VANCOUVER, JUNE 3, 1972–NEW YORK CITY, JULY 26, 1972
WHILE I CERTAINLY ENJOYED MYSELF on the Rolling Stones 1972 tour of America, the tour itself was most definitely not fun. Rather, it was a military campaign of the first order, a rock ’n’ roll version of General Sherman’s March to the Sea that enabled the Stones to cross over into a brand-new market that would continue to expand exponentially with each passing year.
In terms of the zeitgeist, the tour was precisely what the age demanded. Over the top, loud, violent, angry, decadent, and incredibly lucrative, it bore no resemblance whatsoever to the extremely civilized cakewalk I had experienced with the Stones in England just fifteen months earlier. The real miracle was that I even managed to get myself on the tour in the first place.
Despite all the time I had spent with the band over the course of the previous year, I discovered to my great shock that I was not the fair-haired boy at Rolling Stone that I had imagined myself to be. And so I had to call in as many favors as I could from those who worked for the Stones before the magazine agreed to let me cover the tour. Although I also wanted to write a book about the tour, the man who ran the magazine’s publishing division simply could not have been less interested in the idea.
Even though I had to put my great dream of becoming a published author on hold, the good news for me far outweighed the bad. At long last, I was going to get to write about something big. Exactly how big, I had no idea until I began hanging out at the Beverly Rodeo Hotel in Los Angeles where the bar was always filled with hookers and tour manager Peter Rudge, Jo Bergman, Alan Dunn, and Chris O’Dell were frantically working to put together shows by the Rolling Stones in thirty-two cities over the course of the next fifty-three days.
Unlike my account of the English tour which had focused solely on the Stones and their offstage adventures, what I wanted to do this time around was cut back and forth between the band, the supporting musicians, the people working on the tour at every level, and all the insanely obsessed fans who were willing to go to impossible lengths just to see a single show.
What I did not realize until the tour actually began was that in order to do this I would find myself spending just as much time outside the awful hockey arenas where the Stones performed as I did backstage with the band. As I soon learned, the hordes of angry kids who assembled out there each night had not come to hear the music but rather to do some fighting in the street.
And so instead of helping Keith Richards break into a locked dressing room, as I had done on the English tour, I found myself hanging alongside Peter Rudge on a large corrugated metal door that forty kids without tickets had already managed to lift four feet off the ground at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver so they could come rushing in for free.
In Seattle, I watched Mick Jagger walk toward the band’s private plane with a blond girl who might have been twenty years old. In a plain cotton dress with no makeup on her face, she would not have looked out of place selling cookies and lemonade at a high school dance. After bidding her goodbye, Mick looked at me with a lascivious grin on his face and said, “Yeah, I had a nice bit of sex last night. Know what I mean?”
Why Mick had even gone to the trouble of telling me this, I had no idea. No more than five minutes later, he was clutching the armrest of his seat in abject fear while explaining that the power turn the Stones’ private jet was now making was the single most dangerous moment in any flight. As always, it was just Mick being Mick. On the road in America, I soon learned there was no way of knowing what he might say or do in any given situation.
Unlike the English tour when I had been the only reporter traveling with the band, the Stones were now accompanied from city to city by a press contingent so large that it would not have looked out of place on a presidential campaign. To protect Mick from physical harm and ensure that Keith would not get busted for drugs by local cops, they were both surrounded by several concentric circles of heavy-duty security. Unless you were doing heroin, there were also certain rooms into which you simply could not go once the show was over. Despite these constraints, certain moments that occurred while I was out on the road with the Stones that summer have stayed with me ever since.
After visiting Dealey Plaza so I could look up at the sixth-floor window in the Texas School Book Depository from which the Warren Commission claimed that a lone gunman had assassinated John F. Kennedy, I found myself drinking dark beer and eating pizza with Charlie Watts late one night in a very collegiate bar in Dallas. Delighted not to be recognized by anyone, Charlie stared at his food and said, “It’s not much of a way to see the country, is it? All you care about is how the bed is and can you get something to eat after the show?”
Before the show in Houston the next night, I was banging away on my portable typewriter in the little trailer the Stones used to leave the arena each night when Charlie stuck his head in through the window. After watching me for a moment, he said, “Doin’ your homework then, are you?” With his drumsticks spinning like helicopter rotors in his hands, he then walked out onstage to play.
In New Orleans, Ahmet Ertegun threw what must still rank as the greatest party I have ever attended in my life. As Roosevelt Sykes, a sixty-six-year-old Chicago-based boogie-woogie piano player known as “The Honeydripper,” Snooks Eaglin, a blind guitarist, and the fabled Professor Longhair performed, people danced themselves into a daze in a room where the temperature was easily 100 degrees. When a New Orleans street band began strutting across the floor led by a magnificent old black man in a black hat and white gloves with a starred white sash across his chest and a stuffed pigeon dangling off one shoulder, everyone began walking behind them in time to the second line while waving white handkerchiefs in the air.
