under their thumb: How a Nice Boy from Brooklyn Got Mixed Up with the Rolling Stones (and Lived to Tell About It)

Below: Twain, photographed in 1907 Facing (above): Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts at Turku Airport, Finland in 1965 Facing (below):The cover of Issue 19 of Beggar’s Banquet

Introducing under their thumb

“I’d like to welcome President Clinton,” Mick Jagger tells the VIP crowd. “And I see she’s brought her husband.”

The Rolling Stones are at New York’s Beacon Theatre, and Martin Scorsese’s shooting it for a documentary. It’s October 29, 2006, and, after decades of drug busts, paternity suits, funerals, divorces, rehabs, and chemotherapy, the Stones can still put out. I mean, damn, these guys are good. But as my eyes and ears fixate on them at the Beacon, my mind wanders to another time and place. My eyes see Mick onstage, but my mind sees him in his house, blotting the orange juice I spilled on his rug. My ears hear Keith Richards plucking “I’m Free,” but my mind hears him offering me bourbon on his terrace. And Ronnie Wood? I’m

peeling potatoes with him in his kitchen. I used to pal around with these guys. And if this were ten or twenty years ago, I’d have begun my night backstage. I’d tell Keith and Ronnie to break a leg, and then I’d visit them after the show. But that’s

not happening tonight. I finagled my way into the crowd, and the Stones don’t know I’m here. For me, there’s never been a world without the Stones. They came into existence two months before I did. But I didn’t hear them until I turned

ten. To that point, if you didn’t have a Saturday morning TV show, I didn’t know you. The Monkees, The Beatles, and Jackson 5 were the only bands I could name. Life changed in 1972, when an announcement came from my sister’s bedroom: Everything seems to be ready . . . Are you ready? . . . Sorry for the delay. . . . Is everybody ready? What followed were the strangest words and most violent sounds I’d ever heard: I was born in a

crossfire hurricane! And I howled at my ma in the driving rain! Followed by: I think I bust a button on my trousers. . . . You don’t want my trousers to

fall down, now do ya? I had no idea what it meant, but it was impossible to ignore. My sister said it was the Rolling Stones. She showed me their album cover, and they looked pretty tough. Like they could definitely beat up the Monkees. Until recently, my sister had listened only to “Build Me Up Buttercup” and “I Think I Love You.” But somehow, in the summer of ’72, she switched her allegiance from Keith Partridge to Keith Richards. She ditched her ‘45s and bought some Stones albums. One was shaped like a stop sign. Another had a zipper on it. She pointed to the blond- haired guy and said he was dead. She said the Stones had been busted for drugs, evicted from hotels, and had played at concerts where people got murdered. I thought my head would explode. The chaotic stories, violent music, and wild album covers overwhelmed me. But I craved

more.

contained words I wasn’t allowed to repeat. And while I didn’t understand a phrase like “I laid a divorcée in New York City,” I was certain it sounded cool and that I wanted to do it. To

me, the Stones were the most rebellious people on earth, so I instantly became obsessed with them.

As luck would have it, my sister grew tired of the Stones and offered me her albums for a

buck apiece. I suddenly had a Stones collection. When their next album came out, I got sticker shock. Goats Head Soup cost me $3.48 at Alexander’s Department Store. The band came to Madison Square Garden in 1975, but Mom wouldn’t let me take the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. I was only 12. I followed the tour by listening to WNEW and by scouring the pages of Rolling Stone and Creem. I envied the DJs and writers who covered the

