That was the problem Jagger had been pondering in Australia while mouthing his awful Ned Kelly lines. The only way the Stones could put themselves in the black again was to undertake the American tour they had been discussing, and postponing, since mid-1968. Mick, Keith, Bill and Charlie were all agreed that they had to get back on the road again, and they had to do it independently of Klein. However, it was vital not to provoke an open rift with Klein. Once any legal proceedings began, Klein would be able to freeze all their funds pending a court decision that might take years.
Jagger’s solution was to approach Ronnie Schneider, Klein’s nephew and principal adjutant in the bloody reorganization at Apple. Schneider had always been fraternally fond of the Stones, particularly Brian and Keith; he also had become disaffected by his uncle’s apparent emotional fixation on the Beatles, and was looking for a chance to break into solo management. Klein, still deep in Beatle boardroom conflict, consented to let Schneider handle the Stones’ tour, provided he did so from the Klein office. When this proved unworkable – as it did almost immediately – arrangements were too far forward to cancel. Ronnie Schneider was in charge of the Rolling Stones.
The news that the Stones were to tour again caused a momentary diversion from Fleet Street’s running saga of the Beatles, Apple and Allen Klein. One radio interviewer even asked George Harrison why he thought Jagger and Co. were going back on the road again. ‘I think they need the money,’ was George’s spot-on reply. ‘… and that new guitarist of theirs is fantastic.’ Keith Richard, too, spoke of the new dimension and subtlety Mick Taylor had brought to the band. ‘It’s taken a bit of time to weave him in but the band’s really together now. We’re really looking forward to getting back out there …’
In fact, all of them were jittery at the prospect of returning to a milieu barely recognizable as the one in which their reputation had been made. When they had last toured, in 1967, it was still basically as a pop group, obliged to do little more than fill a theatre with screams. These past two years had seen the evolution of pop into rock – a simple excess of sound and spirits into a culture: a consciousness. Rock was not only a thousand watts louder; it was also a thousand times more serious. Seriousness devolved equally on the bands (not groups any more), playing songs as grandiose and difficult to halt as ocean liners, and on the audiences, listening with an intentness that implied almost comparable virtuosity. Few enough ex-pop groups had dared chance their arm in the new rock world. The Beatles themselves would ultimately perish, not so much from the financial coils enmeshing them as from fear that if they played in public again – as Paul McCartney wanted – people might actually listen to them.
The Stones were already figureheads of the new culture, thanks to a young American entrepreneur named Jann Wenner who had adored them from the beginning. In 1968, Wenner launched the first-ever intelligent rock paper from the hippy capital of San Francisco and gave it the name Rolling Stone. As well as an inspired editor, Wenner was a determined socialite who mingled on equal terms with the stars his paper covered. He soon got to know Jagger and even persuaded him to help finance a short-lived British edition of Rolling Stone. Wenner’s encouragement and promise of support was crucial in persuading the Stones to cross the Atlantic once again.
Since putting on a rock tour in 1969 was a process understood by no one in the Stones’ employment, Jagger sought help from his old friends The Who, already expert travellers in the modern manner. The Who lent the Stones their road manager, Peter Rudge, who had begun his career booking pop groups for the Cambridge May balls. Rudge’s brief from Jagger – inspired by past dissatisfaction with American promoters – was to assemble a road show that would be completely self-contained. The Stones would travel with their own maintenance, publicity and security staff and their own compere, Sam Cutler. Removing the last perquisite of local promoters, they would even book their own supporting acts. Their choice for this first tour was the husband and wife duo, Ike and Tina Turner, and their old blues idol, B. B. King. Keith reacted strongly to suggestions that their supporting acts might overshadow the main attraction. ‘I want a strong opening act,’ he insisted. ‘If they’re good, it’s going to make me work that much harder.’
The crucial factor, as everyone knew, would be Jagger’s own performance. In a world where the long-haired rock star had grown commonplace, a head-tossing cliché, how could Jagger recreate his old, unchallengeable spectacle and shock? He pondered the matter at length, with frequent reference to an earlier figure whose leaps could bring the heart of an audience into its mouth. At one point, he called Jo Bergman and said, ‘Find me a Diaghilev.’
