True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (23 page)

Then B.B. stopped talking, was quiet for a moment, played eight searing bars of blues, and sang, “When I read your letter this morning, that was in your place in bed.” The crowd, white city people, hooted and hollered, and for the moment even the cops seemed to stop harassing bystanders. Rising on his toes, B.B. lifted the guitar neck on the ascending notes. With his blue suit shining in the blue spotlight, so intent on what he was doing, B.B. was, for all his eight children by six different women, a saint of the blues.

After B.B.'s set, the Kings of Rhythm opened the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. The Ikettes (one of whom was the black girl who had been with Mick earlier) were going on as I started back to B.B.'s dressing room and noticed the backstage heavies talking to a fat man in one of the orange mini-togas worn by the Forum ushers, making them look like a fag track team. Klein was telling him that there must be no uniforms near the stage while the Stones were playing. The fat man nodded in disbelief and asked, “What happens when twenty thousand kids rush the stage?”

“We'll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Klein said, and the man in the toga said, “Oh, I see. Great.”

Everyone's attention was diverted as here came Tina down the hall, wearing a gold-and-silver-fringed dress, very short. With her was a big black young man in a white trench coat. Beside him she looked like a tiny, sexy doll, red-skinned, red-haired, filling the air with a scent so sweet, so musky, as to equal the evil black funk of her husband Ike.

B.B., in his locker room, was talking with his three sisters and his daughter Gloria about his father, a no more than average-sized man, telling B.B.'s very large brother what he could and couldn't do, shaking his finger upwards in the boy's face. But I remembered Tina's
perfume and the way she looked and had to see her. She was telling the women in the audience, “Yo' man may not be taking care of you 'cause he has three or four other ladies he be takin' care of at the same time, puttin' yo' love in the
street.
You just have to say, ‘Give it
tuhh
me—' ” Tina made a long, rising moan, holding the microphone between the palms of her hands in a rolling caress, bringing her pursed lips near it, exhaling hot and damp on the head of the microphone. She and the Ikettes started to dance in their near-Egyptian way, and with my body sensitized by the heroin, it got all my attention, their hieroglyphic sexual writhing, arms folded over breasts, bucking, making little grabbing movements with their thighs as their skirts rose higher, higher, almost high enough to reveal the heavenly mink-lined wet black cunt. The lights went out, a strobe started to flicker, Tina and the Ikettes writhed and thrusted, caught in their mad nigger poses, crotch flashing, smoke bomb—

Next, the Rolling Stones. The aisles were cleared, those of us among the Elect were gathered in a gaggle behind the stage, and in Shirley Watts' opinion there was far too much fuss over what might have been worthwhile—fun, even—if kept simpler. But it was too late for that; we were in a mammoth arena with many different kinds of cops, rental cops, regular Inglenook suburban L.A. police, Forum guards in orange skirts, and, leaning against the back wall, a lady cop wearing under her white uniform shirt a black bra wide as a motorcycle belt.

Out front the lights were down again and the crowd were on their feet, stamping, the high metal arches ringing. In the backstage doorway Jagger was standing, dressed in black trousers with silver buttons down the legs, black scoop-neck jersey with white Leo glyph on chest, wide metal-studded black belt, long red flowing scarf, on his head an Uncle Sam hat, his eyes wide and dark, looking like a bullfighter standing in the sun just inside the door of the arena, seeing nothing but the path he walks, toreros and banderilleros beside and behind him, to his fate.

I was born in a crossfire hurricane
And I howled at my ma in the driving rain
But it's all right now . . .

It is possible that to know the essence of this moment you would have to be part of the most Damoclean time yet seen on earth (“This could be the last time,” says an early Stones record), to have come to this music in the innocence of youth because of its humanity (Alexis Korner called the blues “the most
human
music” he had ever heard), to have followed it steadfastly through all manner of troubles, and to have found yourself in a huge dark saucer-mushroom, doing it again,
playing for survival, for your life. You had to be there. Twenty thousand people danced together. The big Ampeg amps blasted, lights (red, this was a fast number) sliced the darkness, Mick whirled in a white sunburst at the center of a purple carpet.

At the end of the first song, “Jumpin' Jack Flash,” the crowd settled back. There were more cops than ever hovering around, Pete Bennett making them all superfluous as he strolled back and forth in front of the stage smoking a cigar, no one daring to approach for fear of instant mental picture of diving underwater wearing cement over-shoes. Jagger asked, “Has it really been three years?”

