True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (39 page)

“We'll have a helicopter bring out some film stock,” David says.

“See you later, Measles,” Ronnie says, as he Mick and I board the limo, all sitting abreast on the wide rear seat.

“They will stay, won't they?” Mick asks.

“Yeah, they'll stay” Ronnie says. “I'll make sure they get some film.”

Mick seems pleased and excited, and why not? This is what the Stones—all of us?—have been after all along (though I regret, as I stodgily kept saying, the necessity for abandoning all the good works of history along with the bad
—
the Ellington band, Bach, the flush toilet, and other great works of man's ingenuity seem to be undervalued by the rock audience), no matter what it took, abandonment of what refinements and conveniences, it was necessary to seek an alternative. So here we are, thousands of strangers coming together in a strange place like some mad sect prophesying Apocalypse—Shakers, Holy Rollers; roll over, Beethoven, dig these rhythm & blues. But why this place? Though it does fulfill Spengler's requirement that the Fall should come, the Decline should reach its climactic moment, on the westernmost point of the West, and in fact they had first talked of Golden Gate Park, the Golden Gate to the Orient, as the site for this, this. . . .

“How'd we get this place?” I ask Ronnie. We are away from the
stage now, driving very slowly, gently, through the steady onward press of young people with their baskets and sleeping bags and jugs and dogs. It is so late and we have been up for so long that, even with the cocaine, Ronnie's voice comes and goes in and out of my hearing. Something about no rock in the park, so this fellow offered this place mostly for the publicity after they tried to get Sears Point Raceway, which was owned by Filmways, which was partly owned by Haskell Wexler's mother. Wexler had been in L.A. and had shown Mick half of
Medium Cool,
his Chicago '68 Democratic convention riot movie, and he had been asked to do the Stones film, but he had other commitments. Anyway, the Sears Point people had offered to let the Stones have the site for just the weekend rental but then Filmways (who also owned Concert Associates, who'd promoted the Stones' L.A. Forum shows) became interested and demanded hundreds of thousands in deposits and millions of dollars of insurance plus distribution rights to the film shot at the festival. So here we are at Altamont. It doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense to me, but it has been a while since much of anything has, especially anything related to upper-echelon show-biz wheels and deals. I can't see what Haskell Wexler's mother has to do with it. “So how much is it costing the Stones?”

“Nothing,” Ronnie says. “The film rights will pay for it.”

“That's nice,” I say. “It really is a free show.”

“It's free,” Mick says, slumped under his cap, “but it still has to be paid for. Maybe we can sell bits of the film to TV
—
maybe Tom Jones would buy a couple of numbers.” We have come to a stop behind some other cars lined up before the gate, and people are crowding around the limousine. “I wanted to do all the shows free,” Mick says, “but that was before I talked to the accountants. I'd like nothing better than to do a free show on the East Coast.” There are kids at the window now, knocking, and Mick finds the button to slide it down. The driver is honking the horn, though the other cars are parked and empty and are not about to move by themselves.

“Are you real?” a girl is asking Mick. She has long dark hair and is bundled up in a heavy green stadium coat. “Is it really you?”

“Yeah, I'm real, are you real?” Mick says.

She reaches in, taking his hand
—
“Let us in,” she says, “it's so cold out here,” but Mick is tired and wants to sleep, so he says, “Are you havin' a good time?”

“Yeah, who are they?” the girl says, looking at me and Ronnie.

“Just some friends,” Mick says, but the girl seems
—
though maybe I'm crazy with dope and no sleep
—
sort of paranoid. “Are you havin'
a good time?” Mick asks again as the gate guard comes over, wearing a beige rent-a-cop uniform, and says to the people around the limo, Would you please move so this car in front here can move so this car can move so the one behind it can move so we can get this other car out? All right? Grumbling gently, hip but tractable like in a 1956 movie,
Don't Knock the Rock
or whatever, the kids fall back and we pull away and Ron with the gold heart says, “The kids are so lovely,” and Mick says, “Yeah, they're gettin' down with it, that's what you have to do.” And they really are
—
there really is something about them, they are definitely getting down with it, and Mick's saying this while slumped in the back seat of a Cadillac limousine on the way to the cool white sheets of a Nob Hill hotel seems incongruous. I am by no means sure why I'm going back to the hotel myself instead of staying out here with this giant beast of humanity, and I say in reply, “Yeah, that's what Keith's doing.”

“I'd like to stay but I've got to rest,” Mick says, and I say, “Yeah, Keith's fantastic,” and Mick says, “I've got to sing
—
if I had to play the guitar tomorrow I think I'd stay, but I've got to sing.”

The cars in front have been moved and we roll out the gate, the guard locking up behind us against the hundreds of people who are outside, hundreds or thousands of the hundreds of thousands who'll be coming.

“If it's free, why are they keeping people out?” Mick asks, ever the avenger of injustice.

“They can come in at seven,” Ronnie says.

“Seven?” Mick says, obviously not thinking much of this answer, but Ronnie says, “If you let them all in you'd never get the stage set up,” and Mick says, “Yeah,” settling back, then asks, “What about the people already in there, though?”

“They have to go out in the morning.”

“What?”
Mick asks.

“Joke,” Ronnie says.

We are slowly proceeding the hell outa here, and now in the near-dawn hour the pilgrims are increasing, a steady stream of them on both sides of the car in their rough clothes and long hair, bleached out in the headlights' glare. I'm wondering whether I should leave, whether I should miss a minute of this mass phenomenon that I do not even like the looks of. Wherever we have been before, none of us has ever been alone in the desert with hundreds of thousands of other young freaks, the Rolling Dead, all kinds of dope and no rules!
DO WHAT THOU WILT:
that shall be the whole of the law. At Woodstock, a commercial
event which turned into something else, a détente existed between people and police, because the police were outnumbered, but here you couldn't find the police even if you wanted, we are free, free at last.

