True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (28 page)

Shirley, staring at Bill as if she were thinking of something else, said, “I read something that said all that's left for the Stones now is to die before they're thirty, and I thought it was terrible, I was very upset, and then I remembered Bill's already thirty, so that's all right.”

At 6:00
A.M.
I called home and woke Christopher. “So far, so good,” I told her.

“Can I buy a new dress?” she asked.

Then I went to bed. When I woke up, trouble was waiting.

De old bee make de honeycomb
De young bee make de honey
De Good Lord make all de pretty gals
An' Sears Roebuck make de money

F
URRY
L
EWIS

“I
GOT SETTLED
in my office, and they were away, which was probably America, and I was thinking, Ah, how many days before they come back and I get to see them,” Shirley Arnold said. “By this time the fan mail was ridiculous, stacks—you know a post office sack, we had about eight of those in the office unanswered. We used to ring up the GPO, and they would come round in a van and take the letters back. I think we had about sixteen thousand fan club members within about three months, so when we sent the newsletter out we had to have members in to help address envelopes. Fans were coming up to the office, and I was all excited, 'cause I was there and I was working for the Stones, and then they came back, and they came into the office and said, ‘Hello, how's it going?' They sat and talked to me, and I thought, This is me, sixteen, working for who I want, really loved them, and there are all the fans that come to me with their problems and that write me letters, so I just sort of changed. When I first went I was more interested in working for the Stones than in anything else, and then I realized that I was working for the fans. I got fond of the fans and was really interested in them, which was
a good thing. The fans used to say, Who's your favorite? And I'd say I haven't got a favorite, and I think that's why they liked me, 'cause if a Mick fan walked in and I said Mick's my favorite, she would have hated me, 'cause I was inside, working for them. My money was quite good, and there were fans who had no money and I used to give them money, and take them to lunch, and buy them coffee. I really loved them, I wasn't doing it for someone to say thank you, but it was just nice, because I was a fan, and I think that was the greatest thing, because I was a screamer, that's why I understood the fans.”

Returning from the United States, the Stones drove from Heathrow Airport to Oxford for a booking at the university, made a year ago, “and don't think they didn't try to get out of it,” Stu said. They slept all the following day and met the day after with a solicitor to discuss forming a limited company and having the bass player's name legally changed from Perks to Wyman. Two days later they played an all-night Welcome Home show with at least fifty other performers, not much fun, and “It's All Over Now,” their version of the song Murray Kaufman had given them, was released. Then they took two weeks off, and before the holiday was over
Melody Maker
had the record listed as the best-selling single record in England, the Stones' first number-one single.

On the second night after the Stones started back to work, they played the Queen's Hall in Leeds, a place that once had been a tram garage, but now was a concert hall with a revolving stage. “It was in the center of the hall, and they had to run for it,” Stu said. “And again it was Brian who got left behind, because they had it all worked out, a gang of bouncers round them, and they just ran. Four of them got themselves together in and amongst these bouncers. Brian's fuckin' about onstage, 'arf asleep, doin' something or other, and all the bouncers take the four off the stage, and all the kids go after them, and there's Brian still on the stage with his guitar and just me, pickin' up instruments and fuckin' about. Brian realized, Ah, they've gone, and panics:
'Do
something,' and of course within seconds the kids realized he was still there, and ka-pow. Brian destroyed again.”

Brian was by now a father once again—Linda had given him another son named Julian—and at times he seemed to like it. “There was one time when Brian and Linda were gonna get married,” Shirley Arnold said. “They actually told people that they were going to get married. This was after the baby—they were still living in Windsor. Whenever they came in town, I looked after the dog, a white poodle called Pip. One day they came to the office, and they said they were gonna get married, and Brian was all excited. Maybe he did want to marry,
maybe he wanted to settle down and know where he belonged. But he never quite made it. I was a friend of Linda's, and they were rushing around, Brian saying, You're gonna be chief bridesmaid. Linda and I went out that afternoon; she was looking at wedding dresses and I was looking at bridesmaids' dresses—and I don't remember what happened after that. They just split up. She decided to stay at home with her mum and they left each other again.”

