True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (33 page)

“Um, Auburn,” Mick said.

“Auburn University,” Berry said. “I want to be sure, 'cause I ain't gone do no lookin' ‘round, I'm goin'
straight
to that gig.”

When Sam Cutler announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Rolling Stones,” the crowd stood and cheered. Jagger tipped his Uncle Sam hat. “Very nice smells down here,” he said, referring to the aroma of the
marijuana being smoked in the front seats that went almost all the way up to the stage. The show was brisk. Even the line in “Sympathy for the Devil,”

I shouted out, Who killed the Kennedys?

passed without a ripple, nobody paying mind to Mick's heavy lyrics.

One girl, kneeling before the stage, kept yelling, “Take it off!” Jagger lashed her into silence with “Midnight Rambler,” swinging his belt overhead, crashing it down onto the stage. There were shrieks in the darkness as Mick crawled on all fours, looking stark mad in a red spot.

As “Little Queenie” started, Mick said, “If you can move”—the place was packed—“why don't you shake your asses?” By the end of the show the place was rocking, ringing with that sound, like great organ chords. It was a good crowd, a good show, no hassles, no “I'm Free.” We ran out, piled into limousines. Schneider, who happened to be in the car I caught, was carrying two rolls of movie film.

“Where'd you get that?” Michael Lydon asked.

“Some kid with a camera,” Schneider said. “We'll develop it and see if there's anything good and use it in a documentary if we make one.”

“You're going to develop that?” Lydon asked.

“No,” Schneider said. “I'm going to expose it and wear it around my neck.”

“You mean you just
took
it?”

“Tell him you're a thief, Ronnie,” I said in exasperation, “so he'll understand.”

At the Quality Court, where room service was closed, no one wanted to go out again, but I was hungry and went across the street to a steak and egg café and ate a hamburger. On the way back to my room I stopped by to see Jon Jaymes and ask what time we'd be leaving tomorrow. Jon was naked to his fat, hairy waist. With him were two girls, one dark-haired and quiet, one big and blond and loud. She was wearing plastic bracelets of red, blue, gold, yellow, and green, earrings that were each three great gold hoops. Jon was on the phone to Schneider, who sent the girls to him and who had another bevy of girls with him now. The blond had told Schneider that she had a pound of butter in her purse, and she wanted to spread it over Jagger's body and lick it off. Schneider had tried sending her to Sam.

“I saw him,” she said, “he fucked me, he's a pig.” She was angry, talking about the girls who were with Schneider: “I really hate those chicks. I really do, especially that one. She told a lie about me and if I go down there I'd probably knock the fuck out of her.” Wrestling the phone away from Jaymes, she said, “Ronnie, do you know those girls are underage? What about Keith or Charlie or Bill? You can have Mick
Taylor,” she said to her companion. “It doesn't matter, I'm not choosy, I just want one of their bodies, and I want it now. I can't wait around forever, I have to go pick up my little boy.”

I gave up, went to bed and slept—to be awakened at 9:30 by a call from Jo, who told me to go back to sleep, we'd be leaving at 2:45
P.M.
on a commercial flight to Montgomery, Alabama. Almost at once Ethan Russell called with the message from Jon Jaymes that the press should be in the lobby and ready to leave in fifteen minutes. Cursing, I got out of bed. I showered quickly and was shaving when the phone rang again. It was Jaymes, who said, “You and the rest of the press and your gear, downstairs, now.” I gripped the phone, sputtering, then threw it back into its cradle. I finished shaving, dressed, and went down with my bags to find, as usual, plenty of time to lean and wait before we left—Jo, Stu, Michael Lydon, Ethan Russell, and I. The Stones were still sleeping and would take a later plane.

I rode to Atlanta with Jo sitting beside me as I got drunk on bourbon. Chip Monck, she said, saw Brian onstage last night, playing tambourine for about three minutes at the end of “Under My Thumb.” I kept on drinking.

