Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye (4 page)

“Fantastic,” Charlie says, making the word sound like a soft cymbal crash with brushes.

As I would later learn, Jim Price was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and then grew up in Midland, while Skinnay Ennis hailed from Salisbury, North Carolina. Since this was long before such facts could be checked on the Internet, I simply wrote down what I had heard and then reported it as the gospel truth. At three in the morning in Newcastle, what really mattered most, at least in my own mind, was that by coming up with Ziggy Elman’s name on the spur of the moment, I had established my own credentials as someone worthy of traveling with the Stones.

Ignoring everything else that is going on around him, Marshall Chess leans in even closer to Mick and says, “I can send you a test pressing by air, and you can send me back a dub.”

“By hand,” Mick says.

“By air and hand,” Marshall tells him. “And you send me back a dub.”

“You’ll send me one too,” Charlie suddenly calls out.

A little surprised, Marshall says, “We will, Charlie.”

Smiling, Charlie says, “Just addin’ to the bravado.”

“Will you do it that way, Mick?” Marshall implores. “Will you?”

In a voice made far louder by the fact that he is now in England, Bobby Keys says, “Ah’m gonna burn down this goddamn hotel if ah don’t find mah suitcase. Goddamn, ah’ll throw Charlie Watts out a window.”

Spying a hapless waitress who just happens to be passing by with a serving platter in her hands, Keys says, “What’s that? Slide one of them on mah plate, lady.” Picking up the small dinner roll she has just given him, Keys says, “You know what these are good for?”

Already knowing what is about to happen, Jim Price softly says, “Oh-oh.”

Whang,
a dinner roll goes spinning through the air.

“You know what these glasses are good for?” Keys asks rhetorically.

Back up at the head of the table, Marshall asks, “Will you do it that way, Mick? Will you? If we cut ‘Moonlight Mile’ to four verses and make up a running order so the guy in the States can get started on the sleeves?”

Mumble, mumble. It’s now four in the morning, and Mick has his head down talking to Bianca in a voice only she can hear. When he finally lifts his head, Mick looks more than a little glazed. From the completely blank expression on his face, it seems plain that he
has not heard a single word Marshall Chess has said to him in the last ten minutes.

Having already done two shows tonight, Mick Jagger is now being asked to make a decision that will affect not only the release of the new album but the future of the band as well. Looking very much like an English schoolboy at the end of a very long and trying day, Mick says, “What, Marshall?”

CHAPTER TWO

MANCHESTER, MARCH 5, 1971

WHAT WITH ALL THE CHANGES
the psychedelic revolution has wreaked upon the world, both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin less than six months dead, and the counterculture they helped spawn in America now most definitely on life support as the war in Vietnam rages on, do people still politely approach stars like the Rolling Stones to ask for autographs? In Newcastle, where it sometimes seems like the Depression has never ended and the city still looks as it did back in the 1930s, they most certainly do.

As all those members of the band who have somehow managed to rouse themselves by midmorning sit at small tables in the hotel dining room eating breakfast, a steady stream of gray-haired little old ladies, Irish chambermaids, and middle-aged waitresses come up to offer them menus and tissues as well as any bit of paper on which they can lay their hands.

Fidgeting nervously from one foot to the other as they stand there waiting, they say, “Are you a Stone then? Will you sign this for me? Will you? I’d appreciate it ever so much.” And because this is England, where everyone has been raised to always be as
polite as humanly possible, the Stones dutifully do just as they are asked.

Although they were able to make their way out of London without attracting any undue media attention, the mere presence of the Rolling Stones here in Newcastle is most definitely news. Wearing a natty dark double-breasted blazer and an outrageous wide-brimmed hat, Mick strolls into the hotel lobby once breakfast is over only to be greeted by two very straight newspaper reporters, who immediately turn to a hipper-looking colleague and ask, “Is he one of them?”

