Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye

by Robert Greenfield

  “Charlie!” Mick calls out. “Are you tired of all this then, the one-night stands and all?” As Charlie is far too busy at the moment creeping around behind the cameras while asking everyone who is being interviewed to respond, Mick says, “Naw, we started last night and we’re just gonna go on until the body gives out.”

  Zip! Off go the floodlights. Shoving his hands into his jacket pockets, Mick heads out the front door where a photographer from the Daily Mirror begins snapping his every movement as he puts his bags into the boot of the white Bentley that will take him and Bianca to Manchester for tonight’s two shows.

  As I stood there watching them drive away, Jo Bergman appeared by my side. A short and bubbly woman with an outrageous mane of frizzy black hair and an infectious laugh, she had been brought over from America by Brian Epstein to help him run the Beatles’ fan club. For the past four years, she had been in charge of the Stones’ office at 46A Maddox Street in London. And so when she offered me a ride to Manchester, I happily accepted and clambered into the backseat of a rented Ford Cortina.

  Only then did I realize that the man behind the wheel was Ian Stewart. Thirty-two years old, “Stu,” as he was called by one and all, was short, square, and stocky, with piercing blue eyes, prematurely gray streaks in his hair, and a prognathous jaw that caused former manager Andrew Loog Oldham to decide he did not look enough like a Rolling Stone to continue playing piano with the band but should instead begin driving them to gigs.

  While this particular job had long since been passed on to others, Stu still arrived at the hall long before every show so he could set up Charlie’s drum kit and make sure everything onstage was exactly where it should be. By having never changed at all since he first met the band while auditioning for them in an upstairs room at the Bricklayer’s Arms pub in Soho in 1962, Stu had become the only person whom the Stones trusted to always tell them the truth. On this tour, Stu would also occasionally slide behind the piano to play on songs that did not contain what he called “any Chinese chords.”

  Clad as always today in a blue nylon windbreaker and a pair of plain cloth pants that make him look for all the world like just another roadie, Stu begins negotiating his way out of the city. Turning to Jo Bergman, he points out the window and says, “See that grotty transport caf over there? We literally had to force them to turn on the TV in 1963 when we were on Thank Your Lucky Stars for the first time. We walked in there and everyone said, ‘What? A bunch of longhairs like you on the telly?’ And I can tell you this, that TV never worked properly either.”

  A cautious and canny Scot whose drug of choice is good malt whiskey, Stu definitely becomes someone else again when he gets behind the wheel of a car. Putting the accelerator all the way down to the floor as soon as we leave Newcastle, Stu begins driving like his namesake, the world champion Grand Prix racer Jackie Stewart. Going at what he would call “a vast rate of knots,” Stu attacks each and every treacherous curve on the narrow winding road that leads through the towering range of hills known as the Pennines like he is trying to better the current world land speed record for this particular course.

  Bracing myself in the far corner of the backseat, I hold on tight for what has become a terrifying real-life version of “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.” Feeling as though my bladder is going to burst, I wait for as long I can before blurting out that I really need to go to the bathroom. Muttering darkly to himself, Stu just keeps right on driving. Before I can ask the question again, he suddenly slams the car to a skidding stop in the middle of nowhere and points to the side of the road. After relieving myself as quickly as I can in the green and purple bracken and heather, I slide back into the car and off we go again.

  That Stu did not particularly like me, I already knew. As I would later learn, none of it was personal. What with my American accent, long hair, beard, blue denim work shirt, and jeans, I simply reminded him of all those dreadful hippies who had persuaded the Stones they would encounter nothing but peace, love, and flowers when they took the stage during the free concert at the Altamont Speedway in northern California in December 1969.

  With nothing to do to pass the time but talk as we headed toward Manchester, I started telling Jo Bergman about all the time I had spent backstage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem while doing my master’s thesis on the storied music hall that even for the Stones had always been the high palace of American rhythm and blues. Naming just a few of the performers I had seen there week after week while standing in the wings, I talked about the great Joe Tex, Patti LaBelle, the Five Stairsteps, the Delfonics, and of course, “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business,” “Mr. Dynamite,” “Soul Brother No. 1,” the inimitable James Brown.

