True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (32 page)

A few days later the London papers printed the news that Decca would in the next three years spend at least £1,700,000 to finance five films starring the Rolling Stones. It was also announced that an American, former accountant Allen Klein, thirty-one, had taken over the Stones' business management, replacing Eric Easton, who received “a golden handshake.”

“He'd served his purpose—we'd done as much as we could in England,” Keith said. “We could get a grand a night, and that's as much as you could earn, in those days. You think, What the fuck do we need him for . . . because that was the way it was. Onward.”

The Stones' comanager Andrew Oldham, the papers said, would work with Klein as “creative manager.” The papers didn't say that Klein was Andrew's discovery; he had lived in an orphanage and in poverty with his grandparents, been in the army, become a certified public accountant on the G.I. Bill. He did record-company audits for some entertainers, keeping half of any underpayments he found, and he found plenty. He did an audit at RCA Victor for Sam Cooke and became Cooke's manager, but Cooke was shot and killed in a motel scrape with a whore in Los Angeles. Cooke, whose first fame was with the gospel group the Soul Stirrers, was a popular symbol to black Americans, and it was as natural for the Stones to sign with Cooke's ex-manager as it was for them to record at Chess, or at the RCA Studios in Los Angeles, where Cooke had recorded. One of the songs on the Stones' latest album release in the United States,
Out of Our Heads,
was Cooke's “Good Times.” The English papers did say that the Stones' reason for hiring Klein was “to further the group's financial success.”

Andrew told reporters that the first of the Decca-financed Stones movies would be made within the next six months, but that it was “too early to say” what the movies would be like. Mick snarled at one reporter, “We're not gonna make Beatles movies. We're not comedians.”

The Stones went back to work, doing three television appearances in four days, playing Dublin and Belfast on the weekend. The Dublin concert was stopped when part of the second show audience at the Adelphi Theatre leaped over the orchestra pit onto the stage. Mick was dragged to the floor; three boys were throwing punches at Brian while two others were trying to kiss him. Wyman was crushed against a piano at one side of the stage. Keith managed to get offstage, and Charlie sat playing the drums, his face expressionless. In Belfast the audience tore up the seats and threw them at the stage. As the Stones tried to leave, fans covered their car, but they got away with another collapsed roof.

The next morning they flew to Los Angeles for a few days to record
at RCA their new single release, “Get Off of My Cloud.” The Jagger/Richards song, not about love or even love/hate, but about the frustrations of the modern world, was in the same vein as “Satisfaction,” though not as memorable. But “Satisfaction” was the most popular song in the world, and it would have taken an airplane crash to stop the Stones now.

They returned to England, played a concert on the Isle of Man, were the hosts for a special edition of the television show
Ready, Steady, Go!
On September 11 the Stones began a tour of five German cities. Teenagers broke through a police cordon at the Düsseldorf airport when the Stones' plane touched down. About two hundred fought their way, breaking windows, wrenching phones off the walls, smashing doors, to an airport waiting room where the Stones were to give a press conference. Police cancelled the conference, and the Stones drove to Münster. Newspapers there described the show as “hell broken loose” and “a witches' cauldron.”

Next day the Stones played the Gruga Halle in Essen and the day after that the Ernst Merck Halle in Hamburg. While six thousand fans rioted inside the Gruga Halle, two thousand rioted outside. The ones inside had the advantage of not being ridden down by mounted police. In Hamburg also there were police on horses with clubs and hoses keeping out the kids who were trying to get into the Stones' show. Cars were overturned, and kids were trampled by horses.

On September 14, with
Melody Maker
listing “Satisfaction” at number one for the second week, the Stones played Munich. Anita Pallenberg, the girl the Stones had met backstage at the Olympia Theatre in Paris, was there. She had some amyl nitrite poppers, and Brian was the only one of the Stones who would share them with her. He went home with her, but Mick and Keith had said something to him that made him cry all night.

