True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (25 page)

“You couldn't see the bloody ballroom for ambulances,” Stu said. “They were carrying girls out one after another. The promoter had let far more people into the hall than it would hold. And they were passing out right, left, and center. The boys had to come in through somebody's garden, up a ladder, through a window. I think it'd originally been a cinema, and there was this vast great wide stairway on one side of the building, and when we left, it was covered in bodies. Just gone. Flaked out. They carried hundreds out that night. It was awful. All fuckin' Chuck Berry's fault.”

The next night the Stones played in Bristol, and Brian, driving down alone from London, missed the first show. “That caused one hell of a row,” Stu said. Brian's retribution was so swift as to seem compulsive. Three days later the Stones played Saint George's Hall in Bradford, across the street from the Victoria Hotel, where they stayed. Between shows, Stu said, “They didn't want to sit around their dressing room until the second half. No cops about. They said, Shall we chance running across the road to the hotel? They all made it except Brian, who chickened out before he got to the hotel entrance because there was people running after him. He eventually turned round and ran the other way. So all these people are chasing Brian through the streets in Bradford, tearing clothes off him. The police finally brought him back without a jacket, without a shirt, and he'd lost a shoe and handfuls of hair. All the others got across easy, but not him.”

Two days before, the Stones had taken smallpox vaccinations for their trip to the United States, about three weeks away. Before leaving, they did more television appearances and frantic concerts in Scotland and England. One newspaper review said, “Never before has there been a sound to rival this—except, perhaps, in the jungles of darkest Africa!” Their mounting success brought reporters to write about the individual Stones. Wyman, who for months had been writing “stuck in fog” in his diary as code for spending the night with a girl, complained in one story that the Stones' busy schedule kept him from his family: “We had a dog once but we couldn't keep it because I was never at home and he used to bite me when I turned up. That's rather sad really, isn't it?”

In another story, Brian answered critics of the Stones' effect on
their audiences. “The Rolling Stones do not incite violence,” he said. “I deny it categorically.”

On June 1, the Stones left for the United States, where they were not unknown but not exactly known. Their LP had been released, and London Records, English Decca's U.S. chapter, had distributed news clippings, photographs of the Stones, and T-shirts with
THE ROLLING STONES
on the front. London had also hired Murray “the K” Kaufman—a Manhattan disc jockey also called, because he liked and helped them, the Fifth Beatle—to like and help the Stones. Kaufman met the Stones at Kennedy Airport, conducted a press conference for them there, and took them to his program on WINS, where they spent most of the evening. He also gave them a record he thought they might like, called “It's All Over Now.” The Stones planned some recording, as well as touring and television, while in the United States. They would stay two and a half weeks, much longer than the Beatles' first visit, with greatly inferior planning and promotion, and with, as Keith said, “disastrous results, almost.”

The Stones spent their first night in the U.S. trapped in the Astor Hotel by screaming girls outside, whom they believed had been hired. The next day they were taken out and shown to interviewers and photographers. They saw David Bailey, the fashionable London photographer, and met Jerry Schatzberg, the fashionable New York City photographer, and Baby Jane Holzer, a Warholite who was blond and fashionable all over. “The first people to catch onto us in New York, thought we were just bee-yoo-tee-full,” Keith said.

Next day the Stones flew to Los Angeles. There were crowds of girls, probably a few hundred in all, waiting for them at the airport, as there had been in New York. The Stones appeared that night at the taping of a television show called
The Hollywood Palace,
whose guest host, Dean Martin, a musician of a different school, ridiculed their performance, appearance, ancestry, you name it. Partly because of this, and partly because they were billed among a trampolinist, a great many King Sisters, an elephant act, cowgirls, and so on, the Stones discussed walking off the show. But the dress rehearsal had been taped and could be shown, so they decided they might as well go on.

The Stones had a distinct feeling that they were not taking off in the United States like a rocket, but after a day of swimming at Malibu and a night of relaxing, they played a concert in San Bernardino that was a riot, just like England, except that the cops wore white motor-cycle helmets and carried guns. San Bernardino raised the Stones' spirits so that they could fall the next night, at the Texas Teen Fair in San Antonio with George Jones, Bobby Vee, circus acts, and rodeo riders. Nobody came. It was so hot in San Antonio, not far from the Mexican border, that Wyman had Keith cut his hair. The tour was
taking on a deep aura of gloom, and they were thinking of cutting it short. By the time they reached Chicago, Andrew Oldham was in hysterics or at least histrionics. At the hotel, after a scene with a revolver, Mick and Keith told Andrew to shape up and go to bed. He kept begging them for “just one bullet.”

