Apathy for the Devil Read Online Free

At one point in the set, a spectator-I couldn’t tell if it was male or female - rushed the stage and attempted to grab Jagger’s legs in a sort of rugby tackle manoeuvre. The singer responded by calmly driving his mike stand into the interloper’s
face, causing blood and several teeth to arc across the spotlight. It was shocking to behold but also somehow perversely appropriate. We were all in the grip of something that was completely out of control, a sort of mass delirium, a voodoo ceremony for the white adolescent libido to come alive to.
    By the end, all the barriers had come tumbling down. When they left the stage, they’d obliterated every performer and every note that had preceded them. I saw the other acts leaving the building with their instruments and suitcases at the end of the evening and they had to run a gauntlet of rabid female Stones fans outside the stage door who were only too willing to call attention to their various musical and image shortcomings.
    The rules were all changing. ‘Tame’ was out. ‘Audacious’ was in. The Zeitgeist pendulum had moved to the other end of the culture spectrum, the one diametrically opposed to notions of conformism and bourgeois uniformity. And the Rolling Stones were at the centre of this cultural youth quake, its designated dam-busters.
    I actually got to meet them that night too. The promoter took me and his son into their dressing room, which wasn’t much bigger than a toilet cubicle, about a quarter of an hour after they’d vacated the stage. ‘Why is that little cunt getting to meet them and not us?’ screamed an enraged female, one of many being blocked from entering through the adjacent stage door. But hey, I couldn’t help it if I was lucky.
    At first glimpse the group looked utterly shattered, wrung dry by the exhausting routine of travelling around the British Isles in a cramped and underheated Transit van night and day. Keith Richards was stretched out on a makeshift sofa, eyes closed, mouth slightly agape, an open bottle of brown ale balanced
precariously on his lower torso. Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman were towelling the sweat from their hair and necks and staring blankly at their dressing-room walls as if under hypnosis. They didn’t exactly radiate approachability but when I timidly offered them a piece of paper to autograph, they obliged without complaint, even though I had to gently nudge Keith in order to wake him up.
    Mick Jagger was the one I was wariest of. I’d just seen him literally smash someone’s face in and now he was standing directly before me looking extremely angry about something or other. For an insecure second, I thought he might be experiencing an allergic reaction to my overcoat but then I noticed that his livid expression was aimed squarely in the direction of Brian Jones. Jones was surrounded by three young female fans, all of whom were clearly captivated by his genteel Cheltenham-bred manners and blond-haired pretty-boy insouciance. I could tell these girls were attracted by Jagger too - they kept shooting awed glances his way - but he frightened them with his contemptuous eyes and sullen expression so much that they never dared actually approach him. This set off a tense dynamic in the room: Jones swanning around these girls like the cat who stole the cream and Jagger staring at him with murder in his eyes.
    Of course, Brian Jones had started out as the undisputed ringleader of the Rolling Stones and was certainly acting as though this continued to be the case. He was still physically strong and mentally focused: the drugs and alcohol hadn’t yet diminished him. In fact, he was possibly at his all-time happiest at this precise juncture of his life. All his dreams were coming true and the Stones were still fundamentally ‘his’ creation. The Jagger- Richards songwriting partnership had yet to reach commercial
fruition and so he could still kid himself that he held the reins and was directing the whole operation. It