True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (66 page)

Mick sat on a wooden bench in the little airport, eyes still hurt and angry, bewildered and scared, not understanding who the Hell's Angels were or why they were killing people at his free peace-and-love show. “How could anybody think those people are good, think they're people you should have around,” he said.

“Nobody in his right mind could,” I said, “that's why—” I started to say, That's why I said last night that you believe too much of the hype, but I didn't. He had paid for his beliefs and nobody had the right to condemn him.

“Some people are just not ready,” Keith was saying, but how ready was any of us to live in the real world, a world that would each year become more like Altamont?

“I'd rather have had cops,” Mick said.

“The Angels are worse than cops,” Gram said. “They're bozos, just a bunch of bozos. They're so dumb. Michelle and I were standing by the right-hand side of the stage not bothering anybody, just standing as far away as we could be and still see, and one Angel kept trying to push us back, every two minutes. Every two minutes I'd have to explain to him all over again just like the first time that we were supposed to be there.”

“Some people are just not ready,” Keith said again. He had taken off
the red Nudie shirt he'd worn onstage and slung it over his shoulder, and he was starting to shiver. “Hey, where are my jackets? Hey, Sam! Sam! Did you get my jackets out a the caravan?”

“They're on the helicopter,” Horowitz said, without any idea where in hell the jackets were.

“Don't let it take off,” Keith said, “a black velvet jacket and a Hungarian sort of gypsy jacket,” forgetting the moldy Nazi greatcoat. “They both cost a fortune, don't let the copter take off with them.”

Horowitz looked in the helicopter and came back with an old sheep-skin jacket, saying, “They weren't there, they must be in the trailer, we'll get them, don't worry, please, we'll get them but for now will you just put this on just for the moment, please?”

Keith did finally deign to toss the jacket over his shoulders, whereupon Horowitz, ever desperate to do the wrong thing, said to Gram and Michelle, “There's limited seating on the plane”—which had just landed—“but there's already another one on the way. You won't mind staying, will you, it'll only be about ten minutes.”

Hearing this, I said, “Just a minute,” to Gram and walked over to Keith. “There's room for Gram and Michelle on the plane, isn't there?”

“Sure,” Keith said.

We went out to the plane, a fifteen-seater. After so many, the names all blend together and it doesn't matter if they're red and white or white and gold or if the seats are brown or two-tone green. It was a short ride to San Francisco and a not so short ride in limousines back to the Huntington, safe and more or less sound. Gram was kissing Michelle, trying to make out with her, and she seemed to be enduring it like a high school senior making do with a sophomore boy on the way home from a church hayride. “We wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for you,” Gram said to me. “Thanks a lot.”

“It was nothing,” I said. We grew quiet as we approached the hotel. It was beginning to dawn on us that we had survived.

By the elevators was an
Examiner
with the headline, 300,000
SAY IT WITH MUSIC.
Say what?

Keith was walking around his suite like a whippet, saying, “If Rock Scully don't know any more about things than that, man, to think the Angels are—what did he say? Honor and dignity?”

“He does seem to take a romantic view of things,” I said from my position on the floor.

“Yeah, man,” Keith said, lighting a joint as he stepped over me, headed for the couch. “He's just a childish romantic, I have no time for such people.”

We listened to television news reports of the killing, speculating on whether we'd have to stay and testify, wondering whether we should get out of town at once, but we were too hungry and summoned a
waiter with a menu. “Oh, God,” Gram said, “it's in French.” He handed the menu to Keith. “Here, you read this stuff.”

“Ah,” Keith said, “this makes it so much more complicated.”

Just before the waiter arrived, Keith had been talking about the Angels. “They're homicidal maniacs, they should be thrown in jail.”

Far out, I said to myself. Mick had said he'd rather have cops, and now Keith like Colonel Blimp wanted to throw the bastards in jail. The Rolling Stones had played their comeback tour, it had worked, they would get worse publicity than ever, they were still alive, the world's greatest rock and roll band—but what could you do for an encore to human sacrifice?