By the next day Andrew was in sufficient control to accompany the Stones to the morning television interviews and to Chess Recording Studio, where the Stones, with the help of Ron Malo, Chess' expert engineer, recorded four songs, including their next single, “It's All Over Now,” a fine, spontaneous fourteenth take. The group ended the day with more radio and television interviews. The problem was that the Stones were making no national impact. Andrew used one of the oldest techniques a hustler can use when his act is too cold to get arrested: he got arrested.

The next morning Andrew called the news media and invited them to a press conference the Stones planned to have on a traffic island in Michigan Avenue, and did have, until the police came. It was on the national television news that night, which was the idea in the first place.

After taking their leave of the police, the Stones went back to Chess and recorded twelve more songs. Muddy Waters was there and helped them carry in their equipment. The graciousness of Muddy, from whose song “Rollin' Stone” Brian had taken their name, was touching. The Stones were recording Chuck Berry's “Around and Around” when Berry walked in. A week before they left England, Mick and Charlie happened to confront Berry, after he had snubbed them backstage at Finsbury Park. They were in a hotel elevator: the elevator stopped at a floor, the door opened, there stood Berry, who stepped aboard, saw Mick and Charlie, turned his back, when the door opened again he walked out, wouldn't speak. But this time he was trapped. “Swing on, gentlemen, you are sounding most well if I may say so,” he said, sounding like Duke Ellington at his most unguent.

The next day the Stones, back on tour, played to four hundred kids at a fair in Minneapolis, the following day to six hundred in an Omaha auditorium. These were the days of Scotch and Coke, and there was always a bottle of Scotch in the dressing room, but the auditorium in Omaha was public property, where alcoholic beverages were prohibited by law, in the person of a cop who looked into the dressing room, saw the whisky bottle, made them pour it out, and made a couple of the Stones pour out their drinks. He told Keith to do likewise. “The thing is,” Keith said, “I wasn't actually drinking whisky, the other two were drinking whisky and Coke, and I was drinking a Coca-Cola. He told them to pour it down the bog, and I refused to pour mine down because I said, Why the fuck is an American cop
telling me to pour the national drink down the bog? Cop pulled a gun on me. Very strange scene to me, a cop ordering me at gunpoint to pour a Coke down the John.”

Then, Scotch gone, cop gone, the Stones watched grimly on a tele-vision set in the dressing room the network broadcast of their visit to
The Hollywood Palace,
cut to near forty-five seconds among the elephants.

“That was the thin end of the wedge for Eric Easton,” Stu said.

“Easton, we suddenly realized,” Keith said, “wasn't big enough to handle anything outside of England.” The next day, Keith bought a.38 revolver, in case he might want to drink a Coke backstage again sometime.

Just as things were going badly, they became worse. The hotel in Chicago threw them out, something about girls in some of the rooms, and called the police, who discovered that the Stones planned to go to Canada for a television appearance and that Keith had lost his passport. The police assured them that if they left the country they would not get back in. So instead of Canada, they went to see B. B. King at the Twenty Grand in south Chicago, and on following nights played to tiny groups of people in mammoth halls in towns like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Hershey, where hardly anyone knew who or what the Rolling Stones were. The Stones didn't know what Hershey Bars were, and they called Phil Spector in Los Angeles to ask why the town was painted brown and there were trays of chocolates everywhere.

The next night they played to three hundred in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where Irv the program man sold his twelve programs. Driving from Harrisburg in a bus, the Stones saw a house get struck by lightning. Then, so swift it could give you the bends, they were back in Manhattan to play Carnegie Hall, “just screaming with kids,” Keith said. “We'd almost forgotten what it was like, 'cause we were used to that every night, every time we played, and suddenly we were brought down, bang, everybody saying, What a fuckup, we've blown it. America was still very much into Frankie Avalon. There wasn't any thought of long-haired kids, we were just entertainment-business freaks, with long hair, just like a circus show. And we get to New York and suddenly we realize that maybe we—that it's only just starting.”

