Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye

by Robert Greenfield

  Based on Mick’s completely one-sided conversation with me in the dressing room at the Roundhouse between shows, there was no doubt in my mind as to which side of that line I was now on. As I trudged back up Haverstock Hill to my flat that night, I knew my brief career with the Rolling Stones had just come to a sudden end.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE MARQUEE, MARCH 26, 1971

  POOR KEITH. SAY WHAT YOU WILL about the man but ever since the tour ended twelve days ago, his life has pretty much been what even he might describe as a living hell. Leaving London on the day after the final two shows at the Roundhouse, Keith headed straight for Redlands, his country estate in West Sussex. And while no one could deny he had certainly earned the right to enjoy some peace and quiet before going into tax exile in the South of France, Keith had a far more urgent problem to solve before he could even begin to think about this.

  Because he and Anita were shooting as much as a third of a gram of heroin a day during the tour, neither of them can leave the country without first undergoing some form of treatment to clean themselves up. And so instead of taking long, bracing walks through the woods at Redlands, Keith lies in bed twitching and puking as he endures the same nightmare of a cure that did not keep either him or Gram Parsons straight for long just a month ago.

  A day after Keith starts kicking, Anita admits herself to Bowden House, an exclusive private nursing facility in North London where only those with money can afford to go. Because she has regularly been skin-popping cocaine and heroin speedballs, Anita is even more strung out than Keith and so is given sleeping pills and methadone to help her through the agony of withdrawal.

  Emerging from his own hellish cure looking somewhat pale and battered but otherwise none the worse for wear, Keith returns to London on the day before the Stones are scheduled to appear at the Marquee Club on Wardour Street in the West End. Although the sole purpose of this gig is to film the band in performance for a television special, gaining admission to see the Stones perform in the club on Friday night has promptly become the hottest ticket in town.

  To ensure that all those on the band’s guest list will be admitted without any hassles, Stones’ publicity director Les Perrin asks Chip Monck to come up with a set of special passes for the event. Taking an image supplied to him by designer John Pasche, Monck prints it out onto fifty small self-adhesive patches with the words Not recommended for application on suede or velvet on the back. “And that was how the tongue logo was born,” Monck would later say. “The first time anyone saw it was as the pass for the Stones’ show at the Marquee Club.”

  The first of what will prove to be an endless series of problems at the Marquee occurs as soon as the crew starts loading in the gear. Getting right into it with Chip Monck, the director of the television special informs him that he needs at least 600 foot-candles of light onstage to be able to film the Stones. Although Monck does his best to satisfy this demand, neither man seems all that pleased with the end result.

  Just as they have done so many times before, the Rolling Stones spend the afternoon waiting for Keith Richards to arrive. Looking, as Bill Wyman will later write, “awful, dirty, unshaven, and very untogether,” Keith finally shows up four hours late in a mood too foul for anyone to ignore. Being Keith, he does not bother to explain why he feels this way.

  As though everything he has been going through lately is not enough, Keith stepped out of the front door of his very fashionable town house on Cheyne Walk today only to be surrounded by a brace of policemen. In the unctuous manner that English coppers always use when addressing someone they want to arrest on sight, they said, “Hello, Keith. How are you, boy? Let’s roll up your sleeve, eh? Let us have a look at your veins. Not on the heavy stuff, are you? How’s Anita and the baby? What’s this? Does this smell like hash to you, Fred?”

  From their point of view, it all makes perfect sense. Knowing Keith is about to escape their clutches for good by fleeing to the South of France, the cops would love to pin one final bust on him before he goes. Having gone through all this before with Brian Jones, and then at Redlands, and then when both Mick and Marianne Faithfull were busted in Mick’s house right next door, what really freaks Keith out is that some detective sergeant eager for a payoff or a promotion might not think twice about planting something on him.

  As Keith will later say, referring to the £7,000 in bribes Mick paid to make the Redlands bust go away to no avail, “At least in the States you know the cops are bent and if you want to get into it, you can go to them and say, ‘How much do you want?’ But in England, you can drop fifty grand and the next week they’ll still bust you and say, ‘Oh, it went to the wrong hands. I’m sorry. It didn’t get to the right man.’ It’s insane.”

  Still suffering the aftereffects of his recent bout with heroin withdrawal, Keith can now no longer even leave his house without being rousted by the law. And if that were not enough, Keith has only just learned that Anita is having so much trouble trying to kick in Bowden House that she will not be able to accompany him and Marlon to France. With the weight of the world now squarely upon his shoulders, is it any wonder the man has no patience at all for what is now going on at the Marquee?

  As trumpeter Jim Price will later say, “The Marquee was a big disaster. There were a lot of arguments going back and forth between the band and Mick and Keith and the club owner and the director of the film. There was no role for Bobby Keys or me to play but there were a lot of delays and we were there all day long and did practically nothing.”

  By now, anyone who has ever seen Keith in action when the darkness is upon him should know there is no way in the world this show will proceed without a hitch. In this case, the hitch is presented by Harold Pendleton, the former accountant and well-known jazz buff who first began putting on shows at the Marquee when it was still located at 165 Oxford Street.