While it may now seem difficult to believe that anyone could not recognize Mick Jagger in the flesh despite how long he had been famous in his native land, a reporter from the
News of the World
made this very same mistake on February 5, 1967 by writing that after Mick had taken six amphetamine tablets while brandishing a lump of hashish in Blaise’s nightclub in South Kensington, he openly acknowledged having first taken LSD while on the road with Bo Diddley and Little Richard, but “didn’t go much on it now [that] the cats had taken it up. It’ll just get a dirty name.”

No doubt so stoned out of his head at the time that it seemed like a good idea to send up the reporter in this manner, the Stone in question was actually Brian Jones, who always liked to refer to himself as “the original founder of the Rolling Stones.” On
The Eamonn Andrews Show
on Thames Television that night, Mick promptly announced he would be suing the newspaper for libel.

A week later, the
News of the World
helped engineer the drug bust at Redlands, Keith’s country home in Sussex. The
draconian sentences meted out to Mick and Keith at the end of a trial that was front-page news then made them both authentic counterculture heroes in England. While so much had changed over here since then, the British press still delighted in tearing down those whom it had already made rich and famous and so just as soon as Mick’s identity was confirmed beyond any shadow of a doubt, an impromptu media circus began with him standing squarely in the center ring.

Zip! Suddenly, the lobby is brilliantly flood-lit. As a cameraman begins rolling film, an interviewer from the BBC steps forward with a microphone in his hand. Sticking it right into Mick’s face, the interviewer says, “A-hah, ahem, in his interview in
Rolling Stone
magazine, John Lennon said that what the Beatles did yesterday, the Stones do tomorrow. Are you then too planning to break up?”

Like a goofy teenager who thinks this is either the dumbest or funniest thing he has ever heard, Mick’s face cracks wide open as he begins to laugh. “Naw, we’re not breakin’ up,” he says. “And if we did, we wouldn’t be as bitchy about it as them.” When the interviewer asks why the Stones have now chosen to go live in France, Mick says it was Keith’s idea, which is most certainly not the case.

Pursuing a line of inquiry that seems to make sense only to him, the interviewer then asks, “Is the band tired?”

“Charlie!” Mick calls out. “Are you tired of all this then, the one-night stands and all?” As Charlie is far too busy at the moment creeping around behind the cameras while asking everyone
who is being interviewed to respond, Mick says, “Naw, we started last night and we’re just gonna go on until the body gives out.”

Zip! Off go the floodlights. Shoving his hands into his jacket pockets, Mick heads out the front door where a photographer from the
Daily Mirror
begins snapping his every movement as he puts his bags into the boot of the white Bentley that will take him and Bianca to Manchester for tonight’s two shows.

As I stood there watching them drive away, Jo Bergman appeared by my side. A short and bubbly woman with an outrageous mane of frizzy black hair and an infectious laugh, she had been brought over from America by Brian Epstein to help him run the Beatles’ fan club. For the past four years, she had been in charge of the Stones’ office at 46A Maddox Street in London. And so when she offered me a ride to Manchester, I happily accepted and clambered into the backseat of a rented Ford Cortina.

Only then did I realize that the man behind the wheel was Ian Stewart. Thirty-two years old, “Stu,” as he was called by one and all, was short, square, and stocky, with piercing blue eyes, prematurely gray streaks in his hair, and a prognathous jaw that caused former manager Andrew Loog Oldham to decide he did not look enough like a Rolling Stone to continue playing piano with the band but should instead begin driving them to gigs.

While this particular job had long since been passed on to others, Stu still arrived at the hall long before every show so he could set up Charlie’s drum kit and make sure everything onstage was exactly where it should be. By having never changed at all since he first met the band while auditioning for them in an
upstairs room at the Bricklayer’s Arms pub in Soho in 1962, Stu had become the only person whom the Stones trusted to always tell them the truth. On this tour, Stu would also occasionally slide behind the piano to play on songs that did not contain what he called “any Chinese chords.”