ANITA PALLENBERG: “Everybody was slashing me when I had Marlon, saying ‘You must be crazy to have children. How can you have a child on the road?’ Keith’s mom always saw me as a foreigner. You know those English moms. I remember everything I did was strange – ‘Isn’t that strange?’ – even milk bottles I had for the babies. Everything was weird. For me, children are the best thing I ever had. I thought it was better for Marlon to be with his parents than by himself. Marlon learned to walk on stage.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Anita’s an amazing lady. There are some people who you just know are going to end up all right. That’s why we had Marlon, because we just knew it was the right time. We’re very instinctive people.”
ELIZABETH WINDER: “A welcome ceremony awaited Marlon back at
Cheyne Walk, including a musical tribe of mystics from Bangladesh. They chanted as the baby was brought into the
house, dropping rice and rose petals from the oak balustrade. Robert Fraser was there with a crib
hand-painted in psychedelic colors.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Marlon’s full name is Marlon Leon Sundeep. Brando called up while Anita was in the hospital, to compliment her on ‘Performance.’ ‘Marlon, that’s a good name. Why don’t we call him Marlon?’ The poor kid was forced through this religious ceremony when we arrived home in Cheyne Walk, the rice and the flower petals and the chanting and all of that shit. Well, Anita’s the mother, right? Who am I to say no? Anything you like, Mother. You’ve just given birth to our son. So the Bauls of Bengal came, courtesy of Robert Fraser. And Robert had a crib made, beautiful little one that rocked. So that’s his full name, Marlon Leon Sundeep Richards. Which is the most important bit. The rest is mere pretext.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Having kids turned me on a lot. It reminds you of so many things that you’d totally forgotten about and you get these double takes, just because there’s an incredible difference. It changes your life, your thinking; the kid is your little thing, and you think, ‘Goddamn, I helped make that.’ And it’s all full of purity and innocence, and it’s just smilin’ at you and wants to kiss you and hug you, and all it wants to do is just feel you and touch you, and you’ve never felt so loved in your life. It’s that bit of love you gave your own parents, the bit you don’t remember – your kids give that back to you. And you realize, ‘I’ve just been given the first two or three years of my life back.’”
STEPHEN DAVIS: “It was a witchy time. There was black magic in the air, amateur necromancy that made Stones pal Kenneth Anger’s occult dabbling in London look tame. Astrology was immense. Hippie girls cast the tarot and threw coins to consult the I Ching. Gurus were afoot, and hip youths were ‘getting back to the land,’ with communes sprouting everywhere. The rock music scene was totally wild. Los Angeles groupies began to spread rumors about Led Zeppelin signing a pact with the devil in exchange for their incredible new success. It was a replay of Robert Johnson at the crossroads, a new blues legend for the Atomic Age.”
OSSIE CLARK: “I flew with the Stones to their first date, on November 17. I remember vividly that from the moment I set foot in that plane, before it took off from London, I felt a kind of oppressive fear. There was a negative electrical charge in that atmosphere compared to the tours I had gone on before that. The flight over was a nightmare, truly scary, the way the Stones were towards each other, towards me, an insistent, brooding, uncontrolled intimidation. In Los Angeles we were put up in a big house, and the evil vibes intensified. The Stones were taking all kinds of horrible drugs, primarily a new kind of potent acid that they had gotten hold of.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Without a doubt it was a strange generation. The weird thing is that I grew up with it, but suddenly I’m an observer instead of a participant. I watched all these guys grow up; I watched a lot of them die. When I first got to the States, I met a lot of great guys, young guys, and I had their phone numbers, and then when I got back two or three years later, I’d call them up, and he’s in a body bag from Nam. A whole lot of them got feathered out, we all know. That’s when that shit hit home with me. Hey, that great little blondie, great guitar player, real fun, we had a real good time, and the next time, gone.”
GLYN JOHNS: “There was some screw-up going to Phoenix; we either missed the flight or there were no airline tickets. Jon Jaymes said don’t worry and booked a private jet. It was a 137 seater – a big bloody airplane for sixteen people and a few hangers-on. We fly to Phoenix, do the concert, and on the way back – while we’re in the air – Keith says, ‘Let’s go to Las Vegas.’ This is after the gig – it’s like one o’clock in the morning.”
CATHY: “So we all dropped a few more black beauties, or whatever those things were called where you could stay up all night. I remember Ronnie Schneider having a suitcase of money handcuffed to his wrist. I think we dropped the whole night’s take from Phoenix at the baccarat table.”
STANLEY BOOTH: “We walked down the strip strung out like Madame Bovary’s wedding party. When we got to the Circus Circus, Jon Jaymes just greased our way in, asking a Circus Circus host if they’d like the Rolling Stones as guests. ‘Certainly,’ the casino manager said, ‘we’ll put their picture on a wall’ – even though it quickly became clear that old-line Vegas casino managers in 1969 had no idea who the Rolling Stones were.”
JO BERGMAN: “In Circus Circus when they announced that the Stones were there, it was just silent. Nothing. Nobody even looked up from the slots, from anything. They just kept pulling the levers and dealing the cards.”
