There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll Page 3
On June 3rd in San Antonio, the band posed for Ken Regan’s camera in front of the Alamo, with Mick wrapped in a British flag. Bianca Jagger—who would come on and off the tour—did Mick’s makeup and it looked better than when Pierre Laroche had slathered it on. In Kansas City, everyone had to wait to go to the airport because Mick reportedly was in his hotel room, leisurely eating ice cream and drinking champagne. In fact, he was watching Elvis Presley on TV. He made a face. “Owh, he’s awful,” Mick said. I said he’s become a parody of himself. “No,” said Mick, “he’s not a parody, this is what he is.” In Boston, I went with Christopher Sykes to the Ritz-Carlton for tea and then to see the movie Mandingo. After the Boston show, during the runner, Peter Rudge shrieked, “This is the most untogether getaway since Kennedy tried to drive out of Dallas!!” Charlie Watts said it was hard getting his fabrics together on this tour. People snorted cocaine right in front of me, then slipped me a packet to hold for them. The band arrived at shows in trucks, vans, decoy vehicles. The only one who drove in a limousine was Irving Azoff, the manager of the Eagles—who opened a few of the stadium shows. “We used to have limos,” Charlie Watts told me. “We’d have all these limos, like in Milwaukee, for twenty-four hours a day. And then we’d get the bill for $30,000.”
Very little escaped Annie Leibovitz’s camera. If she heard a food fight going on in the hallway at the hotel in Cleveland at five thirty a.m., she’d get out of bed, stagger to her doorway wearing a salmon-colored robe, and click away. In Los Angeles, Bianca’s bathtub overflowed at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and Annie took photos. In Toronto, Alan Dunn informed me that Mick had lost his jockstrap, and asked if I had any “knickers” he could borrow. I lent Mick a pair of white, lacy, sheer bikini underpants from Henri Bendel, he wore them backwards, and Annie took a picture. (In 2010, after Keith wrote in his memoir that Mick had a tiny cock, I said to Keith, “You know that’s not true. Annie took that photo of him wearing my underpants in 1975 and he actually has quite a big one.” Keith just looked at me and replied, “Mine’s bigger.”)
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On June 30th we flew from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., where there was much discussion about whether or not the band, and Mick in particular, would go to the White House. Bianca had become friendly with Jack Ford, the good-looking, younger son of President Gerald Ford. She was going to interview him for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and she really wanted Mick to visit the White House. (“Only if they paint it black,” sneered Peter Rudge.) There were several backstage phone calls about it, with Mick’s continued refusal to go. He ultimately skipped the White House and had lunch with Ahmet Ertegun instead. An assortment of congressmen and other government officials were backstage for the two shows in D.C., and Mick talked to Viktor Sakovich, the Russian cultural attaché. Mick said when he tried to set up a Russian tour for the Stones, he was asked what he would do to improve cultural standards of the Russian youth. “I said I thought they could improve their own cultural standards without any help from me.” To which Mr. Sakovich replied, “Oh, that’s too philosophical for me.” Bianca discussed her research for the Jack Ford interview. She didn’t want Andy—who accompanied her to D.C.—to act his usual innocent, wide-eyed, gee-whiz self and make the whole thing too girlish. She said Andy was thrilled that he went to the Oval Office and that David Kennerly, the President’s official photographer, took a picture of her sitting at the President’s desk, pretending to be writing. Kennerly told her that George Harrison had done the same thing. She said Jack Ford thought Kennerly helped him get girls but in her opinion, it was the other way around. She had taken Jack Ford to dance at Le Jardin in New York City, someone cut in on them, and Jack didn’t realize that the guy wanted to dance with him. That’s what she liked about him, she said, that he was so straightforward, so naive. But Christopher Sykes privately said to me, “Can you imagine anyone being remotely interested in him if he wasn’t the President’s son?” The day of the second show in D.C., some of us got a private tour of the White House and after that, Christopher, Annie and I went to visit Christopher’s friend Maria Shriver at her family’s house in Virginia. We sunbathed, swam in the pool, and answered the then nineteen-year-old Maria’s questions about what was Mick really like. Onstage that night, Mick wore red shoes, red, yellow and blue striped socks, green trousers, a silver belt, silver bracelets, a pink and green jacket, a white and green top, and a red and gold sash-scarf. All at once. It didn’t work.
