sm SECTION ONE
sm
HANGING OUT WITH BOB DYLAN AND THE BEATLES
Bobby Neuwirth, accompanied by the Blacklisted Journalist in the days when Blackj wore a suit and tie and smoked, among other things, filtered cigarettes.
I.
Here I am taking Bob Dylan up to Manhattan's Warwick Hotel to hang out with the Beatles, but I know I'm making a mistake. To me, hanging out with Bob and the Beatles is always a great historic occasion and lots of larfs. So, what's the mistake I'm making? I'm bringing Scott Ross along.
Who's Scott Ross? I introduced him to my readers in my BLACKLISTED JOURNALIST COLUMN SIX of February 1, 1996, which described Scott as one of the Christian Broadcasting Network's most effective TV talk show hosts. I also characterized him as being as close to a left-wing Jesus freak as I think anybody could hope to find on religious right-winger Pat Robertson's Family Channel. I, of course, am not one of Pat Robertson's biggest fans. In fact, I consider it a tossup between organized religion and the legal profession as to which has done more damage to humankind.
At the time, of course, I had no inkling Scott was going to turn into such a Jesus freak. When I knew him way back then, Scott showed no fear at all of Jesus or of God or of any form of The Almighty. Scott was totally into secularism when we got to be buddies. In those days, sinning was Scott's way of life. To tell the truth, Scott's capacity for sinning was what most attracted me to him. I once even caught him in bed with my wife and still we stayed friends. Not until much later did I learn that Scott's father had been a preacher and that religion runs in Scott's family with the force of a river, no matter how polluted.
Like I say, I knew I was making a mistake. I should have said no, but Scott kept twisting my arm. He kept pleading that he wanted to meet the Beatles. Thirty years later, he would tell me that he had already met them. Thirty years later, I can look back on a lifetime of making mistakes and to a however dwindling future of making many more. This is a story about something that happened when the Beatles were in town for their 1965 Shea Stadium extravaganza.
II.
"I was one of the MCs at that show!" Scott exclaims.
It is now November 20, 1994 and we are in Scott's study in Chesapeake, Virginia. I haven't seen Scott in maybe 27 years, but the writing of this story has demanded that I find him again to get his recollections.
"There were other guys emceeing," he says. "Of course, Murray the K was there. Ed Sullivan actually introduced them," and he emphasizes "them" to mean that TV's dour-faced Ed and not a mere disc jockey such as Murray the K got to introduce the one and only Beatles.
"I introduced King Kurtis," Scott explains. "It was an amazing thing that I was even involved because I was relatively new on the scene. . ."
When, after 27 years, Scott and I were finally reunited at the airport in Norfolk, Virginia, where Scott and his family greeted me, I cried tears of real emotion. I felt the joy of being reconnected to a past I thought I had lost forever. So many of my old friends have written me off, but Scott, Jesus freak that he might be, seemed genuinely glad to see me, aging non-believer that I might be. Also sharing in that reunion was Scott's wife, the former Nedra Talley of the former Ronettes. Scott and Nedra welcomed me as if we never had been parted. Another reason I cried, I guess, is that I connect Scott and Nedra with the wife I once so deeply loved and now so sorely miss. Nedra and my wife got to be pretty tight during the however short months the two of them knew each other.
It was after my wife died and after Scott and Nedra disappeared into Bibleland and after I got exiled to my Devil's Island of the Mind that I lost touch with Scott. Now he is sitting in a cushioned chair at his desk in his study while Nedra is perched near a window. I sit opposite with my cassette recorder running as he tells about leaving the Beatles' Shea Stadium concert in Jerry Schatzberg's Bentley and almost getting killed when the crowd mobbed the Bentley, thinking the Beatles were inside it.
"The Bentley sure got bent-up," he says, adding that mounted police were needed to extricate the car and rescue its occupants. "A lot of people got hurt. It was serious!"
Jerry Schatzberg was Scott's manager at the time. Jerry was a fashion photographer who'd been bitten by the same bug that was to bite me but he made it big. He was one of the owners of 1965's posh East Side club called Ondine, located on 59th Street beneath the Queensboro Bridge, where Scott and I would sometimes hang out with Brian Jones and the Rolling Stones. Jerry later went into movie-making, directed Al Pacino in a 1971 classic called Panic In Needle Park and then I lost touch with Jerry. In fact, that was when I lost touch with everybody.
III.
"There were some chicks there!" Scott recalls.
The night's head games storm into my memory and I ask Scott if he remembers them, too. Head games and mind fucks were the Number One sport whenever Bob Dylan was around. Bob is another one of those old friends who have written me off. I don't blame him. I got to be pretty much of a wreck. I can also look back at myself as having been something of an asshole. But then, assholism seems to be a chronic condition with me. As hard as I try to cure myself, there's hardly a day goes by without me remembering an occasion as recently as the day before when I was an asshole again. Were there chicks there? No, I didn't remember any chicks. Scott calls the head games "madness."
"So, I'm there!" he says "I'm there with that inner circle, so-called, of Rock and Roll royalty. And watched the games going on. The TV was on with no volume. There was other music playing. And there were people running in and out of the room---"
I interrupt to say I didn't remember anybody in the suite other than those who came with me plus the Beatles, their business manager, Brian Epstein, and their two devoted road managers Neil Aspinall and Malcolm Evans. My impression is that the Beatles didn't care to have anybody else around. I'm afraid they didn't want Scott there, either. At one point the phone rang and Mal Evans picked it up.
"It's Sammy Davis Jr.," Mal announces, holding his hand over the telephone mouthpiece. "'E wants t' cum oop. 'E's in th'lobby."
"Tell 'im we're asleep!" Paul says.
IV.
"Here's one of the things that I remember happened," Scott says. "George wanted to go out. So, he commandeered Neil Aspinall to get him out of the hotel."
The truth is that I wrote a first draft of this story years ago, when the details were still fresh in my memory, but now Scott is remembering things I'd forgotten. He mimics George's Scouse:
"'I wanna go oot!'
"So everybody said 'OK!' 'Crazy!' 'If you c'n get out, get out!'
"Because everybody wanted to escape. It was like being in prison, sitting in a hotel all the time. There was all this madness in the street, the kids were yelling, the cops were everywhere and the hotel was sealed tight. But George somehow got out with Neil, the road manager. And they went out and they drove around the city.
