True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (24 page)

The lights came up for the raving end, a giant sign in the audience,
JESUS LOVE AND PEACE.
Darkness again, and then the spotlights washed over the stage, over the crowd, and the crowd broke forward as if the light had released them like the moon releasing locked-up secrets of the mind, letting out the demons. They came up against the stage, past the line of guards who were there to keep them back. Sam Cutler pushed Schneider aside to save a boy who was being dragged backstage by guards.

Mick, silhouetted above squirming, screaming bodies, was dancing at the edge of the stage, pouring pink champagne into a glass, raising it high, a toast, a toast, hands waving like undersea flowers before him. A boy being manhandled by guards beside the stage closed his eyes and put his hands together in a gesture of prayer. The whole building was jumping; I thought it might collapse like a bridge from lock-step marching. “We'll kill the king,” Mick sang again, but when the show ended Sam told me he had been backstage rescuing kids from cops who were beating them on the feet with clubs.

The blues is a lot like church. When a preacher's up there preachin' the Bible, he's honest-to-God trying to get you to understand these things. Well, singing the blues is the same thing.

L
IGHTNIN'
H
OPKINS

T
HE FIRST WEEK
of January 1964 the Stones opened a tour of England, billed second to a trio of black American girl singers called the Ronettes, who quickly saw that to follow the Rolling Stones onstage was to commit professional suicide. After that the Stones always played last and got top billing.

Things were going well for the Stones, except Brian, for whom things were going to hell. Linda Lawrence, to Brian's alarm, was pregnant with his third child. At this rate he could father fifty bastards: Look at him, the teen idol, strolling the sidewalks of Windsor arm in arm with his pregnant girlfriend, his bloody pet goat, Billy G., following like a puppy dog.

Brian was still missing performances, excusing his absences because, for example, he and his chauffeur were “lost in a fog.” The day after that one, the Stones played Shrewsbury, a grim place, and Brian was complaining that he needed something for a sore throat. Stu, who was driving Brian and the other Stones, turned toward a chemist's in a one-way street. Brian jumped out of the car and ran into the chemist's, as Stu and the others noticed that they were headed
the wrong way, the traffic was coming toward them, and they had been recognized, fans were swarming. “Leave him,” Keith said. Brian had lost considerable hair and clothing by the time he managed to reach the Granada Theatre.

On this same day, two fourteen-year-old schoolgirls—having written to the manager of the theatre in Aylesbury the Stones had played the night before, asking permission to see the dressing room the Stones had used, or if that were not possible, could we please just touch the door handle—were photographed for a local newspaper, one of them looking reverently at the door, the other kneeling, eyes closed in ecstasy, nuzzling the handle. The Stones' rhythm pounded sex tremors through the floor and the upholstered seats into the white cotton knickers, into the dews and damps, freeing the ripeness that presses outward against the skin, a wildness from within, knowledge in the flesh, old and devout and perverse, and with eyes shut tight she kneels as her hot cheeks press and caress the cold doorknob.

Other fans were now breaking out the Stones' dressing room windows, stripping the van of its lights, mirrors, even the rubber window mounts; popularity had become hysteria. Stu said, “It wasn't pleasant to see what the music did to people.” It was the looks on their faces that had changed, that you did not like to see, the straining, screaming faces of young English girls, sweating and squealing like pigs, not loose and happy like raving together at the Crawdaddy but reaching out for something separate from themselves, not the music but the musicians, to touch them, tear them asunder to find out what manner of magical beings have let loose this madness.

But while the Stones were playing concerts almost every night and appearing on at least one national television program each week, the three records they had released were not chartbusters. The week the tour with the Ronettes ended, the Stones' first extended-play record was number 2 in the popular EP charts, “I Wanna Be Your Man” was the number 9 single. It would go no higher, but it was still a hit, a Top Ten record. Now they had to do it again.

