Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  Rock Scully and Emmett Grogan, leader of the Diggers, came to L.A. to discuss the free concert with Jagger and his brain trust of tour executives: Ronnie Schneider, security consultant John Jaymes, and Sam Cutler. The Grateful Dead’s organization would try to secure Golden Gate Park and get the other San Francisco bands to play. It would be Woodstock West, but better. The Hell’s Angels would handle security, no problem.

  When rehearsals began, there was initial fear in the entourage as they heard how badly the Stones played, stopping and starting, ragging each other. Rehearsals scheduled for 7 P.M. only got going when Keith arrived at one in the morning, a pattern that continued throughout the tour. The Stones adopted an arrogant “make ’em wait” attitude that infuriated promoters and arena personnel all over the country as the band often went on three hours late.

  After a week, to general relief, the band started playing like the Rolling Stones. It was just the five Stones, plus Ian Stewart on piano for the Chuck Berry rockers that Keith and Mick Taylor could play together. Mick Taylor was shocked by how loud the Stones’ new Ampeg amplifiers were set. “If you don’t play as loud as Keith,” Stu told him, “you might as well go home.”

  The concert business in America had been professionalized since the Stones had last toured, with vast changes in the format of the commercial rock show.

  As Keith recalled, “It had changed while we’d been off the road for three years. Suddenly we had to work with P.A. systems. Now there’s an audience who’s listening to you instead of screaming chicks. Before, we’d go out and play and there’d be one speaker hanging off the wall for the voice and that was it. The band just played, the girls screamed, and we ran away. Instead of playing full blast to try and penetrate the audience, now we gotta learn to play onstage again. So for us it was like a school, that ’69 tour.”

  Mick Jagger: “The whole thing became more organized. Had your lights, had your own crew. Up to then rock and roll tours were much more ramshackle. You played every kind of place, very disorienting for the performer. It’s much easier to play the same kind of place every night, the same stage, the same configuration. It becomes like a second home.”

  On Friday, November 7, 1969, the Stones flew to Fort Collins, Colorado, to begin the tour at Colorado State University. The band’s security unit, under the massive black bodyguard Tony Funches, was made up of moonlighting New York City narcotics detectives, armed to the teeth. Their job was as much to protect the Stones from local police as it was to hold their rabid fans at bay. And from the beginning, the fans, especially the girls, tried to throw themselves at the band in reckless waves of adulation and lust. America seemed really crazy for the Stones.

  Sam Cutler introduced the band in Colorado with what became his famous boast: “Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest rock and roll band in the world—the fabulous Rolling Stones!” Mick professed to be shocked at Cutler’s ballsy slogan, instant buzzwords that caught like a prairie fire around the land, provoking much comment and wonder. Was it really true? Mick: “It was a stupid epithet, like we were a circus act. I used to say, ’Please don’t use that, it’s too embarrassing.’ ” Sam Cutler ignored him.

  Mick was performing in his black “Omega” jumpsuit, the legs of his and Keith’s trousers fashionably studded with silver Mexican conchas. Trailing a long pink silk scarf and with blue-beaded moccasins on his feet, Mick danced and whirled on a purple carpet with a white starburst, bumped and grinded, minced and pranced, carrying the visual part of the show by himself in Brian’s absence, as the other Stones played almost impassively around him.

  Next day, two shows at the Los Angeles Forum. Mick started eyeing Claudia Linnear, the statuesque Ikette whose pelvic astonishments were a highlight of the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. Just before “Honky Tonk Women,” Mick asked for the house lights to be turned on “so we can see you,” and the rest of the show was played in bright electric light.

  On November 9, the Stones had their first fiasco, at the Oakland Coliseum, where it went bad even before the music started. Promoter Bill Graham was abusing fans, slapping teenage girls, which made Charlie livid. Graham then got into a fistfight with Sam Cutler. After they were pulled apart, Graham began shouting at Pete Bennett, Allen Klein’s tough New York promo man, who smashed Graham in the crotch with his briefcase. Graham went ape, and two competing teams of security goons squared off in the backstage corridors. Graham threatened to cancel the second show and demanded to speak to Mick, whom he worshiped as the living apotheosis of Rock Spirit. Jagger received Graham in his dressing room, hardly looked at him, continued to apply his mascara and rouge, and haughtily told Bill to please stop shouting and quit being silly. “The show,” Mick told him, in not much above a whisper, “must go on.”