Stones and desperately wanted their job. At school, I had no one to share my enthusiasm with. The kids in my seventh-grade class were into the Carpenters. My teachers complained about my ratty Stones T- shirts, my dirty long hair (patterned after Mick’s), and my semi- obscene belt buckle (bearing the Stones’ tongue logo). I was attending yeshiva, the Jewish version of parochial school, so there was a dress code. I broke it every day, but I was a straight- A student, so they didn’t expel me. When the Stones released their Some Girls

album in June 1978, I was 15 years old, attending public high school. Over the summer, I wore that record out. It was as vital as anything from CBGB’s and confirmed the Stones’ take-

noprisoners attitude. It dripped with sarcasm and pissed off Jesse Jackson, women’s groups, and even Lucille Ball. I relied on Creem, Rolling Stone, and ’NEW to keep up on the tour. The Stones were a big story that year, so a lot of outlets jumped on the bandwagon. But most of them—local newspapers, local news shows—screwed up. They’d miss the Stones’ sarcasm or, worse, get their facts wrong. I can’t tell you how many times I’d read that the Stones opened with “Johnny B. Goode” when it was really “Let It Rock.” All I could think was, “That guy saw the Stones at the Palladium and I didn’t?”

The Album Tracks episode is what pushed me over the edge. Album Tracks was a TV show hosted by two DJs from WNBC named Lee Masters and Bob Pittman. They featured a report on the Stones’ ill- fated Altamont concert. They said the Stones were performing “Sympathy for the Devil” when a kid got murdered in the crowd, and that the Stones have been too scared to perform the song since. First of all, if they had watched Gimme Shelter, they’d know the kid got stabbed during “Under My Thumb,” not “Sympathy.” Second, if they cared the least bit about the Stones, they’d know that “Sympathy” was played plenty of times after Altamont. I’ve got the bootlegs to prove it. If these guys don’t know the most dramatic scene in Gimme Shelter, I thought, then maybe they shouldn’t be rock journalists. (Pittman later founded MTV. Masters became president of the E! channel.) I wrote them a courteous letter, but got a dismissive response. They said their facts came from a “rock encyclopedia” and that they were sticking to their story. I realized I could do a better job than most grownups at covering the Stones. And so, in September 1978, armed with a borrowed typewriter, I pecked away at the first issue of my fanzine. It was the week of my 16th birthday, and the start of my junior year in high school. Fanzines—or ’zines, for short— have been around a long time. But the modern version sprouted from the do- it- yourself punk- rock zeitgeist of the late Seventies. ’Zines took pride in how crappy they looked, and most were handwritten, not typed. Mine was a combination of both.

I had no idea where to print, much less who would read, my little creation, but I didn’t care. My primary goal was to report the facts. In my debut issue, I wrote about Keith’s upcoming drug trial and about the band’s upcoming appearance on Saturday Night Live. I wasn’t giving you anything TV Guide didn’t, but at least I was accurate.

In 1978, there wasn’t a Kinko’s on every corner and no one had a PC. If youwanted to lay out a page, you had to do it the hard way: scissors and glue. “Cut and paste” literally meant to cut and paste. Typos weren’t deleted, they were covered up by Wite- Out or by powdery stuff called Ko- Rec- Type, which didn’t always work. A simple page could take you a day. But it meant that ’zine publishers were extremely passionate people, dedicated to our subjects. We were in it for love, not money. I dubbed my ’zine Beggars Banquet because I wanted it to be—bear with me on this—“a banquet of Stones information that even a beggar could afford.” Back then, copy shops were primarily found on college campuses. If you didn’t live near one, you had to go to a bank or library. That’s who had the copy machines. For 10 cents, you put your library book or bank statement on the glass and, about thirty seconds later, a horrible- looking copy oozed out. I tried the machine at the Flatlands Avenue bank, but the results were illegible. That’s when I remembered my high school’s mimeo room. I knew a student volunteer who had the keys. He snuck me in after hours, and we mimeographed a hundred copies of my three- page issue. All on the Board of Ed’s dime. When I left school that night with my published ’zine, I had no idea what to do next. My hundred copies looked like crap, but at least they smelled great.

Under Their Thumb: How a Nice Boy from

Brooklyn Got Mixed Up with the Rolling Stones (and Lived to Tell About It) (Paperback,

9781493065080, £22.95) by Bill German publishes