TOO ROLLED TO STONE?

(Ed. Note: Just as this issue went to press, the Rolling Stones announced the cancellation of their planned Summer 1976 tour.)

The nice thing about the law of gravity is that it applies to everybody.

Basically, the law of gravity don't give a flying one if you're President of the United States or Princess Anne or Keith Richard or just some schmuck on the street. You mess with the law of gravity, man, you get your center of gravity at too acute an angle to your feet and bubeleh, sure as bears poop in the woods you're gonna fall on your rosy ass, and that's Jact.

Gerry Ford falls down a lot (maybe he was attempting to walk and chew gum at the same time). Princess Anne got slung off her nag the other week and - da da ba da daba da da -Keith Richard, guitarist, songwriter and social arbiter to a whole genera* tion of middle-class drug abusers, skids wildly on the polished, dragonpainted portable stage that the Rolling Stones are using on their '76 Tour Of Europe and takes a dive in front of 10,000 earnest young Frankfurters right in the middle of 'Jumpin Jack Flash.'

It don't phase ol' Keith none, though.

OF Keith just collects his legs until he's sitting in some kind of weird discombobulated lotus posture and continues whacking away at his guitar, not missing a single sawtoothed rusty chrome chord the whole time.

It don't phase Mick Jagger either -Mick Jag-gur petforming on the ramp that leads down into . the audience from stage center like the tongue on the Stones logo. Jagger just flounces over to his fallen comrade, his mouth a giant red O like some dumb glossy PVC Klaus Oldenburg sofa or something and he bends down oh-so-graceful and hands Keith his pick • which the maestro has dropped on his journey from here to there - and helps him locate his legs and jack-knife back on to his feet.^

'Falling down gets you accepted. 'Mick Farren, 1976.

Yeah, but Keith Richard don't got to devote one second's thought to what gets you accepted as opposed to what gets you the Cosmic Phooey. Keith, you dig, is one of the ones who get to do The accepting - or, alternatively, to hand out the Cosmic

Phooeys to the poor unfortunates who come over limp when measured

up to the Big Yardstick.

You know the riffs:

There's the one that goes 'When Keith Richard comes into a room rock and roll walks in the door,' right, and the 'Keith Richard the world's most elegantly wasted human being' which comes equipped with hyperbolic virtuoso prose which attempts to outdo the last writer's description of how utterly, utterly out of it and cadaverous Mr. Richard looked at the time, and the scholarly bit about Keith's pitiless opentuned riffing and Newman Jones III and the four hundred and ninety-seven guitars: ^all of which boil down to a single one-liner terse enough to stick on a telegram and not be hurting-when ydu get your phone bill, and that one goes 'Keith Richard is rock and roll.'

Yeah, well, rock and roll just fell on its ass.

In Frankfurt.

Where else?

Anyway, enough of this — whooooeeeeee! — kandy-kolored tangerineflake streamline babysitting and down to hard-tack brass-hat fax'n info about what this month's Biggest Fuss is about and what a number of you equivalent to the population of a decent-sized city have sent out up-front bread for a chance to get a brainful of: the Rolling Stones show, 1976 model, as performed before the finest flower of Frankfurt youth at some concert hall I never found out the name of and soon to be on display In the States, the last time being exactly one year ago.

Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, who earn less than their more charismatic colleagues due to their restricted compositional activities — have been around more recently. Inf act, I spotted them at a Heathrow check-in counter last year, and no-one seemed to be paying them much mind.

The new Stones show is prefaced by an admifable cassette tape of exclusively black and mostly pretty tough dirt-yard black music. It's got Bo Diddley doing 'You Don't Love Me,' and some Robert Johnson and Earl Hooker, plus some real dirty-ass JA juice, intermingled with some soupy modern falsetto creamy pimp-suit crooning.