Sitting on the floor smoking, we listened a couple more times to television reports of the killing, then didn't listen anymore. Keith played the Alabama tapes. Ronnie and Jo went to the airport and bought the getaway tickets. “I'll let you know in the morning if I'm going to make the plane for Geneva,” Mick told Jo.

Sam had passed out on the couch and we told him to leave, so he got up and made it to a chair where he passed out again, gaunt and bristly in his white turtleneck, head thrown back, mouth open. “Hey, wake up, man,” Keith said. “Go to bed, you're a drag to have around, you're unconscious.”

Sam opened his eyes, looked around quickly, then collapsed again into a coma. We were all in varying degrees of shock, feeling as if we'd been tossed up on the beach out of an angry storm.

When the food came, we ate and went on sitting, more or less speechless. We were all dead sleepy, but none of us wanted to leave. We had been through a shattering experience, in a way the experience we had been looking for all our lives, and none of us knew what to say. Talking on the phone to a radio station, Mick said, “I thought the scene here was supposed to be so groovy. I don't know what happened, it was terrible, if Jesus had been there he would have been crucified.”

When he was off the phone, he said that he was down on the idea of the movie. “I don't want to conceal anything,” he said, “but I don't want to show something that was just a drag.”

At one point in the evening, Mick and I were sitting on the floor with Emmaretta Marks, a black girl who had spent some time with Keith in Los Angeles before the tour started. Janis Joplin's name came up, and Mick said that she tried hard to be funky but she still wasn't black. Thinking of Taj Mahal's equipment boy saying that you can have more fun with niggers than anybody else, I said, to see how Mick would react, “Well, that's the dream, we all want to be black, what we think black is.”

“
I
don't,” Mick said. “I'm not black and I'm proud of it.” Emmaretta laughed, and Mick smiled for the first time since going onstage that night.

Tony went to bed but the hotel objected to his having two women in his room. “I told them it was my wife and sister,” he said. “They said I was immoral. Honky bastards.” I called the desk and ordered them one more room.

At four in the morning we were still sitting around. Charlie usually went to bed early, but tonight none of us wanted to be alone. A scratchy old blues record was playing on Keith's tape recorder. “Can you get that line there?” Mick asked me. “What's he saying?”

I listened, but there was too much surface noise, the message was lost. “I can't get it,” I said. “Something about God and the Devil.”

“I'll play it back,” Mick said.

I listened again. “I still can't get it.” I was so tired that my ears were not clear.

“But it's the point of the whole song.”

Finally I said good night and told Mick if I didn't see him tomorrow I'd see him in England. I went to my room, didn't call anybody, didn't even think, just got into bed and fell asleep.

Tragedy absorbs the highest orgiastic music and in so doing consummates music. But then it puts beside it the tragic myth and the tragic hero. Like a mighty titan, the tragic hero shoulders the whole Dionysiac world and removes the burden from us. At the same time, tragic myth, through the figure of the hero, delivers us from our avid thirst for earthly satisfaction and reminds us of another existence and a higher delight. For this delight the hero readies himself, not through his victories but through his undoing. Tragedy interposes a noble parable,
myth,
between the universality of its music and the Dionysiac disposition of the spectator and in so doing creates the illusion that music is but a supreme instrument for bringing to life the plastic world of myth. By virtue of this noble deception it is now able to move its limbs freely in dithyrambic dance and to yield without reserve to an orgiastic abandon, an indulgence which, without this deception, it could not permit itself. Myth shields us from music while at the same time giving music its maximum freedom. In exchange, music endows the tragic myth with a convincing metaphysical significance, which the unsupported word and image could never achieve, and, more-over, assures the spectator of a supreme delight—though the way passes through annihilation and negation, so that he is made to feel that the very womb of things speaks audibly to him.

F
RIEDRICH
N
IETZSCHE
:
The Birth of Tragedy

“I
THOUGHT
that I'd fallen down, on top,” Shirley Arnold said, “but I fainted at the side. The next thing I can remember apart from seeing the coffin go down was being back in the car, and I was saying, ‘How did you get me up?' Everyone was saying, ‘Are you all right?' Then we went back to the house, had a quick cuppa tea, and made our way home.

