Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye (23 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

LOS ANGELES, MARCH 24–25, 1972

FORCED TO LEAVE THE SOUTH OF FRANCE
in the fall of 1971 as quickly as possible so as to avoid being thrown into jail by the local gendarmes on a variety of drug charges, the Rolling Stones had come to ground in Los Angeles, a city where they had always felt very much at home. Under incredible pressure to finish the new album so they could tour America, Mick and Keith had just spent the past four months working together in the studio as harmoniously as they ever had before.

Which did not mean the work itself had gone all that smoothly. As Andy Johns would later say, “We all traipsed off to Los Angeles and it was still a bit tedious but we were getting things done and then I started mixing and it was going slowly. Mick wanted me to work faster but I got four or five mixes done and then I told him I was going home for Christmas and I got the feeling I was not going to be asked back. Which was what happened and they started working with someone else.

“Jimmy Miller had me come back to LA to produce a solo album with Jim Price. We were out in Malibu and someone had
just given me a hash cookie that had started to come on really strong and I don’t like that kind of stuff anyway so I was sitting in my room paranoid as hell with the chair under the door handle so no one could come in and the phone rang and it was Jagger. Who then had to proceed to eat a little bit of humble pie without sounding like it. When I said, ‘You didn’t call to say hello. What is it?’ he told me, ‘Well, you know, those mixes of yours, we can’t seem to beat them.’”

Along with Mick, Andy Johns went into Wally Heider’s studio to begin mixing again only to decide that he preferred working at Sunset Sound. “Mick said, ‘Here are the tapes. Just finish the fucking thing. You’ve got two days.’ I already had four or five songs done so I just stayed there and ended up mixing two-thirds of the record in one huge great mammoth forty-eight-hour session.”

Nevertheless, the mixing process was still not done. Two days before Marshall Chess was scheduled to fly to New York City to hand-deliver the masters to Atlantic Records so the album could be released before the Stones began their tour, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Miller, and Andy Johns were still driving themselves crazy trying to come up with the final version of
Exile on Main St.

One year to the weekend after I had seen the Stones play the final two shows on their farewell tour of England, I left the house high on a twisting road overlooking Topanga Canyon where I had been living for the past three months to talk to Mick for an article about the new album and the upcoming tour that would not appear in
Rolling Stone
until nearly another month had passed.

Back then, Los Angeles was most definitely not the city it has since become. While you could still get anywhere you needed to go on the freeway in twenty minutes no matter when you left your
house or in which direction you were headed, the maleficent spirit of Charlie Manson was not yet entirely dead. Without warning up in those hot, dry canyons, things could suddenly get weirder than hell and often did.

This was also the era when the “Riot House” (aka the Hyatt House) on the Sunset Strip was filled with English music business heavies whose accents gave them total license to get just as crazy as they liked without ever having to suffer the consequences. However, even for those at the very top of the food chain in rock ’n’ roll, actually trying to live in Los Angeles back then could induce a form of culture shock so severe that the only cure for it was to go back home again just as quickly as possible.

As Rose Millar would later say, “Mick Taylor and Chloe and I moved into this house on Stone Canyon Road just up a bit from Keith and Anita and it was awful and I couldn’t stand it. There was this concrete log in the fireplace and everything was white and made of plastic. Even in January it seemed like summer and what saved our lives was the Edwin Hawkins Singers doing ‘Oh Happy Day.’ Both Mick and I loved that song so much and every morning we’d wake up and say, ‘Oh no, we’re still here,’ and put on the song and go back under the bedclothes. I thought LA was much worse than the South of France because there was so much cocaine around and that was when Mick Taylor began doing it in excess.”

Authentically depressed by his new surroundings as well as by the glacial pace at which work on the album was proceeding, Mick Taylor had begun writing notes about how he no longer wanted to be in the Rolling Stones. Taylor had also told the young woman who was taking care of his daughter just how lonely he felt because he never got to meet anyone anymore. For someone
stuck in Los Angeles without enough to do to occupy his time, it was not an atypical reaction.

