True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (50 page)

The next day, Linda left the hospital and Brian moved to the Royal Avenue House in the King's Road. And the day after that, Serafina Watts was born.

Brian went to Marrakech to record some musicians called the G'naoua, Glyn Johns going along as engineer. Glyn and Brian didn't get along, and the music was disappointing. Though he would return to Morocco in the summer to record in Joujouka with Brion Gysin, Brian was back in London by the end of April. The Stones had finished a new single, “Jumpin' Jack Flash,” with an optimistic chorus:

But it's all right now
In fact it's a gas

It was time. The
Daily Express
for May 9, in a story titled “Things Look Bad for Rolling Stones,” observed that the Stones had not had a number one single since “Paint It, Black” over two years ago.

But three days after that story appeared the Stones gave a surprise
performance at the
New Musical Express
Pollwinner's Concert at Wembley Stadium—they had been named the top rhythm & blues group. It was just like the old days, girls screaming, cops with linked arms holding back hysterical fans. The Stones did “Jumpin' Jack Flash” and “Satisfaction,” and Mick threw his white shoes into the crowd.

Nine days later, four days before “Jumpin' Jack Flash” was released, Brian was again arrested for drugs. He had heard the screams for the last time.

Men have brought their powers of subduing the forces of nature to such a pitch that by using them they could now very easily exterminate one another to the last man. They know this—hence arises a great part of their current unrest, their dejection, their mood of apprehension. And now it may be expected that the other of the two
heavenly forces,
eternal Eros, will put forth his strength so as to maintain himself alongside of his equally immortal adversary.

S
IGMUND
F
REUD
:
Civilization and Its Discontents

I
SLEPT
the sleep of the exhausted and overdosed but not for long because Gore called. Being like all speed freaks evangelistic, Gore wanted to take me to his doctor, and because I was crazy and going crazier I got up and dressed and went out to meet him on the corner in front of the shop Paranoia, I mean Paraphernalia. After about four hours' sleep I was still anesthetized by the heroin, didn't order any breakfast at the hotel, but arriving a few minutes early to meet Gore, I went into a small grocery, drank half a pint of milk and almost threw up on the spot.

To distract myself and kill time, I went across the street to a drugstore and called a girl I'd known slightly in Memphis, where she went to the Art Academy. She now lived in Manhattan and knew Ronnie
Schneider, whom she'd plied with an idea that had become all too common in the sixties; to film the old bluesmen with some of their rock and roll progeny, in this case the Rolling Stones. At least she didn't want to float the Band down the Mississippi, as another jerk had suggested, hauling Furry and Bukka out to the boat for a little bottleneckin' and hambonin'. Ronnie had told me she wanted to talk to me. My reaction against him had been so violent that he was trying to soothe me, and his way of changing face, from considering me as carrion to accepting me at least for the moment as a fellow bird, was to say, Gee, we've got a mutual friend, she said she'd like to talk to you—so I called her and she told me that she had her plan all together, she just needed me to help her get one last detail, the Rolling Stones. I told her I'd see what I could do, knowing what that would be.

I crossed the street again and there was Gore, blond and tortoise-shelled and schoolboyish. He said his regular speed doctor was out of town, so we walked back over near the Plaza for a visit with one Adolf B. Wolfmann, M.D., D.D.S., D.M.D. He was not quite as bad as Peter Sellers in
The Wrong Box,
blotting his prescriptions with a kitten, but he gave you the feeling he had a lot to be surreptitious about. He let us in, a man with a grizzled red pompadour and a white hospital coat, throwing two bolts to open the street door, locking them again behind us, unlocking two more locks to let us into an inner office, opening another lock to let us into a small room with a padded examination table. Gore introduced us and said, “He wants to start taking the treatments.”

“You want to start the treatments also? All right, wait here.”

Maybe he went and pulled a tooth, but he came back with two horsecock needles full of I suppose Methedrine and egg yolk, Gore and I dropped our trousers, he shot us up, we paid him ten dollars American apiece, he threw the bolts to let us out, and we sailed away down Central Park South, hearing behind us the faint snapping of locks.