In Mobile, Alabama, I saw what I still believe to have been a moment of authentic social change in America when an audience comprised mainly of white kids got on their feet to dance as Stevie Wonder, who opened so brilliantly for the Stones each night, launched into “Superstition.” Once the show was over, Ian Stewart, who would log an astonishing 8,000 miles in rental cars before the tour was over and then sleep for three straight days on the ocean liner taking him back to England, drove me at top speed through Biloxi, Gulfport, and Bay St. Louis in Mississippi on Highway 90.
By the time my first article appeared in Rolling Stone, I had already been ordered to leave the tour. Whether this decision was based on how much money the magazine was spending to keep me on the road, the quality of my writing, or the fact that Rolling Stone had also decided to have Truman Capote write his own account of what it was like to journey through America with the Rolling Stones, I had no idea either then or now.
All I knew was that Truman was in and I was out. Leaving the tour at its midway point in Nashville, I flew back to Los Angeles and began cranking out what was to be my final massive report about the Stones at play in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion in Chicago, the incredible saga of Cynthia Sagittarius, the twenty-one-year-old hippie girl who hitchhiked to every city on the tour and then just waited outside the hall until someone gave her a ticket, and how it felt to be surrounded by thick-necked cops in the Deep South who hated everyone and everything having to do with the Rolling Stones.
After having filed reams and reams of copy, I was horrified to see that all my deathless prose had been slashed to ribbons. Thoroughly overwrought, I called the editor at the magazine who had sworn on a stack of Bibles that I would be allowed to cover the entire tour. The moment he got on the line, I began lecturing him about how you just could not lie to people in this world and then ever expect them to believe you again. On and on I went, telling him in no uncertain terms just how wrong what he had done really was. And then, without further ado, I told him I was quitting and slammed the phone down as hard as I could before he could say another word.
It was not until a few days later that I realized just how badly I had screwed up. Not only was I no longer on the tour, I had also just walked away from the only job I had ever loved. Not yet twenty-six years old, I knew my career as a writer was over. Because going to school was the only thing I was good at, I decided to try to enroll at UCLA for a PhD in English. Exactly what I was going to do with this degree if and when I ever completed my studies, I had no idea.
And then a letter arrived that had been forwarded to me from the magazine. Having read what I had written about the Stones, the man who ran a publishing house that has long since gone out of business and had been named after a magazine that also no longer exists asked me if I would be interested in writing a book about the tour.
Rushing to the phone, I called him in his office in lower Manhattan, negotiated what seemed to me like the truly fabulous advance of $3,500, and flew to New York City in time to catch the final four shows of the tour at Madison Square Garden. After checking into a hotel across the street from the hall that made the Black Hole of Calcutta seem luxurious by comparison, I went backstage with my bright red tour laminate in hand so I could watch the Stones perform for the first time in nearly a month.
What with Truman Capote and Andy Warhol sitting side by side like a pair of elder vampires in the Stones’ dressing room and every star-fucker in town doing all they could to get as close to the band as possible, the backstage scene at the Garden was a human zoo.
When I had last spoken to Mick as he sat in a hotel room in St. Louis watching the Democratic convention on television with the sound turned, off, he had told me that the shows in Madison Square Garden were going to be something special. Hyping the event as only he could, Mick had said, “Maybe I’ll stand on my head, pull off all my clothing, and just go crazy. Hopefully, by that time, I’ll be completely mad.”
Literally reduced to skin and bone by the physical nature of his performances night after night as well as by the vast amounts of cocaine nearly everyone on the tour had been doing to keep themselves going, Mick seemed so wired in New York that he could barely answer an interviewer’s question without jittering in place like someone had inserted a live wire into his spine.
With dark shadows beneath his eyes and the skin drawn so tightly against the bones of his face that he seemed to be wearing a mask, Keith Richards looked no better than Mick. Being Keith, he did come up with my favorite line of the tour at the madhouse of a press reception that followed the first show at the Garden. After being told by some woman he did not know just how good he had been in some movie she did not name as well as how much she wanted to thank him for what he had given her, Keith turned to me with a completely deadpan expression on his face and said, “I never fucked her. I swear.”
Accurately describing the insanity that the Stones had generated in New York, Keith looked around the room and said, “Right now is when you realize you’re a product.” In terms of what the gods of commerce had done to the holy grail of rock ’n’ roll, no truer words had ever been spoken. For me personally, the end of the tour was so truly sad and thoroughly disheartening that after the final show in Madison Square Garden on July 26, 1972, I never saw the band perform onstage again.
At the time, all I really cared about was that I finally had a book to write that someone actually wanted to publish. To gather the material for what would become S.T.P.: A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones, I spent the next three months interviewing everyone who would speak to me about what had really happened behind all those closed hotel room doors during the long hot summer when the Rolling Stones had journeyed through America on what to that point in time was the highest-grossing tour in the history of rock ’n’ roll.