True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (22 page)

“ ‘What did you do to me?' I asked him.

“ ‘Look,' he says, ‘I've got printers, everything—'

“ ‘ 'S not my fault,' I tell him.

“So he says, ‘How about we go partners?'

“I tell him, ‘All right, we'll be partners, but I won't pay you.' So it turned out we went partners after all. Then the next year Klein does his own shitty program—”

The hall was filling and I was beginning to wonder if I'd find a place to sit when Michael Lydon came over with two tickets down front, stage left. We found our places in the press of youth, some in little pullover sweaters, some hairy mountain freaks, all seeming gentle. The Bob Dylan song on the public address system ended, a fraternity-brother voice boomed Welcome and introduced the first act, Terry Reid, one week shy of his twenty-first birthday, who looked gentler than anybody. Though he never arrived, Terry and his trio had been for the past year or so the coming thing in English blues. But his act seemed not to move this crowd, who may not have known that English blues bands were supposed to play and scream as loud as possible. Knees pressing into my back, a girl in a sorority blazer sat beside a boy with short, neat hair and a tan sports jacket. I was seated on the aisle; to my right were three pretty girls in three sizes, each with dark hair and dark eyes.

As Terry screamed “I Got a Woman,” the girls, Spanish-blooded, told me they were sisters: one fourteen, one twenty, and as Terry, with one blue spot on him and his flat-top guitar, introduced a song called “Bunch Up, Little Dogies,” the third sister, too cute to be a minute over seventeen, a little guerrilla in the battle to see who will wear a crown, came to my side, and I began to see what the tour was about. When we are young, innocent, and ignorant, and we look and smell good, all that is required is a little rhythm—what could be more revolutionary, more troublemaking, than bringing rhythm to the scent of the classroom? We looked at each other, our heads, our hair touching in the crowd, and clasped hands, her skin soft as you might expect, nearly any seventeen-year-old is soft, but not every one is so serious and quiet.

Terry Reid was followed by the blues singer and guitarist B. B. King, who was backed by his usual rhythm section and hip, bored-looking horn players. Then the crowd, now under a haze of marijuana smoke, heard Sam Cutler's voice in the darkness saying, “All right, Fort Collins, we made it, we're here, and now I want you to give a big western welcome to the Rolling Stones!” Keith, in black suede pants with silver conchos down the legs and a red jersey shirt dazzling with rhinestones, played the opening notes of “Jumpin' Jack Flash,” Mick, all in white, leapt into the air, and the crowd came to their feet.

The show was fine, it all worked, except—with my arm around my little guerrilla, feeling that way, two strangers suddenly together, I felt also, when Jagger sang “I'm Free,” saying “You know we all free,” that she, no hand-clapper, in this lonesome western basketball gym was not free, and she knew it. The song, written by Mick as a declaration of sexual independence, now seemed to be about many kinds of freedom. As the Stones started their last song, all the crowd standing, jumping on chairs, I held her against me so she could see the stage, and I looked into her happy, hopeless face—just a memory now, with the feel of her hair, her shy turning-away smile—and touched her shoulders, her hair, whispered to her, and she said, What? In the noise, the cheering, the music, it doesn't matter how much I love you, I can't stay, one small kiss and I'm gone, back on the road, Holiday Inns and airports, sad, tired, drear, ugly mechanics of transportation—to L.A. in the dawn, with the lights in the city below us, under the smoke and fog, going out like the last small fires one by one.

T
hey lock the gate behind us. We are inside, but where are we? A plateau of dusty red clay. The road leads downward again, away from the Altamont Speedway clubhouse, as we follow a couple of Chip Monck's production crew. A station wagon meets us in the road and Sam Cutler gets out, phosphorescent from speed and cocaine. He hugs Keith, is dodged by Mick, swaps hellos with Ronnie and me, and glances at Tony. Warily. He has not forgotten what Tony said to him in Miami.