BILL WYMAN: “We did do some rehearsals. We didn’t do a lot. You know what the Stones are like. It was mostly party time. We rehearse for a week or something, and you end up doing a couple of hours here because everybody turns up late, or they don’t appear at all, or they’re off somewhere else. Keith’s socializing with the locals, and Keith’s getting stoned, and it was always a disaster. It was basically like that. But in the end we pulled it together. We’re good like that.”
ETHAN RUSSELL: “Somehow I heard that the Rolling Stones were in Los Angeles. So I got on a plane and flew down. I turned left off the Sunset Strip onto Doheny Drive, drove up the winding street into the hills, and then right onto Oriole Drive and up to the very top of the hill. I parked in front of the last house on the street that was obscured by a high hedge. I opened the unlocked gate onto a vast sweep of lawn, went to the closest door, and entered. Inside the Oriole House, as we called it, was a classic example of upscale, LA tacky. It was all view and shag carpet. The house overlooked the endless, gridded panorama of the streets and houses below. The wall facing this vista was covered in mirrors so that it, too, reflected the view. The mirror was composed of smoked glass laced with gilt veins in some forgotten interior designer’s demented idea of Roman opulence. In the middle of this reflecting wall sat a gas-jet fireplace, left burning night and day. The kitchen flowed into the rambling living room where I saw my friends from England, now strangely teleported into this California house.”
ELIZABETH WINDER: “The Stones were staying with Stephen
Stills on Shady Oak in Studio City.
Honeysuckle and wild jasmine climbed the trellis. Bougainvillea tumbled from the bower bridge
that connected the mansion to the two-story pool house, which the Stones had
taken over as their recording studio.
You could breakfast in the solarium on mimosas and cocaine, along with
fresh baguettes and tortas de papas. You
could doze off in the hammock under a canopy of palms or head down to the
cabana for naked tarot readings, courtesy of a blonde local mystic named Angel.”
CATHY: “Our real serious goal was to meet Mick Jagger. We were groupies, but not just any groupies. We were among that elite group of seven or eight who could walk into the Whisky and hang out. One night Sam Cutler came up to us – we didn’t know who he was – and asked if we wanted to get into the limo in front of the Whisky. There was a guy in there. We asked, ‘is he English?’ – you could tell Sam was English as soon as he opened his mouth. Sam said, ‘Yeah.’ We asked if he was in a group. Sam said, ‘Yeah.’ So we left with him and scrambled into the waiting limo. Inside Mick Taylor was looking all forlorn because these two dopey girls were jumping in the car with him. We didn’t recognize him because our recognition of the Stones was from the other guys in magazines. We went up to a place on top of the hill and got out of the car. Sam asked us to make some tea and toast and said the other guys would be there soon.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Here’s Gram and Taj Mahal. Gram told me this story about how the first time he met Taj, he was sitting at a table in a bar in the San Fernando Valley and Taj came in, this hulking great frame filling up the doorway, closely followed by his wife, who was even bigger than he was. They came straight over to Gram’s table, and Taj picked him up off the ground, gave him a big bear hug, and said, ‘Man, it’s great to see a white boy doing something!’”
SAM CUTLER: "In the main room of the Stills house, overlooking the pool, was a grand piano. In front of a wonderful log fire, Keith and Gram Parsons would sit at the piano and run through a massive catalog of country songs, crooning moody duets late into the night. It was one of my great privileges to see them together, happy as sandboys, singing about the despairing poor of America. I almost cried in my beer. The Stones had originally approached country music with a certain tongue-in-cheek disdain. Gram was responsible for changing that. As he taught Keith a thousand and one country tunes, the music clearly resonated with a lonely man who was missing his lady and son back in London."
CATHY: “We still had no idea what the group was. Then up the driveway came the car with the lights flashing and Keith Richards walked in with his pink sunglasses and his cape. Mick Jagger followed him in his crushed yellow velvet pants and his little frilly girly shirt and said, ‘Could you make us some tea and toast as well?’ Mary and I couldn’t believe it. I think I still have fingernail marks on my palms from us holding each other’s hands. A couple of days later, Sam Cutler said Mick kind of fancied me and wished I’d come back. That’s when I explained I’d love to hang with them, but I had a daughter to take care of. Sam fired the chauffeur and hired me to drive. He paid me an insane amount of money for that time. That’s how I became Mick’s driver, which was a joke because even to this day I’m the worst, most dyslexic driver. I never know where the hell I am and where I’m going. I remember trying to drive to the airport in Chicago during the tour. I ended up in front of a police department with Keith in the back doing up. He glances out the window and says to Mick, ‘You can fuck her, but can we get a different driver?’”
HENRY DILTZ: “It was one of those substantial homes. It had a swimming pool. It had a whole wing going off in one direction with rooms in it used for rehearsals. It had a whole pool house that had an apartment in it. A complex. Through the gate and up the driveway. And you come into this whole world there… A lot of people around… In those days you could go over and could stay for a couple of days if you wanted. You’d meet somebody there and fall in love. It was a very open society.”
