folding chairs, next thing to playing a prison. Hanging behind the high stage was a big American flag. In the center of the gym a green electric scoreboard was suspended from the ceiling:

The Stones and Stu were on the stage among guitars, cases, amplifiers, wires, microphones. Some funky-looking hippies were watching, wearing yellow scarves to distinguish them as security guards, so one of them told me—a girl with straw-colored hair and light blue eyes, their pupils opened big and black by LSD. She asked if I would like some, telling me, as if there could be any doubt, that she was ripped to the gills. I said thanks but no, I need my paranoia intact.

Over by the back door were some jocks in yellow baseball caps and green Colorado State warmup jackets. Leaning against the front of the stage were a couple of the hippie guards. They were all watching Mick and Keith lounging onstage in their perverted public sprawl. Uniformed Colorado campus police were watching, too, licking their lips.

Charlie started playing and the others began tuning up, Mick playing harp, Keith turning up his amp. The lead wire of his guitar was tangled with Bill's, and they stopped playing to pull them apart. A balding man in a silk suit, holding a load of programs under one arm, was waving his free hand at Jagger. “Hey!” he shouted. “Harrisburg, PA.” Mick waved, laughing.

“You know these guys?” I asked the man.

“I was with them on the 1964 tour, the first time they came to America. My name is Irving,” he said, pronouncing it Oiving. “Pleased to know you. They remember Harrisburg, PA. There were about three hundred there in a hall bigger than this. I sold twelve programs.”

The Stones were running lightly through the songs they would do. Schneider was walking the length of the hall, putting his left hand on each row as he stepped forward, counting the house.

Outside the lights were on and a crowd of young people were gathering. When the Stones stopped rehearsing we went down a hall, passing athletic trophies in big glass cases and a ticket office with bank-window glass, to a big room behind a door with a sign saying
ACTIVE LETTERMEN ONLY
. It was just a room where active lettermen had whatever they had like other people had cocktail parties, with couches and low tables littered with copies of
Sports Illustrated, American Rifleman,
the
Colorado State Alumnus
with Marine General Lew Walt on the cover. The Stones left at once, going to the Holiday Inn, not touching the big buffet, with all sorts of wines, liquors, meats, cheeses, and Alka-Seltzer, as required by their contract. They were going to get ready for the show, and that had little to do with having a nice tea. I poured a glass of wine and lit a reefer.

Once oiled, I went back to the gym. Oiv was selling programs.

“After I did the Stones' first tour,” he said, “then they broke up with Oldham and Easton, and Klein didn't want to—what's the word?—the contract. Honor it, right. Because he gets a twenty-thousand-dollar guarantee from this other program guy. So I get a lawyer and he gets a court injunction: the other guy can't sell the programs, and if he does
sell any programs he has to give the money to me. They can't sell nothing nowhere. So the guy calls me: ‘What are you doing to me?'