Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye (7 page)

“Gram,” Charlie says. “Fantastic.”

Getting to her feet in the far corner of the room, a striking-looking young woman with a sharp-boned face, long red hair, glittering eyes, and pale, lightly freckled skin begins making her way toward the bar. Having given birth to Mick Taylor’s daughter Chloe just two months ago, she seems far more direct and outgoing than the newest member of the Rolling Stones as well as very much at home in the company of rock stars.

Although I knew none of this at the time, Rose Millar (whom everyone always called Rose Taylor even though she and Mick Taylor were not yet married) was also on her first tour with the Rolling Stones. Described by her younger brother Robin, who in time would himself become a well-known record producer, as having “always been wild from the age of fifteen” as well as “car-stoppingly gorgeous,” Rose had been expelled from the exclusive St. Paul’s Girls’ School in London. She had then gone to work in the editorial department of an advertising magazine while hanging out with rock stars like Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, Georgie Fame, Long John Baldry, and Rod Stewart.

Giving up her job at Mick Taylor’s request after they had begun living together, Rose had met the Stones for the first time while they were recording
Sticky Fingers.
As she would later say, “I began going to the sessions at Olympic Studios and I couldn’t believe how rude they all were. To each other, really. I was used
to bands who all got on well with one another but these people didn’t have the same camaraderie and would turn up whenever they felt like it. Mick Taylor seemed to be there all the time as did Charlie and Bill but they were all absolutely always waiting for Mick or Keith.”

While being out on the road with the Stones seemed, as Rose would later say, “a bit more exciting and better than the slog of the studio, the tour wasn’t really fun because even at that point I think Mick Taylor realized he had made a mistake by joining them. Even then. Because he could have done other things. He could have gone and joined Paul Butterfield. He could have done music he was more interested in than rock ’n’ roll. He could have played the blues. And jazz. He was also taking classical guitar lessons. His music interests were very wide and if he had done something that he had been the boss of, it would have been better for him than taking this job which of course everyone said, ‘Oh, you have to do this. It’s so wonderful.’

“In all the time he did it, he never ever thought it was wonderful. Ever. If he played well, it was okay except that Keith would turn his amp down. Or he would only have the time of his solo to play well and that was that. If he played badly, they applauded anyway so he felt there was no discernment on the part of the audience. He didn’t feel he was making any contribution that was really important. He was so sensitive. And he was never satisfied with what he did with them, really.”

Since Mick Taylor rarely said anything at all on this tour and seemed to be playing at the height of his powers on a nightly basis, no one had any idea how he was really feeling. Never shy about expressing herself, the same could not be said about Rose.

Catching sight of Keith as she nears the bar, Rose says, “Keith, I dreamed about you last night. You know that thing with the glass top you keep Marlon’s toys in? You were standing with it on a sandy beach that was sinking and you said, ‘Someone help me, or get me a drink.’”

As only he can, Keith says, “Get me a drink probably.”

Carefully cutting slices from an apple which he then inserts one by one into a tall glass of Pimm’s No. 1, a gin-based herbal liqueur no one else would ever think of drinking at this hour of the night, Keith adds, “I’ll have to think about that one for a while.” Taking his drink with him, he then quietly exits the room.

What no one knew back then was that shortly before the tour began both Keith and Gram Parsons had undergone a disastrous attempt at cleaning up by undergoing the apomorphine cure, recommended by
Naked Lunch
author William Burroughs as the only way to stop using heroin. Lying side by side in a four-poster bed in Keith’s house on Cheyne Walk, they had spent seventy-two hellish hours twitching from the treatment while throwing up into a bucket—only to then promptly begin using again once the treatment was done.

Although Keith had not yet really interacted with anyone on the tour except for his companion, the blond and beauteous Anita Pallenberg, their young son Marlon, Gram Parsons, and his fellow musicians while they were onstage together, this too would change in time.

CHAPTER THREE

COVENTRY, MARCH 6, 1971

SATURDAY NIGHT IN COVENTRY,
the small and picturesque city in the West Midlands where the Luftwaffe bombed St. Michael’s Cathedral to ruins during World War II. Wearing a black-and-white-checked jacket, Mick Jagger sits quietly at a table in a restaurant between shows with his hands folded before him, drinking red wine. As some girl whom no one seems to know is hustled away through the front door, she cries out, “Forget my name, you bastard, you and all your Rolling Stones.”