MISS PAMELA: “Miss Mercy and I went to see the Flying Burrito Brothers at the Corral in Topanga Canyon, twirling and spinning together. Jagger, Richards, Watts and Wyman came walking in and the roof lifted off the dilapidated old dump. We carried on like nothing astounding was going on, and kept dancing to The Burritos. Luckily I had on a long black velvet dress, cut real low, and lots of chi-chi rhinestones. I could feel his eyes upon me, and I rocked out even more. Gram noticed what was going on from the stage, and said into the microphone, ‘Watch out for Miss Pamela, she’s a beauty, but she’s tender-hearted.’ My sweet Gram was so thrilled that his new best friend, Keith, was there to see him play. Mick came up to Mercy in between sets and said, ‘Introduce me to you beautiful lady-friend,’ and then he kissed my hand and bowed.”
MISS PAMELA: “Mick invited Mercy and me back to the huge house the Stones were renting in Laurel Canyon, and number one on my farfetched fuck list was literally within my grasp. Mick, Keith and I sat around the fireplace, listening to Mercy predict profundities through her beaten-up tarot cards. She carried her cards everywhere, hoping to bump into the likes of Keith, spread them out on the rug in a triangle, explain the Tower and the Hanged Man, and create answers for unasked questions. After the reading, which went on for half an hour, Keith picked up a guitar and Mick sang, ‘I followed her to the stay-shun… a SUITcase in my haaand.’ I entered rock and roll heaven and was hanging out on cloud nine. Mick and I danced around the living room to the Stones’ unreleased album, and when he asked for my opinion I was tongue-tied, but smiled like I had written a rave review.”
ZACHARY LAZAR: “It had been two months since Brian’s death and most of the time it still wasn’t real. This was the period when Keith was smashing up cars on the M1, falling asleep with lit cigarettes in his hand, staying up for three nights in a row, shooting rifles from the cockpit of his Hovercraft. It didn’t look or feel like mourning. In many ways, it was the happiest he’d ever been.”
TONY FUNCHES: “I’m in the kitchen of the Stones’ house real late one night and Keith comes up to me and says, ‘How are you doin’?’ I say, ‘My ass is kind of dragging, to tell the truth.’ He says, ‘Well, here you go. Have some of this.’ He had that gold bamboo thing. And he lays some out. And I go, ‘How do we do it?’ And Keith goes, ‘I’ll show ya.’ And I was like – Shazam, man! It was an astral flash. It was an eye-opening, pardon the pun, experience. Me and Keith hit it off fuckin’ perfectly.”
STANLEY BOOTH: “I remember Keith’s lying out in the hammock, and Mick says to Phil Kaufman’s girlfriend, ‘Go tell Keith that we’ve started.’ So she says, ‘Keith, they’ve started.’ And Keith says, ‘Oh yeah. Tell ‘em they’re sounding great.’”
SAM CUTLER: "Keith would get dressed up, decide we were going to some club, announce the intended destination, and then flop out in the back of the car - out to the world. On our first such foray, Keith was passed out on the back seat and I was driving down Sunset Boulevard on the way to the Ash Grove club on Melrose. Suddenly, Keith sat up in terror and screamed, 'You're on the wrong side of the road!' I screamed right back, 'Keef, this is America!' He flopped back down and was asleep before his head hit the seat. The human riff possessed the ability to fall asleep in any position anywhere at any time, but once in a while he had nightmares. My driving didn't help."
CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN: “LA
music insider Rodney Bingenheimer remembered going to a party in LA with Jagger
and then stopping at the House of Pies on North Vermont Avenue at one in the
morning ‘to pick up girls. All these
teenyboppers would come up to Mick and say, ‘You look like Mick Jagger!’ and
he’d say, ‘Yes, everybody says that.’ Then he’d take a couple home with him.’”
STANLEY BOOTH: "Waiting to go to what would be a dull party in Bel Air, we lounged around the house. Jagger and I were sitting with Wyman on the black leather couch, looking out the big window at the black hills of Halloween. Wyman said it was a holiday for kids, mostly, and Jagger disagreed: 'They're real, those spirits, and the people to come after us will know about them.' 'If the world survives,' I said. 'We'll blow it up eventually,' Mick said. 'That's inevitable.'"
ETHAN RUSSELL: “In the beginning, preparing for the tour in the small cavern-like rehearsal room at Stephen Stills’s home was fine for practicing and polishing songs, but it was far too small to allow the Stones to set up their equipment and perform as they would in their forthcoming shows. Calls to friends unearthed an available soundstage on the Warner Bros. production lot that was being used for the filming of ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’ They booked it and shifted the preparations for the tour to it. When they got there, the stage was still being used for the film’s central theme, a marathon dance contest from the 1930s. The introduction of the Rolling Stones into a Depression-era backdrop was both surreal and prophetic.”
STANLEY BOOTH: “The whole marathon dance ballroom set, it couldn’t have been more appropriate. The sign looming over the set read, ‘Hours remaining!’ The irony – you could cut it with a knife. Keith came into the ballroom set riding a bicycle, holding a sign saying PROPERTY DEPARTMENT, RESERVED PARKING FOR KIRK DOUGLAS. He put the sign in front of Jagger’s mike and cycled away. I was up in the rafters with Gram Parsons, who was wearing this big, brown, obviously very expensive shaggy ten-gallon beaver hat. We’re smoking this killer weed – it was that rock’n’roll dope that had that tangy taste to it – got you just underwater, you know – aaaaaaaaaagh! We were stoned out of our gourds, and Gram was just smiling and laughing.”
