True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (55 page)

Later, Tom Keylock said: “I've known Brian for years, and I love him. He's cheated me, he's lied to me. And the one time in his life the little bastard tells the truth, he gets done for it.”

Mr. Seaton rapped with his gavel for silence. He looked very stern as a guard raised Brian to his feet. Last year he was a bastard. And at that time, Brian had not broken probation. “Mr. Jones,” the Chairman said, “you have been found guilty. I am going to treat you as I would any
other young man before this court. But last year Mr. Seaton had thought Brian guilty. “I am going to fine you, and I will fine you relatively, according to your means. Fifty pounds, and one hundred guineas court costs. You will have,” the Chairman added in delicious irony, “one week to get up the money. Your probation order will not be changed. But you really must watch your step, and stay clear of this stuff.”

A reporter who had covered trials in London for many years said, down in the entrance hall a few minutes later, that he had never seen a magistrate show so clearly his contempt for a jury. Brian came out, Suki on his arm, and grinned lewdly at the schoolgirls.
The children are singing,
“Ha, Bou Jeloud!” At the street they posed for the photographers, Brian, Suki, Keith, Mick, and the little girl who had been sitting next to Mick and who was now clinging to his arm.

Two men in working clothes stopped on their way down the sidewalk. One of them, who had red hair, asked what sentence Brian had got. Told that Brian had been fined, he said to the other man, “Crikey, you or I'd have got thirty years.”

In a minute the Stones' cars were brought round. Brian and Suki were in Brian's Rolls-Royce. Mick and Keith got into the back seat of Keith's blue Bentley. “Give him some bird,” yelled the red-haired man. (“Bird,” in cockney rhyming slang, is short for birdlime, and stands for time.) “And a bath as well,” his friend added, as the Stones drove away, the rebel flag of the Confederate States of America on the Bentley hood flapping gently in the breeze.

By the blazing creosote logs feverish men lie down to dream of a Savior riding on a great white Catholic mule and freeze.

. . .

The rain gently lays its head
Across the rail,

It is almost a lifetime
Before the six o'clock flyer.

C
HARLIE
B
ROWN
: “John Jack Kerouac 1922-1969”

“ I
HOPE
we made up for it.” The stewardess, who had done little and nothing special, sounded as if this were a permanent part of her routine. When we got off the plane, it was near the end of the day, the month, the decade, our youth. We were standing on the cold blown concrete of the dark deserted West Palm Beach Airport, where there was no snow, but the wind sought you out and chattered your jaws.

Stu, who'd flown down earlier, emerged out of the night with the news that two helicopters were coming to pick us up. While we waited, Stu said to me, “A friend of yours was down here looking for you, Charlie Brown, very helpful guy. The equipment came in on the plane and we had no way to take it to the gig, so I asked him where we could rent a truck, and he just happened to be driving one. Very helpful guy. You must thank him for us, 'cause we might not have made it otherwise.”

“Where is he?” I asked.

“He went back to Miami.”

When the helicopters arrived, we crept out to them, bent over, hunch-backed under the whipping blades. They took us up and down again a bit soon, hitting hard on the beach. We slogged through soft sand, crossed a lawn, climbed a spiral staircase, and entered the swank Colonnades' swankest suite, the Bob Hope, caves of ice glittering with crystal chandeliers, polished marble, gilt-laced mirrors. It was as tasteful as anything Las Vegas had to offer, and its mirrors had never reflected anything that looked like the group coming in with the Rolling Stones. Past velvet couches, a piano, a bar with drinks and food, we found waiting for us in a big bedroom, seeming rather out of place themselves, the festival promoters, Dave and Sheila Rupp, a compact, sunburned man in a khaki jumpsuit and a small, shapely brunette in a splendidly whorish red vinyl raincoat.

Dave owned a fast-car shop and Sheila was a schoolteacher. They couldn't have been more gracious, especially considering that the Stones were by now about eight hours late. The Stones were the least of the problems that the festival had brought into the Rupps' lives. “Since the festival my business has been firebombed and burned down,” Dave said. “My fire insurance has been cancelled, the John Birch Society have been calling me and saying they're going to kill my wife and child.”

