Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye (9 page)

Or was he referring to the manner in which he had finally decided to end his long-standing relationship with Marianne Faithfull after being told in no uncertain terms by Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary founder of Atlantic Records, that her increasing
dependence on heroin was putting the future of the Rolling Stones in jeopardy?

Unwilling to be so gauche as to try to conduct an actual interview with Mick as we rode together on that bus, I was not about to ask. What I also did not know back then was that the stage was not the only place on which Mick performed. Because Mick was always on, his entire life was a performance and so there was never any knowing what was real and what he was doing purely for the effect it would have on the audience for whom he was performing, which in this case happened to be me.

What I can say for certain is that once Mick had given you his total attention, you found yourself willing to do almost anything to get it back again. At close range, his personality was just as addictive as any of the most powerful drugs known to man.

Getting to his feet as the bus finally comes to a stop, Mick says, “I’m going to have to sit you down sometime so we can have a long rap about Bali.” And then just as quickly as he appeared by my side, Mick hops off the bus and makes his way into the hall through a backstage door.

Located at 126 Renfield Street in central Glasgow, Green’s Playhouse first opened in 1927 and looks as though no one has bothered to clean it since then. Paint peels off all the walls in long curling strips, the air vents are covered with thick black soot, the entire backstage area is lit by bare bulbs, and the dressing rooms are so small that you literally cannot turn around without bumping into someone. When I ask a local stagehand why the
second balcony has been closed tonight, he says, “To keep the rattles doon.”

As a band that has been together for a week opens the show by playing two songs written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Bill Wyman sits backstage passing the time by talking about the days when a show by the Rolling Stones was still an invitation for the disaffected youth of England to demonstrate their general displeasure with any and all forms of authority.

“In a place like Birkenhead,” Bill says, “we’d go out and start ‘I’m gonna tell you how it’s gonna be….’ Three bars in and they’d all come sweepin’ over the stage and we’d be finished for the night and back in the hotel with a thousand quid. Girls leapin’ from a forty-foot balcony and arrows in the paper the next day showin’ where one of them had jumped from.”

Shaking his head in wonder at how different it has all become over the course of the past seven years, Bill says, “I remember only one audience back then that didn’t like us from the start. All the factories here in Glasgow close at the same time during the summer. ‘Scots week,’ they call it. They all go to Blackpool, which is two hundred miles down the coast, and drink and we played there on the last Saturday night and they were evil. The stage was six feet high so all we could see was heads. There were about thirty of them sitting right down front spitting at us. Because of our long hair, I guess, and their birds fancyin’ us.

“Keith was covered in it and finally he said, ‘If you do that one more time…,’ and the guy did it and Keith kicked him in the head and they all went wild and came at us. We ran off the stage right into a police car. Stu came back to the hotel later with a little piece of wood hangin’ off a wire and said, ‘Here’s what’s
left of your piano.’ They destroyed the chandeliers, tore up all the seats, and smashed the amplifiers. Charlie’s cymbals were just twisted pieces of metal.

“When we played Glasgow back then, they barred all the shop windows and had us come into the hall through a police corridor lined with Alsatian dogs. Not that it mattered. The fans still smashed up a train, crushed and burned all the chairs in the hall, and caused $30,000 worth of damage. You’ll never see that again, I don’t think.”

Not surprisingly, considering the context, the conversation in the dressing room then turned to the cataclysmic day when the Rolling Stones had performed at Altamont. Going off on a bit of a petulant rant as what he called “some lovely cocaine Keith left behind” went around the dressing room, Mick began complaining about writers like Ralph Gleason, the august cofounder of
Rolling Stone
magazine, and Al Aronowitz of the
New York Post
by saying, “Ralph Gleason wasn’t even there, man. He’s made more money than anyone from Altamont. He should at least say he wasn’t there. Al Aronowitz? He wasn’t there either, was he?”

While at this late date there would seem to be no point whatsoever in rehashing the long and complicated sequence of events that led up to the free concert Bill Graham would later call “the Pearl Harbor of rock,” no one who was then not alive can truly appreciate the media shit-storm that was loosed upon the Rolling Stones in America after the Hells Angels hired to act as security guards stabbed a gun-wielding young black man named Meredith Hunter to death right in front of the stage. Insofar as
the straight press was concerned, Altamont marked the end of the Aquarian dream that had begun just six months earlier at Woodstock.