In Atlanta we rented a car, nobody tipping the black porter who loaded a half-ton of luggage into the trunk, and drove away, heading down to Auburn. I drove the car, a blue Dodge Charger, past pine woods and rolling Georgia fields. “Looks very much like Scotland,” Stu said. “Very pleasant.” But as we went deeper into the country, passing signs—
DON'T LOSE YOUR SOUL BY THE MARK OF THE BEAST, JESUS WILL SAVE U
—Mo-Jo gas stations, and tarpaper shanties, two banks of slate-colored clouds engulfed the sun, so that we entered Alabama under a morose blue-green sunset, and Stu said, “What a stupid place for a rock and roll concert.”

“Apollo Twelve is three and one-half hours out at six forty-five
P.M.
Auburn time,” the radio said. Men were going to walk on the moon for the second time in history, and none of us could be bothered. I was driving ninety miles an hour through the Alabama backwoods, but the sky had turned black by the time we reached Auburn, and it had begun to snow. As we drove onto the campus, the wind was whistling, snow whirling in the headlights. We parked behind the auditorium and ran to the back door, which we were happy to find unlocked.

Inside we were greeted by the head of the Auburn Special Events Committee, a graduate assistant who taught math and whose name was Jett Campbell. His helper was Mike Balkan; both of them were sober young white men with tidy haircuts. Terry Reid was here, but the Stones' whereabouts was unknown and there was a rumor, Jett told us, that Chuck Berry was not coming.

Two shows were scheduled, and Terry went on to start the first one.
The auditorium was not filled, and no one in it was black. Terry was booed during his first song, and some members of the audience yelled requests for irrelevant country songs. A few people stood and applauded when Terry went off, but it was a cold crowd on a cold night, and still no Stones and no Chuck Berry.

Then the back door opened and Chuck Berry came in with a white girl and my friends Jim and Mary Lindsay Dickinson, Jim carrying Berry's guitar. Berry's band was already present, and while he was on and I was talking to the Dickinsons, the door opened again and the Stones came in, all chilled from spending three hours aloft in an un-heated DC3 that leaked air, “freezing our asses off over the Mississippi Delta,” Keith said.

Jagger, taking the weather as a personal affront, was reconsidering the idea of visiting the South between the halves of the tour: “If the South's going to be like this, I don't want to visit it, I thought it was warm in the South.”

Friends of mine from Georgia had come to the show, and I was running low on marijuana, so I asked Keith if he had any to spare. He told me to let him know if I found some because the band had none left. Jagger, hearing me mention that my friends had come to the show, said, “It's not gonna be very good. The crowd's not good, and I'm not going to sing much, I'm fucking hoarse. And you have to have a night off sometime.”

They did seem to rush through the show, it was the weakest one yet, no question of singing “I'm Free” under these circumstances. The hall was half full, and though the Stones played hard the place didn't shake.

Between shows I swapped the luggage from the car I'd been driving to another one, because I would be staying in Columbus tonight, and the others would be flying to Illinois. The Dickinsons and I sat in the car and smoked part of my dwindling dope. They had come in with Chuck Berry because they happened to stay at the same motel as Berry in Columbus, and Mary Lindsay had knocked on Berry's door and asked him if he knew where I was. Berry had been in the shower when she knocked, and his girl, Elizabeth, had let Mary Lindsay in. Berry came out of the bathroom and talked to Mary Lindsay while lying on the bed face down, nose buried in Elizabeth's crotch. But he did agree to take the Dickinsons to the show if they would guide him there. They had to stop for directions only once. “One of you Caucasians better do the asking,” Berry said at an Alabama gas station.

The first show had been late, and the second show was already so late that Terry Reid was cancelled. The Auburn Special Events people were upset because the coeds had to be in their dorms by midnight. The girls here were not groupies or even fans, just coeds with Friday night dates,
and the reason there were not more of them was that a lot of the boys were saving their money to take them to the big football game tomorrow night.

Berry started the second show with his first hit, “Maybellene,” interpolating “Mountain Dew” at boring length. Then someone—a boy from Memphis whom I knew slightly and had given a ticket to the second show—called for “Wee Wee Hours,” the B side of “Maybellene” and the first Chuck Berry blues. Berry, looking surprised, asked, “You want to hear some
blues
?” A small band of enthusiasts shouted “Yes!”