"I remember this is what George relates to us when he gets back. A few hours later, whatever it was. So he comes back and he's telling us all the story of how he got out."
Scott mimics George's Scouse again:
"'And I went doon to Forrty-Second Street and I bought a newspaper and I went to Sybil's'
"The club at that time belonged to Richard Burton's then-wife, Sibyl Burton. And George said:
"'We went over there and we went here and we went aroond and you know what? Noobody bothered me!'
"And Lennon just looked at him and said"---and Scott imitates John Lennon's Scouse:
"'That's b'cause nobody likes ya, George!'
"Isn't that typical Lennon?" Scott asks. "Poor George! The sweetest guy! The dearest guy! He is! He really is! In fact, I have some albums here that he gave me. George and I somehow went off into one of the rooms. He wanted me to hear some of his music. And he was into Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan at the time. I have these albums here. He said, 'You gotta hear this!' So he's playing me all this Indian sitar music. And I'm going, 'Gosh, man!' You know, you smoke dope and you try to get into it and it'll take you off on some plane somewhere, but you could hardly dance to it, you know, and it didn't have a good beat.
"But we sat and listened to music. And then I started to tell him about some stuff I had, blues stuff and things. And he said, 'Oh! We gotta listen to it!' And I said, 'But it's back up at my apartment. And I'm not gonna try and get you out of this place again!' He said, 'Well, could you go get them? You take my car!' He calls the driver or something, I go downstairs and I try to get out of the hotel. They thought I was one of the boys from England. They didn't know which one or if I was one of the Stones. They went nuts!
"So, I got into George's limo, went up to my apartment on the West Side, West 85th Street, got some of these blues albums in the limo, come back down with this stack of albums and then come back up into the hotel room. I had to go through that and it was like running the gauntlet. And so I had to get through this whole deal again. But then I get there with the albums, I gave them to George. I guess he kept them. I don't remember ever taking them back."
V.
I knew I'd be violating their privacy by shoving a stranger down their throats, but I'd gotten big-headed enough to think I could get away with it.
When I say that I knew taking Scott along with me would be a "wrong thing," Scott asks:
"Why would it be a wrong thing?"
When I tell him why, he says:
"But it worked out!"
"It worked out and it didn't work out," I answer. Doesn't he remember?
"Oh!" Scott says. "So you remember it didn't work out? I'll have to hear your perspective on this. This is good! . . . Well," he adds with a laugh, "I hope I didn't embarrass you!"
"What does it matter now?"
"What a terrible thing!" he laughs, contemplating all the powerful connections I used to have at that time and then, laughing again, he adds: "Al Aronowitz knew eh-eh-ehvvverrrybody!"
Those were the days.
VI.
Like I say, I knew I was making a mistake. Mistakes can be like steps in a staircase that lead up or down, but my mistakes took me on something more like a roller coaster ride. Or maybe a downhill ski jump. I thought I wanted to make a million dollars in the rock and roll business when all the while what I really wanted was to fulfill myself as a writer. And so, I let myself get torn apart by an inner conflict of interest long before I was falsely accused of conflict of interest while writing the POP SCENE column for the New York Post.
This was 1965, when it seemed to me that words and music were changing the world. What use was the typewriter any more? I was hanging out with the most inspirational figures of my time. How could I NOT be inspired by them? Writing their success stories, I got the idea I could write my own. Why shouldn't I go into the music business and make a million dollars? Like everybody else, I could use a few bucks. Besides, it seemed so easy.
I teamed up with Gerry Goffin and Carole King, a husband-and-wife songwriting team successful enough to have since been enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Like me, they lived in New Jersey's suburbia, close enough for us to become friends. They thought I knew what I was doing and I talked them into producing a record by a local high school band, a bunch of kids who were trying to sound like the Rolling Stones. We called the band THE MYDDLE CLASS and put out a 45 entitled Free as the Wind. Almost immediately, Scott started helping us hype the record and so, I ended up needing him.
Actually, I knew what I was doing when I maneuvered myself next to all these giants I was hanging out with. My original purpose, of course, was as a writer. I wanted to get on the inside because I wanted to write the exclusive inside story. But then I became aware that I was not only chronicling a cultural revolution but was also helping to shape it. I foresaw the movie that one day would have to be made about these giants and I delighted myself with the thought that somebody would have to play me in the movie. But the color of money blurred my focus as a writer. Instead of concentrating on getting the story, I now had obligations as a music business entrepreneur. I sort of owed Scott one and so I took him
'Possibly the most
self-destructive binge of creativity in history'
along, even though I knew his presence would distract me from my purpose as a writer.
VII.
Here comes Bobby Neuwirth barging into the story. To barge in was always Bobby's style. Today, he's largely overlooked because he never had a hit record, but let me tell you he was one of the most inspirational and seminal characters of the '60s Rock Revolution, possibly the most self-destructive binge of creativity in history.
In those days, Bobby was an appendage of Bob Dylan, a champion hardballer on Bob's all-star team of Hipper-Than-Thou players. Hipper-Than-Thou was the favorite head game of the Dylan crowd and Bobby was maybe the game's most vicious hardballer, one of those razor-tongued originals who put the diss into dissrespect. When he got finished putting you down, you could crawl out the door through the keyhole. He also could slit your throat and you'd never even bleed.
Although he was one of my idols, I was never one of Bobby's favorites. He also thought my head was too empty for the two hats I was trying to wear and he constantly let me know about it. Either I was a journalist or a rock-and-roll promoter, and he made it clear he wouldn't be satisfied with me as one or the other. Only a few weeks before the Shea Stadium concert, while taking Carole King on a tour of my Greenwich Village haunts, I practically tripped over Bobby as he was staggering up the cellar steps from the Cafe Wha? on MacDougal Street. As usual, Neuwirth was flying high, fueled by drugs and drink.
When knights jousted during medieval times, the ceremony called for them to cut each other up verbally first. They'd lift their visors to exchange elaborate insults in a ritual then known as calumniare, the Latin word from which came the English word, challenge. I know I never would have said anything to challenge Bobby, but he didn't need a challenge. To Bobby, everyone was a challenge.
Carole was sweet, talented, successful and good-looking and I was proud to show her off. I could feel the buttons popping off my shirt as I introduced her. But Bobby was his usual drunk and surly. I can't remember his exact words, but he snarled at her, saying something like this:
"Oh, you're the chick who writes songs for bubble gum wrappers, right? Are you going out with Al because he promised to get your name in print?"
