Out on the road with their girlfriends and small children in tow, the Stones no longer resembled the pop idols they had been back in 1966 in any way, shape, or form, and so the good news was that there was no way they would ever be banned from staying there again. The bad news was that they were all bored to death. With nowhere to go and nothing better to do, everyone congregated in a large room where no other guests were permitted to enter and proceeded to do all they could to entertain one another.
Speaking in a soft and halting voice, Gram Parsons, the brilliant singer-songwriter who left the Byrds to become a founding member of the Flying Burrito Brothers, and whom Marshall Chess now plans to sign to Rolling Stones Records, starts telling Charlie Watts about the night Bobby Keys walked into a studio to play on a session with Yoko Ono. “People were sniffing Excedrin and bouncing off the walls. And Yoko said, ‘Bobby, imagine there is a cold wind blowing and you are a lonely frog.’ Bobby Keys a frog. He just laid down his sax and played marimbas and tambourine and said, ‘Lady, yew shore got a strange slant on things.’ Yeah, starting with your eyes.”
“Gram,” Charlie says. “Fantastic.”
Getting to her feet in the far corner of the room, a striking-looking young woman with a sharp-boned face, long red hair, glittering eyes, and pale, lightly freckled skin begins making her way toward the bar. Having given birth to Mick Taylor’s daughter Chloe just two months ago, she seems far more direct and outgoing than the newest member of the Rolling Stones as well as very much at home in the company of rock stars.
Although I knew none of this at the time, Rose Millar (whom everyone always called Rose Taylor even though she and Mick Taylor were not yet married) was also on her first tour with the Rolling Stones. Described by her younger brother Robin, who in time would himself become a well-known record producer, as having “always been wild from the age of fifteen” as well as “car-stoppingly gorgeous,” Rose had been expelled from the exclusive St. Paul’s Girls’ School in London. She had then gone to work in the editorial department of an advertising magazine while hanging out with rock stars like Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, Georgie Fame, Long John Baldry, and Rod Stewart.
Giving up her job at Mick Taylor’s request after they had begun living together, Rose had met the Stones for the first time while they were recording Sticky Fingers. As she would later say, “I began going to the sessions at Olympic Studios and I couldn’t believe how rude they all were. To each other, really. I was used to bands who all got on well with one another but these people didn’t have the same camaraderie and would turn up whenever they felt like it. Mick Taylor seemed to be there all the time as did Charlie and Bill but they were all absolutely always waiting for Mick or Keith.”
While being out on the road with the Stones seemed, as Rose would later say, “a bit more exciting and better than the slog of the studio, the tour wasn’t really fun because even at that point I think Mick Taylor realized he had made a mistake by joining them. Even then. Because he could have done other things. He could have gone and joined Paul Butterfield. He could have done music he was more interested in than rock ’n’ roll. He could have played the blues. And jazz. He was also taking classical guitar lessons. His music interests were very wide and if he had done something that he had been the boss of, it would have been better for him than taking this job which of course everyone said, ‘Oh, you have to do this. It’s so wonderful.’
“In all the time he did it, he never ever thought it was wonderful. Ever. If he played well, it was okay except that Keith would turn his amp down. Or he would only have the time of his solo to play well and that was that. If he played badly, they applauded anyway so he felt there was no discernment on the part of the audience. He didn’t feel he was making any contribution that was really important. He was so sensitive. And he was never satisfied with what he did with them, really.”
Since Mick Taylor rarely said anything at all on this tour and seemed to be playing at the height of his powers on a nightly basis, no one had any idea how he was really feeling. Never shy about expressing herself, the same could not be said about Rose.
Catching sight of Keith as she nears the bar, Rose says, “Keith, I dreamed about you last night. You know that thing with the glass top you keep Marlon’s toys in? You were standing with it on a sandy beach that was sinking and you said, ‘Someone help me, or get me a drink.’”
As only he can, Keith says, “Get me a drink probably.”
