The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. Stanley Booth
element for this generation has been that we all, girls too, grew up wearing pants that clearly showed our sexual organs, straining right there against the denim), and to Wyman, a tiny man with the face of a funny gargoyle, who started a groupie empire, in fact, the groupie empire (‘It originated with Bill,’ Keith said. ‘He screwed thousands. He marked it all down in his diary.’ Actually he stopped counting after, I think, 278), Keith said, ‘He’s not doin’ much, that band’s so bad, but every once in a while, wow—’
Wyman, watching Berry, who had let nothing, not even prison, stop him from singing about sixteen-year-old pussy, smiled and said, ‘Yeah,’ e’s great, inne—’
When Berry’s set ended we left the Whisky (our leaving, like all our arrivals and departures, swift and dramatic, everyone staring at the Stones as we swept out into limousines at the curb) and rolled, four carloads of us, down the superhighway toward the Corral, a nightclub in Topanga Canyon, to hear Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers.
Along the miles and miles of highway, we (the Wattses, Bill and Astrid, two or three others) were talking about music – Shirley who loves old-time rock and roll very elated about seeing Chuck Berry – when for the first time on this tour we encountered Wyman’s Weakness. Bill told the driver to stop at a gas station, got to go to the loo, and we rolled on and no place was open, and Bill again said, Hey, you gotta stop somewhere, gotta go to the loo, and the driver said, Doesn’t seem to be any place open. Well, stop at one that isn’t open, Bill said, just let me out of the car, and Charlie reminded him that ‘It was you got us in trouble like that the time before, Bill.’
It was March 18, 1965, the last night of the Rolling Stones’ fifth tour of England. The tour had lasted two weeks, fourteen consecutive nights of playing movie houses, two shows nightly. It had not been especially eventful. Three shows had been recorded for a concert album. In Manchester, at the Palace, a girl fell fifteen feet from the upper circle of seats into the stalls. The fall went almost unnoticed as 150 screaming girls stormed the stage when Mick sang ‘Pain in My Heart.’ The girl ran away from attendants attempting to take her to an ambulance and was later seen outside the stage door, still screaming, ‘Mick, Mick.’ At Sunderland, where the Stones played the Odeon, fans wanted to buy the water the Stones had used to wash their hair, and someone sold their fag ends, cigaret butts, for a penny each. At Sheffield, a grown man seeking an autograph pulled Charlie off his stool while he was playing. At the Leicester Trocadero, another girl fell out of the upper circle, losing her front teeth. ‘We were scared,’ Mick said later. ‘You know how these things catch on. We could easily end up with an outbreak of people swan-diving from their balconies and somebody killed.’
At the Rochester Odeon, which they would remember as one of the worst theaters in England, the stage door watchman wouldn’t believe, because of the way they looked, that the Stones were the Show, and refused to let them in. Keith shoved him down and they went in anyway. At the Sunderland Odeon, while Charlie was announcing the song ‘Little Red Rooster,’ a girl leapt onto Mick’s back. He calmly carried her to the edge of the stage and set her down.
On the last night of the tour, March 18, after two shows at the ABC Theater at Romford, the Stones headed for London in Mick’s Daimler. Before he reached home, Wyman needed to urinate. As their road manager Ian Stewart described the situation, ‘Really, if you sit in a dressing room all night, drinking Coca-Cola, go onstage for about thirty minutes, leap about like idiots, drop your guitar to run out into a car in the bloody cold weather, you’re just about ready for a quick tiddle.’