  Going into far too much detail, I then described the day when the disc jockey who had been scheduled to emcee the first show at the Apollo failed to appear and I suddenly found myself being shoved toward a backstage microphone on which a list of all the acts had been taped. In a voice I could barely recognize as my own as it boomed through the theater up to the balcony where only winos and glue-heads ever sat for the early show, I then proudly announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Apollo Theater.”

  As the legendary rock promoter Bill Graham once said about having won the Wednesday night amateur Latin dance contest at the Palladium Ballroom in New York City, “Why should I ever want to be President of the United States?” Much like him, I also felt like I had already done something better by getting to announce that show at the Apollo one afternoon.

  What I did not know at the time was that just like me, both Mick and Keith had made their own obligatory white boy pilgrimage to the Apollo. Journeying up to Harlem on their first visit to New York in 1964, they had watched James Brown do his mad “Jump back, Jack / See you later, alligator,” shimmy on one leg while exhorting the crowd to madness by falling in utter exhaustion to the stage and being led off into the wings wrapped in a purple cape, only to miraculously return once more dancing even harder than before.

  The effect of Mick and Keith’s visit to the Apollo can be plainly seen in Charlie Is My Darling, the documentary of the Rolling Stones’ tour of Ireland a year later. Perched on one leg as he performed on the bare stage of a movie theater with no theatrical lighting, Mick looked for all the world like a white and skinny version of none other than the great James Brown himself.

  The point of all this being that at a time in the music business when all credentials were entirely personal and what mattered most was whether or not you really loved the music, I had just introduced myself to Ian Stewart as someone whose life had also been irrevocably altered by the power of rhythm and blues.

  Never once turning around to look at me, Stu just keeps right on driving with both hands on the wheel and his eyes firmly fixed on the road ahead. Long before he is ready to stop the car again, I say, “Stu, I don’t know how to tell you this but I really have to go to the bathroom again.” This time, his reaction is entirely different. Shaking his head as he begins to laugh, Stu says, “God, you’re just like Brian, ain’t you? He always had to stop as well whenever we were headed somewhere.” And from that moment on, for reasons I did not then understand, I am okay with Stu.

  When at long last we pull up in front of the Manchester Free Trade Hall, a gaudy Italian palazzo of a building built in the 1850s, a long-haired freak standing outside the front door is asking everyone who passes by for tickets. Brushing past him, I follow Jo Bergman inside the hall only to find that Keith Richards is already there. Shockingly on time for a change, he sits by himself in a garish, fluorescently lit dressing room, plunking away on a guitar.

  With showtime drawing near, Mick sits in a chair staring at himself in a mirror as Bianca, still wearing her outrageous wide-brimmed hat, carefully makes up his eyes. Having finished applying mascara, she then goes to work on his cheeks with a wide brush.

  Although the Stones are only twelve minutes late for the first show, a bit of slapstick that could have come right out of the English music hall takes
place in the corridor outside their dressing room. Two ancient geezers who look as though they have worked in this building since the hall was built start talking about why Mick Jagger is not yet onstage.

  Like he knows this for a fact, the first ancient geezer says, “E’s ’avin’ a quick jump with his girlfriend before the show.”

  “Naw,” the other replies. “E’s ’avin’ his left ball tattooed.”

  “His left one? Why’s that?”

  Leaning in close, the first one says, “E’s only got one, y’know.”

  Decked out in checkered cloth caps, ill-fitting jackets, and trousers that were now much too big for them held up by suspenders, or “braces” as they were called in England, old men just like them could be found backstage wherever the Stones went on this tour. Wizened relics from another age who would not have known one Rolling Stone from another if their lives depended on it, most of them were civil employees who had held their jobs for years and so were not about to do anything that might cost them their weekly pay packet.