I had felt faint and limp-wristed, but with the charge in my ass I decided we didn't need a cab, we could walk across town to Madison Square Garden for the Stones' afternoon concert. Out of an earnest desire not to rob this account of its true interest, I will confess that I was carrying the red carnation from my bedside table at the Plaza; so there I went, boots, jeans, and leather jacket, sniffing a long-stemmed red carnation, looking like some insane faggot ought to be kilt with a shovel, as we walked briskly through the streets, fatigue gone, feeling ardent.

At the Garden Terry Reid was on. Not since “Bunch Up, Little Dogies” in Fort Collins had he seemed to be at one with an audience, but no other audience had seemed as gentle and peaceful as that one. I never heard him do that song again. Gore went out to make a phone call, checking
on a delivery to his house for a party there tonight after the Stones' evening concert, and never came back. Pete and Nicole were at the show, and I went up and watched B. B. King and Ike and Tina Turner with them. Then I shouldered and slid and elbowed and threw my weight around with the guards and made it back to the stage, where the lights were going down and Sam was coming out, more mad-eyed than ever, to the mike: “The greatest rock and roll band in the world, the Rolling Stones.” I kept wishing he would say, “The scaredest rock and roll band,” but he never did, not even later, when there was no doubt about it.

The Stones came out, plugged in, the mushroom spines above began to reverberate with “Jumpin' Jack Flash.” The traditional esthetic of popular songs required that the singer's life should be made desolate by the departure of his true love, who could make everything all right if only she would return. If such songs as Bob Dylan's “It Ain't Me, Babe” and the Stones' “Stupid Girl” and “Under My Thumb” defied that convention, they were not quite the same thing as songs about rape and murder. “Some of those early albums, like
Between the Buttons,
were so
light”
Mick had said one day at the Oriole house while we were listening to an acetate of
Let It Bleed.
This tour would lighten his approach for good. He would go on singing about death and destruction, but he would cut out the Prince of Darkness business. He was about to have more darkness than he ever wanted.

The show was now tight, no flat spots. When Mick sang “I'm Free,” all around the front of the stage were gum-chewing kids with glazed eyes, their arms held high, fingers in V-signs. One dark-haired girl, her large shapely bosom in a red and black gypsy blouse, was holding aloft her middle finger, considerably more appropriate. Kids were on the chairs, in the aisles, and in back people were yelling “Sit down.”

“We'll all be standing soon,” Mick told them, as Keith, hunching his back, lowering his shoulders, started “Live with Me” with peculiar whawhawha chords. By the time “Satisfaction” began, the room was once again a sea of bobbing bodies, one boy with his shirt off somehow hovering over the crowd, dancing. As “Street Fighting Man” neared its conclusion, Keith opened up his amps all the way and Mick, who'd been scampering along the edge of the stage waving with both hands, snatched up the basket filled with rose petals and scattered them—red rose petals flowing from his hands as if borne along on a breeze of guitar notes—then hurled the wicker basket out twenty yards in a graceful arc, petals drifting slowly down, clapped his Uncle Sam hat on his head and away we went, back to the hotel in limousines. This time I was the only person I knew in the car. For a mad moment I thought we were being kidnapped, but we went back to the hotel. I stretched out on my bed but couldn't get any rest because people kept coming in, editors and
anthologists, literary flotsam, and Cynthia kept phoning, but I wouldn't take the calls. I lay in bed thinking about Nicole and how she had kissed me at the concert, and how I'd see her tonight at Gore's.

Then I was back at the Garden, sitting in section A, row 8, with Wexler's children, Lisa and Paul, and some of their friends. Michael Lydon and I took an early taxi because we wanted to see B.B., but the show was running late. The lights were still on and we waited, smoking grass. I put some mescaline tablets on my notebook and passed them around. I was taking them not to get high but to stay awake, the speed was running down. We sat through Terry Reid's loud and boring set, then a long delay, during which we smoked more dope, our silent vigil broken into once by Chip Monck, who said, “We're recording tonight as well, and it's complicated, please bear with us.”

At last B. B. King came out in a blue suit, hands folded together on chest, making his little Afro-Oriental bow. He picked up his guitar Lucille, strapped her on, and sang “Every Day I Have the Blues.” Everybody's fatigue seemed to fade away as B.B. played. I had seen him at a number of places the year before, among them the Fillmore in San Francisco, the day after Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, and the Club Paradise in Memphis, the city where Martin Luther King was assassinated earlier in the year. In the early fifties B.B. had created the archetypal electric blues guitar style. You could hear his life in his playing—the cows he'd milked, the fields he'd plowed, the streets he'd played on, the miles and years he'd had to travel to get to this night.

