Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye

by Robert Greenfield

  After having filed reams and reams of copy, I was horrified to see that all my deathless prose had been slashed to ribbons. Thoroughly overwrought, I called the editor at the magazine who had sworn on a stack of Bibles that I would be allowed to cover the entire tour. The moment he got on the line, I began lecturing him about how you just could not lie to people in this world and then ever expect them to believe you again. On and on I went, telling him in no uncertain terms just how wrong what he had done really was. And then, without further ado, I told him I was quitting and slammed the phone down as hard as I could before he could say another word.

  It was not until a few days later that I realized just how badly I had screwed up. Not only was I no longer on the tour, I had also just walked away from the only job I had ever loved. Not yet twenty-six years old, I knew my career as a writer was over. Because going to school was the only thing I was good at, I decided to try to enroll at UCLA for a PhD in English. Exactly what I was going to do with this degree if and when I ever completed my studies, I had no idea.

  And then a letter arrived that had been forwarded to me from the magazine. Having read what I had written about the Stones, the man who ran a publishing house that has long since gone out of business and had been named after a magazine that also no longer exists asked me if I would be interested in writing a book about the tour.

  Rushing to the phone, I called him in his office in lower Manhattan, negotiated what seemed to me like the truly fabulous advance of $3,500, and flew to New York City in time to catch the final four shows of the tour at Madison Square Garden. After checking into a hotel across the street from the hall that made the Black Hole of Calcutta seem luxurious by comparison, I went backstage with my bright red tour laminate in hand so I could watch the Stones perform for the first time in nearly a month.

  What with Truman Capote and Andy Warhol sitting side by side like a pair of elder vampires in the Stones’ dressing room and every star-fucker in town doing all they could to get as close to the band as possible, the backstage scene at the Garden was a human zoo.

  When I had last spoken to Mick as he sat in a hotel room in St. Louis watching the Democratic convention on television with the sound turned, off, he had told me that the shows in Madison Square Garden were going to be something special. Hyping the event as only he could, Mick had said, “Maybe I’ll stand on my head, pull off all my clothing, and just go crazy. Hopefully, by that time, I’ll be completely mad.”

  Literally reduced to skin and bone by the physical nature of his performances night after night as well as by the vast amounts of cocaine nearly everyone on the tour had been doing to keep themselves going, Mick seemed so wired in New York that he could barely answer an interviewer’s question without jittering in place like someone had inserted a live wire into his spine.

  With dark shadows beneath his eyes and the skin drawn so tightly against the bones of his face that he seemed to be wearing a mask, Keith Richards looked no better than Mick. Being Keith, he did come up with my favorite line of the tour at the madhouse of a press reception that followed the first show at the Garden. After being told by some woman he did not know just how good he had been in some movie she did not name as well as how much she wanted to thank him for what he had given her, Keith turned to me with a completely deadpan expression on his face and said, “I never fucked her. I swear.”

  Accurately describing the insanity that the Stones had generated in New York, Keith looked around the room and said, “Right now is when you realize you’re a product.” In terms of what the gods of commerce had done to the holy grail of rock ’n’ roll, no truer words had ever been spoken. For me personally, the end of the tour was so truly sad and thoroughly disheartening that after the final show in Madison Square Garden on July 26, 1972, I never saw the band perform onstage again.

  At the time, all I really cared about was that I finally had a book to write that someone actually wanted to publish. To gather the material for what would become S.T.P.: A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones, I spent the next three months interviewing everyone who would speak to me about what had really happened behind all those closed hotel room doors during the long hot summer when the Rolling Stones had journeyed through America on what to that point in time was the highest-grossing tour in the history of rock ’n’ roll.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  KINGSTON, JAMAICA, DECEMBER 1972

  ALTHOUGH KEITH RICHARDS DUG THE FUNKY VIBE so much that he promptly bought the mountaintop estate overlooking Cutlass Bay that had once belonged to British pop star Tommy Steele, the Rolling Stones had not come to Jamaica to record their new album because of all the beautiful beaches that dotted the island or to avail themselves of the plenteous supply of ganja that Bob Marley would soon make famous all over the world. Simply, the Rolling Stones had come to Jamaica because they had nowhere else to go.