“You asked for it,” Berry said and played “Wee Wee Hours” and then “Dust My Broom.” The bad band was forgotten, and for about ten minutes the room was transformed. Then Berry went back to his old rock and roll songs, singing obscene lyrics to some of them and doing such other songs as “My Ding-A-Ling,” a childish dirty ditty. He went on and on, as the Stones waited, Stu becoming outraged, threatening to turn off Berry's electricity. Finally Jett Campbell went onstage and thanked Berry, who left at last.

Jett, who had been on the phone with some higher authority, made the announcement that the Auburn coeds had been granted what he called “When-over permission,” meaning that they could stay out until the concert was over. “While the Rolling Stones are getting ready to come out, let's hear a great Auburn cheer,” Jett said, leading the crowd in a crescendo: “Warrr-EAGLE!”

I went backstage, where Stu was passing around tiny bottles of airplane Scotch. Alcohol was prohibited at the University, but Jett and Mike made an exception in our case, because we were exceptional. Jo was on the telephone, trying to reach the Stones' London office. Wyman, perfectly relaxed waiting to go onstage, told me that transportation and hotel problems always happen, no matter how well prepared you are.

The Stones' second set was better than the first; they were looser and warmer and the audience, War Eagles or not, were warmer too. Someone down front threw something at Jagger, who said, “You missed me with that joint.”

“We love you,” someone else shouted, and Jagger, tossing his long red scarf over his shoulder, said, “Thank you, sir—a man down here says he loves me.”

When the lights came up for the last three songs, I went down into the crowd and danced before the stage. Wyman saw me and smiled, making one of his rare onstage changes of expression.

“It might happen,” Mick said, “even in the streets of Auburn—”

Everywhere I hear the sound of marchin',

Chargin' feet, boys

The Stones had come here through freezing cold for $35,000, out of which they would pay the other acts and all their own expenses. They could have made much more money someplace else, but they had chosen to play at Auburn University before a herd of fraternity pins. Though there were not even any campus police to be seen, most of the crowd were not dancing, and the Stones' brave effort seemed too weak to make a real difference.

At the end of the show, out the back way again, the Stones going to fly from the frozen South to Champaign, Illinois, where they would play another university tomorrow night. I drove with the Dickinsons to the motel in Columbus, hired a room and went to bed, leaving a call for nine o'clock in the morning. It was a long drive across Alabama and Mississippi to Memphis, and I wanted to get started as early as possible. But the call didn't come; I woke up after eleven, called the Dickinsons, and by the time we left it was afternoon. As we walked out through the lobby, a television set, tuned to Saturday cartoons, said, “Wait! It's not the giant pussy!”

I was eager to get home and see Christopher, but Dickinson drove slowly because today was his birthday and he was superstitious. My impatience was not lessened when, just past the Tallapoosa County Memorial Gardens, a cemetery in which several Jersey cows were grazing, we ran out of gas. Dickinson pulled onto the grassy shoulder and started to write HELP on a piece of paper. That message seemed a bit vague for the motorists of Alabama, so he made another sign saying GAS. I took it and tried to thumb down cars, but they sped up as they passed. Then an Alabama State Patrol car came along and stopped about thirty feet behind us. I walked back to the big grey Pontiac with the state outlined on the front doors and told the man in his grey twill shirt and sunglasses, “We just did the dumbest thing you can do.”

“You run out of gas,” he said.

Mary Lindsay joined us, and the trooper asked, “Is that a girl or a boy driving the car?” Jim's hair was quite long.

“That's my husband,” Mary Lindsay said in her most mature tones. The trooper explained that he didn't want to leave two women alone on the highway, but that Mary Lindsay and Jim could stay and he would take me to where I could buy enough gas to make it to Birmingham.

As we rode along I was thinking that things were not as bad as they might have been; we could have waited a long time for someone to stop and help us. I noticed the trooper's name, Pilkington, on the black plastic nameplate pinned over his shirt pocket, and it occurred to me that I was carrying drugs that even in modest quantity could get me
put away forever in Alabama. Pilkington looked serious, and I looked out the window, serious too, when the giant pussy came to my aid. I remembered the cartoons and knew there had to be football on a cold Saturday afternoon in November.

“Who's winnin' the game?” I asked.

Pilkington relaxed, grinned, said, “Ole Miss whippin' hell out of 'em.”