Sunday, January 24, 2016

Opening paragraphs.....................................


      Why did we stop at the 4-Dice Restaurant in Fordyce, Arkansas, for lunch on Independence Day weekend?  On any day?  Despite everything I knew from ten years of driving through the Bible Belt.  Tiny town of Fordyce.  Rolling Stones on the police menu across the United States.  Every copper wanted to bust us by any means available, to get promoted and to patriotically rid America of those little fairy Englishmen.  It was 1975, a time of brutality and confrontation.  Open season on the Stones had been declared since our last tour, the tour of '72, known as the STP.  The State Department had noted riots (true), civil disobedience (also true), illicit sex (whatever that is), and violence across the United States.  All the fault of us, mere minstrels.  We had been inciting the youth to rebellion, we were corrupting America, and they had ruled never to let us travel in the United States again.  It had become, in the time of Nixon, a serious political matter.  He had personally deployed his dogs and dirty tricks against John Lennon, who he thought might cost him an election.  We, in turn, they told our lawyer officially, were the most dangerous rock-and-roll band in the world.

-Keith Richards,  Life

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