Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye (19 page)

After Jo Bergman goes to check out the place, she decides that, yes indeed, this is where the party should take place. Leaving all the details to Lady Elizabeth and her staff, Jo then turns her focus to a problem Marshall Chess has only just brought to her attention.

As Jerry Pompili, who worked as the house manager of the Fillmore East in New York before doing security for the Stones on the English tour, will later say, “Although
Sticky Fingers
had not yet been released, someone suddenly realized no one had ever bothered to write down the lyrics for ‘Bitch,’ ‘Brown Sugar,’ ‘Moonlight Mile,’ and ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,’ which meant that those four songs could not be copyrighted. Jo Bergman had me go over to Mick’s house with the acetates and drop a needle on them and
try to figure out what the hell he was singing. Which was not really all that easy.

“I played the acetates over and over and wrote down all the lyrics I could understand by hand. Then I took the pages back to Jo and Mick came into the office and looked at them and that got his memory going so he was able to fill in most of the blanks. We had one disagreement and it was on ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.’ There was one line that sounded to me and everybody else like ‘Yeah, I’ve got flatted feet now, now, now,’ but Mick swore that was not what he had sung. He couldn’t remember what it was, so we just went with ‘Yeah, I’ve got flatted feet now, now, now.’”

A very tough and savvy street guy from New Jersey who often carried a Beretta in his back pocket while on duty at the Fillmore East, Pompili then begins working with Lady Elizabeth Anson on planning the party. Ignoring the fact that the two of them are as different as chalk and cheese, Pompili also begins hitting on her but to no avail. Apparently recognizing his true talents, Lady Elizabeth assigns Pompili the all-important task of setting off the fireworks display that will serve as one of the highlights of the Stones’ farewell party on the banks of the Thames.

With vintage champagne flowing freely from the bar, two hundred people crowd a ballroom where weddings and tea dances are usually held. Although John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Eric Clapton, Roger Daltrey, and Stephen Stills are all there, Keith Richards is nowhere to be seen. Considering the wild spirit of abandon everyone seems to have brought with them to this party tonight, this will in the end prove to be a blessing in disguise for all concerned.

As loud music plays over the public address system, people begin getting royally pissed. As Jerry Pompili will later say, “I don’t
really remember all that much about the party because just like everyone else who was there, I got extremely fucking drunk. I was totally drenched in champagne, my shirt was off, and I kept trying to corner Elizabeth Anson all night long. Being a proper English lady, she was very polite but I got nowhere with her at all.

“At one point in the evening, I stumbled down to the banks of the river where the fireworks were so we could begin shooting them off. I don’t know what I was using to ignite them but I set myself on fire and the guy from Chip’s crew I had come there with had to roll me in the grass to put out the flames. We were all so fucked up that no one even noticed. I think I must have blacked out after that because the next thing I remember I was sitting in the front seat of my Volkswagen van when John and Yoko came by and said, ‘Are you going to London? Can you give us a ride?’ And I said, ‘Give you a ride? Are you fucking crazy? I can’t even stand up.’”

As Lady Elizabeth Anson would later recall, “The guests got ridiculously out of control. That wasn’t Mick’s idea of fun. It was the hangers-on. I can still clearly remember watching people throwing bottles of vintage champagne into the river and thinking that if anyone at Skindles was really clever, they would send a diver down there after the party and make extra money by recovering the bottles. In fact, I’m sure they’re all still there. Right at the bottom of the River Thames.”

At around two in the morning, the powers that be at the hotel decide the time has come to shut down the music. Without any warning, the PA suddenly goes dead. Wandering around the ballroom in a somewhat altered state, Bianca starts protesting what has just happened by saying, “You can’t do this to us. This is 1971.
Things have progressed beyond this. We can stay up later than two in the morning.”

No doubt prompted by how distraught the love of his life feels about this, Mick gets right into it by loudly demanding to know why the music has been stopped. After being told that it was done to comply with a local ordinance, Mick decides to demonstrate his extreme displeasure with this response by flinging a chair through one of the large plate-glass windows overlooking the river.

As Alan Dunn will later say, “I’m not certain if Mick threw that chair through the window because they had shut off the power or as his last act of defiance against the English establishment.”

Forget the band’s final shows at the Roundhouse or the made-for-television disaster at the Marquee. It is with this signal gesture and the loud sound of breaking glass that the Rolling Stones finally bid farewell to England. Time to turn off the lights. This party is over.

PART TWO

AFTERMATH

(In which I finally forsake what by now has become the fairly annoying ploy of using italics to separate myself from who I was back then in order to begin a full-blown account of my time with the Rolling Stones once the English tour was over.)

