Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye

by Robert Greenfield

  Seen at close range before the show as he sits before a mirror putting cream on his face in a narrow dressing room with white walls, Mick Jagger, then just twenty-seven years old, looks oddly frail and very pale. Nervously bumping his toe against the floor by the dressing room door, Bobby Keys, the Stones’ beefy, florid-faced sax player, says, “Let’s do it. I’m ready. Yeah, I’m ready. Been ready for years.”

  Pointing to the room where Keith Richards and Mick Taylor sit behind a closed door, Charlie Watts, whose bag has been lost in transit but does not seem all that concerned about it because all he brought with him was a toothbrush, a handkerchief, and a pair of drumsticks, says, “They’re tunin’ up. They been fuckin’ tunin’ up for fifteen minutes. We should be on. What are they gonna do when things go wrong?”

  Putting down the copy of Melody Maker he has been carefully perusing beneath the baleful gaze of a large English policeman, Mick Jagger says, “Hang on. We’re comin’.” Getting to his feet, he grabs Charlie by the shoulders, pushes him halfway out the door, and says, “Go on, Charlie. Go on.”

  In a pink sateen suit and a multicolored jockey’s cap, Mick leads the band onstage and starts the set with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” The Stones then go into “Live with Me,” followed by “Dead Flowers,” a song off their as yet unreleased new album. Far more intimidating than his songwriting partner in every way, Keith Richards sits down beside Mick on a wooden stool in a purple spotlight and picks out a dead-perfect acoustic version of Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain,” followed by “Prodigal Son.”

  What has been a series of brilliantly played songs suddenly becomes something else again as the Stones go into “Midnight Rambler.” As it will break down nightly on the tour, the song begins with anywhere from six to twelve bars of basic blues as Keith slings one guitar off over his head and gets another one on and tuned so he can launch into the song’s driving riff. After Mick sings the first four verses, the psychodrama begins with just Bill Wyman’s bass pulsing away and the lights going all blue and eerie on Mick’s face.

  Taking off the studded black belt he wears around his waist, Mick gets down on his knees and begins crooning, “Beggin’ with ya, baby … go down on me, bay-bay, uh, uh.” Rising to his feet in a slow and decidedly sinister manner, Mick wails, “Well, you heard about de Bos-ton….” As he stretches out the second syllable, Mick dangles the belt behind his shoulder. Slashing the belt down onto the stage as the band comes back in behind him and all the lights go blood red in his face, Mick wails, “Honey, it’s not one of those….”

  As one, the entire crowd lets out its collective breath. Young girls who have just gotten what this song is all about giggle nervously. With the band hitting everything in sight, Mick prowls the edge of the stage hunched over like an evil old man. After the song crashes to a shattering climax, the Stones go right into “Bitch,” with Bobby Keys and trumpet player Jim Price blowing stomping circles against the melody.

  Stepping to the microphone, Mick says, “And now, a song for all the whores in the audience.” After the Stones tear through “Honky Tonk Women,” they launch into a long, unrecognizable introduction that suddenly becomes “Satisfaction.” Solidly crazed by what they are now hearing, the crowd in Newcastle starts rocking down the aisles. Middle-aged ladies in toreador pants who seem to have come straight out of 1957 bump obscenely to the beat as skinheads in Ben Sherman polo shirts, neatly pressed jeans, and black Doc Martens boots idiot-dance in the balcony.

  Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie” is followed by “Brown Sugar” and then “Street Fighting Man.” At its climax, Mick flings a wicker basket filled with yellow daffodils into the house. As the final chords of the song ring out through the hall and flower petals slowly come floating down through the spotlight beams, Mick leaps four feet into the air and screams.

  To huge applause, the Rolling Stones exit stage right. In an hour and a half, they have done twelve songs. Despite how long and hard everyone goes right on cheering, that’s it. The first show of the tour is over and as everyone who has traveled with the Stones before already knows, this is a band that does not do encores.