STANLEY BOOTH: “On the ground it was darker and still cold and the colors were not so vivid. Keith and I stood sharing a joint, and watching one bright blue-white point in the blue-gray corner of the sky. ‘The morning star,’ Keith said, ‘and when she’s gone we’ll have the sun.’ Jagger stood slightly apart from everyone, leaning against a lifeguard’s chair. ‘I’ve got to find a place to live,’ he said. ‘Got to think about the future, because obviously I can’t do this forever. I mean we’re so old. We’ve been going for eight years, and we can’t go on for another eight. I mean if you can do it you will do it, but I just can’t, I mean we’re so old. Bill’s thirty-three.’ Keith took an opposing view, ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re sixty-eight and bald. If you can do it, there’s somebody who can dig it. But if you’re a rock’n’roller, you’ve got to be on the stage. A rock’n’roller doesn’t exist unless he’s on the stage.’”
ALICE COOPER: “I was at Zappa’s cabin one time when Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull came in. They were stoned or drunk, and Frank threw them out. I couldn’t believe it. Imagine, a fly on the wall like me, afraid to breathe around them, and that happened. Frank told them, ‘Come back when you’re straight.’ Incredible! He didn’t take drugs, maybe once in a while a Coors beer or a sip of whiskey, but that was it.”
BILL HARKLEROAD: “I don’t know how many Rolling Stones were there at the time, but Mick Jagger certainly was, as were The Who and Marianne Faithfull. She was so ripped she was drooling - but what a babe - I was star struck! It was funny because Jagger really didn’t mean a whole lot to me at that point. I’d played all their tunes in various bands. To me he really wasn’t a singer - he was a “star”. But when I actually met him, all I can remember thinking is, “How could you be a star? You’re too little!” ....I ended up in this jam session in a circle of people about six or seven feet apart and we’re playing Be-Bop-a-Lu-La”! Don, Captain Beefheart, was to my immediate left wearing his big madhatter hat and to his immediate left was Mick Jagger and right around the circle all these people were playing, Frank included. So I’m jamming with these guys almost too nervous to be able to move or breathe. I started to ease up after I noticed that Jagger seemed to be equally intimidated. Then we went into Muddy Waters’ “Rollin’ & Tumblin’” and a couple of blues things and that was it. It was such a strange experience - somehow just out of nowhere I’m down in Hollywood meeting Frank Zappa and this whole entourage of famous people like Jagger, Marianne Faithfull and Pete Townshend. What an audition! There I was 19 years old and I’m very taken with these big important people.”
GAIL ZAPPA: “Mick Jagger came over to our cabin with Marianne Faithfull, and she spent a few minutes demonstrating her ability on the tambourine, and then pulled her clothing apart to reveal the bruises it caused on her ass and on her hip. That was very exciting. I also remember that Frank had gotten a splinter in his foot – we were all walking around barefoot, and there were these wood floors that hadn’t been taken care of – and Mick Jagger got down on his hands and knees and grabbed Frank’s foot in order to see what kind of assistance he could offer. Frank was really taken aback by that. I have very strong feelings about it – it was very genuine and very spontaneous.”
ELIZABETH WINDER: “That Santa Ana breeze spiked with electric
sex – Marianne sensed it in the jasmine-y air of the Canyons, rich terpenic,
heavy with indoles. Some dark madness
was brewing outside the Hills’ rarefied haven.
While Mick lounged by the pool, ‘all that Gimme Shelter stuff’ was
coming home to roost. Love-ins had given
way to bloodlust in California, and nihilistic fringe groups hailed Mick as the
devil incarnate.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Mick rented a house in the Hollywood Hills. Anita had a chauffeur and limo outside her house twenty-four hours a day to take her anywhere she wanted to go. She would stumble into the limo, go and get some acid, then come back and trip. I also spent a lot of time with Pamela Mayall and Andee Cohen, just sort of swimming and lounging by the pool, doing a little coke and a lot of raving around. But no smack. Andee and I had cocktails in air-conditioned bars. Anita didn’t come out till later.”
PHIL KAUFMAN: “Anita
was a lovely lady. I used to take her shopping
in LA. I remember hanging out with her
and Keith. She was unpretentious and
just a nice person. I remember we all
went to a club to see Ray Charles.
During that night she asked me to stand guard by the ladies room while
she went in there to do drugs.”
EVE BABITZ: “Gram Parsons was ripe for the fall, but he wanted to find somebody who he thought was worthy of falling off the tree for. The Rolling Stones came into town, and Gram went over to see them, and he never came back. He went over to the Chateau Marmont and degenerated into the quagmire of the Sunset Strip.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “Gram arranged for us to go see this show with Ray Charles and Tina Turner – this one was in Las Vegas – he’d always be doing things like that. I took to Gram right away – he was just incredible – wonderful, handsome and smooth and southern – and guitar player, the lot – he was great – had the most beautiful voice – and he knew so many songs, apart from all that he wrote – and he used to just play.”