All this happened with a near-nightly chorus of screams and attacks of varying intensity. One night in London, while the Stones recorded, Stu and I talked about the time the Stones played Blackpool: “July 24, 1964, which was very nearly the date on my gravestone,” Stu said.

“They got out, and you had to stay there, right?”

“Yeah, but they only just got out, believe me. I'll tell you roughly, what happens is this, that this city up in Scotland called Glasgow, which is the roughest city in the world—”

“In the
world
?”

“Yeah. I'll guarantee that. They'll thump-up anybody, these people, they'll take on the U.S. Marines, anybody, put 'em away without any difficulty at all, because they just live for fighting. They're not cowardly about it, they don't have to do it in gangs, one guy'll take on three any time he feels like it. In Glasgow, all the factories and all the construction companies shut down the same fortnight of the year. This is what's called the Glasgow Fair. In that fortnight, they move out of Glasgow. Glasgow shuts down, literally, and the rest of the country trembles.

“One of their pet places is Blackpool. A lot of them have run out of money by the end of the fortnight, but those with money spend all of it on the last night on drink. They get drunk themselves—Scotch, beer, Scotch, beer, like that—and anybody 'oo 'asn't got any money, they buy drinks for. Once they're outside of Glasgow, they all stick together—and if one guy 'as a go at a bloke from Glasgow, then they all jump 'im. So, unsuspecting, we agree to do this dance at the Empress Ballroom, which holds about six thousand people.”

“You didn't know of these folkways at the time?”

“We knew what they were like, but we didn't connect the end of the Glasgow Fair and Blackpool. We get into the town, and it's absolutely full of these ravers from Glasgow, and I thought, Oh, this should be fun. It's the last night, and so they all, or as many as possible, or as many as were still sober by eight o'clock at night, and many who were drunk, crowd into this Empress Ballroom. There was some sort of funny agreement whereby police in uniform were not allowed inside the ballroom, some sort of thing between the people that operated the ballroom and the police. The police stayed out of sight backstage, and they were bloody trembling.

“The only thing that saved us was the stage was about six feet high, and these people from Glasgow are pretty small. They're rarely much more than five foot six or seven. In Germany they call them poison dwarves, because they're so little, and they do so much fuckin' damage. All these Glasgow regiments, like the Black Watch, in Korea and in the last war, they gave them all the deadliest jobs going, because nothing's too much for them, they never run away, they just go straight, they love it.”

“I wonder why they're like that.”

“I think it's just the awful deprived way—it's just Glasgow. Glasgow is one big mistake. They built these fantastic tenements that they all live in. But unlike most slums—I mean, a slum house in say Baltimore is usually leaning over and ready to fall down, but the tenements weren't. They were built of granite during the industrial revolution, and they'll still be standing yet. They'd have a hell of a job knocking them down. No hot water. In fact, no running water at all in the actual living accommodations, only on the hallways. One toilet to maybe three flats. Hopelessly underpaid. Very susceptible to slumps, because Glasgow's built round ship-building and heavy industry, and in a slump, that just goes. That's the way these people are brought up. You go into Glasgow and you see a bus queue of men coming out of a factory, they've all got scars, all been cut, all had their noses pushed in. Horrible place.

“This night there was a bit of an anti-Stones thing going on, not really quite sure what, and they were all very drunk, and the feeling was getting nastier and nastier, and you could tell it. They were really looking for bother, and eventually some of the ones—”

“What was the distribution of the crowd? Were there some little girls?”

“No. These guys had their girls with them, but they weren't the sweet little big-eyed, long-haired fans from London. The girls carry the knives. The Stones'd play a number, and there'd be big cheers and claps and things, and a little bit of screaming, but there's also a lot of derisive cheering as well. No cops, no bouncers. There was the Stones on this stage and a couple of old retainers in uniform at each corner of the stage. Another thing about these people in Glasgow, they won't normally just walk up to a guy and hit him. They need a spark—you got to detonate them. I think this kept them off the stage, 'cause they could have come up anytime they felt like it. Some of the guys in the crowd, some of the ones that had been booing—Keith can't stand being booed, anything like that, he was sayin' ‘Aw fuck you' to them and they could hear him. So they started spitting, and eventually Keith is literally covered by these cobblies at the front spitting at him.

