True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (63 page)

But it's all right, it's all right
In fact it's a gas

Some people were dancing, Angels dancing with their dirty bouffant women. A pall of wariness and fear seemed to be upon the people who were not too stoned to be aware, but the music was pounding on and though the drums were not properly miked and the guitars seemed to separate and disappear in places and you couldn't really hear Wyman's bass, it was hanging together.

“Ooh, yah,” Mick said as the song ended. He stopped dancing, looked into the distance, and his voice, which had been subdued, now began to sound pacific, as he glimpsed for the first time the enormity of what he had created. One surge forward and people would be crushed. Half a million people together, with neither rules nor regulations as to how they must conduct themselves, can through sheer physical weight create terrible destruction. “Oooh, babies—” low motherly tone “—there are so many of you—just be cool down front now, don't push around—just keep still.” He laughed as if he were talking to a child, looking down at the pretty stoned faces before him. “Keep together—oh yah.”

Keith tested the first three notes of “Carol,” unleashed the riff, and Mick leaned back to sing

Oh, Carol! Don't ever steal your heart away
I'm gonna learn to dance if it takes me all night and day

The sound was better, drums and bass clearer, guitars stronger. At the end Mick said, “Whoo! Whoo! Aw, yes!” He hoisted a bottle of Jack Daniel's that was sitting in front of the drums. “I'd like to drink, ah, drink one to you all.”

Keith set out on “Sympathy for the Devil.” As Mick sang, “I was around when Jesus Christ had his moment of doubt and pain,” there was a low explosive
thump!
in the crowd to the right of the stage, and oily blue-white smoke swirled up as if someone had thrown a toad into a witches' cauldron. People were pushing, falling, a great hole opening as they moved instantly away from the center of the trouble. I had no idea people in a crowd could move so fast. Mick stopped singing but the music chugged on, four bars, eight, then Mick shouted: “Hey! Heeey! Hey! Keith—Keith—
Keith!”
By now only Keith was playing, but he was playing as loud and hard as ever, the way the band is supposed to do until the audience tears down the chicken wire and comes onstage with chairs and broken bottles. “Will you cool it and I'll try and stop it,” Mick said, so Keith stopped.

“Hey—hey, peo-ple,” Mick said. “Sisters—brothers and sisters—
brothers
and
sisters
—come
on
now.” He was offering the social contract to a twister of flailing dark shapes. “That means everybody just cool
out
—will ya cool out, everybody—”

“Somebody's bike blew up, man,” Keith said.

“I know,” Mick said. “I'm hip. Everybody be cool now, come on—all right? Can we still make it down in the front? Can we still collect ourselves, everybody? Can everybody just—I don't know what happened, I couldn't see, but I hope ya all right—are ya all right?” The trouble spot seemed still. Charlie was making eager drum flutters, Keith playing stray notes.

“Okay,” Mick said. “Let's just give ourselves—we'll give ourselves another half a minute before we get our breath back, everyone just cool down and easy—is there anyone there who's hurt—huh?—everyone all right—okay—all right.” The music was starting again. “Good, we can groove—summink very funny happens when we start that numbah—ah, ha!”

Keith and Charlie had the rhythm pattern going, tight and expert, and Mick asked again to be allowed to introduce himself, a man of wealth and taste, but not about to lay anybody's soul to waste. Keith's solo cut like a scream into the brain, as Mick chanted, “Everybody got to cool out—everybody has got to cool right out—yeah! Aw right!”

Sounding like one instrument, a wild whirling bagpipe, the Stones chugged to a halt. But the crowd didn't stop, we could see Hell's Angels spinning like madmen, swinging at people. By stage right a tall white boy with a black cloud of electric hair was dancing, shaking, infuriating the Angels by having too good a time. He was beside an Angel when I first saw him, and I wondered how he could be so loose, nearly touching one of those monsters. He went on dancing and the Angel pushed him and another Angel started laying into the crowd with a pool cue and then a number of Angels were grabbing people, hitting and kicking, the crowd falling back from the fury with fantastic speed, the dancer running away from the stage, the crowd parting before him like the Red Sea, the Angels catching him from behind, the heavy end of a pool cue in one long arc crashing into the side of his head, felling him like a sapling so that he lay straight and didn't move and I thought, My God, they've killed him. But they weren't through. When he went down they were all over him, pounding with fists and cues, and when he was just lying there they stood for a while kicking him like kicking the dead carcass of an animal, the meat shaking on the bones.

