Read Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye Online
Authors: Robert Greenfield
Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye (2 page)
And now, without further ado, this is what it was like to be on tour with the Rolling Stones a long time ago in a galaxy that now seems very far, far away indeed. Enough said. See you on the road.
IN THE EMPTY KING’S CROSS MAIN LINE STATION
in North London on a cold, clear Thursday that feels like November in New York, the 12:00 train to Doncaster, York, Darlington, Newcastle, Dunbar, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen is leaving from track 8. Although the Rolling Stones are about to go off on tour in the land of their birth for the first time in five years, no screaming hordes of fans, nor a single reporter save for yours truly, have come to see them off.
In part, this is because from way back when Ian Stewart, their former piano player, was still driving them to gigs all over England in an old VW van, the Stones have always been a traveling band who go out on the road night after night to perform and then move on to do it all over again in another town. In part, it is also because what with the Beatles having only recently shocked their millions of fans by breaking up in the most contentious manner imaginable, the Stones have now become such an integral part of English culture that their comings and goings over here no longer attract the same kind of attention that had been lavished upon them in America since they first played at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1964.
Nonetheless, with all the necessary plans and preparations having been made and a brand-new album soon to be released on their very own record label, the Stones are about to set off on a ten-day journey through Newcastle, Manchester, Coventry, Glasgow, Bristol, Brighton, Liverpool, Leeds, and London that they have announced will serve as their farewell tour of their homeland.
The England they are about to leave to go into tax exile in the South of France bears very little resemblance to the England we now know. Even in London, a great city by any definition of the term, central heating is still an entirely foreign concept in 1971. To keep warm during the long winter months, most people feed sixpences into a coin-operated electric heater mounted on a wall while wearing as many layers of clothing as possible. For those who live in tiny bed-sitter flats in London, the loo is almost always down the stairs and the only shower may well be located in the basement where it is shared by all who live in the building.
As virtually no one I know in London owns a car, traffic is not an issue. Although the British pound is worth an astonishing $2.40, everything is still so cheap in England that anyone can sit like a lord in the back of a black cab while being driven from one end of London to the other for less than a quid and still have enough money left over to hand the driver a generous tip.
Since tiny garret flats like the one in which I live rent for as little as £6 (about $15) a week, those who earn the average weekly wage of £28 ($67) and do not have a family to support can easily afford to keep themselves in food and drink while still depositing more than half that sum in their bank account.
In England, there are only three television channels: BBC-1, BBC-2, and ITV. Those who watch them usually do so on a set
they have acquired through “hire purchase,” paying a nominal fee each month until the set finally becomes their own. Even in London, most people still prefer to spend their evenings drinking in local pubs, which promptly shut their doors at 11:00 PM. Since a pint of bitter costs just 11 pence (about 11 cents), most regulars have consumed their limit by the time “last call” is sounded.
Despite the fact that England has been the preeminent source of popular music in the world for the past decade, British radio is a vast and utter wasteland. Because there are no hip free-form FM stations and the pop songs played on BBC 1, 2, 3, and 4 are utterly bland and vapid, the preferred way to listen to music is to pass a three- or five-paper English hash joint from hand to hand as an album goes round on a turntable in someone’s flat.
While this may seem impossible for those under the age of thirty to comprehend, there is no Internet. No email, no Facebook, no Twitter, and no YouTube. There are no cell phones. Some people in London do not even own a phone and so have to walk to a call box across the road with a pocket full of coins to contact whoever might be interested in talking to them.
Although the daily tabloid newspapers that traffic in celebrity gossip all have huge circulations, the straight press in England usually restricts their coverage of pop stars to headline stories about drug busts and sex scandals. And while the pop press has most definitely noted that the Rolling Stones are beginning what they have announced will be their farewell tour of Great Britain, no one has leaked the news of their departure from London today and so I am the only journalist who has come to see them off.
In the King’s Cross Main Line station in this England that no longer exists, Nicky Hopkins, the brilliant rock ’n’ roll pianist who went to California for a week and wound up staying there for two years as a member of Quicksilver Messenger Service, keeps hopping on and off the train to snap photographs of anything that looks typically English to him, like all the crumpled purple-and-white Cadbury chocolate wrappers that litter the platform.
