True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (52 page)

“It's on fire,” Mick yelled. “We've got to get out of here. There's something dripping out of the engine, tell the pilot.”

But the fire went out. “Just some excess oil burning off,” the pilot said. By that time we were more or less in a line at the door. We sat down and the plane took off. Keith lit a joint and soon there were half a dozen going around the cabin. I was sitting next to Sam, who took out a 35-millimeter film can filled with cocaine and a small gold spoon. We passed them back and forth, the cocaine hitting the insides of our heads with little crystal explosions like buckshot hitting a chandelier. Sam, looking out the tiny porthole into the darkness, his eyes dark-circled, said in a low voice, almost a whistle, “Cor—tomorrow's the last day—the last day of the tour.” There would be recording in Alabama and the free concert in California, but it was true, tomorrow would be the last official date of the Rolling Stones' 1969 tour. As if bringing himself back to reality, Sam said, observed for the record, “I've lost twenty-one pounds in America.”

The groupie from New Jersey kept rolling joints out of her purse and passing them around. “This is my dream,” she said, looking back at Mick. “I can't think about it. For years he's been my God. It's like I'm up in an airplane with—God.”

We landed in cold, wet New York at the Marine Airport and I got into a limo with Jon Jaymes and his Columbus Day Marching Society, including Barbara the body-paint girl, Mike Scotty, and the two groupies. Jon was holding aloft the hand he'd hurt before the second show tonight in a skirmish with radical kids who'd been stopped by the
cops from pulling down the U.S. flag. The kid Jon tried to hit had ducked, and Jon's fist had smashed into the wall. Eyes closed, looking like the great sleeping Buddha Kalinga, Jon held in midair the hand, wrapped in bulk, a hurt puppy's paw.

“It's really too bad for such a nice guy to get hurt,” the New Jersey groupie said. “I want to thank him for bringing us along. I really hope I can thank him.”

“I expect you'll get the chance,” I told her.

The girl I found sleeping in my bed when I came back to the Plaza from Boston was wearing a purple silk dress and a sable coat. In the interest of privacy we changed rooms, walking through the corridors like in a scene from the Dodge House, a cowboy in a red shirt and a party lady in a purple gown, headed for heartbreak. I had loved her since I was sixteen and she was eleven. Ten years later she would nurse me back to life after I fell off the big rock in Georgia, receiving for her pains more heartbreak.

We could feel it coming in the morning when we said goodbye. I put her in a cab and went back upstairs for my suitcase. The immediate goal was to board a charter flight at twelve noon for West Palm Beach, where the Stones were scheduled to close the festival at sunset, so the Stones, the Maysles brothers, Michael, Ethan, Sam, Tony, all with baggage, were making a great pile in the lobby of the Plaza this Sunday morning. When I came down, I saw Jo standing by the elevators, weeping. Later she would tell me she'd been afraid she couldn't handle it, couldn't do her job. I walked to the other side of the lobby, where a bellman with somebody's bags, looming suddenly over me, said, Make room. A bit curt, I thought, especially since I wasn't in the man's way—we were both in the middle of a crowd and would have to turn sideways to move in any direction. I told the bellman that if he'd get out of my way I'd get out of his, which enraged him, his face turned red, he began to splutter. As he got himself under control and hauled away the bags, a girl in an army fatigue jacket came up and asked me if I'd vouch for her so she could go to Florida. I had never seen her before and told her I couldn't vouch for myself. Michael Lydon was standing nearby with his arm around Jo, who was still crying. The Maysles brothers and I decided to leave and took a taxi for the Marine Airport.

As we rode we talked about the Stones. David and Al seemed to know nothing about them and two months later, after their film was shot, would still be talking about Bill Watts. At the airport we walked out to the plane in the cold grey day, the rest of the group arriving as we were going up the stairs. We boarded the plane at about two-thirty Eastern Standard Time, all of us deploying for comfort. There were forty extra seats. Keith and Mick went to the back, and from Keith's tape
recorder the sound of Chuck Berry soon filled the cabin. The Maysles brothers and I had taken seats at the front. The Butler Aviation stewardess brought beer and sandwiches in Saran Wrap, and after eating I fell asleep, waking up in about an hour to find us still sitting in the same spot, nothing happening, the world outside in the portholes darker and greyer.

