True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (30 page)

Next day, in Perth for the last shows of their first tour of Australia, Bill, whose suite adjoined Brian's, came in through the connecting doors to Brian's bedroom, where Brian was already in bed, about to be joined by a girl who was sitting on the side of the bed in her bra and panties. Bill greeted them cheerily, sat beside the girl in the dark room, whispered in her ear, and away they went together. Those girls couldn't give themselves up fast enough, but to have one taken out of your bed was funny, and people made sure Brian knew how funny it was.

Returning to L.A. by way of Singapore and Hong Kong, where the Stones played concerts, Charlie met Shirley, who was waiting for him; Mick re-recorded his singing of “The Last Time”; Wyman flew back to England, and soon they all went their various ways. The day before “The Last Time” was released in England, the Stones reunited there to do a live television broadcast of the song. Millions of viewers saw
Mick dragged by fans from the rostrum, twisting his ankle, getting stabbed by stiletto heels.

The Stones took almost a week off before starting a new tour, their fifth of England, with both “The Last Time” and
The Rolling Stones No. 2
high in the charts. The tour ended in one of their finest moments, Wyman's Weakness versus a certain garage in Stratford. “Nothing would have come of it,” Stu said, “if it hadn't been for some local super-zealous idiotic youth club leader who happened to be getting his little Morris 3 fart-box filled up with a gallon and a half of paraffin.”

After another scant week off, the Stones started a short Scandinavian tour, flying to Copenhagen, where they had the entire nineteenth floor of the Grand Hotel. “And I'm afraid,” Stu said, “the Grand Hotel, which is still the best hotel in Copenhagen, ever since that week will not have anybody who even looks as if he's got long hair inside the door. Nineteen floors up, they were throwing empty bottles out the window. To the fans down below.”

During rehearsal at Odense, Mick received an electric shock while holding two microphones and fell into Brian, who fell into Bill, who was knocked unconscious. They all recovered, and the show went on. After more concerts and television appearances and more girls and eviction from a Gothenburg hotel, the Stones returned to England. They spent a few days without working, did a television show and closed the
New Musical Express
Pollwinners' Show at Wembley Stadium. On the sixteenth of April they flew to Paris to play the Olympia Theatre. The Stones had played there before, and Paris was not especially exciting. Diane Wyman and Stephen came along with Bill. Brian was with a French model named Zouzou. After one of the shows, a girl came backstage. She said in a German-sounding North Italian accent that her name was Anita. She was a model and had acted in Italian films. A few years before, when she was seventeen, she had gone to the United States and had lived in a house in Greenwich Village where the poets Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg also lived; at the time, she had been scared to death. Now she was no longer seventeen, no longer scared to death. Brian knew nothing about her and had no thought that he would die loving her.

Nearly everyone who wrote about Bolden followed . . . in saying that he was a barber, and in addition that he edited a scandal sheet called
The Cricket.
These unsubstantiated facts became part of the legend. . . . Buddy's widow, Nora, said that “. . . he did not run a scandal sheet and was not a barber, although he drank a lot and hung out at barbershops.”

D
ONALD
M. M
ARQUIS
:
In Search of Buddy Bolden

S
TEPPING INTO THE OFFICE
to find out when we would be leaving for tonight's show, I collided with Schneider, who asked, in a tone more abrasive than usual, whether I'd talked to my agent. “If you don't get something together by tomorrow, you're not going any farther with the tour.”

“I 'spect Mick will have something to say about that,” I said, eyeing his neck, reminding myself that to throttle him would likely cause trouble.

“When did you talk to Mick?”

“Every day.”

“Well, it's getting expensive carrying everyone around.”

“I'll be happy to pay my bill.”

“No, but there are all these people talking about deals, and the deals don't get together.”

“I am not one of those people.”

“Then why isn't it getting together?”

I said that these things take time and went into the living room to seethe. Months later, when he was drunk in the underwater atmosphere of a mod London basement restaurant called Barracuda (lit by tanks of green water containing lazy, cool-eyed killer fish), Ronnie would explain that his business technique derived from classic high school sex moves: outside the bra, inside the bra and so on. I saw him cruising, waiting to rend off hunks of my book.