The journalistic herd in the cattle-pen press section right under the left speaker banks plays conjecture poker and comes to the conclusion that the drunk-and-dirty-mo'-dead-than-alive stuff was Keith's choice and the wellgroomed shot-silk pimpmobile muzak was dagger's, which is about 50% correct, since we later ascertain that our phantom deejay is none other than Honest Ron Wood, with a few additions made by Big Mick.

The Stones' tradition has always been to have black support acts, the best they could get. The Meters go down okay, but the applause has faded almost before Art Neville has made it into the wings, which means that the audience were into digging them while they were there, but right now it's Stones-time, and nuthin' but nuthin' gets to delay Stonestime'.

Jaggor prowls and struts ana minces and flounces like a faggot chimpanzee, his wnole body one big pout.

Not by more than half an hour, anyway.

We listen to'The Tape again, and then the lights go down — wheeeeeeeooooooowwwwww! — a WEA dude comes on to introduce the band — in English, possibly as a concession to the GI's off the bases who make up at least half.the audience. You can spot 'em easy. They're the ones with the short hair and the frayed jeans who're looking aggressive and hooking down booze and hash at as frenetic a rate as possible.

The German WEA guy says, 'The Rolling Stones!' like he was about to take his bow after performing some particularly abstruse conjuring trick, and in the dark two shadowy humans with dapper silhouettes move purposefully towards strategic seats behind drum kit and piano.

And then the lights come up and Mick Jagger, Keith Richard and Ronnie Wood lurch onto the stage in a cluster and Bill Wyman, looking timidly rather than satanically withdrawn, beams in to his spot in front of -his stack. Wood, cigarette mounted at a jaunty angle, scuttles over to his amp, Keith Richard ruffles his hair and hitches up his guitar, Jagger — wearing a silver leather jacket that looks to be part of David Bowie's 1972 offstage wardrobe — parades around the stage with a gait like his pout expanded into an entire bodily style.

Charlie (ah, Charlie's good tonight, inne? Whaddya mean, scumbag, Charlie's good every night) lights the fuse on that snare-bass drum-and-cowbell intro to 'Honky Tonk Woman.' Keith, leaning backwards from the knees, methodically chops out those measured opening' chords like each chord was a white line on a mirror, Jagger prowls the stage like he's sniffing each bit of it for a particular odor — like a dog trying to remember just where he pissed the night before — and yep, it's the Rollin' Stones right enough. Know 'em anywhere.

The Great Charlie Watts is playing so clean and crisp and precise that it's almost a shock to pick up on the fact that there's also a ridiculous amount of muscle in his barebeat. Even allowing for the fact that Ollie Brown, a lean black denim percussionist, is whoppin' ass on various passive objects right behind him, it's clear just who's down in the engine room hefting the coal into the furnace.

Next up they do 'All Down The Line' off Exile On Main Street, and halfway through someone wakes up behind the mixing desk and cuts in the afterburners on the guitars. It happens in midchord and suddenly a Keithchord comes scything out of the speakers and slices the top of my head off. I suddenly feel that my skull's just done bin metamorphosised into a two and a half minute softboiled egg and that some intensive bastard is about to dig in with a spoon and eat my brains up.

Apart from Ollie Brown, the only other supporting musician (leaving the mysterious Exact Status of Ronnie Wood out of it) was the omnipresent Billy Preston ('Ivories tickled to order; Beatles and Stones a specialty') who, for some reason, appeared minus his mushroom cloud Afro wig and satin and tat.

Messrs Wood and Richard flanked Jagger, looking for all the world like a pair of diseased crows.

They're a remarkably well-matched pair both eye wise and earwise. Eyewise, they were like bookends propping up the Jagger Library Of Poses; and Wood's extrovert contrast to Mick Taylor's studious angelic self-effacing whiz - kid - in - the - shadows-next-to-Bill concentration erodes Richard's previously obvious Number Two Son position. He's taken over some of the backing vocals that used to be Richard's, and his cheery scampering about and winning ways with a cigarette butt set off the traditionally limned legendary Jagger and Richard stage mannerisms.