  Asked to perform even the simplest task before a show, their response was always, “Oh, I can’t do that. It’s more than me job’s worth.” Having somehow managed to survive two world wars as well as the terrible food rationing in England that had kept Ian Stewart from ever getting to eat a banana until he was seven years old, they were all members in good standing of the generation that had always considered the Stones an affront not just to national dignity but moral rectitude as well. Since it was utterly pointless to argue with them about doing anything for the Stones before they performed because it was always more than their job was worth, no one ever even tried.

  Onstage before a packed house during the first show in Manchester, Mick Taylor takes two soaring blues solos in “Love in Vain.” After the Stones do a twelve-minute version of “Midnight Rambler,” Jagger attacks Chip Monck with an open bottle of champagne to wish him a happy thirty-second birthday onstage. As always, Mick then ends the show by flinging the basket of flower petals as he leaps into the air.

  In the world of rock ’n’ roll circa 1971, no one had a more impressive onstage résumé than Edward Beresford Monck, who had always been called “Chip” ever since he was a boy. Best known as the reassuring voice from the stage that had warned the crowd at Woodstock to stay away from the brown acid, Chip had been dosed by Owsley at Monterey Pop, helped Bill Graham renovate the Fillmore East, and lost five teeth after a Hells Angel smacked him in the mouth with the weighted end of a pool cue at Altamont.

  A tall, lean, and rangy man with long reddish-brown hair, a huge mustache, and the regal bearing of a New England aristocrat, Chip had first seen the Stones perform at the Boston Garden in 1967. As he would later say, “They just stood there and played and so I tried to do something more decorative and creative with them.”

  After being hired by the band for their 1969 American tour, Chip put together the first lighting system ever to go out on the road with a rock ’n’ roll band. To a great degree, what happened each night on this tour when the Stones performed “Midnight Rambler” was due to Chip. For when Mick Jagger slapped that studded belt against the stage and all the lights suddenly went blood red in his face, everyone in the house knew they were watching an authentic theater piece.

  Before each show began, Chip would help set the mood for what was to come by playing songs like “Hard Headed Woman” by Cat Stevens. Once the show was over, Chip would send the audience home by playing a version of “Lady Jane” from which he had removed the vocal track, thereby making it into what he would later call “a beautiful piece of instrumentation. Like a madrigal, really. ‘Have a good evening, get home safely, we look forward to seeing you the next time around.’”

  An artist in his own right who would sometimes laughingly refer to Mick Jagger when he was not around as “His Ladyship,” Chip always made it plain to his crew that being on the road with the Stones was not a party and they were not to associate with the band under any circumstances unless they were asked to do so—which of course never happened.

  And although Chip would later say that by this point in his career he had “already gotten to the point where I realized production was three fingers under the elbow as the artist crossed the street and not something that was supposed to rival the music,” his nightly contribution to what the Stones were then doing onstage was most definitely a significant part of the overall mise-en-scène.

  Sitting together in a corner of the dressing room between shows, Charlie Watts turns to Bill Wyman and says, “Why aren’t we staying in the Piccadilly Hotel here?”

  “Banned,” Bill tells him.

  “What?” Charlie says. “Banned? Not us. Jagger’s a film star now.”

  “Not him,” Bill says. “Us. Last time we were here, Brian was throwing pillows out of a fourteenth-floor window. Blame it on the night porter then.”

  As he would soon demonstrate in no uncertain terms on this tour, Bill Wyman was already the walking history of the Rolling Stones. Unlike Mick and Keith, Bill forgot nothing and had only to consult the extensive journals he had so carefully kept over the years to know precisely what the band had been doing on any given day. A compulsive collector, Bill also saved virtually every last piece of Stones memorabilia that ever came through his hands.

  When it came to putting up with Mick and Keith, Bill was in many ways just as long-suffering as Charlie, and there were endless tales of Bill walking into the studio only to discover that Keith had gone ahead and put his own bass line on a song without ever bothering to inform Bill about what he was doing.