Something like that. He was about as charming as a mugger. I tried to counterattack. As catty as I could be, I went right to what I thought had to be his weak spot: Was he making a career out of being Bob Dylan's shadow?
"How come you're not with Bob tonight?" I asked.
He weaved on his feet as he looked at me with great contempt, saying:
"You couldn't find a heavyweight to hang out with tonight? Listen, Al, are you still tryin' t'get your pitcher onna cover'f 16 magazine? Aint you found your place in rock and roll yet?"
Something like that. To which I replied:
"And do you know what place you occupy?"
Something like that. Absolutely the smartest and most stinging comeback I could think of. Something lame, very lame. Like I say, I suffer from a chronic case of assholism.
VIII.
Some 30 years later, Scott doesn't remember the assault which Bobby launches upon getting into my station wagon on the night we pick him up with Dylan downtown. The assault continues non-stop all the way up to the Beatles' hotel, which we find besieged by teenybopper fans.
"There was a crowd like this outside the Stones' hotel, too!" Scotty remarks as we walk across Fifty-Fourth Street to make our way through the crowd and into the Warwick entrance.
Neuwirth wrinkles his nose at Scott's remark. I wrinkle my nose, too. Scotty is exaggerating. I was there when the Stones were in town. There were only a handful of fans outside the Stones' hotel compared to the crowd we now see outside the Warwick.
As usual, I grab the lead in our flying wedge through the crowd. In 1965. not only am I top-heavy with self-importance, but I also weigh a lot. I am well on my way to turning into a 240-pound incredible hulk of fat, which was the fattest I ever got before I realized I had lost sight of what I was doing when I unzipped my pants. In 1965, they call me "Big Al." The fact that Dylan walks behind me in the wedge helps pump up my self-image. Yes, being in Bob's company makes me feel exalted. Meanwhile, Scotty goes through the crowd of teenybopper fans as if he were the star. He walks as if he expects to be asked for his autograph.
"Yeah, some of my radio fans recognized me when I went in to see the Stones, too," he says while we are going up in the elevator. "They asked me for my autograph."
That draws another look of disgust from Neuwirth. As for me, I am thankful that we've made it through the crowd without any of the fans hitting on Dylan. All we needed was for the fans to recognize Dylan and mob him. On the other hand, I am disappointed that didn't happen. Dylan is my hero, after all. For his part, Bob puts on a show of scorn for the teenybopper adoration of the Beatles, but this is an era of great competition and Bob is very competitive. He laughs at John, Paul, George and Ringo for performing while being drowned out by the screeches that always prevent the audience from ever actually hearing a Beatles concert. He sneers at the idea of living a life while being mobbed by fans. Who wants to be imprisoned in a hotel room like this? His attitude is that he never even cared if he met the Beatles in the first place. That's the impression he leaves me with at the time. But Dylan always sounds as if he's putting me and everybody else both down and on and I never really know whether he is or not. Ultimately, I decide it doesn't make any difference. Like I say, without question, Bob's one of the greatest artists who ever lived.
IX.
When, some 30 years later, Scott asks why taking him along would be a "wrong thing," I answer:
"I thought that they would object to the intrusion."
He can't figure out why. He keeps insisting that Nedra had already taken him to meet the Beatles, that he already knew them. I remember the Ronettes being led up to the Beatles' suite at the Plaza soon after John, Paul, George and Ringo stepped off the plane in New York in February of 1964. That's when I covered the Beatles' arrival in the states for the Saturday Evening Post.
"When the Beatles arrived," Scott says, "I was working as assistant music director at WINS. I was working with Murray the K, Mad Daddy and all those guys. Nedra---the Ronettes---had traveled with the Beatles in England and done all that gig, so when the Beatles got to America, one of the top things on their agenda was they wanted to see the Ronettes. So the girls got up to the Beatles' suite when the Beatles were at the Plaza. Then it wasn't too terribly long afterwards that I met them with Nedra. Then, later on, when I met them with you, I already had been with them."
X.
In my first draft of this story, I remembered Scotty clinging to me for dear life that night at the Warwick. Nobody has anything to say to him and nobody wants to listen to his non-stop rap about how exciting it was to hang out with the Rolling Stones. Or how well he knows the Ronettes. Or about what an adventure it has been to get through the mob of teenyboppers on the sidewalk downstairs.
When we enter their suite, John, Paul, George and Ringo are relaxing imperiously on the edges of a couple of beds, rapping their heads off with one another. John rises to say hello. One by one, they all do. There's absolute cordiality. Warm greetings. Handshakes. Smiles. Grins. Laughs. Conviviality. But no bear hugs. No arms wrapped around shoulders. There is a sort of relaxed stiffness, an inability to cross the boundaries of the demureness which prevailed the first time I took Bob up to meet the Beatles. There is an underlying atmosphere of competitive tension. Although they always are delighted to see one another, how can Dylan and the Beatles not be aware of how, psychically, heavily armed they come. Even relaxed and loosened-up, they have a relaxed and loosened-up way of preening and strutting and swaggering. They try to be good-natured in their boastfulness as they tell about their latest exploits. They certainly know how to turn everything into a laugh. The Beatles are always F-U-N.
XI.
At the Warwick that night, I didn't wire myself up like a rat who's going to snitch. I didn't have a hidden camera like a TV reporter or a bug like a CIA spy or any other secret 007-type device developed by the likes of Ian Fleming's "Q." In other words, I didn't record all the small talk and the quips and repartee that goes down when giants like a Bob Dylan and a John Lennon get together. But documentary movie-maker Donn Pennebaker later did. Some months after this night at the Warwick, during Bob's second tour of England in 1966, Pennebaker filmed the world's two reigning head game champions locked in an encounter in the back seat of a London limo. The footage was supposed to be part of a cinema verite production for ABC which Dylan called Eat The Document, but ABC refused to broadcast the film and Bob himself suppressed the two reels showing the scene in the limo. Bootleg copies nevertheless still abound. Also, you can get a partial transcript by clicking on http://kiwi.imgen.bcm.tmc.edu:8088/public/files/bbs/etd.html.
Shooting from the jump seat, Pennebaker keeps his camera lens aimed straight at the two of them, a noticeably liquored Bob and, at his right, a noticeably liquored John, who, in addition, is noticeably uncomfortable. Also noticeable is that he's fidgety and ill-at-ease. John was afterwards quoted as saying that he didn't really want to be there. He gave the impression that he was sort of Shanghaied into the role. of an extra obviously intended for use as nothing but Bob's foil. Otherwise, John shared the same respect that all of us have for Bob's artistry. Lennon showed up and he was there, wasn't he?