The next day the Stones went to West Berlin and played to twenty-three thousand in the Waldbühne, where Hitler used to appear under the open sky. The following day, off to Vienna and then home to London. They took six days off, the British version of
Out of Our Heads
was released, and then they opened a four-week English tour at the Astoria Theatre in Finsbury Park. In a corner of the dressing room Brian sat alone, playing on his Gibson guitar Wilson Pickett's “In the Midnight Hour.” Keith and Charlie were talking with friends, Bill was beside the stage watching the Spencer Davis Group, and Mick was talking to reporters. The Stones performed a new sequence of songs, with Brian playing organ on “That's How Strong My Love Is,” playing with people who had humiliated him and reduced him to tears, and as he heard the screams of ecstasy from the audience in the darkened hall, Brian threw his head back in the spotlight, laughing.

At Liverpool thirteen girls were injured as they tried to climb over
the canvas-covered orchestra pit to the stage. Theatre officers lowered the curtain, and the Stones accused them of panicking. In Manchester Keith was knocked unconscious by something somebody threw. He was carried offstage, woke up, and came back to finish the show. Mick was cut by something, probably a coin, and had to wear a plaster under his left eye for most of the tour. Brian was struck on the nose by a half-crown.

The tour ended on October 17, “Get Off of My Cloud” was released in Great Britain on October 22, and on October 27 the Stones left Heathrow Airport for New York City. The next day they held a press conference in the penthouse of the Hilton. To protect the Stones from the fans around the hotel, their limousine was driven onto the hotel's freight elevator, and they were carried to the top. Most of the Stones' fans in the United States at this time were quite young girls who thought that anything English was exotic and adorable, but a writer at the Hilton press conference said the Stones looked “like five unfolding switchblades,” adding, “I left with the terrible feeling that if Kropotkin were alive in the 1960s he would almost certainly have had a press agent.”

On October 29 the Stones flew to Montreal, handing over the passports in a bundle so the customs officers wouldn't notice that Keith's was missing. There were eight thousand in the audience at the Forum, thirty reported injured. The Stones flew back to Syracuse, New York, played the next afternoon to six thousand students at Ithaca College and played that night to eight thousand at an auditorium in Syracuse. On Halloween they played to thirteen thousand at the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, fighting fifty-knot head winds to get there, sneaking Keith over and back. In Rochester the next night thirty police and thirty ushers could not control the crowd of thirty-five hundred at the Community War Memorial Auditorium. The Stones did six songs, during which the curtain came down four times. Finally Keith, furious at the treatment of the crowd by the police, shouted, “This is a hick town. They were twice as wild in Montreal. They won't get hurt. You're too rough with them.” The police chief stopped the show, but “Get Off of My Cloud” was the most popular record in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

The Stones played Providence, New Haven, the Boston Garden, the Academy of Music in New York in the afternoon, and Convention Hall in Philadelphia the same night, the Mosque Theatre in Newark, Reynolds Coliseum in Raleigh, taped an appearance on the television show
Hullabaloo,
played Greensboro, Knoxville, Charlotte, and on November 17 came to the Memphis Mid-South Coliseum.

A teenager in the 1950s—I was twelve years old in 1954, the year Elvis Presley made his first recording—I had been given a new sense of
life by rock and roll, a sense that diminished as the quality of the music diminished. Now musicians my own age, like the Stones, again were taking up the music. Christopher and I went to see them.

The audience consisted almost entirely of pubescent girls, some with Mom and Dad, all white, shrieking at the tops of their piping little voices. The Stones' show was not a concert but a ritual; their songs, compared in content or manner of performance with the material of other popular musicians, were acts of violence, brief and incandescent. Mick threw a tambourine into the audience, and hundreds dived for it. Years later I would get the Stones' autographs for the girl who caught the tambourine, its sharp-edged cymbals slicing her hands so badly that she had to be taken to a hospital emergency room and stitched together.

Four of the Stones left the next day for Miami, and Wyman stayed in Memphis. Cindy Birdsong of Patty LaBelle and the Blue Belles, one of the other acts on the tour, stayed there too. Wyman went to the Club Paradise and saw Big Ella and the Vel-Tones, but he didn't get to be such good friends with Cindy Birdsong as he would have liked. Anita Pallenberg flew to Miami to visit Brian. Anita and the Stones, staying at the Fontainebleau, rented motorboats from the hotel and floated in the ocean off Miami Beach until late afternoon. When they came in, there was no sign of Brian. Then they saw him, under a line of seagulls, a tiny dot in the sunset, headed out to sea. The hotel sent a boat after him, because he hadn't enough fuel to make it back. “I was chasing the birds,” he said.