  It did, but the amps burned out right after “Jack Flash.”

  Mick: “Shit! Hang on a minute. Can you hear that?” The guitars were dead, so they moved the acoustic bit up to the front. Power restored, they tried to regain their footing. “Carol” built into a propulsive swing with the two guitars weaving together. There was hardly any applause. Same after “Sympathy.” The crowd was completely sedated. Mick: “Oh, it’d really be a groove if you’d shake your arses!” Nothing, a few cheers. “O-kaayy, here we go, slowly rocking on.” This led into “I’m Free,” which killed the show like a shot in the head.

  “I think we’ve got a problem,” Mick said into the mike, a wild understatement. He plunged into the harp intro to “Midnight Rambler” with its sadomasochistic floor show. He took off the heavy studded belt that Marianne had bought in the Kings Road and whipped the stage floor in diabolical time to Keith’s deafening guitar chords during the song’s rape scene. When the belt struck the stage, Chip Monck flashed a gory strobe of red light, like an explosion of blood in the pitch-black hall. The effect was dramatic, violent, enthralling.

  This woke the soporific audience, provoking the first real applause of the show, ten songs into the set. But it wasn’t really the crowd’s fault. The hall was too big, the sound was bad, and the Stones didn’t really come alive until “Little Queenie” got rocking good. “Come on, San Francisco!” Mick shouted. “Let’s see how you can shake your arses! Come on! Gonna have a good time! Wooooo! Come on! We want to hear the chicks hit the high notes of this next one.” This was “Honky Tonk Women,” which started slow and stately, played awhile as a sing-along, and got really good when Mick Taylor remembered why he was there and started to play his wild Arabian blues fills. The show ended, on fire at last, with “Street Fighting Man,” Keith setting off his dynamite riff with energy, feedback, and flame-throwing liquid spears of sound. Mick threw a big basket of rose petals into the crowd, as he did at every show. The second Oakland show only happened because some Grateful Dead crew people in the audience raced over to the band’s Marin County headquarters, got the Dead’s amps, and loaned them to the Stones.

  The Stones made a quick getaway to their chartered plane after the show. Instead of flying back to L.A., a demoralized Mick ordered the pilot to take them to Las Vegas, where they spent the rest of the dark morning gambling. At one point, with no limos, the band started stumbling across desert roads from one casino to another, looking to lose even more money.

  Both of the Oakland shows had been recorded by Bill Graham’s staff and broadcast over the San Francisco FM station KSAN. Within weeks of the tour, the edited tapes were bootlegged on an album with the stamped title LIVEr Than You’ll Ever Be. The first unauthorized Stones record—the disc label said Lurch Records—it appeared in early 1970, sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and received rave reviews in the underground press.

  The Stones’ tour continued through November, coursing through the western United States amid immense publicity and increasing fan abandon. The cops at Southern Methodist University’s field house reminded the band’s security squad that Texas judges awarded up to ten years in prison for possessing a single joint, so the Stones—guarded by their own narcotics police—discreetly snorted their coke
while Chuck Berry opened the show, then played a perfunctory set and got the hell out of town.

  The next show was at Auburn University in Alabama in front of a segregated crowd of ugly-lookin’, cannon-fodder crackers too stoned to dance. Mick hated this so much he insisted on flying out that night instead of staying in the local motel. They waited hours for a chartered plane to show up, then took off uneasily in an ancient DC-3 during a rainstorm that blew them into Chicago airsick and thoroughly disgusted.

  Sunday night, November 16, in the Chicago International Amphitheater, Chuck Berry refused to play until he got his $3,000 fee in cash. Abbie Hoffman got backstage to ask for money for the trial of the Chicago Eight, the radical antiwar leaders indicted for disrupting the Democratic convention the previous July. He left empty-handed. As Tina Turner and the Ikettes gyrated in hip-high silver minidresses, Mick watched from the wings, licking his lips, eyes glued to Claudia Linnear. This annoyed Ike Turner, who packed a gun onstage and had proprietary feelings toward Claudia himself. After the show, Tina Turner took Mick aside and warned him to lay off sister Claudia or there was going to be a problem with Ike. Mick cooled it for a while, then got into the lubricious dancer when Ike wasn’t around. When he found out, Ike Turner was mad as hell.

