Each book signed and numbered. 420 pages. Distinctive oversize 15 x 12" page format. The first 750 are presented as a Deluxe Edition, boxed in an impressive 16-3/4 x 19 x 5" clamshell case and containing a signed, limited hand-made gelatin silver print. More.   

FROM THE PREFACE....You could easily imagine that lives as disparate as ours, as geographically separate, would never cross. What could bring us together, what could we possibly have in common?
        Bill Wyman was in the Royal Air Force stationed in Germany when he first heard rock ‘n’ roll on American Armed Forces radio, but it is seeing Chuck Berry in the movie Rock, Rock, Rock that seals his fate. “The hair stood up on the back of my head, and I got shivers all over. I’d never been affected like that. I think Keith (Richards) saw that movie about 16 times!” And Mick Jagger is carrying “Rocking at the Hop,” a Chuck Berry record, under his arm when he and Keith bump into each other at the Dartford train station and decide to “get together.” Stanley Booth is driving with his parents across Georgia when he first hears Ella Mae Morse on the radio. “It was out of the night in South Georgia. It was just as black as the inside of your hat. And I thought, ‘Damn, I don’t know what this is. But this is what I want!’”
      In San Francisco I lay in bed listening to the foghorns out the window and to the soft country music on my brown plastic monaural radio – the orange glow of the tubes shining through the cracks in the back. Then Elvis appeared and swept me into rock n roll, which introduced me to Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and the Everly Brothers.
      I sometimes think of the sixteen of us as passengers boarding separate trains at stations continents apart, but over time the train-lines converge until we are deposited on top of a hill in Los Angeles. All of us, now on the same train, embark across America, until on December 6th 1969 we arrive – with 400,000 others - at a location no one had ever heard of, a series of brown hills 40 miles east of San Francisco.....

Knowing about events is different than living them. To listen to the music of the 1960s today (and that so many still do it is a testament to the fact, as Mick Taylor says, “We made great music.”) is not to experience it as we did: brand new, as it was released, in real time and in sequence: first Dylan then the Beatles then the Stones then Hendrix then Dylan, again, then the Beatles, again, and so on, with only a few months between them - growing with them as they grew, watching the world change around you in response, watching it without knowing where it would end, and being prepared to believe as an unqualified (but somehow concrete) promise a phrase such as “Nothing you can do that can’t be done.” For a long time it did just get bigger, and better. The horizon did seem limitless.

It has been my goal to try and build a book that provides – not so much the history of the tour, or an “inside look” – but the experience of being there, because shared experience communicates in a way ideas simply don’t. We know now what we didn’t know then, but imagine, for a moment, that you didn’t.

Imagine that you have glanced up from this page, and you see in front of you Davis, California, a small university town 90 miles Northeast of San Francisco. You’re eighteen years old, and it is September of 1964. Over the grass of the University’s Quad on a serene and sunny day float the strains of I Want to Hold Your Hand. Or, later, you are at a party with a group of art students. The Rolling Stones are blaring from the stereo a new hit song and the singer is belting out, “Hey Hey You Get Offa My Cloud.” Then one hot, humid night in a makeshift dark room in the summer of ’65 you hear the voice of Bob Dylan demanding over the radio -- drums, organ, and electric guitar behind him -- “How does it feel to be on your own, with no direction home, a complete unknown, just like a rolling stone?”
Each album, following on the heels of earlier, brilliant work, still seemed to transcend the ones that had come before. There was an abiding, inescapable sense that these remarkable people - Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones - were talking not only to us but also to each other, and that we were all, somehow, in this together .
     Or imagine, you’re in the American South writing about racial violence for the Boston Globe, and then Newsweek magazine sends you to England in 1965 to write about Carnaby Street and “Swinging London.” Then you’re in San Francisco as founding member of Rolling Stone magazine. Michael Lydon, a writer for the New York Times, a native of Massachusetts and graduate of Yale says:
“What I truly remember is the number of ideas moving around very rapidly, and very brilliantly. It was an emerging international conversation about life, and art, and music, and politics It wasn’t directed, but inspired by brilliant statements of all kinds - trenchant, challenging observations.
Jerry Garcia was as smart as one of your friends from Yale who was a clerk for some Supreme Court judge. No, even smarter. The more I listened to the music, and the ideas they generated, and the more I got into it, I just felt a personal challenge from it. In a song if someone says to you “He not busy being born is busy dying…” I took that as a challenge. If you’re not really fighting to keep growing, you’re going to wither away. So if I don’t want to wither away, I’ve got to keep growing. I wanted to be part of the conversation. I wanted to write about it. I wanted to make my own contribution.”
In the sweltering South, Stanley Booth, writing bios about the aid recipients he encounters as part of his job working for the welfare department in Memphis Tennessee, spends an afternoon with the Beatles in the summer of 1966:
     “It was one thing to hear their records and enjoy that, but then you meet them, and they’re four different people - not just some pop phenomenon. Four guys, who do what they do rather well, and they’re just like us. You realized that something was going on, an international phenomenon and it was going some place. It appeared that there was a very positive energy that people were participating in; that was passing between these characters, whether it was Antonioni or Truffaut, the Stones or Dylan, Joan Baez. There was this attitude, and it was a positive attitude; it was a pro-human attitude and an attitude of genuine values. I mean when John Lennon asked the Mayor of Liverpool, ‘When are you going to get those people some teeth?’ That was just great. It was sensible and it gave one hope.”
In London Georgia “Jo” Bergman lends Paul McCartney her make-up and wonders why he needs it for a radio show. Before that she has worked in the theater and witnessed the explosion of fashion and ideas, the emergence of Britain from the Second World War:
     “It was a really exciting, just the best time. 1962 was the beginning. In ’63 it really started exploding. Not just the Beatles - that’s when the fashion started happening and the films and the art and everything else. In England what had happened in the Sixties is an upending of some of the expectations of the class system so that talented people, from Liverpool, from the East End, from anywhere that were working class or lower middle class, who were photographers, or film-makers or fashion designers or actors or musicians – came bursting through the door, just threw it open. The Genie was out of the bottle. Suddenly, popular culture, which had been ersatz American was upended by all of these people saying, ‘Wait a minute’ and doing it with humor and wit and style and all of it came together and that’s what was so exciting about being in England in the Sixties: just this profusion of surprise in every creative media that you looked at – in every form that you looked at. And it was everywhere. And class didn’t go away but David Bailey got to be king, Albert Finney got to be king, and Mary Quant got to be queen. And you bluffed your way into it, talked your way into it, whatever but it was just enormously exciting to be there. And we all knew it. It was the beginning of practically everything.”
     “The music came across the airwaves,” says Keith Richards, “and suddenly it felt like the world was actually changing….I knew what I wanted to do: get this band together. I was becoming this very unlikely missionary for a new kind of music. That’s what Jimmy Reed, Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf did to me. Elvis, Buddy, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee, Little Richard, Bo Diddley – it’s what all those cats did to me. I’m only eighteen, and already people ain’t hearin’ this music anymore, and it had lit my life up! Now one way or another I got to keep the flame alive! We were disciples.”