Any idea that the Stones had lost power as a concert attraction was dismissed by the instant reaction of promoters across America. Ronnie Schneider, in London, was inundated with transatlantic calls, offering them virtually any price or guarantee they cared to name. For a concert relayed on closed-circuit TV in the current style of world-title prize fights, one showman was prepared to pay four million dollars. Schneider, for all his excitability, was prudent enough to divide the itinerary between established promoters and top prestige venues like the Los Angeles Forum and New York’s Madison Square Garden. The advances that rolled in gave the tour its sorely needed financial float – especially since Ronnie Schneider ordered the cheques to be made out, not to its overall booking agency, William Morris Inc., but to the Stones’ own ad hoc company, Stone Tours.
America’s ears were simultaneously to be assaulted by no less than three new Rolling Stones albums. The first was a collection of golden oldies entitled Through The Past Darkly and dedicated to Brian Jones – whose presence, indeed, permeated every track. Then there was a fourteen-cut promotional disc, issued to 200 radio stations in the hope of its being broadcast complete as a history of the Stones from Route 66 to Love In Vain, a sneak preview track from their new album Let It Bleed.
Let It Bleed, now in final mixing stage, was scheduled for release in early December, when the tour would be reaching its climax. Just how large a climax, no one, of course, imagined – nor how horribly apt an album title could prove to be.
‘Are you,’ a laconic woman journalist asks Mick Jagger, ‘any more satisfied now than when you last came over here?’
The question is so uncharacteristically witty for an American press conference that even Jagger deigns to show a flicker of amusement.
‘D’you mean financially?’ he banters, craning to see her in the media crush. ‘Sexually? Philosophically?’
‘Financially and philosophically satisfied.’
The place is New York’s chic Rainbow Room, perched on the 30th floor of Rockefeller Center. The date is November 25, two days before the Stones’ appearance at Madison Square Garden. The mood is euphoric – an upswing nothing now can spoil. Around the white-suited Jagger, camera shutters snap and buzz. Protective arms endlessly reposition the microphone into which, smiling broadly, he delivers a slightly more expansive non-reply than usual.
‘Financially … just sa’isfied. Sexually sa’isfied … y’know. Philosophically … tryin’ …’
‘Don’t expect them to scream,’ someone whispered as a last warning to Jagger before he went onstage at Los Angeles Forum on November 7. And certainly, the 18,000-strong audience, traversed by Zeppelin searchlight-beams, bore out in their murmurous restraint everything the Stones had heard about the bromide effect of ‘serious’ rock.
It lasted until the searchlights cut off, plunging the miniature universe into a more dizzying dark, and a voice of giant, unapologetic Englishness said, ‘’Ere they are, ladies and gentlemen, after three years … the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world …’ Before Sam Cutler could say ‘Rolling Stones’, the entire darkness was on its feet, screaming to the full force of its lungs.
On a stage drenched with psychedelia’s painful blue-white light – discovered there, somehow, in mid-leap – was a figure whom no Diaghilev had dressed in its gamine black off-the-shoulder jersey and split-flared gaucho tro
users, pinched together by a broad, heavily studded belt. Round its bare neck with a knee-length scarf, of the type that throttled Isadora Duncan. On its head was a red, white and blue striped top hat. Attentiveness and Woodstock dignity melted against a voice so hardly on key, it seemed not quite human, bawling out the fable to its sub-human genesis:
‘Aah was bawn in a cross-fire hurri-caayne …’
Keith Richard, in spangled orange and earrings, a gipsy dipped in ketchup, played an almost indecent-looking see-through guitar. Charlie Watts at his drums seemed to have changed clothes at the last minute with an ordinary construction worker. Bill Wyman was in one-piece Faustian red. Only Mick Taylor conformed to West Coast type with his shoulder-length hair and leg-of-mutton smock sleeves, his virginal face angled sideways, as he followed his own playing, solemn as some thinking girl in a novel by George Eliot.
They were, in short, outlandishly different and triumphantly unreformed. Playing their old songs, about London dolly birds, or their new ones, about Hitler and Satan and riot and rape, the same vicious power was still there, plunging and re-plunging into its listeners’ minds like a mainliner’s needle or a vampire’s fangs. For, in that time of rampaging pretentiousness, it seemed as miraculous that they bothered to play the old songs as that they dared to play the new.