The Maysles brothers' lights were going on as Dave went out to see about the rest of the group. I sat on the bed beside Sheila, whose lip-stick matched her raincoat. “The parents call and say that the kids are like they are today because they have teachers like me,” she said.

“They're right about that,” Michael Lydon said.

“That was a compliment,” I said.

“Where have you all been?” she asked.

I started telling her about the crippled plane and Air Force One as Mick, wandering into the room, heard what I was saying and in a glance communicated the hopelessness of explaining or even knowing where we had been or what we had been doing. He collapsed beside me on the bed as we laughed with determined impotence and indecision. The next question to which nobody knew the answer was whether the Stones should go on now in the dead vast and middle of the night or wait for sunrise. We amused ourselves the best we could while whatever combination of energies that propelled the Rolling Stones took its time deciding.

At Tony's request (“I got some other things to do”) I rolled some joints for the gig, sitting in a black marble bathtub. The scene was filmed by David and Al, which alarmed Tony. You couldn't blame anybody for being confused about what was permitted. Then, finding a quiet bedroom, I called Charlie Brown, who came to the telephone from his
little Coconut Grove snake-trapper's hut and read me his Kerouac poem. I told him I'd talk to him later and went out to the bar, where a waiter was heating soup and pouring drinks. As I approached, Mick and Charlie Watts were exchanging mutters. Charlie strolled away, and Mick turned to me. “Charlie's such a bitch,” he said. He was naked to the waist, wearing a wooden cross on a leather thong around his neck.

“I've never thought of Charlie as a bitch,” I said.

“You don't know him as I do.” We ate soup and drank Scotch, standing at the bar, the Maysles brothers filming. Mick went behind the bar to get closer to the cold cuts, and in my dim awareness I remembered to ask Dave Rupp why he was doing this thing that was hurting him in so many ways. He started by telling me that as a teenager he had won nineteen world championship drag races. Later he had owned a nightclub in his hometown, Wichita, Kansas, where B. B. King and Bo Diddley worked and the Kingsmen (who recorded “Louie Louie,” one of the all-time great brainless rock and roll songs) were the house band. “But this festival is the biggest thing we've ever done. The cops are pigs and the kids are great,” Dave said, not loud enough for any of the cops in the Stones' entourage to hear. “I learned that when I was thirteen and outrunning the cops in a hot rod. We've lost our business, we've lost probably altogether a quarter of a million dollars, but it's been worth it because of the kids, the kids are great.”

We broke off as the sound of a helicopter descending onto the lawn just outside the big windows drowned all talk. Dawn might never come, and it was time to go see these young people who for the last three days, in the mud, had been skirmishing with the authorities. Ethan, Michael, the Maysles brothers, and I went down the spiral stairs, out of the building's shadow into the yellow glare of the landing lights, and got on board. The Stones would follow in another helicopter. Palm trees thrashed in our wake as we lifted off for a ride above beach motels, each with its green-glowing chlorined pool, and away from city lights, over darkness, moonscape, empty marshes, until we saw a tiny clump of lights twinkling in the distance.

We were over the lights and then coming down to land on the dirt at the Palm Beach International Raceway, the Rupps' little drag strip. The surrounding countryside seemed only barren fields with standing mud puddles. A path toward the stage area had been made by laying planks and pieces of plywood across the puddles. We walked on the boards till we came to a dirt road where Bill Belmont was waiting in a blue Chevrolet. He drove us up behind the stage, which looked out over the Raceway. Inside a backstage trailer a suntanned, blond, waterskiing kind of girl named Rhonda was serving excellent tea with cream and sugar. Inside the cyclone fence a few yards away were thirty thousand people. Rupp had told them to use the fence's wooden supports for
firewood. As the Stones came in and were being wrapped in blankets, I went out and walked beside the very tall stage down to the fence, where I told a security guard that I was going into the crowd and coming back.

“You can't do that,” he said. I pushed past him, but the kids were pressing up to the fence, and as soon as I was among them a boy came up to me and said, “Don't I know you from Oklahoma?”

“Not me,” I told him.

“Yeah, I know I've seen you down in Oklahoma, New Mexico, some-place—”

“I'm sorry.”