On the day after the tour ended, the Stones were scheduled to record, but Andrew Oldham cancelled the session, and they all went to a reception for Phil Spector, the Ronettes' record producer, the boy genius from the United States. Young, talented, and rich, he was everything that Oldham wanted to be. The Stones had tried several times to record “Not Fade Away,” the Bo Diddley-inspired song by Buddy Holly, and when they tried again a few days later, Oldham invited Spector to the session. But the session didn't go well, and Oldham telephoned Gene Pitney, who was in London on his way to the United States from an appearance in Italy. Pitney had written “He's a Rebel,” the first hit record on Spector's Philles label, and he knew a
lot about the record business. “Andrew called me and said, ‘Listen, we gotta record a follow-up, and they all hate each other, and I don't know what to do,'” Pitney said.

“ ‘I'll be over in a minute,' I said, ‘I'll work it out.' So I took a big bottle of Martell cognac, and I got there and told them that it was my birthday, and it was a custom in my family that everybody had to drink a water glass of cognac to celebrate the birthday. It was the happiest session you ever saw in your life. Spector wound up playing an empty cognac bottle with a half-dollar.”

It was such a happy session that the Stones recorded a song for the B side of their next single and two more songs for album cuts. But Pitney saw “a standoff thing. Mick and Keith were always close together, and Brian was like—in left field. God bless him, but I think he always had a problem with—I think just society in general. He was very paranoid even with the other guys in the group, not just from people outside the group. When you have that, there's giant problems to begin with.” The Stones had no time for problems. Almost every day they were entering further realms of wealth and fame. A couple of days after the record session, they made more money than they had ever made in one day by recording a television commercial for Rice Krispies, a breakfast cereal that talked to itself in a three-word vocabulary, snap, crackle, pop.

Meanwhile the Beatles left England for their first performances in the United States, on the Ed Sullivan television program and two concerts at Carnegie Hall. Fifty thousand people requested the Sullivan show's 728 seats, and the Carnegie Hall shows sold out in a matter of hours.

Two of the Beatles' records had been released in the United States a year earlier to scant response. But steady publicity in the British press had been picked up by the London offices of the U.S. news media;
Time, Newsweek,
and the
New York Times,
as well as NBC and CBS television, did stories about the Beatles. Capitol Records, who distributed the Beatles' records in the United States, spent fifty thousand dollars for what they called a “crash publicity program.” They plastered five million
THE BEATLES ARE COMING
stickers on telephone poles, washroom walls, and other appropriate places throughout the country. They tried to get a copy of the Beatles' current single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” to every disc jockey in the country. They made up a four-page newspaper about the Beatles and sent out a million copies. They photographed their top executives wearing Beatle wigs, offered Beatle haircuts free to all their female employees, and persuaded the actress Janet Leigh to get one. They even tried, unsuccessfully, to bribe a University of Washington cheerleader into holding up a card reading “The Beatles Are Coming” before the television cameras at
the Rose Bowl football game. “There was,” said one Capitol vice president, “a lot of hype.”

The Beatles' appearance on the Sullivan show was reported to have been seen by seventy-three million people, and to have reformed the United States' teenagers for as long as it lasted, since across the country during that hour not one major crime was committed by a teenager.

The Rolling Stones, on tour with some peculiar English acts, did not seem to be doing much to deter crime. Rather the opposite; fans attacked the Stones, separately and together, and their van, breaking the windshield. “Some of those crowds were too much,” Stu said. “They began to get used to the idea that the Stones dropped their bleedin' guitars the last number and ran for it. And then the crowd from the first house would hang about till the second house had finished, and they'd be waiting for you as well. It got to be quite a problem. This is something they never really got credit for, that even at this stage they were causing bigger riots than the Beatles ever caused in this country. You see, nobody liked them. The establishment hated them, so they never got any good publicity.”

