True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (62 page)

“Kind of festive, you mean?” I said.

“Yeah, it's great.” He smiled, but no one else did.

Charlie was looking away, distracted, as if he weren't seeing the buildings rush past. “Brian had a whole trunk full of jewelry,” he said. The contents of the trunk, like most of Brian's possessions, had disappeared after his death. “It was like pirate treasure, a whole trunk full of little trinkets.”

While the luggage was shifted into the helicopter, Mick led the film crew around the pier. Among the people watching was a fat, blond, white-stockinged, cross-eyed groupie. “Charlie,” Mick said, “get in the film, Charlie.”

“Kiss the girl,” the cameraman said.

“No,” Charlie said.

“On the cheek.”

“No,” Charlie said, with his turned-down smile. “Love's much deeper than that, it's not something to be squandered on celluloid.”

We climbed into the helicopter and cranked off over the bay. “Did we remember the brandy?” Charlie asked, wearing the pilot's olive-drab bill cap. “We get the food in?”

“Yes,” Mick said, “the loaves and the fishes.”

As we flew over the California countryside in the shaking helicopter, I scrawled in my notebook, “dun-colored contours of earth below laid out like the kids last night but like giants in khaki sleeping bags.” Long before we reached Altamont we could see lines of cars backed up on the highway and parked cars and then great swarms of people. We descended at a crazy angle to a spot a long way up the hill behind the stage, coming down with a bump. The doors opened and we were out-side in the crowd. Mick and Ronnie got out first and a boy ran up to Mick and hit him in the face, saying, “I hate you! I hate you!” I couldn't see it, I just saw a scuffle and heard the words. I grabbed Charlie and held on to him, because I didn't want him to get lost, God knows what might happen to him.

I don't know how Mick and Ronnie and little Mick moved so fast, but they disappeared, leaving me with Jo and Charlie Watts, the world's politest man. I tried to move him through the sea of sleeping bags, wine bottles, dogs, bodies, and hair. Like a mule in quicksand, he didn't want to go forward, didn't want to go back. “Come on, Charlie,” I would say. “Just step right on them, they don't mind, they can't feel a thing.” The ones who were conscious and moving about said, “Hello, Charlie,” and Charlie smiled hello.

As we moved along, heading down toward the stage, we heard the Burritos playing in the distance, “Lucille” and “To Love Somebody” driven to us on steel-guitar beams. It was chilly but the sun was shining, there were Frisbees in the air. We learned later that the Jefferson Airplane, who played just before the Burritos, had been disturbed by Hell's Angels punching a black man in front of the stage. Marty Balin, the Airplane's lead singer, intervened and was knocked unconscious. We were pushing through the crowd, stumbling, trying to avoid the big dogs. People were tossing us joints and things. Looking at a yellow-green LSD tab, Charlie asked, “D'you want it?”

“I ain't too sure about this street acid,” I said.

“Maybe Keith will want it.”

We were getting into the backstage area, trucks and trailers all around, the people there standing up, but it was still crowded. We moved quickly now, glimpsing faces painted with crescents and stars, one big naked fat boy whose nostrils were pouring blood. The trailer we were headed for was surrounded by little girls, people with cameras, and Hell's Angels. Once up the steps and inside, we were in the eye of a hurricane, peaceful and redolent of ozone.

The Burritos' set had ended, and Gram and Keith and I sprawled on
a bed in a corner of the crowded trailer with a two-year-old girl who sat on my lap and told Keith, “I'm gonna beat you up.”

“Don't beat me up,” Keith said. He had been out here all night, taking LSD, smoking opium, and seemed clear-eyed and content.

“I'm gonna beat you up,” she said again.

“Is that a promise?” I asked.

“I beat both of you up,” she said.

This trailer was where we had eaten chocolate chip cookies and sniffed cocaine in the early morning hours, but now the air was so thick with marijuana smoke that Jo, sitting at the fold-out table with Ronnie, taking turns on the phone as they tried to get a helicopter to pick up Wyman, started hyperventilating, shaking and quaking. Some of the New York heavies were outside the trailer, and I took them drinks, beer and coffee. Tony was there, his right hand bandaged with splints. “I punched a couple of guys out,” he said, taking with his left hand out of his pocket a big Buck knife. “I got this to compensate.”