  In Kingston, where the band was staying in the sprawling mansion that had been the home of Island Records founder Chris Blackwell before being converted into the Terra Nova Hotel, the gun culture still ruled the streets. Outbreaks of political violence by warring gangs fighting to control the drug trade were the rule rather than the exception. Without all the security that had accompanied them on the American tour, the Stones were now isolated, beleaguered, and very much on their own.

  Although the rich, thick smell of flowers filled the air in Kingston, the huge turkey vultures known on the island as “john crows,” that came swooping over the swimming pool at the Terra Nova each day, seemed like harbingers of evil. When Bill Wyman’s female companion was raped in their hotel room by an intruder who forced Wyman to hide under the bed during the attack, it only served to confirm that the Stones were now surrounded by a kind of darkness they had not known before.

  Stateless and homeless, the band was now truly in exile as they had never been in the South of France. The psychic toll exacted by this condition was so exhausting that it began wearing on the Stones in ways even they could never have explained. You could hear it in the music. In Jamaica, the overall feeling was so grim that on every level it felt like the end of the line.

  What should have been a simple nightly trip to Byron Lee’s Dynamic Sounds recording studio at 15 Bell Road on the edge of Trench Town instead became a military expedition of the first order. As soon as the van that had brought the band from the hotel pulled to a stop outside the studio, everyone filed as quickly as possible down a narrow alley to a door where two heavily armed guards stood watch. Once all the musicians were inside a studio where the walls were pocked with bullet holes, the doors were locked for the night and no one went outside again until the session was over.

  Despite how awful the decision to record their new album in Jamaica now seemed, the Stones were also besieged by a sizable portion of the English rock press as well as a host of Japanese reporters and photographers who had come to file stories about the band’s upcoming tour of the Far East. So near yet so far away, the press corps would all sit by the hotel pool each morning literally twitching with envy as they stared at the nearby table where the Stones and their people were having breakfast.

  For me, Kingston was the final stop on what had seemed like a never-ending research trip. During the past three months, I had spoken with Hugh Hefner in the living room of the fabled Playboy Mansion in Beverly Hills and listened to Bill Graham tell fabulous stories with the timing of a Borscht Belt comedian in his home in Mill Valley. I had interviewed Truman Capote in his home overlooking the sea at the tip of Long Island and gotten to meet the great director Elia Kazan, who was then living with Peter Rudge’s ex-wife in Manhattan. In Boston, Mayor Kevin White, a true old school politico, had begun talking before I could even turn on my tape recorder about the night he had walked out onstage to beg a sold-out crowd to be patient while they waited for Mick and Keith to be released from a Rhode Island jail.

  In London, I had actually persuaded Ian Stewart to sit down with me for one of the few interviews he had ever done in his l
ife. I had also spent a memorable day riding through Hertfordshire swilling Courvoisier out of plastic cups with Bobby Keys in the back of a long black limousine as he went looking for a place to live in the English countryside.

  In the middle of the afternoon, Bobby and I found ourselves sitting in a very grand and rather stuffy living room across from Barbara Cartland. Despite the fact that the overly made-up seventy-one-year-old woman known as the queen of the romance novel most certainly did not need the money, she happened to have a cottage for rent.

  “And so, young man,” the future Dame Commander of the British Empire trilled in her impossibly upper-class accent while looking right at Bobby, “what is it exactly that you do?”

  While my best answer to her question would have been “running wild while doing whatever he pleases on tours with the Rolling Stones,” this was not how Bobby Keys dealt with her inquiry.

