Life

Being an only child forces you to in­vent your world. First you're liv­ing in a house with two adults, and so cer­tain bits of child­hood will go by with you lis­ten­ing al­most ex­clu­sively to adult con­ver­sa­tion.

And on top of that it was around Dartford where German bombers would get cold feet and just drop their bombs and turn around. ‘Too heavy round here.’ BOOM. It’s a miracle we didn’t get it. The sound of a siren still makes the hair on the back of my neck curl, and that must be from being put in the shelter with Mum and the family. When the sound of that siren goes off, it’s automatic, an instinctive reaction. I watch many war movies and documentaries, so I hear it all the time, but it always does the trick.

My earliest memories are the standard postwar memories in London. Landscapes of rubble, half a street’s disappeared. Some of it stayed like that for ten years. The main effect of the war on me was just that phrase, ‘Before the War.’ Because you’d hear grown-ups talking about it. ‘Oh, it wasn’t like this before the war.’ Otherwise I wasn’t particularly affected. I suppose no sugar, no sweets and candies, was a good thing, but I wasn’t happy about it. I’ve always had trouble scoring. Lower East Side or the sweet shop in East Wittering, near my home in West Sussex. That’s the closest I get nowadays to visiting the dealer – the old Candies sweet shop. I drove over there at 8:30 one morning not long ago with my mate Alan Clayton, singer of the Dirty Strangers. We’d been up all night and we’d got the sugar craving. We had to wait outside for half an hour until it opened. We bought Candy Twirls and Bull’s-Eyes and Licorice & Blackcurrant. We weren’t going to lower ourselves and score at the supermarket, were we?

The fact that I couldn’t buy a bag of sweets until 1954 says a lot about the upheavals and changes that last for so many years after a war. The war had been over for nine years before I could actually, if I had the money, go and say, ‘I’ll have a bag of them ‘ – toffees and Aniseed Twists. Otherwise it was ‘You got your ration stamp book?’ The sound of those stamps stamping. Your ration was your ration. One little brown paper bag – a tiny one – a week.

He was a dispatch rider in Normandy just after the invasion, and got blown up in a mortar attack, his mates killed around him. He was the only survivor of that particular little foray, and it left a very nasty gash, a livid scar all the way up his left thigh. I always wanted to get one when I grew up. I’d say, ‘Dad, what’s that?’ And he’d say, ‘It got me out the war, son.’ It left him with nightmares for the rest of his life. My son Marlon lived a lot with Bert in America for some years, while Marlon was growing up, and they used to go camping together. Marlon says Bert would wake up in the middle of the night, shouting, ‘Look out, Charlie, here it comes. We’re all goners! We’re all goners! Fuck this shit.’

The war was over by then, but where I grew up you’d turn a corner and see horizon, wasteland, weeds, maybe one or two of those odd Hitchcock-looking houses that somehow miraculously survived. Our street took a near hit from a doodlebug, but we weren’t there. Doris said it bounced along the curbstones and killed everyone on either side of our house. A brick or two landed in my cot. That was evidence that Hitler was on my trail. Then he went to plan B. After that, my mum thought Dartford was a bit dangerous, bless her.

In 2006, the political ambitions of Governor Huckabee of Arkansas, who was going to stand in the primaries as a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, extended to granting me a pardon for my misdemeanor of thirty years previous. Governor Huckabee also thinks of himself as a guitar player. I think he even has a band. In fact there was nothing to pardon. There was no crime on the slate in Fordyce, but that didn’t matter, I got pardoned anyway. But what the hell happened to that car? We left it in this garage loaded with dope. I’d like to know what happened to that stuff. Maybe they never took the panels off. Maybe someone’s still driving it around, still filled with shit.

Carter:

You want to start a riot? You seen outside? You wave one pair of handcuffs and you will lose control of this crowd. This is the Rolling Stones, for Christ sakes.

Police Chief:

And your little boys will go behind bars.

Judge [returned from interview]:

What’s that?

Judge’s Brother [taking him aside]:

Tom, we need to confer. There is no legal cause to hold them. We will have all hell to pay if we don’t follow the law here.

Judge:

I know it. Sure thing. Yes. Yes. Mr. Carrrer. You will all approach the bench.

The fire had gone out of all except Chief Gober. The search had revealed nothing that they could legally use. There was nothing to charge us with. The cocaine belonged to Freddie the hitchhiker and it had been illegally discovered. The state police were mostly now on Carter’s side. With much conferring and words in the ear, Carter and the other lawyers made a deal with the judge. Very simple. The judge would like to keep the hunting knife and drop the charge on that – it hangs in the courtroom to this day. He would reduce the reckless driving to a misdemeanor, nothing more than a parking ticket for which I would pay $162.50. With the $50,000 in cash that Carter had brought down with him, he paid a bond of $5,000 for Freddie and the cocaine, and it was agreed that Carter would file to have it dismissed on legal grounds later – so Freddie was free to go too. But there was one last condition. We had to give a press conference before we went and be photographed with our arms around the judge. Ronnie and I conducted our press conference from the bench. I was wearing a fireman’s hat by this time and I was filmed pounding the gavel and announcing to the press, ‘Case closed.’ Phew!

