True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (36 page)

Schneider asked me for Berry's receipt. Business as usual. Yesterday the Stones played two shows in Champaign-Urbana at the University of Illinois Assembly Hall. At least this place was not another basketball gym. Behind the stage curtains a small neon sign read,
SIRLOIN ROOM NEXT DOOR.

The old brown hall, filled with folding chairs, had a low ceiling, compared with some of the space domes the Stones had played, and the atmosphere was more old-fashioned and theatrical. The Stones' first set seemed more like the old days, with Mick twirling the microphone and stomping. There didn't seem to be any cops pushing people around; Stu pushed the ineffectual blue-capped ushers offstage. It was as if, after what had happened here last year, nobody in authority cared about a
little old rock and roll concert. The crowd stood, danced, sang, shouted. The show seemed over in no time, and we ran out the back door to the limousines, the same limousines which had brought the San Francisco-based rock group, the Jefferson Airplane, who were crouched at the back entrance of the theatre with movie cameras, filming the Stones' departure.

At the hotel Jo phoned the dining room with our order, to be eaten there after a press conference and after a call to the Stones' English office, instructing them to find two places in London for the Stones to play concerts before Christmas and to send telegrams to each of the Beatles, asking them to play the shows, offering them the closing spot. The Beatles, who were coming apart, would not reply.

In Keith's suite there were fuzzy-headed people with cameras and tape recorders, as we'd come to expect at press conferences. One of them asked, “Do you notice any difference in the crowds you have on this tour compared to your previous ones?”

“Yeah,” Keith said. “The audiences used to be composed ninety percent of chicks twelve and thirteen. My first thought on this tour was, ‘Where are they now?' The audiences are much more intimate now. They listen more, we can play much better.”

“We got a guy we heard was good for sound and lights,” Mick said. “If you're gonna play ice hockey stadiums and huge abattoirs, you really should do something to make it better.”

There were questions about the still-unreleased album, and Mick said they expected some trouble getting airplay: “Some people find some of the lyrics rude. Some of the lyrics are rude, actually.”

Mick sat on a couch, crosslegged and barefooted, giving polite answers to dimwitted questions until someone asked how long it had taken him to learn sitar, an instrument he does not play.

We were soon seated in the Pump Room, waiting for dinner. It was a large room with great crystal chandeliers, midnight blue walls, candelabras bearing three points of light on each white-clothed table. We sat at a long table near a small dance floor and a quintet—tenor saxophone, trumpet, rhythm section—playing songs like “Yesterdays” and “Willow Weep for Me.” Jon Jaymes—sitting with his mother, Mike Scotty (the older man who'd been along in San Diego), and a handsome young blond girl at a table to our right—was talking as usual into a telephone. The band was good, and the place was not bad, but the sedate clientele regarded us as if we were a circus troupe with our own Mafia rep. You couldn't blame them.

Ordering early did no good; we sat and waited for our food, Michael Lydon grabbing the chance to ask Mick some questions he had been saving up about “Midnight Rambler.”

“I write,” Mick told him, “just to confuse people like you.” And
because the service was slow, he added, “I don't really like ‘Midnight Rambler.' I don't dig singing about killing people. Taj told me ‘32-20' by Robert Johnson's not where it's at.” But making love and death into songs was exactly the Stones' business.

When the food finally arrived it was good, pâté, rijsttafel, caviar, cannelloni, wines, cognac, and we ate quickly, because the hour drew nigh. Then we went back to the barn, drove in the back, and as I was going into the dressing room, Stu stopped me. He asked if I knew someone named Abbie Hoffman. Not really, but close enough. Most people knew Abbie because, after the Democratic convention was over and the troops were gone and the tear gas had drifted away, Abbie and seven others, “the Chicago Eight,” were charged by the U.S. government with conspiring to cross state lines for the purpose of starting a riot. Abbie had come to the Convention as a nonleader of a nonpolitical party, the Yippies, who held a funeral for their nonmovement and nominated a pig named Pigasus for President. For this he was on trial.

