Mick Jagger (53 page)

During Isherwood’s visit, Tony Richardson received word that a gang of students from Canberra University were headed for Palarang, intending to kidnap Mick and demand a thousand dollars’ ransom for charity. The kidnappers never materialized, but ten local policemen kept an all-night watch in the kitchen unaware that the house’s occupants were smoking pot in the adjacent sitting room. A couple of days later, Marianne was released from her nunnery and rejoined Mick, which for Isherwood made their shared quarters “the most fascinatingly wicked house in Australia.”

After what they had both been through in Sydney, wickedness was the last thing on Mick’s and Marianne’s minds. The Australian trip that was supposed to bring them closer together ended a month later when Marianne flew to Switzerland, at his unstinted expense, for psychiatric treatment. There she found a woman doctor who grasped her situation and genuinely did help her. But at no point along this world-circumnavigating trail of misery did anyone suggest she should stop doing drugs.

Also now in Mick’s notebook were the lyrics for a new Jagger-Richard song, inspired by Marianne’s wan little joke on being recalled to life, that “Wild horses couldn’t keep me away.” It was the first real love song he had ever written, not at all tyrannically cool in its confession of guilt mixed with helplessness and declaration that he was still there for her: “I watched you suffer a dull, aching pain
Now you decided to show me the same
No sweeping exit or offstage lines / Could make me feel bitter or treat you unkind.”

He had been back in London only a few days when his car was broken into and a few small items disappeared, including the notebook with the “Wild Horses” lyrics, which, as usual, he had not bothered to memorize. Rather than go to the probably unsympathetic and unhelpful police, he had Les Perrin plant a few newspaper diary stories that if the notebook were returned, a reward would be paid and no questions asked. Within hours, an anonymous male caller rang Shirley Arnold at the Stones’ office to say he had the book but wanted fifty pounds for it. “When I told Mick, he said, ‘I’ll give him thirty,’ ” Shirley recalls. “However precious it was to him, he still tried to beat the price down. And the bloke agreed to thirty.”

It was arranged that Shirley would meet the caller in the concourse at Waterloo station, hand over the money, and receive the notebook. She felt extremely nervous about dealing with someone possibly unpleasant or even dangerous all on her own but never thought of objecting, such was the devotion Mick inspired. Only as the handover took place did she realize she hadn’t been sent alone after all: Mick’s new young driver, Alan Dunn, was standing near, keeping an eye on her.

With Britain now thoroughly Rolling Stones–conscious once again, the time had come for the second, even more crucial stage in Mick’s plan for their renaissance. The review of their finances by Prince Rupert Loewenstein was now complete, and made far from happy reading. Prince Rupert’s urgent recommendation was that they get back to America on tour as soon as possible, ideally before the year’s end. Mick agreed and, moreover, was determined that the earnings from such a tour should not fall into the same black hole that other group receipts these past several years appeared to have done. In other words, Allen Klein must have no part in it.

While Mick was in Australia, Keith had confronted Klein in London—taking along the Hyde Park compere, Sam Cutler, for support—and told him he was fired. But, as everyone knew, it wasn’t as simple as that. Instead, Mick and Prince Rupert came up with a plan to loosen Klein’s grip by degrees rather than try to machete his hand off at the wrist. His nephew Ron Schneider had worked for his ABKCO organization since before he signed the Stones and was popular with all of them. Schneider in fact had recently quit ABKCO, tired of Klein’s control freakery, and was looking to start in management on his own. At this opportune moment Mick rang him from the Ned Kelly location and asked him to organize the Stones’ first U.S. tour in more than three years, beginning early in November.

When Schneider told his uncle about the offer, he recalls, Klein “went ballistic” but was too deeply enmeshed in Beatles problems to trample on it with the ferocity he once would have done. His only stipulation was that the tour must be run out of ABKCO’s New York office, which Schneider did for a short time before quietly transferring operations to his home in Riverdale. Amazingly, Klein even agreed to the creation of a company called Stone Productions, jointly administered by Schneider and Prince Rupert, into which all the tour earnings would be paid.

Schneider’s initial approaches produced an overwhelmingly positive response from major concert venues across America, including New York’s Madison Square Garden and the Los Angeles Forum. The problem was that putting together a tour on the necessary scale required major finance, and with around $1 million of their royalties still frozen by the Oldham–Eric Easton litigation, the Stones’ collective bank account was virtually empty. The one small advance of $15,000 offered by the William Morris organization would not have paid Keith’s backstage bar tab. Schneider’s solution was to approach each venue individually and make a deal for 75 percent of the gate, with 50 percent of the projected total payable up front.