Here's the picture. It's about 7 in the morning after an obviously long night. Although in some sort of boil about being where he is, John can be seen successfully keeping his cool when Dylan, getting a glimpse of the Thames River through the early morning rain, starts carrying on a meaningless ramble about "the mighty Thames," adding:
"That's what held Hitler back! The mighty Thames! Winston Churchill said that!"
It is a remark not particularly designed to please British ears, even if Bob says it in jest. Or is he throwing down a gauntlet? At this point, John looks straight ahead through his dark shades, expressionless as he takes a drag or two on a cigarette. Everybody seems to be trying to humor Bob, also wearing his usual shades, as he puts on a show, acting like a spoiled brat. Does this footage now haunt him? No wonder this is an outtake, one of two reels never inserted into the finished movie. Continuing to throw his weight around, Dylan unceremoniously calls out loudly to the British driver:
"Tom, aint that right?"
Tom, the driver, answers with a harried and muffled "Definitely, right!" but he's not quite audible enough to suit Bob, who calls out even louder:
"Aint that right? AINT THAT RIGHT?"
Under attack but looking straight ahead at the road as he drives, Tom answers with a much louder "Definitely!" To which Dylan replies:
"Tom, I think I'm gonna turn you into Tyrone Power."
"Say that again, will you Bob?" Lennon says.
"Tom," Dylan says, "I think I'm gonna turn you into Ronald Coleman."
"That's better" John comments. "That's very much better."
". . .Reginald Young," Bob continues, "Petey Wheatstraw, Or Sleepy John Estes, man! Or Robert Johnson. Go to Medical School like J. Carrol Nash---"
"Johnny Cash," interrupts John, "or all the rest of them.!"
"I have Johnny Cash in my film," Dylan announces. "Are you gonna shit yourself when you see it! You won't believe it!"
"Hey!" Lennon exclaims, "John's gonna shit again!"
Dylan tells Lennon that Cash doesn't know he's in Dylan's film. Dylan asks, "You know what he looks like? Have you spent much time with him? He moves great! He moves like that!"
Dylan's demonstration of how Johnny Cash moves, indiscernible to me, is described as a "human sloth-type gesture" in http://kiwi.imgen.bcm.tmc.edu:8088/public/files/bbs/etd.html. Bob then tells Pennebaker:
"Hey, you gotta cut that part of the film out, man, 'cause I really like him. All the good people move like that. Like prize fighters." Then, smiling directly into the camera he adds: "Johnny!"
+ "Johnny!" Lennon picks up the refrain and sings out: "Big River! Big River!" and Lennon then gives the thumbs-up sign.
"Yeh, he's on film, too!" Dylan says. "He's incredible!"
"Quite a guy, huh?" says Lennon.
"Quite a guy, John!" seconds Dylan. "Oh, man, you shoulda been around last night. Tonight is a drag!"
"Oh, really, Bob?" John asks, with only a hint of sarcasm.
"Haha!" Dylan laughs sheepishly. "I wish I could talk English, man!"
Lennon (dryly): "Me, too, Bobby!"
Conceding that John can talk American, Dylan turns to the driver:
"Hey, Tom, you've heard me talk in English, haven't you? But I can never do it around John though because John's such a great actor that. . ."
". . .You can't believe that it's me!" John finishes the sentence for Dylan. John not only hold his own in this give-and-take in the back seat of the London limo, but, clearly, he comes out ahead.
"Barry McGuire's a great war hero," Lennon says at another point. He is as relentless as Dylan.
"Barry McGuire?" questions Dylan. "He's a great friend of yours, John, I understand."
Lennon fires back:
"He met me through you, Bob. Remember that? He's a great buddy, Sergeant Barry."
"Haha!" says Bob, "I was sure you were thinking about someone else."
"Bob forgot his lines again," Lennon comments. "CUT! CUT! You were really shaking. Tape that again! Start it again! You looked so natural but really shaking!"
"I don't care about that," Bob says.
"Bless 'em all, bless 'em all. . ." John sings.
"Tell me about The 'Silkies!'" says Bob, apparently referring to a British group which had a chart record.
"No," Lennon replies, "I'm not telling you about that."
"Tell me about---oh I got a pain in my side!" Bob says. "Tell me about this pain in my side!"
"We may never. . . You may never. . . We've missed all of those," Lennon answers. "Why don't you take some yourself."
"Hey, I've taken a few milligrams of Silkie once," Bob says, "it didn't work out very well."
John quickly mumbles something unintelligible and then brings up Elvis' name, telling Bob to "get off me, get off me!" and then asking, "Oh, really, is this 20 minutes yet?" referring to the length of the reel in Pennebaker's camera.
Dylan says to Pennebaker, "You're running a 10-minute one, aren't you?"
"Exactly," says Pennebaker.
Dylan asks about continuity in the film. Lennon tells Dylan to come in again with Barry McGuire, but Bob's Barry McGuire routine goes nowhere. John is invincible.
As the second reel begins, Dylan says:
"I can't look!"
What has happened remains unclear to me. Dylan adds:
"Ha ha! He's terrible. He's terrible. He's worse than that. He's terrible. He's much worse than that."
"No, never, never, never!" John replies. "Rubbish! I never use the word. Rubbish!"
"Naw, he's wicked!" Bob says. "Oh, that gives you away, man!"
"That," John answers, "along with that comment will get you. . ." and Lennon starts to hum what sounds like a Gershwin tune: There's a someone that I'm hoping to see, adding: "Real life! Real life!"
The camera beeps rolling and Bob says:
"That was the end? It ran right out, huh?"
After a pause, Bob adds: "I wanna go back home, man. See a baseball game, all-night TV. I came from a land of paradise, man!"
In his most sarcastic Scouse, Lennon comments, "Sounds great."
"Well," Dylan says, "I'm not the one to really give it the rightful sound, man. I know people who could make it sound so great that you wouldn't even have the capacity to speak."
Lennon doesn't speak.
In obvious discomfort, Dylan says, "I don't understand. Hey, I'm getting very sick, man! I'll be glad when this is over cause I'm getting very sick here."
"With the tremors?" asks John.
"Are you getting sick here?" asks Dylan.
