True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (29 page)

In the next place the Stones played, the Palace Ballroom in Douglas, on the Isle of Man, the only police dog on the island was onstage to protect them from seven thousand teenagers, but the dog got excited by the music and the screaming and was led away, snarling at the crowd and the Stones. “I thought he was going to take a bite out of me,” Mick said.

At the ABC Theatre in Hull, two dozen rugby players formed a line in front of the orchestra pit, but when Mick walked along the edge of the pit shaking his maracas, a girl grabbed him, arms around his legs, and he fell into the pit. He crawled back onstage unhurt.

Part of the Stones' charm was that they lived in an atmosphere of danger, and one came near them at one's peril. Near the end of this tour, at the Gaumont Theatre in Ipswich, Stu watched as “the barrier in front of the stage collapsed and a girl got a broken back. I saw her go down and I heard her back break. But a lot of them you never heard about. They were in the local papers the next day and that was all.”

Charlie Watts and Shirley Ann Shepherd barely had time to get married (secretly, by a Bradford registrar) before the Stones were off for Belgian and French television appearances and their first appearance
at the Olympia Theatre in Paris. “Even as late as this,” Stu said, “Brian was thinking of himself as a leader, 'cause he wanted a bigger amp than Keith's, the day before we went to Belgium I remember driving down especially to get him the same size amp the Beatles used, just to keep his little Welsh mind happy.”

With a successful Paris concert behind them—a spokesman for the Olympia said that the theater had suffered £1400 worth of damages—the Stones came home and had a day to pack before leaving for their second assault on the United States. About this time the Stones had four records on the British charts, including a new EP, “Five by Five,” recorded at Chess. Wherever there were popular-record charts, the Stones' records were on them.

Trying to make up for the mistakes of their first U.S. tour, the Stones began this one by appearing, after rehearsing for two days, on
The Ed Sullivan Show.
“We'd got it into our heads that Ed Sullivan was the thing to do,” Stu said. “The only thing worth doing.”
The Ed Sullivan Show,
in the beginning called
The Toast of the Town
, every Sunday night for twenty years was the phoenix of vaudeville, bringing to U.S. television the most various collection of acts that could be imagined, the finest ballet dancers and opera singers doing two and a half hot minutes, comedians, jugglers, animal acts—all stars who had reached the top, because in its time and place, the Sullivan show was the top.

When the well-rehearsed Stones were on the Sullivan show, the reception from fans inside and outside the theater was so enthusiastic that Sullivan said he'd never book the Stones again. The Stones were pleased, knowing that probably meant they would be invited back. The next day they flew to Los Angeles. They played Sacramento, then took a day off, noticing that in the five months they had been away, the men had grown their hair longer.

After rehearsing for two days at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, the Stones appeared on the Teen Awards Music International (T.A.M.I.) show, recorded before an audience by a new process called Electrono-vision. The Stones closed the show, following, among others, the Beach Boys, who wouldn't speak to them; Marvin Gaye; the Supremes; the Miracles; Chuck Berry, who was pleasant, talked with them and even gave Wyman a pair of cufflinks; and, ultimately, James Brown, who said he would make the Stones wish they'd never left England. The Stones had never seen James Brown. “The kids were eating out of his hand,” Stu said. “Mick and them were trembling, having to follow this. But they did it, they got canned and bowled on and did it.” It was one of their most spirited performances; even Wyman moved a bit.

In the next few days, the Stones did shows in a couple of Southern
California towns, recorded six songs at RCA Studios in L.A. with Jack Nitzsche, who worked with Spector and conducted the stage orchestra for the T.A.M.I. show, and then they left for Cleveland. They were preceded by an address on Cleveland radio from the local mayor, advising the citizens that the Rolling Stones gave immoral performances and that no teenagers should be allowed to see them. In spite of this the show was poorly attended, perhaps because on this night Lyndon Johnson was elected president of the United States by the greatest percentage of the popular vote in the country's history. Next, New York City, the Astor, then to Providence and a cinema where no live act had ever played. The management had covered the orchestra pit with thin plywood, and when the Stones started playing, girls ran down the aisles, jumped onto the plywood and disappeared into the pit.