  Between shows, the dressing room is oddly calm and very quiet. As Keith Richards jiggles his eighteen-month-old son Marlon up and down on his knee, bassist Bill Wyman says to no one in particular, “Do you remember carryin’ an amp around Newcastle in a wheelbarrow?” With one more show to do tonight, people sit in small groups talking to one another while smoking Dunhill International filter cigarettes that cost far too much for most of their fans to ever afford.

  Although it does not seem possible, the second show is even better than the first. With a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth and two bottles of whiskey propped up before him on the piano, Nicky Hopkins only moves from the wrists down as he plays killer honky-tonk riffs. Corkscrewing his body in ever-tighter circles as he gets off on the music and his silver-studded earring swings into view for the first time, Keith turns his back on the house to seesaw back and forth into Charlie’s big Gretsch bass drum.

  With his jack-o’-lantern face turned to the side and his mouth open, Charlie doubles up and starts drumming against himself like a tightly wound metronome. Trooping off the stage once more after “Street Fighting Man” ends, the Stones head for the dressing room. Outside the hall, a line of long black limousines waits to take them to their hotel.

  Wearing a blue nylon windbreaker that makes him look like he just shot eighteen holes on a local golf course, Ian Stewart walks into the dressing room and says, “Curtain call, chappies.”

  “They don’t do curtain calls,” their publicity person says.

  Chip Monck, who is colloquially known as the “Voice of Woodstock,” or just “VOW,” on the tour and has been calling light cues all night long while dancing beside the piano, sticks his head in the door and says, “No one is leaving.”

  “Go out and play some songs on piano, Stu,” Keith says.

  “No one,” Chip Monck repeats, “is leaving.”

  Slumped in a chair, Mick looks at Keith and says, “What do we do then? We should go quickly.”

  “What do we do?” Keith asks.

  “Uh,” Mick says, “‘Peggy Sue’?”

  “If we’re going,” Keith says. “Someone better tell them.”

  Pouring through a narrow door, the Stones walk back onstage into a cosmos of light and noise for their first encore in three years, “Sympathy for the Devil” followed by Chuck Berry’s “Let It Rock.” With the house lights all the way up as Keith chops the rhythm into half and quarter notes, the crowd has now become part of the show and everyone is on their feet and dancing as Mick bumps and grinds at the front of the stage like the second coming of a somewhat spastic James Brown.

  Drinking Scotch whiskey from a white paper cup in the dressing room after the encore is over, Bobby Keys shouts out, “Chawlie! Chawlie Watts! What do you mean, stirrin’ up all these people like that?”

  “Naw, Bobby,” Charlie says. “It was you. I saw you through the whole thing, just plottin’ to make it happen.”

  In every sense back then, Bobby Keys considered himself a full-fledged member of the Rolling Stones. No shrinking violet he, Bobby’s personality was so high-voltage that it could light up an entire auditorium. Unlike Jim Price, who rarely if ever spoke, or Mick Taylor, who on this tour still seemed incredibly shy and unsure of himself except when he was performing onstage, Bobby Keys was always perfectly happy to let fly with whatever came into his mind at any given moment without bothering to censor himself in any way whatsoever.

  That the Stones in general and Mick Jagger in particular were willing to put up with Bobby Keys on a nightly basis spoke not just to how much they appreciated his skill as a musician but also to their very English tolerance and fondness for real characters who were never afraid to be themselves in their presence.

  Because there is nowhere else to eat in Newcastle at this hour, a long table covered in white linen has been set for forty people in a bal
lroom at the Five Bridges Hotel in Gateshead, just across from Newcastle on the River Tyne. Forty clear glass tumblers, forty knives, forty forks, and forty spoons all sit perfectly aligned beside forty gleaming white plates. At two in the morning, the entire scene is a true beggars’ banquet, not to mention a bit of surrealism, Rolling Stones style.

  Despite what it says in my notebooks, this almost certainly cannot be right as there were only nineteen people on the tour. There was a road crew of twelve, half of them English and half of them American, but no one ever saw them because once the show was over, they were all busily breaking down the stage so they could load all the gear into a twenty-two-foot bobtail truck, also known as a “five-tonner” in England.