“I could see all this going on. I was standing on one side of the stage nearest to Keith, and Keith and these guys started exchanging words. I thought, ‘Right, they've got one more number and they'll be off if they're lucky.' There was one guy right in front, he was a bit taller than the rest, and he spat at Keith, and Keith just kicked him in the head. And that's it. Good night. The whole hall just ee-rupted. One of their people had been kicked, and that was the spark. These guys' reactions are pretty quick, he probably got out of the way all right. I'm surprised they didn't get hold of Keith's leg and pull him off the stage. He wouldn't be here now, if they had. Keith still thought he was God and that he could kick one of these guys and get away with it, but I was next to him—the other guys already turned, realizing they're gonna have to get off the stage—I just pushed him, said ‘For fuck's sake get out of here while you're still alive,' and I went off as well.

“The cops got rid of them all right, and luckily between the backstage area and the rest of the hall there were some fairly heavy doors. We could hear cymbals going through the air, thumps as all the amps got smashed up, and then there was the most glorious fucking crash of all time—there'd been a grand piano on the stage. The cops stood it long enough and sent for reinforcements. And they wouldn't go near them. They wouldn't look at these guys. After there was about fifty of them, they went in with truncheons. By this time a lot of the steam had gone out of it. Charlie wasn't using his drums, he'd borrowed a drum kit off this guy, and the guy was sitting there crying, his lovely Ludwig kit—we never saw it again, got one cymbal back. They didn't steal them, they just smashed them. Of the amplifiers, there was bits of wood, and I think we got one loudspeaker chassis. Without any cone in it, and that was all. Everything else was totally mangled. They took about a dozen people to hospital. Not having been able to get hold of the Stones, they started fighting amongst themselves.

“We'd booked a hotel in Preston, which is about twenty miles up the road. We drove to the police station, the boys had their own cars at the police station. Cops walked round and round the hotel all night.”

Interviewed after Blackpool, the Stones called it the most sickening night of their lives, but what difference does it make whether one is torn apart by one's enemies or one's friends? One week after Blackpool, the Stones went to Ireland. “The first time we went to Ireland,” Stu said, “we did this thing in Belfast and the whole city turned out, they couldn't get near the Ulster Hall to get in. And when they got in they couldn't defend the stage. The stage stretched the full width of the hall. There's kids everywhere. Lots of kids hurt that night. Bloody horrifying. Show lasted twelve minutes. Cops didn't want it to go on in the first place. There was space for seating up behind the stage,
and they were getting on the stage at either side and going up behind the Stones, more and more were doing this till the Stones just got surrounded. Quite a night. Never been nearer. We should have got mangled that night.”

On August 7, 1964, the Stones went to TV House, Kingsway, London, where they appeared on
Ready, Steady, Go!
Twenty policemen and more on motorcycles tried to control the mob waiting outside, but girls broke through the police lines after the show as the Stones ran for their limousine. One policeman climbed off his motorcycle and onto the Stones' Austin Princess to stop fans getting in. As the chauffeur drove away with the Stones, one of the car doors came open, knocked down a policeman, struck a lamppost, and the fans tore it off its hinges.

The Stones flew to Holland for a concert in The Hague. There were police onstage, but after three songs the fans attacked and it was closing time, gentlemen. Back in England at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton, a ballroom on top of a tower, “the stage was so high that they had to use a block and tackle to get the gear up there,” Stu said. “The kids were pressing the front, getting underneath the stage so they couldn't see anything, and the trouble started.” Two hundred fainted, and about fifty were thrown out for fighting. A girl pulled a switchblade on two guards who were trying to subdue her two escorts, and four guards were required to disarm her and carry her out of the hall.