True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (9 page)

When Keith had dressed again and we were heading back to the house, I remembered to tell him that I had written the letter. “Yeah,” he said, “I'll speak to Mick about it,” plunging me again into gloom, things seemed never to get past this point, but I went to my Oz room and got the famous letter. A minute later, when I got back, Keith was gone. Jagger was in the living room on a couch with Jo Bergman, talking business, frowning. I looked in the backyard and saw nobody, then went out front and found Mick Taylor alone. I did not say, Where the hell is Keith? but airily remarked, “Insane business, people running about.” It was the first sentence I could remember saying to Mick Taylor. He smiled simply and said, “I don't mind the business part as long as I don't have to do it.”
Then
I said, “Where the hell is Keith?”

“He and Charlie just left for the studio.”

I went inside thinking, To hell with it.

Then as I passed, Jagger looked up and said, “Isn't there a letter or summink somebody wants me to sign?” Now we both were frowning. I produced the letter and he signed it, Jo behind the couch not even thinking about not reading over our heads.

I had typed the Stones' names in the order—Jagger, Richards, Watts, Wyman, Taylor—that I wanted to collect them, because I knew that once Jagger and Keith had signed the others would; so I rode with the two Micks past the Whisky-à-Go-Go and Hollywood High School to
Sunset Sound Studios, where they were finishing their new album. I asked Keith, slumped on a couch in front of the recording console, to sign the letter and he did, in the wrong place. “Doesn't matter,” I said, and though Mick Taylor was at the bottom of the list he was sitting next to Keith, so I passed him the paper and pen, and he signed. Charlie signed leaning over the console. That made four out of five. I went to an office and called Wyman at the Beverly Wilshire, where he and Astrid were still living and were not happy about it. He said he was not coming to the studio, but he'd be over to the Oriole house for dinner about seven-thirty and he'd sign it then. “That'll be all right, won't it,” he asked, and I said sure. But I wanted to get the letter out tonight. The tour was starting soon, I expected big expenses, and I knew in my bones that it would take forever to get a publishing contract and even longer to get paid.

When I went back to the control room Charlie and Mick Taylor were leaving, and I rode with them back to the Oriole house. Wyman and Astrid were coming over for dinner because they were bored with eating out, and we were going out because we were bored with eating at home. I had nothing to worry about except that we might leave before Wyman arrived, so I worried about that. But they came in and sat down to dinner just as we were leaving. I laid the letter beside Wyman's plate and asked him to sign it. He perused it, taking his time. I had already waited longer than I wanted to. “Right there,” I said, handing him a pen. Wyman picked up the letter and asked, “You don't mind if I read it, do you?” I said sure, go ahead, it's just one sentence, no big deal. “Still got you on the defensive,” Charlie said, but Bill signed, I put the letter in my notebook, and out we went.

The next step was to make copies of the letter and mail the original to my agent, but I wouldn't be able to do that till tomorrow. Still, I had the letter, the letter was signed, it was in my notebook, my note-book was in my hand. We were rolling in a limousine past expensive houses on streets named after birds.

Dinner at a trendy, surly restaurant was not much fun, but afterwards we met the other Stones at the Whisky-à-Go-Go to hear Chuck Berry.

On the Strip, on the corner, past the tense, remote loungers at the entrance, into the darkness, the land of dreams, where it was hot and smoky and crowded, a big barn with a small elevated dance floor, the bandstand high in a corner, unfamous people looking for famous people, famous people looking for each other, the Rolling Stones sitting at tables in the corner not looking for anybody. I sat with Jagger, Keith, and Wyman, an odd combination. Young girls, two or three or seven together, kept walking by our tables, passing maybe six times before they got up the nerve to ask for the Stones' autographs. The
waitresses hovered around us, dollar bills folded lengthways between their fingers.

Onstage were four white musicians, loud and incompetent. A light show was playing on two walls, one covered with Jello-colored liquid globs and swirls, the other showing salmon leaping up a small water-fall, one clip repeating over and over, intercut between scenes from a Japanese movie featuring a giant beast come from the sky to devour the world. The eating of Tokyo blended perfectly with the rest of the action in the room, where people who had grown up surrounded by crazy images—like the girl on the dance floor dressed in black leather, looking mean in her boots and wrist guards—tried to be as real as Batman or Wonder Woman or Zontar, the Thing from Venus, shuddering there on the wall.