"Worse than sick, for about a week, now," says John. Or is it Bobby Neuwirth who says that from the front seat? "Melancholia, I think. Melancholia"
John chuckles. Asked what's so amusing, he answers:
"Just t'keep ya alive. No need t'get too dead on our London scene."
Dylan chuckles, too. When Pennebaker opens a window to shoot in from outside, Bob starts
Did
Bob Dylan
throw up?
out complimenting the shot but ends up complaining about the cold coming in the open window. He scowls and groans and asks, "How far are we from the hotel, Tom?"
"About five minutes" Tom says.
"Oh, wow!" Dylan complains.
"Permission to land, Tom!" says John.
With his head in his hands, Dylan says, "Oh, God, I don't wanna get sick here! What if I vomit into the camera? I've done just about everything else into that camera, man, I might just vomit into it."
At this point, Pennebaker comments, "It'd make a nice ending wouldn't it? 'Cooking with Dylan,' we'll call it." Or did he say "Puking with Dylan?"
As you keep watching the reel, you get the impression that Bob barfs at this point. Even Lennon seems to get a little sick from Bob's vomit. But Donn Pennebaker, who points out that he was in Bob's direct line of fire, insists that although Neuwirth, sitting in the front seat, kept rooting for Bob to throw up into the camera, Bob held his barf until he reached a cuspidor in the hotel.
The whole point of a head game is to make the other guy lose it. You win when you get the other guy so up tight that he can't hold his liquor. Except, back in the '60s, Bob always had trouble holding his liquor. From the time I met him, alcohol was Bob's drug of choice, but in the '60s, when he was staying at my house in Jersey, many were the nights Bob'd spend the ride back home from New York barfing out the window on the passenger's side of my station wagon or my TR3 or whatever I was driving at the time. Getting Bob to throw up was no big deal.
XII.
Like the wars of primitive tribes, who, according to hippie lore, fought their battles by hurling insults at one another instead of weapons, the Rock Revolution of the '60s was fought and won with head games as much as with music. Call them whatever you like: brain rapes, mind fucks, mental sleight-of-hand, psychic aerobics, noodle-twisting or the Dozens, also known as the Dirty Dozens. When I was a kid, one of the worst insults you could hurl was to tell the other guy that his mother wore Army shoes. Or how about this?
Your Pop's in jail,
Gotta get some bail
Your Mom's onna corner yellin'
"PUSSY FOR SALE!"
Verbal combat is, of course, a form of head game which, in the inner cities, has become more contemporaneously known as "dissing." When I was a kid, dissing could lead to a fist-fight or, at worst, maybe the baring of a switchblade. But such weapons have become all but obsolete in the more recent inner cities and the consequences of dissing within those environs can be deadly. Artistic and talented ghetto rappers have refined dissing into a valid art form but the shootouts of the rock world in the '60s were, like the wars of those ancient, primitive tribes who hurled insults instead of weapons, decidedly more civilized. The wounds left by verbal shootouts are psychic and, obviously, not quite so lethal as gunshots. Still, the '60s superstars all sported super-egos and walked with the swagger of gunslingers.
"Do I look like Billy the Kid?" Bob Dylan once asked me out of the blue.
He was preening in his hip-hugging, skin-tight jeans and his tan suede jacket before a full-length mirror in his Chelsea Hotel suite in New York. We were supposed to go out on the town and, as I waited for him, he stood before the mirror looking at himself standing this way and looking at himself standing that way and he turned to me, ran his hand through his curly bush of uncombed hair, grinned and asked:
"Do I look like Billy the Kid?"
"You've got to be psychically armed!" Bob used to boast. He knew he certainly was. There also was a time when Bob used to taunt:
"Why don't you ask Mick Jagger if he thinks he's psychically armed? Why don't you ask him?"
At the time he asked me, I was seeing a lot of Mick but of course I didn't consider myself psychically armed enough to ask Mick if he thought he was psychically armed. I was sure that he did and that he was.
Some of these shootouts of the '60s, like the one in the back seat of the London limo, reminded me of the fictional "great debates" depicted by classic French humorist Francois Rabelais in his tales of the giant Gargantua and of Gargantua's giant son, Pantagruel. And also of Pantagruel's impish and wily sidekick, Panurge. Dylan obviously was the giant of his time but the role of his impish and wily sidekick was filled by Bobby Neuwirth, whose razor tongue helped make him almost as much of a hero to me as Bob. For me, Bob and Bobby remain as larger-than-life as the larger-than-life fictional giants, pere et fis, whom Rabelais wrote about. Not to mention the impish sidekick, Panurge, who sometimes won his "great debates" without a word, instead using only lewd or vulgar hand signals.
There is also a bit of magic in these Rabelaisian verbal shootouts of the '60s. just as there was magic in the fictional Rabelaisian "great debates," but I'll have to tell you at some other time about taking Bob and Robbie Robertson up to Brian Jones' suite at the Chelsea one very hot summer day. Right now, I'm very busy kicking myself for the mistake of having gone into the music business in the first place.
XIII.
So, like kids, the superstars of the '60s played a hip version of the dozens. The "great debate" in the back seat of the London limo was an evolved version of the give-and-take between Bob and John that night at the Warwick. John was invincible that night at the Warwick, too, but at the Warwick, Bob didn't stand a chance. At the Warwick, John had his whole team with him. Paul, George, Ringo, Brian, Neil, Mal, and was Derek there, too? Along with manager Brian Epstein, Neil, Mal and Derek were as much a part of the Beatles organism as the Beatles themselves.
Derek Taylor, the Beatles' press officer, one of the most charming men who ever lived. He held conversations with a dozen people at a time like a checker champion beating a bunch of people all at once. I remember one time in the past when he enlisted my aid in lifting Ringo's sagging spirits by reassuring Ringo he would be signing autographs for the rest of his life. But I've already told you about Derek in my COLUMN SEVENTEEN. Now, where is he that night that night at the Warwick? As I write this, there's a Christmas card from him lying on my desk. A short note on it says he is progressing in his fight against cancer. It is with whatever psychic energy I have that I pray for Derek.
XIV.
Psychic energy is what it was all about. It was their psychic energy which made these men such giants. I've written about Sinatra and I've met Elvis, but has there been an act to follow Dylan or the Beatles? Not so far.
