Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye (10 page)

As though keeping his band in check on the road is also part of his job, Mick puts an end to the conversation before the terrified girl runs screaming down the hall by saying, “Bobby? Come on now, Bobby. Time for us to go back onstage, eh?”

After doing a second show every bit as good as the first, the Stones and all those traveling with them begin settling into their seats on the midnight flight from Glasgow to London. Sitting next to Bobby Keys all the way at the back of the plane, Marshall Chess keeps saying, “Boogie, Bobby, boogie,” as the two of them talk about old-time rock ’n’ roll sax rides.

Across the aisle from them, Anita Pallenberg picks up on the phrase and begins crooning, “Boo-gey, boo-gey.” Because of her accent, the word sounds like an errant German nickname for Humphrey Bogart.

By her side, Boogie, a small brown-and-white King Charles Spaniel puppy, is about to fall asleep in Keith Richards’s arms. With the doors of the plane about to close, contentment positively flows from seat to seat as conversations buzz and hum. The seatbelt sign is on and the engines are about to rev when a blue-jacketed airline official suddenly comes through the door.

Walking all the way back to where Keith and his dog recline, the official says, “That dog flies by prior arrangement only, sir. You’ll have to get off the plane.”

“What?” Keith says.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the official tells him. “But I warned you in the airport. I don’t know how you managed to slip by me onto this plane but you’ll have to get off now.”

“Look,” Keith says, “I’ve flown BEA, TWA, Pan Am … to San Francisco, to places you and this airline have never been….”

“You have to supply a box, sir,” the official tells him.

“I happen to know that section of the Geneva Convention very well,” Keith tells him. “You have to supply the box.”

Can it be that Keith Richards has actually committed this particular section of the Geneva Convention to memory? Even if he has, that is not the point. Simply, no one tells Keith Richards what to do. As this poor beleaguered airline official is about to learn, no one ever has and no one ever will.

Taking the conversation to a whole other level, Keith says, “This is ridiculous. It’s an emergency. My wife and child are here
and we have to get home so we can take our child to a doctor tomorrow.”

Although Keith and Anita are in fact not married and Marlon himself seems to be the very picture of good health at the moment, the real truth is always what Keith Richards needs it to be at any given moment in time. Not realizing just how far in over his head he has gotten himself here, the official says, “I’m sorry, sir.”

“We just want to get home,” Keith says. “Is it that important? Just let us leave.”

Firmly standing his ground, the official says, “The rules, sir.”

“I know the rules,” Keith tells him. “Get this plane going. We’re not moving.”

Spinning on his heel, the official walks back down the aisle and leaves the plane only to return with two large Scottish policemen in blue uniforms in tow. “What’s the law doin’ here?” Mick calls out loudly. “Come to arrest us all, have you? Oy! You, you, oy!”

Naked to the waist save for the blue nylon windbreaker Ian Stewart gave him after he threw his sweat-soaked T-shirt into the house at the end of the second show, Mick Jagger is lying flat on his backbone in a seat on the aisle. Turning his head the other way, the big Scottish cop now towering over Mick does his best to ignore him.

“Oy,
oy!
” Mick says again. And then, just like the saucy English schoolboy he so often seems to be, Mick reaches out to jangle the cop’s sleeve with his hand.

Leaning over Mick, the cop says, “Now, now, chummy, no one’s done nothin’ yet. Why should we arrest anyone?”

“He’s come to arrest the dog,” Keith says.

“What are you doing here?” Mick demands. “A little dog like that. A puppy. You should be ashamed.” As his face collapses in a look of utter dismay, Mick wails, “Who called the law? Arrest us.”

“Chummy,” the cop says.

“Chummy?” Mick demands.

“Sir, look,” the cop says.

Quickly shifting gears, Mick says, “Don’t curse me. I saw you say ‘fuck.’ Don’t go cursing me.”

Beautiful, Mick. All the cops have to do now is search the luggage and find the little brown medicine jar of cocaine with a pound note wrapped around it for convenient use that was going around the dressing room tonight and everyone will immediately be escorted to a Glasgow jail.

Taking command of the situation just as he did when Bobby Keys was out of control backstage between shows, Mick says, “Anita, go find the captain.”

Beautiful, Mick. What better way to solve this problem than by sending Mata Hari Anita, who tonight is a vision in crocheted stockings, highly-polished black leather boots, and a pair of hot pants that leave nothing to the imagination, into the cockpit to seduce the captain of this plane as it stands on a runway in Glasgow?

“Gooo,” Mick suddenly says. Across the aisle, Marlon laughs happily as he repeats the word right back at Mick. Surrounded on all sides by little kids, slinky ladies, and crazy rock stars, the bewildered cops realize they are outflanked on every level.

Trying to come up with a solution that will make everyone happy, Marshall Chess says, “We’ll put the dog in Charlie Watts’s orange bag. Is that okay?”

“Yes,” says one of the cops.

“No,” says the airline official.

“You brought him on the plane and now the two of you can’t agree,” Keith shouts.

“How about mah rattlesnake?” Bobby Keys yells. “Can ah keep him up here?”

“How about my vulture?” Jim Price asks.

With words whizzing back and forth across the aisle like bricks in a street fight, Keith says, “Ya Scots git. Get off the plane!”

“Arrest us,” Mick demands again.

With the flight now already fifteen minutes late, a hurried conference is convened at the front of the plane so the stewardesses, the pilots, the cops, and the airline official who started all this in the first place can discuss the situation among themselves.

“We’ll link arms,” someone calls out.