People were chanting “Wavy Gravy! Wavy Gravy!” and incomprehensible shouts came from the public address system. The place had the desperate atmosphere of a refugee camp. Some people were standing, some were sitting, some were sleeping, wrapped in sleeping bags and blankets. The ones sleeping looked helpless, like corpses, lying on the wet dirt. Onstage there was a great whaling of drums and a fireworks rocket went off, streaking high above the dismal mud, purple, yellow, blue. Then Sam's voice, amplified, was saying, “Sorry for the delay, sorry for the hangups. We're here—will you give a warm welcome to the Rolling Stones?”

The crowd were on their feet, yelling. I went back past the guard and the fence and up the long sloping stairs. Michael was standing on the rear stage. “They better work hard to be as good as those kids,” he said.

The Stones, wearing jackets, were starting “Jumpin' Jack Flash” and were working hard just being there. It was cold and the strings wouldn't stay in tune and the wind whipped the music around. As the song ended, Mick said, “Mornin'—West Palm Beach—wish I was down there—'cause I bet it's warmer down there with ya—”

By the time “Carol” ended, Keith was warmed up. He took off his black velvet jacket and started “Sympathy for the Devil,” bare-midriffed in his red rhinestoned Nudie shirt. Working as hard as they could to overcome the circumstances, the Stones through a miracle of effort had everyone I could see dancing. “Fuckin' limeys,” David Maysles said. “Let's beat up on 'em.” In the distance at times I thought I heard screams, but I couldn't be sure.

“Sorry you had to wait,” Mick said when the song ended. “May we be forgiven?”

Keith cut him off with the opening chords of “Stray Cat.” They didn't do the blues songs—too cold to sit still. Before “Midnight Rambler,” Mick said, “Now we're gonna slow it down a bit—for those people who're trying to get some rest and some nooky.” There was a cheer whose weakness moved Mick to ask, “Have you been havin' a good time in Miami? Has it been muddy, has it been cold—”

Again Keith stopped Mick's talking by starting the song. After “Gimme Shelter,” Mick tried again. “I think it's pretty amazing,” he said, “because you're here. Everybody is amazing to get it together after all the hassles. It's important and you know it's important because you're here.” He was vague as hell but all we had to go on was some vague sense of purpose drawing us together. Michael Lydon would write of this audience that “Their yearning to come together (where does it come from?), to experience that love-in, festival feeling they've heard so much about, floods up to the stage in waves of expectation so trusting and naive as to be at once absurd and deeply moving.” Chip threw the spotlights' beams onto the crowd, and as “Live with Me” started, the people were writhing in the circling blue lights, underwater creatures disturbed in the deep.

The opening notes of “Satisfaction” hung out into the night like an automobile going over a cliff, drums crashing, bass notes rumbling out of tune, Mick Taylor's E-string breaking. All the music was being played by frozen fingers. After “Honky Tonk Women,” Mick said, as he'd started doing in Boston, “Before we go we'd like to say a special hello to all the minority groups in the audience—all the fags, all the junkies—hi, junkies—all the straight people, cops—”

“They went home hours ago,” a boy backstage said.

The Stones did “Street Fighting Man” splendidly and terribly in the awful cold. Near the end Chip pointed the spotlights into the sky, where at nearly five o'clock there was still no glimmer of dawn. The high-flung basket of rose petals turned, spilling in the moving lights, blood-red drops falling as we turned to leave.

We crowded into the backstage trailer. I told Keith how fine the effort had been, and he said, “The sound was pretty bad, I'm afraid. We were all out of tune, no way to stay in tune in that temperature.”

“A lot of things could have been better,” I said, “but—”

“Ah!” Sam said, shushing me as he bustled over. “We don't need to hear that.”

“You didn't hear me right,” I said, making a mental note that Sam was rounding the bend.

We went back, walking the planks, across the puddles to the helicopters and up into the coming dawn. Now that the show was over the color of the sky was at last changing, purple, mauve, lavender, rose, orange, red. The Stones were going to eat breakfast at the Colonnades, fly to Muscle Shoals, go to the Holiday Inn, and sleep. Such were their general intentions. We landed on the grass and walked down to the beach. On the ground it was darker and still cold, and the colors were not so vivid. Most of the group turned back toward the Colonnades. Keith and I stood sharing a joint and watching one bright blue-white point in a blue-grey corner of sky. “The morning star,” Keith said, “and when she's gone we'll have the sun.”