Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye (3 page)

What has been a series of brilliantly played songs suddenly becomes something else again as the Stones go into “Midnight Rambler.” As it will break down nightly on the tour, the song begins with anywhere from six to twelve bars of basic blues as Keith slings one guitar off over his head and gets another one on and tuned so he can launch into the song’s driving riff. After Mick sings the first four verses, the psychodrama begins with just Bill Wyman’s bass pulsing away and the lights going all blue and eerie on Mick’s face.

Taking off the studded black belt he wears around his waist, Mick gets down on his knees and begins crooning, “Beggin’ with ya, baby … go down on me, bay-bay, uh, uh.” Rising to his feet in a slow and decidedly sinister manner, Mick wails, “Well, you heard about de Bos-ton….” As he stretches out the second syllable, Mick dangles the belt behind his shoulder. Slashing the belt down onto the stage as the band comes back in behind him and all the lights go blood red in his face, Mick wails, “Honey, it’s not one of those….”

As one, the entire crowd lets out its collective breath. Young girls who have just gotten what this song is all about giggle nervously. With the band hitting everything in sight, Mick prowls the edge of the stage hunched over like an evil old man. After the song crashes to a shattering climax, the Stones go right into “Bitch,”
with Bobby Keys and trumpet player Jim Price blowing stomping circles against the melody.

Stepping to the microphone, Mick says, “And now, a song for all the whores in the audience.” After the Stones tear through “Honky Tonk Women,” they launch into a long, unrecognizable introduction that suddenly becomes “Satisfaction.” Solidly crazed by what they are now hearing, the crowd in Newcastle starts rocking down the aisles. Middle-aged ladies in toreador pants who seem to have come straight out of 1957 bump obscenely to the beat as skinheads in Ben Sherman polo shirts, neatly pressed jeans, and black Doc Martens boots idiot-dance in the balcony.

Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie” is followed by “Brown Sugar” and then “Street Fighting Man.” At its climax, Mick flings a wicker basket filled with yellow daffodils into the house. As the final chords of the song ring out through the hall and flower petals slowly come floating down through the spotlight beams, Mick leaps four feet into the air and screams.

To huge applause, the Rolling Stones exit stage right. In an hour and a half, they have done twelve songs. Despite how long and hard everyone goes right on cheering, that’s it. The first show of the tour is over and as everyone who has traveled with the Stones before already knows, this is a band that does not do encores.

Between shows, the dressing room is oddly calm and very quiet. As Keith Richards jiggles his eighteen-month-old son Marlon up and down on his knee, bassist Bill Wyman says to no one in particular, “Do you remember carryin’ an amp around Newcastle in a wheelbarrow?” With one more show to do tonight, people sit in small groups talking to one another while smoking Dunhill
International filter cigarettes that cost far too much for most of their fans to ever afford.

Although it does not seem possible, the second show is even better than the first. With a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth and two bottles of whiskey propped up before him on the piano, Nicky Hopkins only moves from the wrists down as he plays killer honky-tonk riffs. Corkscrewing his body in ever-tighter circles as he gets off on the music and his silver-studded earring swings into view for the first time, Keith turns his back on the house to seesaw back and forth into Charlie’s big Gretsch bass drum.

With his jack-o’-lantern face turned to the side and his mouth open, Charlie doubles up and starts drumming against himself like a tightly wound metronome. Trooping off the stage once more after “Street Fighting Man” ends, the Stones head for the dressing room. Outside the hall, a line of long black limousines waits to take them to their hotel.

Wearing a blue nylon windbreaker that makes him look like he just shot eighteen holes on a local golf course, Ian Stewart walks into the dressing room and says, “Curtain call, chappies.”

“They don’t do curtain calls,” their publicity person says.

Chip Monck, who is colloquially known as the “Voice of Woodstock,” or just “VOW,” on the tour and has been calling light cues all night long while dancing beside the piano, sticks his head in the door and says, “No one is leaving.”

“Go out and play some songs on piano, Stu,” Keith says.

“No one,” Chip Monck repeats, “is leaving.”

Slumped in a chair, Mick looks at Keith and says, “What do we do then? We should go quickly.”

“What do we do?” Keith asks.

“Uh,” Mick says, “‘Peggy Sue’?”

“If we’re going,” Keith says. “Someone better tell them.”