A thin, dark-haired girl, fifteen at most, asked me, “Would you tell Keith something for the girl who was crying?”

Keith had mentioned an acid-freaked girl peeking in the trailer windows, crying “Keith, Keith.” Thinking this girl was a friend of hers, I said, “There's nothing to be done for her, he talked to her already, she shouldna took all that acid.”

“I
did
n't,” she said. “It's me, please tell him. . . .” She started crying.

“Did you see that child, little con artist?” I asked Keith when I was back inside on the bed.

“Yeah, she couldn't say anything, just ‘Keith, Keith, is it you, are you real?' I couldn't do anything for her.”

Mick and Gram were leaning out the door, talking to people. Gram was wearing brown suede pants and a rhinestoned Nudie shirt with Thunderbirds on the front, Indians on the deltoids, a dancing brave on the back. A little while later Mick and I tried to walk around and see some of the show—Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were playing—but there was no way, it was too crowded, you couldn't move in the crush and what you could see you didn't want to be close to. Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas came into the trailer bearing tales of how the Angels were fighting with civilians, women, and each other, bouncing full cans of beer off people's heads. Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the San Francisco psychedelic manufacturer, known as Owsley, was giving away LSD, the Angels eating it by handfuls, smearing the excess on their faces. It didn't sound good but there was no way to do anything about it, nothing to do in the center of a hurricane but ride it out.

Wyman's helicopter was late, so we waited. Gram and I sat on the bed, smoking and singing Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb songs, until he said, as I was attempting to remind him of the words to “Filipino Baby,” that he thought I had given up music for writing some time ago.

In the last light of day Wyman and Astrid arrived with a girl who had done some office work for the Stones in Los Angeles.

“He's really very nice, you know,” Charlie said to me, talking about Gram. “I've been talkin' to him about San Francisco, and the hippies and all that, and he's got standards, he goes just so far and no farther. And when that girl came in, he stood up just naturally without thinking about it.”

Soon we went out to a large yellow canvas tent a few yards away where the guitarists would tune. Jo was still trembling and I walked with my arm around her. The Stones had planned to go on at sunset, but the light was gone. Hell's Angels were guarding the tent. Inside, on a cardboard table, were a box of Ritz crackers and a chunk of yellow cheese. Keith and Bill and little Mick started tuning. All around the tent, people were trying to peek in. A boy looked into a slit in the canvas and an Angel reached through and pushed his face back.

I sat on the grass in a corner of the tent with Gram, who was talking as if we were about to leave high school forever. “I really liked what you wrote about our album. Would you write me a letter sometime, I'd sure like to have a letter from you.”

“Sure, soon as I get the chance,” I told him. I never got the chance.

“The lines you quoted about not feeling at home anywhere—that was really good, it was really where I was at when we did that album.”

Jon Jaymes waddled in, giving the Angel at the tent flap a sad look, and I eased over to hear his news. “There are four Highway Patrol cars,” he told Mick. “Those are the only ones available to take you to the airport. We can have them right at the back of the stage, so when you come off—”

Mick was shaking his head. “Not with the cops,” he said. “I ain't goin' out with the cops.”

“I knew you'd say that,” Jon said.

For some reason, as he stood surrounded by Hell's Angels in the world's end of freakdom denying the only safe way out, I was proud to know Mick Jagger, and I put my arm around his shoulder, on his orange and black satin batwinged outfit, nodding my head in agreement. We looked at each other and began to laugh.

“Where's the stage?” Mick asked. We went to the back of the tent and peered out between two folds of canvas at the hastily constructed wooden platform about thirty yards away.

“Would you mind taking this guitar out there for me?” Keith asked me.

“Pleasure,” I said. I didn't mind, and it would give me a chance to get a good position onstage.

Keith handed me his twelve-string. As I started out, an Angel, very short, maybe five-five, Mexican-looking, oily black curls, straggly whiskers, drooping greasy mustache, said, “I'll take you there.” I appreciated his help. Night was upon us, and I wouldn't have wanted to fight my way through the dense backstage crowd. Trucks were parked behind the stage, a narrow passway between two of them. People were everywhere, exhausted, bewildered, lost, expectant. I followed close behind the Angel to the stage, where I handed the guitar to Stu, who looked worried.

