True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (46 page)

“For the first time in three years,” Sam Cutler said, getting louder, “the greatest rock and roll band in the world, the Rolling Stones!”

The big yellow-blue-white spot bleached out Jagger as he came on-stage, twirling overhead his Uncle Sam hat, not smiling, gaze fixed on fate. In a breathless rush of silence the Stones came out, Charlie settling onto the drums, the others, quick and businesslike, plugging their guitars into the amplifiers, twisting dials, setting levels, until Keith hit the opening chords of “Jumpin' Jack Flash,” Mick started to howl about being born in a crossfire hurricane, and the kids all stood up and screamed. Glyn Johns stopped me in the corridor at the Plaza the next day to say that he had been backstage in a sound truck and the truck was jumping on its springs. “So I got out to see who was shaking it—I thought there might be some kids on top of it—but there was nobody there, the truck was just picking up the vibrations from the house, the whole bloody building was shaking.”

As “Jack Flash” ended, Mick, buttoning his trousers, said by way of greeting, “Think I busted a button on me trousers, hope they don't fall down. You don't want me trousers to fall down, now do ya?”

Yesss,
the crowd answered, as Keith started “Carol,” standing beside Mick in the spotlight, surrounded by a glimmering halo of rhine-stones on his Nudie shirt.

“We are making our own statement,” Brian had said in one of the interviews the publicity office arranged to keep him from feeling left out. “Others are making more intellectual ones.”

What message would you get if you were fifteen years old, standing in a cloud of marijuana smoke inside a crowded, cavernous hall, face reflecting the red and blue and yellow lights, watching Charlie hit the drums as hard as he was able, Bill slide his tiny hands over the skinny neck of his erect light-blue bass causing a sound like booming thunder, little Mick stare with wide eyes as if he were hearing an earthquake's faint premonitory quiverings, Keith bend over his guitar like a bird of prey, Jagger swoop and glide like some faggot vampire banshee, all of them elevated and illuminated and larger and louder than life? A few years later, a
New Yorker
writer would observe, “The Stones present a theatrical-musical performance that has no equal in our culture. Thousands and thousands of people go into a room and focus energy on one point and something happens. The group's musicianship is of a high order, but listening to Mick Jagger is not like listening to Jascha Heifetz. Mick Jagger is coming in on more circuits than Jascha Heifetz. He is dealing in total, undefined sensual experience of the most ecstatic sort.”

By the time that was written, Mick had sung “Midnight Rambler” in pink top hat and tails; after Altamont, the Stones would for reasons of self-preservation turn toward comedy. But in 1969, few people at
Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving Day thought that what the Stones were doing was a performance.

The Stones had first come to the United States in 1964, fewer than six years before. They had done five U.S. tours in three years, then were stopped for almost three years. Since then they had become world-famous idols, outlaws, legends, relics, and one was now a corpse. They had been more than lucky to find a guitarist who was docile and played, though not as Brian once had, excellent bottleneck. One problem they'd had preparing to tour was choosing songs that Keith and Mick Taylor could play. Hence “Carol” and “Little Queenie,” Keith's Chuck Berry specialties, and hence the difficulty Jagger had mentioned of getting the old things together. The old things had featured, as Stu said, “two guitar players that were like somebody's right and left hand.”

The people inside Madison Square Garden on this Thanksgiving had, most of them, lived through a time of cold war, hot war, race riots, student riots, police riots, assassinations, rapes, murders, trials, waking nightmares. But Keith, Mick, Charlie, Bill, and the new guitar player were impersonating the Rolling Stones, and the audience were impersonating their audience, both of them at the moment a great success. Dancing under the circumstances (“Oh, Carol! Don't ever steal your heart away—I'm gonna learn to dance if it takes me all night and day!”) seemed to have a transcendent value. Many people thought then that dancing and music could have a major role in changing the structure of society. They may have been naive, but they were much more interesting than the sensible people who came along later. The Stones would tour the United States every three years for a long time to come, and the value of dancing would never be less than transcendent, but at Woodstock, only a few months before and a few miles away, music had seemed to create an actual community. There was—at this time, for many members of this generation—a sense of power, of possibility, that after Altamont would not return.

