Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye (26 page)

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.’”

Although Keith somehow managed to talk his way out of the situation, he was banned from ever staying again at the Londonderry Hotel. “There had been a fire while we had been recording at Nellcôte and then Keith’s house in Sussex had burned down as did Mick Taylor’s house during that period. Wherever he went back then, Keith was always followed by a trail of fire.”

While Keith may have never known he was about to be replaced in the Rolling Stones by Jesse Ed Davis, a talented guitarist who would himself eventually die of a drug overdose, the fact that
Mick Jagger was ready to do this to keep the band on the road spoke volumes about how their relationship had changed over the past two years. Although neither of them knew it at the time, the writing was also on the wall for both Jimmy Miller and Andy Johns.

By the time the Rolling Stones went to Munich in 1974 to record
Black and Blue,
Miller had been replaced as the producer of the album by Mick and Keith, aka The Glimmer Twins. After showing up late for the first session because one of Keith’s friends had stolen his stash and then subsisting for a while on heroin that Mick “was kind enough to steal from Keith for me,” Andy Johns was told not to come back after the Christmas break. Neither he nor Jimmy Miller ever worked for the band again.

Despite how dire the scene in Jamaica had seemed, it soon became just another dark chapter in the never-ending story of the Rolling Stones. In time, both Mick Taylor and Bill Wyman would leave the band. For wildly different reasons, Jo Bergman, Marshall Chess, Chip Monck, and Peter Rudge would also soon be gone.

In 1985, Ian Stewart would die of a massive heart attack at the age of forty-seven while sitting in his doctor’s waiting room. After doing a show in his memory at the 100 Club on Oxford Street, the Stones would go right on touring just as they always had done before. In time, Mick and Bianca would part company as would Keith and Anita but the Stones still soldiered on.

As their former manager Andrew Loog Oldham, whom the Stones had also left behind, wrote of them, “Stars must be killers, always striking first and last…. There’s no remorse when they kill, no regrets when they pimp and no shame when they whore. And it’s really a fair exchange: the world needs them and they need the world.”

While some may view this as the devil’s bargain, the truth was that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards simply could not survive without making music and then walking out onstage to perform before huge crowds all over the world. As everyone would learn over the course of the next five decades, it would never be over for the Rolling Stones until Mick and Keith were finally done.

EPILOGUE

HAIL AND FAREWELL

AFTER FINDING MYSELF A SMALL CABIN
overlooking the ocean in northern California for the princely sum of $125 a month, I started working on the book that came to be entitled
S.T.P.: A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones.
Sitting at a desk a carpenter friend had built for me, I wrote a chapter a week and then went out on Friday nights to celebrate.

The first full-length account ever written about a rock tour, the book has since been republished in America and the United Kingdom and remains in print to this day. Having said that, the reviews that greeted
S.T.P
. when it first appeared were most definitely mixed.

In
Rolling Stone
magazine, the late Chet Flippo wrote, “Greenfield is perhaps too much the objective observer, too much the disinterested journalist. He never explains why he was kicked off the tour, he never develops a coherent viewpoint. At different times, he appears as ‘I,’ as ‘this writer,’ and ‘anyone.’ Ultimately,
S.T.P.
is part of the endless coverage of the Stones, who … manage either to be substanceless people or project a public image of vacuity.”

In
NME,
the weekly English music business trade paper, the late Mick Farren, the former lead singer of the Deviants who was himself no mean writer, noted, “I fear this book may be the one that could finally O.D. the reader on rock writing, particularly that flat, conscientious, detailed, post–Truman Capote style that has made
Rolling Stone
what it is today…. The book shows that writers like Greenfield can get locked in by rock and roll. Instead of wearing out his buns hanging around on a Stones tour, he should be with the real action.”

To all these charges even at this late date, I do plead guilty, Your Honor. For the record, I should also like to state that when someone half my age recently asked me if there was anything left to say about the Rolling Stones, I said, “No.” Which of course did not stop me from going on at length about them here for the third time in my career.

And now at long last, we come to the title of this book. As all dyed-in-the-wool fans of the band already know, it happens to be a line from “Angie,” a song that Keith wrote while kicking heroin in Switzerland shortly after
Exile on Main St.
had finally been deemed ready to be delivered to Atlantic Records.

As Nick Kent, the mild-mannered English rock journalist who went into a phone booth in London one day only to reemerge as the second coming of Keith Richards, wrote in
NME
when “Angie” was released, “This is positively the most depressing task I’ve had to undertake as a rock writer. This single is a dire mistake on as many levels as you care to mention. ‘Angie’ is atrocious.”