For most of the large number of serious rock critics present, Mick Jagger’s new range of theatrics caused as much discomfort as a hand straying to their collective knee. The moment in Jumpin’ Jack Flash when he took off his studded belt and whipped the stage with it was considered a detail too fraught with innuendo for most even to mention. For the New York Times’s Albert Goldman the conclusive moment came in Street Fighting Man, when the Forum audience stood up and beat time with upraised arms and clenched fists.
‘Ja wohl!’ wrote Albert Goldman. ‘Mein friends, dot’s right! Dot good old rock ’n’ roll could warm the cockles of a storm trooper’s heart. OK – they don’t give you a torch and an armband, like in the real old days, and send you down the Rhine to swing with the summer solstice. But you can still squeeze in hip by haunch with thousands of good kamerads; still fatten ears, eyes and soul on the Leader; still plotz out while he socks it to you in stop time, and best of all, boys and girls, you can get your rocks off, no, with that good old arm action that means … well, you know what it means.
‘No question about it, Der Führer would have been gassed out of his kugel by the scene at the Forum …’
Even Albert Goldman could not deny that just the warm-up acts in the Stones ’69 tour were outstanding entertainment value – first B. B. King in his grey flannel suit, bending elegant notes on his guitar, Lucille; then Ike and Tina Turner, a laconic guitarist standing by, while his half-naked princess wife teased a hand microphone into an erect phallus, fondling it with bejewelled fingers, flicking it with her tongue as she murmured and gurgled an act of fellatio, communicable to thousands. Of all the influences on Mick Jagger’s stagecraft, none was to be so great as Tina Turner. He would stand each night and watch her, his body absorbing her mannerisms like data being fed into a computer.
Two sell-out shows at the Forum grossed $260,000, breaking the Beatles’ record for a single night’s concert-earnings – as well as roughly quintupling the Beatles’ share of the box-office receipts. At San Diego two nights later, the sports arena was stormed by 2,000 fans who had been unable to buy tickets. Forty-six were charged with offences ranging from drug-possession to throwing rocks at cars.
A new hazard of touring was the plethora of political groups, weaned from love and peace to more strident protest, and anxious to acquire the huge rock audience as a target for their propaganda. The Black Panthers in particular dogged the Stones’ tour, because black musicians were involved and because Jagger himself, in his revolutionary phase, had several times intimated sympathy for the black militants. In Oakland, the Panthers demanded that Jagger formally announce his allegiance; when he did not, death threats were issued. ‘I went backstage,’ Ronnie Schneider says, ‘and Ike Turner shouted to me, “Hey Ron – if you’re worried about the Panthers, come stand with us.” All of their bodyguards – and Ike and Tina, too – were carrying guns.’
As tour manager, Schneider had been enjoying himself since he had been able to shout down the telephone at Bill Graham: ‘Frankly, Bill – what have you ever really done?’ Admittedly, all Graham had done was run the San Francisco Mime Troupe, organize Bob Dylan’s 1964 American tour, turn the Fillmore West into rock’s premier auditorium and, through his association with Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, become the most powerful – as well as most respected – rock music promoter in California. He was, none the less, running only some of the Stones shows and obliged to liaise with Ronnie Schneider about matters he was accustomed to decide for himself. Disputes between the two grew ever more fierce until at Oakland, in a fight over who should and should not stand on the stage, Schneider hit Graham with his briefcase.
The tour had reached Dallas when some news came in from London which sent Mick Jagger’s courtiers into an agonized huddle outside his motel room door. British newspapers were reporting that Marianne Faithfull had left London for Rome in the company of Anita Pallenberg’s one-time boyfriend, Mario Schifano. Questioned by reporters, Marianne had made it clear she was leaving Jagger for Schifano, whom she described as her ‘Prince Charming’.