  * * *

  Wild Horses in Alabama

  Late November 1969. The Stones were crisscrossing America now, playing better every night. “Midnight Rambler” took over the show, a six-scene play-within-a-play, a blues allegory on rape and murder. By the time the lights came on for “Honky Tonk Women,” whole buildings were rocking. In some of the halls, the Stones could see the balconies actually sway. It was Keith’s favorite part of the show. “The whole place looks the same, when the house lights are up, when the stage looks just as tatty as the rest of the hall and everybody’s standing up. That’s the real turn-on, not the ’theater’ [of “Rambler”]. It’s when the audience decides to join, that’s when it really knocks you out.”

  Traveling separately from the band was a mysterious friend of Keith’s named Fred Sessler. He was forty-six, looked sixty-six, an international businessman born in Poland. He’d seen the Stones in their Crawdaddy days and later befriended Anita and Brian. Sessler had what he called a legal license to import pharmaceutical cocaine from a Swiss drug company. On the tour, he traveled by himself and stayed in his own suite at the band’s hotel. When the musicians ran out of coke, a gofer would deliver an empty 35mm film can. He’d fill the can from a large plastic sack, run a jack of diamonds over the edge, and screw the cap back on—always with a smile. Anytime, day or night. Over the years, Sessler became a legendary companion and benefactor of many rock stars and can still be found backstage at Stones concerts.

  Around this time, Mick Jagger learned that Marsha Hunt was pregnant with his child and that Marianne Faithfull—having learned of this—had run off to Italy with an ex-boyfriend of Anita’s, Mario Schifano. Anita had arranged for Mario to stay with Marianne while Mick was away; she took him to bed, then left Mick for him. It got into the press immediately, leaving Mick publicly cuckolded during his triumphal American tour.

  On November 26, the Stones held a press conference in the Rainbow Room, atop the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. Mick announced that the Stones would play a free concert in San Francisco at the end of the tour to say thank you to their American fans. The concert, he predicted, would “create a microcosmic society which sets an example to the rest of America as to how one can behave in large gatherings.”

  A reporter asked him if, after recording “Satisfaction,” the Stones were more “satisfied” now.

  “Sexually, do you mean?” Mick asked amid press laughter. “Or philosophically?” Told both, Mick answered, “Sexually, more satisfied. Financially, dissatisfied [Allen Klein was standing behind him]. Philosophically, still trying.”

  The Stones’ contract with Decca was expiring in a few months, and much intrigue now began. The Stones were in contact with Marshall Chess, the son of Leonard Chess, whose death the previous year ended the family’s involvement in Chess Records, which had been sold. Marshall went to Jagger, looking for work, and was eventually made president of their new vanity label, Rolling Stones Records. Mick began to talk with Ahmet Ertegun, the debonair chief of Atlantic Records, the R&B-loving son of a Turkish diplomat. Atlantic Records was the founding label of the R&B movement, the company where every blues-loving English rock band wanted to be. Ertegun had signed Led Zeppelin earlier in the year and was presently selling tonnage of Led Zeppelin II, affectionately known as the Brown Bomber. He wanted the Rolling Stones, and Mick Jagger wanted Atlantic to distribute Rolling Stones Records.

  Decca wanted a live album of the tour, so Glyn Johns recorded shows in Baltimore, New York, and Boston. A film crew had also joined the tour, led by documentarians Albert and David Maysles, who would film the Madison Square Garden shows and stay with the Stones through the free concert in California.

  The three Madison Square Garden shows were sellouts and the best music of the tour; everything had to come together for the live album and the film. By this time, the Rolling Stones probably were the greatest rock and roll band in the world. People thought Mick Jagger believed it, anyway. Terry Reid opened all the concerts. Janis Joplin watched the first show from the side of the stage, after duetting with Tina Turner during the Revue’s set. Janis was taking an occasional nip from her omnipresent bottle of Southern Comfort. When Mick sang “Live with Me,” drunken Janis yelled back, “You don’t have the balls!” Jimi Hendrix came backstage on the last night, looking blasted but jamming deftly, playing Mick Taylor’s guitar upside down. Mick Jagger worked on his makeup and ignored Hendrix, still annoyed because Jimi had put a move on Marianne years before. After the Stones played their best show of the tour, Mick stole Hendrix’s beloved girlfriend, the celestial black groupie Devon Wilson, and brought her back to his hotel for three days of piece and love (Jimi commemorated their tryst in his great song “Dolly Dagger”). Keith and Charlie went late to Slug’s, the stygian jazz bar on the Lower East Side, to hear drummer Tony Williams’s fiery jazz-rock band Lifetime, with John McLaughlin playing guitar.

