July 14 Friday
At 10:35 got a taxi to the dentist at the Apothecary (63). Walked home. About 8:15 Andy came over thinking everyone was here, he didn't stay.
July 15 Saturday
About 4:30 RAIN. About 1:30 Lesley and Judy came over, watched the new movie in the livingroom using a light bulb. Played 20 questions. Dave came, then Gillian, watched 'Bugs Bunny' at 4. Gillian left, made hamburgers, listened in on Lesley and Manny on the phone. Judy left, I watched 'Elizabeth R' on TV, Dave and Lesley went downstairs. About 9:50 Lesley was on the phone, I sprayed her with some stuff, when she tried to spray me I hit her with water. Lesley and I played cards, they left at 11.
July 16 Sunday
Walked to Lesley's, got there at 12:30, sat in the kitchen. She gave me Sputnik (64). Judy came, about 1:30 we drove down to Town of Mt Royal to Manny's house [where all the furniture was covered in plastic]. I had brought all 15 movies and we watched 13 of them [oh my Lord]. Three guys and two girls came, went to the kitchen and ate. They left at 6:30. Manny, Judy and I played cards, blew bubbles. All of us tried crank calls but no one was home except one (Jewish International Whore House of Montreal). Left at 10:30, got a drive with Lesley.
July 17 Monday
Didn't do anything in the afternoon except Gillian's portrait. nite- got picked up by Lesley at St John's and Lakeview. Picked Gillian up at the hospital [?] and got dropped off at Fairview Cinema. Met Dave there, saw the movie 'Play it Again, Sam'. Got a drive home with Gillian at 8:30. [this night the Rolling Stones played at the Forum. A bomb in one of their vans had destroyed some of their equipment. It was so hot inside the Forum girls were removing their tops. I regret not having seen this concert...but a vivid desciption of it has come my way (2008)].
July 18 Tuesday
ø
July 19 Wednesday
About 1:30 Gillian, Alan Walker and Lesley came over, brought out the rabbit [my sister's], we left and walked down the 2&20 to Lesley's, sat in the kitchen, didn't do much. Got a drive home with Gillian at 5:30. nite- Dave came over at 8:30, he brought the new Stones album [Exile in Main St.]. He left at 11.
July 20 Thursday
Bought 'Exile on Main St.'. Went to Gillian's, talked. Went up to the study and watched TV, Abby came up. Then Dave arrived, went to the livingroom. Alan came, Gillian and Dave danced. Left about 4:25. nite- Gillian and Alan came over about 6:45, smoked 2 joints I think were tobacco. Judy came, then Andy. Attacked Gillian, so Judy and her attacked me. Gillian told me Dave took 2 of my records and I discovered he took back his T-Rex [I got mine back]. Everyone left at 10.
July 21 Friday
Nite- about 7:15 Lesley and Judy came over, talked, didn't do much. I poured abit of water on Lesley's buns and she got pissed off and left at 10:30, Judy left too.
July 22 Saturday
Parents gone till Tuesday. Dave came over, then Judy. Dave and Judy were downstairs most of the time. Watched 'Bugs Bunny', attacked Judy before she left at 6. nite- Dave stayed, Andy came over about 7:45, fooled around (Dave put oranges up shirt as tits) [and I believe on the front porch yelled that he wanted a divorce]. Graham Banks, Robert Fenouhlet and Fred Parnell came and Andy went with then to got smoke but the guy wasn't in. Andy came back about 10, he left at 11, Dave at 11:15.
63. At the corner of St John's and Hymus, it had a drug store, Royal bank and a restaurant on the ground floor, and medical offices on the second. My dentist was Dr. Archibault, he had been my dentist since moving to Pointe Claire. His office used to be in his home near the shops.
64. The ashtray. Sputnik later disappeared from my place. Lesley later said she'd taken it back, she couldn't part with it. But where is it now?
2008. On January 16, 2008 I received an email from Daniel Richler (see his Wikipedia entry. Everyone around me has a damn Wikipedia entry but me!):
I've just finished reading your online journals, which I enjoyed tremendously. We don't know each other (actually, I don't know any of your friends; the only people in your account I ever met were those from CHOM - Trevor, Beverly, Earl, Terry et al.), but I still got a powerful nostalgia buzz from it. Have other people who were teenagers in that era expressed the weird feeling of having lived such parallel lives? Though I spent my teens in Westmount and Mont Royal, we went to the same clubs and record shops, concert arenas, school cafs and shopping malls, discovered the same music, TV shows, movies, books, magazines and drugs in more or less the same order, and grew up (most of us) to become functioning adults in spite of our parents' most dire predictions...