Carefully cutting slices from an apple which he then inserts one by one into a tall glass of Pimm’s No. 1, a gin-based herbal liqueur no one else would ever think of drinking at this hour of the night, Keith adds, “I’ll have to think about that one for a while.” Taking his drink with him, he then quietly exits the room.
What no one knew back then was that shortly before the tour began both Keith and Gram Parsons had undergone a disastrous attempt at cleaning up by undergoing the apomorphine cure, recommended by Naked Lunch author William Burroughs as the only way to stop using heroin. Lying side by side in a four-poster bed in Keith’s house on Cheyne Walk, they had spent seventy-two hellish hours twitching from the treatment while throwing up into a bucket—only to then promptly begin using again once the treatment was done.
Although Keith had not yet really interacted with anyone on the tour except for his companion, the blond and beauteous Anita Pallenberg, their young son Marlon, Gram Parsons, and his fellow musicians while they were onstage together, this too would change in time.
CHAPTER THREE
COVENTRY, MARCH 6, 1971
SATURDAY NIGHT IN COVENTRY, the small and picturesque city in the West Midlands where the Luftwaffe bombed St. Michael’s Cathedral to ruins during World War II. Wearing a black-and-white-checked jacket, Mick Jagger sits quietly at a table in a restaurant between shows with his hands folded before him, drinking red wine. As some girl whom no one seems to know is hustled away through the front door, she cries out, “Forget my name, you bastard, you and all your Rolling Stones.”
Taking a sip of wine, Mick says, “Boring, isn’t it?”
Beside him, Bianca is talking about going gambling somewhere later this evening. Long after everyone else went to bed last night in Manchester, Mick, Marshall, and Bianca found themselves in a casino where they only let them lose and Mick dropped about £300, a sum Keith will later laughingly estimate as about half his total earnings from this tour.
“You even play gin rummy in a foreign language,” Marshall tells Bianca. Since he already owes her about $8,000 in rummy debts, Marshall should know. “But that dealer in Manchester, he was terrible.”
“Dealing out of a shoe, probably had three decks in there,” Ian Stewart says. “Have to report him to the gaming commission, won’t I?”
“Ah,” Marshall says, “but if we had won, we’d all be saying how good he was, wouldn’t we, Mick?”
After thinking about it for a moment, Mick says, “I don’t care.”
Around the phrase, a long moment of silence grows and grows. In many ways, it seems a lot like what happens each night when the Stones play “Wild Horses.” The song is so powerful that it stops the audience dead in their tracks and for a long moment everyone just sits there thinking about it before they begin to applaud. Slowly, it dawns on everyone at the table that in terms of his gambling losses as well as so much else that is now going on around him on this tour, Mick simply does not care.
Picking up on this, Marshall says, “Oh, that was last night, huh?”
Leaning forward, Bianca asks Mick, “Tu vas changer le choix?”
If ever there was a time for Mick Jagger to consider altering the set the Stones have been doing onstage each night, this would be it. Performing before a young and strangely quiet audience during the first show, Mick did all he could to get the crowd on their feet but no matter how hard he tried, it did him no good at all.
The response was so muted that at the end of “Street Fighting Man” Mick did not even bother to throw the basket of flowers into t
he house. To ensure that everyone would get out of their seats at least once before leaving the hall, Chip Monck then played “God Save the Queen,” which did serve to keep the crowd on their feet until it was over.
With his mind already on something else, Mick looks at Bianca and says, “Choix de quoi?”
“De quoi, de quoi,” she answers with a laugh.
Having had perhaps one drink too many tonight, one of the band’s ladies wobbles a bit as she passes by the table. “Drunken bitch,” Mick says. “She won’t lose weight that way, will she?” Sighing just as he did before, he says, “Nothing to do but bitch, is there?”
Getting to his feet, Ian Stewart looks at Mick and says, “C’mon then. Intermission’s over.”
Showing some real emotion for the first time all night long, Mick says, “No. Don’t wanna. Oh fucking why? They sold all the tickets here in three hours and then they just sat there.”