  Let It Bleed was released at the end of November. The cover was a surrealist collage depicting the band as plastic figures on a wedding cake assemblage whose layers contained a pizza, a tire, a can of tape, all atop an old turntable (the assemblage is shown destroyed on the verso). The album was immediately recognized as a climactic masterpiece in reviews. “The Stones have never done anything better,” wrote Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone. “This era and the collapse of its bright and flimsy liberation are what the Stones leave behind with the last song of Let It Bleed. The dreams of having it all are gone, and the album ends with a song about compromises with what you want—learning to take what you can get, because the rules have changed with the death of the Sixties.”

  Let It Bleed got to no. 3 in America against withering competition (Abbey Road and Led Zeppelin II) and was no. 1 in England for months.

  Two shows at Boston Garden, where “Live with Me” shook the house. Before “Street Fighting Man,” with the house lights up, Mick said (with a wicked smile parting famous lips, revealing overbite): “We’d like to say a special hello tonight to all the minority groups here with us, all the fags, all the junkies—good evening, junkies! [sneaks a look at Keith, who’s using]—and all the straight people, the cops, all you minorities out there.” The Stones returned briefly to New York, waited in a broken plane for nine hours, flew to Florida on November 30 to play the Miami Pop Festival, held in a swampy drag strip inland from Palm Beach. This was the last show of the ’69 tour, and the Stones were brain-fried but still able to take nourishment. They were topping a bill that included the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother, and Johnny Winter, and they thought it would be a good prep for the big outdoor show in San Francisco the following weekend.

  The Stones had been starting their shows two hours late, building up fan anticipation by keeping ’em waiting. Now t
hey were eight hours late: 55,000 kids had been waiting outdoors in a grove-killing Florida rainstorm in battlefield conditions. There was political trouble as well, with right-wing groups agitating against the festival and the corrupting power of the Stones specifically. The Stones were flown in by chopper. Freezing, wrapped in a blanket, Keith hit the chords of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” at three in the morning, and thousands of cold kids started dancing. They played until dawn broke over the Everglades, and the “festival” was counted a ragged victory for the band, performing in the open air with frozen fingers. Exhausted, the Stones jammed a little for their film crew in their Palm Beach hotel, then disappeared off the map for a supposed rest. Instead, they flew to northern Alabama and checked into the Holiday Inn near Sheffield for a few days of recording, arranged by Ahmet Ertegun and kept secret from Allen Klein. Klein controlled the Stones’ song copyrights, tape masters, and royalty payments. He had the Rolling Stones by their throats, and they couldn’t afford to rile the volatile accountant.

  At Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, a squat bunker in a factory zone where Aretha Franklin and other Atlantic soul stars did some of their most down-home recording, the Stones worked with Memphis musician Jim Dickinson and engineer Jimmy Johnson. A big old porcelain toilet bowl in the middle of the funky studio held a microphone for special plumbing resonance, “a shitty sound,” according to the locals.

  At Muscle Shoals, the Stones began working on their next album and the rest of their career. The first night, they recorded “You Gotta Move,” a retitled version of Mississippi bluesman Fred McDowell’s “Got to Move.” Keith took the high part sung by McDowell’s wife, Annie Mae, as he had when they did the song as part of the tour’s acoustic set. The second night, playing guitar, Mick taught Keith his Australian outback song, originally titled “Black Pussy” but renamed “Brown Sugar,” partly in honor of sepia beauty Claudia Linnear. “Brown sugar” was also the street name of unrefined heroin from Southeast Asia. (“Drugs and girls,” Mick later said of the lyric. “All the nasty subjects in one go.”) Charlie got into a classic rock groove (“Do it like ’Tallahassee Lassie,’ Mick told him”), and Ian Stewart played good boogie piano. Mick wrote the three verses on the spot, and the band got it right after half a dozen takes. In “Brown Sugar,” the Stones had what they came for: a furious and alive record of a coked-up band rocking out in the Deep South.