The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. Stanley Booth

Booth, relating a backstage palaver in the UK in 1963. Booth instantly steps into Stewart’s shoes: ‘If the Stones were astonished to be playing with Bo Diddley, how must Bo Diddley have felt, seeing a blond English cherub, with a bruised and swollen eye, playing just like Elmore James, who had learned from Robert Johnson, who had learned at the crossroads from the Devil himself.’ But Booth’s presence is so strong for certain nights in 1969 that you almost don’t want to be there, for fear that the music as Booth renders it won’t live up to the hopes invested in it – invested in it by the musicians, the audience, the writer, and, catching the fever, the reader. And there are the incidents from Altamont, the disastrous free concert that ended both the band’s tour and the decade the tour summed up, which are so poetically horrible – ‘a tall white boy with a black cloud of electric hair was dancing, shaking, infuriating the Angels by having too good a time . . . [an] Angel pushed him and another Angel started laying into the crowd with a pool cue and then a number of Angels were grabbing people, hitting and kicking, the crowd falling back before the fury with fantastic speed, the dancer running away from the stage, the Angels catching him from behind, the heavy end of a pool cue in one long arc crashing into the side of his head, felling him like a sapling so that he lay straight and didn’t move and I thought, My God, they’ve killed him’ – that they truly make you wish you weren’t there. I was, as it happened, and as I read Booth’s pages again, forty-two years later, I feel every terror, every horror, every repeating shock. The visions rush back in a flash – a fat man, covered with dried blood, his teeth knocked out, wandering naked behind the stage in the dark, hours after the Hells Angels had beaten him; a naked woman, covered in bruises, clutching a blanket that someone had given her to cover herself with, a foreign object she’d forgotten she had and forgotten to drop, that trailed in the dirt – as if it wasn’t over yet.

      It isn’t; that’s the burden of Booth writing of the time that has passed between a phone call in 1969 – ‘We said goodbye, a thunderhead of music, drugs, money and anguish starting to gather out in the future’ – and the years that followed: ‘How ready were any of us to live in the real world, a world that would each year become more like Altamont?’ Those retrospective prophecies describe why it took Booth fifteen years to write his book, and why, today, it can still take you for a walk down the street, make you laugh, fill you with delight and, as you step off the curb, turn your knees to water.

       for all the children

      We want the heats of the orgy and not its murder, the warmth of pleasure without the grip of pain, and so the future threatens a nightmare, and we continue to waste ourselves . . . we are the cowards who must defend courage, sex, consciousness, the beauty of the body, the search for love, and the capture of what may be, after all, an heroic destiny.

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THE KILLING GROUND

       It is late. All the little snakes are asleep. The world is black outside the car windows, just the dusty clay road in the headlights. Far from the city, past the last crossroads (where they used to bury suicides in England, with wooden stakes driven through their hearts), we are looking for a strange California hillside where we may see him, may even dance with him in his torn, bloody skins, come and play.

       A train overpass opens in the sky before us; as we come out of it there is an unmarked fork in the road. The Crystals are singing ‘He’s a Rebel.’ The driver looks left, right, left again. ‘He don’t know where he’s going,’ Keith says. ‘Do you – are you sure this is the way?’ Mick asks. Turning left, the driver does not answer. The radio is quite loud. ‘Maybe he didn’t hear you.’

      See the way he walks down the street

      Watch the way he shuffles his feet

      Oh, how he holds his head up high

      When he goes walkin’ by

      He’s my guy

      When he holds my hand I’m so proud

      ’Cause he’s not just one of the crowd

      My baby’s always the one

      To try the things they’ve never done

      And just because of that they say

      He’s a rebel

      And he’ll never ever be

      Any good

      He’s a rebel

      ’Cause he never ever does

      What he should

       Mick closes his eyes. Certain we are lost, but so tired, with no sleep for the past forty hours, less able each moment to protest, to change direction, we proceed in a black Cadillac limousine into the vastness of space.

      ‘Something up ahead here,’ the driver says. Parked by the road is a Volkswagen van, a German police dog tied by a rope to the back door handle. The dog barks as we pass. Farther on there are more cars and vans, some with people in them, but most of the people are in the road, walking in small groups, carrying sleeping bags, canvas knapsacks, babies, leading more big ugly dogs. ‘Let’s get out,’ Keith says. ‘Don’t lose us,’ Mick tells the driver, who says, ‘Where are you going?’ but we are already gone, the five of us, Ron the Bag Man, Tony the Spade Heavy, the Okefenokee Kid, and of course Mick and Keith, Rolling Stones. The other members of the band are asleep back in San Francisco at the Huntington Hotel, except Brian, who is dead and, some say, never sleeps.

      The road descends between rolling dry-grass shoulders, the kind of bare landscape where in 1950s science fiction movies the teenager and his busty girlfriend, parked in his hot rod, receive unearthly visitors, but it is crowded now with young people, most with long hair, dressed in heavy clothes, blue jeans, army fatigue jackets, against the December night air that revives us as we walk. Mick is wearing a long burgundy overcoat, and Keith has on a Nazi leather greatcoat, green with mold, that he will leave behind tomorrow or more accurately today, about sixteen hours from now, in the mad blind panic to get away from the place we are lightly swaggering toward. Mick and Keith are smiling, it is their little joke, to have the power to create this gathering by simply wishing for it aloud and the freedom to walk like anybody else along the busy barren path. There are laughter and low talking within groups, but little cross-conversation, though it seems none of us is a stranger; each wears the signs, the insignia, of the campaigns that have brought us, long before most of us have reached the age of thirty, to this desolate spot on the western slope of the New World.

      ‘Tony, score us a joint,’ Keith says, and before we have been another twenty steps giant black Tony has dropped back and fallen into stride with a boy who’s smoking and hands Tony the joint, saying ‘Keep it.’ So we smoke and follow the trail down to a basin where the shoulders stretch into low hills already covered with thousands of people around campfires, some sleeping, some playing guitars, some passing smokes and great red jugs of wine. For a moment it stops us; it has the dream-like quality of one’s deepest wishes, to have all the good people, all one’s family, all the lovers, together in some private country of night. It is as familiar as our earliest dreams and yet so grand and final, camp-fires flickering like distant stars as far as our eyes can see, that it is awesome, and as we start up the hillside to our left, walking on sleeping bags and blankets, trying not to step on anyone’s head, Keith is saying it’s like Morocco, outside the gates of Marrakech, hear the pipes . . .

       The people are camped right up to a cyclone fence topped with barbed wire, and we are trying to find the gate, while from behind us the Maysles film brothers approach across sleeping bodies with blinding blue-white quartz lamps. Mick yells to turn off the lights, but they pretend to be deaf and keep coming. The kids who have been looking up as we pass, saying Hi, Mick, now begin to join us; there is a caravan of young girls and boys strung out in the spotlights when we reach the gate which is, naturally, locked. Inside we can see the Altamont Speedway clubhouse and some people we know standing outside it. Mick calls, ‘Could we get in, please?’ and one of them comes