Earwise he works out infinitely better than I'd forseen (or foreheard). I've heard him play some of the most lamentable guitar known to medical science during his days with the Faces (working, perhaps, on the principle that band and audience alike were too wiped out to know the difference and that nobody cared but a few snotty reviewers who'd get savaged by their readers in the letters pages anyway), but now and then, like on the early Stewart solo albums and the Clapton Rainbow concert and one or two occasional Faces gigs when Rod Stewart's ego and the various consumptions had been kept in check, he'd hauled out some chops that weren't to be coughed over.

Here, operating as an extension of Richard, filling out Rock and Roll Himself's riffs and squeezing curlicues out of the lead guitar tube to put the icing on the cake, he got it on with a ferocious energy and a commendably disciplined and canny channeling of same. Dig: nobody gets fifteen minutes to solo while the rest of the band go off to leak, take a hit, cop a drink or get blown in this band. Nobody gets to be selfindulgent except You Know Who;

Jagger prowls and struts and minces and flounces like a faggot chimpanzee, his whole body one big pout. His moves are athletic/gymnastic rather than balletic, like a calisthenics programme > designed by the Royal Canadian Air Force.

His shoulders into Ronnie Wood, limpwrists so extravagantly that the movement spreads right up his arm to his shoulder, and niggers outrageously between numbers, going 'All right/' and 'Yeah!' and 'Ssssssssuguh!' like he was Isaac Hayes or somebody.

The only time he stays still is when he sits down behind the electric piano for 'Fool To Cry,' one of the four numbers they do off Black And Blue (the others, in case you wanna learn the words in time for Madison Square Garden are 'Hey Negrita' — so-so — 'Hand Of Fate' — more impressive live than on record — and 'Hot Stuff' — which still sucks on ice).

Messrs. Wood and Richard flank Jagger, looking for all the world like a pair of diseased crows.

They do 'Get Off My Cloud', \You Can't Always Get What You Want', 'Happy' (which Jagger caps with a heavily sarcastic, 'Fank yoli Reef. That wos great'), 'You Got To Move' (with Keith standing back to spin out the guitar lines and Jagger, Preston, and Wood clustered round the mikes), 'Brown Sugar' (audience really picking up on the 'Yeah...yeah...yeah... shooooo!' bits) and an oddly perfunctory 'Midnight Rambler,' which doesn't really play tug-o'-war with your nerves the way it oughtta despite the ritual whipping of the stage with the hallowed silver belt and not-quitedramatic-enough lighting changes.

Keith Richard, quintessential rock star, cool personified and the Idol of millions, has |ust ripped me off for my last smoke.

Still, it was 'Midnight Rambler' which launched the set into second gear , which it needed to coming as as it did after Billy Preston singing 'Nothing From Nothing' and performing a rather undignified Ikettes dance routine with J agger.

Where it all really cut loose was on the final 'Jumpin' Jack Flash'—'Street Fightin' Man' medley wherein Keith fell down etc., etc., Richard/Wood doesn't have the crystalline snaky lead/ firing from the hip rhythm purity as Richard/Taylor, but it's so raunchy that if it moved in next door your lawn wouldn't even wait around long enough to die, it'd move to a nicer neighborhood.

The trouble is that Jagger's cosmic inflation of spoiled brattishness has been so crudely exaggerated that it's stylized itself up its own ass. It's a good show, sho' nuff, but he comes on so strong that it just degenerates into hamming.

He plays the spoiled brat much better offstage, anyway.

Well, in my dream he did. Lemme tell you about it.

. After the show I went back up to my room, and had a smoke. Somebody spoke and I went into a dream. I had me a dream that made me sad, about the Stones and the...

In my dream, Dave Walters from WEA ushered me and three other rockpress folks into Ronnie Wood's room so that we could like hang out. And as soon as I'd been introduced to Mr. Wood — who acted pleasant and civil despite my having, in the real world, written some fairly unpleasant and uncivil things about him in the past — we sat down and smoked.