When “Sympathy for the Devil” began and it became clear that nobody was going to sit down, I went around back and climbed the stairs to the stage. Hendrix was sitting behind one of Keith's amplifiers. Keith was a twisted figure, torturing his guitar strings in the red spot-light, his blistering solo saving the song now as it did on the record. The lyrics were ponderous, but they were written by a man who'd done some thinking on the nature of evil.

So if you meet me
have some courtesy
have some sympathy
and some taste

Use all your well-learned
politesse
or I'll lay your soul to waste

While Keith played, Mick took long drinks from a fifth of Jack Daniel's and a can of Stauffer's beer. Ten feet in front of the stage Jon Jaymes and Gary Stark were trying to hold back the crowd, among them a tall, electric-haired boy in a bow tie, chewing gum with big open-mouthed smacks. A couple of yards to the rear Pete Bennett prowled, cigar in jaw, smiling, nobody going near him.

Because they had gone on to release three albums of new material during the three-year layoff, the Stones had for this tour many songs never performed in public. There was nothing in the set from
Their Satanic Majesties Request,
an album done, as Jagger said, “under the influence of bail.” It was futuristic and introspective and, because Brian was devastated by the events of his life, lacked guitar interplay. By the time the Stones recorded the next album,
Beggar's Banquet,
Keith had learned bottleneck. The band had stopped depending on Brian for anything; if Keith could have played bottleneck and rhythm at the same time onstage, they would never have needed another guitar player. The current set consisted of four songs from
Banquet,
four from
Let It Bleed,
two by Chuck Berry, two early Stones songs that featured Keith's guitar, the last three singles, and “Satisfaction.” As Stu said, “If Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, and myself had never existed on the face of this earth, Mick and Keith would still have had a group that looked and sounded like the Rolling Stones.”

“Sympathy” ended with the aisles packed, the air filled with shrill cheers. As the Stones had changed from social misfits to satanic majesties, the stupid girls grown up wrong had become stray cats. “Bet y'mama don't know you can bite like that.” Jagger took off the black choker hung with gold coins, tossing it behind him, leaning across the stage-front, shaking his ass at the stray cats, his red scarf swirling.

Learning bottleneck had led Keith, and so the Stones, deep into country blues. Mick sang the opening lines of “Love in Vain” in a blue spot, and as Mick Taylor's bottleneck answered, the Stones were caught by seven blue spots, two each on Mick and Keith. The next two songs, “Prodigal Son” and “You Got to Move,” had been too intimate (“It's a wank”) to rehearse. Keith and Mick did them alone, perched on stools, the rock and roll audience listening intently, nobody sitting down, to the songs of old black men too poor to put glass in their windows.

You may be high
You may be low
You may be rich
You may be po'
But when the Lord gets ready
You got to move

As the last note from Keith's National clanged into silence, Wyman started thumping heavy bass notes for “Under My Thumb.” Many of the early Jagger/Richards songs (except the ones about Mick's mother) were about girls they met at debutante balls. This one seemed to be no longer in favor with Mick, but Keith liked his guitar part and didn't have to sing the words.

Under my thumb's a squirming dog who's just had her day

Under my thumb's a girl who has just changed her ways

. . . It's down to me, the change has come, she's under my
thumb

Coming with a crash after the gospel truth, the song appeared to draw the audience toward the stage by levitation. Jon and Gary were driven backward, while Pete, incredibly, still ambled down front, bantering with girls in the aisle. Without pausing the Stones went into “I'm Free.” Before the first chorus ended, Jon and Gary had been pulled onstage, Ronnie had run backstage with the crowd snapping at his heels, and even Pete had gotten out of the way.

The New York newspaper critics would judge this concert a failure, not as a musical performance but as a riot. “The biggest surprise at the Garden last night,” the
Post
reporter wrote, “was that the Stones gave us a nice concert, no more and no less. Did Mick Jagger really think he was going to get busted for inciting to riot in a hall that was built for cigar smoke and the ringing echo of fight announcements?”