  As everyone was sitting down to dinner in the hotel that night, the crew was still back at the hall. As Chip Monck would later say, “My favorite story of that whole tour was Newcastle City Hall with Mr. Brown, who came out after the second show was over with a loaf of bread, a paint pot, and a little brush. He said, ‘Now, I’m terribly sorry to interrupt your load-out but I wondered if you could do me a favor? As this is a council hall, we try to keep it as best we can. Now, you’ve made some penetrations in the wall up there, so I wonder if you would just take this bread and stick it in the hole and wait for it to dry and perhaps before you leave, you could just paint over it?’ And I said, ‘Yes, Mr. Brown.’”

  At the head of the table, a small man with dark hair, piercing eyes, and a beaked nose is working Mick for all he’s worth. Having only just flown into London this morning from New York, Marshall Chess, whose father and uncle founded the legendary Chicago blues label bearing the family name, is the man whom Mick and Keith have chosen to run Rolling Stones Records. Intent on getting final approval from Mick so the new album can be released on time, Marshall is even more wired than usual tonight, which in his case is really saying something.

  In a white linen cape and a wide-brimmed hat she wears pushed back on her head, Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias sits silently by Mick’s side. Her face is so beautiful as to be insolent—high cheekbones, a cruel mouth, and features so sharp that Mick must sometimes feel like he is staring into a mirror whenever he looks at her. Whether she has any interest whatsoever in the subject currently under discussion is another question altogether.

  “More than twenty minutes on a side and you lose level,” Marshall says. “You know that. It’s how they cut the grooves. So we have to work out the running order.”

  Further down the table, Jim Price asks Charlie Watts, “You dig Skinnay Ennis, the cat who blew that solo on ‘We Meet and the Angels Sing’?”

  A dyed-in-the-wool jazz fanatic from way back, Charlie says, “Fantastic.”

  Shrugging off the cloak of invisibility I donned when I boarded the train to Newcastle, I open my mouth for the first time on the tour and say, “That was Ziggy Elman.”

  “He’s from my hometown,” Jim Price says.

  “Who?” Charlie asks.

  “Skinnay Ennis,” Price says.

  “You mean Ziggy Elman, man?” I say.

  Shaking his head sadly, Charlie says, “They’re both dead.”

  “Henry Busse too,” Price says. “On ‘I Can’t Get Started with You.’”

  “Fantastic,” Charlie says, making the word sound like a soft cymbal crash with brushes.

  As I would later learn, Jim Price was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and then grew up in Midland, while Skinnay Ennis hailed from Salisbury, North Carolina. Since this was long before such facts could be checked on the Internet, I simply wrote down what I had heard and then reported it as the gospel truth. At three in the morning in Newcastle, what really mattered most, at least in my own mind, was that by coming up with Ziggy Elman’s name on the spur of the moment, I had established my own credentials as someone worthy of traveling with the Stones.

  Ignoring everything else that is going on around him, Marshall Chess leans in even closer to Mick and says, “I can send you a test pressing by air, and you can send me back a dub.”

  “By hand,” Mick says.

  “By air and hand,” Marshall tells him. “And you send me back a dub.”

  “You’ll send me one too,” Charlie suddenly calls out.

  A little surprised, Marshall says, “We will, Charlie.”

  Smiling, Charlie says, “Just addin’ to the bravado.”

  “Will you do it that way, Mick?” Marshall implores. “Will you?”

  In a voice made far louder by the fact that he is now in England, Bobby Keys says, “Ah’m gonna burn down this goddamn hotel if ah don’t find mah suitcase. Goddamn, ah’ll throw Charlie Watts out a window.”

  Spying a hapless waitress who just happens to be passing by with a serving platter in her hands, Keys says, “What’s that? Slide one of them on mah plate, lady.” Picking up the small dinner roll she has just given him, Keys says, “You know what these are good for?”

  Already knowing what is about to happen, Jim Price softly says, “Oh-oh.”

  Whang, a dinner roll goes spinning through the air.

  “You know what these glasses are good for?” Keys asks rhetorically.

  Back up at the head of the table, Marshall asks, “Will you do it that way, Mick? Will you? If we cut ‘Moonlight Mile’ to four verses and make up a running order so the guy in the States can get started on the sleeves?”