  Like a true son of Texas, Bobby politely explained that he was a musician who specialized in playing the saxophone. Because I knew who Barbara Cartland was and Bobby had no idea whatsoever, the entire scene seemed like something out of a Restoration comedy. And while she did offer him the cottage, Bobby wisely decided to continue looking elsewhere for his very own rural rock star retreat.

  After returning to New York City, I had flown to Kingston, checked into the Terra Nova, and begun interviewing all those I had not seen since the tour had ended. My task was complicated by the fact that as always when they were in the studio, the Stones were working throughout the night and then sleeping all day long. After several failed attempts to talk to Mick, I finally left a note on the door of his room asking him to give me a call.

  When I answered my phone at some ungodly hour of the night, I was so asleep that Mick just laughed and said it would be better if we spoke to one another at a more convenient time. As good as his word, he sat down with me for a lengthy interview. Making everything yet more difficult, all the Rolling Stones except Keith then flew to France to appear at a hearing in Nice on drug charges stemming from the summer they had spent recording at Nellcôte.

  For the Stones, the stakes were very high indeed. If the French authorities decided to issue an international warrant for Keith’s arrest, the band’s tour of the Far East would have to be canceled. As Keith would later say, “It’s all a bunch of political bullshit…. I have the feeling the French are trying to show the Americans that they are doing something about the drug problem. But rather than actually doing something about it, they bust a big name. The only thing I resent is that they try and drag my old lady into it. I find that particularly distasteful.”

  With no one left for me to interview, I checked out of the Terra Nova and went to visit an English rock photographer who was spending two years in Port Antonio teaching at a local school. At one point during the utterly terrifying train ride through the Blue Mountains, a woman at the back of the car held up her young son so he could piss a glittering yellow stream down the aisle. For the rest of the ride, I watched the pool of liquid slosh back and forth between the seats as we rounded one treacherous turn after another.

  After arriving in Port Antonio, I learned there was a reggae show that night at the local cinema featuring Toots and the Maytals and Desmond Dekker. Although I really wanted to see them perform, the rock photographer informed me that because several people had been hacked to death with machetes at the last reggae show there, this would not be a good idea. Which was just how wild it was in Jamaica back then.

  Although the hearing in Nice went well for the Stones with all of the witnesses testifying they had been browbeaten by the police into filing false statements, an arrest warrant on charges of drug trafficking was filed against both Keith and Anita in France. Returning to Kingston, the Stones then spent another two weeks in the studio without getting very much done. And while Bill Wyman would later write that producer Jimmy Miller collapsed and engineer Andy Johns became ill in Jamaica, the truth was that along with Keith, they were all so strung out on smack that working on the new album did not seem nearly as important to them as finding a way to stay high.

  As Andy Johns would later say, “By the time we went to Jamaica to do Goats Head Soup, my habit had gotten pretty serious. Keith, Jimmy Miller, and I were the junkies and we ran out of stuff so someone flew in and tightened us up. Then Jimmy said, ‘Fuck this. I’ve got enough left to make a trip back to LA and cop for us all.’ While he was gone, Keith and I were going through withdrawal like mad and then Keith called up and said, ‘I bet Jimmy left something in his bathroom.’

  “So I got assigned to break into Jimmy’s room. Maybe we even had the key. I went in and the first place I looked was in his electric razor. Bingo, there were a couple of grams. I came out of the room and Keith said, ‘Oh great, I’ll have that.’ And I said, ‘What are you fucking talking about? Fair dues.’ He could be really naughty like that. So we split it and then we ran out again and I was upstairs in my room and it was so bad that I could not even have the sheets touch me.

  “It was that uncomfortable and Keith called and said, ‘Oh, we can drink our way through this. Come on down to the bar and have some drinks with me.’ I went down there and he was fine. I took a sip of a Bloody Mary and threw up. Looking back on it, Keith had obviously gotten something from somewhere and just wanted someone to hang out with and he didn’t share any of it with me.”

