Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye (12 page)

Unable to help myself after yet another particularly outrageous comment, I said, “Keith, you are so fucking politically incorrect.” Laughing out loud, Keith replied, “Yes, and it’s all quotable, man!” True that, both then and now.

Before the first show begins, a writer and a photographer from some German magazine wander into the dressing room. Clad in shiny black leather, they both look as though Erich von Stroheim has chosen them from central casting to play these parts. When someone asks them what they are doing here, the writer says he is looking for “Mick Jagga, ja?” Led off to the far corner where Mick sits, the writer starts firing questions at him as the photographer snaps madly away.

Getting ever weirder, the night wears on. At some point, someone asks me to take Gram Parsons upstairs so he can watch the show. Gram is so loaded tonight that he can barely see. His eyes are slits in his face, he is slurring his words, and his skin is so deathly pale that I am afraid to ask how he is feeling. That there is no way he will ever find the stage on his own is obvious.

Eager to be of service, I lead Gram out into the still-freezing corridor. Pushing open the door I think will lead us into the cavernous hall where 2,000 sweaty kids are smoking as much hash as they can to prepare themselves for the Stones, we instead find
ourselves standing before a steep flight of stairs. Since the only way to go is up, I lead Gram to a landing only to discover that the door is locked.

Up two more flights of stairs we go, only to encounter yet another locked door. With no other choice, we keep on climbing. Feeling like a kid trapped changing classes in a high school of the perpetually damned, I look over my shoulder to see how Gram is doing. With his breath so labored that he cannot speak and his face even more deathly pale than it was before, Gram Parsons is now seriously losing it in every possible way.

Knowing this is not cool at all and I am failing miserably at taking care of Gram in the manner to which he has long since become accustomed, I start climbing the stairs faster than before. After what seems like an eternity even to me, I finally find a door that has not been locked. When Gram joins me, I shove open the door and we walk through it together only to find ourselves standing on the completely deserted balcony of a huge movie theater.

Right in front of us on a screen that looks to be at least twenty feet high and twice as wide, the extremely awful movie
Myra Breckinridge
is being shown in very lurid living color. As Raquel Welch, Mae West, and John Houston cavort before us like overblown figures from a fever dream by Hieronymus Bosch, Gram and I look at one another in horror. Both of us know we have entered another dimension. Gram Parsons and I are now in the twilight zone.

Getting out of there just as fast as we can, Gram and I run back down the stairs like the hellhounds are on our trail. Making our way back to the dressing room, we head to the other end of the corridor, go up some stairs, and walk through an open door into
what looks like a big barn of a discotheque. Because the wooden floor beneath us is sprung, it actually moves up and down when we step on it, thereby making everything seem even more surreal.

After I finally deposit Gram Parsons by the side of the stage, I start apologizing for having led him on a nightmare journey I am fervently hoping he is much too stoned to remember for long. While I would like to say I am doing this out of concern for him, the truth is that I am far more worried about how all this might affect my standing with the Stones. When I am done telling Gram how truly sorry I am, he just looks at me. Opening his mouth to speak for the first time since we left the dressing room, he says, “Wow, man.
Wow.
” And then, just like the ghost he will soon become, Gram Parsons turns his back and vanishes into the crowd.

Although it is still freezing cold in the downstairs corridor outside the dressing room, it is so hot inside the Big Apple itself that when the Stones finally take the stage for the first show of the night no one can stay in tune for long. No doubt to express their enthusiasm for what they are hearing, kids in the audience begin heaving the pillows on which they have been sitting toward the stage.

Spinning end over end in beams of red, green, and yellow light, the pillows come thudding down on the gear. When one of them knocks over the long brown tapered bottle of German white wine Bill Wyman always keep on top of his amp during the show, the Stones just go right on playing.

Having spent much of my free time on the tour writing lovesick poems about how lonely I was on the road, I ended up spending
the night in Brighton with a lovely English girl named Julia who wore high lace-up boots and had an infectious smile. As I would later learn, she was the daughter of a full colonel in a British cavalry regiment. That he would not have hesitated to shoot me dead on sight from horseback for what she and I did together that night, I had no doubt. And although this turned out to be not just a one-night stand but the beginning of a brief but somewhat meaningful relationship that I still look back on fondly, I cannot now remember her last name for the life of me.