  A sexual privateer of the first order who also kept a complete log of all the women he slept with on the road, Bill was accompanied on this tour by the lithe and lovely Astrid Lundstrom, whom he had met in 1967 when she was an eighteen-year-old Swedish schoolgirl studying in London. Having been around the Stones long enough to be completely accepted by everyone, Astrid was then still so shy that she usually spoke only to Bill.

  As she would later say, “Bands are male tribes and the Stones were always kind of making fun of Bill because he was too straight for them. In my opinion, he was incredibly straight. A bit rigid, a bit anal, and the sort of person who cataloged things. But quirky, no. I would have found that very appealing. I like quirkiness. But Bill was not quirky at all.”

  In Rolling with the Stones, the massive, coffee table–sized book he co-authored with Richard Havers in 2002, Bill Wyman dutifully noted that shortly before the Stones began their farewell tour of Great Britain, he received a payment of $662 from former Stones’ manager Allen Klein. Charlie Watts, Ian Stewart, and the estate of Brian Jones were all sent checks for $251, while Mick and Keith each received more than $805,000 in royalties, an enormous sum that would now be worth six to eight times that much. And so, despite the incredible amount of money the Rolling Stones owed the Inland Revenue in England, it was not as though either Mick or Keith was exactly broke at the time.

  According to Bill, precisely 34,400 people came to see the Stones perform on their farewell tour of Great Britain. Getting down to farthings and pence as only he could, Bill noted that the total gross receipts from the tour amounted to £25,800 (just a bit more than $60,000). After all the expenses had been deducted, the remaining sum was split so many ways among the Stones and their supporting cast of musicians that it seems clear even now that money was not the motivating factor for these shows.

  In his book, Bill also included some of the articles about the Stones as well as reviews of their shows that appeared in various journals in England at the time, among them the Financial Times, the Yorkshire Post, the Record Mirror, and the Newcastle Journal. Although the notices were almost uniformly favorable, referring to the Stones “as a piece of social history” and “still the best little rock ’n’ roll band in the world,” Bill himself was singled out for “his gravedigger’s smile” and for looking onstage “as though he was waiting for a bus. But he didn’t sound like it because he and the others played superbly.”
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  In the world according to Bill Wyman, that was just about all there really was to be said about the Rolling Stones’ farewell tour of England.

  As the time for the band to go out onstage to do the second show draws near, Mick suddenly gets to his feet and says, “I’m so zonked out. I need some energy.” Like a boxer doing some fancy footwork before entering the ring for a championship fight, he starts running madly in place before leading the band out of the dressing room door.

  Standing in what has now become my regular spot beside Chip Monck at the piano on the left side of the stage, I watch as the people sitting right down front reach out to the stage with their eyes closed and their hands held up before them like they are now praying that Mick Jagger will take them somewhere they cannot possibly go without him. Although none of this can hold a candle to the awful acid-induced madness that went down on the stage at Altamont, there is most definitely something truly frightening about it.

  As we ride together to the hotel after the show in the backseat of a limo, Marshall Chess says, “You thought tonight was scary? You should have seen the show in Paris on the European tour last year. Real revolutionaries in that crowd, man. One guy wanted to pull me offstage because I was wearing a suit. Another guy came onstage and fell to his knees begging Mick to whip him. Three naked chicks came dancing out. It was crazy. In Germany, this Hells Angel had a gun. It only shot blanks, but we took it away from him. If he’d pulled it out during the concert, he would have been killed. Chip had these metal pipes onstage he used like javelins to keep the crowd away. Compared to that, tonight wasn’t scary at all.”

  Having been declared persona non grata by all the establishments where they would have preferred to stay tonight in Manchester, the Stones instead found themselves stuck all the way out of town in a classic red brick British railway hotel located not all that far from a sign pointing appropriately enough to THE EDGE.