In New York Brian told a newspaper man about a vision he'd had, coming out of a nightclub in the London dawn. “It was,” the writer wrote, “as if the heavens had called him to look up and see the face of a goddess angel telling him to work for human good.”

Greetings and welcome Rolling Stones, our comrades in the desperate battle against the maniacs who hold power. The revolutionary youth of the world hears your music and is inspired to even more deadly acts. We fight in guerrilla bands against the invading imperialists in Asia and South America, we riot at rock 'n' roll concerts every-where. We burned and pillaged in Los Angeles and the cops know our snipers will return.

They call us dropouts and delinquents and draftdodgers and punks and hopheads and heap tons of shit on our heads. In Viet Nam they drop bombs on us and in America they try to make us war on our own comrades but the bastards hear us playing you on our little transistor radios and know that they will not escape the blood and fire of the anarchist revolution.

We will play your music in rock 'n' roll marching bands as we tear down the jails and free the prisoners, as we tear down the State schools and free the students, as we tear down the military bases and arm the poor, as we tattoo
BURN BABY BURN
! on the bellies of the wardens and generals and create a new society from the ashes of our fires.

Comrades, you will return to this country when it is free
from the tyranny of the State and you will play your splendid music in factories run by the workers, in the domes of emptied city halls, on the rubble of police stations, under the hanging corpses of priests, under a million red flags waving over a million anarchist communities. In the words of Breton,
THE ROLLING STONES ARE THAT WHICH SHALL BE! LYNDON JOHNSON—THE YOUTH OF CALIFORNIA DEDICATES ITSELF TO YOUR DESTRUCTION! ROLLING STONES—THE YOUTH OF CALIFORNIA HEARS YOUR MESSAGE! LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION!!!

—Broadsheet distributed at the Rolling Stones' concerts in Oakland

L
EAVES AGAINST THE WINDOW
woke me, and I looked out to see birds flying away in the wind. The heroin aftermath made everything as slow as an anxiety dream. It was Sunday. I showered, dressed, and called my father to ask if the contract had been sent to Memphis, but it hadn't been. I didn't know what I would do with the contract once I got it, except try to protect it. I had told the agency to send it in a plain wrapper. I didn't know what else to do.

I flew to Oakland with Jo Bergman, David Horowitz, Michael Lydon, and the photographer Ethan Russell. As we left the plane, photographers on the runway took our pictures, until they saw that we were not the Rolling Stones. In the airport, passing another car on a pedestal, we saw a little old black woman wearing a straw Sunday hat and a shin-length brown dress, walking with a cane, carrying a hymn book. I thought of her at the time as a good sign, but didn't stop to think that she was headed away from us.

In a couple of rented cars we drove to the Edgewater Inn, down the freeway from the airport, past the Oakland Coliseum, where the Stones would play in a few hours. The Inn was small, one story behind a two-story front, like a car wash behind a church facade. Jo picked up a handful of keys at the desk while Horowitz conferred with press people who accosted him as we came in. He came back, saw Jo, and asked, “How'd you get the keys?”

“I just have that kind of face,” she said.

A board walkway extended from the back door of the lobby to the swimming pool and on to a rear addition to the motel. Beside the pool there were a steam shovel and a sign saying
DANGER POOL FULL OF CHLORINE.
On the double glass door at the back of the motel smaller
signs said
DANGER
backwards twice. So much for the little old colored lady.

The rooms (five plus a suite—we wouldn't be staying the night) were done in
le style
Holiday Inn, plain brick walls painted beige. Jo ordered beer and bottles of whiskey from room service, and after a drink, we tried driving to the Coliseum, but a constant stream of cars leaving the football stadium next door prevented our turning left, so Jo, Michael, and I got out of the car and crossed the street into the stadium's parking lot. We were looking for a place to cross the deep ditch that divided us from the Coliseum's parking lot. Two men and two women were getting into a car as we passed, and Michael asked how we could reach the Coliseum. “You can get across up there,” one of the men said, pointing farther up the asphalt. I walked to the spot and saw a wide stretch of dirty water running in the ditch. I walked back and said Thanks for the help, sport. You can make it, he said, swim across. Fuck you, I said. Oh, come on, Jo said, and we walked along the edge of the freeway till we could reach the Coliseum.