Mick turned the big, black car into a Francis service station in Romford Road, Forest Gate, east London. It was about eleven-thirty. According to the station attendant, forty-one-year-old Charles Keeley, ‘a shaggy-haired monster wearing dark glasses’ got out of the car and asked, ‘Where can we have a piss here?’ Keeley told Wyman that the public toilets were closed for reconditioning, which was a lie, and then denied him access to the staff toilet. Wyman’s behavior, according to Keeley, ‘did not seem natural or normal.’ He was ‘running up and down the forecourt, taking off his dark glasses and dancing.’ Then ‘eight or nine youths and girls got out of the car.’ Mr Keeley, ‘sensing trouble,’ told the driver of the car, Mick Jagger, to get them off the forecourt. Jagger pushed him aside and said, ‘We’ll piss anywhere, man.’ This phrase was taken up by the others, who repeated it in ‘a gentle chant.’ One danced to the phrase. Then Wyman went to the road and urinated against a garage. Mick Jagger and Brian Jones followed suit farther down the road. According to Mr Keeley, ‘Some people did not seem offended. They even went up and asked for autographs.’ One customer, however, told the Stones their behavior was ‘disgusting.’ At this the Stones ‘started shouting and screaming.’ The incident ended with the Daimler driving away, its occupants making ‘a well-known gesture with two fingers.’
Mr Keeley took down the license number. The customer who had spoken out against the Stones was one Eric Lavender, aged twenty-two, secretary-warden of a Forest Gate community youth center. ‘If the police do not prosecute, I will press a private prosecution,’ said the indignantly alliterative Lavender.
At the police prosecution of the affair, the Stones told a different, and much shorter, story. Wyman testified that he had said nothing more to Mr Keeley than ‘“May I use the toilet?” I never swear.’ Being refused, they got back in the car and drove off. Mick also denied any insulting behavior and said that he had never sworn at school, university, or since. Brian said he was not the type of person to insult anyone – ‘I am easily embarrassed.’ The court sided with Messrs. Keeley and Lavender, and the Stones were ordered to pay fifteen guineas costs, in spite of Wyman’s plaintive statement: ‘I happen to suffer from a weak bladder.’
But as he told the story now, while we rolled down the California coast on this pleasurable night, this pleasure-seeking night, before a tour that would be stranger than any of the Stones’ previous ones, Bill’s memory lifted the story to heroic proportions: ‘. . . so I go behind this place, see, and I’ve got me chopper out, when here comes this bloke waving a bloody electric torch, cryin, ’Ere, ’Ere—’
‘He probably had to have a torch to see it,’ Shirley said.
We found a gas station and while waiting for Bill we lost the other limousines. None of us knew where the Corral was, least of all the driver, and we raced along the highway looking for spoor. Somebody thought it was down that turning to the right, is that it, nah, that place is closed, and then there it was on the left, a little roadhouse, capacity about two hundred, tables and a small dance floor, crowded with rednecks and members of Los Angeles rock and roll society. Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys was present, and so were the young ladies Miss Christine and Miss Mercy, members of the Bizarre Records act called the G.T.O.’s, meaning Girls Together Outrageously or Orally or anything else starting with O. Miss Mercy was dark and heavy, a fortuneteller with kohl-rimmed eyes, many bracelets, rings, and scarves. Miss Christine, willowy and blond, in a long red dress with virginal lace at the bosom, was a California-bred magnolia blossom. Dancing together, they glided before us like one person, red, yellow and blue jukebox lights washing over the room as Gram sang ‘I made her the image of me.’
We sat at a long table, the Stones Gang and their friends and women, drinking pitchers and pitchers of beer, whooping and hollering while the Burritos played ‘Lucille’ and old Boudleaux Bryant songs, a real rock and roll hoedown. It had been nearly six years since the Stones played in English clubs where sweat condensed on the walls and people swung from the rafters. They were glad when they stopped working in clubs and went on to bigger places, but later they missed them, as they had come, over nearly three years, since their drug arrests, to miss playing itself.
Now, getting ready to go back on the road, it was good to be at the Corral and see all these different types, motorcycle boots, eagle tattoos, lesbian romancers, white English niggers, Beach Boys, Georgia boys, brought together by the music. The night seemed to pass like a dream, one minute all of us were singing along and the next minute it was closing time and we were going out. We dozed on the way home, and when we got there I drank a glass of raw milk and went to bed, with my notebook, the letter inside, under my pillow. I was nearly unconscious, but I always read something before I go to sleep. I had been rereading Kerouac, preparing