By the time the Rolling Stones embarked on their 1969 U.S. tour - their first since 1966 – the sixties were in full flood. The Stones were the last active performers of the “Big Three” (Dylan, the Beatles, the Stones.). The Beatles were squabbling and would soon break up. Bob Dylan had injured himself in a motorcycle accident and was reclusive. The Rolling Stones tour, about to begin, would be the biggest tour rock music had ever seen. We banded together in Los Angeles in September of 1969 and started to prepare. Join us.

INTERVIEWS

JON JAYMES (excerpt)
B. 1946 D. 1994

“Transportation”

If he were alive (and if we knew where he was) and if, when contacted, he told the truth, then “Jon Jaymes” would be represented by an interview as everyone else. But the most likely prospect is that Jon Jaymes is dead. Even when alive, however, the truth about Jaymes was never easy to determine. That includes, in the end, his actual name, which appears to have been John Clifford Ellsworth. But police files around the country list multiple aliases, including John Jaymes, Clifford J. Ellsworth and Thomas Fiorella. It is entirely possible that Jaymes had more names and more separate lives, but he appears here as Jon Jaymes because in 1969 he talked his way onto the Rolling Stones tour of America. What follows is the saga of Jon Jaymes, at least as well as I can reconstruct it. Someone should write a song.

I don’t recall the first moment I saw Jon Jaymes. If you happened to notice him among the rock stars and the long-hairs a likely first response would be to wonder what he was doing there, an unhealthy looking fat man with four inch side-burns, a bad complexion and a complete lack of style. He didn’t make sense. Not like Pete Bennett (as Stanley Booth describes him ‘the thickest-necked man I’d ever seen.’) who could be seen chewing a cigar, wearing a pin strip suit and glossy tie. Bennett was like something you might expect from the “Untouchables,” so you could understand the type. Even to someone like me, roughly as naïve as they come, it made sense that Pete Bennett had a role to play promoting records. (Even I’d heard of payola. Not, of course, that such a thing was ever mentioned.)

Pete Bennett worked with Allen Klein, and Allen Klein was fearsome. I knew that because by the time of the tour I had been working with the Rolling Stones on and off for the better part of a year, and whenever Allen Klein’s name came up it was always in an adversarial manner, and always because even the Rolling Stones couldn’t get any money – their money – out of him.

But this fat young man didn’t fit any of those molds so he didn’t make any sense. Then we were told he didn’t work for us, he worked for Chrysler. So that settled it, sort of, but it didn’t, really, because he was around all the time, and why would that be necessary? It just didn’t fit at all.

Of course Jaymes didn’t work for Chrysler, we found out later. Instead, he’d gone to Chrysler and told them he was working for the Rolling Stones, and afterwards came to the Rolling Stones and told them he worked for Chrysler, and they would provide the Stones with free cars during the tour and really didn’t want anything in return except, maybe, if it worked out, a picture of the Stones with some of their cars. That could be taken at the end of the tour - no need to worry about it right away.

And so we were given Chrysler’s cars, which we abandoned, keys in them, at curbs and airports, all over America.

Ronnie Schneider, talking to me in 2005 about Jaymes, said, “You have to remember I was a small operation. I was basically getting the tour ready in a couple of weeks. I didn’t have any money. So if someone comes to me volunteering to give me stuff, I don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” That made sense. Plus the cars were there when you needed them. “Everything was like he said it would be,” says Ronnie. Jaymes delivered. It was free....