To make him feel better, Stu says, “This was the most depressing part of the tour last time as well.”
Walking over to the table, Charlie does a little soft-shoe routine that makes Mick smile and says, “Let’s go out there and tread the boards then, Mick.”
“Yeah,” Mick says. “A tap dance. Oh, it’s all right. But why do they just have to sit there? Let’s go then. We’ll do the same show. But if it’s the same audience, we’ll knock out a number and go home early, eh?”
In the dressing room as the Stones get ready to go back out onstage, the sound of Buddy Holly singing “Ready Teddy” comes spooling out of Bobby Keys’s ever-present cassette recorder. As the next song starts Bobby says, “Mah golden saxophone is comin’ up now.” Born in Slaton, Texas, on the same day as Keith Richards, Bobby is twenty-eight years old but still sometimes looks like the fresh-faced kid who first went out on the road with Buddy Knox and the Rhythm Orchids in 1961.
A spinner of tall tales who has definitely become the life of the party where the Stones are concerned, Bobby starts talking about how he played and recorded with Buddy Holly at K-Triple L radio in Lubbock and then appeared on the first Alan Freed show at the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre, which featured Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Clyde McPhatter, and the Everly Brothers backed up by Sam “The Man” Taylor’s big band.
After carefully explaining to me how he learned to steam all the wrinkles out of his stage suit by hanging it in a hotel bathroom with a hot shower going full blast so he could then press his outfit to perfection beneath the mattress of his bed, Bobby says, “Ah been on the road sixteen goddamn years. That’s why I am the way I am.”
Because in every way possible he seemed to embody the wild outlaw spirit that was at the heart of rock ’n’ roll, I just could not get enough of Bobby Keys on this tour. With a mouth and a heart as big as Texas, he was every rock writer’s dream come true, an endless source of colorful stories about how he had once shot craps with Major Lance in a nightclub in Muncie, Indiana, and seen Billy “Fat Boy” Stewart pull a gun on someone during an argument after a show.
Because it was all such great stuff, I dutifully reported what Bobby Keys told me word for word in the article I wrote about the tour for Rolling Stone magazine only to learn many years later that on this tour Bobby was working just as hard at creating his own legend as he did each night playing saxophone onstage with the Stones. Taking it point by point, here is the actual truth.
Far too young to have ever actually played or recorded with Buddy Holly, Bobby Keys was eleven years old when he saw Holly perform on the back of a flatbed truck at the grand opening of a gas station in Lubbock. Since Alan Freed did his first show at the Brooklyn Paramount in 1955 when Bobby was just twelve years old and neither Buddy Holly and the Crickets, nor Clyde McPhatter, nor the Everly Brothers appeared on the bill, that story was also not true. Nor had Bobby already been on the road for sixteen years in 1971.
What does seem to be true is that while he was working with singer Bobby Vee at the Texas State Fair in San Antonio in July 1964, Bobby Keys did see the Rolling Stones perform before a decidedly indifferent crowd who could not have cared less about their music. When the Stones came back to do their second show that night, Bobby told Brian Jones that pop groups in America always changed their clothes before going onstage, thereby prompting the members of the band to exchange what they were wearing with one another.
As Jim Price would later tell me, he and Bobby Keys had both flown to London after completing Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour with drummer Jim Gordon, bassist Carl Radle, and keyboard player and vocalist Bobby Whitlock to join forces with Eric Clapton in a new band that came to be called Derek and the Dominos. After rehearsing for about a week at Abbey Road studios, they realized, in Price’s words, “Hey, this is a guitar and keyboard band and they don’t need any horns.”
Both musicians were about to return to Los Angeles when Mick Jagger called and asked them to come play on the sessions for Sticky Fingers. A trained musician who could also play piano, Price came up with all the horn arrangements in which Bobby played the sax solos. Both Keys and Price then accompanied the Stones on their 1970 European tour.
