Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye (15 page)

In what was meant to serve as a dry run for tonight’s effort, Glyn was also behind the board of the rock truck as it sat parked
outside the Empire Theatre last night in Liverpool so he could record both of those shows as well. Taking a quick look around the room to make sure neither Mick nor Keith is listening, Glyn sighs and says, “I hope they play better tonight than last. I really do.” Spinning on his heel, Glyn Johns then walks out the door to begin what will be one of the last nights he will ever work for the Rolling Stones.

Mad as it may seem in this day and age of carefully planned marketing and digital media campaigns designed to sell new albums through every means available to man, the Rolling Stones were touring Great Britain a month before
Sticky Fingers
was to be released. Although the Stones had no real choice in the matter because they had to be out of the country by April 1 for tax reasons, they did find themselves playing as many as four or five songs from the new album each night that no one in the audience had ever heard.

By this point in the tour, I had seen the band perform “Bitch” and “Brown Sugar” so many times that both songs had burned their way into my brain. Unfortunately, this was also the only place I could hear them once the night’s shows were over. Utterly possessed by those pounding horn parts and Keith’s unrelenting rhythm guitar riffs, I would walk around all day long singing as many of the lyrics as I could remember over and over to myself.

Even though the album was not yet out, Marshall Chess was God’s own salesman when it came to pushing it to all the eager record buyers who then made up the core readership of Rolling Stone magazine. As Marshall was only too happy to tell me, the ten tracks on
Sticky Fingers
were (in what would turn out not to
be the final running order) “Bitch,” “Brown Sugar,” “You Gotta Move,” “Dead Flowers,” “I Got the Blues,” “Sister Morphine,” “Keep-a-Knockin’” (i.e., “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking”), “Wild Horses,” “Sway,” and “Moonlight Mile.”

Befitting the utterly chaotic way in which the Rolling Stones recorded back then, Marshall said that even though the album was slated to be released during the third week in April, there was still a chance Mick might want to go back into the studio to re-record some of his vocals. Because he literally did not have the time to do this once the tour was over, this never happened. But to have even been considering the possibility after having spent more than a year in the studio at a cost of £42,000 (a little less than $100,000) spoke volumes about just how difficult it was for Mick and Keith to ever let go of an album that everyone else thought was long since done.

Because I was still completely clueless about the economics of the music business back then, what I did not understand was just how badly the Rolling Stones needed their new album to be a hit. Throughout the entire tour as the band played their asses off onstage night after night, the elephant in the room was whether or not
Sticky Fingers
would sell enough copies to justify the insanely lucrative deal that Ahmet Ertegun had given the Stones so he could distribute their next five albums.

As difficult as this may now also be to understand, the Rolling Stones were not yet the heavyweight champions of record sales they have since become. After being released in December 1968,
Beggars Banquet
had gone platinum in America by selling a million copies. A year later, Let It Bleed had sold twice as many records and gone double platinum. Reverting to form,
Get Yer
Ya-Ya’s Out!
had sold a million copies in America after being released in September 1970.

While these sales figures were certainly nothing to be ashamed of and continued to provide Mick and Keith with a steady source of income as songwriters thanks to the deal they had signed with Decca Records, the totals paled in comparison to the number of albums that bands like Chicago, Santana, and Blood, Sweat, and Tears were then selling. Released just six weeks before the Stones’ tour began, Simon and Garfunkel’s
Bridge over Troubled Water
was on its way to going eight times platinum in America while selling an astonishing 25 million copies worldwide.

It had been for precisely this reason that Clive Davis, then the head of Columbia Records, decided to pass on signing the Stones to his label. In the end, the only record company suitor willing to meet Stones’ business manager Prince Rupert Loewenstein’s demand for a huge advance as well as what Davis called “a staggering royalty rate” was Atlantic Records. Obsessed with not just the music of the Rolling Stones but Mick Jagger as well, Ahmet Ertegun pursued the band for more than a year and then agreed to come up with a $1 million advance for each of their next five albums against what was then the unprecedented royalty rate of 10 percent.

Further complicating the upcoming release of
Sticky Fingers
was what both Mick and Keith saw as a deliberate act of corporate pique as well as an attempt to extract one last return on its initial investment in the band. On March 6, 1971, Decca Records issued a compilation of Stones’ tracks recorded in the mid-1960s that had never before appeared on an album in the United Kingdom. Aptly entitled
Stone Age,
the cover of the album featured a weathered
stone wall on which graffiti relating to the Rolling Stones had been scrawled.

Adding further insult to injury, the artwork was a total rip-off of the far superior image of a graffiti-covered bathroom wall complete with open toilet that Decca had refused to allow the Stones to use as the cover for
Beggars Banquet,
thereby delaying the release of that album for several months. Without fully understanding the irony of his remark as he spoke about it in the dressing room before a show one night, Mick described what Decca had done as trying to get “blood from a stone.”

