Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye (8 page)

Because in every way possible he seemed to embody the wild outlaw spirit that was at the heart of rock ’n’ roll, I just could not get enough of Bobby Keys on this tour. With a mouth and a heart as big as Texas, he was every rock writer’s dream come true, an endless source of colorful stories about how he had once shot craps with Major Lance in a nightclub in Muncie, Indiana, and seen Billy “Fat Boy” Stewart pull a gun on someone during an argument after a show.

Because it was all such great stuff, I dutifully reported what Bobby Keys told me word for word in the article I wrote about the tour for Rolling Stone magazine only to learn many years later that on this tour Bobby was working just as hard at creating his
own legend as he did each night playing saxophone onstage with the Stones. Taking it point by point, here is the actual truth.

Far too young to have ever actually played or recorded with Buddy Holly, Bobby Keys was eleven years old when he saw Holly perform on the back of a flatbed truck at the grand opening of a gas station in Lubbock. Since Alan Freed did his first show at the Brooklyn Paramount in 1955 when Bobby was just twelve years old and neither Buddy Holly and the Crickets, nor Clyde McPhatter, nor the Everly Brothers appeared on the bill, that story was also not true. Nor had Bobby already been on the road for sixteen years in 1971.

What does seem to be true is that while he was working with singer Bobby Vee at the Texas State Fair in San Antonio in July 1964, Bobby Keys did see the Rolling Stones perform before a decidedly indifferent crowd who could not have cared less about their music. When the Stones came back to do their second show that night, Bobby told Brian Jones that pop groups in America always changed their clothes before going onstage, thereby prompting the members of the band to exchange what they were wearing with one another.

As Jim Price would later tell me, he and Bobby Keys had both flown to London after completing Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour with drummer Jim Gordon, bassist Carl Radle, and keyboard player and vocalist Bobby Whitlock to join forces with Eric Clapton in a new band that came to be called Derek and the Dominos. After rehearsing for about a week at Abbey Road studios, they realized, in Price’s words, “Hey, this is a guitar and keyboard band and they don’t need any horns.”

Both musicians were about to return to Los Angeles when Mick Jagger called and asked them to come play on the sessions
for
Sticky Fingers.
A trained musician who could also play piano, Price came up with all the horn arrangements in which Bobby played the sax solos. Both Keys and Price then accompanied the Stones on their 1970 European tour.

While I am certainly not the only journalist ever to be taken in by a charming but unreliable source, Bobby Keys was so completely irresistible in so many ways that even now I cannot find it in my heart to hold any of this against him. Thanks to the energy he and Jim Price brought to the Stones’ music each night onstage, the band seemed in many ways to be completely reborn.

Despite all the braggadocio, Bobby had in fact spent most of his adult life out on the road smoking pot, drinking to excess, and taking as much Benzedrine as he could while traveling from one small town to another with a variety of bands on a bus. Which was why Bobby Keys was the way he was.

Shutting off his cassette recorder in the dressing room, Bobby Keys carefully pulls a velvet jacket on over his ruffled black stage shirt. Grabbing his horn, he charges out into the hallway like a runaway Brahma bull. Bumping right into Mick, he says, “You gotta teach me some French, man.”

Laughing out loud, Mick says, “Sure, Bobby.”

“Want me to write some songs too?” Bobby asks. “They won’t sell as much as yours but….”

Before he can complete the sentence, the Stones walk out onstage. And just like in the movies, the second show is a bitch. With the lights all green and purple in their faces, Mick and the boys incite the crowd to a near-riot. As Charlie cooks like crazy,
Mick puts the microphone between his legs and bends over so far during “Midnight Rambler” that his forehead actually touches the painted white wooden stage. Out in the house, everyone sweats and dances and then goes home happy.

Or as Bobby Keys shouted as the Stones trooped back onstage in Newcastle for their encore, “Goddammit, rock ’n’ roll is on the road again!” And beyond any shadow of a doubt, so it is.

Long after the tour was over, the single image that stayed with me from Coventry was seeing Bianca standing in an empty backstage hallway playing with a yo-yo on a string she had wrapped around the wrong finger of her hand. Wholly engrossed in what she was doing and looking much like a young girl dressed up in black and white for a big Saturday night on the town, Bianca seemed completely oblivious to everything that was going on around her.