“Arrest us,” Mick demands yet again.

Walking up the aisle with the only piece of luggage Charlie Watts brought with him tonight, Marshall Chess grants one of the cops a battlefield promotion and says, “Look, Lieutenant, how’s this bag here?”

Finally conceding, the airline official says, “If you put the dog in the orange bag, he can ride in the hold.”

“What’s your name?” Keith demands.

“Never you mind,” the official says. “It’s not important.”

“Ah, but it is,” Keith tells him. “If this dog dies, I’ll see that it does become important. If he freezes to death in the hold….”

Trundling Boogie off the plane in Charlie’s orange bag, the airline official puts him in the hold and at long last the plane finally takes off. When it screeches to a halt an hour and a half later on the runway in London, there is a moment of sheer terror as yet
another bottle containing half an ounce of cocaine with a current street value of $500 in England somehow hits the floor before being quickly grabbed and put safely away again for later use.

As for Boogie, he doesn’t freeze to death at all but instead comes spilling and sliding across the polished airport floor with his tail wagging happily as Keith gathers him into his arms. Climbing into a brace of waiting chauffeur-driven Bentleys and long black Dorchester limousines, everyone speeds home and the incident is quickly forgotten by one and all. Call it just another minor laugh-filled moment on tour with the Rolling Stones.

CHAPTER FIVE

BRISTOL, MARCH 9, 1971

THE KIDS IN BRISTOL MAY BE SHARP
as a pistol but the seven ushers standing in front of the stage are thick, bearded wrestlers in silk suits who stop anyone from dancing if they even dare to get out of their seats. During “Street Fighting Man,” Mick places a small mound of flowers atop each of the ushers’ heads like an offering. As if by magic, all the kids start dancing and the Stones then go out to do an encore. Going even further during the second show of the night, Mick kicks one of the ushers in the shoulder as he drags a pretty young girl off the stage.

Aside from Keith looking for Ian Stewart in the dressing room before the first show because “he has some very important pills I can’t go onstage without” and then asking, “Where are joints? I can’t find any in my bags,” nothing much happens in Bristol. And so for the Stones and all who travel with them, it becomes just another stop along the road.

What I do find of great interest now was that earlier in the day both Mick and Charlie were making their way down the platform in London’s Paddington Station when the conductor announced that the train to Bristol was about to leave. Running for it, Charlie slipped through the doors of the nearest car just in time. Because Mick could not be bothered to do the same, the train pulled out two steps ahead of him and he had to catch a later one to make it to the gig in time.

Aside from demonstrating the fundamental differences in their personalities, this was Mick acting like a rock star on the road as opposed to the wealthy and successful businessman he would have no doubt become if he had seen fit to complete his studies at the London School of Economics rather than pursue a career singing with a rock ’n’ roll band.

As Tony Smith, who was promoting this tour with his father John, would later say, “As always, Mick was the one who was basically the manager. And I do remember that when the tickets went on sale before the tour started, I was sitting at home on a Saturday afternoon when the phone went and it was Mick saying, ‘I just heard that in Bristol people are being allowed to buy more than two tickets each.’ We had limited the amount of tickets you could buy because they were so much in demand and Mick was on the case and checking all the box offices to make sure it was being dealt with properly and here he was on the phone with me. So he was very much on the ball.”

And there you have it in a nutshell. The English schoolboy persona that always served Mick so well when he pulled it out of his grab bag of personalities on this tour was just one of the many roles he was so adept at playing. Unlike Keith, Mick Jagger was
a shape-shifter of major proportions. As Keith would later say of Mick, it was like dealing “with a nice bunch of guys.”

And now a word about Charlie Watts. Unfailingly polite and always hysterically funny in his own unique deadpan manner, it had become apparent even to me by this point in the tour that in actual fact Charlie was the one around whom all the other Stones revolved. Without him, they would still have been the Rolling Stones but the fun factor would have most certainly been diminished a thousandfold.

Unlike Mick and Keith and the late Brian Jones, Charlie had never taken acid and so his soul had not been psychedelicized. While he might have a quick smoke before walking out onstage or drop the occasional upper to keep himself going on the road, Charlie was still the same person he had always been. As hip as they came and sharp as a razor, Charlie Watts was a living, breathing throwback to a time when jazz musicians were content to be just that and nothing more because the concept of rock stardom had yet to be introduced to the world.

Although Charlie was the steady throbbing heart of the band onstage, the Stones themselves did not follow him when they played. Because Charlie followed Keith and was always a bit behind while Bill Wyman tended to be in front, thereby causing the overall rhythm to wobble at times, it was not unusual to see Keith charge over to the drum kit like a madman in the middle of a song while screaming at Charlie to pick up the beat. If this bothered him in any way whatsoever, he never let it show.

Aside from his musicianship, it was also Charlie’s endless ability to put up with all the madness that came with being a Rolling Stone that enabled him to remain at the center of their
very small and completely incestuous world. If you asked Charlie a question back then, he would always give you a straight answer. Although he looked like Buster Keaton and still dressed like the graphic designer he had become after attending Harrow Art School, there was something so artless and charming about Charlie’s personality that everyone on the tour always wanted to be around him.

Far more than any of the other Stones, Charlie was grounded. And so if anyone had told me he would go through some serious personal changes later in his life and then actually punch Mick Jagger in the face after becoming outraged by what Mick said to him over the phone at five in the morning in a hotel in Amsterdam in 1983, I would have called that person a liar. What I can say for certain even now is that back then Charlie was not just a sweetheart of major proportions but also most definitely everyone’s darling.