Stu said that Mick wanted to see Abbie, so I went and found him, bushy-haired, jovial, intense, sitting out front with his pretty, dark-haired wife, Anita. We went backstage, where Abbie told Mick, “We're in the same business. Your thing is sex, mine's violence.”

“Yeah, I love a good fight,” Mick said.

“Say, do you know where you are, what happened here, the Demo—”

“Sure, I know,” Mick said, brushing his hair.

“Who's the man with the bread?” Abbie asked me, and I pointed to Schneider, sitting at the table with the Saltines doing addition.

“Why don't you give us some bread?” Abbie asked.

“No,” Ronnie said.

Abbie repeated the question to Mick, who laughed and said, “For what?”

“The trial,” Abbie said. “The Chicago Eight.”

“I've got to pay for my own trials,” Mick said.

“I'll pay you back,” Abbie said, “when the trial's over.”

“Please,” Sam was saying in his officious cockney manner, “will everybody except the Stones leave the dressing room, they have only about five minutes.”

Abbie shrugged, and we went out. “He didn't say yes, but he didn't say no. I've been trying to talk to him all day. I even called the Ambassador East and told them I was Elvis Presley. ‘Jus' wanna see how ole Mick is a-gittin' along.' ”

I watched the first half of the Stones' set from onstage, standing behind Keith's amplifiers, then after “Prodigal Son” I went into the crowd and joined Abbie and Anita, sitting with them and, as things got hectic, standing with them on chairs. Abbie kissed Anita during “Little Queenie” and sang harmony off-key on “Honky Tonk Women.” The
conspirator was just another rock-and-roll-crazed kid. “I may come to California for the free concert,” he said.

After the show the Stones travelling party went back to the hotel to pick up luggage. Charlie and I would have liked to stay in Chicago and go to some jazz clubs, but we were going back to Los Angeles. The Stones were going to record an appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
there the day after tomorrow.

Keith and I were in his suite, talking as he packed. He dropped a pack of cigarettes, bent to pick them up, and dropped them again. “It's that time of night when you drop things and can't pick them up,” he said.

Wyman, coming in, said, “I've got such a ringin' in me ears.”

“I always have one after each show for about half an hour,” Keith said. “A high-pitched ringin' sound.”

The driver of one of the limousines that took us to the airport was the man who drove the judge of the Chicago Eight trial to court every morning. “What does the judge say about Abbie?” I asked.

“He hates him. Says he's going to jail.”

On the plane, I reminded Mick that at the Woodstock festival Abbie had tried to address the crowd and had been hit on the head with a guitar by Pete Townshend of the Who. “I don't blame Townshend, I'd probably have done the same thing,” Mick said.

We talked about the shows on the first half of the tour and the problem of controlling the people who try to control the crowds. “The press conferences are odd,” I said. “It's as if nobody understands what you're trying to do.”

“We don't know ourselves what we're trying to do,” Mick said and went to play cards.

Charlie joined me and asked, “Is he good, that Abbie guy? Is he a good guy?”

“Well,” I said, “it depends—”

“I mean, he doesn't carry himself like somebody you'd respect. He's like a clown.”

“Maybe in politics these days the clowns are the most respectable people.”

“Sad, isn't it?” Charlie said.

Stephen Stills' house had been returned to him, so the Stones were moving to the Oriole house. The rest of us were going to stay at the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset Boulevard, but I rode up to the Oriole house with the others because I wanted to see if my contract was there. I was drunk from drinking on the plane but managed to be the first person in the house, looking in the kitchen, living room, office, everywhere the mail might be. Though I'd told the agency to send the
contract in a plain wrapper, there it lay on the desk in the office, the name of the agency on the envelope like a red flag. I was just shoving the envelope into the front of my trousers when Jo and Ronnie came into the office. I left quickly, went out the back door and stuck the contract in a low hedge of boxwood in the yellow light from the kitchen windows.

Back inside, I drank some raw milk, the first I'd had since we'd left for Dallas, hung about till it was time to go to the hotel, got in the car, waited for it to start, then said I'm forgetting something—ran around the corner of the house to the hedge, jammed the contract into my trousers, went back to the car. At the Hyatt House I put the contract in a drawer, fell into bed, and slept.