  Because they were still “junk buddies,” Andy Johns remained close to Keith even after the Stones left Jamaica on December 13, 1972 without having achieved very much at all in the studio. In June 1973, both Keith and Anita were busted in Keith’s house on Cheyne Walk for grass, Mandrax, and heroin as well as a collection of burnt spoons and syringes.

  Far more seriously in England, Keith was also charged with possession of unlicensed firearms and ammunition, specifically a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver he had bought for $200 from one of his black security guards on the American tour and then taken with him to Jamaica for protection, 110 rounds of ammunition, and a 9-millimeter Belgian shotgun with a sawn-off barrel that all by itself would have landed him an automatic sentence of a year in jail.

  As Andy Johns would later say, “Keith was up for what was probably the worst bust he’d had so far. When the coppers walked into his bedroom on Cheyne Walk, he had immediately grabbed three or four blackened spoons and started stirring this old cup of coffee to get the smack off them and the detective inspector went, ‘You don’t have to bother with that. We’ve already got you.’”

  Clad in a black chalk stripe suit and a white shirt with no tie, Keith emerged from his limousine outside the Great Marlborough Street Magistrates Court in London on the day of his hearing with an unlit cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth. Looking every inch like a glamorous movie star queen, Anita was decked out in a floppy hat, her best jewelry, and a sheer black blouse through which her breasts were clearly visible.

  Despite the way they looked, Keith was so concerned about the possible outcome of the hearing that he had spent the previous week hanging out with Andy Johns. “This was Keith’s second or third bust,” Andy Johns would later say, “and it really looked like he was going to go down. To distract him, I had taken Keith to Hamleys, the big toy store in London, and we’d gotten all these models to build just to keep his mind off of things.

  “On the day of the trial, I got to lower court and I had been up for two or three days and I smelled just rank. I remember sitting in the back of the courtroom with Mick Jagger on one side of me and this woman from the Daily Express on the other with my arms clamped firmly to the sides of my body so this awful pong didn’t come out too much. I said to Mick, ‘What’s going to happen?’ And he said, ‘I think Keith’s going down. But it’s all right. I’ve got Jesse Ed Davis with his bags packed in LA. He can be on the next plane.’ Which I thought was beyond mercenary. Because they had to tour with Goats Head Soup which was just about to be released.

  “The prosecutor read out this list of twenty-five charges and I thought, Well
, he’s sunk. That’s it. But then Keith’s barrister got up and said, ‘Mr. Richards obviously could not have been residing at Cheyne Walk. Otherwise, he would have been liable for a million pounds in tax.’ Then they presented all these letters from various people saying that some roadie had left the firearms and the ammo in the house. The barrister said Marshall Chess had been living there and Keith understood that Marshall had a drug problem but he had promised Keith he was straight now and so Keith felt very let down by him. It was very fucking naughty and they really did a number on Marshall. Boing! A 250 quid fine for Keith and Anita and off they both walked.”

  After Keith and Anita had made their way through all the press people gathered outside the courtroom, they slid into the backseat of the Daimler limousine where Andy Johns was waiting for them. “I had a gram of blow in each of my socks and I just handed one gram to the left and one to the right because I was sitting between them and off we went to the Londonderry Hotel to celebrate Keith’s release.

  “We were all sitting there and feeling shitty and waiting for the man and all the kids were in the next room. Marlon and Dandelion Richards and my son William, who was then still quite young. They were all sleeping on this bed and sure enough, one of them had knocked over a lamp and set fire to the mattress. The smoke filled up this teeny little annex corridor and then started coming into our room and everyone panicked.

  “Fortunately, I had this bag from Biba’s so I went in the bathroom and filled it up with a water a couple of times and put out the fire. And I thought, Fuck, Keith has only just gotten off three hours ago and here we are again. Doesn’t take much time. I knew I had to get out of there and as I was jumping in the elevator, the hotel manager was coming the other way and all the people on the floor were saying, ‘Lock him up. Throw the key away. He’s endangering our lives.’”