John Henry Days

“The Angels continued to crack heads open through each act. As the Jefferson Airplane started ‘Revolution,’ Marty Balin jumped off stage to break up a fight—the Angels had started picking on this black guy near the front of the stage and Marty jumped in to break it up. And the Angels turned their fangs on him and beat him unconscious. They beat the lead singer of the Jefferson Airplane unconscious. I was still far from the stage but I heard Paul Kantner—the guitarist—take the mike and start berating the Angels. So one of them grabbed a mike and told him to shut up. They were in control. I didn’t like Marty personally—he had snubbed me at a party a few months before and though I retaliated by saying a few unkind things in print later on, I still held a grudge—but obviously the scene was now out of control. They’d beaten up a rock star, for Christ’s sake. But the show went on. The Angels controlled the night.

“I woke up and it was dark. I had a little more stamina than Andy, but the last night’s partying had finally caught up with me and I crawled into one of the junked cars and fell asleep. I vaguely remember doing that. I woke up and had all these seat springs digging into my back. I got out of the car and asked a kid if I’d missed the Stones and he told me that’s what they were all waiting for. People had ripped down the speedway fencing to make bonfires, so that lit things up a bit, I could see people dancing naked in the orange glow. You know, burn, baby, burn. Shit. And the film crew’s lights helped. The Maysles brothers were filming the concert—Mick was jealous that the Woodstock movie was coming out in a few weeks and he wasn’t in it, so he got the Maysles to film his own free concert. People were singing Stones songs like that would summon them out of their trailer and then an Angel would glide by and drown them out with his motorcycle. But then one time the hog sound didn’t cut out. It got louder and the sea of people parted and this wedge of Angels came driving up through the people like an arrow. And between their motorcycles came the Stones, protected from the crowd by their bad-ass bodyguards. The screaming got massively loud. I got myself into the wake of the Harleys and pushed myself forward to the stage. I felt the thousands at my back, hungering behind me. As the Angels helped the Stones up onstage, I saw that it was full of people. Angels, hangers-on, anyone who could still stand and control their body was up there. It was ridiculous, man. I weaseled my way to the right, and got a pretty good view. At one point one of the cameramen zoomed in on me, but I never made it into the movie.

“The big banks of lights showered the stage with a hellish red light from above. There was barely enough room onstage for the band with all those fucking Angels, but the Stones took their places. I saw this German shepherd, one of the Angels’ dogs, hoof around the mikes, eyes as greedy and hungry as those of its masters. Behind me, the miles of people pushed forward. It was the moment they had all been waiting for. Deliverance time. It was night and the greatest rock and roll band in the world was going to take them to their reward. And then it broke—Keith started to drag his claws across the strings and Mick twirled his black and orange cape and they started into ‘Carol.’ The crowd surged forward all of a sudden—we were as close together as we could have been and they wanted more. More people wanted in. It all came down to this, I thought. A few yards away, this hepcat in a Nehru jacket—Nehru jacket, shit—tumbled into one of the Angel’s hogs because the crowd pushed him and of course first one then two Angels started beating him. I was pushed forward by the shift in the crowd so I lost sight of it—the last I saw of him was a volley of pool sticks coming down on his head like lightning. The Stones must’ve known it was too violent in the crowd to play, I know for a fact they knew what was going on, but they kept playing. Thing is, it wasn’t even that great a set. Totally uninspired. All the energy they’d had in L.A. had totally dissipated by the end of the tour. They were doing the show, they were doing what they did best, but they couldn’t hide the fact that it had been a long couple of months. Maybe they didn’t take a stronger stand against the Angels because they just wanted it to be over. They just wanted to play their final set and get the fuck out of America. They’d been bullied by what the press and what the public expected, the pop had shifted and forced them into this. Or maybe they were scared of the Angels, of what they had wrought, and if that was the case then they should never have gone into ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’ It was just stupid. Mick in his Satan mode asked the crowd to please allow him to introduce himself, lit up all red against the black desert night, and the Angels took their places. The Angels brought their wrath upon the hippies, raising their baseball bats and pool sticks upon the heads of the kids. The kids all clambered and rushed up to get up to the front of the stage, they ran up to the Gates and the Angels swung down on them. Mick tried to stop it and the Stones quit the song. Mick said, cool it, cut it out. As if he were still in control. The Angels dragged away some people and things calmed down a bit. Mick joked, “Something funny always happens when we start that song,” as if he thought that you could say the words of the spell and then act surprised when you smelled brimstone.

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