Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye

by Robert Greenfield

  A life artist of the first order who had never paid any attention whatsoever to the rules governing conventional behavior, Anita was a collector and connector of people who by this point in time had already been everywhere, done everything, and knew everyone who mattered in the world of international café society.

  Anita’s time of service with the Rolling Stones had begun when she met and fell in love with Brian Jones in Munich in 1965. Without her fantastic sense of style and incredible eye for fashion, Brian might never have blossomed into the gender-bending psychedelic peacock he became after the two of them began regularly dropping acid together in their flat in Courtfield Road, which soon became the epicenter of the hippest scene in London.

  That Anita left Brian after he had lost all control to be with Keith only made perfect sense because the two of them were so similar in many ways. Much like Keith, Anita was a wild jungle creature whom it seemed no one could ever tame. Like him, she also did not give a shit what anyone thought of her. At a time when the women’s liberation movement was just being born, Anita had already achieved a kind of riotous individual freedom that would eventually lead her as far down the road of excess as anyone had ever gone.

  A magnetic creature who always drew the beautiful people of both sexes to her side, Anita was perfectly suited to live in the world of the Rolling Stones because she thrived on chaos. The crazier things got, the more Anita liked it. Because there was no knowing what might come out of her mouth at any given moment, she could also be as funny as hell.

  Before this tour had even begun, the changes wreaked upon Anita’s personality by her increasing use of heroin had become apparent to those who knew her well. As Astrid Lundstrom would later say, “I remember being impressed with how strong Anita seemed when she got pregnant with Marlon. When I saw her again at the airport in August 1970 as the Stones were about to go on tour in Europe, I was blown away because she was totally strung out and a mess. She was a mess on the English tour as well, and I think by then she had already lost it in a way.”

  Despite how loaded Keith and Anita were on the tour, they both still somehow managed to take impeccable care of Marlon without employing a nanny to do any of the dirty work for them. I can still clearly remember Anita laughing and wrinkling her nose at the smell as she leaned toward Marlon in the dressing room in Coventry before the show and said, “Time for a change now, yes?”

  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.

  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.