Jagger was, as predicted, furious. Though he himself had been having a semi-public affair – with American actress Marsha Hunt – it seems never to have occurred to him that Marianne would do the same. To be cuckolded thus, in the very spotlight, dealt his pride a terrible blow. Out there, under the Zeppelin beams, they would know all about it. They would know there was a better lover in the world than Mick Jagger. Still, the image made its inexorable demands. He must rouge and powder himself, tie on his Isadora scarf, tip his Uncle Sam topper and leap forth like Nijinsky with his mock-Dixie yell of ‘Hi y’all …’
Consolation came in the madness of the road, the whirl of limo travel, wrapped in his silver cloak, the harem attentiveness of girls for whom sleeping with rock stars had become practically a vocation. The Stones, by divine right, could avail themselves of such famous groupies as Miss Mercy, Susie Suck or, most memorably, the Plaster Casters, a duo who made commemorative plaster casts of their conquests’ erect penises. Despite the challenge implicit in rival plaster casts, there was still no doubt as to the groupies’ ultimate objective. The story is told of a particular girl who, upon emerging from each night’s exertions with this or that rock legend, always made the same comment: ‘He was great – but he wasn’t Mick Jagger.’ Eventually, it is said, the day came when Jagger himself summoned her to his hotel room. Next morning, her friends gathered round avidly. ‘So how was he?’ someone asked. ‘He was great,’ the honoured one replied. ‘But he wasn’t Mick Jagger …’
Film and TV cameras saw only the usual sardonic, untouchable Jagger, born of groupie myth rather than fact, controlling the Rainbow Room press conference on November 25, and telling the lady reporter he was ‘financially sa’isfied, sexually sa’sified, philosophically tryin’.’ The real Jagger, observed by no one, had been desperately ringing up Marianne in Rome and pleading tearfully with her to come back to him.
‘“Philosophically tired ” did he say?’ the New York Tribune whispered. ‘Do you,’ another questioner tried, ‘identify with revolutionary youth in America?’
‘We’re with you.’ Jagger laughed. ‘Right be’ind you.’
‘How about the war in Vietnam?’
‘Just get over it as soon as you can.’
‘What do you think about John Lennon returning his MBE medal to the Queen?’
‘He should have done it as soon as he got it.’
‘I read in the paper that you’re going to be giving a free concert. Is that true?’
‘We are going to do a free concert,’ Jagger said. ‘It’s going to be on December – er – sixth in San Francisco. But it isn’t going to be in Go
lden Gate Park. It’s going to be somewhere adjacent to Golden Gate Park and a bit larger …’
The whole ghastly business had its origins in a desire to do something nice. It began because the Stones felt that rare collective impulse, a twinge of conscience.
Financially and sexually satisfied as they were by the tour’s official end, they could not help but notice what a backwash of resentment it left behind. Promoters in almost every city along their route criticized them for their arrogance, their demands for backstage comforts, their lateness in beginning shows, their sulky pique if either of their opening acts seemed to be getting more applause than they did. The most frequently voiced criticism concerned a ticket price allegedly 50 per cent higher than for any comparable rock attraction. To amass their two million dollars gross, it was suggested, the Stones had systematically and callously ripped off teenagers all across America.
Most such condemnation appeared in newspapers to which the Stones paid little heed. But elements of the underground press, too, had begun to attack them. Most damning of all was Ralph J. Gleason, co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine and influential columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
‘Can the Rolling Stones really need all that money?’ Gleason asked in his Chronicle column. ‘If they really dig the black musicians as much as every note they play and every syllable they utter indicate, is it possible to take out a show with Ike and Tina Turner and not let them share in the loot? How much can the Stones take back to Merrie England anyway? … Paying six and seven dollars for an hour of the Stones a quarter of a mile away because the artists demand such outrageous fees says a very bad thing to me about the artists’ attitude to the public. It says they despise their audience.’
In fact the ticket prices, from $4.50 to $7.50, were only marginally higher than what rock fans were currently paying to see Blind Faith or the Doors. The Stones themselves had been horrified by the $8.50 top price at LA Forum and had publicly announced it was set by the management, not them. ‘Rolling Stone reprinted what Gleason wrote, without checking any of it,’ Ronnie Schneider says. ‘It was all bullshit – like claiming the Stones were conning Ike and Tina when they’d booked them in the first place. They were paying B. B. King, even though he’d have gone on that tour for nothing.’