Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

“So those were the good old days. By the summer of sixty-nine all those screaming girls had stopped cutting their hair and let those Annette Funicello bobs go to hell. They burned their bobby socks and tramped around in dirty feet and had run away from home to join the fabulous furry freak carnival. Most of the Stones’ TV appearances for the last few years had been on the news, not Ed Sullivan — they kept getting busted for various drug charges. Mostly a little pot, but that’s what it was like back them. Getting busted for a little grass was big news. Brian Jones was a corpse at this point. He was always the ragged prophet of the group, standing off behind Mick with that airy look in his eyes and then he finally lost it. I feel it is one of my primal personal fucking tragedies that I never met the man. They found his body in a swimming pool and that was the first bad thing, I think. That should have told everybody that the gig was up.

“By that point I had started writing and was getting published. Crawdaddy gave me some regular work in the back of the book, and I got some San Francisco scene pieces into Rolling Stone so I thought I was a big shot. They were just little scene things but I thought I had hit the big time. So when the Stones came to America for their first tour in three years, I was front and center. They’d hired Mick Taylor, that dumb shit, to take Brian’s place and got B. B. King and Ike and Tina to open up for them. I caught them in Los Angeles at the start of the tour and even got into this party for them in the Hollywood Hills. This guy I knew had the same dealer as the guy throwing it and we just walked right in.”

“Did you get to meet them?”

“Not until much later. I was a small fry, like I said. I met Mick later in New York during the Studio 54 days. But that was the older Mick. He was the elder statesman then, the settled-down and established rock star. Not Jumpin’ Jack Flash. Not like then. The first time I ever saw them live was at the Forum on the kickoff of that sixty-nine tour. In L.A., I drove down for it. They were incredible, of course. They’d been out of circulation and their flock was waiting for them. The greatest rock and roll band in the world. They came out under red lights on the stage and immediately ripped into ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash.’ Mick came out with this Uncle Sam hat and a red, white and blue cape, dancing like the devil, slapping his hands together with that dance he always does, sticking his neck out like a chicken and bumping his groin against the air like he was fucking some invisible pussy. It’s a gas gas gas. This was the Let It Bleed days, and Mick was doing his best satanic trip on the crowd and everybody loved it. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’—on one level it went against the vibe the kids had been working, but still they all bought it. It was channeling the inverse of all that, it was the anti-matter but it worked. Keith still looked halfway human back then, he had this crazy black hair on his head that looked like two crows fucking. He had those long spider arms and held the guitar as far as he could from his body when he played, like he was holding this pot of steaming tar that was too hot for him. He ripped into the songs, just looking up at Mick now and again to see which way they’d take the crowd. Bill Wyman was on the left with his long woman’s face, not doing much but doing his bit as usual and Charlie Watts just looking down at his kit, half his hawk face hidden by this sweep of brown hair, that was the look that was in, everybody had it. And Mick did his strut, hands waving the crowd up and urging them on. Sticking out those famous lips of his, he’d crack his body out like a hooker peddling blow jobs on Tenth Avenue. B. B. King and the Ikettes had stirred us all up all night and Mick took all that pent-up shit and released it. It was a wild night. I remember this guy standing next to me — he looked like a narc — and when the Stones came on he tapped me on the shoulder and passed me this skunky burnt-up joint. I was pretty high already and had seriously thought for the whole show that this guy, this schoolteacher next to me, was from the FBI. Just waiting to bust me. I was fucking obsessing on this guy all night. He didn’t say anything or move the whole show, not even when the Ikettes were shaking their tits at us. So he passes me this joint and I look in his eyes and his pupils are the size of fucking quarters. He had eaten a few tabs of what, I don’t know, that’s what it looked like, and was desperately trying to keep his shit together. Then the Stones came on finally and snapped him out of it and he was back in reality, almost anyway. Who knows what he saw up there, but it snapped him out of it.

“The tour started from there and went all across the country, selling out everywhere. They made something like a million dollars over the course of it, and that’s what got them into trouble. It was the time of free concerts and festivals and that’s what the kids wanted. They demanded it. It was their right. Of course they wanted it all for free — they were Americans. Woodstock and Hyde Park and the Isle of Wight — that’s what was going on. So the rock press got into the act. Ralph Gleason over at the Chronicle wrote a piece slamming the Stones for ripping off the kids and not giving anything back. Ralph thought they should give something back, basically accusing them of being sellouts. I always liked Ralph — he was one of the last moralists. So then Rolling Stone joined in the act and that pissed off the Stones to no end. Here was their comeback tour — they’d survived the drug busts and Brian’s death, and now they were being reviled by their fans. Or the press, rather. At every press conference, it was like, ‘so when are you going to do a free concert, when are you going to do something for the kids?’ So what I’m saying is that already the concert had a bad vibe on it. It was born more out of p.r. than love for what the kids were trying to do.”

“You’ve gone from ‘we’ to ‘the kids.’ ”

“Have I? It was a long time ago. Maybe I’m just in journalist mode right now. I’m trying to be objective.”

“And you sound like even more of a hippie than usual.”

“I always talk like this.”

“He’s right — he always talks like this.”

“But you went in for all that peace and love stuff, right? You always talk about it.”

“I’m just trying to get some objectivity in my account, if that’s okay with you, Tiny.”

“I saw the Rolling Stones a few years ago on one of their farewell tours. One of their many farewell tours. I have a hard time reconciling. I’m trying, but I don’t get it.”

“You had to be there, Frenchie. It was a whole period that they were a part of. That’s what I’m trying to get across.”

“Don’t get mad, I’m just saying. I’m more of a Hootie and the Blowfish man myself.”

“All right, all right. So at the end of the tour, the Stones announce that they want to do their free concert thing and they want to hold it in San Francisco. Only the city fathers want this outrageous insurance bond for Golden Gate Park, the natural place to play, so they had to find someplace else. They retain Melvin Belli, this old school gangster lawyer-type to handle the arrangements. At this point Belli is handling the Manson defense down in L.A. Nice, right? He flies up to San Francisco and does some wrangling and massaging and secures the Altamont Speedway, this old stock car racing track out in the desert about forty miles outside of San Francisco. And it’s on, December of 1969.

“We drove out there in Andy Farber’s old Mustang early in the morning. I don’t think you would’ve ever met Andy — he wrote the first really great mushroom piece — but he stopped writing in the early seventies and moved to Alabama to start a chicken farm. Andy and I were drinking this big jug of California red and smoking joints as we drove out there and it was a great morning. Sunny. We’d been up all night at the pad of this friend of his and we just kept going. And we headed out and every so often we pass a van or a car full of hippies and they honk and wave, and we wave back, it’s all good fun. There’s this great energy that we’re all just going to hang out and listen to music and smoke some grass and maybe get laid and it’s going to be a good time.”