Not surprisingly, this was not the way Mick Jagger felt about Los Angeles. For starters, he had set himself up with Bianca and their five-month-old daughter Jade in a huge southern California Gothic mansion on St. Pierre Road in Bel Air. Originally built for
Tarzan
star Johnny Weissmuller with an artificial waterfall that had long since gone dry, the house was surrounded by thickets of tangled vines and dense underbrush and looked as though it had come straight out of
Sunset Boulevard.

On the Saturday I went to see him, Mick came padding barefoot down the sweeping staircase at four o’clock in the afternoon. Wearing a shiny silk zippered jacket with two tigers snarling at one another across the shoulders, he walked into the huge dining room and sat down at the table to talk to me with a beer in his hand.

As a sprinkler whispered softly outside the window, Mick began describing
Exile on Main St.
by saying, “It was cut during the summer and we’ll be touring this summer, so it all fits in. It’s a summer-y album and very commercial, I think. It’s a double album like
Electric Ladyland.
God knows, there was enough in that for a year’s listening.”

Shifting his focus to the upcoming tour, Mick noted that the schedule was really not all that grueling. “It’s like the one we did last time. Five cities a week for six weeks. We wanted to have rest in the middle, two weeks off to recover, but that meant we’d have been in the country more than six months and eligible for national service. You know, the draft.”

The concept of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards being summoned to take their draft physicals so they could then be inducted
into the United States Army and sent off to fight in Vietnam because the Rolling Stones had spent too much time in America was so completely ludicrous that I should have laughed out loud when Mick said this to me. Instead, I reported his words just as he had said them and his statement then ran in its entirety in
Rolling Stone.

Continuing to make it all up as he went along, Mick talked about how he wanted to see the Stones begin experimenting onstage as they had done while making
Their Satanic Majesties Request.
“I mean,” he said, “Mick Taylor has even more strange ideas than me and I know Charlie wouldn’t mind going along with it. I wouldn’t want us to be a band people think they could rely on.”

With what I have now come to recognize as the kind of improvisational genius even the great Charlie Parker might have admired, Mick said the Stones would be doing “a little bus tour of the Deep South.” He then expressed his desire to put on a concert in Los Angeles “outside in the open air, smoggy and all.” That the Rolling Stones would not be doing any such thing until all the lawsuits still pending against the band for their ill-fated concert at Altamont had finally been laid to rest, Mick did not bother to say.

Although Mick did find it a bit annoying that movie star tourist buses had begun stopping outside the driveway of his house, he said, “The anonymity here is pretty good. It’s not like England where it’s so crowded that one has to buy a thousand acres to have any privacy and where they line up outside your house to find out who you fucked the night before. I hate that place. You think if only they’d let you, you could take it over and really get it together because it’s so small really. You think that something like the miners’ strike is going to really bring about a change. But it’s such a pathetic little village sometimes.”

Concerning his feelings about the country where the Rolling Stones were currently wanted by the police for questioning, Mick sighed and said, “Do you know there are no more salmon in the rivers of France? They’ve killed them all with pollution. In Nice and Cannes, the French are thieves. I’ll never live there again.”

After going upstairs to gather his things together so he could go to the studio, Mick walked back into the dining room and said, “People have asked me if I’m not frightened to go out onstage and work every night in America. Maybe you shouldn’t even print anything about that. But, I mean, if we can’t play here, in our other home so to speak, what good is it?” Knowing he had just delivered the perfect exit line, Mick then headed out the door.

After having driven down Sunset Boulevard in a big black Mercedes, Mick walked into the studio so he could make yet another attempt to come up with a final mix for the song that after much discussion he had already selected to be the first single from the new album.

As Andy Johns would later say, “We had recorded ‘All Down the Line’ at Nellcôte and then overdubbed it in Los Angeles. It was the first song that actually got finished, and Mick said, ‘This is a single. This is a single!’ And I thought,
He’s out of his fucking mind. This is not a single.
So I said to him, ‘You’re wrong about this. This is not a single.’ And he went, ‘Really? Do ya think so?’ And that was the first time I realized, ‘Jesus, he’ll actually listen to me.’

