THE BEAT GOES ON

The Making of a Rolling Stones Fan

Stage One

Getting up at 5:00 a.m. isn’t something I make a habit of. In fact, anything short of Haley’s Comet or an eclipse of the sun doesn’t qualify as a suitable excuse. And yet, in spite of this, I found myself walking down Telegraph Avenue the other day at this ungodly hour in search of the nearest Ticketron, official distributors of tickets for the long-rumored Rolling Stones concert. It wasn’t that I had finally figured out why they’re called “the world’s greatest fock and roll band.” No . . . that came later.

To confuse things, Berkeley is blessed with two Ticketrons, both within a block of the other. In front of the first was a 300-legged human caterpillar that showed definite signs of having spent the night. I began worrying. Was I too late? Had I underestimated the Stones? No time to wonder . . . the challenge had been laid out. More than ever I had to see them. Certainly discouraged, but not yet beaten, I somehow convinced myself that the line was long because nobody knew about the other Ticketron. It had only been open about a month and was hidden in the maze of the University. Sure, that was it! All I had to do was go there and my worries would be over. Slowly now . . . don’t give it away. It scares me sometimes, when I realize the games my mind plays with reality when faced with something I’d rather not accept. But it didn’t last long, for the second Ticketron was just as inhabited.

I resigned myself to waiting in the second line. Almost immediately I was approached by a friend who quickly explained that he was in charge of numbers, wrote my name on a list and gave me a piece of paper scrawled with No. 182. I was now an officially registered member of the line.

Another friend yelled out, and I was soon being filled in on the happenings of the night before. He said the line had started around 3:00 p.m. the day before, a full 19 hours before tickets even went on sale. Realizing this, the numbers had been set-up to free everyone from the confines of the line, without risk of losing their positions. It was agreed that the line would be reassembled at 6:45 a.m., and a group of people had volunteered to stay up all night, getting names and handing out numbers. Looking around, it seemed the political science majors had done their job well. A concert line had-been transformed into a small society in a matter of a few hours. In addition, a campus entertainment group had shown a movie on the wall of the building. What a sight that must have been! Over a hundred people watching Duel in the Sun by starlight.

It appeared the night had been, for the most part, a sleepless one. About 7:00 a.m., the real test came. It was time to reassemble the line. The planners were pretty sure it’d work, but had a couple of bigger than average friends just to make sure. (They weren’t necessary.) Numbers were called, most people showed, and where they didn’t, new numbers were issued. I moved up from No. 182 to 151.

There was no longer any need for continuing the number system. The line had swollen to about 500, but the numbered people were still set off. We had braved the elements together.. . sure . .. some more than others, but that didn’t seem to matter when compared to the casual late comers. We were still a community. It was about then that we bagan to notice that periodically a police car would come by and take pictures of the line. In Berkeley, that’s not so odd, but the fear that it represented helped keep the line close and spirited. A minor victory for the Stones’ line at Ticketron No. 2.

As the final hour approached, everyone began to speculate about their chances of getting tickets. Time for the math majors to shine. Figures were compared, altered, analyzed, agreed on, and the generally accepted conclusion was that taking into consideration high level runoff, and the fact that there were approximately 50 Ticketrons within a reasonable distance of the concert, each agency would get about 300 tickets. Assuming there would be a line at every

Ticketron, 75 people should get tickets. But like I said before, our minds don’t like that kind of reality. (Especially holding No. 151!) Immediately the computer science majors took over. If we could just get the guy to keep punching tickets continually, instead of handling each customer individually, our agency might conceivably come up with more tickets than the others. It was enough hope so that by 11:00 or so, there were still 250 of us, even though all indications were against us.

By noon, there were only 150 of us left. About 19 had gotten tickets. The line became a symphony of desperation.

The guy next to me was saying that this was the first concert he’d felt was important enough to attend in over two years. A guy a little ways away was giving a quick history of the Stones, seemingly to convince himself there was a good reason for remaining in line. While at the same time, a little further down the line, I could hear a guy lamenting that this was going to be the last chance to ever see the Stones. A small group had gathered around a phone book, and was trying to figure out where the most deserted agency might be. Another was leaving to try and get hold of a friend who worked in another Ticketron. The guy in front of me was in a daze. He just kept repeating to himself, “I can’t believe I’m stupid enough to still be here.” About this time, someone started playing a tape of Beggars Banquet. “Pleeese allow me to introduce myself . . .” was met with a resounding chorus of “fuck you Jagger.” And along with this, the undying beat of lament, “this is as close as we’ll ever get!” Could it really be that we needed the Stones that bad?