The Stones went back to Manhattan that night by train, getting out at Grand Central Station, where the black porters yelled, “Are you the Beatles?” and the Stones yelled, “Are you the Harlem Globetrotters?”

They were in New York City for the next two days, but did no more concerts. They had a new single, “Time Is On My Side,” from a new album,
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, on the U.S. charts, and they paid a friendly visit to London Records. That night Brian and Bill went to a jazz club in Greenwich Village where they met Julian Adderley, called “Cannonball” because of his rotundity, a man of enormous appetites, considered by some musicians the greatest alto saxophonist since Charlie Parker, and the man after whom Brian had named all his sons.

At midnight of the next day the Stones flew to Chicago, where they would spend most of the next week, and Brian would spend all of it. On their first day the Stones went back to Chess Studios and cut five tracks. Among the tracks they finished, Stu said, “there was a thing called ‘Stewed,' on which Brian didn't play. He was pissed. But I don't think that was ever released, it was just an instrumental. And I think the great mysterious ‘Key to the Highway'—we know we did it, but we can't find it. I can hear it in my head. But nobody's got a copy of it, and it was never released, and Decca say they ain't got it. I remember playing on it.”

For the next four days, mostly doing interviews, the Stones were in Chicago, except for a drive to a press reception in Milwaukee to promote the shows there. Brian didn't make it to that pair of concerts, nor to the one the next night in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on a bill with the Shangri-Las and a band with green hair, nor to the one after that, in Dayton, Ohio; Brian was in Chicago at the Pasavant Hospital with a temperature of 105 degrees, delirious, the doctors said, from bronchitis and extreme exhaustion.

“He was certainly ill, all right,” Stu said, “but he didn't do anything to help himself, he aggravated it by taking too much of some­
thing, and generally behaved very stupidly. I tell you what, he nearly got hoofed out there and then. He hadn't really contributed anything on those record dates. He was either stoned or pissed or just sick, and they got fed up with him.”

The Stones, carrying on without Brian, drove four hundred miles from Dayton to Louisville, Kentucky, in a bus, played two shows at the Memorial Auditorium, sent their equipment back to Chicago, slept in Louisville, and followed the equipment the next morning. The Stones had scheduled two shows at the Aire Crown Theatre in McCormick Place. “The Aire Crown Theatre's got one of these stages that rise out of the pit,” Stu said, “so Brian decided he was all right, and he was gonna leave hospital, and we thought it'd be groovy if we didn't make any announcement, we just came up out of the pit with Brian playing, and the kids all went stark raving out of their minds.”

The Stones flew the next day to New York City, where they had their picture taken for the cover of
Cashbox
and were taken to lunch, to nightclubs, saw a rough cut of the T.A.M.I. show. Then back to England and the release of a new single, “Little Red Rooster,” a song done earlier by master bluesman Howlin' Wolf. News, no longer new, of the Wattses' marriage appeared, with Charlie denying it. It was a small lie; the Stones hardly had any time to be at home. There were plenty of girls if you wanted them, but very little home life.

“Brian finished with Linda,” Shirley Arnold said, “but he didn't actually finish, full stop. They used to go back and finally when they did finish there were lots of girls.”

Brian seldom heard from Pat, the girl who had left him after Jagger had been with her, and their son. “Brian had a few letters,” Shirley said, “which meant I had a few, 'cause any letters that were sent to them came to me and I dealt with them. I think he was paying her some money every week. She sent a letter one year with a photograph of the baby—well, he was growing up then—he was the image of Brian. It wasn't a very nice letter. It was Christmastime and she said, ‘This is a photograph of your son. Would you send him a typewriter—a kid's typewriter?' I told Brian about it and he said, ‘Okay, you can send it, but say that you opened the letter and that you sent it.' So we did that.”

On January 6, 1965, the Stones flew to Ireland, did interviews, a television show and two concerts in Dublin, “another of these occasions when Brian got separated from everybody else when they were trying to get out of the theatre and got lost in the crowd,” Stu said.

