Stones Touring Party

A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones

Robert Greenfield

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781781311998
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

'A compelling account of the Stones trashing America during 1972… Greenfield was allowed the kind of access journalists can only dream of today' The Times The Stones' 1972 tour of the States was perhaps their best – and certainly most notorious – ever. Their previous visit in 1969 had ended in the nightmare of Altamont; now, three years later, they had just recorded their two finest albums, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street, and were musically in their prime – if also personally at their most dissolute and debauched.
Robert Greenfield, one of America's finest writers, went along for the ride and came back with a riveting account of high living, excess and rock & roll fury, from the Playboy Mansion to the jail cells of Rhode Island. This was an extended tour Party, capital P, to which all America's hip, rich and glitzy were invited, from Truman Capote to Stevie Wonder, Annie Liebowitz to Hugh Hefner. The result has been acclaimed as one of the all-time classic music books.
Published for some years by Helter Skelter under the title A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones, it is now reissued by Aurum under its original title with a new introduction by the author. Robert Greenfield is also the author of Exile on Main Street: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones and biographies of Timothy Leary and Jerry Garcia. He lives in California.

Book One

Chapter One — JUNE

At least the heat has broken. With the temperature clicking at sixty seven degrees the next day and the time 10:31, the S.T.P. bus is rolling through cool, foggy L.A. toward the airport and the first concert.

A small man in the back of the bus is halfway out of his seat and talking. His fist is balled up and he's whamming it into his thigh. He's passing a joint along to the guy in back of him who's all sleepy-eyed and trying to make his face work. Ah, good mornin,’ Bobby Keys says to the joint. And good mornin to you, Marshall. Now, what ah wanna know is what do ah do with this?’ Keys reaches into his pocket and twirls a small plastic bag around.

‘Get rid of it,’ Marshall Chess says. ‘Definitely… get rid of it. Remember that time we played Helsinki on the European tour? They had dogs waiting for us when we went into Finland…’

‘Ah doan know… it's such a little thang…’

‘Then don't go through Customs on the same line as me,’ Marshall laughs.

All of the tension of the past few weeks has been building to this… the moment the show gets on the road. Marshall feels it. He's wired, excited, there's a gig tonight, the first one… and the feeling is catching. A bus full of crazies, headed off to who knows what kind of adventure… jiminee… it's like that day in June when your mother finishes sewing name tapes on everything you own and packs you down to the station where the bus for Camp Cula-Monga stands waiting, jammed with hundreds of jittering kids you don't know at all but will be sharing life secrets with in a few days.

It's peak experience time, with grownups getting to act like kids, with the Stones as an excuse and a reason and an avenue to bizarre encounters. Peter Rudge is ratcheting in and out of his seat, saying, ‘We're about to hit the beaches. We're about to hit the beaches,’ and there's that definite going-off-to-war excitement in the air.

Certainly, to wear an S.T.P. badge is to be a part of a small army. All of the technical assistance, all the innovation in stage technique and rehearsing, the twenty-seven people along to work… there could be no doubt that a lot of it was motivated by the basic insecurity that must plague all performers—the knowledge that one day they will go out on stage and play to an audience that just sits there, resembling nothing so much as a still-life portrait of the House of Lords, and that will be it. Time to hang it up and start living in the country.

For the Stones were taking a definite chance. Despite the overwhelming ticket demand and the avalanche of media interest in them, they were going on the road with essentially the same kind of show they had done in 1969. What nobody could forecast was how the kids would react to it. The Stones would do a classic rock and roll set, composed of twelve or fifteen separate and distinct numbers, each with a beginning, middle, and an end, starting out hard and fast, calming in the middle, then all-out rocking at the end designed to leave the audience up and dancing when it was over.

When the set ended, so did the show. The Stones rarely did encores. They worked like stars… come out, hit ’em hard, zonk ‘em, then run to the limos before the cheering stops, out of the building and on to the plane. Strictly 1966 Beatles-type stuff that made the distance between the musician and the customer unbridgeable. In the spirit of P. T. Barnum, the Stones always left ’em wanting more.

But would they want more? Probably, but the Stones this time around were about to be thirty or older and the audiences would be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, some younger. Would they dance? Did they know who Chuck Berry was? That he'd come to Phil Chess, Marshall's father, in the early fifties with a tune called ‘Ida Red’ and that Chess had told him to rewrite the lyrics, and two weeks later it was called ‘Maybelline.’ Chess recorded it and drove to New York to lay some acetates, and some bread, on Alan Freed and by the time he'd gotten back to Chicago, people were screaming to buy it. They'd made it number one and Phil Chess didn't know a damn thing about it because he'd been busy driving back home in his car, selling forty-fives out of his trunk to record stores along the way.

It was no accident that Marshall Chess was on this tour, or that he ran the Rolling Stones’ recording operations. He was a blood link to the music the Stones are all about… Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry… ‘Rolling Stone Blues,’ ‘Mona,’ and ‘Johnny B. Goode.’