There was always something slightly . . . off about what Mick wore onstage. A piece of glass would be missing from a chunky necklace. A rip in his pink trousers. An unnecessary scarf. A leather jacket worn over a blouson top over a tank top. As the tour progressed, he really started to pile it on: jackets over other jackets and scarves tied around his waist for no apparent reason. Too much pancake makeup, metallic eyeshadow, mascara and Elizabeth Arden eight-hour cream on his lips. Unfortunate shoe choices. After the tour, he admitted to me that he didn’t really look the way he had envisioned. I asked him why he didn’t just go onstage looking the way he did every day, which was much cuter. “You don’t want to go on looking like some old blues singer,” he said. I asked what had he wanted to look like? He wouldn’t tell me. “I’ll save it for the next tour,” he said. Right. Otherwise Bowie might steal it.
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Keith had always said that the Stones really were Ian “Stu” Stewart’s band. Stu (who died of a heart attack in 1985) had started the Stones as a blues band with Brian Jones in the early 1960s. But he had been pushed out early on because he didn’t look the part. I always wondered how he could still work for them. Stu could play fantastic boogie-woogie piano—not only with the Stones onstage and on records, but also with Zeppelin (“Boogie with Stu” on Physical Graffiti). Basically, he became their glorified road manager and also arranged all the Stones’ recording sessions. When I got to know him better, I asked him if he was bitter about being pushed out of the band. “Well,” he said, “it wasn’t done very nicely.” Stu was wary of most people and outright disdainful of all journalists. I respected him, I knew what he meant to the band and it was important to me to have his approval. At first, it was enough of a hurdle just to get past his disapproval. But we eventually got around to talking about blues and jazz—Lightnin’ Hopkins and Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Horace Silver—and he warmed up to me a little bit. Then slowly, and possibly because of my previous and ongoing association with Led Zeppelin—who he liked—his distrust disappeared. Eventually, we became friends. Still, it took a long time for him to agree to do the only interview he ever did. He told me that he thought the Beatles were “nice lads who wrote pretty songs, but were horribly overrated.” Stu thought that Keith was the best rock and roll guitarist because he didn’t do any solos, and, that, even with the interminable twenty-minute solo taken onstage nightly by Zeppelin’s John “Bonzo” Bonham, Bonzo was the best rock and roll drummer. He said that Mick got some of his best onstage moves from watching Inez Foxx and Tina Turner. We did that interview in Atlanta, around ten in the morning, and the only reason I managed to wake up so early to do it was because it was Stu. And I’m certain that the reason he set that time was because he probably had a golf game scheduled for right afterwards.
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Six weeks into the tour, by the time we got to Chicago, Mick looked tired. Keith appeared invigorated. Bob Greene wrote a column in the Chicago Sun-Times that claimed blues legend Howlin’ Wolf couldn’t get tickets to the Stones show. Wolf eventually came, sat with Buddy Guy and Junior Wells in a backstage dressing room, and fell asleep. But Stu was livid. “When you consider that you’ve got all these people around,” he told me, “and then Bill Wyman can’t even get tickets for Howlin’ Wolf in Chicago . . . Wolf sat in the dressing room, and they wanted to take him up to the pressbox because there were no tickets. But to get to the pressbox you have to climb a lot of stairs and he couldn’t do it. So he just sat in the dressing room, and never saw the concert to this day
. But there were a lot of little Playboy scrubbers who got tickets and whose friends are they? Not even friends of the boys.” (Note: The Stones were always called “the boys.” Male musicians in bands are always called “the boys.” Men who are now well into their sixties—some in their seventies—when they are on tour, are referred to as “the boys.” Sometimes there’s an attempt—especially with the Brits and the Irish—to be a bit more graceful. So they say “the lads.” Or “the guys.” But it is never, ever “the men.”)