That night at the Warwick, the Beatles have reached a new zenith. They are in town to introduce rock and roll to Shea Stadium, where John, Paul, George and Ringo make their grand entrance by helicopter, landing nearby at the old Flushing Meadows World's Fair site before being chauffeured into the stadium in a Wells Fargo armored truck. On a stage erected at first base, the Beatles play to an audience of fifty-six thousand screaming fans, at this time the largest crowd ever assembled for an outdoor rock concert. John, Paul, George and Ringo are at the height of their psychic solidarity. They have reached their absolute oneness as a musical entity. Each is part of a single, larger organism with its own consciousness. No matter which of the Beatles speaks, his is just another tongue of the larger organism. Each shares the larger organism's consciousness and always knows exactly what the others are thinking. I have never seen a tighter group. The Beatles don't have to talk to one another. They can read one another's minds. That's how psychically armed the Beatles are. If Bob Dylan is Billy the Kid, the Beatles are the James Brothers.
XV.
In the beginning, I was the ringmaster. It was obvious that these guys had to get to know one another and it was always left to me to organize their get-togethers. I had maneuvered myself into the position of go-between. What a great spot for a journalist like me! The go-between for the giants of the century! Obviously, I blew it, didn't I?
My job was to shoehorn these giants into the same room without bruising any egos other than my own. That was like trying to fit a bunch of Goodyear blimps into a hotel suite. They couldn't help their inflated egos. They were the most idolized and lionized kids in the whole world. Everybody was licking their boots or their asses. How could that kind of adulation NOT have gone to their heads? These swaggering young heros with hair-trigger egos, fast draws and dead aims ranked with the best verbal sharpshooters of all time.
The Beatles had conquered the world in a flash, but Dylan had set out to wield a more pervasive hold on the future. That night at the Warwick, he feels he's been more uncompromising than the Beatles in achieving success. He feels that his success, if not greater, is purer. He scorns bubble gum music and, until I introduced him to them, he scorned the Beatles as bubble gum. He has told me that he himself will never cater to screeching teenyboppers by making 45s for Top 40 radio stations. The Top 40s, led by the powerful 50,000 watt AM stations, were called Top 40s because they played only the Top 40 records on the Billboard and Cash Box pop charts. If Bob didn't like the Top 40s, the feeling was mutual. Program directors and disc jockeys considered Bob Dylan the least likely recording artist to come up with a Top 40 hit. And yet, with Like A Rolling Stone, Bob not only has crossed over into Top 40, but he has demolished another wall by getting a hit with a six-minute single when everybody said the Top 40s would never play a record longer than two and a half minutes. I tickle my own ego with the thought I have played a role in his career. I have helped influence him to go electric. My head may be empty, but it's getting bigger.
XVI.
Every time I try to remember that night at the Warwick, Scott Ross looms in my mind, blocking my view. I knew he'd get in the way. I can't remember if Derek is there and I also can't remember if Robbie Robertson is there. At the moment, I have only a suspicion that they are and I'm kicking myself again that I can't remember if such unforgettable old friends are at with us at the Warwick that night. In August, 1965, when we pull up in front of the hotel, Robbie is not only Bob's guitarist but he soon will supplant Neuwirth altogether as Bob's chief sidekick, off-stage co-star and top head game teammate. Soon, on August 28th, Robbie will be playing as a member of Dylan's electric backup group at Forest Hills Stadium. Eventually, Robbie also becomes Bob's onstage co-star, sharing Bob's spotlight. Like, I say, Robbie used to be a good friend of mine but the last time I tried to get in touch with him, he had an assistant tell me he didn't have time to talk to me. I'm told he doesn't even talk to Dylan any more, either. Bob doesn't talk to Neuwirth, Neuwirth doesn't talk to me. Doesn't anybody talk to anybody any more? As bluesman Jimmy Cox once wrote, Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out Except, I'm the only one of the bunch who's down and out. Is that the way it has to be? But that's not exactly the way it is. George calls me every once in a while. I'm hoping he'll call me and tell me what he remembers from that night at the Warwick.
XVII.
As I say, while the Beatles are their usual charming selves, Bob and Bobby walk with their usual swagger. Inflated egos are in no short supply in the rock world of the '60s. With fleets and fleets and fleets of blimps all wanting to fit in the same hangar, head games emerge a a form of ego warfare.
Is it within inflated egos that competition between great artists root? Was it the need of the great artists of the '60 to keep inflating their egos that drove them to succeed continually in outdoing and surpassing one another and themselves? Inflated egos obviously resulted in the verbal head-game shootouts I witnessed. Was the creative fruitfulness of this era another result?
Without competitiveness, how else are we going to keep topping ourselves? Competitiveness reigns in pop music just as it does in sports. Or just as it did in the quick-on-the-draw, Billy the Kid Wild West, with its hot lead shootouts. Yes, it was the competitiveness of this era, the need to keep topping one another and oneself, that helped make the '60s truly one of culture's golden ages.
XVIII.
I first met Scotty Ross while hanging out in some midtown hotel with Brian Jones and the Rolling Stones. At the time, he impressed me as pretty smooth, another one of those silver-tongued devils who never pauses to take a breath or to let you get a word in. He was, after all, a disc jockey, spinning records on a small Long Island station at a time when I was courting every disc jockey I could meet who might be able to put my Myddle Class record on the radio. Scotty is one of the first jocks to oblige me by giving the Myddle Class record a good rotation on his small Long Island station.
When we were hanging out with the Rolling Stones, Scott knew how to handle himself. Taking him up to the Warwick, I have overlooked the fact that the difference between hanging out with the Rolling Stones and hanging out with the Beatles is the difference between sitting at the head table at a wedding banquet or sitting with the kids. The Stones are like young and wild princelings. The Beatles are like conquering emperors. It was during Bobby Neuwirth's withering attack during the ride uptown in my station wagon that I have experienced my first fears. Have I have mistaken Scotty for more of a heavyweight than he turns out to be? Of course, I also have mistaken myself for more of a heavyweight than I turn out to be.
XIX.
As far as I'm concerned, You have to be a narcissist to be a musician in the first place. I saw Dylan and Lennon as mirror images of each other across the Atlantic. Bob was the essence of American hip and John epitomized English hip. English hip was maybe burdened by centuries of tradition that America didn't have. American hip was more Wild West, but the charisma of the Beatles transcended such ephemeral concepts as national boundaries and native cultures. To br a giant, you have to be universal.