I decided I needed to get away for awhile, and anyway I was hungry. I had to go by the other Ticketron to get to the donut shop, and things hadn’t changed. I asked for a couple of donuts, and as the girl made my change, she asked if they were sold out yet. I mean My God, was it really so big an event that you could safely assume everybody knew about it? I always thought only the World Series and the Super Bowl were that big. I went back a little dazed but thinking.

It was getting really hot, and only the most determined and desperate remained. Having circled around us for a couple of hours, the ticket scalpers finally moved in. A few around me fell for a quick $20.00. Another went for $25.00, still another for $35.00, and finally someone drug off $ 100 00 for two tickets for Thursday night. (Base price was $5, all seats.) It let up only when the scalpers began to realize their tickets would be worth even more as the concert got closer and the album came out. They went back to circling.

Their visit brought out the worst in everyone. It also didn’t help that it was approaching two o’clock, and only about 30 people had tickets. I think it was at this point, after nine hours of waiting, that I first admitted to myself that I wasn’t going to get tickets. But I didn’t leave yet. I needed to think about all that had happened. People were calling for the trashing of Ticketron. Some were bitching that the other Ticketron had sold more tickets. Still others were spreading rumors about an added concert for Wednesday night, while the really dazed were whispering about a free concert at the end of the tour. The Stones had done it all this time, without having to step on stage. It was finally time to go.

Aftermath

The following day brought a lot of things into question. Not getting tickets is bad enough, having to wait up to 15 hours to find out is ridiculous. The Ticketron I was at came out about right as far as number of tickets distributed, but some of the others didn’t. An agency in downtown San Francisco only distributed tickets to 23 people out of a line of 400. At four tickets per person, that’s a total of 92, and yet the head Ticketron office claims about 300 tickets were transmitted to the agency. Asking around, I found a considerable support for the charge that large numbers of tickets had disappeared into the hands of ,many a Ticketron employee. Ticketron claims to have distributed five and one half times as many tickets on the Monday the Stones’ tickets went on sale as they usually do, on an average day. This I have no reason to question. The tickets went on sale in Chicago, Long Beach, Los Angeles and San Francisco all at the same time on the same day. What seems ludicrous to me is that a local concert has to depend on a computer in Beverly Hills to distribute the tickets; that there’s so little control over which cities go on sale when; and that there seems to be no way under this system to insure that the tickets ever reach the people standing in line. Ticketron is so proud that their computer handled 82,000 tickets that day they didn’t have time to find out exactly what happened in Menlo Park, where an alleged unauthorized Ticketron sprung up. It appears that it had real enough tickets though, and so once again there’s the question of how so many tickets got loose, and subsequently into everyone’s hands except those of the people standing in line.

As for Bill Graham, a spokesman was quoted as saying, “The computer probably blew a fuse or something,” and that Graham “feels really bad about it [the ticket hassle]. He wouldn’t want anybody to have to go through that hassle.”

Well, thanks for the sympathy, but we did go through the hassle. It’s too bad, but a lot of people who spent the day in line aren’t going to see the Stones. By the same token, a lot Of people who didn’t, are. The handling of the sale of Stone’s tickets made two things pretty clear. First, Ticketron and Graham once again showed they’re the business side of rock and roll. Sell the tickets first, then worry about who gets screwed! As for the other thing, it’s a little more optimistic. Through all the shit, it’s even more certain that rock and roll will stand!

Doug Kroll

Grootna is Fonky

Grootna held a party the other night. They were celebrating a major victory, and they invited all their friends. Two days before, they’d gotten word from Columbia Records that they had been kicked off the label, so they just had to celebrate.

Grootna’s first album didn’t exactly make history. Basically, at the time it was recorded, they were six friends who lived in Berkeley and Oakland, and they liked playing together. Marty Balin liked them too, and when the Airplane was recording Bark, he decided that he’d like to produce them. So, when the Airplane didn’t show up for a recording session, Marty’d get on the phone and call the Grootna folks and they’d all rush to the studio and work on setting down their tunes. Finally, the album came out, in November, too late for the Christmas rush, and opinion amongst the few who heard it was divided. Myself, I liked it. And so, the other day, I ventured to Mill Valley to Marty Balin’s back yard, and spoke with Dewey da Drummer about Grootna’s less-thanstellar career.