“Nooo,” the crowd yelled, as the band started “Carol,” Mick dancing, leaping high in the air like Miss Twinkletoes of 1969, not stomping booted feet and barking into microphone with abrupt James Brown monkey gestures, prancing, the Black Prince, swirling flowing scarf, blue-beaded Indian moccasins quiet on the soft carpet. Keith was wearing the same thing he wore last night, ear-tooth hanging in spot-light, the King of the Wraggle-Taggle Gypsies. As the Stones began “Sympathy for the Devil,” I noticed Klein standing beside the stage, lighting a briar pipe.

When the song ended, Stu, who had been hidden by the piano, came across the stage carrying two high stools, wearing a pale yellow swallowtail dress suit. He set the stools around one microphone, Jagger sat on one, Keith on the other, and the two of them did the Reverend Robert Wilkins' “Prodigal Son” and Fred McDowell's “You Got to Move,” Keith bent over his National steel-bodied guitar, stiff chords rising from it, rhinestones on his haggard shoulders sparkling in the blue lights. Charlie joined them for Robert Johnson's “Love in Vain,” Shirley watching him stomping his pedals, love and pride in her green eyes.

The crowd, quiet during the slow songs, screamed for “Midnight Rambler.” They were standing for the next song, “Under My Thumb,” and the next, “I'm Free,” which still didn't ring true. During the next two songs, the crowd surged steadily forward. I was pressed up against the right aisle wall with Shirley, Schneider, and the cops, Schneider helping the cops push the kids back.

“I wish I could see you,” Mick said. “You're probably even more beautiful than I am. Chip, could you turn on the lights?” Mick peered out, hand over eyes, Indian fashion. The lights came up, the crowd, bright with color, surged forward, and I saw that I was about to be trapped between the numerous cops and the crush of bodies. I could be in only one of three places: in front of the stage with the cops, backstage with the cops, or onstage. I shoved my notebook into the front of my britches and swung up onto the stage like swinging out the bathroom window, Stu's piano ringing in my ears, Jagger leaping
straight up, genitals visible, almost palpable. He landed at the rear of pretty little Mick, hands behind head, hips grinding, screwing little Mick's guitar solo. As the song ended the lights went down for a few seconds and back up again, the crowd a bobbing, swaying mass of heads against the stage. Looking from right to left I saw Jagger and the Stones inciting the audience to orgasm, and Klein, beside the stage, grabbing people in the crowd by their shoulders, throwing them down the aisle that led backstage, screaming “Out! Out!”

“Street Fighting Man” was the last song. “I'll kill the king and rail at all his servants,” Mick sang, he and Keith facing Charlie, giving him the boogaloo beat, Charlie pounding it out, the whole place vibrating, Mick running around the stage throwing from a basket rose petals, as in the aisle below me, Klein faced the crowd with a long pole, the kind that fits a heavy push-broom, a fat little man, holding the pole in the middle, slamming it into people who were trying to dance.

Down the backstage hall (where I was allowed to be because I had two metal badges, one like a European stop sign, the other a reproduction of a Massachusetts road sign saying Rolling Stones—except that I had given them away to a Swiss photographer who seemed to need them worse than I did) I walked without credentials, thinking of Alfonso Bedoya, the bandit chief in
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,
saying to Bogart, “Bodges? We ain't got no bodges. We don' need no bodges. I don' have to show you any stinkin' bodges.”

Al Steckler was standing, more or less alone, outside the Stones' dressing room. I asked him why he didn't go in, and he said, “Ask him,” nodding toward Tony, looming like a mastodon in a wide stance before the door. “No, thanks,” I said.

The second show was an hour and a half late getting started. Backstage the atmosphere was terrible; it seemed every other person was wearing a purple fringed suede vest. I was talking to Steckler and Jo Bergman when a tall blond girl came up and said that she had lost Gram Parsons, he was supposed to meet her here. I went to the Stones' dressing room to get Phil Kaufman to find Gram. The girl led us to the door on the upper level where she had left Gram, and he was still there, the guard wouldn't let him in.

