Life [0]
Table of Contents
Photo Insert
Copyright Page
For Patricia
Photographs
With Doris, Ramsgate, Kent, August 1945.
1959, aged fifteen, with my first guitar, bought by Doris.
Early Rolling Stones, Marquee Club, 1963, with Ian Stewart, our creator (top right).
Redlands, my house in Sussex, England, soon after I bought it in 1966.
Brian, Anita, me—high tension in Marrakech.
Altamont Speedway, 1969, as things get ugly.
Close harmony with Gram Parsons, guest at Nellcôte, during the making of Exile on Main St.
The Starship, Bobby Sherman’s old plane, on the 1972 “STP” tour of the USA.
With Marlon on the road in 1975.
New romance. Patti Hansen, New York, 1980.
Holding Voodoo, the rescued cat, in his lounge, Barbados, August 1994.
The Amsterdam Arena, July 31, 2006.
Chapter One
In which I am pulled over by police officers in Arkansas during our 1975 US tour and a standoff ensues.
Why did we stop at the 4-Dice Restaurant in Fordyce, Arkansas, for lunch on Independence Day weekend? On any day? Despite everything I knew from ten years of driving through the Bible Belt. Tiny town of Fordyce. Rolling Stones on the police menu across the United States. Every copper wanted to bust us by any means available, to get promoted and patriotically rid America of these little fairy Englishmen. It was 1975, a time of brutality and confrontation. Open season on the Stones had been declared since our last tour, the tour of ’72, known as the STP. The State Department had noted riots (true), civil disobedience (also true), illicit sex (whatever that is), and violence across the United States. All the fault of us, mere minstrels. We had been inciting youth to rebellion, we were corrupting America, and they had ruled never to let us travel in the United States again. It had become, in the time of Nixon, a serious political matter. He had personally deployed his dogs and dirty tricks against John Lennon, who he thought might cost him an election. We, in turn, they told our lawyer officially, were the most dangerous rock-and-roll band in the world.
In previous days our great lawyer Bill Carter had single-handedly slipped us out of major confrontations devised and sprung by the police forces of Memphis and San Antonio. And now Fordyce, small town of 4,837 whose school emblem was some weird red bug, might be the one to take the prize. Carter had warned us not to drive through Arkansas at all, and certainly never to stray from the interstate. He pointed out that the state of Arkansas had recently tried to draw up legislation to outlaw rock and roll. (Love to see the wording of the statute—“Where there be loudly and insistently four beats to the bar…”) And here we were driving back roads in a brand-new yellow Chevrolet Impala. In the whole of the United States there was perhaps no sillier place to stop with a car loaded with drugs—a conservative, redneck southern community not happy to welcome different-looking strangers.
In the car with me were Ronnie Wood; Freddie Sessler, an incredible character, my friend and almost a father to me who will have many parts in this story; and Jim Callaghan, the head of our security for many years. We were driving the four hundred miles from Memphis to Dallas, where we had our next gig the following day at the Cotton Bowl. Jim Dickinson, the southern boy who played piano on “Wild Horses,” had told us that the Texarkana landscape was worth the car ride. And we were planed out. We’d had a scary flight from Washington to Memphis, dropping suddenly many thousands of feet, with much sobbing and screaming, the photographer Annie Leibovitz hitting her head on the roof and the passengers kissing the tarmac when we landed. I was seen going to the back of the plane and consuming substances with more than usual dedication as we tossed about the skies, not wanting to waste. A bad one, in Bobby sherman’s old plane, the Starship.
So we drove and Ronnie and I had been particularly stupid. We pulled into this roadhouse called the 4-Dice where we sat down and ordered and then Ronnie and I