“The first thing that went wrong was we signed the contract, and it gave us everything we wanted. Two weeks later, along comes this rider to the contract, which was supposedly about artwork on the album cover, but which in reality would’ve annulled most of what was in the contract we’d already signed.” Needless to say, they didn’t sign it. The second furor was over Le Petomaine, the turn-of-the-century French entertainer, whose whole act consisted of farting various tunes including “Le Marseillaise” on the stage of the Folies. Le Petomaine has assumed something of a trademark status with Grootna, and they wanted him on the album cover.

“The actual recording of the album didn t go over too well, “Dewey continued. “The sound wasn’t too good, there was leakage and stuff like that, but the feeling was so good, so fresh. I figured the feeling was so good we just had to put the album out. Besides, we’d spent a lot of money.” Trouble was, nobody — from the recording engineer right up the Columbia hierarchy — took them seriously enough to aid them, although they kept on giving, them money to do what they needed to do. Columbia had out bid several other labels for the group, and they didn’t seem to know what to do next. “What we wanted to do was record a second album immediately, because by the time Columbia bought the first one it was six months old. We would’ve recorded a second album and then gone out on the road to promote it, but we got into a hassle with Columbia over recording engineers — they wouldn’t let us use ours and we didn’t want theirs — so it never got done. And while that was all going down, both (Columbia president) Clive Davis and Bill Graham, who was managing us at the time, were on Christmas vacation and in the time it took them to get back the story had gotten out of hand, and the way Clive finally heard it, we’d bounced their engineer out on his ear or Something. But they didn’t bother to promote us at all — we got one half-page ad in Rolling Stone, and a full page in Billboard, and that was it. They lost the artwork for the ad we sent them, and the ad they had used said we were the band which had taken San Franciscoby storm, which was bullshit.”

Indeed. Grootna prides itself on being a Berkeley band. In fact, most of its members came from an old Berkeley band called Sky Blue, in which lead singer Anna played drums, believe it or not. Dewey is the most famous member of the group, having started out with an incomprehensible band called Mad River, going from there to Country Joe and the Fish, playing with them at Woodstock in the rain, and, upon the Fish’s demise, jamming with Vic Smith and pulling Grootna together. And, although they have an impressive East Bay club track record, they have never taken anything by storm, let alone such a stolid place as San Francisco.

Still, the group is determined to make it. I asked Dewey what it was that he thought made Grootna so special. “Oh,” he replied instantly, “it’s the material. We write all of it, but still it’s danceable. I mean, Mad River wrote all their own material too, but you couldn’t dance to it for sure and nobody knew what they were supposed to do when we were playing it. With Grootna, there’s no confusion at all. You dance” You sure do. Two numbers into a set, they’re likely to have 75% of the audience up and dancing. The sound is tight, clean, and what everybody connected with the band calls FONKY. The tunes are hummable, you can tell one from another, and when Anna (she pronounces it “Ahhhhna) sings, the whole thing fits together into a wonderful whole. Nearly every member of the band is a distinctive songwriter, and now with Marty writing songs with the band they’ve got more good material than they can work up. In fact, the stuff they’ve already put out on their album is so good that I find myself wondering why nobody’s covered, say, “That’s What You Get,” or “Waitin’ For My Ship.”

The future for Grootna looks okay, if not exactly rosy. For one thing, they’ll soon be cutting an album under Marty’s name, which Dewey describes as “sort of a solo album — stuff he’s written and a whole lot of stuff that he likes a lot that he’s found on old albums and stuff like that.” They’ll be backing other artists, too, perhaps, and, if they can find the time or an interested record label, or maybe even both, they’ll be putting out a second Grootna album. Slim Chance, their former rhythm guitarist, had his option picked up when Columbia dropped the group, and he’s reportedly working on a solo album himself.

Meanwhile, though, they’re getting gigs here and there, almost all of them in the San Francisco area, and mostly in the small clubs that the whole group prefers so much. That’s hardly surprising, since they came up in those small clubs, but it’s also the ideal place to go see them. As Dewey observed, it’s kind of hard to relate personally to an audience when you can’t even see where most of them are.

Grootna is good. Any band that can make people as happy as they seem to is gonna make it. They’re lucky, furthermore, in having friends like Marty Balin who can look out for them, having been through it all before.

But a mystery remains.

“What,” I asked as I was leaving, “does Grootna mean?”

“It’s the alchemical formula for making gold out of shit.” “It’s a cereal,” “It’s the Choctaw word for FONKY.”