Pouring through a narrow door, the Stones walk back onstage into a cosmos of light and noise for their first encore in three years, “Sympathy for the Devil” followed by Chuck Berry’s “Let It Rock.” With the house lights all the way up as Keith chops the rhythm into half and quarter notes, the crowd has now become part of the show and everyone is on their feet and dancing as Mick bumps and grinds at the front of the stage like the second coming of a somewhat spastic James Brown.

Drinking Scotch whiskey from a white paper cup in the dressing room after the encore is over, Bobby Keys shouts out, “Chawlie! Chawlie Watts! What do you mean, stirrin’ up all these people like that?”

“Naw, Bobby,” Charlie says. “It was you. I saw you through the whole thing, just plottin’ to make it happen.”

In every sense back then, Bobby Keys considered himself a full-fledged member of the Rolling Stones. No shrinking violet he, Bobby’s personality was so high-voltage that it could light up an entire auditorium. Unlike Jim Price, who rarely if ever spoke, or Mick Taylor, who on this tour still seemed incredibly shy and unsure of himself except when he was performing onstage, Bobby Keys was always perfectly happy to let fly with whatever came into his mind at any given moment without bothering to censor himself in any way whatsoever.

That the Stones in general and Mick Jagger in particular were willing to put up with Bobby Keys on a nightly basis spoke not just to how much they appreciated his skill as a musician but also
to their very English tolerance and fondness for real characters who were never afraid to be themselves in their presence.

Because there is nowhere else to eat in Newcastle at this hour, a long table covered in white linen has been set for forty people in a ballroom at the Five Bridges Hotel in Gateshead, just across from Newcastle on the River Tyne. Forty clear glass tumblers, forty knives, forty forks, and forty spoons all sit perfectly aligned beside forty gleaming white plates. At two in the morning, the entire scene is a true beggars’ banquet, not to mention a bit of surrealism, Rolling Stones style.

Despite what it says in my notebooks, this almost certainly cannot be right as there were only nineteen people on the tour. There was a road crew of twelve, half of them English and half of them American, but no one ever saw them because once the show was over, they were all busily breaking down the stage so they could load all the gear into a twenty-two-foot bobtail truck, also known as a “five-tonner” in England.

As everyone was sitting down to dinner in the hotel that night, the crew was still back at the hall. As Chip Monck would later say, “My favorite story of that whole tour was Newcastle City Hall with Mr. Brown, who came out after the second show was over with a loaf of bread, a paint pot, and a little brush. He said, ‘Now, I’m terribly sorry to interrupt your load-out but I wondered if you could do me a favor? As this is a council hall, we try to keep it as best we can. Now, you’ve made some penetrations in the wall
up there, so I wonder if you would just take this bread and stick it in the hole and wait for it to dry and perhaps before you leave, you could just paint over it?’ And I said, ‘Yes, Mr. Brown.’”

At the head of the table, a small man with dark hair, piercing eyes, and a beaked nose is working Mick for all he’s worth. Having only just flown into London this morning from New York, Marshall Chess, whose father and uncle founded the legendary Chicago blues label bearing the family name, is the man whom Mick and Keith have chosen to run Rolling Stones Records. Intent on getting final approval from Mick so the new album can be released on time, Marshall is even more wired than usual tonight, which in his case is really saying something.

In a white linen cape and a wide-brimmed hat she wears pushed back on her head, Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias sits silently by Mick’s side. Her face is so beautiful as to be insolent—high cheekbones, a cruel mouth, and features so sharp that Mick must sometimes feel like he is staring into a mirror whenever he looks at her. Whether she has any interest whatsoever in the subject currently under discussion is another question altogether.

“More than twenty minutes on a side and you lose level,” Marshall says. “You know that. It’s how they cut the grooves. So we have to work out the running order.”

Further down the table, Jim Price asks Charlie Watts, “You dig Skinnay Ennis, the cat who blew that solo on ‘We Meet and the Angels Sing’?”

A dyed-in-the-wool jazz fanatic from way back, Charlie says, “Fantastic.”

Shrugging off the cloak of invisibility I donned when I boarded the train to Newcastle, I open my mouth for the first time on the tour and say, “That was Ziggy Elman.”

“He’s from my hometown,” Jim Price says.

“Who?” Charlie asks.

“Skinnay Ennis,” Price says.

“You mean Ziggy Elman, man?” I say.

Shaking his head sadly, Charlie says, “They’re both dead.”

“Henry Busse too,” Price says. “On ‘I Can’t Get Started with You.’”