“I was having a hard time mixing it and I said, ‘Jeez, I just can’t imagine this on the radio.’ And Mick said, ‘Do you want to hear it on the radio?’ And I said, ‘Yeah. How do you …,’ and he said, ‘Oh, we can do that.’ And he went, ‘Stu, call up that radio station. Go round there with the tape. We’ll call you from the limo.
Have ’em put it on.’

“I was tooling up and down the Sunset Strip in the back of this limo with Keith and Mick and Charlie listening to a mix on the radio. I mean, how surreal is that? And Mick says, ‘What do you think?’ The sound system was so ratty in the limo that I said, ‘I don’t know, man.’ And he said, ‘We’ll have Stu play it again.’ Picking up the phone, he said, ‘Stu, have ’em play that again.’ Sure enough. There it was again. I thought that was pretty cool. But in the end, they decided ‘Tumbling Dice’ was the single.”

Despite having made this decision, Mick still looked none too pleased as he walked through the control room door of studio number 3 at Wally Heider’s that night. “Was this the Beach Boys’ studio?” he asked. “I mean, I’ve been here before. You lose all the highs.”

Hesitantly, the regular studio engineer, who would not be allowed to touch a single knob or dial that night, said, “Uh, actually it was completely rebuilt a while ago. You might still think there’s too much bottom but that’s because the top is going out over your head.” Not at all happy with this answer, Mick grimaced and decided to just try to make the best of it.

Sitting alongside producer Jimmy Miller at the board, Andy Johns cued up a rough mix of “Tumbling Dice.” From out of the speakers came a raging river of sound. Four guitars, two playing rhythm, one tracked through a Lesley, Bobby Keys on saxophone, Jim Price on trumpet and trombone, Nicky Hopkins on piano, Mick Taylor on bass, Charlie Watts on drums, Jimmy Miller on drums in the coda, and Clydie King and Venetta Fields on backup vocals. When the song finally ended, it seemed very quiet indeed in the room.

“Well,” Andy Johns said. “What do you think?”

Looking up at the soundproof ceiling, Mick said, “I want the snares to crack and the voices to float. It’s tricky all right. You think you’ve got the voices sussed and all of a sudden the backing track seems so….” Stopping for a moment to find the proper word, Mick finally said, “ … so …
ordinaire.
”

After rewinding the tape, Andy Johns began flicking knobs and turning dials so he could come up with a brand-new mix. Like magic, the bass guitar receded and the drums sounded crisp as the guitars began to overlap as they had not done before. Not at all certain that he liked this version any better than the last, Mick was suddenly distracted when Bianca walked into the room. Looking just as fabulous as ever, she sat down on the couch and began smoking a cigarette as Andy Johns rewound the tape yet again.

Even for Los Angeles back then, an awful lot of cocaine began going around the room. Since no one was going home anytime soon that night and the entire process was so laborious for those who had now been working on this album for nearly a year, it definitely seemed better to be wired than to fall asleep during the session.

After playing Mick yet another mix that did not seem to please him, Andy Johns said, “I thought you liked cymbals like that.”

Shaking his head, Mick said, “They sound like dustbin lids.”

Pouting for a moment, Andy Johns then began rewinding the tape so they could start all over again. And so it went until long after I had left the studio and gone back home.

That Keith Richards was nowhere to be seen in the studio that night spoke volumes about who was now running the show insofar as the new album was concerned. Whether this was because Mick was the one who always took over at this stage of the
proceedings or because Keith had far more serious personal issues to deal with at the time was hard to say.

After having made my way up the very hip and fashionable Stone Canyon Road in Bel Air the next day, I found Keith lying on the roof of the big two-tone Chevrolet parked in front of his house making faces at his son Marlon through the windshield. Because Keith only ever existed in present time, our conversation began as though it had only been a few days since we had last seen one another at Villa Nellcôte. That we now both somehow found ourselves in Los Angeles was also of no great concern to him.