Old Gods Almost Dead (18 page)

When the band returned to London, Brian stayed behind to hang out with his actress girlfriend Zou Zou and French pop star Françoise Hardy at Castel, the hot Paris club that year, basking in the atmosphere and adulation he enjoyed in Paris. He may have been the outcast of his band, but Paris treated Brian Jones like a god.

                

The Rolling Stones'
third North American tour began in Montreal on April 23, with “The Last Time” radiating its bitter energy from America's fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel radio stations. It was scream-a-rama at the Academy of Music on 14th Street in New York City as Mick stepped over the footlights and jabbed a finger into the steamy bedlam during the Stones' first number, “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.” A piercing inhuman din was the audience's response to his torrid declaration—“I want you! You! You!” Ticket demand was so intense that promoters booked three more New York shows for the end of the tour.

The next day, the Stones were driven to Philadelphia for a concert featuring Little Anthony and the Imperials, Reperata and the Delrons, Bobby Vee, and the hot English headliners Herman's Hermits. The Hermits were a British Invasion bubblegum group with a current hit record, “Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter.” Their singer was a younger, cuter, friendlier Jagger clone, and they were so popular that they would outsell both the Beatles and the Stones in America the following year. Mick hated the Milquetoast, teenybopper band so much that he still recalled, thirty years later: “Herman's Hermits were top of the bill and we were second, and there was some argument about the dressing rooms. Herman [Peter Noone] was complaining because his wasn't big enough. There we were, and he was top of the bill because Herman's Hermits were
huge.
And then the most impossible thing was going out to have a hamburger, and some guy would go, 'Are you guys Herman's Hermits?' It would
kill
us! We'd say 'Fuck you! Herman's Hermits is
shit!
' ”

If this touched a nerve in twenty-two-year-old Mick Jagger, it may have been because the similarities between the artistically valid Rolling Stones and the manufactured pop of Herman's Hermits (and other, younger English groups flooding into America) were much closer than anyone wanted to admit in 1965.

No Satisfaction

May 1965.
The Rolling Stones were so big in America now that mighty Ed Sullivan had to eat his words. On May 2, they played “The Last Time,” “Rooster,” and “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” on Sullivan's Sunday night show.

On the southern leg of the tour, at the Gulf Motel in Clearwater, Florida, Keith woke out of a fitful sleep with a riff in his head. Half-awake, he reached for his guitar and recorded the riff—like a reversal of the clarion horn vamp of “Dancing in the Street,” Martha and the Vandellas' current hit record—on the cassette player next to his bed. Then he fell back into a deep sleep. When he woke in the morning, he rewound the tape and discovered the little riff. Later in the day, Keith played it for Mick and told him, “The words that go with this are 'I can't get no—satisfaction' ” a line in Chuck Berry's “Thirty Days.”

That night, Brian Jones picked up a beautiful young girl, a model, in the bar of the motel. The next morning, she emerged from Brian's room in tears, covered in bruises, both her eyes blackened. She told her girlfriend, who'd spent the night with Bill Wyman, that Brian had raped her and then beat her up. The girlfriend told Bill and said something about calling the cops. Panic! They were all so disgusted by Brian's brutality that, after a quick conference (Andrew: “Don't mess up his face!”), one of their English roadies, Mike Dorsey, stormed into Brian's room and thrashed him, breaking two of Brian's ribs. They took Brian to the hospital, where he was taped up and given painkillers. They made up a story that he had fallen while practicing karate by the motel pool. Brian spent the rest of the tour depressed, humiliated, schwacked on pills and drink.

By May 9, the Stones were in Chicago for a gig at the Arie Crown Theater. The next day, they went to Chess Studios for a round-the-clock session with engineer Ron Malo that produced cover versions of Don Covay's “Mercy Mercy” and Otis Redding's “That's How Strong My Love Is.” They also cut the hilarious put-down “The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man” (supposedly about London Records' lazy promo guy George Sherlock: “sure do earn my pay, sittin' on the beach every day”); and the first acoustic reference track of “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction,” which sounded to Keith suspiciously like contemporary California folk rock, which he hated. They also cut six R&B covers, including Little Walter's “Key to the Highway” and “Fannie Mae,” whose riff they took from “Promo Man.” This was the Stones' last recording session in Chicago. Brian, sick and stoned on pills, didn't play on them.