In a corner of the room a television set was giving the news, sending into the room horrors of oriental wars, zodiac killers. Charlie, on one of the couches, was watching, smiling his pleasant amazed smile.

Ronnie came into the room from the office, where he had been screeching into the telephone, and sat in the chair next to mine. “Why can't I get your agent on the phone?” he asked. “He doesn't return my calls.”

The last time Ronnie told me this, I said, “He never returns my calls either.” But now, pushing back, I asked, “What do you do for the Stones, Ronnie? Or is it Klein? Who do you work for?”

“I don't do anything for Klein,” Ronnie said. “I work for the Stones.”

“What do you do for them?” I asked, sounding like Mr. District Attorney.

“I'm a groupie,” Ronnie said, getting up and talking over his shoulder as he left the room. “I crave their bodies.”

When he had gone, Charlie asked, “Don't you like Ronnie?”

“Do you like him?”

“He's not so bad, really.”

He was bad enough for me.

At the Burbank airport we had to wait because the plane (borrowed for us by the redoubtable Jon Jaymes) wasn't ready. Everybody except me joined the Stones in the restaurant. I didn't want to be with Jagger where he could be influenced by Schneider.

In the waiting area, a man in a business suit, carrying an attaché case, said to another man outfitted the same, as he pointed out a tall blond young man standing ahead of them in a line to the ticket counter, “He's Jagger, the singer with the Stones.”

“Oh, yeah?” said the second business suit. “The Gallstones?”

As I was writing this dialogue in my notebook, Jo Bergman appeared at my side. “I thought you hadn't made it,” she said.

“No, here I am.”

“Have you—what's going on with you and Ronnie?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Ronnie doesn't understand and doesn't care what I'm trying to do, and I am not going to discuss it with him.”

“He might surprise you,” Jo said.

“In a dark alley,” I said.

“We'll talk about it tomorrow.”

The plane was ready: it was a giant plane for our group (even though the group tonight included friends, cooks, groupies, and Mick's Ikette), a Boeing 707 from Air California, with 115 seats and three stewardesses in orange ruanas, all ours till six
A.M.
After the show in Phoenix we were going to Las Vegas for some late-night action.

Jagger and Keith huddled with Sam Cutler in the rear of the plane, then Mick joined the Ikette a few seats back of me and offered her a small drift of snow on the back of a magazine. “Try it, you'll like it,” he said and sniffed through a rolled-up twenty.

Schneider came forward, talked to Mick for a few minutes, then came to me and rested one hand on the arm of my seat. “Mick says you got to get it together,” he began. I dropped my notebook and grasped his lapels, looking deep into his eyes, thinking how much I would enjoy throwing him off the plane. “Ronnie,” I said, “leave me alone.”

I let go of him and went to speak to Mick.

“Don't worry about it, man, don't listen to him. In a funny way he wants to get it together for you. I mean, he wants it to happen.”

“So do we,” I said, hoping I was right, “but we want to do it right. I don't want you to think I'm bullshitting you—”

“I know you're not bullshitting me.”

As we came down the steps of the plane in Phoenix, the cool night air brought with it the strong odor of fresh cow manure. The Sports Arena had a rodeo feeling, with earth, not ice, under the floorboards, and I was starting to relax. I stepped over a rope stretched across the doorway to the dressing rooms, but Ronnie stopped me. “What did Mick say?” he asked.

“Listen, Ronnie, this is a small matter to you, but to me—”

“No, it's not small, but your agent is no good, he's not getting it together.”

I started to answer, but he went on: “I know somebody at your publishers, so I'll know what kind of deal you've got.”

There was no way to tell when he was bluffing, but to me he was a total bluff. He was trying to stop me from doing my work, and I had to remind myself once again not to scrag the bastard. He must have seen something in my eyes then, because he said, “You shouldn't take anything I say personally.” It was true, I shouldn't, any more than a cheerleader in high school should have taken it personally when he grabbed her tit. I walked away. Ronnie had nothing and I had everything to lose.

We arrived late and missed the opening acts, Terry Reid and Ike
and Tina Turner. Now the lights were down and Sam introduced “From England—the Rolling Stones.” Mick strutted a tour of the stage, waving his Uncle Sam hat, then clapped it on his head and began singing “Jumpin' Jack Flash.”