He put the guitar on its wire stand in front of one of Keith's amps. I stood behind the amps, looking around. People were all over the stage, most of them Angels and their women. The Angels were pushing off everybody who wasn't an Angel or part of the stage crew. I had seen Angels before, and
en masse
they were just as lovely as I'd expected, filthy boots and jeans or motorcycle leathers, one bearded specimen wearing a bear's head for a hat, looking as if he had two ferocious grizzly heads, one on top of the other.

On the PA system Sam was saying, “The reason we can't start is that the stage is loaded with people. I've done all I can do. The stage must be cleared or we can't start.” His voice sounded dead tired and flat and beyond caring.

An Angel—President Sonny Barger of the Oakland chapter, I believe—took the mike and said, in a voice not unlike Howlin' Wolf's, “All right, everybody off the stage including the Hell's Angels,” and people started to move. Angels were on top of the trucks, behind the stage, on the side of the stage, on the steps to the stage. I was holding my notebook, thinking, God, where to begin, when I was wheeled around—All
right, off
the
stage.
Looking to see what had me, I found his body to my left, dressed in greasy denim, but no head. Still, he picked me up by the biceps so quickly and brought me with such dispatch to his eye level that I couldn't complain about losing lots of time. His eyes were hidden under the lank rat-blond hair that fell over his grime-blackened face. There they were, glints in the gloom, but they were not looking at me or at anything, he was so high he was blind, eyeless in Gaza.

Eyeballs rolling like porcelain marbles in their sockets, jaws grinding, teeth gnashing saliva in anger,
“Off
the
stage”
he repeated in mild admonition, gentle reproof. It was that ever fresh, ever new, ever magic moment when you are about to be beaten to a pulp or to whatever your assailant can manage. This one, unlike the old last of the Con­
federates cop at the Ed Sullivan show, could, at least with his comrades, pound me into tapioca. I was in midair, still holding my notebook, thinking that I could reach up and thumb his eyes, I could put my hands behind his head and bring my knee up fast, depriving him of his teeth, or I could shove two fingers into his nostrils and rip his face off, but a little bird on the hillside was telling me that the moment I did any of these things, hundreds of Angels would start stomping. I don't remember what I told him. My next clear memory is of being alone again behind the amps. I wasn't even wearing any badges. Earlier today, on the way to the helicopter, Ronnie had been talking about newspapermen calling for press passes, not believing there weren't any. It's free, he told them, just come. Free at last. Well, not exactly.

“I just talked to one of the Angels,” Michael Lydon said, appearing at my side.

“So did I.”

“I asked him if he liked the Rolling Stones' music.”

“Did he?”

“He said, ‘Yeah, I dig them.' ”

The Stones were coming up the four steps between the trucks onto the stage, a brightly lit center in the black fold of hills. The crowd, estimated by the news media at between two and five hundred thousand, had been tightly packed when we struggled through them about five hours ago. Now they were one solid mass jammed against the stage. There were eager-eyed boys and girls down front, Angels all around, tour guards trying to maintain positions between the Angels and the Stones. A New York City detective at Altamont was a long way off his beat. The expressions on the cops' faces said they didn't like this scene at all, but they're not scared, just sorrowful-eyed like men who know trouble and know that they are in the midst of a lot of people who are asking for it. Against the stage, in the center of the crowd, a black cop with a mustache watched, his expression mournful, his white canvas golf-hat brim pulled down as if he were in a downpour.

Sam came to the singer's mike and in an infinitely weary voice said, “One, two, testing,” then with a glimmer of enthusiasm, “I'd like to introduce to everybody—from Britain—the Rolling Stones.”

There was a small cheer from the crowd—they seemed numb, not vibrant like the audiences in the basketball gyms after Tina Turner—whoops and yells and shrieks but not one great roar. Bass-thumps, guitars tuning, drum diddles, Mick: “All right! Whooooh!”—rising note— “Oww babe! Aw yeah! Aww, so good to see ya
all!
Whoo!” Last tuning notes, then the opening chords of “Jumpin' Jack Flash.”