Bob and the Beatles wanted to be friends. Haven't they pretty much stayed friends ever since? In the rarified atmosphere of Mount Olympus, they were the gods that had the most in common. They seemed to me to be natural allies, but had success spoiled them rotten? Is arrogance unavoidable in self-made working class heroes who achieve position and power they'd only dreamed of? After all, they were their own versions of Alexander the Great! Could Bob and the Beatles make it with one another? Between their embrace was a minefield of potential paranoia. Like radioactivity, competitive tensions are invisible but no less potent. I was the go-between, sure! The go-between for Billy the Kid and the James Brothers. In a way, arranging one of these get-togethers was like catering a picnic on a blanket thrown on quicksand at high noon.
Eventually John says, "Let's 'ave a larf."
It's time to smoke some pot.
XX.
There is never any lack of food or drink in the Beatles' suite, and, because they have already learned that Dylan's drink is cheap wine, the Beatles always are sure to have some Beaujolais on hand for him. By now, they are also equipped with their own marijuana.
It's usually Mal or Neil who carries the stash and rolls the joints. Sometimes it's Derek
The Beatles
had smooth
psychic teamwork
Taylor. Ultimately, Derek can always be counted on to be carrying something to smoke. But it's not until after we turn on, if then, that I get a clear picture of how smooth their psychic teamwork is. After we turn on, I get paranoid that Scotty can't carry his weight. After we turn on, I get paranoid that maybe I can't carry my own weight. After we turn on, everything becomes mystical that night at the Warwick. It's very strong pot we're smoking.
XXI.
Like I say, partying with Dylan and the Beatles is always fun, but the game of Hipper-Than-Thou amounts to a psychic tug-of-war between two sides separated by a mud pit of paranoia. Whether meaning to or not, each side subtly tries to pull the other side into the pit. I had warned Scott that this wasn't going to be kid stuff.
"I'll be cool," he had promised. "You don't have to worry about me."
XXII.
Thirty years later, in his study in Chesapeake, Scott has to remind me that I was at their wedding. Embarrassed, I cop out:
"That was many pounds of pot and kilos of cocaine ago."
"That was 27 years ago!" Scott says, laughing. "That was the only time I ever got you into a church. It was a church on Seventy-Second Street off Lex. Everybody was whacked up on the sidewalk. Yeah, man, you were there when I got married!"
Scott's home in Chesapeake is a happy and comfortable house which immediately embraces me with the equivalent of a bear hug, With a finger of Chesapeake Bay tickling Scott's back yard, his house is located in a suburban development on a circling street. In the back yard, there is a gazebo and a hot tub and beyond it, on the placid, sheltered finger of bay water, I can see a mother duck paddling proudly, dragging a string of ducklings behind her. Nedra runs her family with the same authority. It's when I start explaining about the verbal shootouts and getting caught in the crossfire that she recalls what happened that night at the Warwick. Still, Scott doesn't remember. He told her about it years before and now he has forgotten.
XXIII.
Bob could string words together with God-like power and he also could charm the rattles off a snake's ass. Often seeming to speak in parables a lot like the liner notes he wrote for his early albums and a lot like the lyrics of his songs, he was always incredibly stimulating. But at the same time he could be moody and mysterious and unpredictable and cranky and nasty. When I first hooked him up with the Beatles, I was trying to woo him away from the embrace of the folkie purists. In the beginning, Bob was pooh-poohing pop while I argued that today's hits are tomorrow's folkie classics.
After we get high at the Warwick that night, I can sense the tensions all the more. More than once, I detect Bob or Bobby probing the Beatles' defenses, but they can't make a dent. The psychic solidarity of the Beatles is impregnable. The Beatles are too together and there are too many of them. They dominate the room. If this is going to turn into a shootout, the Beatles have Bob outgunned. I'm on Bob's side, but he knows I'm not a sharpshooter so much as I'm a fence-sitter. I'm a sissy. I don't consider myself psychically armed. My own style of playing head games is I try not to have to play them. Besides, I'm the go-between. Not only do I consider myself a reporter, above the fray, but I'm supposed to be a diplomat. I'm supposed to have diplomatic immunity. I'm not supposed to take sides and I'm not supposed to get caught in the crossfire. Obviously, I don't always succeed. One of my problems is that, as much of a self-promoter as anyone else, I've compromised my position as a journalist by trying to make a million dollars in the rock and roll business. In a way, I've forfeited my diplomatic immunity.
The truth is that hanging out with giants has made me want to be a giant, too, but the only part of me that gets gigantic is my head. I've begun to think that stardust is falling on my shoulders. Hanging out with Bob and the Beatles and the Stones and everybody else, I am building sandcastle dreams for me to live in. I pat myself on the back because of the role I have played. I see myself as having helped Hercules divert the mainstream, which would soon eddy in pop culture's psychedelic era. Almost single-handedly, the Beatles are pointing pop in that direction.
I knew something great would come out of putting Bob and marijuana together with the Beatles. I knew the kind of influence they would exert on one another. The Beatles had become role models for the youth of the entire western world. To the Beatles' audience, whatever the Beatles did was right. Whatever the Beatles did, the world came to accept. For Bob and the Beatles to meet didn't just change pop music. That meeting changed the times.
XXIV.
At the July, 1965 Newport Folk Festival, held some weeks earlier, Bob tried to play with an electric band but was booed and heckled off the stage. I wasn't there but I heard about it. Some said Bob was in tears. I, of course, had been rooting for Bob to go electric. Going electric would make his music more accessible. My point was that he had something to say and that more people should hear it. I argued that the purists, the academicians, the old-guard, the hard-liners, the diehards, the fundamentalists, always resist change, but change is the only thing that's constant in the universe. Yes, I argued, widen your audience.
He has already recorded his next electric album, Highway Sixty-One. The album is going to be released in a week or so and I love it! Not only was I at the recording sessions, but, hanging out with Bob and Bobby, I've listened to the album many times since. The songs, with lyrics which sound to me as if they've been written by a new messiah, doesn't sound as pretty or pleasant as a Beatles album, but it's not supposed to. The album plays much cleverer mind games with its listeners.
"I brought along a dub so you c'd her it," Bob says, telling the Beatles about the album. Still, too many beats pass before John finally says:
"Well, let's 'ear ih'."
Dylan hands me the Highway Sixty-One acetate and says:
"Here, Al! You play disc jockey!"