But then a lean, high-cheekboned, brooding-eyed black man came onstage, wearing his guitar low as a gunfighter's gun, stroking it with obscene expertise, and even Keith's image—the worst image in the room, Indian, pirate, witch, the image that grins at Death—reverted to what he was when he first heard Chuck Berry, a little English schoolboy in his uniform and cap. A few years passed before Keith could see Chuck Berry in person, because Berry was in the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute for taking a fourteen-year-old Indian whore across a state line for the wrong reasons, but Keith and Jagger both learned Berry's trademark duck walk from the film
Jazz on a Summer's Day,
which Keith saw fourteen times. Later, when Chuck Berry was out of prison and Mick and Keith were Rolling Stones, they met him, and unlike many of their musical idols, he snubbed them repeatedly, so that they respected him all the more and were trying to hire him for the present tour.

And now as Berry played “Sweet Little Sixteen,” playing sloppily with this punk band, not even playing the right changes, still from time to time in the breaks there was a flash of the magic of his guitar, and Keith, once more the schoolboy who wore tight pants under his baggy ones, leaned across the table to Wyman, because Wyman used to go to dances in two pairs of pants, a baggy pair over tight ones, they wouldn't let you in the door wearing tight ones (it is possible that the single most powerful unifying social element for this generation has been that we all, girls too, grew up wearing pants that clearly showed our sexual organs, straining right there against the denim), and to Wyman, a tiny man with the face of a funny gargoyle, who started a groupie empire, in fact,
the
groupie empire (“It originated with Bill,” Keith said. “He screwed thousands. He marked it all down in his diary.” Actually he stopped counting after, I think, 278), Keith said, “He's not doin' much, that band's so bad, but every once in a while, wow—”

Wyman, watching Berry, who had let nothing, not even prison, stop him from singing about sixteen-year-old pussy, smiled and said, “Yeah,'e's great, inne—”

When Berry's set ended we left the Whisky (our leaving, like all our arrivals and departures, swift and dramatic, everyone staring at the Stones as we swept out into limousines at the curb) and rolled, four carloads of us, down the superhighway toward the Corral, a night-club in Topanga Canyon, to hear Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers.

Along the miles and miles of highway, we (the Wattses, Bill and Astrid, two or three others) were talking about music—Shirley who loves old-time rock and roll very elated about seeing Chuck Berry—when for the first time on this tour we encountered Wyman's Weakness. Bill told the driver to stop at a gas station, got to go to the loo, and we rolled on and no place was open, and Bill again said, Hey, you gotta stop somewhere, gotta go to the loo, and the driver said, Doesn't seem to be any place open. Well, stop at one that isn't open, Bill said, just let me out of the car, and Charlie reminded him that “It was you got us in trouble like that the time before, Bill.”

It was March 18, 1965, the last night of the Rolling Stones' fifth tour of England. The tour had lasted two weeks, fourteen consecutive nights of playing movie houses, two shows nightly. It had not been especially eventful. Three shows had been recorded for a concert album. In Manchester, at the Palace, a girl fell fifteen feet from the upper circle of seats into the stalls. The fall went almost unnoticed as 150 screaming girls stormed the stage when Mick sang “Pain in My Heart.” The girl ran away from attendants attempting to take her to an ambulance and was later seen outside the stage door, still screaming, “Mick, Mick.” At Sunderland, where the Stones played the Odeon, fans wanted to buy the water the Stones had used to wash their hair, and someone sold their fag ends, cigaret butts, for a penny each. At Sheffield, a grown man seeking an autograph pulled Charlie off his stool while he was playing. At the Leicester Trocadero, another girl fell out of the upper circle, losing her front teeth. “We were scared,” Mick said later. “You know how these things catch on. We could easily end up with an outbreak of people swan-diving from their balconies and somebody killed.”

At the Rochester Odeon, which they would remember as one of the worst theaters in England, the stage door watchman wouldn't believe, because of the way they looked, that the Stones were the Show, and refused to let them in. Keith shoved him down and they went in anyway. At the Sunderland Odeon, while Charlie was announcing the song “Little Red Rooster,” a girl leapt onto Mick's back. He calmly carried her to the edge of the stage and set her down.