“While we were driving down to the cemetery—at the cemetery gates there was a policeman. He saluted as Brian went past, and Charlie laughed. I was so tearful, and I said, ‘What
you
laughin' at?' and he said, ‘The policeman saluted. Brian's curlin' up somewhere, lookin' on and lovin' it.' ”

I didn't want to outstay my small welcome at the Joneses', but Mrs. Jones sat with me and the cat as Mr. Jones talked, rambling from one time of Brian's life to another, putting together clues. “Very soon,” he said, “the two together, Jagger-Richards, were getting very uptown. Louie and I went to the Colston Hall, Bristol, in the fall of '66 to see Brian, when he and the group were playing there, and Brian seemed very different. All of his spark seemed to be gone. He was very unhappy. We didn't stay. Brian was not friendly. An indefinable change had come over him.

“It was typical of Brian that he called later, after the tour was over, and apologized. He said, ‘I wasn't very nice.' I said, ‘That's all right.' He said he had been upset about Anita—who I understand said after his death that she did him wrong.

“Brian played ‘Honky Tonk Women' for me down at Cotchford Farm. It was his arrangement—but I believe it was re-recorded without him. We were with Brian about five weeks before he left the Rolling Stones—and I'm convinced that he had no notion of leaving the Rolling Stones then—but there were moves afoot to get him out.

“When Brian became a Rolling Stone it seemed that he had found his soul, he had achieved what he wanted. The criticism troubled him very much for our sake—when there'd be an attack in the newspapers he'd call. Especially later with the drugs, he'd say he was ‘very upset because he knew it would react on you.' I told him it didn't, of course it did.

“After he was arrested the second time he called us—he was in tears. ‘I've been fixed,' he said. ‘I give you my word, Dad, I had no idea that blasted stuff was there.' I said, ‘I believe you, Son,' and I did. He never told me a lie. When I was upset with him, even as a child he'd always tell me the truth about what he'd done.

“I never went to court. Brian asked me not to, so we never did. After
the trials he always would call his Mum and tell her that things would be all right. He'd say, ‘Is that a bit better, Mum?'

“And he'd call other times, fairly regularly—every month or so. When he felt happy and secure and strong he didn't. And sometimes he'd come to see us, thought nothing of time, he'd blow in at four in the morning. He's rung me at all hours of the night, from Hollywood, Vienna, Paris, Melbourne. . . . He called from Melbourne once and we talked for the best part of an hour. He was homesick. He'd been listening to Winston Churchill's funeral on the radio.

“I was very foolish once. I trusted that chauffeur, Brian Palastanga. He came here after having taken Brian to the Priory Nursing Home. I told him people had been rude to Brian's mother—he told Brian and Brian was terribly upset. He called up, all in tears. The whole experience at the Priory was very bad for Brian, a lot of psychological rubbish which made him feel a freak.

“The famine in Biafra affected Brian terribly. He felt he should go with Mick to Biafra to try to do something to help the situation. ‘People say it won't do any good,' he told me, and probably it wouldn't have. But he had great feelings for the sufferings of others—animals, other people.

“Down at Cotchford Farm that night, Brian had gone to bed with his sleeping tablet, a ‘sleeper' as he called them. He knew this Frank Thorogood, who'd been down there working on the place, and this nurse were up in his flat—a flat in the garage, away from the house. Brian had said that Frank could stay in the flat. Then when Frank brought the nurse out Brian was not happy with that. It was a small town, and Brian knew it might cause trouble. He got up from the bed and tried, so Anna told us later, to get Frank to leave, couldn't, then they had what was referred to as a ‘party' which I interpret to mean that they had a few drinks together, and Brian was sleepy, he'd taken a sleeping pill after all. He got up, tried to get them to leave, and then after a few drinks decided to have a swim. With the pills and the drink and the warmth of the pool—Brian kept it at about ninety degrees or better—he simply went to sleep in the bath.