True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (43 page)

The Stones played Warsaw, taking what Mick called “a piddle of our usual fee,” carrying full-scale rock and roll for the first time to Communist Eastern Europe. “The only scene I ever seen near it was when we tried to get out of the Long Beach Auditorium in 1965 when a motorcycle cop got run over and crushed,” Keith said. “All the cops had white helmets and the big long batons. Exactly the same equipment. Exactly the same uniforms. Deployed in the same way.”

The tour was a series of fights, featuring the Stones, customs officials, fans, and police, and involving thrown chairs and guard dogs and fire hoses. Back in London when it was over, Jagger said, “I see a great deal of danger in the air. . . . Teenagers are not screaming over pop music any more, they're screaming for much deeper reasons. When I'm onstage, I sense that the teenagers are trying to communicate to me, like by telepathy, a message of some urgency. Not about me or about our music, but about the world and the way they live. And I see a lot of trouble coming in the dawn.”

Trouble was certainly coming to the Stones. On May 10, while Jagger and Richards were at a preliminary hearing in Chichester Magistrates' Court, putting up £100 bail apiece, pleading not guilty, and electing to be tried by jury, Brian was leaving his Courtfield Road flat surrounded by six Scotland Yard drug detectives.

In the early evening of the first day of spring 1970, I was at a flat in Duke Street St. James's, talking with Brion Gysin, who was in London visiting friends. Gysin had been telling me about taking Brian Jones to Joujouka to hear “the group of the Master Musicians. I've known them for twenty years, going up there since 1950, recognized that they are the people of Pan, and that's another whole long story—”

We were interrupted by William Burroughs, who came in and sat down, wearing a hat and overcoat. He was the drunkest man I had seen since I had last seen Furry Lewis. Reduced in Burroughs' presence as Keith was reduced by Chuck Berry, I found myself telling him about my prized copy of
Big Table 1
with its first U.S. printing of parts of
Naked Lunch.

“Oh, wow,” Burroughs said, seeming to awaken. “That's a real collectors' item.” His eyes narrowed. “They are—now—quite valuable collectors' items—and—y'know—if you want to—I could autograph it, and we would—ah—share—”

“Make a little exchange,” Gysin said.

“—anything—we could get—on the collectors' market.”

I rested easier then, because I knew I was talking to men who, like Furry Lewis, would burn a guitar for firewood. Burroughs began to grumble about not wanting to be an artist, just wanting to make money; I quoted Shaw to Goldwyn: The difference between us is that you care only about art and I care only about money.

“There you go,” Burroughs said. “No one who is an artist gives a shit about being an artist. They want to make a little money and have a little peace. Be an artist, indeed.” He was struggling to unload a layer of clothing.

“Take off your coat, William,” Gysin said. “There's a good move.”

“At least I think I'll take off my hat,” Burroughs said. He got to his feet, hung the hat on a rack, and sat back down. “Now I'll take off my coat.”

“Excellent,” Gysin said. “I wonder if I can get back to Joujouka. I really would like to talk about Joujouka and what the music is and what Brian got on tape and how it ever happened that he got there. How does he appear in your book?”

“Brian? As—well—sort of—as a little goat god, I suppose.”

“I have a wild tale which I'll tell you about just that. A very funny thing happened up there. The setting was extremely theatrical in that we were sitting under a porch of a house made of wattles and mud. Very comfortable place, cushions were laid around like a little theatre, like the box of an old-fashioned theatre, and a performance was going on in the courtyard. And at one moment—dinner obviously had to be somewhere in the offing, like about an hour away, everybody was just beginning to think about food—and we had these acetylene lamps, giving a great very theatrical glow to the whole scene, rather like lime-light used to be, a greenish-white sort of tone. And the most beautiful goat that anybody had ever seen—pure white!—was suddenly led right across the scene, between Brian and Suki and Hamre and me, sitting on these cushions, kind of lying back, and the musicians out in the courtyard about ten feet away right in front of us, so quickly that for a moment hardly anybody realized at all what was happening, until Brian leapt to his feet, and he said, ‘That's me!' and was pulled down and sort of subsided, and the music went on, and it went on for a few minutes like that, and moments lengthened into an hour, or two hours, or whatever it takes to get a great Moroccan dinner together, which sometimes can be three hours or four hours or five hours—”

“Long as it takes to kill a goat,” Burroughs said.