While I am certainly not the only journalist ever to be taken in by a charming but unreliable source, Bobby Keys was so completely irresistible in so many ways that even now I cannot find it in my heart to hold any of this against him. Thanks to the energy he and Jim Price brought to the Stones’ music each night onstage, the band seemed in many ways to be completely reborn.
Despite all the braggadocio, Bobby had in fact spent most of his adult life out on the road smoking pot, drinking to excess, and taking as much Benzedrine as he could while traveling from one small town to another with a variety of bands on a bus. Which was why Bobby Keys was the way he was.
Shutting off his cassette recorder in the dressing room, Bobby Keys carefully pulls a velvet jacket on over his ruffled black stage shirt. Grabbing his horn, he charges out into the hallway like a runaway Brahma bull. Bumping right into Mick, he says, “You gotta teach me some French, man.”
Laughing out loud, Mick says, “Sure, Bobby.”
“Want me to write some songs too?” Bobby asks. “They won’t sell as much as yours but….”
Before he can complete the sentence, the Stones walk out onstage. And just like in the movies, the second show is a bitch. With the lights all green and purple in their faces, Mick and the boys incite the crowd to a near-riot. As Charlie cooks like crazy, Mick puts the microphone between his legs and bends over so far during “Midnight Rambler” that his forehead actually touches the painted white wooden stage. Out in the house, everyone sweats and dances and then goes home happy.
Or as Bobby Keys shouted as the Stones trooped back onstage in Newcastle for their encore, “Goddammit, rock ’n’ roll is on the road again!” And beyond any shadow of a doubt, so it is.
Long after the tour was over, the single image that stayed with me from Coventry was seeing Bianca standing in an empty backstage hallway playing with a yo-yo on a string she had wrapped around the wrong finger of her hand. Wholly engrossed in what she was doing and looking much like a young girl dressed up in black and white for a big Saturday night on the town, Bianca seemed completely oblivious to everything that was going on around her.
Along with her incredible beauty and the obvious hold she had on Mick, it was this quality that had driven many of those traveling with the Stones to utter distraction. A completely self-created creature who never spoke about herself, Bianca was, as Winston Churchill once said of Russia, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Nor did any of the quotidian details of her life to this point in time help explain who she really was. That Bianca had once been Michael Caine’s girlfriend and had been living with the famed French record executive and world-class playboy Eddie Barclay when she had first met Mick six months earlier at a Stones show in Paris revealed precious little about her character or precisely what agenda she was now pursuing with Mick.
Unlike Anita Pallenberg, who had be
en a full-fledged member of the Rolling Stones’ inner circle ever since she had first become Brian Jones’s girlfriend, Bianca was a rank outsider. Making the current situation even more difficult for all concerned, she never tried to hide her complete disdain for the always funky, drug-fueled world of rock ’n’ roll.
Doing his best to make a joke of it, Ian Stewart had rearranged the letters of Bianca’s first name and begun calling her “Binaca.” While driving at breakneck speed from Newcastle to Manchester, Stu had let Jo Bergman know how he really felt about Bianca’s influence on Mick by muttering darkly under his breath, “That bird, she’s pushin’ him.”
And so she was but in precisely which direction no one could say for sure. Because Bianca had such a deep connection to Mick, and because the Rolling Stones could not exist without him, her silent presence on this tour represented a distinct threat to the well-being of one and all. And so everyone always kept a watchful eye on her when she and Mick were together while doing their best to conceal their concern about what their future might entail.
As Astrid Lundstrom would later say, “There was a big split between Mick and Keith on the tour because Bianca was there. Because of her mere presence, Mick became totally different. Before, he was much more approachable and more of an artist, but Bianca fed all that social narcissistic stuff of his.”
What no one then knew was that Bianca was two months pregnant with Mick’s child. Considering the way everybody but Mick seemed to feel about her, this was on more than one level clearly a blessing in disguise.
CHAPTER FOUR
GLASGOW, MARCH 8, 1971
Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye Page 4