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On show days, the band was awakened between one and three p.m., with the exception of Keith, who either never went to sleep, or got up later, or took hours to wake up. The TOTA staff was instructed to get our own wake-up calls “to suit.” Baggage had to be outside our hotel room doors to be picked up by the hotel bellmen and the Stones’ road crew and in the lobby by 2:15. The baggage truck left by 2:45, and departure from the hotel was 3:15. None of this ever happened on time. But amazingly, because of “logistics director” Alan Dunn, it always happened. Our bound itineraries had made-up names of doctors on call in each city: Dr. Hyman Stockfish, Dr. Meylackson—it read like something out of a Marx Brothers movie. These were doctors who basically gave out vitamin shots, tended to medical needs, and in return, got tickets for the concerts. The list of lawyers was even longer. Ticket requests were listed for each lawyer who received a laughable $100 retainer in each city. Unbeknownst to some of us on the tour, the Stones were apparently always on the verge of some sort of legal trouble. It took a lot of lawyers to keep things running smoothly. There was always the threat—often whipped up into a frenzy by the overly dramatic and overstimulated Peter Rudge—that Mick would get arrested for singing “Starfucker” onstage. Or that the band would be arrested for having that inflatable cock prop rise up on the stage during shows. In Memphis, the lawyer listed in our tour book was the band’s immigration lawyer, Bill Carter, whose address was in Little Rock, Arkansas. That would come in handy. There were many “inside jokes” on the daily memos put under our hotel room doors each night: “When we arrived in Milwaukee, one security man was on a beer truck, two were on [the] plane drinking and baggage men were talking to girls.” “Do not take anything into Toronto that you would not want a customs inspector to find.” “Contrary to popular belief, Billy Preston does not like white boys.” Eventually, Keith called the band’s office. “Look,” he said, “I don’t want any more of these jokes on my memos. They’re too esoteric.”
• • •
On July 3rd we flew from Washington, D.C., to Memphis, in the midst of an electrical storm. Mick, who often kept up with weather charts, was not on the plane; he and Alan Dunn chose to drive instead. At one point during the turbulent flight, the plane dropped 5,000 feet. Or so it felt at the time. Keith and Woody raced to the back to take all the drugs. Annie Leibovitz literally hit her head on the ceiling of the plane. I sobbed in the arms of Christopher Sykes. And I remember thinking then that if the plane crashed, the headlines would read, “Rolling Stones and Others Die in Plane Crash.”
We got to Memphis after that scary flight and were greeted at the airport by Jim Dickinson—who played piano on the Stones’ recording of “Wild Horses.” With him was the old blues guitarist Furry Lewis. But the roots of the blues and Stax Records and Al Green and the Memphis Horns aside, to many of us, Memphis was the place where Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. And the next stop on the tour was Dallas; with all those images of the pink pillbox hat and the Kennedy assassination. It was the South. Just a decade earlier, the black acts from Motown or Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters or Ike and Tina Turner—all of whose music inspired the Stones—had to use separate, and unequal, restrooms and often, sleep on their buses because they were denied entry to hotels. So in the South, even in the 1970s, even with a white rock and roll band and the Rolling Stones in particular, there was always a presumed threat. Long-haired drug takers, faggots, sissies, “girls”—the band had heard it all. For me, coming from a liberal, Upper West Side, New York City background, you hated the South even if you’d never been there. We grew up with those newspaper photos and grainy black and white TV images of police beating black children and Andrew Goodman and Medgar Evers and George Wallace and all that. You didn’t want to mess with any of it.
Memphis felt weird from the get-go. First, that plane ride. Then, when we arrived at the Hilton Inn we discovered that there had been some snafu with the reservations and there were no rooms set aside for the entire touring party. The hotel was ominously laid out prison-style, with rooms all around on balconies overlooking the main floor. At the front desk, Peter Rudge went ballistic. He threatened to personally telephone Conrad Hilton, who, at that time, for all he knew, may not have even been alive. When the room situation was cleared up and I finally got to my room, Gimme Shelter, the Maysles Brothers’ documentary about the Stones’ 1969 show at Altamont where an audience member was stabbed and died, was playing on TV. Earlier in the tour, I had asked Charlie about Altamont; how could they have possibly allowed the Hells Angels to organize security, to say nothing of the unprofessional bunch of promoters on that tour. “Well, the Angels just did what they wanted,” he said, “especially in San Francisco. That’s their home ground. We were lucky to get out of there, basically. We were helpless, really. You could say the same thing about Peter Rudge if he did wrong. Mind you, not that I think he would. But we really didn’t know anything about the arrangements until almost when we got there. It was a case of either work with them or have them work against us.” Talking to me about Altamont, Mick said, “People tell me all the time that they had a good time there. Kids arriving the day before, camping out and all that. Sometimes I think that the only people who didn’t have a good time there were me and the guy that got killed.”