“He used to really dig being mobbed,” Keith said. “He'd be dead scared of it, but he used to really dig it, too. He used to demand to be surrounded by heavies, and he'd take his jacket off, and ‘Now. Now. Now. Now!'”

From Dublin the Stones took cars to Cork, one hundred and fifty miles, passing people with donkeys, like going back centuries. The number of centuries was revealed when they stopped at an “old clothing shop, sort of army surplus, in a little village on the road to Cork. We went in,” Keith said, “and this old Irishman grabbed hold of Brian's balls and dragged Brian outside and pointed to the church tower, there's these huge holes in it, and he said, ‘Cromwell's balls did that, now let me see what I'm gonna do to your balls.' So Brian got his cock out and pissed all over his old overcoats and everything. We all went haring out of the shop and leapt in the car, and—he was very old, this cat—and suddenly he leapt up across the street and onto the bonnet of the car and started kickin' the windscreen with his huge boots.” Andrew nicked the man's hat and they careered off toward two shows in Cork.

Next day back in England, and the day after, the Stones played the Hammersmith Commodore on a bill with Marianne Faithfull. Two television shows done, and the Stones left for a tour of Australia and the Far East, stopping over in Los Angeles to record “The Last Time,” taken by Mick and Keith from an old gospel song.

They left L.A. early in the morning for the eighteen-hour trip to Sydney Airport, where hundreds of fans, most of them little suntanned girls in tight shorts, were crashing over police barricades to see the Stones. In Sydney Mick met relatives he hardly knew existed, people with names like Shopp and Pitts. His aunt, whose last name was Scutts, and whom he had met when she visited England last year, had a letter from Mick's mother saying, “I solemnly advise you to take earplugs, because after the last concert I saw, my doctor had to treat me for perforated eardrums.”

The Stones had an entire floor at the Chevron Hilton, with an excellent view of Sydney Harbour and the fans outside. “That's where you stay in a Hilton hotel and the staff send the birds up to you instead of trying to keep them out,” Stu said.

“Amazing number of birds there,” Keith said. “In Melbourne, too, in that weird motel, all glass. Bill on the phone to the hall porter, ‘Send me up that one in the pink.' Nine in one day he had, no kidding, he just sat all day long in his bedroom looking out the window, and he's right in with the hall porter, ‘No, not that one, the one with the blond hair, not that ‘orror.' Used to tell him off for sending up uglies. It was in Melbourne we kept calling up that blind DJ and asking for songs like ‘I'm Beginning to See the Light.' “

The Stones' first Australian shows went well, and they left for New Zealand. They arrived at Christchurch in a downpour, had a press conference and went to the best hotel in town, which was terrible. “Our hotel has too few bathrooms,” Mick said to the audience next day
at the Theatre Royal, “so you can't blame us if we smell.” They hired three bodyguards for New Zealand, but lost one in Christchurch when a police dog bit him, lost a second when his arm got jammed in a door, and the third couldn't guard all of them by himself, and so he left.

At 7:30
A.M.
the Stones flew to “Invercargill, the arsehole of the world,” Keith said. “The southernmost town in the world.”

“You could put your bed in the middle of the street at five o'clock in the afternoon and nothing would disturb you,” Stu said. The audience at the Civic Theatre was as dead as the town, and the Stones cut their performance short.

They were in New Zealand ten days, in near hundred-degree weather, being refused admittance to hotels, watched in stony silence by the crowd at Dunedin, pelted with eggs by the exuberant fans in Auckland, and with Brian and Bill carrying on a competition among the suntanned legs.

“They were the only two who used to actively go out looking,” Stu said. “Bill would usually be the first one to find summink, and then Brian would move in.”

“Bill had an absolute compulsion,” Keith said. “He had to have a bird, otherwise he couldn't sleep, he'd get homesick, he'd start shaking, really, he'd collapse completely if he didn't have something in bed with him, no matter what it was.”

The Stones returned to Australia for more shows in Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth. At a party after one of the Adelaide shows Bill picked up a girl and again Brian nicked her away. She had been in Bill's room at the Akabar Motel, but she went away with Brian, leaving her coat and jumper. When she came back for them the next morning Bill told her to look off the balcony. Her clothes were in the ground-floor rock pool.