MISS PAMELA: “I saw the demise of Gram. He was a drug addict. He let it overtake him. He didn’t need to die. And I still feel him. He was unfinished. The best concert I ever saw live was The Burritos at the Whisky one night. Gram was singing’ She Once Lived Here,’ a George Jones song he turned me on to. He opened my whole heart up to country music. Anyway, Gram was crying and wept through the song. He felt the music. Tears were coming down and no one was noticing. The dance floor at the Whisky had a ledge around it. I remember leaning on that and watching, looking around, no one was noticing and this guy was weeping at the fuckin’ Whisky over a George Jones song. It was the best thing I’ve ever seen.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Listen, they didn’t have to corrupt Gram Parsons! Don’t you understand Gram Parsons was already ripe for the picking? He was ready for absolutely anything! He was ripe, just like I was ripe and just like so many were ripe for the whole experience. It’s just like what happens when an apple gets too ripe to hang on a tree! Who knows how far it’s going to fall?”
OSSIE CLARK: “One night I was at Mick’s house in London – I was designing the costumes for this 1969 tour. The principal costume I made for him was dominated by a black and red shirt with streamers – half black and half red with one black streamer and one red streamer, set off by a red white and blue Uncle Sam top hat… He’d put on a tape of the music that would be played on the tour and he’d dance around and say, ‘I’d like to do this and that,’ and we kind of evolved our costume ideas together. But for this trip, our costume night was different. Mick danced around with great intensity and he was telling me in a stream of what seemed subconscious feelings, somewhat incoherent, what he wanted to convey. It was more than just describing costumes or anything like that, it was as if he had become Satan and was announcing his evil intentions. He was reveling in his role. Frightening, truly frightening. I always knew that Mick had several clearly defined personas – talk about a split personality! But this was a side of Mick never revealed before. He was rejoicing in being Lucifer.”
TERRY REID: “One tour with the Stones is enough for anybody’s lifetime. Partying for 30 dates with Keith Richards, there is nothing more to see. If anybody can put a party together, Keith is the expert. We’d fly into a city, do the gig and fly to the next city. So how do you get a party together? Easy if you’re Keith. He gets on the phone two gigs ahead, and he has a party organized in this hotel, and one going in another, in case one is no good. No one’s gonna say no. There’d be a myriad of characters and miscreants, and he’d book another room for himself in a different hotel, so you never knew where he was. Keith always says, ‘You’ve gotta be a moving target.’ That tour, the only time I could relax, get some peace and quiet, was when we got onstage. It was unbelievable, we never saw daylight.”
STANLEY BOOTH: "In the early days the Stones could and did handle a riot every night, night after night, kept on going, taking no dope of any kind. 'You couldn't,' Keith said. 'You couldn't keep going if you did, not even booze, no pills, nothing.' But in 1969 things had changed. It would be impossible to endure a world that makes you work and suffer, impossible to endure history, if it weren't for the fleeting moments of ecstasy. As you get older, it's harder to cook up the energy, even if your life is composed of distant beaches, soft female skin, plane rides, cold concrete arenas, cops, fatigue, cocaine, heroin, morphine, marijuana, busted amplifiers, riots. You have to get it from somewhere..."
KEITH RICHARDS: “What are these kids like now? I mean, do they watch TV or are they turning on in the basement? The audience used to be composed of ninety percent chicks twelve and thirteen. My first thought on this tour was, Where are they now? The audiences are much more intimate now. They listen more. We can play much better.”
STEPHEN DAVIS: “The three Madison Square Garden shows were sellouts and the best music of the tour; everything had to come together for the live album and the film. By this time, the Rolling Stones probably were the greatest rock and roll band in the world. People thought Mick Jagger believed it, anyway. Terry Reid opened all the concerts. Janis Joplin watched the first show from the side of the stage, after dueting with Tina Turner during the Revue’s set. Janis was taking an occasional nip from her omnipresent bottle of Southern Comfort. When Mick sang ‘Live With Me,’ drunken Janis yelled back, ‘You don’t have the balls!’ Jimi Hendrix came backstage on the last night, looking blasted but jamming deftly, playing Mick Taylor’s guitar upside down. Mick Jagger worked on his makeup and ignored Hendrix, still annoyed because Jimi had put a move on Marianne years before. After the Stones played their best show of the tour, Mick stole Hendrix’s beloved girlfriend, the celestial black groupie Devon Wilson, and brought her back to his hotel for three days of peace and love. Jimi commemorated their tryst in his great song ‘Dolly Dagger.’”
STANLEY BOOTH: “Then a lean, high-cheek-boned brooding-eyed black man came onstage. Wearing his gunfighter’s gun, stroking it with obscene expertise, and even Keith’s image, the worst image in the room – Indian, pirate, witch, the image that grins at death – reverted to what it was when he first heard Chuck Berry: a little English schoolboy in his uniform and cap.”