A couple days later, they flew to L.A. and went back into RCA Studios with Jack Nitzsche and Dave Hassinger to finish “Satisfaction.” In the studio, Keith hollered for more distortion on his guitar. “This riff's gotta hang hard and long,” he kept saying. They turned the amps up, burning them to get a jagged sound, but it still wasn't rough enough. Ian Stewart went over to Wallach's Music City and came back with a new Gibson fuzz box, the first one the company made, and told Keith, “Try this.” It
made
the record, goosed Keith's double-tracked guitar into the mechanized roar of a Panzer division cruising the Autobahn. The acoustic track from Chicago was buried under fuzz-tone guitar, a new bass line from Bill, and harder drum and percussion tracks. Mick's vocal track was deliberately buried in the mix by Dave Hassinger on orders from Andrew, who was worried about censorship if it was too obvious that lack of sexual satisfaction was what was really on Mick's mind.

Jack Nitzsche played tambourine on the new backing track. Brian Jones was loaded on pills and didn't play much on these crucial sessions. Higher-echelon L.A. scenesters visited and brought cocaine to the Stones' sessions for the first time.

The final stereo mix of “Satisfaction” was finished by 5
A.M.
on May 11, 1965.

These sessions also produced much of the Stones' next album: Solomon Burke's “Cry to Me,” the Temptations' “My Girl,” Sam Cooke's “Good Times” (only a few months after Cooke's murder in a local motel). They also cut two new Jagger/Richards songs: “One More Try” and “The Spider and the Fly.”

                

In San Francisco,
where the Byrds opened for the Stones, the Diggers—a proto-hippie anarchist street commune led by Emmett Grogan—published broadside flyers saying the Rolling Stones were “the embodiment of everything we represent, a psychic evolution . . . the breaking up of old values.”

In Long Beach on May 16, the Stones did a complete show for nine thousand kids, who rioted outside afterward. The Stones' limo was engulfed in a terrifying crush of humanity as the kids threw themselves on the car. The band began to scream as the roof caved in and had to push it back up with their legs to keep from being crushed. Keith: “We could hear the roof cracking. We're all panicking! A hundred kids on the car, everywhere, outside, trying to force the door handles, trying to smash in the windows. We couldn't move or someone would get killed . . . the most frightening thing of my whole life.” Police waded in with nightsticks and started to beat people. Blood spattered on the windows as the horrified musicians cringed. A cop was knocked off his motorcycle and badly injured; one girl lost part of her hand. Finally a helicopter landed next to the almost flattened limo; the Stones climbed aboard and were flown to safety back in L.A.

Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters had driven down from Frisco to party with the Stones, and they gave Brian a load of acid. The still-legal LSD-25 was billed as the door to a new consciousness by such apostles as Harvard's Dr. Timothy Leary, who under its influence advised the young to turn on, tune in, and drop out, reject the constipated values of the older generation, and build a new society based on expanded consciousness and communal, millenarian values.

Brian took to acid like someone who'd found God. Tripping his brains out, stepping over hallucinatory snakes, he took his harmonica to the clubs along Sunset Strip and spent his nights jamming with any band that would let the dissolute, wild-eyed young rock star onstage. After dropping a few cubes of Orange Sunshine, Brian even disappeared for a few hours, causing a frantic search so the Stones could make their May 17 gig in San Diego. They were so late for the show that the Byrds began to play Stones songs to placate an angry and restless crowd of kids.

                

Shindig
was
the big pop music network TV show in America in 1965, appearing Wednesday nights on ABC. Taping in Los Angeles on May 20, the Stones lip-synched “The Last Time,” “Play with Fire,” and “Little Red Rooster” on a set decorated with a new Rolls. During rehearsals, the Stones met Billy Preston, the keyboard player for the show's house band, the Shindogs, who later became a regular Stones collaborator. The Stones had pressured the show's English producer, Jack Goode, to feature a real blues musician on the program with them, and chose Howlin' Wolf when Goode told them to take their pick. Wolf arrived from Chicago with his great guitarist, Hubert Sumlin, and another man whom no one recognized.

Mick: “During rehearsal, Howlin' Wolf said to me, 'I want you to come meet somebody.' We went up into the audience—all these children—and this old black man wearing worn denim overalls—before it was fashionable—was sitting with all these kids. And Wolf said, 'This is Son House.' ” Son House, sixty-three at the time, was
the
primeval Delta bluesman, one of the teachers of Robert Johnson, the source of his devil-at-the-crossroads story. “He said, 'This is Son House, and Son House did the
original
“Little Red Rooster.” ' I didn't know what he was talking about, because he [Son House] was a little recherché at the time. But he told me not to worry because he wasn't the first person to do the song anyway.”