By the summer of 1972, though, all of it had already become very tame, ancient history. Rock singers were working half-naked with snakes twined around their midriffs. Their hair was dyed burnt sienna and they were Haunting their omnisexuality as helicopters dive-bombed their audiences with skyloads of paper panties. The Stones played straight, English, white, second-generation rock. There was the slim, but very real, possibility that this time around in the American rockbiz drugstore, where new, amphetamine-charged inputs were plentiful, the Stones would prove to be no more than a placebo.

As the tour bus pulls out, none of this troubles Marshall Chess. A small, pretty man with a Jewish hooked nose, shirred henna hair, and penetrating eyes, who was in the habit of muttering nonsense Spanish-sounding syllables to himself when he felt impatient or exasperated or both, ‘Ai ya hela Maria Santo hay-zoos….’ Marshall knows, absolutely knows that the tour will be a bitch, a mother, absolutely the last big blowout for a long time. The party to end all parties. The biggest charge around.

Marshall figures to be present to dig all of it, one way or another. Ostensibly he is along to promote ‘Exile on Main Street.’ But before the tour is a week old, the album will skyrocket to number one, selling some 800,000 copies and 200,000 tapes. Promotion work will become unnecessary, as will the buzz of calling Mick long distance and saying, ‘Hey, babe… Yeah… we did it, man… number one…’ There will be no congratulatory cables to send, no warm rush of accomplishment for a year of effort and the half-million dollars that went into making the album.

Marshall, a very proud man, who has been in the business ever since he began sweeping out the Chess studios at 2120 Michigan Avenue in Chicago when he was fourteen and who has been through all the changes that come when you start as the son of a hard-driving, self-made Jewish businessman and go through primal therapy to get your head straight, will have to find something to do, some concrete reason to be on tour, a project. He will slip completely into his role as executive producer of the tour film, which is going to be shot by the small, compact man standing in the aisle of the bus with an Eclair 16 obscuring his face and a just-passed joint in his hand. In one smooth motion, the man takes the joint, hits on it, puts it in front of the camera lens, films it, then passes it on.

With this simple act, Robert Frank immediately establishes his S.T.P. credentials, the ability to get loaded and go on functioning. Frank, who at forty-seven is the oldest person on tour, has a patient Middle European face and the demeanor one usually finds among men who spend the day sipping coffee and reading the papers in sunny Swiss or Austrian caf s.

He comes to the Stones through his book of black-and-white photographs entitled The Americans. In his introduction to the book, Jack Kerouac described him as, ‘…Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand, he sucked a sad poem right out of America and on to film…. To Robert Frank, I now give this message: You got eyes.’

Although Jagger has never seen any of the films Frank has made featuring people like Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso (Pull My Daisy, Me and My Brother), he hires him to film the tour. Frank knows little about rock and roll, less about the Stones. It is not a world that interests him. He is part of an earlier, more artistic, Beat sensibility. Still, he feels a great affection for Jagger, great sympathy for a man who can talk to him on his terms and then deal with rooms full of showbiz sharks and lawyers.

As the joint goes down the aisle of the bus and back up again, it's like the opening scene of a World War II movie, where the light of the last cigarette is used to illuminate the faces and introduce the members of the platoon. The S.T.P. platoon consists of the press agent (redoubtable Bob Gibson), the makeup man (who Jagger hired eight hours before the tour bus is scheduled to leave), the guitar-maker (a pipestem thin, blond-haired version of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, who wears a triple-X Stetson hat at all times and takes care of the twenty-seven guitars along for the ride), the accountant (not an accountant at all, but a twenty-year-old College student who, before the tour ends, will handle and pay out $192,000 in cash), the baggage man, Willie (who talks like Wallace Beery and has the face of a New York City cop), and the doctor (whose speciality is emergency medicine and who is equipped to maintain all life systems in the event that everyone's worst fantasy comes real).

The supporting cast are minor players in the tour movie, names that no one knows, faces that the audience never gets to see. They are the people who will go through the cruelest and most drastic life changes on the tour, whooshed up from the relative normality of their everyday lives into the eye of the rock hurricane, close enough to the sick center to share in all the adulation and worship that gets directed at the Stones. As Marshall Chess puts it, ‘When thirty-five chicks come to fuck the Stones, and there are only five Stones, that leaves thirty chicks, so anyone close to the tour gets one… it's part of the ritual, and it's easy to get sucked in so that soon all you're doing is talking, thinking, and worrying about the Stones… they're nice cats, the Stones, I work for them, but they are not my life I am my life… But sometimes I get sucked in too.’

Peak experience. It's all out there, waiting, as the bus dumps the tour party out into a sickly green bus terminal waiting room filled with floral old ladies with Paradise 1000 Travel Club patches on their bulging breasts and handbags, and men discussing Vida Blue's continuing and amazing holdout with the Oakland As.

‘Saw in the paper where he's going into cabinet-making,’ one says to a buddy. ‘Fifty grand a year…. who needs baseball?’