The show—just one tonight—went quickly. I had spoken to Jo about the badness of “I'm Free,” and on the drive to the airport, Glyn Johns, on the tour to plan a live album, was complaining about it: “Mick's recently come across the word
messianic,
and he's quite fascinated with it. It's in this new song, ‘Monkey Man,' you know. He can be as messianic as he wants, but as far as I'm concerned, when he says we're all free, he's talkin' out his arse.”

On the plane to Phoenix Jo told Mick and Glyn told Keith that the shows seemed to drag and suggested cutting “I'm Free.” Keith's reaction was negative—“Bollocks,” he said—but they left out the song, and it seemed to help. The show's pace was steady, even though the crowd seemed quiet, almost docile. When they stood up and the guards, blue-uniformed and beefy, started sitting them down by making head-knocking gestures with flashlights, Mick said, “Why can't they stand up? It's all right, you can stand up if you want to.” So for the last few songs the crowd was jumping and swaying together, girls were riding their boyfriends' shoulders, people were shouting and dancing, it was a rock and roll revival. Mick congratulated the crowd down front. “You
did
it,” he said.

Through a slit in the back curtain a cowpoke wearing a straw hat poked his sunburned head, looking at the crowd with wonder, as if he were sitting on a church steeple watching a cattle stampede. It ended with the petals falling as we ran out the back. Jon Jaymes, swinging his arms, directed us into the Phoenix collection of rented cars, and we raced teenagers and motorcycle cops to the airport.

In minutes we were aloft and headed for Las Vegas. I sat back for the flight. Mick was standing in the aisle beside me with an open suitcase, trying to take his pants off. “It's really hard to move a slow audience like that,” he said. “You feel as if you're moving a great weight.” He put on a black-and-white checked suit and a gray tweed cap, an outfit that made him look like a parody of a music hall performer. “We can't get the old things together. People at the Forum want the most hip things, the things off the new album, but it's hard to move more remote audiences. They want to hear the hits—but we've had trouble getting them together.” He closed the suitcase.

At the Las Vegas International Airport, we saw next to the gate as we entered a row of slot machines being fed by an airman and two drunks in business suits who bellowed and whistled at us as we passed. Four taxis took us to the Strip, among the hotels, nightclubs, casinos, with their dazzling neon signs that impoverished the stars, luring the
average Depression-bred American with the promise that he could make things better overnight. The taxis stopped and Jon Jaymes beckoned us into the Circus Circus. Outside, fountains were spouting and crashing; inside, fun mirrors were waiting to distort your image. As we collected, stewardesses too, in the lobby, lined with photographs of celebrities staring into flashbulbs, James greased our way in, asking a Circus Circus host if they'd like the Stones as guests. “Certainly,” the man said. “We'll put their picture on the wall.”

A spiral staircase led down into a giant circular room, decorated in red, with circus acts going on all around. Halfway down the spiral we saw on a stage below us a sword balancer wearing black tights and a white blouse. Keith saw him, his glittering rhinestones, his greasy hair, and smiled; a light, tiny but intense, flashed from Keith's eyes. The swordsman's eyes flashed back. “Hey! I know jew!” he said. “I seed jew in the movies, yes?”

“Yeah,” Keith said.

Leaning backward, closing his eyes, gesturing palms up with both hands, the sword balancer said, “Man, you out of sight.”

“So are you, baby,” Keith said, turning away.

“Stay—stay and see my show.”

But Keith, heading down the stairs, did not look back. At the bottom were slots, various kinds of tables, the croupiers, dealers, all in red and white candy-striped shirts, staring at us. We attacked the tables and machines. Above us the sword balancing act began, two swords held by their points in the man's teeth, nobody watching. At a table above the slots, four women who looked like grandmothers were asleep. Mick and Keith played blackjack. Up a few stairs, black curtains hid an alcove under a sign saying Adults Only Sleeping Beauty Ball Toss. I couldn't stand the suspense and stepped past the curtains to find a young man behind a counter where baseballs were stacked inside billiard racks. About fifteen feet behind him was a green metal disc a few inches wide. Farther back, displayed on a couch under a rose-colored light, behind a gauze curtain, was a girl wearing tiny rose-colored panties and a chiffon shawl.