Howlin' Wolf made his network TV debut with a raspy, spat-out “How Many More Years?” as the Stones symbolically sat at his feet. Brian cut short an interview and told
Shindig
's host to be quiet so Wolf could begin the number. It was a great moment.

                

Before the band
left California, they struggled over “Satisfaction.” The label said it was the best Stones song ever and wanted it out immediately. Keith didn't even like it. “It sounded like a dub [demo] to me,” he recalled. “I couldn't get excited about it. I'd really dug it that night I wrote it in the motel, but I'd gone past it. I didn't want it out. It sounded all right, but I didn't really like that fuzz guitar. I wanted to make that thing different . . . you needed either horns or something else that could knock that riff out. The riff was going to make the song or break it on the length you could drag it out, and it wasn't meant for the guitar. Otis Redding got it right when he recorded it, because it's actually a horn riff.”

Keith was adamant. He didn't want it as a single, but was outvoted. (Only Mick sided with Keith. The band was still a nominal democracy—even Stu had a vote.) So a monaural mix of “Satisfaction” was released in America later in the month and became the Stones' first no. 1 record in the U.S.

Brian Jones was disturbed by this. He still wanted the Stones to play R&B, the only thing that interested him. Later, while the band did “Satisfaction” at the end of their shows, Brian would play “Popeye the Sailor Man” as a countermelody because it's what he thought “Satisfaction” sounded like. It made the rest of the band crazy, and there was more talk (mostly from Andrew) of getting rid of Mr. Jones.

After the final California shows in San Jose, Fresno (cut short by police), and Sacramento, the Stones split up and traveled back to New York separately. Brian stayed in L.A. and dropped as much acid as he could, trying to develop new music under LSD's lysergic veil. Frustrated by these often-tuneless or modal experiments, Brian always erased his tapes the next day. Brian was a high-concept musician, great at coming up with a hook or a color, not good on details, and his total inability to write songs would help seal his fate in the Rolling Stones.

Like a Rolling Stone

The Stones regrouped
in Manhattan the day before the first of three sold-out shows at the Academy of Music and found themselves the focus of intense interest by the downtown demimonde. London Records rushed out “Satisfaction” (“Promo Man” on the flip), and Keith's roaring fuzz-toned riff was buzzing out of radios everywhere. Bob Dylan was back in New York after his English tour. Wanting to meet Brian, whom Dylan regarded as
the
Rolling Stone, he arranged an introduction through reporter Al Aronowitz, who brought Dylan and entourage up to Brian's room at the Lincoln Square Motor Inn.

Dylan was in his 1965 speed-driven prime, about to stun the pop world by strapping on an electric guitar and playing his visionary, Stones-inspired rock and roll in public. Bushy-haired, hawk-beaked, nasal-voiced, black-shaded, sharp-dressed poetic champion bonded with articulate, pilled-up acidhead Welsh bluesman. Guitars came out and joints were lit by Dylan cohorts Bobby Neuwirth and Al Kooper. Brian's nervous paranoia about marijuana tickled Dylan. Jones had been told he was out of the group if he got busted for pot in America and couldn't work, so he was very uptight. Dylan couldn't believe it and teased him. “Brian, man,
fuck,
you're even puttin'
me
uptight.”

Another night Dylan and Brian hung out at Andy Warhol's midtown studio during a big party. Warhol, ultimate voyeur and reporter, was filming the lost moths drawn to his flame as they destroyed themselves acting out sex and drug fantasies. It was the only scene in town. Rudolph Nureyev was there, dancing with pretty men to “I Get Around,” “The Name Game,” “Come See About Me,” and the Kinks blasting “You Really Got Me.” The sexual tension in the Factory was intense. Edie Sedgwick was there, the “Girl of the Year,” a lithe, half-mad, self-absorbed heiress type from an ancient Massachusetts family. Her starring roles in Warhol's underground movies had catapulted her into
Vogue
fashion spreads and general subterranean goddesshood. She had a low, sexy voice that always sounded like she'd just stopped crying. With her cropped hair dyed platinum, Edie was the promiscuous young queen of the Warhol superstars, an American icon at twenty-two. Every young man in New York wanted her.