As he does so, Charlie Watts comes walking toward the train accompanied by his father, who has spent his life working as a lorry driver for British Railways. Precisely why he is here, no one can say for sure, but as five to twelve becomes four, three, two, one, and a conductor with a green flag in his pocket comes down the line closing all the doors, Charlie’s father says, “Awright, Charlie, awright now, I don’t want to go, lemme off.” Hopping off the train at the very last moment, Charlie’s father disappears into a cloud of gray white steam that curls up from beneath the wheels of the train as it rolls out of London heading north.
While by all rights any account of the Rolling Stones on tour should begin with a detailed description of the whereabouts of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the two central figures of this tale, both of them, as well as guitarist Mick Taylor, have missed the train. Although the Stones cannot possibly go onstage tonight without them, no one seems particularly concerned about their absence. As it turns out, the two Micks will catch a later train and arrive in plenty of time for the show. Beginning a pattern of behavior that will persist throughout the entire tour, Keith misses that one as well and has to be driven up to Newcastle.
As pelting small-flake snow starts coming down outside the windows of the train, Nicky Hopkins just keeps right on snapping
photographs of all the dark, satanic mills that have dotted this green and pleasant land ever since William Blake cried out for a bow of burning gold and the arrows of desire. A painfully thin man with dark hollows beneath his eyes, long hair that hangs down to his shoulders, and a droopy cowboy mustache, Nicky wears a fringed buckskin jacket that makes him look like a psychedelic gunslinger from Marin County. Thoroughly English in every way, he gazes wistfully out the window as the train speeds past an open field and says, “I love sheep. They just stand there and grow.”
What I did not then know about Nicky Hopkins was how sick he had been ever since childhood. Then twenty-seven years old, he had already had much of his large intestine and one of his kidneys removed. Having first worked with the Stones on
Between the Buttons
in 1966, Nicky had played on five tracks on
Beggars Banquet
as well as on “Sway” and “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” during the band’s recent sessions for
Sticky Fingers.
Wherever he went for the next ten days, Hopkins was always accompanied by a woman whose name appears nowhere in my notebooks because everyone on the tour seemed to know her only as The Person Who Is In Charge of Nicky. A good-looking but intimidating presence with a pronounced New Jersey accent she did her best to hide by trying to sound English, she had long straight hair, brightly polished blood-red fingernails, and an attitude that can only be described as truly formidable.
Since her entire focus was on taking care of Nicky while also constantly telling him what to do, no one ever willingly engaged her in conversation or made any effort whatsoever to find out who
she really was. At some point during the tour, someone mistakenly told me she had formerly been married to Al Kooper, yet another wildly gifted keyboard player who by then had become famous as the founder of Blood, Sweat, and Tears. As I later learned, this was not true.
Nicky seemed so gentle and sweet-tempered that it was impossible not to like him even though the woman he was with always treated him like an invalid, which he most definitely was not. Although the term was not then in vogue, the two of them were beyond codependent. Simply, it was a relationship that made you want to never be around them for very long, especially if you thought Nicky was something special, which I most certainly did. Seven months after the tour ended, the two would be married but as they say in the movies, that is another story altogether.
The real point about Nicky Hopkins on this tour was that with him on piano, an instrument that back then could never be miked well enough to hear all the impossibly liquid notes that flowed from his fingertips like water, the Stones were now able to go places in their music onstage where they had never been before.
Having taken LSD for the first time when he was dosed in the studio while recording Shady Grove with Quicksilver in 1969, Nicky Hopkins played piano in what I can still only describe as a truly psychedelic manner. And while I saw Nicky smoke the occasional joint and take a drink every now and then during the tour, his talent was so immense and his physical condition so frail that it seems impossible to me even now that shortly after becoming a Scientologist in 1986, Nicky Hopkins would estimate that he had spent a million pounds on alcohol, Valium, heroin, and pot.
Without a sound check and only a week of rehearsal, the Stones begin the tour in Newcastle, a gray, scruffy, soulful city on the banks of the Tyne that has lately fallen on hard times. In the sold-out City Hall, more than two thousand people, many of whom stood in line for as long as sixteen hours to buy tickets costing anywhere from fifty pence ($1.20) to a pound, wait patiently for the band to go onstage in England for the first time since they performed in London in December 1969.
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.”