Mick, in his red ruffled silk shirt and burgundy blazer, was standing in the aisle, talking to Ronnie. “What's wrong?” he asked. “We're sitting, sitting.”

“I talked to the pilot,” Ronnie said. “He says we missed our place in the lineup because we were late getting here, now we have to wait for some planes to land.”

Outside we could see streaks of white in the failing light. It was beginning to snow. We sat in the maw of a great metal bird as if the machinery had us and we must wait on its pleasure. There was nothing else to do except eat sandwiches, drink beer, and talk.

“Did you see those kids last night?” Michael Lydon asked Mick, talking about the debutante ball at the Plaza as we had come in. “They were like something from a Scott Fitzgerald short story,” Michael said. “I talked to a couple of the boys and a girl. I asked her, ‘Do you know a lot of the Rolling Stones' songs have been written about you?' She said, ‘Yes, and Bob Dylan's too, I think about it every time I hear the line, “with her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls.” ' She said she felt pretty good about it. They'd been doing grass and cocaine at the party. I said, ‘Coke's good but expensive,' and they said, ‘Yes, but it's good if you can afford it.' They must be really big debs. Not the best, but really good.”

“Some of them asked me if I wanted to go to a deb ball,” Mick said, “and I told them that there are no real debutantes in America.”

“What do you mean, there are no—” Michael said.

“There aren't. There isn't,” Mick said, “any American aristocracy, so there can't be any debutantes.”

“But there isn't any anywhere, really,” Michael said.

“Of course there is,” Mick said. “There is in England.”

“He thinks he'll be knighted,” I said, “that's why he says that.”

“Doesn't do you any good to be knighted,” Mick said. “You have to be a baronet at least, that's the lowest—you're automatically a sir if you're a baronet. We used to play at those deb balls, that's where we met all our friends. That's not true, but I do have some dear friends I met there.”

“How'd you get invited to play at those parties?” Michael asked. “Did the kids ask for you?”

“Yeah, they'd tell their parents to hire us. They paid very well, they've got the money. I just had an offer—fantastic, as much as we make at one concert here—to play at one of those parties.”

“Just recently?”

“Yeah, like two weeks ago.”

“Will you do it?”

“God knows I don't need that, they're horrible, people are always coming up with requests.”

“But you really believe in the aristocracy,” Michael said, missing Mick's irony.

“Well, nobody's about to do anything about that system. We have now a chance, since they gave the vote to eighteen-year-olds, to get three million new voters, make a change, destroy an irrelevant system. But England's so stagnant, the kids there are just like they've always been. Nobody's interested in doing anything except some people who are already into politics. You can't get anything together there. This is our only chance in the last fifty years to really change things, and nobody cares—”

“Change them to what?” Charlie asked. He and Sam Cutler were sitting nearby. “What are you going to put in place of the system we have now?”

“Nothing,” Mick said. “Nothing would be better than a system that's irrelevant.”

“That's
right”
Sam said. “We just need to stop the
cops,
right, from pushing people around. Eventually it comes down to that.”

After spending weeks going from California, the Southwest, to Alabama, Chicago, the Eastern Seaboard, trying night after night to shake another bit of America loose, we sat waiting to fly to the last gig in Florida, helpless in an airplane that wasn't going anywhere, and began to discuss for the first time the question What Is To Be Done.

“The theme that keeps constantly recurring in your thoughts, man,” Charlie told Sam, “is hitting a cop.”

“My old man was a red, right,” Sam said, “and I've seen what the cops do. I've seen them seize the subscription list of the
International Times.
There comes a time when you have to say, ‘Right, this is it, I'm not moving.' ”

“But everybody in politics is pushing you out into the street,” Charlie said. “I don't like it.”

“Wouldn't you go into the streets to fight the cops if it came to that?” Sam asked.