There was another major stumbling block—one that Brian had created for so long but was now, ironically, down to Mick. His cannabis bust the previous May made it doubtful, to say the least, that the U.S. Immigration Service would grant him a visa. John Lennon at the time had a similar “crime of moral turpitude” on his record and was being denied entry for a much shorter visit that included no public performances. But while Lennon took every opportunity to rail against American imperialism, Mick these days was careful never to say anything that might make the U.S. government consider him a threat. Luckily, too, the Stones’ contacts included an official in the consular department of the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square, where he had once demonstrated against the Vietnam War. In exchange for sweeteners that included an all-expenses-paid holiday in the South of France, this friendly insider made sure his visa went through.

The final months of the sixties had turned into a climactic celebration of rock music’s seemingly limitless benign power and the ability of its young audience to gather together peaceably in huge numbers. There had already been Blind Faith and the Stones in Hyde Park and Bob Dylan on the Isle of Wight. Then, for three days in mid-August, a record five hundred thousand gathered on a dairy farm near Woodstock, New York, to watch thirty-two acts, including the Grateful Dead, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Jefferson Airplane, the Who, and Jimi Hendrix; this double–Hyde Park multitude not basking in sun like their British cousins, but lashed by humid rain and floundering in mud, yet just as euphoric, mutually supportive, and devoid of any urge for destruction or violence.

However, there were growing signs that this sunny, smiley counterculture possessed a dark and threatening underside. Just prior to Woodstock, the leader of a California hippie commune, a failed songwriter named Charles Manson, had turned his young male and female disciples loose on a murder spree suggested by a Beatles song, “Helter Skelter.” In two nights, Manson’s so-called family had randomly slaughtered seven people, including film actress Sharon Tate, the eight-months-pregnant wife of the director Roman Polanski, and had scrawled pop-song references on the walls of their luxury homes with their blood. It later emerged that one of the killers told one of the victims he was “the Devil, here to do the Devil’s work.”

The devil’s work was also currently being celebrated in a new film, Invocation of My Demon Brother, directed by Kenneth Anger (whose former lover Bobby Beausoleil had gone on to join the Manson Family) and with a Moog synthesizer score by Mick Jagger, that best-known of all modern apologists for Satan. To underline the connection Mick thought he had severed months ago, Anger’s images of naked young men in pagan crucifixions were intercut with glimpses of a white-flounced figure onstage in Hyde Park.

If the Stones in the person of Mick carefully abstained from all comment that might threaten to destabilize American society, no such restraint governed the publication that had borrowed their name. Rolling Stone had evolved into a radical political paper as much as a music one, and had recently dubbed 1969 “the Year of the American Revolution.” Many credulous souls—especially in the world’s credulity center, California—presumed Rolling Stone spoke directly for the Stones and so believed their impending arrival would ignite that revolution; if aided by the dark forces seemingly now at their command, so much the better.

The U.S. embassy official who issued Mick’s visa in London might have paused had he or she seen a pamphlet already circulating in Oakland. “Greetings and welcome Rolling Stones,” it said, “our comrades in the desperate battle against the maniacs who hold power. The revolutionary youth of the world hears your music and is inspired to even more deadly acts … the bastards hear us playing you on our little transistor radios and know they will not escape the blood and fire of the anarchist revolution … Comrades, you will return to this country when it is free from the tyranny of the state and you will play your splendid music in factories run by the workers, in the domes of emptied city halls, on the rubble of police stations, under the hanging corpses of priests, under a million red flags waving over a million anarchist communities … ROLLING STONES, THE YOUTH OF CALIFORNIA HEARS YOUR MESSAGE! LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION!!!”

ON OCTOBER 27, Mick announced the tour’s twenty-eight-show itinerary to a packed press conference at Los Angeles’s Beverly Wilshire Hotel. He had been in L.A. for three weeks already with Ron Schneider, preparing for the Stones’ biggest assault on American sensibilities since The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. Their Let It Bleed album was to be released to coincide with the start of the tour, along with a compilation of golden oldies, Through the Past Darkly (whose cover commemorated Brian Jones’s last-ever photo shoot with the band), and a special fourteen-track promo album for radio stations.