The end of the room we're in is occupied by a sofa, a table, a gang of chairs and a mammoth sound system blasting out Maceo Merriweather, Fury Lewis, Robert Johnson and good reggae. Over at the big table, Keith Richard, who looks — let's just say 'tired' — is giving an interview to a Swedish radio guy.

I'd read in the London Sunday Times that each Stone received $45 a day pocket money, so after we'd talked blues a little bit, I asked Woody what he spent his on. . ,

'It's more like $640 a week,' he said amiably enough. 'That's just the per diem.'

I discovered that Honest Ron was brother to Art Wood, former leader of the Artwoods, a group who I'd dug when I was 15 or so and who'd included Keef Hartley on drums and Jon Lord on organ.

A seat at The Captain's Table had fallen vacant, so I annexed it just as Keith started into answering someone's question about why all the stuff on Black And Blue was a year or more old.

'Those were just the dates on which we did the basic tracks/' he articulated carefully. 'There was a lot of overdubbing and mixing later on, but there's only so much room for information on an album cover.'

TURN TO PAGE 70

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 55

I asked him what happened to the stuff they'd cut with Jeff Beck.

'We didn't do any songs; we just played and sometimes the tapes were rolling and sometimes they weren't.'

So how was it?

Irritable flicker of the eyes. 'You know Jeff. Sometimes 'e was brilliant and sometimes it was rubbish. Ronnie can tell you far pnore about Jeff Beck than I can anyway.'

Richard assembles refreshments delicately on the table in front of him, emits a resounding snfff and leans headlong into the next question which is 'What do you think of groups like Eddie and The Hot Rods and the Count Bishops and the Sex Pistols [Some current English groups — Ed.] who are like what the Stones used to be like twelve years ago?'

It seems pretty dumb to ask a cat who ain't been in England for two years what he thinks of three unrecorded bands who've sprung up in the last six months, but hell, whaddya expect from a dream? Logic?

'I only really listen to black music these days.' saysj^ichard, snfff. 'I ain't too interested in white bands who rip off white bands who ripped off black bands.'

Ronnie Wood wanders over and hands Richard a fragment of cigarette packet with something written on it. Richard scans it, snffffs it, and looks at me very hard. He also makes no attempt to pass his refreshments around.

That fragment of my conscious mind which is monitoring the dream wonders, 'Is this some masterly demonstration of Zen and the art of Cool Maintenance, or is the guy the most outrageous bogarter in Christendom?'

Keith looks at the note and then back at me.

Though I'm sitting opposite him, in some weird floating dream way I can read the note. It says, 'Keith — do you realize that you're ^talking to Charles Shaar Murray?' [Murray gave Black And Blue a bad review in the English weekly New Musical Express — Ed.] I must be dreaming — big rock stars passing notes in class.

We talk a bit about how Albert King's still fantastic but B.B. King's down the pan these days, and then I look up from Number Three and see that Mick dagger's come into the room, making a Grand Entrance which unfortunately nobody really reacts to. Sure, I know what Robert Greenfield wrote in S.T.P. about how by his mere presence, Jagger changes any event that he is present at, but Jagger's coming into this room don't change it none. He just gets the automatic glance that the sound of an opening door and footsteps always gets.

'I read your review, Charles, and I thought it was rubbish,' Keith'says suddenly and, staring defiantly around the table to dare anyone to call him out, snarfs loudly. Weirdass dream. Nick Kent told me that when Keith gets annoyed he throws ashtrays.

'Yeah, well,' I say, 'I thought the album was pretty disappointing.'

'Most people liked it,' he comes back. 'Did you write that just to be different, then?'

'Naw, most people I know thought it was dreadful too.'

'Maybe you ought to broaden your circle of acquaintances,' he said.

'Oh, I dunno... it's getting broader all the time.'

Damn! I wouldn't dare to talk back to Keith Richard like that normally. I'm waiting for him to do something bizarre and heavy and Keithish when Ronnie Wood intercedes:

'There was something in your review,' sez Honest Ron, 'that Keith got really upset about. I can't quite remember what it was, but...I'm surprised that he didn't take it up with you.'