“No,” Charlie said. “I wouldn't.”

“Charlie's a true cockney,” Mick said to me, as Sam went on trying to convince Charlie that hitting cops would solve the world's problems. “A real Londoner. But now he lives in the country and a lot of things I hate about country people I can see in Charlie. He'll join a preservation society and spend his time writing letters.”

“I don't know about the societies,” I said, “but preservation is what
I'd like to see, the preservation of life on the planet, there's not a stream in my home county that isn't polluted—”

“I don't know,” Mick said, “maybe the natural thing is for the streams to be polluted, for it to die. Maybe that's what should happen.”

“I hope not,” I said.

We broke off talking because Keith came by, somehow showing just by walking past the idleness of our chatter: it's not what you say that counts. Keith had been snoozing in the back and was surprised, not surprisingly, to find us still in New York.

“If we're not gone soon we'll give up,” Mick said.

Keith spoke to Ronnie, who went again to see the pilot, who told him that we'd be changing planes, there's something wrong with this one, but ours is here, on the ground, as soon as they have it ready we'll get on it and take off. Time stretched on, we ate more sandwiches. Outside it was nearly dark. “Let's forget it,” Keith said. “It's too late. If we aren't gone in fifteen minutes let's not go.” But the pilot told Ronnie that President Nixon had come in, Air Force One was landing, and no one could go in or out while that was happening. Air Force One was not landing, and most what of what we were told at the Marine Airport was untrue, but we didn't know it then, and so we sank a little further into acquiescence. “Fuck it,” Keith said. “It's too late.”

“But we made the guy that's promoting it—he's just an independent guy doing the whole festival himself,” Ronnie said, “and we made him pay the whole guarantee in front, we've already got the bread.”

“Well, we'll fly over and drop the money on the crowd,” Keith said.

Mick and I were singing along with “Who Do You Love” on the Ronnie Hawkins tape Wexler had given me, doing the right words as Hawkins did the wrong ones. “Got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind.” At that moment the pilot came out of the cockpit and said, “Your plane just landed.”

It was nearly seven o'clock. We went in the darkness across the wet asphalt to an identical but healthier plane, everyone taking the same seat he'd had before. Feeling a bit faint, I took out an amyl nitrite popper, broke it, inhaled it, passed it to the Maysles brothers, who inhaled without knowing what it was, and I enjoyed watching their surprise as their heads inflated.

We buckled up and zoomed off into the night sky, singing along with Keith's Chuck Berry tape, rushing from the amyl as the engines whined. The epic hiatus was over. “We're sorry for the delay,” the stewardess said. “We hope we can make up for it during your trip.” I had a vision of naked stewardess legs lying in the aisle as Sam (three times) and Tony helped her make up for the delay. A poker game was starting in the front of the plane and Mick went to join it. Ronnie came past, heading that way, and David stopped him to ask, “How do the Stones split their income? Does Mick get more than the others?”

“They split five ways, even,” Ronnie said. “That's why I work for them.” He went on up and joined the game. Joints were passing, and one of the security men, playing poker, asked, “Do you mind if we smoke?”

“Are you kidding?” Ronnie said.

Sam had been talking about fighting cops. We were going someplace where the cops and the kids seemed to be at war, and here the cops were getting high with us. I sat smoking with the Maysles brothers, trying to ease my mind. Mick came back and David told him, “I think you should direct this film.”

“I'm not a director,” Mick said. David kept insisting, but Mick didn't respond. David and I began to discuss films but soon began to differ, since I thought
Strike
and
Potemkin
were great films and he didn't.

I drifted back to the galley, Mick following. As he came closer he said, “I disagree,” starting to giggle. “That's ridiculous,” I told him. We leaned against the wall laughing, then got more beer and sandwiches and sat back down. Mick looked out one of the portholes. “If one does what he does for God, or the Good,” he said, looking tired and pale, “then I haven't been able to find anybody doing anything better—certainly anybody in politics—than what I'm doing, or anybody better to do it with.”

Interviewer: To get back to Buddy Bolden—