Alone, except for the drummer keeping time on the snare-rim, B.B. played a long ride that became a riff that started to shake as the band came in for “Little Bit of Love.” B.B. played music that got all worried into tight note-cluster knots, then started to boogie and worked its way out of its trouble to ecstasy, perfectly expressive of human hopes, desires, fears, exhaustion, and beauty. Coming back for an encore, B.B. said, “This song is dedicated to you and to the stars of tonight's show, the Rolling Stones—because without them you wouldn't have heard B. B. King.” He sang and played the same song he'd dedicated to Bobby Kennedy's ghost that night in San Francisco, the song that begins, “I don't even know your name, but I love you just the same—”

Jerry and Shirley Wexler showed up as B.B.'s set ended and I was headed backstage to speak with him. In the dressing room B.B. seemed tired and sad, and I went out to stand with Mick and watch Tina; this was our last chance to see her on this tour. By the time Mick slunk off to change we had been severely reminded that we were just two skinny white boys.

Wandering around backstage waiting for the Stones to go on, I noticed a great many heavyset security men. Now, in addition to the stop-sign buttons and the road-sign buttons and the
GOD BLESS AMERICA
buttons, there were red buttons and white buttons and green buttons. Jo, headed for the Stones' dressing room wearing all these buttons, said, giving me a green button, “Here, this is Italian power, it'll take care of you. Jon Jaymes says this is the only one that counts.” Jon was fond of saying that the purpose of his organization was to make people aware that Columbus had discovered America. The Garden had lost the humane atmosphere it had possessed last night and was less freaky but no less tense than the Forum had been. The rear halls were full of strange beef and the audience was already down front, so I stayed behind the stage. When the Stones came out, Jo and Ronnie with them, I joined the tight little group moving on a raft of security men past the backdrop curtain, up the stairs to the stage. But as I climbed the stairs, two men I'd never seen before grabbed me and started to throw me off.

“Hey! Wait a minute!” I yelled, no time to reason with them. They were shoving me off the side of the stairs, I grabbed their arms, trying not to fall—and Ronnie and a couple of our familiar security men stopped them. “God, you people are rude,” I told the gentlemen who'd been trying to break my neck.

“Buddy, this is my livelihood,” one of them explained.

The big clock at the end of the hall said 12:01. It was the first thing everybody saw coming onstage. “I'll turn into a pumpkin,” Mick said. “Sorry you had to wait—okay, babies.”

“Jumpin' Jack Flash” began, and there was that feeling again—the tour was a drag, but when the music started it was all right now. The esthetic of this music—and its morality—demanded that when certain code-patterns of rhythm and melody were achieved, the only decent thing to do, in Joujouka or Congo Square or Madison Square, was to dance. Michael Lydon and I looked at each other, gave mad Indian war whoops and started to dance like medieval believers possessed by the spirit. Everybody was doing it; Mick was dancing like a demonic sprite. The very air was crazy; in spite of the icy smell of Mafia, the place seemed awfully hot. Mick was dripping wet when, at twenty past twelve, he said “Stray Cat.” Sam, bent over like a graverobber, slipped onstage to put a Coke on the drum stand where Mick could reach it, sticking his head under Charlie's crash cymbal, and Charlie, seeing him, hit it harder. Mick and Keith did the blues songs devoutly, hunched over on their stools with a halo of light around their heads. From the rear of the stage I could see the audience, everybody listening, and the people backstage, nobody listening. “Under My Thumb” and “I'm Free” were very fast, Mick turning his back to the audience, lips curled, making faces at Charlie as if to say, Play harder. Jo, sitting on an amp stage right in an orange lace dress, looking like an eighteenth-century character, clapped time with “Midnight Rambler.” As Mick said, “I'd like to ask you a question—would you like to live with me?”, up the stairs
came Leonard Bernstein with his wife, son, and daughter. Somehow Bernstein in his black turtleneck seemed to relax the atmosphere. Ronnie and one of our security men grabbed me—“Who's this? He's not with us! Let's throw him overboard!”—picked me up, both giggling madly, and rushed to the edge of the stage. I was laughing too, suddenly it was a huge party, not so threatening, just another show, the Stones were getting away with it again.