True Adventures of the Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth

Author:Stanley Booth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 1984-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

22

The only way to avoid murder is by ritual murder.

NORMAN O. BROWN: Love’s Body

AFTER EIGHT HOURS I woke up with just enough time to repack and leave for Chicago, where I would rejoin the Stones. I drove with Christopher to the airport. She sighed, looking out the Mustang windows.

From O’Hare Airport I phoned Jo at a hotel that called itself the Ambassador East. Jo told me to meet them at the International Amphitheatre, where the Democratic Party selected a presidential candidate last year, an occasion that provided much sport for the police. A cab driver, an old man in a grey cap, told me about the place: “Down by the stockyards. Built it for a cow barn. Three blocks long.” McCormick Place burned last year, and while it was being rebuilt, the Amphitheatre was being used, the driver said, “for conventions and shows.”

I arrived primed for a battle to get in, but there was no one in sight, and the back door was open. Inside, only the stage crew was on hand. Bill Belmont showed me around. Belmont always looked the same, dressed in Levi’s and a blue shirt with a button-down collar, black-haired, dark-eyed, and he was always ready to show you around. Belmont would talk to anybody. (Much later I learned that Jon Jaymes had passed from Belmont to Chip Monck’s manager and met the Stones with cars at the Los Angeles airport after the Fort Collins shows.) He didn’t leave the tour until the stage was clear of corpses. This part of the Amphitheatre, where the Stones would play, was the Arena. On the rear wall, a painted sign said HOME OF THE INTERNATIONAL LIVESTOCK EXPOSITION. In this dusty old rust-colored barn the obligatory U.S. flag was huge, hanging in the dead center of the room. If it fell rows of customers would smother.

I found the ambience a mite oppressive and went backstage to the dressing rooms, really just the business offices of the Amphitheatre, with filing cabinets, shabby desks, and tables. On the walls hung a couple of paint-by-number still lifes, Cake with Rose and Vegetable Plate. One desk was brightened by a bouquet of dusty blue plastic flowers. Thumb-tacked to another wall was a list of this year’s Amphitheatre attractions: a Jehovah’s Witnesses convention, wrestling bouts, livestock shows, roller derbies, the Boy Scouts of America Fun Fair. On a table in a back room were a few packages of pre-sliced American cheese, Saltine crackers covered with plastic wrap, and some apples. The Jehovah’s Witnesses probably hadn’t even got that much, a point (with just exactly whom we are dealing, here) emphasized when Stu came in and I asked him, because Dickinson had told me that performers’ contracts include fines for lateness, whether the Stones had been fined so far on the tour.

“No promoter would fine the Stones because they’re too big,” he said. “They could tell all the English groups not to work for this or that promoter and he’d have no acts.”

The Stones hadn’t

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