  Mumble, mumble. It’s now four in the morning, and Mick has his head down talking to Bianca in a voice only she can hear. When he finally lifts his head, Mick looks more than a little glazed. From the completely blank expression on his face, it seems plain that he has not heard a single word Marshall Chess has said to him in the last ten minutes.

  Having already done two shows tonight, Mick Jagger is now being asked to make a decision that will affect not only the release of the new album but the future of the band as well. Looking very much like an English schoolboy at the end of a very long and trying day, Mick says, “What, Marshall?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  MANCHESTER, MARCH 5, 1971

  WHAT WITH ALL THE CHANGES the psychedelic revolution has wreaked upon the world, both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin less than six months dead, and the counterculture they helped spawn in America now most definitely on life support as the war in Vietnam rages on, do people still politely approach stars like the Rolling Stones to ask for autographs? In Newcastle, where it sometimes seems like the Depression has never ended and the city still looks as it did back in the 1930s, they most certainly do.

  As all those members of the band who have somehow managed to rouse themselves by midmorning sit at small tables in the hotel dining room eating breakfast, a steady stream of gray-haired little old ladies, Irish chambermaids, and middle-aged waitresses come up to offer them menus and tissues as well as any bit of paper on which they can lay their hands.

  Fidgeting nervously from one foot to the other as they stand there waiting, they say, “Are you a Stone then? Will you sign this for me? Will you? I’d appreciate it ever so much.” And because this is England, where everyone has been raised to always be as polite as humanly possible, the Stones dutifully do just as they are asked.

  Although they were able to make their way out of London without attracting any undue media attention, the mere presence of the Rolling Stones here in Newcastle is most definitely news. Wearing a natty dark double-breasted blazer and an outrageous wide-brimmed hat, Mick strolls into the hotel lobby once breakfast is over only to be greeted by two very straight newspaper reporters, who immediately turn to a hipper-looking colleague and ask, “Is he one of them?”

  While it may now seem difficult to believe that anyone could not recognize Mick Jagger in the flesh despite how long he had been famous in his native land, a reporter from the News of the World made this very same mistake on February 5, 1967 by writing that after Mick had taken six amphetamine tablets while brandishing a lump of hashish in Blaise’s nightclub in South Kensington, he openly acknowledged having first taken LSD while on the road with Bo Diddley and
Little Richard, but “didn’t go much on it now [that] the cats had taken it up. It’ll just get a dirty name.”

  No doubt so stoned out of his head at the time that it seemed like a good idea to send up the reporter in this manner, the Stone in question was actually Brian Jones, who always liked to refer to himself as “the original founder of the Rolling Stones.” On The Eamonn Andrews Show on Thames Television that night, Mick promptly announced he would be suing the newspaper for libel.

  A week later, the News of the World helped engineer the drug bust at Redlands, Keith’s country home in Sussex. The draconian sentences meted out to Mick and Keith at the end of a trial that was front-page news then made them both authentic counterculture heroes in England. While so much had changed over here since then, the British press still delighted in tearing down those whom it had already made rich and famous and so just as soon as Mick’s identity was confirmed beyond any shadow of a doubt, an impromptu media circus began with him standing squarely in the center ring.

  Zip! Suddenly, the lobby is brilliantly flood-lit. As a cameraman begins rolling film, an interviewer from the BBC steps forward with a microphone in his hand. Sticking it right into Mick’s face, the interviewer says, “A-hah, ahem, in his interview in Rolling Stone magazine, John Lennon said that what the Beatles did yesterday, the Stones do tomorrow. Are you then too planning to break up?”

  Like a goofy teenager who thinks this is either the dumbest or funniest thing he has ever heard, Mick’s face cracks wide open as he begins to laugh. “Naw, we’re not breakin’ up,” he says. “And if we did, we wouldn’t be as bitchy about it as them.” When the interviewer asks why the Stones have now chosen to go live in France, Mick says it was Keith’s idea, which is most certainly not the case.

  Pursuing a line of inquiry that seems to make sense only to him, the interviewer then asks, “Is the band tired?”