The song was over and Mick was saying, “Who—who—I mean like people, who's fighting and what for? Hey, peo-ple—I mean, who's fighting and what for? Why are we fighting? Why are we fighting?” His voice was strong, emphasizing each word. “We don't want to fight. Come on—do we want, who wants to fight? Hey—I—you know, I
mean like—every other scene has been cool. Like we've gotta stop right now. We've gotta stop them right now. You know, we can't, there's no point.”

Sam took the microphone. “Could I suggest a compromise, please.” He was a bit more awake now and the soul of peace and reason. “Can I ask please to speak to the—” He stopped then because the logical conclusion was, “—to the Hell's Angels and ask them please to stop performing mayhem on people.”

“Either those cats cool it,” Keith said, “or we don't play. I mean, there's not that many of 'em.”

It was a fine brave thing to say, but I had made up my mind about fighting the Hell's Angels while one of them had me in the air, and probably the rest of the people present had concluded some time ago that the first man who touched an Angel would surely die. Even as Keith spoke an Angel was ripping into someone in front of stage left. “That guy there,” Keith said, “if he doesn't stop it—”

There was a pause while another Angel did slowly stop him. Still another Angel yelled to ask Keith what he wanted. “I just want him to stop pushin' people around,” Keith said.

An Angel came to the mike and bellowed into it. “Hey, if you don't cool it you ain't gonna hear no more music! Now, you wanta all go home, or what?” It was like blaming the pigs in a slaughterhouse for bleeding on the floor.

Horowitz was leading some of the women in our group back to the trailer. Michael Lydon asked me, “Can I use your notes later? My old lady's had a bad acid trip and she cut her foot and I need to get her out of here.” Later Michael wrote of the Angels, “Their absolute solidarity mocks our fearful hope of community, their open appetite for violence our unfocused love of peace.” At the time I thought, Notes? He thinks I'm taking notes?

Stu, in his blue windbreaker, was at the mike, saying in a cool but unhappy voice, “We need doctors down here
now,
please. Can we have a doctor down here now to the front?”

You felt that in the next seconds or minutes you could die, and there was nothing you could do to prevent it, to improve the odds for survival. A bad dream, but we were all in it.

I looked around, checking my position, which if not the worst was not good, and saw David Maysles on top of a truck behind the stage. Ethan Russell and Al Maysles were up there with their cameras, and more people, including a couple of Hell's Angels sitting in front dangling their legs over the side like little boys fishing at a creek in the nineteenth century.

“Hey! David!” I said.

“You want to get up here?”

“Sure.” I stuck my notebook behind my belt and swung aboard, being careful not to jostle the Angels. At least now I would be behind them, instead of having it the other way round, which had given me worse chills than the wind did up here. It was cold away from the warm amps but this was, I hoped, a safer place and better to see from.

Hunkered behind the Angels, I noticed that only one wore colors, the other one in his cowboy hat and motorcycle boots was just a sympathizer. Sam was saying, “The doctor is going through in a green jumper and he's just here—” pointing in front “wavin' his hand in the air, look.” The mass, like a dumb aquatic beast, had closed up again except for a little space around the body. (The boy didn't die, to my—and probably his—surprise.) “Can you let the doctor go through please and let him get to the person who's hurt?” Someone in front spoke to Sam, who added wearily, “We have also—lost in the front here—a little girl who's five years old.”

Charlie was playing soft rolls, Keith was playing a slow blues riff. “Let's play cool-out music,” Keith said to Mick.

They played a repeating twelve-bar pattern that stopped in half a minute. “Keep going,” Mick said, and it started again, a meditative walking-bass line, the Stones trying to orient themselves by playing an Elmore James/Jimmy Reed song they had played in damp London caverns. “The sun is shining on both sides of the street,” Mick sang. “I got a smile on my face for every little girl I meet.” The slow blues did seem to help things, a little. A huge Angel with long blond hair, brown suede vest, no shirt, blue jeans, was standing behind gentle Charlie, patting his foot, one giant hand resting on Charlie's white pullover. The song ended without event and Mick said, “We all dressed up, we got no place to go,” which was all too true.