“—and we were absolutely ravenous, when Brian realized he was eating that same white goat.”

“How did he take that?”

“He said, ‘It's like Communion.' ”

“ ‘This is my body,'” I said. “But Jesus didn't eat himself, he fed the others.”

“If he'd been sensible, he'd have eaten Judas,” Burroughs said. “I'm gonna eat Graham Greene next time I see him. Gulp!”

All the beauty that's ever been, it's moving inside that music. Omar's voice, that's there, and the girl's voice, and the voice the wind had in Africa, and the cries from Congo Square, and the fine shouting that came up from Free Day. The blues, and the spirituals, and the remembering, and the waiting, and the suffering, and the looking at the sky watching the dark come down—that's all inside the music.

S
IDNEY
B
ECHET
:
Treat It Gentle

O
N THE ROAD
I was in the habit of wearing a wristwatch to bed. When I woke up this particular afternoon, it said ten minutes past one. The watch was a Timex on a brown leather strap, and—as I would learn—not the most trusty Timex. I took a shower in the stately Plaza bathroom and came out in a towel to find, sitting on the beds, Ethan Russell and Michael Lydon. They were going to Jon Jaymes' suite. I dressed and went along. The place was like a gypsy camp: bodyguards all over, waiters carrying trays of food in and empty plates out, an ex-Lawrence Welk child prodigy pianist touting his four older sisters' rock band (the Hedonists), and Barbara, a pretty girl with brown hair and Bambi eyes. She was a model but she didn't have that evil model look. Jaymes was going to have her travel around in a bikini and help him demonstrate
Laugh-In
body paint. “This is a real break for me,” she said.

Ethan, Michael, and I went next to Jo Bergman's suite, but it too was full of people, and Jo was distracted.

“We came to see if you were ready to go to the press conference,” Ethan said. I hadn't even known there was going to be another one.

“No, you go ahead,” Jo said. “I've got to get some Valium for Mick.”

In the lobby we ran into Charlie Watts and Mick Taylor. Charlie was wearing a white wool pullover under a pearl-grey leather trenchcoat. “We were just goin' out for a walk,” he said, “when somebody happens to stop us and tell us about the press conference. It's a drag havin' to sit around not knowin' what's happening. And all this security around, havin' all these heavies, it don't look good—”

As Charlie and Mick left to look for the other Stones, the elevator delivered Jo Bergman. “There are some limousines outside,” she said, but there weren't. It had snowed in the night, and now, if you stood still, the wind blew rain in your face and froze you, so we decided not to wait for the limos and hiked the eight blocks to Rockefeller Center.

The press conference was held on the sixty-ninth floor in the Rainbow Room, behind big windows looking out on the city; a
haut-bourgeois
setting. At the door a girl in a long-sleeved dress sat by a small white-clothed table, checking names against a list. Al Steckler, inside, saw us and waved us in. A long table, also white-clothed, held drinks and steak tartare canapés. The waiters wore dinner jackets, and a string quartet—one long-haired boy also in black tie and three girls in evening dresses—were sawing away at Mozart.

In the big square inner room were rows of chairs facing a long table that held bouquets of flowers and pitchers of orange juice. Before long the place was filled with press people who ranged in appearance from dapper black men in suits to scruffy hippies in dirty jeans. By the time you started to wonder what they had in common, the Stones came in and sat at the table, Sam Cutler with them, Pete Bennett and Allen Klein standing behind them. A writhing mass of media people, fighting and scrambling, thrust microphones and flashed photobulbs, groped and twisted like lost souls in Hell as the Stones sat with the flowers and orange juice, staring across the white expanse of tablecloth.

I went and hid in a corner. Jon Jaymes was standing beside the table, hands raised toward the press, looking like a man conducting the antics of a bevy of magpies. As the crowd grew quieter, though they didn't stop snarling and pushing, questions drifted across the room.

