the Stones had no real plans for a record label of their own. ‘That’s about all we’ll get, the label,’ Mick said. ‘Unless you hire a fleet of lorries and sell the records for half price there’s no point in it.’
The meeting, it appeared, would be friendly and dull, without the conflict that once characterized the Stones’ encounters with the press. So the great feeling of unity with the Stones this crowd would have had three years ago watching them meet the press on television was missing, and a reporter was moved to ask for a reply to the statement in Ralph Gleason’s column of the day before that ‘the price of tickets for your concerts was too high and that a lot of people who would like to see you can’t really afford it.’
Without seeming to defer in the slightest degree to the prattling of a middle-aged jazz columnist, Mick generously said, ‘Maybe we can fix something up for those people.’
‘A free concert?’ someone asked, but Mick said he didn’t know and evaded the issue with aristocratic ease: ‘We can’t set the price of tickets. I don’t know how much people can afford. I mean, I’ve no idea.’
Someone else asked whether the U.S. State Department gave the Stones any trouble or asked them to sign anti-drug statements before allowing them to enter the country. Mick said, ‘Of course not, we’ve never done anything wrong,’ and through the laughter and applause Rona Barrett asked, ‘Do you consider yourself an anti-establishment group, or are you just putting us on?’
‘We’re just putting you on,’ Mick said.
‘Taking you for a ride,’ Keith murmured, reptile eyelids drooping.
Rona presses on: ‘How did you enjoy eating at the Yamato last night?’
‘She was under the table,’ Keith explained, but it didn’t stop her.
Mick told a questioner that the Stones hoped to hire Ike and Tina Turner, Terry Reid, B.B. King, and Chuck Berry as supporting acts for the tour, and the question of a free concert returned. These young reporters seemed to suggest even more strongly than had Ralph Gleason that the Stones had an obligation to a new community, formed largely in the Stones’ image. It seemed the sort of thing that the Stones in their independence had never flirted with, and Mick avoided the subject again: ‘If we feel that’s what’s got to be done, then we’ll do it. I’m leaving that very fluid, you notice, I’m not committing meself.’
‘And how is Marianne Faithfull?’ Rona Barrett asked Mick. If you didn’t know better, you would have thought she was the only reporter interested in the Stones’ personal lives.
Three days after Brian Jones died, Marianne Faithfull, Jagger’s régulière for the past two years, in Australia with Mick to appear in a movie, looked into a mirror and saw not her face but Brian’s. Then she took an overdose of sleeping pills. Only luck and prompt medical attention saved her life. After recuperating in Australia and Switzerland, she returned to Mick’s house in London, where she was now, feeling neglected.
‘She’s all right,’ Mick said to Rona. ‘How are you?’
Rona, undaunted, wanted to know of any plans Mick had to run for public office: ‘I’m not feeling very messianic,’ he said, laughing.
Other people asked more questions about festivals and free concerts. The subject would not go away; this year the popular imagination had been outraged or delighted, captured anyway, by the pop festivals, mammoth exhibitions of drugs, sex, and music. Last year’s spectacle was the police violence in Chicago during the Democratic Party’s nominating convention; the year before that, we had the discovery by the mass media of the widespread use among the young of psychedelic drugs; this year there had been giant music festivals at such places as Woodstock, Hyde Park, Atlanta, Denver, the Isle of Wight, Dallas, where people came without paying, whether or not tickets were sold, went naked, had sex and took drugs openly with almost no arrests because there was no way short of war to arrest hundreds of thousands of people. It seemed that the World War II babies had grown into a force traditional society might be unable to restrain. There should be, Keith said about the festivals, ‘ten times more of them.’
But, someone still wanted to know, what about the prices of the tickets to the Stones’ concerts?
Mick, Keith, and Sam Cutler began talking at once, stopped together, and Sam said, ‘Could I just say this: The prickets—’ And Keith kissed him on the cheek.
They were still, after all, the Rolling Stones. Mick made a little speech, the questions trailed off, and Mick said, ‘Thank you very much, people,’ sounding like the late Merriman Smith ending a presidential press conference.
The Stones left the room. There at the end Mick had said: ‘We aren’t doing this tour for money but because we wanted to play in America and have a lot of fun. We’re really not into that sort of economic scene. I mean, either you’re gonna sing and all that crap or you’re gonna be a fucking economist. We’re sorry people can’t afford to come. We don’t know that this tour is more expensive. You’ll have to tell us.’ It seemed, since the Stones had always avoided having other people tell them what to do, a serious step.
Steckler, Sandison, Jo, and I met the Stones in Bill Wyman’s suite, where the serious question in the sitting room was whether the Stones would release a single record from their new album before the tour started. Steckler suggested they release the album’s country version of ‘Honky Tonk Women,’ their latest single, thus becoming the first musical group to release the same song twice in a row.
Jagger suggested releasing the title track, ‘Let It Bleed,’ as a single ‘if anybody would play it on the radio.’
‘Not with those lyrics,’ Jo said.
‘Well, they’re not just dirty, I mean they’re double entendre,’ Mick said.
‘“If you want someone to cream on, you can cream on me,” is pretty single entendre,’ Jo said.
‘We also have to decide which press you’ll talk to,’ Steckler said, and named several periodicals that had requested interviews.
‘Saturday Review, what’s that like?’ Mick asked.
‘Dullest magazine in America,’ I said. ‘Duller than the Saturday Evening Post. Duller than Grit.’
‘That’s all right, then.’
The meeting was short; nothing was settled, except to try living for a few more days. No blueprint, no master plan.
After lunch of ham sandwiches and beer back at the Oriole house, Steckler, Sandison, and I visited the Laurel Canyon place. A pudgy young man named Bill Belmont, part of Chip Monck’s stage production crew, came along in the limousine with us and pointed out the sights like a tour guide who dreams of being a press agent: ‘That cabin there, that’s Frank Zappa’s house, used to belong to Tom Mix. This house we’re going to, where the Stones are, used to be Carmen Miranda’s house and Wally Cox’s house and then it belonged to Peter Tork of the Monkees and now it belongs to Steve Stills. David Crosby lived there for a while. I can tell you everything. You see that story in Rolling Stone about the Doors? I did that. I told the guy the whole article. He just wrote down what I said.’
At a dirt road on the valley side of Laurel Canyon there was a gate, but it was open and we drove up, the dark green valley walls around us. The house was stone, with a swimming pool and big paved drive where two limousines and two rented sedans were parked. From the far end of the house across