CHAPTER TWELVE

BELFAST, PARIS, AND NICE, MARCH 25–MAY 21, 1971

ONE MONTH AFTER THE TOUR WAS OVER,
the 5,300-word article I had written about it appeared in the April 15, 1971, issue of
Rolling Stone
magazine under the title “The Rolling Stones on Tour: Goodbye Great Britain.” For those who care about such matters, the cover of that issue featured a photograph of Joe Dallesandro, the underground film star who had made a career out of appearing nude in Andy Warhol films, cradling a naked baby to his bare chest.

In what I suppose you might call a nice bit of synchronicity, it was also Joe Dallesandro whose penis could be seen hanging to the right in a pair of very tight black jeans on the cover designed by Andy Warhol for
Sticky Fingers,
which was released on the very same day. Not that I was thinking about any of this at the time.

For me, the most significant thing about the piece was that I had finally managed to get something I had written published in the back of the magazine rather than on the news pages up front where my articles usually ran. And while no one from the Rolling Stones bothered to get in touch to tell me just how accurately I
had portrayed what had happened during the tour, it was not as though I was waiting to hear from them.

Turning my attention to what I thought were definitely far more important stories, I had by then already spent what I can only describe as the single most frightening week of my life in Belfast covering the ongoing religious war between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland colloquially known as “the Troubles.”

In a city where everyone was so high on revolution that the sound of automatic weapons fire and bombs going off in the distance at night seemed like music to their ears, I soon realized that unlike Ernest Hemingway, I was not cut out to be a war correspondent and returned to London as quickly as I could.

After I had filed my story about Belfast, I began looking for something new to write about. Without any idea what I was going to do when I got there, I somehow managed to persuade Andrew Bailey, the editor of the London bureau of
Rolling Stone
who had by then also become my good friend, to let me cover the Cannes Film Festival.

On my way there, I stopped off in Paris to interview a high-ranking member of the North Vietnamese delegation to the Peace Talks which had already been going on for years without doing anything to end the war in Vietnam. Not surprisingly, the representative had nothing much new to say and the story never ran. I was about to leave for Cannes when I got a call informing me that I had been chosen to conduct the
Rolling Stone
interview with Keith Richards in the South of France.

After flying to Nice on a prepaid ticket, I walked into an office at the airport to pick up the car someone from London had rented
in my name so I could drive to Keith’s house to set up the interview. After signing a variety of forms in triplicate, I went back outside only to see that I had been given the keys to a shockingly expensive-looking French sports car. The car was so utterly fabulous that James Bond would not have looked out of place behind the wheel. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that unlike all the cars I had driven in America, this one had a clutch and a stick.

When I tried to exchange the vehicle for something a bit less grand, the woman in the office told me that what with the Cannes Film Festival already in full swing, no other cars were available. My choice was simple. I could either hitch a ride to Keith’s house or learn how to drive this sleek machine.

Knowing exactly what James Bond would have done in this situation, I slid suavely behind the wheel of the car, turned the key in the ignition, and stepped down on the gas just as hard as I could. Sputtering loudly, the engine immediately died. Stubbornly, I started it right up again. Again I floored it. Again the engine stalled. After somehow finally managing to jam the stick into first gear, I lifted my foot off the clutch slowly enough to ease out of the parking lot. This was my second big mistake.

Utterly unable to master the intricacies of clutching and shifting, I soon learned I could not even go from first to second without grinding the gears so loudly that the sound was painful to my ears. If I pressed my foot down too hard on the accelerator, the car would shoot forward like a bullet from the barrel of a gun. If I took my foot off the clutch too quickly, the engine would die and the car would stop right in the middle of the road.

Behind me, angry French drivers, all of whom had only recently competed at Le Mans, began to blow their horns. Roaring
past me with that classic look of utter Gallic disdain on their faces, motorists of both sexes threw me the French finger while uttering curses that left no doubt as to my dubious parenthood and total lack of brains.

As soon as I reached the stretch of impossibly narrow, curving mountain road high above the sea leading to Villefranche, I knew I was going to die. One false move behind the wheel and I would go careening over the edge and plummet to my death on the jagged rocks far below.

On the spot, I made what I suppose you might call a battlefield decision. No more stopping. From now on, I would not stop for anyone or anything. I would not stop for red lights, I would not stop for stop signs, and I most definitely would not stop for all the gendarmes in blue uniforms who were directing traffic in the middle of crowded roundabouts with whistles clenched between their teeth.

Staying resolutely in second gear as I slowly cruised through one intersection after another, I began waving my hands in crazy circles to let everyone know I was no longer actually in control of this vehicle. For some reason, this technique seemed to work wonders for me and the next thing I knew, I was turning off the treacherous mountain road and on my way to Villefranche.

By the time I finally nosed the car through the massive black wrought-iron front gates of Villa Nellcôte, I was soaked with sweat. Even to myself, I smelled like a dead coyote. My hands were shaking, my self-confidence was shot, and even though the car was somehow still in one piece, I was a total wreck. Having to walk up the broad marble front steps of what looked to me like a smaller version of the Palace at Versailles did nothing to ease my anxiety.