Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [63]
The other third is law ‘n’ order.
The incredible degree to which security was enforced on this year's tour was justified—mostly—by the facts of life circa 1972. But there are always casualties, not to mention simple injustices. In San Diego, for instance, some hip con made up several hundred fake tickets and sold them. As a result several hundred people with legitimate ones found themselves stranded outside the arena. With no recourse but to, quite appropriately, rip the joint to rubble. Wouldn’t you? Or wish you could, if you didn’t have the guts? Where does “drive myself right over the wall” stop? Should it? I don’t know.
The most interesting form of security on this tour, though, was that phalanx of mostly nonuniformed bodies which kept the Stones permanently insulated: a phalanx of concentric circles. Right. Just like Dante, if a trifle more sleazy and less important. The Stones are a target for every parasite alive. So they and the parasites end up, starting at the smallest and innermost circle and moving outward, with:
The Stones. Eye of the hurricane.
Their entourage. Family friends, occasional acolytes, and musicians not in the Stones. You don’t think Bobby Keys rates with Charlie Watts, do you?
Roadies, technicians, businessmen, PR people. They get to hobnob with the Stones, though perhaps not so much as the inner circle.
Members of the press traveling with the Stones. These people get to see a lot of the band—sometimes more than the friends, sometimes less than the drones. Anyway, they garner plenty of anecdotes and style notes, even though most of their articles are elegant press releases.
One nighters. Media people in each city with backstage passes, who get to interview or photograph the Stones or just stand around.
Media people and assorted rock scene hustlers who got in free, courtesy of PR, but with no backstage passes. They get to sit out front, which is reasonable. There's always too many people backstage.
Next, of course, the paying audience. Used to be that included everybody who gave a shit in the first place. On the first few tours, nobody was excluded, because the Stones didn’t fill the house that often. By 1969, everybody knew; part of the excitement was that the next day or in the wee hours after the concert you’d reconnoiter with your friends to bask in the memories. It may seem petty, but it was important: “Geez, weren’t they fabulous!”
If you can say that now, you’re a member of an elite. Chances are two out of three Stones fans missed ‘em in ‘72, which puts you outside the eighth circle, in the real circle with no boundaries:
EVERYBODY ELSE
There is no way this cannot sound like sour grapes, but it really isn’t. A tour of this size is an undertaking on a scale with building the pyramids. One could even say that it's not all champagne and rockin’ glory for the Stones either. A friend who traveled with them told me that they were consistently surrounded by people of an extremely low caliber. Low in many ways, he said: mean, unhealthy, alternately hostile or sycophantic (depending on who they were dealing with), burnt out, tattered, unpleasant to look at and be around. The Stones’ patience with them, he added, was unbelievable.
Then again, I don’t see many rock ‘n’ roll bands at gigs with people around them that I could admire or care to exchange two words with. Burnt-out cycle. The Stones are professional artists and businessmen, doing a job, giving something for all they receive.
But it's also true that this tour probably made as many people unhappy as it made happy. There's a line in “Torn and Frayed” about “impressive rooms filled with parasites.” While it's true that almost nobody gets to hobnob with the Stones that the Stones don’t want to look at, it's also true that when you’re in the kind of elevated position they’re in, people keep relating to you in the most peculiar ways. Nobody wants to look too eager. Meanwhile, you’re traveling