Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye (14 page)

Now that we have some sense of who Anita was back then, the reasonable question to ask would be why she and Bianca literally could not stand the sight of one another. From all accounts, the
antipathy between them had begun on the 1970 European tour when Anita borrowed some clothes from Bianca only to return them so stained and soiled with God only knows what kind of substances that Bianca refused to ever wear them again.

What was really going on between these two incredibly powerful women back then was a battle for control. Far more than Bianca, who only really cared about Mick, Anita had been the queen bee of the Rolling Stones for so long that she could not bear the thought of anyone taking her throne away. In Astrid Lundstrom’s words, “Anita hated Bianca because she took some power away from her. That was the bottom line. And also because, on the surface, Bianca looked like she had it together. Of course, Bianca had enormous influence over Mick as well and that was also something Anita did not like.”

Although Beatles’ biographer Philip Norman would later call Bianca “the Yoko Ono of the Rolling Stones,” the truth is that what really drove Mick Jagger and Keith Richards apart was Keith’s increasingly heavy drug use. And while Anita’s utter distaste for Bianca certainly did not make things easier for anyone, even Anita knew there was really nothing she could do about Bianca but complain.

For Mick and Keith, the music had always come before the women. And so, despite the way Anita and Bianca felt about one another, the Rolling Stones just went right on making music together on this tour as they had always done before.

CHAPTER EIGHT

LEEDS, MARCH 13, 1971

BEFORE THE FIRST OF TONIGHT’S TWO SHOWS
in the refectory of the Student Union Building at the University of Leeds, the Rolling Stones and all those traveling with them sit killing time like students with nothing better to do in the cafeteria. As Mick Taylor tunes up in front of a giant food mixer, Charlie Watts, looking very collegiate in a green-and-white Leeds University sweatshirt, settles down beside Bill Wyman in one of the leatherette booths scattered across an outsized room framed on three sides by huge floor-to-ceiling windows.

Despite how strange the whole scene already seems, things definitely get weirder when Marshall Chess calls everyone’s attention to the fact that a horde of desperate fans have assembled right outside the windows. In order to get the Stones to notice them, some of the fans begin slamming their hands against the glass.

Bang-bang-bang
and sure enough, one of the windows splinters right down the middle as though it was just struck by a lightning bolt. And while it might seem like a good idea to move those fans back before someone gets seriously hurt, this is still England
after all. When a member of the university security staff finally walks into the cafeteria, his solution to the problem is to turn down all the overhead lights so no one can see inside any longer.

As Bianca sits in a booth with her breasts gathered together like a pair of ripe apples beneath a see-through blouse, a bare-chested Mick Jagger begins prancing around with a gold-spangled bolero cape over his shoulders. Wearing far more rouge and lipstick than he has sported before any other show on the tour, Mick looks like the caricature of a rock star he played in
Performance.

Completely oblivious to everything going on around him, Keith stands all by himself in the middle of the room holding his guitar like it is the only thing anchoring him to the earth. As yet another cloud of smoke from the cigarette he keeps firmly clenched between his front teeth drifts slowly upward, it forms a perfect halo around his head.

With everyone already looking forward to the shows at the Roundhouse in London tomorrow night that will bring the tour to a close, Leeds might be nothing more than just another very strange stop on the road were it not for the fact that some thirteen months ago The Who came here to record what critics on both sides of the Atlantic have already called the greatest live album ever made.

Having always pursued their career with one eye carefully cocked on what every other great band was doing, the Rolling Stones have decided to follow in The Who’s footsteps by recording their own live album tonight in Leeds. It is for this reason that the fairly brand-spanking-new, one-of-a-kind mobile recording truck that Ian Stewart assembled with advice from his old friend and former flatmate Glyn Johns is now parked right outside the hall.

While the initial intent behind the project was to enable the Stones to record whenever and wherever they liked without having to pay exorbitant studio fees for sessions at which Mick or Keith did not even appear or the band accomplished almost nothing, what Marshall Chess calls “the rock truck” has now become part of the Stones’ new overall business plan.

Packed to the rafters with £100,000 ($240,000) worth of sixteen-track recording equipment and painted a sickening shade of khaki green for what Marshall calls “camouflage,” the truck has already been used to record several tracks for
Sticky Fingers
at Stargroves, Mick Jagger’s palatial estate in the English countryside.

To continue recouping their sizable investment in the truck, Marshall says the Stones will be leasing it out to other bands for £1,500 ($3,600) a week. And since Mick will no longer be living there once the Stones decamp to France, Stargroves is being outfitted as a state-of-the-art, live-in recording studio with round-the-clock facilities that can be rented for £2,500 ($6,000) a week.