About three o'clock I got up, dressed, had breakfast in the coffee shop, then went to a drugstore and bought some stamps and a manila envelope for my contract. When I got back to my room the phone was ringing; it was Jo, organizing dinner for the Hyatt House contingent. I went along, with Jo, Ethan Russell, and some other people, but Jo had to stop by the Oriole house. Gram was there, and he, Keith, Charlie, and I started listening to records and the dining party left without me.

We listened to the Stones' first EP, then their second single, “I Wanna Be Your Man,” with Brian's remarkable solo. Charlie was sitting on the couch with his back to the window, the lights of Los Angeles below. Keith flopped beside him. “What happened to Brian?” Charlie asked.

“He did himself in,” Keith said. “He had to outdo everybody, do more. If everybody was taking a thousand mikes of acid, he'd take two thousand of STP. He did himself in.”

Charlie nodded sadly. “It's a shame,” he said. “Brian could do that”—nodding toward the record player—“without even trying.”

Gram roared away on his motorcycle, going to get a record he wanted to play. Keith joined Jagger in one of the back bedrooms, where they sat hunched over guitars, Keith mumbling as he played, Mick listening. “It's the strongest thing they have together,” Anita told me later. “Keith doesn't know what he's saying, but Mick can interpret it.”

Charlie, Mick Taylor, and I listened to some jazz records and some by Furry Lewis, Fred McDowell, and Johnny Woods. Then Gram showed up with a Lonnie Mack record, and we listened to it while Charlie played a drum kit set up by the piano.

Earlier this evening Rock Scully and Emmett Grogan had been up to talk to Keith and Mick about doing a free show. Grogan was a founder of a San Francisco group called the Diggers, who supplied the community with food, clothes and political conscience. Now Gram, who had left a large chunk of hashish on the coffee table, couldn't find it, so we looked everywhere, under the sofa cushions, under the piano, in the icebox, all over the kitchen, in the office, on the floor. Keith came out
then and searched in all the same places, finally deciding that Scully and Grogan had stolen it.

“Shit,” Gram said. “I spent my last night's pay on that hash.”

But Keith poured some cocaine onto a Buck Owens record sleeve and we forgot about the hash. Gram had a sore throat—the same sore throat Mick had created before the first show, everybody has had it at least once by now—and told us the Parsons Health Plan: “It's the drugs, they keep you healthy—that's what I tell all my health-food friends.”

Gram left, and Keith and I talked about the still-unreleased new album. “The mastering fucked it up,” Keith said. “We refused it. They equalized and limited it. Makes all the difference to a record.”

Keith went back to play more with Mick, and Charlie asked me, “Is it worth going out to eat?” He was despondent now that Shirley and Serafina were gone. “It's not bad,” he said, “I don't mind being on the road, I just don't like being in the house now that they're not here anymore.”

We finally did go out, to the Times Square Delicatessen on Sunset and Doheny—drank Löwenbräu, ate blintzes and matzoh ball soup. Charlie cheered up a bit, told funny stories about English jazz players, but the beer came off the table at two o'clock, and we said goodnight.

Next morning at the Hyatt House I woke up at ten, called my agent, and asked what to do about the contract. “Just sign it and send it back,” he said. I was eager to do that, but first we met—the lot from the Hyatt House and the Stones—at the Oriole house, from where we would go to CBS Television City, down by the Farmer's Market, and the Stones would tape two songs for the next Ed Sullivan show. “We wanted to do something more fah out,” Mick had said at the Chicago press conference, “but there isn't anything more fah out. It doesn't matter what you do, because one minute you're a washing machine, the next, something else. It's like an antique show.”

Up in the bird neighborhood, where the zoning codes were strict, it was a beautiful sunny day, flowers nodding in the gentle breezes. When we got to the house I made myself some toast and drank some milk. The city below us was hardly visible in the white smog. Furry Lewis was singing on the record player. Mick burst into the kitchen, remarked to the room at large, “I'm moving out tomorrow, this is a madhouse!” and went back the way he came. I followed him. Jo, on the couch talking on the phone to Steckler in New York, asked, “So when will the record be out?”