Riding back to London on the train the next day all by myself, I was high as a kite on the power that came from touring with the Stones. Although there was no black limo waiting outside Victoria Station to take me home, I realized that being on tour with the Rolling Stones was in fact the ultimate adolescent fantasy.

Getting to stay up just as late as you liked each night, you could order whatever you liked in any restaurant without ever having to pay for it and there was no one around to tell you what to do. The rush that came from being on the road with the band was so addictive that those who had already become far more accustomed to this lifestyle than me were always perfectly willing to do whatever was required in order to remain within the inner circle. No doubt about it. After just six days on the road with the Stones, I was hooked.

CHAPTER SEVEN

LIVERPOOL, MARCH 12, 1971

IN LIVERPOOL’S LIME STREET STATION,
Mick steps off the train from Euston in London looking somewhat like an altar boy with his hair cut short. Although the storied Empire Theatre, where local luminaries like the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Searchers, and a host of others have all performed, is just half a block away and Mick could easily walk there in no time, it is still much too early for him to show up at the hall. With Bianca by his side, Mick slides instead into the backseat of a long black limo that takes them to the old, dark, cavernous hotel where they spend the rest of the afternoon.

While Mick may in fact have nasty habits and take tea at three, the hotel is so boring that a few hours later he finds himself escorting Bianca into the tearoom off the lobby at the far more proper time of four o’clock. Sitting down at a table in the corner, they both watch the ancient waitress who looks like she has been working here forever shuffle slowly toward them while pushing a trolley stacked high with cups and saucers, pots of tea, and toast and jam.

Catching sight of Mick for the first time as she begins sliding a cup and saucer onto his table, the waitress suddenly straightens up and exclaims, “
You!
The last time you were here, you didn’t pay the bill!”

Laughing out loud, Mick explains to Bianca that when the Stones played in Liverpool in 1966, a group of hysterical teenage female fans broke into the tearoom while he was there. Forced to flee for his life, Mick did in fact leave the bill behind. Promising the waitress he will not be doing this again today, Mick promptly charms her into serving him and Bianca tea.

Several floors above them in Marshall Chess’s suite, things are not nearly so calm and civilized and for a very good reason. At the moment, no one knows where Keith Richards happens to be. Whatever rough jungle telegraph has kept Marshall and Jo Bergman apprised of Keith’s whereabouts as he journeyed to every previous gig to which he was also late seems to have finally collapsed under its own weight today. With just two hours to go before the first show starts, Keith is, for want of a better term, missing in action.

Although Ian Stewart has already told me about the night the Stones went onstage in Aylesbury without Brian Jones after he had driven the wrong way in the fog and that the band did four shows without him during their 1964 American tour, this is a kettle of completely different fish. As a band, the Rolling Stones cannot even walk out onstage without Keith. In other words—no Keith, no show.

And so it is that as the afternoon wends on and the time to leave for the hall draws near, the general mood among those gathered in Marshall’s suite gets just as dark as the oncoming night. Having spent a fair amount of his adult life waiting for Mick or
Keith to show up, Charlie Watts seems completely unconcerned about it all as he sits in an overstuffed chair in the living room avidly watching the latest episode of
Dr. Who.

By this time, the popular BBC science fiction series has been on the air for so long in England that when I ask Charlie if he can help me understand it, he just throws his hands up in the air and says, “No, I can’t. If you haven’t seen the show since the start, it’s impossible.” Without another word, he then leans forward and directs all his attention to the screen.

Having sat as a teenager with my parents in my living room in Brooklyn each Sunday night watching one group after another from Liverpool perform on
The Ed Sullivan Show
during the British Invasion in 1964, you might think that I would have been eager to leave the hotel to get my own look at this tough-as-nails, working-class city on the River Mersey from which all that great music had come.

Stuck in limbo in a hotel that could have easily passed for the setting of a rock ’n’ roll version of No Exit, the thought never even entered my mind. Being on the road with the Stones was so all-consuming that the central drama of the day—would Keith Richards make it to the gig?—was all that really mattered to me.