STANLEY BOOTH: “Mick Taylor handed his guitar to Hendrix and asked him to play. ‘Oh, I can’t,’ he said. ‘I have to string it different.’ Hendrix was left-handed, but he went ahead and played the guitar upside down, wizard that he was. As Hendrix played, I went into the bathroom to talk to Jagger, who was putting mascara on his lashes. Hendrix had tried to take Marianne Faithfull away from Mick, and he wasn’t about to stand around and listen to him play, upside down or sideways. Jagger seemed distracted, but I figured it was because he was about to go onstage. I didn’t know that elsewhere in his life a black girl was telling him she was going to have his baby, and a blond girl (who two weeks ago had been threatening to join the tour) was telling him goodbye.”
SAM CUTLER: "Mick fixed me with a baleful stare and said we had to talk. 'Sam, when you're introducing the band, please don't call us the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world.' I replied like some London gangster: 'Well, either you fuckin' are or you ain't. What the fuck is it gonna be?'"
OSSIE CLARK: “We went out and took our seats, the Stones appeared, the first note was played and the whole place erupted like a tiger roaring. I almost blacked out. This was not the wave of adulation I was accustomed to hearing, no, this was like a mob being exhorted by a dictator. And then when Mick went into his Lucifer routine with the black and red streamers flying, the audience seemed to spit out its defiance. He introduced himself as a man of wealth and taste who had been around a long time, had taken men’s souls, and achieved a catalogue of Satanic triumphs. I was trembling I was so frightened. And the more the audience’s reaction intensified, the more Mick baited them. I expected a riot, an explosion. I escaped before the concert ended, went back to the house, packed my bag, and immediately left for New York. Even when I got to New York I couldn’t shake off the scary, ominous feelings of that night. It stayed with me. For a week or more after that, I’d wake in the night with a heavy sweat.”
ETHAN RUSSELL: “The Altamont concert was seen as simply the next logical upward tick of the youth explosion, which had already risen in a steady, ascendant line from the early 1960s to this moment. It had always gotten bigger, always gotten better, always gotten higher. We were stardust. We were golden. And we were going to get ourselves back to the Altamont garden. Here, as at Hyde Park, the show went on.”
RONNIE SCHNEIDER: “The night before the concert was just mystical. There would be three or four of us walking around the land at Altamont and people would come up and follow… a quiet procession just following us around. It was so nice and laid-back and beautiful, sitting around the campfire, drinking wine, everybody talking. That’s why Keith decided to stay because it was so fantastic. The night before was beautiful: a great prelude to what we all thought was going to happen.”
ETHAN RUSSELL: “Altamont was a dull, lifeless landscape, as different from San Francisco as the Siberian steppes are from Paris parks. There was no hint of green at all, not a tree, not a blade of grass. The color was baked brown, the hills parched and arid. There were tie-dyed flags (the emblems of the ‘tribes’) poking above the crowd, and Volkswagen buses parked at its edges. Beyond them, below the speedway, stood numerous automobile wrecks, carcasses from races held there, icons of another generation’s idea of a good time.”
MICHAEL LYDON: “You could, you know, wander from campfire to campfire and see people smoking pot and everything. But there were a lot of really weird hippies. There were people who had had weird experiences; there were people who were damaged, or people who had been in prison for drugs. There were girls who were just sort of wandering from guy to guy – talking astrology stuff – that you knew was just unbalanced. People adrift, homeless, spaced, and so ill-educated that they didn’t have any defense against culty-type vibes.”
SAM CUTLER: "Everywhere I looked, I saw people with crazed expressions on their faces, suffering from some form of bum trip. Jackson said bad acid was no doubt responsible, but we were shocked at the numbers of people who seemed to be affected. They were in the hundreds, if not thousands, and Jackson muttered to me, 'Man, this is an ugly scene, real ugly.' People were offering us acid for free, and I asked someone where he got it. He grinned like a maniac and said, 'They're giving it away, man, giving it away.' I never did find out who 'they' were."
MISS PAMELA: “As a matter of extreme principle, I left Altamont an hour before the Stones came on. Scrunge and filth unlimited! I really thought that people would be united and brought together in a lovely way… but nobody cared about each other. I lasted until the Burritos were over and the slimy fucked-up Hell’s Angels started throwing beer on me and no one around me cared. I started crying and cursing and we split.”
GRACE SLICK: “Woodstock was a bunch of stupid slobs in the mud. Altamont was a bunch of angry slobs in the mud.”
LESTER BANGS: “Altamont. It was great! I was really glad I went – no question of preferring that experience to Woodstock, which I missed. But, I remember thinking all day, ‘If I was waiting to see anybody but the Stones, I’d leave this fucking shitheap right now.’ I remember the naked sobbing girl who came stumbling down past us, shoved by some irate redded-out boyfriend up the hill, everyone ogling her and snickering, and her attempts to cover herself as she dazedly picked her way back to her friends, stumbling as she stepped uncertainly through the tribal circles of beatified freaks who dug it all laughing and grabbing. And I remember the freaked-out kid shrieking ‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’ I remember the Angels vamping on him, too, and then seeing him passed in a twitching gel over the heads in the first few rows and then dumped on the ground to snivel at the feet of total strangers who would ignore him, because the Stones were coming on in a minute which would be two hours. But nobody wanted to take their eyes off the stage for fear of missing them.”