Of course by then Mick had already pissed the label off no end by cutting a song entitled “Schoolboy Blues” that in time would come to be known as “Cocksucker Blues” as the Stones’ final single for Decca. Having refused for good reason to release the track, the company was now just paying Mick and the Stones back in kind for having decided to leave Decca to form a label of their own.

Six days after the tour was over, the Stones took out full-page ads in the English pop press stating, “We didn’t know this record was going to be released. It is, in our opinion, below the standard we try to keep up, both in choice of content and cover design.” Despite the ads,
Stone Age
went to number four on the album charts in the United Kingdom. While the record business had already become far more corporate than it had ever been before, the entire contretemps spoke volumes about how truly vile and disgusting the industry could still be even at the very highest levels of the game.

In the end, the good news was that the very expensive corporate gamble Ahmet Ertegun had taken on the future of the Rolling Stones paid off handsomely for all concerned. In May
1971, the first single from
Sticky Fingers,
“Brown Sugar”—a song inspired by backup singer Claudia Lennear that Mick Jagger had originally wanted to call “Black Pussy”—went to number one on the charts in America.

On May 22, 1971,
Sticky Fingers
replaced Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young’s live
4 Way Street
album at number one on the Billboard charts. Staying there for three weeks, it eventually became the most commercially successful album the Rolling Stones had ever made by selling three million copies in America while also doing far better worldwide than any of the band’s previous efforts.

Because Mick and Keith had written and recorded several of the tracks on
Sticky Fingers
while they were still under contract to Allen Klein, the bad news was that he owned the copyrights to those songs. Although neither Mick nor Keith earned the far more lucrative royalties that Atlantic would have paid them, all they had to do to make up for that was begin writing and recording brand-new material for what was now their eagerly awaited second album on Rolling Stones Records. As all those faithful readers who have made their way through
Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones
already know, this would prove to be a story of an entirely different cloth.

Nonetheless, the answer to the question that had been lurking in the back of everyone’s mind during the entire tour as to whether the Rolling Stones’ new album would be a big success was a resounding yes. Against all odds and with the deck stacked firmly against them,
Sticky Fingers
would make it possible for the Rolling Stones to begin the next chapter in their career.

And what of the live album Glyn Johns had come to Leeds to record in the rock truck that was Ian Stewart’s pride and joy?
Alternately called
Live in Leeds
or
Get Your Leeds Lungs Out,
it is currently available in bootleg form all over the Internet and has also been streamed on the BBC Radio 6 website. While you can hear what the Stones sounded like onstage back then, it pales in comparison to how good they were live. Insofar as I can tell from my notes, neither of the shows in Leeds that night impressed me as being anything very special. Which was probably the reason the Stones decided to forget about following in the footsteps of The Who.

As always in Leeds tonight, “Midnight Rambler” is the highlight of both shows. At one point, as Mick croons, “Go down on me, bay-bee,” he actually looks out into the house to see if anyone is hip enough to get what he is singing about. As Mick does this, the stage lights hit the gold spangles on his cape at an angle that makes the reflection shoot all the way up to the perforated white tile ceiling. For the rest of the song, tiny bursts of light swim around in circles high above Mick’s head like a school of crazy fish.

Before “Midnight Rambler” comes to an end, the lady who has been traveling with trumpeter Jim Price throughout the entire tour very politely throws up twice at the side of the stage and then walks off quietly down the hall to the dressing room. So much for Leeds. And now, on to London.

CHAPTER NINE

LONDON, MARCH 14, 1971

AT LONG LAST, A GIG THAT REALLY MATTERS.
On Sunday in London, everyone lucky enough to get their hands on a ticket to see the Rolling Stones washes their hair and then stands in the long, curling line that winds its way around the Roundhouse on Chalk Farm Road.

Originally built to serve as a railway engine turntable shed, the massive circular concrete structure is a unique and unbelievably funky venue where members in good standing of the London underground regularly assemble to fill the air with fuming clouds of hash smoke as they watch bands like Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies perform at deejay Jeff Dexter’s regular Sunday night concert series known as “Implosion.”

When the Stones last played here in London at the Saville Theatre and the Lyceum in the West End in December 1969, they performed before an audience of what Dexter would later call “the Chelsea elite.” As anyone can plainly see, tonight’s crowd bears no resemblance whatsoever to that particular aspect of London society.

Looking as though the Sheriff of Nottingham just evicted them all from Sherwood Forest, a horde of long-haired freaks of both sexes decked out in fringed buckskin, dark green velvet, and hand-crocheted cloaks of many colors comes streaming toward the hall from the Chalk Farm Tube stop across the road. Ignoring the scalpers who are now working the street for all they are worth by quoting prices no one can afford, those who have already paid for their tickets slowly make their way toward the portal that leads into the Roundhouse.

Outside the backstage door where only those whose names have been written down by hand on the guest list will be permitted to enter, an entirely different scene is taking place. Because this is London and these are the Rolling Stones, a multitude of music business luminaries as well as the crème de la crème of the underground have turned out in force to see these shows. Unaccustomed to ever having to stand in line at any gig, they also wait patiently to be allowed inside the hall.