Phil failed to intimidate—“Who's your boss?”—the adamant guard, finally told Gram, “Go downstairs and I'll let you in,” and then I saw, where he had been standing behind Gram, the Memphis blues singer Bukka White, whom I had last seen a couple of months ago at Furry Lewis' house. 1 had seen a handbill advertising Bukka and the Burritos at the Ash Grove the night the boy talked about having fun with niggers, but I'd forgotten it, and now here was Bukka, and I felt like Huckleberry Finn. We embraced, I welcomed Bukka to the Forum,
and the stiff-necked guard said not a word. None of the guards did. Big jolly-looking old fat man with gold teeth in his smile, B.B.'s older cousin, convict freed from Parchman Farm because he sang the blues, Bukka White. At the Stones' dressing room, Tony threw open the door. I introduced Keith and Mick to Bukka. Gram and Bukka were drunk. Bukka reminded me to let him know when B.B., who had been starting his set as we came in, went offstage. “What you doing out here?” he asked me.

“I'm with these guys,” I said, nodding at Mick and Keith. “They play some blues. They ain't bad. For white boys.” I showed him Keith's National guitar, and Bukka, who played a National, an uncommon guitar, was surprised, but not too surprised not to play it. Bukka took the guitar, fumbled a few notes, and said, “I lef my finger picks in the car,” because the white boy has to play first, that's the way it goes. Bukka handed the guitar to Keith, who started playing “Dust My Broom.” Mick joined him, singing a couple of choruses; then they did “Key to the Highway.” Bukka listened, his head cocked to one side, and said, “That's good. These boys is
good.
Has you ever made any records?”

“Yes,” Keith said, looking startled.

“I knew good and well you had. This a star, here,” Bukka announced to the room, holding his open hand over Keith's head. “This a Hollywood Star. If I'm lyin', I'm dyin'.”

B.B., coming in to ask about something, saw Bukka, and we had Memphis Old Home Reunion. “My wife want to see you so bad she takin' medicine,” Bukka told B.B., who lived with Bukka when he first hitchhiked to Memphis from Mississippi.

Mick Taylor, then Charlie and Shirley, came over to me and asked to be introduced to B.B. “They're lovely, aren't they?” Charlie said, meaning men like Bukka White.

“This a world traveller, here,” Bukka said to B.B., talking about me. “This a globetrotter.”

B.B. went away with a bottle of tequila, Bukka went away with Gram's girl, Mick was down to his underpants, changing for the show, and I left the dressing room. Halfway down the hall Pete Bennett borrowed my pen to write the name and address of a girl he had trapped there. “I want her face for an album. She's got an album face.”

I leaned backstage against an equipment wagon and wrote, hundreds of people milling about, all of them wearing badges and stick-on credentials that hardly any of them were entitled to wear. People talked to me but I went on writing, no one could reach me in my Poe-like drugged creative sweats. The place was so crowded with phonies that the people who belonged there were herded into a bunch, and over my shoulder I heard that the badges would no longer signify, we
would have a sign, and the sign, I am not making this up, was the Boy Scout three-finger salute. I kept writing, hoping that I'd be left alone, which writers spend their lives hoping, but it never happens. The fat guard in the orange toga spied me writing, asked, “Is he all right?” and was answered by the entire group: “No!” I flashed the Boy Scout salute over my head and kept writing.

Ike and Tina Turner came offstage, the audience roaring. Shirley Watts, having been pushed by a cop, was standing against the back wall, furious. Schneider was talking about busted heads and cracked ribs given to fans by cops—and Klein, I wonder?—during the first show.

As five
A.M.
approached, the lights went down. “Here we go,” Mick said. As the Stones started to play the crowd swelled forward. All our tiredness seemed to lift, as if we were dreaming and not subject to ordinary physical limits. I saw no uniformed police, nor Klein, but many guards, and Schneider pushing people away. The music ripped through the smoky air, and Mick said, “Wake up a little bit, you been waiting so long, we might as well stay on a long time.”

Now Schneider, holding a briefcase, was on the stairs leading up to the stage. People were climbing onto the stage and being carried off by Tony. Some people in the crowd had crossed eyes from lack of sleep, others were staring, bright-eyed. Pandemonium reigned. At the back of my mind was a paranoid vision of being trapped, saying, “I know the sign!” to uncomprehending guards who would smash me as I gave the Boy Scout salute.