The Beatles are mostly sprawled out on the east side of the room and the hi-fi is at the opposite side. The Beatles never check into a New York hotel without making sure their suite is equipped with a hi-fi. As I carry the dub over to the turntable, Dylan tells about playing the Newport Folk Festival with an electric backup band.
"Yeah," I comment. "They booed him---"
"Naaaw, naaaw!" Dylan interrupts me sharply. "That's not what happened!"
"Yeah, that's wrong, man!" Neuwirth echoes. "That aint the way it was!"
I look up in surprise. Why doesn't he want the Beatles to know? What happened at Newport has been widely reported. Everybody is talking about it in the music business. There has been a lot about it in the papers and on the radio. If the Beatles don't already know, they are going to find out sooner or later. Did the boos of the folk music purists at Newport bother Bob that much? Obviously, I made a wrong move. I didn't know I wasn't supposed to bring that up. A pang of paranoia shoots through me. Am I being dragged into the mud pit? I put the dub on the turntable, pick up the arm and set the needle down in the groove. Highway Sixty-One dances dazzlingly out of the speakers. Everybody concentrates on listening. When Highway Sixty-One finishes, the Beatles don't stampede to congratulate Bob. Certainly not in the same way that fawning fans like myself have told him that the album knocks us on our asses. The collective consciousness of the single, larger Beatles organism seems to be saying:
"Yeah. It's okay."
XXV.
The suite is laid out almost like a railroad flat. We're in a room closer to the front door, which opens to the elevator. I am familiar with the layout of this suite because it's the suite has the same layout as the one in which I interviewed L.A. gangster Mickey Cohen while he was showering. Maybe it's the very same suite. There's a bedroom at the front with its windows overlooking the mob of teenyboppers on West 54th Street below. The loo is in this room. Is this the very same Bathroom where Mickey Cohen showered?
To me, Mickey Cohen seemed more a clown than a killer. He kept telling me stories that made him sound like he belonged to the gang that can't shoot straight. He showered as if her were performing a ritualistic cleansing of his sins. Like Lady Macbeth washing blood off her hands. But I told you all about Mickey Cohen's shower in my COLUMN SEVEN.
XXVI.
Scotty is a very good-looking guy. All the women I introduced him to thought so. He looks like a rock star himself. He's just under six feet, which is about Neuwirth's height. Scotty doesn't look emaciated but he's thinner in the kind of way that Mick Jagger is thinner. Scotty and Neuwirth both have dark hair but Neuwirth wears his hair more like Prince Valiant. Scotty's hair is curlier and more Rolling Stones-ish than Beatles-ish. With dark-rimmed eyeglasses, Neuwirth has an intense, leathery and oval face with lips that always curl at the corners. Neuwirth's face expresses urgency, understanding and a look of amusement when it's not expressing scorn. Neuwirth's face is handsome whereas Scotty's face is pretty. Neuwirth's face is more masculine. Scotty, on the other hand, would look just as pretty as a woman. Scotty has a triangular face with full, sensual lips that usually remain agape. He is certainly smooth at handling women but he's not with the girls on this particular night. He's hanging out with the gods on the summit of Mount Olympus and he gets too light-headed from the rarified atmosphere. The marijuana is too strong for him, much stronger than he can normally afford to smoke. The liquor is too free and he drinks it too freely. He is smooth at handling women but he can't handle the psychic crossfire in which I've warned him he might be caught. He's too quick to let himself be dragged into the pit of paranoia. He's in trouble. He comes to me for help.
"I'm sick!" he says.
I lead him into the front room. The bathroom door is closed. I try the door handle but the door is locked. Somebody's inside. We'll have to wait. We wait. We wait. We wait. Scotty is turning purple. I knock on the door. A muffled voice from within. We wait. We wait.
"Whoever's in there must be pretty constipated," I say.
I'm trying to find some humor in the situation. I tell Scotty that Mickey Cohen has once been in that same bathroom.
"Maybe Mickey's in there taking a shower again?" I say.
I laugh at the situation we're in. We wait and we wait and finally Scotty can wait no longer. He throws up all over the closed bathroom door. The mess runs down the door, gathering in a sickening puddle on the wall-to-wall carpeting. Ugh! I struggle to keep from throwing up myself.
Just then, Bob walks in to go to the bathroom.
"Gawd!" he exclaims after only two steps, and he immediately walks out.
Neuwirth walks in and freezes in surprise. I start to tell him what's happened and he breaks into a snicker which turns into a belly laugh by the time he's back out the door. When Neil comes in, he surveys the scene with stony dismay. He looks at me to make sure I'll get this mess cleaned up immediately.
"This is Paul's room and he won't want to know about it!" Neil says.
Scouse, the Liverpudlian accent is a language unto itself. Sometimes I can't understand what Neil, Mal and the Beatles are saying. Meanwhile, I'm trying not to look at this sickening glop because just looking at it turns my stomach. I'm certainly not curious enough to go through the trouble of determining what Scotty has eaten. How did I get myself into this mess? I feel betrayed. All of a sudden the bathroom door opens and Paul steps out, nearly putting a zippered Beatle boot down in the middle of the puddle of vomit. Paul can't believe that this has really happened. He is certainly caught by surprise. And he is certainly annoyed. Gingerly, he pulls his foot back to avoid stepping into the vomit and exits the room without saying a word. Immediately, Neil comes rushing back in with Mal.
"This is Paul's room!" Mal says.
"Paul joost came out and said somethin!'" Neil complains. "Y'd better get this cleaned oop right away."
Scotty goes into the bathroom and sticks his face into the toilet while I start cleaning up the mess. Neil and Mal occasionally duck back into the room to speed the cleanup with a few tongue lashes across my back. When, with my stomach churning, I have removed all traces of the vomit, I find I have used up all the towels in Paul's bathroom. When I finally bring Scotty back into the front room, Neuwirth says:
"Y'better take 'im home!"
Hurriedly, I apologize and I beat a retreat. I say a few quick goodnights and Neuwirth accompanies me as I usher Scotty to the door. As Scotty and I walk into the corridor to wait for the elevator, Neuwirth stands in the doorway. He glares at Scotty with half a grin on his face. Neuwirth is a little drunk but he is a very handsome man. As both a disser and a kisser, Bobby is a pisser. With impish seriousness, he looks at Scotty and says:
"Hey, man, if any of those kids down there ask ya for your autograph on the way out, don't forget t'tell 'em you're with the Rolling Stones!" ## NEXT: STRICTLY PERSONAL
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