“Stray Cat,” Keith said, but there was another flurry of fighting stage right, partly hidden from us by the PA scaffold, a tower of speakers.

“Hey—heyheyhey look,” Mick said. Then to Keith or to no one he said, “Those
scenes
down there.”

I leaned forward and spoke to the cowboy hat. “What's happening, man,” I asked. “Why are they fighting?”

Over his shoulder, out of the corner of his mouth, he said, “Some smart asshole, man, some wise guy wants to start trouble—and these guys are tired, man, they been here all night, some wise guy starts something they don't like it—arhh, I can't tell you what happened.” Taking a jug of acid-apple juice from his Angel friend, he drank till his eyes looked, as Wynonie Harris used to say, like two cherries in a glass of buttermilk. Me, I lay low.

“Stray Cat” started, Mick sounding perfunctory, forgetting the words here and there, Keith playing madly.

A girl down front was shaking with the music and crying as if her
dream of life had ended. In the backstage aisle between the trucks, the Angels and their women were doing their stiff jerking dance. Most of the women were hard-looking tattooed types with shellacked hairdos, but one of them, no more than fourteen, with a dirty, pretty-baby face, wearing a black leather jacket, was moving the seat of her greasy jeans wildly, and I thought of the little guerrilla in Fort Collins and was glad she wasn't in this crowd.

The Angel standing with his hand on Charlie's shoulder was being asked to step down off the stage by one of the New York heavies, a red-faced, red-haired, beefy man dressed in the light golf-jacket uniform. You could follow what they were saying by their gestures. The cop told the Angel to step down, the Angel shook his head, the cop told him again and pushed him a little. The cop had a cigarette in his mouth and the Angel took it out, just plucked it from between the cop's lips like taking a rose from the mouth of the fair Carmen, causing the cop to regard the Angel with a sorrowful countenance. It was only when two more men in golf jackets turned around and faced the Angel with expressions equally dolorous that he went down the steps. He came back a minute later but stayed at the rear of the stage, dancing, twitching like a frog attached to electrodes.

As “Stray Cat” ended, Mick said, “Ooh baby,” looking up as if for deliverance and finding a shapeless human mass reaching into the darkness as far as he could see. “Baby—all along a hillside—hey, everybody, ah—we gone do, we gone do, ah—what are we gonna do?”

“Love in Vain,” Keith said. The slow elegant Robert Johnson line began, building slowly. “I followed her to the station with my suitcase in my hand—oh, it's hard to tell, when all your love's in vain.” The Stones had not forgotten how to play, but nobody seemed to be enjoying the music, at least nobody who could be seen in the lights that made the stage the glowing center of a world of night. Too many people were still too close together and the Angels were still surly. At stage right an Angel with a skinful of acid was writhing and wringing his hands in a pantomime of twisting Mick's neck. At stage left Timothy Leary huddled with his wife and daughter, looking as if he'd taken better trips. The stage skirts were so crowded that Mick had only a limited area to work. He looked cramped, smaller than ever and cowed, frightened, but he kept on singing.

Things were quiet during “Love in Vain” except for some heavy jostling down front, the prevailing mood of impending death, and the fear and anguish you could see in the faces. “Aw yeah,” Mick said as the song ended. “Hey, I think—I think, I think, that there was one good idea came out of that number, which was, that I really think the only way you're gonna keep yourselves cool is to
sit down.
If you can make it I think you'll find it's better. So when you're sitting com­
fortably—now, boys and girls—” withdrawing the social contract—“Are you sitting comfortably? When, when we get to really like the end and we all want to go absolutely crazy and like jump on each other then we'll stand up again, d'you know what I mean—but we can't seem to keep it together, standing up—okay?”

In the background Keith was tooling up the opening chords of “Under My Thumb.” A few people in front of the stage were sitting, going along with Mick, who for the first time in his life had asked an audience to sit down. The anarchist was telling people what to do. Then, just before he began to sing, he said, “But it ain't a rule.”