Now that the Stones are fully in charge of their own financial affairs for the first time, it only makes eminent sense for them to try to get the maximum return from this tour by recording a live album that might do as well as
Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!
After being released seven months ago, the album sold a million copies in America and hit the number-one spot on the charts in the United Kingdom.

The man who recorded, produced, and mixed that album will be sitting behind the board in the rock truck tonight. A longtime member in good standing of the band’s extended family, Glyn Johns began his career with the Rolling Stones by recording their first demo tracks at IBC Studios in London in 1963. More recently,
he also engineered some of the sessions that the Stones did at Olympic Studios for
Sticky Fingers.

A tall, lean man with dark hair and sharp cheekbones who is making a definite fashion statement tonight in black leather pants and a red wet leather jacket with a white fur collar, Glyn slowly begins working his way across the cafeteria in search of something to drink before the first show begins. Much like his great friend Ian Stewart, Glyn is one of the few people around the Rolling Stones who never minces words in describing how the band has always gone about making records in the studio.

Long after his time of service with them was done, Glyn Johns would note that the Rolling Stones had no idea what a record producer actually did because until Jimmy Miller came along, the band had never had one. Born in Brooklyn, Miller was a talented drummer who had begun his producing career with the Spencer Davis Group, for whom he had also cowritten the hit single “I’m a Man” with Stevie Winwood.

Impressed by the work that Miller was doing with Traffic in the next room at Olympic Studios while the Stones were recording
Their Satanic Majesties Request,
Glyn Johns urged Mick Jagger to hire Miller to produce the band’s next album. A quantum leap from their previous work in the studio,
Beggars Banquet
was Miller’s first effort with the Stones and it became a huge success, both critically and commercially.

As Glyn Johns would later say, “The Rolling Stones, that is to say Mick and Keith, were incredibly difficult to produce. I mean, how do you tell Keith Richards that what he just played wasn’t
any good? Actually, you don’t. I once made the mistake of telling Keith he was out of tune and you would have thought I had just told him his mother was a whore.”

Not surprisingly, the key to Miller’s success with the Rolling Stones was his working relationship with Keith Richards. As Glyn Johns’s younger brother Andy would later say, “Jimmy came in and pulled the Stones together and turned them back into more of a proper rock ’n’ roll band than they had ever really been before. He did
Beggars Banquet,
which was fucking brilliant, and then
Let It Bleed,
which was bloody marvelous.

“When it came to playing grooves, Jimmy was the instigator. On ‘Honky Tonk Women,’ he went out into the studio and started playing two little cowbells, one atop of another on a steel prong, and set the tempo for the whole song. Jimmy really knew how to get fantastic grooves and come up with cool sounds and during the late sixties and early seventies, he was seen as quite a magician in the studio.”

Even with Jimmy Miller behind the board in the studio, Keith Richards continued to be just as unpredictable as ever when it came to showing up on time for a session. As Glyn Johns would later say, “While we were making
Let It Bleed,
there were many occasions when we would work without Keith because he wasn’t there. It would be three or four in the morning and as we would be getting in the car to go home, Keith would arrive and everyone would troop back in like they were in his employ or something. I remember waiting for Keith for three days in Hamburg and he never came and nobody got annoyed. They just accepted it.

“If you want to talk about someone in the band being indulged, it was not Mick. Keith got the Oscar. This was somebody from
the outside looking in who did not give a monkey’s bum about anybody. Underneath all that, Keith could be an extremely loving, caring, considerate person. There were people he cared about that he would die for. And Ian Stewart was one of them. But in the main, Keith’s general reaction with anybody he was working with or who was around him was that he couldn’t care less about them. They didn’t enter into it because he just didn’t care.

“The most frustrating thing to me was when the Stones would sit and play a track for hours and hours and hours, the same thing over and over again. At the beginning, it would sound fantastic. It had all the spark and the adrenaline. After three days, it was deadening and awful. Everyone thinks the Rolling Stones made pretty amazing records. I can assure you they could have been and actually were at one point fifty times better than they ended up being, at least from a rhythm track point of view. By the time they got the track that Keith liked, they were all worn out or played out. Because by then his part had developed into what he wanted.”

Already working constantly with so many other artists that his patience with the chaos that always ensued when the Rolling Stones went into the studio had just about come to an end, Glyn Johns was about to be supplanted as the band’s engineer of choice by his younger brother Andy. Unlike Glyn, who aside from Ian Stewart and Jo Bergman was the only person around the Stones who was completely straight, Andy Johns would soon become so deeply involved in drugs with Keith and Jimmy Miller that his life would never be the same.