The tour resumed, to Shreveport, Dallas, Fort Worth, Tulsa, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Dayton, Chicago, Denver, and Phoenix, where the Stones stayed in Scottsdale and went riding on the desert. This was the first Stones tour with Allen Klein and Ronnie Schneider. The Stones would meet in Ronnie's room before an outing. Better call Brian, he'll be left, Ronnie would say. Don't call him, Keith would say. Even Charlie don't like him. If Charlie don't like him there must be something wrong with him.

Anita would be meeting Brian at the end of the tour in Los Angeles, where the Stones planned to record an album. On the cover of the English
Disc Weekly
for the week the tour ended there was a photograph of Brian and Anita and the headline,
BRIAN JONES WEDDING?
Brian, telephoned during the tour, said that he had been going with Anita for about three months. “Anita,” he said, “is the first girl I've ever been serious about.”

Charles Bolden, a musician, of 2302 First Street, hammered his mother-in-law, Mrs. Ida Beach, in their house yesterday afternoon. It seems that Bolden has been confined to his bed since Saturday, and was violent. Yesterday he believed that his mother-in-law was drugging him, and getting out of bed, he hit the woman on the head with a pitcher and cut her scalp. The wound was not serious. Bolden was placed under a close watch, as the physicians stated that he was liable to harm someone in his condition.

New Orleans Daily Picayune,
1906

L
ATE LAST NIGHT
Stu and I went out to a café, and I ate an omelet while he told me that he'd like to make a record of “Silent Night” with Keith on bass, Jeff Beck on guitar, himself on organ, Mick on harp—but you can't get them together. I slept, awoke, and all too soon, Shirley and Serafina Watts were leaving in the morning sunlight for England. The Stones and most of the rest of us were going later this afternoon to Texas. All long-faced, Charlie, Shirley, and I said goodbye.

Last night Stu said that they used to come to the United States, stay in hotels and with one Englishman and one American tour twenty or thirty cities.
“That's
a tour,” he said. “When you start renting houses
and putting people like Jo Bergman in them, you're going to have trouble, because that's their business.” So we arrived after dark at the Hyatt House in Dallas to find our rooms already rented. Securing rooms was Bill Belmont's job, and as we rode to a Quality Court Jagger told Schneider that Belmont should be hauled on the carpet. It occurred to me that we were travelling across the country without one grownup person.

I went up with my suitcase and came back down to find Belmont and Michael Lydon leaving in a limousine for the Moody Field House at Southern Methodist University. Schneider had, clearly, spoken to Belmont, who said, “I don't have to take this dogshit! They're snobs, they don't care. I haven't talked to Jagger in three days, and I don't intend to. They think they're fucking gods. They started it all, but the crew might go back to the Fillmore and enjoy life. If I say, ‘Let's ride,' they'll all walk out.”

Belmont was operatic, but at the auditorium there was much to be done, and the crew stayed. I went upstairs to the Stones' dressing room, its walls decorated with photographs of SMU football and basketball players. Terry Reid was there, preparing to open the concert; he was twenty-one years old today. I watched his act from the balcony. The place was crowded, people sitting in the aisles and on the floor. I saw no police, just university campus cops. The crowd was throwing Frisbees, colorful little plastic saucers skimming over their heads from the floor to the balcony and back again. They cheered good Frisbee tosses at least as much as Terry's songs.

When his set ended I went back to the dressing room to wait for the next act, Chuck Berry. This would be the first show he had played on the tour, replacing Ike and Tina as well as B. B. King. But one of the promoters, a man in a brown suit, came into the dressing room and said that Berry wouldn't go on until he was paid $3000 in cash. I told the man he'd have to wait for Schneider.

The crowd, occupied with the Frisbees, didn't seem to mind waiting. Soon Schneider and the Stones showed up, and Berry went on. He was wearing white shoes that looked like albino alligators. He had the same bad white band that was with him at the Whisky-à-Go-Go, but he duck-walked, played with his guitar upside down and in various phallic positions and got a big ovation at the end of his set. In a minute he was in the Stones' dressing room, asking Jagger, “Where this gig tomorrow?”