The band did the show at the Memphis Memorial Stadium. Then, there was a travel day before the next show in Dallas. This is when Keith decided on that ill-advised drive from Memphis to Dallas. I remember thinking at the time that Keith probably thought about Mick skipping the flight to Memphis, and thought, well, if he’s going to drive to a gig . . . Maybe not. Perhaps he was lured by the beauty of the backwoods of Arkansas. So Keith, Woody, Keith’s security guard Jim Callaghan, and Freddie Sessler all got a head start, with Keith driving a yellow car. The rest of us were scheduled to take the one-hour flight to Dallas. We arrived at the Fairmont Hotel in Dallas and received the news that Keith and Ronnie and a “hitchhiker” (Freddie) were arrested in Fordyce, Arkansas—a town none of us had ever even heard of—for speeding, for drugs, and for knives. All hell broke loose. There was concern that the show in Dallas would be cancelled and that the entire rest of the tour could be in jeopardy. How could Keith survive a night in jail? What if he and Woody were kicked out of the country? But above all, the prevailing attitude among some of us in the touring party was, how could they be so stupid? In a yellow car, no less. Mick was clearly pissed off. Peter Rudge was all hopped up. Of course, it didn’t take much for Peter to get all hopped up—someone looking at him cross-eyed or rustling a napkin could do it. We all tried to get updates and whispered about it in groups of twos and threes. There was no official meeting, and initially, no press conference. Today, when Willie Nelson is arrested every so often for pot on his bus, or rappers are regularly hauled off to jail for drugs or guns, that arrest in Fordyce seems kind of quaint. But at that time, it was a Very Big Deal. Especially for British musicians, some of whom had been arrested in the past for drugs in England. Visas were at stake. We were all instructed not to talk to the press. The irony of this was not lost on me; I was the press. And many of my colleagues and friends were in the press. Mick, clearly nervous, personally alerted everyone and anyone who might have any drugs to get rid of them right then and there. The police in Dallas might be lying in wait to search the plane. Promoter Michael Crowley was dispatched to Fordyce with bail money; Peter and the lawyers flew there too. Around two a.m., Peter—who prior to this incident had been full o
f plans for an imminent meeting in Los Angeles with all four Beatles that never materialized—returned to the Memphis hotel with Keith, Woody, Callaghan and Freddie. The judge in Fordyce had let them off with some sort of probation, a fine, and a few autographed photos. There was a big, collective sigh of relief. Everyone went to their rooms and went to sleep.
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Reflecting on it now, it probably was either a miracle or a feat of legal wrangling that nothing serious—like an arrest—had happened before this to the Stones in the U.S. (Marianne Faithfull tells me she’s still detained at U.S. Customs because of that 1960s English drug bust at Keith’s Redlands house.) Occasionally, packages were put together and taken by staffers from one city to another. I personally never understood why any band member would ever carry anything when there were always dealers crawling out of the woodwork in every city, only too happy to accommodate the Stones. But all that holding and hiding and sneaking was part of the ritual. And not everyone was the type to ask people for pills. Just the singer. Talking to me about pills in one of our many hours of interviews, Mick said, “Codeine is so ridiculous in this country. They act like it’s such a big deal. Then there are these little pills for diarrhea that have a touch of opium in them; like if you took 300 of them you might get a buzz. So if you want just two, and the doctor is out, you can’t get them. It’s easier to score heroin in this country. Or guns. My first experience with that was with Keith in Arizona; we wanted to buy a gun, just to see if we could. So we got two guns and then we went into a bar and they asked us for ID. And there we had these two fucking guns that we’d just bought wrapped up on the bar. We didn’t need any ID for the guns.”
• • •
When I was a teenager, my parents, my two sisters and I spent summers at Fire Island. I became friendly with Dick and Jill Kollmar, the children of columnist Dorothy Kilgallen. Once, when I visited their Upper East Side townhouse, I saw their mother at the top of the stairs. She was wearing a nightgown and she sort of floated from one room to another. She was thin and pale and seemed to be not fully awake. It was a bit of a shock to see her; not just because she was famous, or had been on the television game show What’s My Line? or that her photo was at the top of her column in one of the New York newspapers. It was because she appeared ghostlike. I realize now that I must have sensed that she was probably on drugs, but I didn’t understand that at the time. And, except for when he was onstage, in the summer of 1975, that’s what Keith looked like to me. Especially during the first part of the day, which usually meant the late afternoon.