Taking a sip of wine, Mick says, “Boring, isn’t it?”

Beside him, Bianca is talking about going gambling somewhere later this evening. Long after everyone else went to bed last night in Manchester, Mick, Marshall, and Bianca found themselves in a casino where they only let them lose and Mick dropped about £300, a sum Keith will later laughingly estimate as about half his total earnings from this tour.

“You even play gin rummy in a foreign language,” Marshall tells Bianca. Since he already owes her about $8,000 in rummy
debts, Marshall should know. “But that dealer in Manchester, he was terrible.”

“Dealing out of a shoe, probably had three decks in there,” Ian Stewart says. “Have to report him to the gaming commission, won’t I?”

“Ah,” Marshall says, “but if we had won, we’d all be saying how good he was, wouldn’t we, Mick?”

After thinking about it for a moment, Mick says, “I don’t care.”

Around the phrase, a long moment of silence grows and grows. In many ways, it seems a lot like what happens each night when the Stones play “Wild Horses.” The song is so powerful that it stops the audience dead in their tracks and for a long moment everyone just sits there thinking about it before they begin to applaud. Slowly, it dawns on everyone at the table that in terms of his gambling losses as well as so much else that is now going on around him on this tour, Mick simply does not care.

Picking up on this, Marshall says, “Oh, that was last night, huh?”

Leaning forward, Bianca asks Mick, “Tu vas changer le choix?”

If ever there was a time for Mick Jagger to consider altering the set the Stones have been doing onstage each night, this would be it. Performing before a young and strangely quiet audience during the first show, Mick did all he could to get the crowd on their feet but no matter how hard he tried, it did him no good at all.

The response was so muted that at the end of “Street Fighting Man” Mick did not even bother to throw the basket of flowers into the house. To ensure that everyone would get out of their seats at least once before leaving the hall, Chip Monck then played
“God Save the Queen,” which did serve to keep the crowd on their feet until it was over.

With his mind already on something else, Mick looks at Bianca and says, “Choix de quoi?”

“De quoi, de quoi,” she answers with a laugh.

Having had perhaps one drink too many tonight, one of the band’s ladies wobbles a bit as she passes by the table. “Drunken bitch,” Mick says. “She won’t lose weight that way, will she?” Sighing just as he did before, he says, “Nothing to do but bitch, is there?”

Getting to his feet, Ian Stewart looks at Mick and says, “C’mon then. Intermission’s over.”

Showing some real emotion for the first time all night long, Mick says, “No. Don’t wanna. Oh fucking why? They sold all the tickets here in three hours and then they just sat there.”

To make him feel better, Stu says, “This was the most depressing part of the tour last time as well.”

Walking over to the table, Charlie does a little soft-shoe routine that makes Mick smile and says, “Let’s go out there and tread the boards then, Mick.”

“Yeah,” Mick says. “A tap dance. Oh, it’s all right. But why do they just have to sit there? Let’s go then. We’ll do the same show. But if it’s the same audience, we’ll knock out a number and go home early, eh?”

In the dressing room as the Stones get ready to go back out onstage, the sound of Buddy Holly singing “Ready Teddy” comes spooling out of Bobby Keys’s ever-present cassette recorder. As the next song starts Bobby says, “Mah golden saxophone is comin’ up now.” Born in Slaton, Texas, on the same day as Keith Richards,
Bobby is twenty-eight years old but still sometimes looks like the fresh-faced kid who first went out on the road with Buddy Knox and the Rhythm Orchids in 1961.

A spinner of tall tales who has definitely become the life of the party where the Stones are concerned, Bobby starts talking about how he played and recorded with Buddy Holly at K-Triple L radio in Lubbock and then appeared on the first Alan Freed show at the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre, which featured Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Clyde McPhatter, and the Everly Brothers backed up by Sam “The Man” Taylor’s big band.

After carefully explaining to me how he learned to steam all the wrinkles out of his stage suit by hanging it in a hotel bathroom with a hot shower going full blast so he could then press his outfit to perfection beneath the mattress of his bed, Bobby says, “Ah been on the road sixteen goddamn years. That’s why I am the way I am.”