The tour party stands around, waiting to be told where to go. Peter Rudge goes into an office and comes out with a distressed look on his face. ‘Jo,’ he says, in the tone of a man having a large tooth extracted, ‘the plane can't land in Vancouver.’

‘Why can't it land in Vancouver?’ she asks calmly.

‘I can't seem to get a straight answer.’

There are answers all over the front page of the morning's Los Angeles Times. There have been two hijackings the night before, one by a black man wearing a U.S. Army captain's uniform and chain smoking hashish. He demanded, and received, five hundred thousand dollars, changed planes in New York and wound up in Algiers, where he was met by four persons identified as ‘Black Panthers.’

The Tac Squad quickly circles up, like a wagon train in times of Indian attack. ‘Is it the hijackings?’ Alan Dunn asks.

‘I can't find out,’ Rudge says. ‘The pilot's failed to file some papers, I think….’

‘Maybe we can…’

‘Hold on…,’ Marshall Chess says, and the next thing anyone knows he is hanging off a pay phone saying, ‘Yes, operator… in Ottawa… Pi-erre Tru-deau. The prime minister, yes. And my credit card number is…’

Might as well go right to the top. All it takes is a credit card and some rock and roll chutzpah and you can talk to the national leader of your choice.

‘Yes,’ Marshall says into the phone. ‘This is Marshall Chess. Of the Rolling Stones. We have a concert scheduled tonight in Vancouver. Eighteen thousand people are waiting for us and our plane has been denied permission to land in Canada. If we don't show up, those kids are going to be… aroused. ‘Good word there. No sense in alarming the prime minister unduly by predicting that if the Stones don't show, hordes of angry kids will burn the city and then sweep eastward toward his personal estate.

‘Yessir, I'll hold,’ Marshall cups one hand over the phone receiver and tells Rudge that he's on with one of Trudeaus press secretaries. They've patched him into the guy's home from the capitol building in Ottawa and now the guy's gone to his other phone to talk to Trudeau himself. It's well known that Pierre is both a right guy and a very deep cat, who more than once has been seen wearing a fringed jacket and rocking out to the sounds of some loud and funky Canadian band. So he is the obvious man to set this straight.

But as Marshall re-explains the situation on the long-distance wire, Rudge is finding out that there's little the P.M. can do. The pilot simply has failed to file flight plans early enough to receive international clearance. It's become a matter for the Tac Squad. As one, Rudge, Jo, and Alan move to the pay phones and begin dialing. Mouths moving, brows furrowing and unfurrowing, eyes opening and shutting, receivers jammed into their ears, they look like a Larry Rivers construction of people trying to get a last bet down before the sixth comes in from Aqueduct.

They arrange for the plane to land at a small suburban airport in northern Washington state and for six limousines to be waiting there to drive everyone into Vancouver. Which means that the Stones and friends will have to pass through normal, everyday roadside Customs, a prospect that does not make Rudge very happy.

Half an hour later, after the chaos has subsided to a normal level and the tour party has dispersed itself through the terminal like particles in solution, the Stones arrive. Flanked by Leroy and Stan, their two black bodyguards, surrounded by a shimmering circle of blond, brown-skinned, blue jade- and copper-colored ladies. In silk and corduroy and studded jeans, they come walking toward the plane like a great splash of watercolor on the dull and empty waiting room canvas.

Primarily, it's their clothing. How the hell?… Do they look like that all the time?… I say, Martha… are they some sort of band? Keith is wearing a black and white striped suit made out of silvered sailcloth that must glow in the dark. Huge silver shades hide his eyes. Wound around his neck as a scarf is a three-and-a-half-foot bright yellow Tibetan prayer flag covered with red ink mantras which used to hang as a windowshade somewhere. In his hand he carries a small black doctor's bag. Not long after they arrive, the plane taxis into position and takes off.

The plane ride is quiet, nervous, expectant, and when the plane touches down in Bellingham, Washington, two hours later, Mick and Keith are the last people off. They come out into bright sunlight, fertile green farm and timberland stretching away to distant purple mountains. They both begin laughing… Jagger grabs Keith's arm and they go tearing ass down the runway, like schoolboys set free for the summer holiday, with the breeze whipping Keiths scarf around his head and their hair falling into their eyes.

When Jagger comes back, he does one of his I-am-a-child routines, peering intently into the turbo jet, toying with the prop, finally allowing them to point him to the limo before he starts chinning himself on the wing. The local folk, already open-mouthed at the presence of a school of black, shiny polished limos, just gape.

At the Canadian border, a hapless Customs man in a log cabin with a Canadian flag on top struggles with manifests, crew lists, and baggage numbers. He has never, never seen people who look and act like this. Polite, co-operative, smiling, but defiant, as though to say, we are playing your little game here but it does not really apply to us. People spill out of cars and Robert Frank has the Eclair screwed into his face and rolling, as Bill Wyman tracks him...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-title Page
• Tilte Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION TO THE 2010 EDITION
• Tales from Rock and Roll Heaven
• Prologue
• Book One
• Book Two
• Epilogue