On January 22, 2008, I received:
The Rolling Stones: Montreal Forum, July 17th, 1972.
by Daniel Richler
As I recall, it was a classic Montreal summer day: blindingly bright, hot, muggy. The freaks and heads were milling about Atwater for hours if not days before, toking up quite openly in Atwater Park across from the Forum, buying and selling tickets or just getting charged on the atmosphere; the cops were out in force too, after those Péquistes blew up the Stones’ truck. Exile on Main Street was a monster record, supplying a steamy soundtrack to the summer in a way that in my experience CDs just don't seem to any more; if to some it sounded like a sleeper on first listen (the reviews, even in Rolling Stone, which had dispatched Robert Greenfield and Truman Capote to write about the tour, were often reserved), my friends and I had it on 8-track infinite repeat for months: we thought it was an ecstatic album, jammed with songs it would take us years to decipher - exotic, grungy, raw, dirty-sexy, drugged up and almost out of control.
The so-called S.T.P. Tour itself made the magazines and newspapers all across America as celebrities and artists like Capote, Terry Southern, Peter Hill Beard, Andy Warhol, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Liza Minelli et al. reportedly partied backstage, and the whole rock’n’roll jet set aristocracy phenomenon felt fantastically exclusive and erotic and out of reach to teenagers like me. The bad Altamont vibe had stuck sexily to the band (the Hell’s Angels were rumoured to have a call out for Mick Jagger’s assassination), and violence had accompanied the band throughout, even before Montreal: 2,000 fans crashed the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver in June; there were 60 arrests in San Diego, and 61 in Washington, D.C.; police threw tear gas at fans in Tucson; and police had to block 2,000 ticketless fans from trying to storm the arena in Detroit. Add to the mix hot summer stories of the Stones’ orgy at the Playboy mansion and you had a myth-in-the-making.
I was fifteen then. I’d walked into all of this right off the plane from England two days before the Forum show (my family moved to Canada in 1972). At that time my parents had a friend named Ted Allan, who was so close to the family he was an uncle to me. He’d fought in the Spanish Civil War, knew Dr. Norman Bethune there and later been a guest of honour in Communist China; he was a Marxist and a novelist and playwright who’d worked in Europe, done the bohemian thing and seen the Paris student riots of 1968. He was enamoured of revolution and was always railing against the Man, despite being in his fifties. He took me down to see the police in formation all around the Forum. “In Paris the gendarmes are real pricks, you know,” he told me as we strolled amongst the cops on Ste-Catherine. “They put lead weights in the lining of their capes and swing them at the heads of the kids.” I didn’t know what that necessarily said about the Montreal police (who, for one thing, didn’t wear capes), but it sure made everything seem more exciting.
Ted promised he’d get me tickets from someone he knew in the Montreal film industry, but then the news went around that 3,000 forged tickets had been sold for the show, so everyone was in a panic and nothing was available. On the afternoon I went down on my own and decided to risk buying something from a tout. I was in a sweat, fearing I'd never get anything, or that if I did it would be a fake, but the show started three hours late and as the last ticketholders were filing in and being frisked I managed to score one crisp ticket in the Reds for… wait for it… a massively inflated... $7.50!
I just caught Stevie Wonder singing the refrain, “Let’s Go Back to Africa” (what was that song?) before leaving the stage. It was suffocating in there, humid and somehow pressurized, with 20,000 fans filling up every seat and aisle and stairway; it reeked deliciously of hash and tobacco and you got out of your head whether you were smoking or not. I remember Jagger later murmuring into the mic, “Très chaud, très chaud…”, and when at the end he tossed a bucket of water and rose petals into the crowd it was like a frenzied mass baptism. Girls were taking off their shirts and gyrating on their boyfriends’ shoulders - one climbed up on mine and I didn't even know her - and when later I got home and undressed I found my sweat had caused the dye in my Carnaby Street loon pants to stain my skin and underwear dark purple.
There was constant pandemonium from the moment the Stones came on. They were living gods in those days, remember, and their fans weren't yet going through some half-weary nostalgia routine. And it was actually a very tense show, with Chip Monck’s rear-stage mirrors working a spectacular, but kind of accusing, Klieg-light effect on the crowd. During “All Down The Line” firecrackers kept exploding, and the repeated bangs sounded like a gun trying to find its target. Jagger went down on one knee, clearly freaked, and soon after that a bottle (not a stubbie; a 40 ouncer!) hit him on the leg.