But right now it is cold and uncomfortable and if I am not going to be among the walking dead when sunset comes, I have to sleep. I know we won't be at the hotel long, and I want to get my tape recorder and a little rest because I am tired, and I want some rest between me and what the dawn will bring. But still, uncomfortable and cold and mad and lost as it might appear, a lot of people are showing up, and anything might happen, just anything.

“I'd like to get some mescaline for tomorrow,” Mick says, also watching the people stream past. “Like to take some after the show.”

“Like to take some before the show,” I say.

“No, I have to sing, I can't sing if I'm stoned, I'll be freakin' out all over the stage
—”

“I've got some, we can take it whenever you want,” I say.

“Do you? Great, I haven't had any psychedelics in a couple of years. I'd like to take some and just wander around in the crowd and talk to the people.”

“All right, I'll take some with you,” I say, “but I don't know, man, you believe all this generation-revolution hype a lot more than I do.”

“No I don't; I don't, I'm just thinking about the film, that's all. It's going to be very interesting for the film. If we travel next year as well, and go to the East and maybe Africa
—
I'd like to have all sorts of different music, African music, oriental music, native things, if we do a world tour I'd like to show a lot of strange musical and exotic, ah, erotic things
—
like these chicks I saw in Bangkok
—
you went to this place, it was like a whorehouse only it wasn't, you come in and there are all these chicks on this red carpet behind this sort of glass curtain, and they're all wearing white socks and blue jeans and T-shirts with numbers, very weird, they all look like
—
what d'you call them, cheer-leaders
—
and you pick the one you want, like, ‘Numbah fifty-two, please,' and they take you away and do w'at ever, tread on you, massage you, suck your cock
—
you can't make it with them there but you can make a date to take them someplace else and fuck them. It was so strange, like
Alphaville,
sort of weird science-fiction atmosphere. There was a concert there too, native music, they were really gettin' it on
—
I mean it was much better than most rock and roll, more exciting. I think that would entertain people
—
I really do, I mean I'm entertained by that sort of thing, and you could cut in all sorts of things, us playing and then maybe some African drums
—
just do it like
The Ed Sullivan
Show, I
mean I don't think there's anything wrong with that form, inherently, just putting one thing after another, as long as the things are interesting
—”

“It would have to be done right, though,” Ronnie says, “or it would just be Around the World with the Rolling Stones.”

“Well, that
—
what's wrong with that?” Mick asks.

“Seems as if you'd need something more,” I say.

“It'll develop as you do it,” Ronnie says, “you don't have to worry about it in detail now. First you should get some bread for it. Ahmet can probably get you half a million from Warner's with a treatment.”

“What could be in a treatment?” Mick asks. “An itinerary, maybe. We don't know where we're gonna go yet. We've got so many things to decide next year, which is the best record company
—”

“Man,” I say, “I tell you, Atlantic—”

“Only Atlantic is hip enough to
—”
Ronnie and I are in agreement for the first time since we have known each other.

“We'll just have to talk to them all,” Mick says.

I open my eyes. We are on the highway now, still in the pitch-black night. We have been riding along talking with our eyes closed. Mick is quiet. It is impossible to tell whether he is sulking or just trying to sleep. Then he says, “I think a film of the Rolling Stones around the world would be interesting. I'd go to see that film.”

“Well, it just depends what's in it, that's what gets the people,” I say. “What the story is, what's at stake. Like that movie I hallucinated about you all with Bill the Sinister Vicar and Charlie the Mute but Honest Gravedigger and Brian the Wicked Renegade who lives with some gypsies on the edge of your estate, the mad gleeful Spirit of Chaos hangin' around the place, and Keith your evil Alter Ego and your wife and baby under threat of death because of the ancient curse, you know, there has to be something at stake
—”

“Oh, my old lady and all that fell apart on me” Mick says. “If you have children you have a family life and if you don't it all falls apart.”

We ride on in silence. After a long time, or what seems a long time, Mick says (on the plane to San Francisco he had been talking to Charlie about marriage and loving one woman and how do you keep it together, so maybe talking about it now reminded him of Charlie),
'
I wish Charlie could have seen it. He was very upset, he thought it was all going wrong.”

I can't see what you could tell from what we saw that would be reassuring
—
it is too vast and ponderously pregnant to be named yet
—
but Mick says, “He felt he was sucked into it
—
because he really doesn't
have much money and they don't know that he really could use the money
—
I could have done the whole tour free because I'm big shit, y'know, and I've got money, but he hasn't and he has a family and could use it
—
wish he could have seen how nice it is out there
—
we'll leave a note under his door.”

And when one can have no more brilliant dinners and make love to no more women, when one has no longer appreciative companions to listen to one's stories and can no longer travel and try one's luck—one can at least summon one's intellectual resources, work at problems, write one's memoirs; one can still test one's nerve and strength by setting down an account of life as one has found it, with all its anticlimax and scandal, one's own impossible character and all. The writing of the
Memoirs
represented a real victory of the mind and the spirit. Scoundrels like Casanova do not usually put themselves on record, and when they do they are usually at pains to profess the morality of respectable people. . . . But when all Casanova's obeisances to the established authorities have been made, life itself in his story turns out to be an outlaw like him.

E
DMUND
W
ILSON
:
“Uncomfortable Casanova,”
The Wound and the Bow