In contrast with hit-or-miss trans-America journeys in the past—remember those redneck state fairs and performing seals!—every detail of the tour had been meticulously organized, using the best professionals available but with the Stones (i.e., Mick) in overall control. For the first time, they were to have their own sound and lighting systems and special stage decoration, including carpet, all directed by “Chip” Monck, who had played the same role at the Monterey and Woodstock Festivals, and also emceed Woodstock. Rather than perform behind barriers of glowering local police, as in the old days, they would have their own stage security force composed of detectives moonlighting from the New York Police Department narcotics squad. Through Ron Schneider and their new company, Stone Productions, they would control the sale of programs, Tshirts, and other merchandise. There was also a specially designed poster of a nude Pre-Raphaelite-looking girl with the now-familiar Jagger aura of raunch and refinement.

Acknowledging the band’s own main creative inspiration—something that no one made them do—the main support acts were to be black artists: bluesman B. B. King and Ike and Tina Turner, with Chuck Berry replacing the Turners for the Dallas show. As if Mick hadn’t spent enough time on camera recently, the tour was to be filmed by America’s noted documentary-making brothers Albert and David Maysles, whose fly-on-the-wall record of the Beatles’ first U.S. visit in 1964 had captured pop at its most amiable and innocent.

Mindful of the Stones’ creaky Hyde Park performance, Mick insisted they should have two full weeks of rehearsal in L.A. before starting out. The original idea was for the band to live together in a house on Oriole Drive, but, as always, its officers and other ranks quickly divided. Mick and Keith moved into the Laurel Canyon home of Stephen Stills from Crosby, Stills, Nash (and now Young), while Charlie stayed on at Oriole Drive with his wife, Shirley, and small daughter, Serafina, and Bill and his girlfriend, Astrid, moved to a hotel. Mick Taylor and Sam Cutler accompanied the Glimmer Twins to Laurel Canyon, Cutler because he was essential to the tour planning and Taylor so that the senior Mick could keep a fatherly eye on him.

The Stills house—once the home of Brazilian movie star Carmen Miranda—came equipped with three young women, a pair of twins known as the Dynamic Duo and an ethereal blonde named Angel, whose sole function was to sit around looking stunning, read tarot cards (not very accurately, it would prove), and give what Sam Cutler diplomatically remembers as “back rubs.” Gram Parsons lent his roadie Phil Kaufman to act as major domo and general fixer, and the moonlighting NYPD cops mounted permanent guard outside. Though the location was supposedly top secret, the odd intruder still attempted to climb through Mick’s bedroom window shrieking her own version of Carmen Miranda’s “I-yi-yi-I like you very much!”

Cutler had expected life with Mick and Keith to be nonstop parties and orgies, but to his surprise, both behaved “like … English gentlemen … at a sedate country hotel.” Mick remained totally focused on the tour ahead, “the general of the rock ’n’ roll army,” overseeing every logistical detail, however small, and every cent in expenditure; his most frequent query was “Are we paying for that?” And even though housemates with his emcee and newest band member, he remained a being apart. “He was never not Mick Jagger,” Cutler remembers. “Even if he came downstairs in his pajamas, he was always onstage.”

Whipping the Stones into good enough shape for the L.A. Forum and Madison Square Garden, however, threatened to be too much even for him. Rehearsals initially took place at the Laurel Canyon house, but only Charlie ever turned up on time and the playing continued to be ramshackle. Finally, in exasperation, Mick changed the venue to a soundstage at Warner Bros. film studios in Burbank. To simulate actual concert conditions, Chip Monck rigged the sound and lighting and decorated the stage just as it would be on the road.

Once the tour preproduction had been sorted and the band were playing with something closer to efficiency, Mick sent for Marianne. Despite her psychiatric treatment in Switzerland and months of supposed recuperation in London, she remained as ghost-pale as dead Ophelia adrift on the “weeping river.” Her autobiography describes how carefully she was prepped so that the reunion would not be too upsetting a surprise for Mick. Phil Kaufman met her at the airport and escorted her not to Laurel Canyon but to a bungalow in the Hollywood Hills, where she was put on an intensive regimen of fruit juice, vitamins, and massage, still without any communication from Mick. “When I had recovered, I was wrapped up in a bow and returned to him.”