Aside from David Crosby saying that real dues would have had to be paid if a musician had been killed at Altamont, by far the most astonishing comment about what had happened that day also came from Bill Graham. Unable to contain his fury, he said of Mick Jagger, “He’s now in his home country somewhere—what did he leave behind throughout the country? Every gig, he was late. Every fucking gig, he made the promoter and the people bleed. What right does this god have to descend on this country this way? But you know what the greatest tragedy is to me? That cunt is a great entertainer.”

What no one in America back then understood was that based on their history as narrated by Bill Wyman in the dressing room in Glasgow, the Stones had long since become accustomed to major riots breaking out at their shows as all the kids outside the hall began flinging bricks, stones, bottles, and anything else they could get their hands on at cops on horseback. As far as the band was concerned, none of this had much to do with them at all. Because the Rolling Stones were only trying to play their music when all hell broke loose and utter chaos ensued, they never took any responsibility for what happened after they stepped onstage.

What few people also seem to have noticed at the time was that just eight days after Altamont, the Stones performed at the Saville Theatre in the West End of London and then did two more shows a week later at the Lyceum on the Strand. The point being that once the Rolling Stones were back in England, everything
that had happened at Altamont was already behind them because they were now in fact safe at home once more.

Yet another salient point that was completely lost in the shuffle was that the Stones themselves had no real idea just how violent the Hells Angels in America truly were. When the band had employed the British version of the motorcycle gang to police their free concert in Hyde Park in July 1969 at which Mick memorialized the recently departed Brian Jones by reading a passage from Shelley in his honor, many of the British Hells Angels actually arrived by bus, thereby prompting members of the pop press to dub them “Hell’s Herberts,” the name “Herbert” being an English slang term for a hapless loser.

That the hippie dream had clearly ended long before the Rolling Stones ever took the stage at Altamont would have been apparent even back then to anyone who had lived in the Haight-Ashbury before LSD was made illegal in California in 1966. However, it was no accident that the Rolling Stones brought this point home to both the mainstream and counterculture media in America. For as Kris Kristofferson then sang, it was always easier to blame it on the Stones.

Released just three months before the English tour began,
Gimme Shelter,
the astonishing documentary film about Altamont by Albert and David Maysles, had served not only to start the conversation all over again but also to make many of those who saw it wonder if there was in fact any hope left for a generation that had once defined itself in terms of peace, love, and flowers. And while both Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts had allowed themselves to be filmed in the documentary viewing what had
happened at Altamont, none of it seemed to have affected the Rolling Stones themselves in any substantive way.

Along with so much else the Stones had seen and done, Altamont was now firmly in their past. And so it should come as no surprise that no one on the tour ever talked about it again.

Getting to their feet, the band walks out the dressing room door. As Mick makes his way through the hot, seedy, cramped basement corridor toward the stage in Green’s Playhouse in Glasgow, he actually brushes shoulders with Rab Munro, the twenty-three-year-old lead singer of the band that just opened the show. Without breaking stride or exchanging a single word, they both continue heading in the completely opposite directions they will follow for the rest of their lives.

As soon as the Stones hit the stage, the 3,100 people who have packed this place to the rafters tonight go wild. As though they have been caught in some kind of weird time warp, all the brassy blond middle-aged women in pants suits who are sitting right down front leap from their seats and begin screaming like teenage girls while clutching their heads in ecstasy whenever Mick shows them his ass. Taking full advantage of the situation, Mick says, “I guess you want me to get on my knees and beg. I bet you want me to crawl. I bet you want me to howl.”

And because yes indeed this is just what they want him to do, Mick promptly begins crawling across the front of the stage, driving them all even crazier than before. As Charlie pounds away at his bass drum and Keith rips one driving riff after another from
his guitar, the women scream and shout and moan and cry in what may well be the first mass public female orgasm in Scottish history.

Backstage between shows, Bobby Keys puts on quite a performance of his own. Fixating on a girl who does some sort of clerical work for the theater, he decides to hit on her by saying, “Do you like rock ’n’ roll? Do you watch TV? Do you like
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.?
Well, that’s Illya Kuryakin right over there. Turn around, Charlie, he’s a little shy. Goddammit, Charlie, turn around!”

After doing so, Charlie disappears just as quickly as he can into the dressing room. Turning back to the girl, Bobby Keys says, “What’s your name, love?”

“Frances,” she says.

“Frances,” Bobby says, “do you like to get nekkid? Ah do. All nekkid and hot and sweaty? Let’s you and me get all nekkid and jump into the pool. Have you ever made love with a saxophone player, Frances? Would you like to live in the country? Ah’ll give up this life for you, Frances, ah swear. Just come home with me tonight.”