∗

It was a classic outcome for the Stones. The choice always was a tricky one for the authorities who arrested us. Do you want to lock them up, or have your photograph taken with them and give them a motorcade to see them on their way? There’s votes either way. In Fordyce, by the skin of our teeth, we got the motorcade. The state police had to escort us through the crowds to the airport at around two in the morning, where our plane, well stocked with Jack Daniel’s, was revved up and waiting.

Judge:

Now, I think what we are judging here is a felony. A felony, gennnmen. I will take summmissions. Mr. Attorney?

Young Prosecuting Attorney:

Your Honor, there is a problem here about evidence.

Judge:

Y’all have to excuse me a minute. I’ll recess.

[Perplexity in court. Proceeding held up for ten minutes. Judge returns. His mission was to cross the road and buy a pint bottle of bourbon before the store closed at ten p.m. The bottle is now in his sock.]

Carter [on telephone to Frank Wynne, the judge’s brother]:

Frank, where are you? You’d better come up. Tom’s intoxicated. Yeah. OK. OK.

Judge:

Proceed, Mr…ah…proceed.

Young Prosecuting Attorney:

I don’t think we can legally do this, Your Honor. We don’t have justification to hold them. I think we have to let them go.

Police Chief [to judge, yelling]:

Damn we do. You gonna let these bastards go? You know I’m gonna place you under arrest, Judge. You damn right I am. You are intoxicated. You are publicly drunk. You are not fit to sit on that bench. You are causing a disgrace to our community. [He tries to grab him.]

Judge [yelling]:

You sonofabitch. Gerraway from me. You threaten me, I’m gonna have your ass outta…[A scuffle.]

Carter [moving to separate them]:

Whoa. Now, boys, boys. Let’s stop squabbling. Let’s keep talking. This is no time to get the liver out and put the knives in ha ha…We got TV, the world’s press outside. Won’t look good. You know what the governor’s going to say about this. Let’s proceed with the business. I think we can reach some agreement here.

Courtroom Official:

Excuse me, Judge. We have the BBC on live news from London. They want you now.

Judge:

Oh yeah. ‘Scuse me a minute, boys. Be right back. [He takes a nip from the bottle in his sock.]

Police Chief [still yelling]:

Goddamn circus. Damn you, Carter, these boys have committed a felony. We found cocaine in that damn car. What more do you want? I’m gonna bust their asses. They gonna play by our rules down here and I’m gonna hit ‘em where it hurts. How much they payin’ you, Hoover boy? Unless I get a ruling that the search was legal, I’m gonna arrest the judge for public drunk.

Judge [v⁄o to BBC]:

Oh yeah, I was over there in England in World War Two. Bomber pilot, 385th Bomb Group. Station Great Ashfield. I had a helluva time over there…Oh, I love England. Played golf. Some of the great courses I played on. You got some great ones there…Wennnworth? Yeah. Now to inform y’all, we’re gonna hold a press conference with the boys and explain some of the proceedings here, how the Rolling Stones came to be in our town here an’ all.

Police Chief:

I got ‘em here and I’m holding ‘em. I want these limeys, these little fairies. Who do they think they are?

In Memphis when they threatened to arrest Mick for singing the lyrics ‘Starfucker, starfucker,’ Carter stopped them in their tracks by producing a playlist from the local radio station that showed they’d been playing it on the air without any protest for two years. What Carter saw and was determined to fight every inch of the way was that every time the police moved, in every city, they violated the law, acted illegally, tried to bust in without warrants, made searches without probable cause.

Carter’s advantage at the immigration department was that he was one of the boys, he came from law enforcement, he had respect for having been with Kennedy. He did an ‘I know how you boys feel’ and just said he wanted a hearing because he didn’t think we were being treated fairly. He worked his way in; many months of slogging. He paid attention particularly to the lower-level staff, who he knew could obstruct things on technicalities. I underwent medical tests to prove that I was drug free, from the same doctor in Paris who had given me many a clean bill of health. Then Nixon resigned. And then Carter asked the top official to meet Mick and judge for himself, and of course Mick puts on his suit and charms the pants off him. Mick is really the most versatile bloke. Why I love him. He can hold a philosophical discussion with Sartre in his native tongue. Mick’s very good with the locals. Carter told me he applied for the visas not in New York or Washington but in Memphis, where it was quieter. The result was an astonishing turnaround. Waivers and visas were suddenly issued on one condition: that Bill Carter toured with the Stones and would personally assure the government that riots would be prevented and that there would be no illegal activities on the tour. (They required a doctor to accompany us – an almost fictional character who appears later in the narrative, who became a tour victim, sampling the medication and running off with a groupie.)

Carter had reassured them by offering to run the tour Secret Service-style, alongside the police. His other contacts also meant that he would get a tip-off if the police were planning a bust. And that’s what saved our asses on many occasions.

He had a lot of balls. He was passionate about the rule of law, the correct way of doing things, the Constitution – and he taught police seminars on it. He’d gone into the defense attorney business he told me because he’d got fed up with policemen routinely abusing their power and bending the law, which meant almost all of them he encountered on tour with the Rolling Stones, in almost every city. Carter was our natural ally.