Along with her incredible beauty and the obvious hold she had on Mick, it was this quality that had driven many of those traveling with the Stones to utter distraction. A completely self-created creature who never spoke about herself, Bianca was, as Winston Churchill once said of Russia, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Nor did any of the quotidian details of her life to this point in time help explain who she really was. That Bianca had once been Michael Caine’s girlfriend and had been living with the famed French record executive and world-class playboy Eddie Barclay when she had first met Mick six months earlier at a Stones show in Paris revealed precious little about her character or precisely what agenda she was now pursuing with Mick.

Unlike Anita Pallenberg, who had been a full-fledged member of the Rolling Stones’ inner circle ever since she had first become Brian Jones’s girlfriend, Bianca was a rank outsider. Making the current situation even more difficult for all concerned, she never tried to hide her complete disdain for the always funky, drug-fueled world of rock ’n’ roll.

Doing his best to make a joke of it, Ian Stewart had rearranged the letters of Bianca’s first name and begun calling her “Binaca.” While driving at breakneck speed from Newcastle to Manchester, Stu had let Jo Bergman know how he really felt about Bianca’s influence on Mick by muttering darkly under his breath, “That bird, she’s pushin’ him.”

And so she was but in precisely which direction no one could say for sure. Because Bianca had such a deep connection to Mick, and because the Rolling Stones could not exist without him, her silent presence on this tour represented a distinct threat to the well-being of one and all. And so everyone always kept a watchful eye on her when she and Mick were together while doing their best to conceal their concern about what their future might entail.

As Astrid Lundstrom would later say, “There was a big split between Mick and Keith on the tour because Bianca was there. Because of her mere presence, Mick became totally different. Before, he was much more approachable and more of an artist, but Bianca fed all that social narcissistic stuff of his.”

What no one then knew was that Bianca was two months pregnant with Mick’s child. Considering the way everybody but Mick seemed to feel about her, this was on more than one level clearly a blessing in disguise.

CHAPTER FOUR

GLASGOW, MARCH 8, 1971

WELCOME TO GLASGOW,
a city so drab and gray and hard and mean that it makes Newcastle and Manchester seem like Paris by comparison. As everyone boards the bus that will take them from the airport to the hall, Mick Jagger decides for reasons known only to him to sit down right beside me. Looking very French indeed today, Mick is wearing a tightly ribbed sweater, a long brushed-suede maxi-coat with a sheepskin lining and collar, and a plaid woolen cap perched backward atop his long, flowing hair. In the corner of his left eye, there is a tiny spot of blood.

Catching sight of a gaggle of giggling teenage girls lined up outside the window to gawk at him, Mick laughs out loud and says he hasn’t seen anything like this since 1962. And then he begins to talk. In a rambling rap that seems to go in all directions at once, Mick starts telling me about the mystical aspects of Stonehenge and Glastonbury and then about all the time he recently spent in Bali, “which is a total culture for the arts where a whole village will stay up all night for an opera or a ballet.”

For reasons that totally escape me, Mick and I then launch
into what soon becomes a long and very involved conversation in fairly rapid-fire French. When I ask Mick how he learned to speak the language, he replies, “En l’école [
in school
], en France un peu [
in France a bit
], et avec ma jeune fille [
and with my girl
.]” Talking about Bianca as she herself never does, Mick tells me she has lived all over the world ever since she was fifteen years old and has spent time in France, Japan, Hawaii, and Canada.

In response to a question about music that I finally break down and ask him, Mick says, “Oh, who listens to Chuck Berry anymore? I mean, I haven’t listened to that stuff for years. Rock ’n’ roll has always been made by white suburban bourgeoisie like Elton John. For God’s sake, I listen to the MC5. I don’t like to see one thing end until I see another beginning. Like, for instance, breaking up with a woman. Do you know what I mean?”

While I was not about to say this to him then, my best answer to this question would have been, “Actually, I have no idea whatsoever.” In his own inimitable way, was Mick trying to tell me that the chapter in the band’s history that had begun on the fateful day in October 1961 when Keith Richards came over to talk to him on the train station in Dartford because of the albums Mick was carrying, Chuck Berry’s
One Dozen Berrys
foremost among them, was now over?