Although “Angie” ranked fifty-ninth in
Rolling Stone
magazine’s list of the Stones’ top one hundred songs and remains the only ballad by the band ever to go to number one on the charts
while also featuring Mick Jagger’s faintly audible guide track—also known as a “ghost vocal”—I cannot say I disagree with Nick Kent’s appraisal of it.

As a song, “Angie” still seems pretty soppy and far too sweet for my taste but there you go. My original title for this book was
Goodbye, Johnny B. Goode
but after a good deal of discussion about whether anyone would know what this meant, the marketing director at Da Capo Press came up with
Ain’t It Time We Said Goodbye
and I decided to go with that instead. Having said this, I am really glad I did.

After lo these many years, the time has indeed finally come for me to say goodbye to the band without whom my career, not to mention my life, would have been radically different in so many ways. Perhaps because I walked before they made me run, I have nothing but positive memories of the time I spent with the Rolling Stones.

On every level, the pleasure was definitely all mine, and I would not have wanted to miss any of it for the world. Or as Keith wrote to Mick Taylor after learning he had left the Rolling Stones, “Thanks for all the turn-ons.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FIRST AND FOREMOST,
I would like to thank Ben Schafer, my editor of long standing at Da Capo Press and fellow aficionado of beatnik literature, who gave me the go-ahead to write this book. My thanks also go to Kevin Hanover who came up with a title that I liked more than my own.

As always, I would like to thank all those who were kind enough to make the time to speak to me concerning the Rolling Stones’ 1971 tour of Great Britain. In alphabetical order, they are Lady Elizabeth Anson, Jeff Dexter, Alan Dunn, Chip Monck, Noel Monk, David Noffsinger, Jerry Pompili, Jim Price, Jeff Stacy, and Tony Smith.

For his invaluable help in finding information about The Big Apple in Brighton, I would like to thank Robert Allan. For helping me sort out exactly what happened in Belfast in the spring of 1971, my thanks to Joe Stevens.

For being a lifelong pal and going through his archives for me, I would like to thank Phil Franks, whose excellent website, the Philm Freax Digital Archive, is a treasure trove of information about the underground scene in England during the early 1970s.

For providing me with the wonderful photograph of Ian Stewart and Mick Jagger, I would like to thank Will Nash. Anyone interested in his remarkable book about Ian Stewart can contact
Will at
[email protected]
. I would also like to thank the great Chip Monck for providing me with photographs from his own extensive archive.

For directing me to the
Daily Mirror
archive, where I was astonished to find a photograph of myself from the 1971 tour I had never seen before, my thanks to Adam Cooper. David Scripps at the Mirrorpix Archive made it possible for me to use these photographs in this book. Thanks as well to Peter Everard Smith for the photo of the Stones performing at the Roundhouse in London that graces the cover of this book.

Closer to home, I would like to thank Chris Cochran, who kept me working through his computer magic. For their friendship and never-ending support, I would like to thank Jeffrey Greenberg, Paul Goldman, and Janice and Brian Higgins.

My gratitude for all they did for me goes to Dr. David Dansky, the incredible human heavy metal beat box machine also known as Dr. Scott Smith, Dr. Jeremy Silk, Ryan Vereker, and all the nurses and incredibly caring staff at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula.

As always, I could not have written this book without Donna, and I thank her for sticking with me through some truly hard times. I should also like to send special love to Sandy and Anna.

If you will permit me, I should like to add one final thought. Whether we know it or not, we are all closing by secondary intention. Along the way, the least we can do is try to shed some light on the process.

SOURCES

MUCH OF WHAT APPEARS IN THIS BOOK
comes from the two spiral-bound notebooks I filled during the 1971 Stones farewell tour of Great Britain. I have also drawn on interviews I conducted in the past with Marshall Chess, Andy Johns, Glyn Johns, Astrid Lundstrom, Rose Millar, and Keith Richards.

ARTICLES

Robert Greenfield, “The Rolling Stones on Tour: Goodbye Great Britain,”
Rolling Stone,
April 15, 1971.

Robert Greenfield, “Keith Richard: The
Rolling Stone
Interview,”
Rolling Stone,
August 19, 1971.

Robert Greenfield, “The Rolling Stones in LA: Main Street Exiles,”
Rolling Stone,
April 27, 1972.

BOOKS

Julian Dawson,
And on Piano
…
Nicky Hopkins: The Extraordinary Life of Rock’s Greatest Session Man.
San Francisco: Backstage Press, 2011.

Pete Fornatale, with Bernard M. Corbett and Peter Thomas Fornatale,
50 Licks: Myths and Stories from Half a Century of the Rolling Stones.
New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.