It’s the name of a band. Why doncha check them out?

Ed Ward

A Phone Call to Yoko

When I went to see A Clockwork Orange, she was there. So was her husband. They sat down right beside me, just like man and wife, taking up the usually standard two seats and playing with their hands in the conciliatory masturbational way we’ve all come to know and love, and absolutely nothing happened! Not one fucking thing happened! Back when Trash came out, Art Garfunkel sat next to me at a screening, and he giggled all through the film, especially when all you could see on the screen were huge, collapsed veins. He really got excited by them, giggling and occasionally licking his lips. There was something definitely wrong with that boy, and it was a joy to watch. But here were John and Yoko, the Les Paul and Mary Ford of the counter culture, and they were just sitting there. John didn’t make any witty comments. Yoko didn’t cut holes in her box of popcorn and try to watch the movie from the perspective of the melted butter. They didn’t fuck during the dirty parts. I didn’t hear them mention John Sinclair’s name once. It was a fucking drag, that’s what it was, and if Stanley Kubrick had been there he would have cried, broken down and cried all over his seat, wept because there are times that you expect to dance and then find that you’ve got no legs.

Well, a while after that, I was reading a copy of the New Haven Rock Press (one of the worst fanzines around and a definite loser), and at the end of an article on John and Yoko, the writer said:

If you’d like to talk to Yoko about the avant-garde, here’s her phone number:

and he gave away her private number. I’m no fool, I’m not going to tell you what it is! I’m after the same thing you are, and anyway, I can’t believe she really wants tripped-out assholes to call her at four in the morning just so they can do Gene Vincent imitations. Shit, it was bad enough when Richard Meltzer was sending me cold pizzas. Fame is a hard thing to deal with. But then again, I figured maybe she really did want that phone number printed, maybe she really wanted some phone calls. It’s lonely at the top, what the hell. You figure John Cage must be sick of her by now, and it’s too early to start making Christmas cards out of peanut butter, so what else is there to do but hppe that maybe someone will call. Phones are a pretty amazing thing in their own right, when you get right down to it, pretty little pieces of black plastic poetry. Just imagine calling somebody up and then melting your phone while tftey listened. You can’t tell me Yoko wouldn’t love something like that! I figured she was wondering why I hadn’t called ... in fact, I thought that maybe she was the one who sent me a copy of the New Haven Rock Press just so I’d call her. Pretty sneaky, but those Orientals are known for things like that. No doubt about it, the girl is clever. Anyone who can go from Fly to Reparata and the Deirons (check “Sisters O Sisters”) is not only on the ball, but is positively sharp. Let’s see Patty Waters top that act! So, if Yoko really wanted me to call, I figured I was a pretty poor sport not to.

It might be a bit awkward . . . you know, she might be embarrassed about having tricked me into dialing that number (which after all might turn out to be the phone of some cheesy delicatessen), so I figured it might be best not to mention where I’d gotten the number. And talking about the avant-garde might give me away also. And, since the baseball strike’s been settled, there’s really not a whole lot to talk about. I thought the best idea was to play for her. Just like “The Little Drummer Boy” that you used to hear about every Christmas, only instead of a drum I had a concertina.

So I dialed. The phone rang a couple of times. I do that myself sometimes — you know, let it ring so they won’t think you’re too anxious. But she was definitely eager when she picked up the other end of the phone.

“Hello,” she said. That sexy voice. I recognised it from the records, from movies, from the Dick Cavett show, but it was warmer, closer, strange and almost musky, thick with love expectations. My hands were shaking. You can fool your mind, but there are times, inexplicable times of great moment, when your body is awed. I couldn’t let her catch on to the fact that I was slowly turning to cream cheese.

“Hello”’ I answered, “I’d like to speak to Yoko.” There! Acting as though I didn’t recognise her. Like Humphrey Bogart asking Ingrid Bergman for a match and, after all these years, saying haven’t I seen you someplace before, kid? V

“Yes,” she said (still keeping up that impossible, brave front), “who is this?”

Without hesitation, I dropped the phone to my knees and Began playing my beautiful red concertina, playing a medley of Scottish hop tunes and ending with a simply fabulous rendition of “A Life on the Rolling Sea.” I dropped the concertina and picked up the phone. I could hear her breathing. Clearly she was enraptured (for seldom have I played so well), and the situation was beyond words. There was nothing to be said, our communication was full, total. Slowly, with amazing dignity and gentle respect, she hung up the reciever.

Brian Cullman