We all get in the wagon and drive to another basin where there are more cars and trailers, scaffolding going up, and a big orange bonfire. The people around the fire make room for us as they recognize us coming out of the wagon, walking toward them. The wind whips the fire high, great blasts toward our faces, the people quietly saying hello. Someone hands up a jug of California red wine and Mick drinks, then Keith, holding the jug in both hands, leaning back. I drink a long pull holding the jug moonshine-fashion with thumb through ring on neck, jug resting on forearm, and think of all the people coming to rest around glowing coals on these hills and of all the roasted hotdogs and marshmallows that will be consumed before daybreak, and if there are this many here now, how many will be here tomorrow afternoon? I can taste the roasted marshmallows. The Maysles brothers have followed us in another car and once more announce their presence with the bright quartz lights, circling the outside of the crowd so that the light is always shining directly into someone's face.

“Turn off the lights,” Mick says. “No lights.” They again ignore him, and Mick turns to Ronnie. “Tell them no lights,” he says.

“Mick says no lights,” Ronnie shouts into Albert's ear. Al, peering through the camera lens, says “Sync it” to David, who hits the microphone with his notebook, and for the moment their film stops. Al, the cameraman, the older brother, leaves the business deals, the con artistry, to David, thirty-seven, who was very upset when the
New York Times
identified him as the one who is forty-three, but now Al is staring at
David over his Ben Franklin half-glasses, saying eloquently without words, “What the hell? Here we are on some god-forsaken hillside with these strange people, this Jagger you've got a crush on, spending our own money to make a film about them, trusting them to look after our interests, these people who just skipped the hotel bill in Miami, and now your crooked pansy friend Jagger is telling us to stop? This is crazy!” Al says all this in a quick perplexed palms-up peep over his glasses, camera balanced perfectly on his custom-made shoulder, hair falling into wrinkling pissed-off boyish forehead, and David answers, lighting a cigaret and throwing the match over his right shoulder in a favorite movement of his that is almost but not quite too fast to be debonaire, “Far oot,” a slogan with us now, the California-ism pronounced with the Maysles' Boston accent, because it fits so many situations. We use it so often that it has become a joke, we all say it, Jagger has taken to saying it about everything. By now we are so crazy that, as in the combat army, language has become code, because we are all thinking and feeling the same things, can read each others' minds, but the Maysles brothers, who have been together all their lives, have refined their conversational code so that David can say “Far oot” and mean “We can't worry about that now,” and anyone who can tell you something like that is so incontrovertibly right that you can only shrug, as AI does, and go with the flow: A girl brings round a joint, the tiny end of a joint, too small to smoke, and this plain girl holds the joint between her fingertips, tells Mick to open his mouth and blows the smoke into Mick's open thick pursed lips, everyone watching the ritual tableau. Then she does the same for Keith, as Mick walks away, toward the stage rising on the slope.

Away from the fire, it is windy and dark. Chip Monck is on the stage, the scaffolding for the PA system is growing, Chip says that it will be finished by dawn, which, we see by Chip's watch, is not far off. We walk behind the stage to the trailer that is to be the Stones' dressing room and shelter in the stormy blast of the day to come, and there in the trailer, smaller but less shabby than the one in Miami, are some of the finer comforts of home, from grass and cocaine to a girl who offers us chocolate chip cookies and is heating coffee in an electric skillet. Sam looks at his watch: “Ten minutes to foive,” he says, rolling his eyes like a madman. Grateful Dead factotum Rock Scully is here, grimy, saying, “Well, we've got a lot of work to do,” sounding like someone who would go right on saying that forever.

“A cold shower and a few laps around the quad, lads,” Keith says. Mick, standing in the doorway with smoke, in the movie lights, boiling
out around him, is talking to a radio interviewer: “I think the concert's just an excuse. It's just for everyone to come and have a good time. The concert is not like the proscenium of a theatre, it's just an excuse to get together and talk to each other and sleep with each other and ball each other and get really stoned and have a nice night out and a good day, it's not like just getting up there and seein' the Grateful Airplane and the Rolling Dead
—”

To know the reality of politics we have to believe the myth, to believe what we were told as children. Roman history is the story of the brothers Romulus and Remus, the sons of the she-wolf; leaders of gangs of juvenile delinquents (
collecta juvenum manu hostilem in modum praedas agere; crescente in dies grege juvenum seria ac jocos celebrare
); who achieved the rape of the Sabine women; and whose festival is the Lupercalia; at which youth naked except for girdles made from the skins of victims ran wild through the city, striking those whom they met, especially women, with strips of goatskin; a season fit for king killing,
Julius Caesar,
Act I.