On the last night of the tour, March 18, after two shows at the ABC Theater at Romford, the Stones headed for London in Mick's Daimler. Before he reached home, Wyman needed to urinate. As their road manager Ian Stewart described the situation, “Really, if you sit in a dressing room all night, drinking Coca-Cola, go onstage for about thirty minutes, leap about like idiots, drop your guitar to run out into a car in the bloody cold weather, you're just about ready for a quick tiddle.”

Mick turned the big, black car into a Francis service station in Rom-ford Road, Forest Gate, east London. It was about eleven-thirty. According to the station attendant, forty-one-year-old Charles Keeley, “a shaggy-haired monster wearing dark glasses” got out of the car and asked, “Where can we have a piss here?” Keeley told Wyman that the public toilets were closed for reconditioning, which was a lie, and then denied him access to the staff toilet. Wyman's behavior, according to Keeley, “did not seem natural or normal.” He was “running up and down the forecourt, taking off his dark glasses and dancing.” Then “eight or nine youths and girls got out of the car.” Mr. Keeley, “sensing trouble,” told the driver of the car, Mick Jagger, to get them off the forecourt. Jagger pushed him aside and said, “We'll piss anywhere, man.” This phrase was taken up by the others, who repeated it in “a gentle chant.” One danced to the phrase. Then Wyman went to the road and urinated against a garage. Mick Jagger and Brian Jones followed suit farther down the road. According to Mr. Keeley, “Some people did not seem offended. They even went up and asked for autographs.” One customer, however, told the Stones their behavior was “disgusting.” At this the Stones “started shouting and screaming.” The incident ended with the Daimler driving away, its occupants making “a well-known gesture with two fingers.”

Mr. Keeley took down the license number. The customer who had spoken out against the Stones was one Eric Lavender, aged twenty-two, secretary-warden of a Forest Gate community youth center. “If the police do not prosecute, I will press a private prosecution,” said the indignantly alliterative Lavender.

At the police prosecution of the affair, the Stones told a different, and much shorter, story. Wyman testified that he had said nothing more to Mr. Keeley than “ ‘May I use the toilet?' I never swear.” Being refused, they got back in the car and drove off. Mick also denied any insulting behavior and said that he had never sworn at school, university, or since. Brian said he was not the type of person to insult anyone—“I am easily embarrassed.” The court sided with Messrs. Keeley and Lavender, and the Stones were ordered to pay fifteen guineas costs, in spite of Wyman's plaintive statement: “I happen to suffer from a weak bladder.”

But as he told the story now, while we rolled down the California coast on this pleasurable night, this pleasure-seeking night, before a tour that would be stranger than any of the Stones' previous ones, Bill's memory lifted the story to heroic proportions: “. . . so I go behind this place, see, and I've got me chopper out, when here comes this bloke waving a bloody electric torch, cryin, 'Ere, 'Ere—”

“He probably had to have a torch to see it,” Shirley said.

We found a gas station and while waiting for Bill we lost the other limousines. None of us knew where the Corral was, least of all the driver, and we raced along the highway looking for spoor. Somebody thought it was down that turning to the right, is that it, nah, that place is closed, and then there it was on the left, a little roadhouse, capacity about two hundred, tables and a small dance floor, crowded with rednecks and members of Los Angeles rock and roll society. Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys was present, and so were the young ladies Miss Christine and Miss Mercy, members of the Bizarre Records act called the G.T.O.'s, meaning Girls Together Outrageously or Orally or anything else starting with O. Miss Mercy was dark and heavy, a fortune-teller with kohl-rimmed eyes, many bracelets, rings, and scarves. Miss Christine, willowy and blond, in a long red dress with virginal lace at the bosom, was a California-bred magnolia blossom. Dancing together, they glided before us like one person, red yellow and blue jukebox lights washing over the room as Gram sang “I made her the image of me.”

We sat at a long table, the Stones Gang and their friends and women, drinking pitchers and pitchers of beer, whooping and hollering while the Burritos played “Lucille” and old Boudleaux Bryant songs, a real rock and roll hoedown. It had been nearly six years since the Stones played in English clubs where sweat condensed on the walls and people swung from the rafters. They were glad when they stopped working in clubs and went on to bigger places, but later they missed them, as they had come, over nearly three years, since their drug arrests, to miss playing itself.