CHARLIE WATTS: “The backstage was full of people. A lot of them were fucked up. I was talking to a couple of the Angels when the tent flap wobbled and one of them whacked it with a billiard cue – there was probably some kid’s head behind it.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “I’d been
there 24 hours, I just couldn’t wait to get out of that place. It was fuck-ups, the beat-ups, chaos, our
people telling us not to go on yet, let the people cool down a bit. Those campfire sessions, they always go on
longer than expected anyway.”
ZACHARY LAZAR: “It had already been a day and a half of wine and Quaaludes, seizures by the medicine tent, fist-fights, barking dogs, but it was possible not to look at any of that if you didn’t want to look at it. Some of them broke out into fits of dancing and singing, buoyed by the bright, sunny day. There was a procession of people in flowers and beads who pushed a colorfully painted cart through the crowd, its spoked wheels as high as their shoulders. Inside the bed was a blue cow made of papier-mache, like something from India. In spite of everything they knew about the band, in spite of everything the band embodied, the crowd was thinking about Woodstock, the glow of having been there. They all wanted this to be something like that, and they were already a little frantic, wanting a good spot, not wanting to miss out.”
ALBERT MAYSLES: “When the acts began, leading off with Santana and all that brass, the mood got better, some kids began to get up and dance, and we were getting it all with our cameras. But just when Santana and his group were heating up and creating a kind of fiesta mood, the disturbances began. Some kid tried to get near the sage and the wall of Hell’s Angels clubbed him down with their pool cues. A naked, obese man, dazed with drugs, wandered around until the Hell’s Angels pool cues bludgeoned him. Right in front of us, a photographer taking pictures of this savagery was attacked by the Hell’s Angels, who beat him with their cues, kicked him with their studded boots and then jammed his camera into his face, leaving him moaning and bleeding on the ground. There were other pockets of violence out of camera shot, and during Santana’s performance unopened beer cans were lobbed from the Hell’s Angel’s school bus, aimed at members of the band.”
STANLEY BOOTH: "The band sounded amazingly sharp. The crowd was more still. Without knowing exactly what, we all felt that something bad had happened. I assumed, and I was not given to flights of horrible imaginings, that the Hells Angels had killed several people... 'Midnight Rambler' had scared me when I first heard it, because it was true, as nobody at Altamont could deny, the dark is filled with terror, murder and evil ride the night air. 'I'll stick my knife right down your throat, honey, and it hurts.'"
SAM CUTLER: "The further we got from the stage, the weirder it became. It was absolutely freezing. People were not dressed to deal with the low temperatures and thousands went on the hunt for fuel to throw on the fires. There wasn't a fencepost left within miles of Altamont, and several derelict barns were pushed over by the crowd and demolished to feed the hungry flames. For the cattle farmers whose properties adjoined the concert site it was an absolute disaster. Traumatized cattle were wandering all over the county and thousands of people were trespassing. I saw abandoned cars burning and people with madness in their eyes dancing in the firelight. I became very afraid."
ALBERT MAYSLES: “A short distance from the stage, there was sudden, violent movement. The mass of people pulled apart, creating a narrow path, and we caught sight of a young black man running frantically toward the stage. There was a blur of activity, his right arm raised up in the air as a second person became involved with him. When we saw this sudden opening in the crowd we turned out camera on it. What were these two people doing? It looked like they were dancing, and then there was a flash of something shiny. The cameraman, his eye to the camera, said, ‘What the hell goes on, two people dancing with all this shit going on?’ The camera was on it but what had happened was too fast for us. As is turned out, the camera had recorded the killing of the black kid. The dance we thought we saw was a dance of death.”
SAM CUTLER: "The 'peace and love' my generation had so assiduously promulgated as the antidote to the violence and hypocrisy of 'straight' society was a hollow miasma. This was not a community intent on caring for and loving one another. Before me was the ugly truth of what we had collectively wrought, manifested in greed, blood, drug overdoses, spilled guts, and hatred. The peace and love generation was busy smashing itself to bits."
MICK FARREN: “When faced with some real Satanic majesty, Mick turned into basically a kind of a flapping old drag queen. ‘Oh, people, why are we fighting. Oh. Brothers and sisters.’ This is the moment when you assert your authority. To a degree, Keith did. ‘Listen, you bastards, if it doesn’t stop, we’re out of here.’ Cut-and-dried old rocker. Fuck this shit. That’s what I expected from Jagger and that’s what I didn’t get. It was an emperor’s-new-clothes kind of moment.”
ETHAN RUSSELL: “What I remember clearly is running into the pitch blackness, up the side of a hill, until suddenly halted by a chain-link fence. Behind me a man had been stabbed to death, though I didn’t know it yet. I remember it being quiet, though it couldn’t have been, since the Rolling Stones were still onstage playing to 300,000 people. Maybe it was my heart pounding or the adrenaline. All I wanted was to get out of there, away from the chaos and the Hells Angels. So I dropped off the top of the truck immediately behind the stage (where the Hells Angels had deposited me) and ran off into the blackness to where I hoped the helicopter that brought me to this desolate place would still be waiting.”