N
ORMAN
O. B
ROWN:
Love's Body

I
WOKE UP
just in time to glimpse the first sunlight I'd seen in days, very edgy because it was Saturday and Mick had told me I had to have a deal by yesterday. When we came in last night, some of us found stagehands in our beds. I slept on the floor, and Stu slept fully dressed, curled in the fetal position, on the circular, vinyl-covered seat of the kitchen table, where I was sitting now, eating a ham sandwich and writing in my notebook about the little guerrilla. My fears were like Chinese puzzle boxes, one opening into another: Jagger might simply want to know for sure that if they carry an extra
man, an actual book will appear, but he might want what Schneider wants, to censor my manuscript and take my money. As night fell I sat in the kitchen with the lights out and worried.

Al Steckler had come out from New York for the first big show, and I rode to the Forum with him, Michael Lydon, and a young woman who also worked at Klein's New York office. She said that she hated Klein, and that she was quitting. I did not have the luxury of that option.

The conversation about Klein lasted through our leaving Oriole and getting lost and ended as we came upon the Forum, a giant concrete building, rising like a monster toadstool from an asphalt desert. We parked and walked down a slanted ramp to the backstage area, passing at a gate a broadly smiling helmeted policeman. Just past him a girl in a black jacket and a boy in a brown suit were wrapped in a deep ravenous kiss.

The Forum had been used this afternoon for an ice hockey game, and the first show was being delayed while they covered up the ice. I stopped by the locker room where B. B. King was dressing to say hello. The year before, I had written a magazine profile about B.B., who had an office in Memphis, and had come to admire his honesty and humility as I had long admired his great talent. We talked for a bit, B.B. showed me a new guitar made for him by the Gibson company, shapely brown polished wood with gold fittings, and then he excused himself to go to “prayer meeting,” opening the bathroom door to reveal the table, the musicians, the cards.

I stepped into the hall and saw the Stones coming in. Jagger had a tall black girl on his right arm, Allen Klein at his left. With them were a tall, thick-necked man with a vacant stare and Pete Bennett, the thickest-necked man I'd ever seen. They all went into the Stones' dressing room, and I let them go.

Out front Terry Reid was opening the show. The Forum was just another basketball gym, the view overhead the same as last night's, girders radiating like mushroom-spines in smoky space. But last night the mood had been gentle—now, ice underfoot, cops everywhere, you can't stand here, you can't do this, you can't do that. I retreated backstage, where Klein, Steckler, and Bennett were having a conclave with a Forum staff man who said, “I'm more worried about crowd control than anything else.”

“I'm not,” Klein snapped. Behind them four different varieties of uniformed police were standing around eight large trunks labeled Riot Helmets, Gas Bombs, and Masks. Nothing about the scene appealed to me, and I walked out front, where B.B. was having trouble starting his set because his voice microphone wasn't working. A young black man who worked for B.B. came out from backstage, and we said hello. I had befriended him in a small way, and he said, “Come on
back here for a minute.” We strolled like little colored gentlemen past the cops and war gear to B.B.'s dressing room, nobody there, and into the bathroom, also vacant, where he carefully unfolded a piece of tinfoil. “Hey, man,” he said, “this
here
shit is
heroin,
you don't do this shit, do you?”

Four light brown sniffs on a shiny knifeblade, and we waltzed out of the bathroom, just as a plump black lady in a red dress was coming in. Better insulated from the cops, I listened to the rap B.B. had developed for the flower crowd: “Laze and gennlemen, if we just had more love, we wouldn't have no—wars.” (Applause.) “Than kyou—And if we had more love, we wouldn't have no—jails.” (Clap, clap, clap.) “ 'An kyou”—and so on. The simple wisdom of a master musician in this frantic, expensive air cheered me up. I looked around and saw Schneider and Klein standing nearby. My eyes met Schneider's, mine laughing, his not.