The Stones did their part to alienate people. On this tour, after playing the Stockton Odeon, they stayed at one of the more pleasant English hotels, called Scotch Corner. “That was a hotel from the past,” Stu said. “Lovely hotel, always wanted to stay there, but they didn't appreciate Brian at all. Brian would walk around the halls in his underpants, making noise, and just be a fuckin' uncivilized idiot. At most of these British hotels, people go to bed at ten at night. But these people made the effort. They said, Yeah, fine, okay, we'll lay on a nice cold meal, and there'll be waiters here when you come back. So we come back from Stockton at twelve midnight, and there are two waiters there, a great big table, fresh fruit salad and melon and cold meat. But Brian's got to start throwing bread rolls around the room, and demanding all sorts of bloody things they didn't have, and then he'd be obnoxious when they didn't have it. And instead of some-body sit—well, sometimes they
would
sit on him and they wouldn't go along, but at other times, once he'd start, the others'd start as well, and oh, I used to get so bleedin' embarrassed.”

On February 21 the Stones' EP record was number one in the EP charts. “Not Fade Away” was released and went into the Top Ten. They were still touring, causing riots of sexual frenzy each night. At the Sophia Garden in Cardiff, a man came into their dressing room, offered to sell them hashish, and they had him thrown out. Sexual frenzy was all right, but hashish was illegal. A few nights later at the Wolverhampton Gaumont, Jagger found among the fan letters left in the Stones' dressing room a note addressed to him, containing a stick of chewing gum and the request, “Please chew some and send it back!” Beyond the perverse and illegal into the unsanitary.

Same day and place, a reporter from
Melody Maker
interviewed the Stones, and the resulting story had probably the most-quoted headline of their early career, the headline that asked the musical question
WOULD YOU LET YOUR DAUGHTER GO WITH A ROLLING STONE?
Consciously or not, the headline echoed the racism directed against people of African descent in the United States. It also fit the image of the Stones held by many people—leering Rolling Stone locked in savage embrace with fair young girl. True or not (and it was both), the image was too strong to be forgotten, especially by newspaper writers. A couple of weeks later, another headline asked:
MARRY YOUR DAUGHTER TO A STONE?
The article mentioned that Brian was moving to a flat in Belgravia. He had left Linda Lawrence. “I think Brian got scared,” Shirley Arnold said. “It was the thought of another baby. They packed each other up, and then I think Brian got scared again 'cause she was having the baby and he decided to stay with her.”

During this time, besides playing to berserk crowds twice and sometimes four times daily, the Stones recorded their first long-playing album, were given scripts for their first film, signed to tour the United States, and Mick and Keith became more skilled as songwriters, “though we didn't like anything we wrote,” Keith said, “and we couldn't seem to get anybody else in the band to play it.” But Gene Pitney had a hit in England with one of their songs, “That Girl Belongs to Yesterday,” and Oldham produced a hit on another Jagger/Richards song, “As Tears Go By,” recorded by Marianne Faithfull, a girl they had recently met at a party. She could barely sing, but she was very pale and blond and had a pseudo-virginal sadomasochist charm that was not wasted on Jagger's philosophical eye.

The Rolling Stones,
their artily untitled (Oldham's idea) first album, was released and went directly to the top of the popular music album charts, a position held by the Beatles for almost all the previous year. “Not Fade Away,” their first release in the United States, entered the
Cashbox
magazine Hot 100. It was number 98, but it was there.

And every day, in every sense, the crowds kept coming. In some towns the Stones would find the places they were going surrounded and couldn't get inside to play. At other places, where there were low stages, the Stones would start, the little girls would run right over the bouncers in front of the stage, and the Stones would drop their guitars and run. Oldham discovered one night between shows that the seats were dripping with liquids deposited by female fans. Dozens of girls fainted at every show; in the places where tickets were counterfeited, or promoters sold more tickets than they had seats, things were even worse.

“The first time Chuck Berry came to England,” Stu said, “we were supposed to be doing two spots at the Savoy Room in Catford, and the first one was supposed to be about nine o'clock, and the next one at half
past ten. Berry was at Finsbury Park, and we'd never seen Berry live. Catford is south London, Finsbury Park is north London. So we're all looking at each other and saying, ‘Well, what's it gonna be?' Of course we went off to see Chuck Berry. And these things were running a little bit late, and it must have been well after nine o'clock before Berry was finished. And he was very weird, he wouldn't talk to us, wouldn't say a bloody dickybird.” The Stones then drove down to Catford.