As for the music itself, well, there’s evidence of the general tour in the movie Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones, but don’t worry if you can’t find it on DVD because it was a boring, lacklustre record of events with no backstage, on-the-street or even audience footage at all. (It was released theatrically for a brief spell in 1974.) Better to hear the bootlegs and to read the in-depth accounts. I don’t remember it this way, but apparently the Montreal Forum rendition of “Midnight Rambler” was their worst of the tour, because Jagger was so nervous. If you want a song-by-song, I recommend stoneslib7.homestead.com, as well as stoneslib.homestead.com, pitt.edu, and wikipedia.org. And if you really want a trip in time, read S.T.P.: A Journey Through America With The Rolling Stones by Robert Greenfield, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth (for the Altamont tour), and The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St. (33 1/3) by Bill Janovitz (the Exile recording sessions).
_____________________
From the morning papers (via stoneslib7.homestead.com):
Amusement Business: “The crowd of 20,000 was the largest, indoors, of the entire tour.”
Montreal Gazette: “At one point Jagger ducked sharply to his right as something flashed out of the audience. Without breaking his stride he went on singing, while an aide picked up a 40-ounce bottle and calmly moved it to one side. Miraculously it hadn’t even broken. Sparklers were lit and thrown, though again no one seemed to have been hurt, although this was no thanks to the thoughtless few who threw them. Some firecrackers were set off, too, but they were lost in the din of the crowd.”
Weekend Magazine: “CRACK! Jagger has heard every kind of firecracker, but this one sounded like a shot. He stopped for a microsecond and then kept going. Nobody noticed. He kept churning, moving to the heavy beat of All Down The Line. Two seconds later – CRACK! Then, exactly the same interval and another. It was precisely the spacing as if someone were aiming and firing. Jagger dropped to one knee, still gyrating to the music. He was badly frightened, I was later told...Ninety seconds later, a bottle sailed out of the crowd and hit him on the leg. He winced...Jagger didn’t know it wasn’t aimed at him. His truck had been bombed. People were shouting. The firecrackers sounded like shots. A bottle had just hit him. He wound up the song, giving Richards his end-it look.”
Weekend Magazine: “The next number was Midnight Rambler where Jagger and the Stones always catch fire for the final five-song crescendo. Jagger moved through it tightly. It was about the worst rendition of their showpiece song given on the tour. Jagger signaled an early end here too, cutting about three minutes from the song. ‘He was freaked,’ said Leonard. The rest of the show moved downward, not up. The house lights usually come on after Rip This Joint. Jagger wanted them on sooner, so the word was passed to cut Rip completely, get the lights up, get the last two songs done and get the hell out of here. They did. The crowd thought it was a great show.”
Montreal Gazette: “Jagger, who’s made his permanent home in the southern part of France, said he may try some of his recently-learned French on the Forum fans tonight.”
Le Devoir: “A un moment donné, il s’est écrié en français: ‘Merci beaucoup, vous êtes très gentils.’”
Montreal Gazette: “At one point Jagger screamed ‘très chaud, très chaud, très chaud’ and no one would argue with that.”
Ottawa Citizen: “By the finale, Street Fighting Man, Jagger had praised his audience in French, showered them with roses and water and tortured every last bit of energy from his musically possessed body.”
Montreal Star: “When Mick Jagger had finished his singing and dancing he threw buckets of water over the sweat-soaked audience and they drew up their arms as if receiving benediction.”
Montreal Gazette: “Then the last number – a perfect finale for the you-can-stuff-it-if-you-don’t-like-it Stones: Street Fightin’ Man. Up went the power salutes, and I honestly believe that, at that moment, Jagger could have unleashed some real havoc on Montreal if he had wanted to see some serious trashing done...But Jagger threw six dozen roses worth of petals to the crowd, shot up the peace sign, scampered offstage, and disappeared.”
Montreal Star: “It was oppressively hot in the Forum and Mick flung bucketfuls of water at the audience and then the rose petals and soon they marched off never to be seen again. The crowd yelled in vain for an encore.”
Montreal Gazette: “A helicopter had been on standby duty on the roof in case the group could not leave by conventional means. It was not needed.”
Weekend Magazine: “Later, there was a party in Jagger’s room. He looked tired and washed out. ‘Not good, man,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t good.’”