“Do you see yourselves as youth leaders?”

“What do you think of the Vietnam War?”

“What do you think of America?”

“Do you think it's getting better?”

“You look more beautiful than ever,” Jagger said. That brought a laugh.

“Mr. Jagger,” a woman wearing glasses and a tailored suit read from a notebook, “some time ago you recorded a song, ‘I Can't Get No Satisfaction.' Are the Stones more satisfied today?”

“Sexually, d'you mean, or philosophically?”

“Both.”

“Sexually—more satisfied, financially—” (thinking of Klein behind him) “dissatisfied, philosophically—still trying.”

“Are you sadder but wiser?”

“Just a little wiser.” I didn't know it yet, but about thirty minutes ago Jagger had learned that Marianne Faithfull had left him, left his house in London, and was living with a film director in Italy. “Do you have any Valium?” Mick had asked Jo, who scrounged one five-milligram tablet from a
Daily News
reporter.

“I have a question for Mick Taylor,” someone said. “How does it feel to replace a member of the group who was loved by so many? I'm talking about Brian Jones.”

Whatever Mick Taylor said was lost in the groan that arose in the room. Even in this crowd, bad taste had its limits. As if on cue, someone asked, “Are the Stones going to give a free concert?”

“Yes,” Jagger said. “The free concert will be in San Francisco December sixth, but there is no exact location yet.”

At the first press conference back in Los Angeles, the hippies had asked for a free show, and now on the other side of America the Stones had promised them one. The tone of the questions as they continued asked not for a statement of position but for a declaration of support. Once again the hippies were in their callow fashion asking whether the Stones were on their side in the battle against repression. In Europe the hip community was so small as to be hardly a community—young sports in blue python jackets strolled the Kings Road with no more herd instinct than pythons—but in America something was driving the people together, and the Stones were going along with it.

“What was your reaction to John Lennon's returning his MBE?”

“At last,” Jagger said. “He should have returned it as soon as he got it.”

“Or if you get one,” Keith said, “you should wear it.”

“What would you do if
you
got one?”

“We never got them, and I rather doubt we will.”

“Mr. Jagger, in California you were wearing an Omega button, which is a symbol of draft resistance—”

“I thought it stood for infinity. I don't know.”

“Mr. Jagger, what is your opinion of the mass concerts such as Woodstock and the Isle of Wight?”

“Well, they all happened in the same year—I think next year they will be more—huge and better organized.”

“Why are you giving a free concert in San Francisco?”

“Because there's a scene there, and the climate's nice. Besides, it's unfortunate when Ralph Gleason has to pay fifty dollars to get in.”

The questions dwindled to a halt, and Sam said, “That's all, folks.”

“Thank you, New York,” Jagger said, and the Stones got up to leave. Charlie, still wearing his overcoat, wandered off in the wrong direction, but he was stopped and put back on course. The Stones zipped away, and the freaks, straights, beards, sideburns, cameras, and recorders rushed for the elevators.

I stopped to talk to Lillian Roxon, who had written a book called
The Rock Encyclopedia.
An Australian, Lillian was a good-looking blond girl with pale blue eyes, but she had gained forty pounds writing her book—which seemed like a lot to go through for a rock and roll book, how little I knew—and soon she was going to be dead, another dead one. I told her goodbye and went down in an elevator with Michael, Jo, and Pete Bennett. We walked back to the Plaza, Pete in front cutting off the wind. “Pete,” I asked, checking out something I'd heard, “is it true you're going to be in an Orson Welles film?”

“Yah,” he growled over his shoulder, smiling past his tightly clenched cigar. “He says I'm a great nachal actah.”

At the Plaza, I went upstairs and called Jerry Wexler, just to say hello. Wexler asked me to come out to his house on Long Island for a visit, but the Stones were playing Baltimore tonight, and tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day, they would play Madison Square Garden. I told Wexler that I had to stick pretty tight with the tour, but he said, Naw naw come on out and have Thanksgiving dinner with us. I told him I'd call tomorrow.