JO BERGMAN: “We were taken up the hill to the helicopter, and I had this feeling that it was all like you were the last person on the last chopper out of ‘Nam.”
ASTRID LUNDSTROM: “We knew that the helicopter we were on was the last one out of there. By the time we got to the helicopter the girlfriend of the guy who got stabbed was outside. The cops were with her, She was hysterical; she was saying things like, ‘Is he dead?’ She was totally freaking out. Then the music stopped and everybody suddenly rushed toward the helicopter. It was unbelievable. I couldn’t believe how many people were coming in.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “I was amazed that things didn’t go more wrong than they did. Meredith Hunter was murdered. Three others died accidentally. With a show that size sometimes the body count is four or five people trampled or suffocated. But at Altamont it was the dark side of human nature, what could happen in the heart of darkness, a descent to caveman level within a few hours, thanks to Sonny Barger and his lot, the Angels. And bad red wine. It was Thunderbird and Ripple, the worst fucking rotgut wines there are, and bad acid. It was the end of the dream as far as I was concerned. There was such a thing as flower power, not that we saw much of it, but the drive for it was there. And I’ve no doubt that living in Haight-Ashbury from ’66 to ’70, and even beyond, was pretty cool. Everybody got along and it was a different way of doing things. But America was so extreme, veering between Quaker and the next minute free love, and it’s still like that. And now the mood was anti-war, and basically leave us alone, we just want to get high.”
MISS PAMELA: “I called the hotel and Mick asked me to come straight over. I was thrilled, but since he sounded flipped-out, I asked him what was wrong, and he said, ‘Don’t you know what happened?’ A guy had been knifed, and died right in front of the Stones as they played free for the masses. He also told me someone shot at him and he was a nervous wreck. I arrived and sat around with the group as they rehashed the sequence of events that led up to this odd death right in front of their eyes. Mick kept saying he felt like it was his fault, and maybe he would quit rock and roll forever. Everyone was extremely high. I felt like some inadequate female fly on the wall, stuck in the middle of No Laughing Matter. Gram was there, leaning against the wall wearing black leather and eye makeup, nodding out. Keith was wearing cowboy clothes. It looked like they were turning into each other. Mick held my hand and seemed slightly reassured that I was there, but other than that, I was feeling stuck in awesome flypaper. I wanted to say something insightful, something so meaningful that it would lift his heart.”
JIM MILLER: “After that bloodstained tour, the Stones’ music seemed to become a mythic force unto itself – ecstatic, ironic, all-powerful, an erotic exorcism for a doomed decade.”
ETHAN RUSSELL: “I saw the road below us, through it was a massive traffic jam, and then realized that it wasn’t lanes of cars creeping along bumper to bumper, but thousands of cars abandoned in the middle of the freeway, a giant parking lot.”
MICHAEL WALKER: “Altamont’s power lay not in its supposed evil but in showing baby boomers the folly of believing their own hype, at such a portentous moment, with cameras rolling. It was a stunning repudiation.”
ROCK SCULLY: “Woodstock and Altamont are seen as polar opposites in a mass-media-generated parable of light and darkness but they were just two ends of the same mucky stick, the net result of the same disease: the bloating of mass bohemia in the late sixties.”
NICK KENT: “Both ‘Performance’ and ‘Gimme Shelter’ – which opened in London just a few short months later – focused down hard on the calamitous predicaments that tend to prevail whenever narcissistic would-be ‘outlaws’ come into direct contact with the infinitely more barbaric article… No one came out looking good from the experience. The onlookers resembled doomed sheep on bad drugs, the Angels acted like sadistic animals and the Stones seemed clearly out of their depth yet still numbly detached from the madness they were inspiring. Mick Jagger in particular is captured on film looking decidedly forlorn and fearful during his Altamont performance – a control freak suddenly confronted with dire circumstances way beyond his control.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “When the horror erupted at Altamont it must have looked to many people like the demons coming home to roost, but not to the Stones. They were just playing a dangerous game that came to life. It was only after ‘Let It Bleed’ that weird things began happening to them.”
SAM CUTLER: “Whenever we got to a hotel, Keith was calling
Anita. He desperately missed her. He pined for her… He was never unfaithful to
her. I was with him every minute of the
day of the 1969 tour and he was never with any other women. He was a one-woman man – a great romantic and
a gentleman.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “After Marlon was born it was a very heavy period and I suffered for about three months. There were so many creeps in the house. Then when Keith went on the American tour that was very hard for me because this is the time when the father should be with the child and I felt completely forgotten. So I just started taking drugs again, and then I smothered all my feelings with drugs. I spent most of my time with Marianne, just sitting together.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “[Many years later] as my friend Cynthia and I were driving on our way to the Sonoma Mission Inn we passed through a dismal patch of scrubland. ‘God, Cynthia, what’s happening? It’s suddenly got very dark here,’ I said. ‘Where the hell are we?’ ‘Don’t you know what this place is? Sugar, this is Altamont.’”