If Mick expected arrests and riots, he had said nothing about it; and if a little old riot were all anybody had wanted, things would have been simpler. But the Stones' last American tour had started with a riot on the East Coast, and there were more than enough sadistic elements floating around to confuse pudgy newspapermen. Sixteen thousand people listened to Mick sing

We all free

if we want to be

You know we all free

and the song ended with a surge of energy that seemed too strong for the Garden to contain. The Stones and their audience were following
decent impulses toward a wilderness where are no laws, toward the rough beast that knows no gentle right, nor aught obeys but his foul appetite.

The lights went out, we heard a drum roll and soft, almost whimpering, harp sounds. Three spots, white-red-white, streaked through the arena's blackness to where Mick, crouched on the purple carpet, was asking, “Did you hear about the Midnight Rambler?” Mick made you feel all the madness and the terror as he purged the demons. The song was the soul of relentlessness:
Everybody got to go.

“When suddenly the police move in, it's very disturbing and you begin to wonder just how much freedom you really have,” Mick had said while awaiting his first trial. Mick talked of freedom, the newspapers talked of riots. Who was more correct? Stay tuned and hear the sad story. But is it freedom a man wants who sings

I'm called the hit-and-run rape her in anger

The knife-sharpened tippytoe

whirling, hands high on small of back, ribs and lips thrust out, then kneeling, swinging his metal-studded belt like a whip. What could he want—and what could they want, those who shriek in ecstasy at his song? And what did I want, watching them, taking notes? Whatever we wanted, it wasn't what we would get.

Hot orange lights seared the air. Mick, himself again, just having a romp, was saying, “Thank you, now we gonna do one that asks the question, Would you like to live with me?” To which Janis Joplin, backstage left, shouted her rude reply. In front of the stage, a blond girl in a gold vest, a redhead in a rose T-shirt and suspenders, and a brunette wearing a gypsy scarf looked on, gone with the wonder. Keith was shaking his head, lost in the music. Tony was crouching by the piano, alert to snatch Mick from the tidal wave of bodies. “We'd like to see you,” Mick said, and the house lights came on as “Little Queenie” began. A boy by the stage, hands in air, was drumming on heaven's door. Jagger was grinding his hips, making eye contact with a girl in a petticoat dancing before the stage, his mouth open wide in a big orgasmic smile. Hendrix was smiling, as if saying to himself, This is it, the real rock and roll soup. I couldn't see anyone who wasn't smiling. Keith, his eyes closed, was controlling with nods and shakes the rhythm of the entire building—Charlie's rhythm and through him Bill's and so little Mick's and Mick's and all the way to the back of the Garden.

As “Satisfaction” began, Mick sat down holding a hand mike, one preaching finger waggling overhead. The audience began crashing onto
the stage, two girls and a boy coming aboard at once, Sam, Tony, and one of Jaymes' men running to pick them up and set them gently down on the floor again. The loose women in the crowd helped on the high notes of “Honky Tonk Women,” as Mick requested, and at the end of “Street Fighting Man,” with Keith turning it up all the way and everybody in the place going mad, I started once again to hear over all a high singing sound like the Angel Choir, ringing up in the smoky, metal spines of Madison Square, a noise that much later, as I waited to be locked up, I could hear still ringing and ringing over the sounds of everything else. Down front a man was holding up a (stunned, it appeared) baby for a look. The audience was undulating like one giant creature.

Great red jugs of acid-laced Kool-Aid were being passed around, onto the stage and back into the crowd. The amplifiers were giving off heat and the smell of old-fashioned radios. Keith rested his guitar against his thigh, ripping it up and down like a gunfighter drawing faster and faster, over and over. Mick, by the edge of stage right, started moving backward in reverse-motion picture fashion and sailed the basket of red rose petals high out over the crowd where they hung for a moment, as the Stones unplugged and ran, and then started slowly to descend, floating on the high ringing howl.

We wheeled out of the Garden, stopping to honk at a saw horse somebody had left in front of the exit. A teenaged boy ran out with us, so fast that he kept up for three or four blocks. A few boys and girls followed in cars, not many, but we drove as if we had just robbed the Deadwood stage and, bouncing along, tore off our muffler so we really sounded terrible, racing through town in a limo full of bodyguards, wall-to-wall muscle, loving every second of it.