From beyond Wood comes a sound exactly like Mick Jagger saying in his proletarian voice, 'Oh fort your review was bahluddy stoopid.'

Mentally shutting out these disturbing hallucinations within the dream, I carry on talking to Wood.

'OL FORT YOUR REVIEW WOS BLAHHDY STOOPID!'

Louder this time. Omigawdomigawdomigawd. This is a dream. This is a dream. Evenif it wasn't, that bit wouldn't be happening. Do not panic. Think only of yourself. Do...not:., panic.

Jagger gets up and flounces away to talk to Paul Wasserman, a heavy-set bearded very straight looking American who's doing the tour P.R.

Shortly after Dave Walters from WE A comes over to me. He's turned green.

He tells me that Mr. Jagger would like me and'my fellow rock chroniclers to vacate the premises immediately.

I gather'up my various impedimenta like a good boy should.

Dave Walters is back and this time he's color-coordinated to match Billy Preston's velvet jacket.

'Paul Wasserman's just told me that Mick said that if you're not out in 30 seconds he'll get the heavies to throw you out.'

Dream or no dream, I'm a lover not a fighter. Ultimately, I'd rather be a healthy wimp than an injured punk.

Just past the threshold, Keith appears looking placatory.

'Look,' he says in conciliatory tones, 'Jagger...' he enunciates the name in less than admiring tones, a sort of aw-come-on-you-know-what-he'slike intonation. 'Jagger wants to go over some songs and rearrange the set. We're probably havin' a party in Billy Preston's room when 'e gets back from eatin'.. .give us yer room number and I'll give you a buz? later on.'

We roll a smoke, light it up.

As soon as it gets to Keith, -he says, 'What's your number? 572? Okay, talk to you later,' and vanishes into the room with it. We are left staring at the door.

With the tranquil acceptance of the utterly impossible that accompanies a dream state, I assimilate the fact that Keith Richard, quintessential rock star, cool personified and the idol of millions, has just ripped me off for my last smoke.

Back in the room I started reading my book. And then I took the phone right offa the hoqk.

Woke up in the morning, and then realised that it was only in my dream. God; if only it had really happened... the night I .stoned the Stones.

Somehow, it made all the bread I'd spent on Stones records when I was a kid worthwhile. Somehow. Couldn't quite figure out how, though.

Then, just after I'd checked out, the porter rushed over to the cab and handed me this envelope marked 'Charles Murray Room 572.' Inside was a note scrawled in red felt-tip on a torn-out page of the tour program.

And this is what it said?.

'Dear Charles (The disappointed man):

'Just to say that we hoped you get yourself and your critical faculties safely back to Tinpan Alley. How come you don't get high? You sure work at it hard enough. That's what London does for you. Enthusiasm-uriship (an equation from the smoke). Did you ever write a review of -Exile'? If you did, and still have a copy, I'd like to see it!

'Anyway, thanks for the number at the door! Come see us in London and we'll get you mighty high (you deserve it; hanging out with neurotic queens from the provinces is gloom by the bucket). I'd love to see a review of your visit to Ronnie's room, now we understand it all. Death to Eddie and the Hotrods!'

It was just signed 'Stones,' but that 'number at the door' bit just had to refer to the final encounter with Keith in my dream. But that was impossible unless Keith had had the same dream I had. ^

After all, I've never even met The Rolling Stones. I'm not even sure I've ever been in Frankfurt. Or reviewed a new Stones qlbum. Or even heard about them putting one out since It's On/y Rock 'N' Roll.

. Look, don't turn me in. I'm harmless. Really I am. I've just got a vivid imagination, that's all. I made all this up, honest. I mean, kny fool knows the Stones aren't really like that.

Are they?

Hey Keith...we can't go on meeting like this.

(Reprint courtesy of New Musical Express)