  Featuring Mick Jagger on vocals and harmonica, Keith Richards and Elmo Lewis (aka Brian Jones) on guitars, Dick Taylor on bass, Ian Stewart on piano, and Mick Avory on drums, the Rolling Stones performed for the first time using that name at the Marquee on July 12, 1962. Although Harold Pendleton and the Stones most definitely go all the way back, it is not as though there is any love lost between them. Nor has the band ever performed for Pendleton since then.

  Despite all the fairly dark and tangled subtext, none of this would be a problem if someone had not come up with the bright idea of stringing a large banner over the stage that reads THE MARQUEE CLUB, thereby ensuring that it will appear in every frame of the television special. As soon as Mick sees the banner, he demands that it be taken down. Since there will be no show tonight if Mick Jagger decides not to walk out onstage at the Marquee, you might think this would not be an issue.

  Because in the business of rock ’n’ roll everyone always thinks they are right until someone with more power forces them to change their mind, it turns out in fact to be an issue of major proportions. And so a discussion begins onstage between Mick, Keith, Chip Monck, and Harold Pendleton. Because this is England, no one actually goes so far as to raise his voice but the conversation does soon become quite heated.

  As Chip Monck will later say, “Pendleton wanted to hang the Marquee sign over the stage. Yeah, fuck you. We were not at the Newport Folk or Jazz Festival where those words had to be seen behind the artist in every photograph. So I made him take it down. And then I ripped it up. With a big smile on my face. Waiting for the bullets.” At some point in the proceedings, Pendleton may have further infuriated the Rolling Stones by muttering, “Still shit,” behind their backs loudly enough to be overheard.

  With all of this as preamble, it should come as no great surprise to anyone that when the Stones finally appear before an audience composed primarily of music business insiders as well as rock luminaries like Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Ric Grech, and former Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham, Keith rushes over to the side of the stage and swings his guitar at Harold Pendleton’s head. As deejay Jeff Dexter, who was there th
at night, will later say, “Keith just went fucking potty.”

  Keith will later explain that he did this because, as one of the kingpins of the traditional jazz movement in England, Harold Pendleton had not wanted to see that scene die and so had hated the Stones in their early days. In truth, Keith went after Harold Pendleton that night because he was the only authority figure within range.

  While you might think Keith has now vented his frustrations without having blown a fifty-amp fuse, his mental state does not improve as the night wears on. At one point, Mick spends an hour in the dressing room trying to persuade Keith to come back out onstage for the second show. Somehow, the Stones manage to make it through the somewhat abbreviated set that will eventually comprise the television special.

  Outside the club, Keith runs into his old friend Michael Cooper, the brilliant photographer who shot the totally psychedelic covers for both Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Their Satanic Majesties Request. Since Cooper happens to be holding, Keith begins snorting heroin with him. Getting as messed up as only he can, Keith then wanders back into the dressing room only to realize he has lost the keys to his car.

  Since the vehicle in question is the beloved dark blue 1966 S3 Bentley Continental Flying Spur known as “Blue Lena” that Keith insists on driving at speeds no human being save for Ian Stewart has ever equaled, this also becomes a minor crisis. As Chip Monck will later say, “Why wouldn’t Keith have lost the keys to his car that night? Every now and then, he lost the keys to his life as well.”

  Although even on his best day, Sherlock Holmes could probably never find something Keith Richards has lost, Alan Dunn, who has worked for Mick Jagger and the Stones since 1968, gets saddled with the task of sorting out this particular problem. After putting Keith in a car that takes him home, Dunn calls the roadside assistance number for the Royal Automobile Club and waits for hours until someone finally shows up at dawn.

  As Dunn will later say, “It wasn’t all that difficult to bypass the ignition so the Bentley was started and then driven down to Redlands without the keys. The guy who was driving pulled into a field and once the Bentley came to a stop in the mud, that was where the car was left running until it finally ran out of fuel.”

  Lest anyone think Keith is done raving for the weekend and now intends to focus all his attention on getting ready for the move to France, he is out on the town again the next night. After downing a few margaritas and snorting some cocaine, Keith decides to pay Anita a visit in Bowden House. Leaping into the front seat of a car with Michael Cooper by his side, Keith sets off on what soon becomes a very harrowing twelve-mile journey to Harrow.

  Driving as always at top speed, Keith bounces the front wheels of the car off various curbs and passes motorists on the wrong side of the road while honking his horn as loudly as possible to let everyone know he has the right of way. To avoid colliding with a truck as he enters Harrow, Keith whips the steering wheel so suddenly to the side that he crashes the car through an iron fence.

  With its front grille now completely crushed, steam shooting out of the radiator, and music from the tape cassette recorder still blasting, the car comes to a dead stop in the middle of a traffic circle. Grabbing all the contraband they have brought with them, Keith and Michael Cooper decide to make a run for it. Heading just as fast as they can away from the scene of the crime, they go through a gate into a quiet English garden. As they begin digging a hole in the ground in which to hide their stash, the door to the house suddenly swings opens and out steps Nicky Hopkins. Politely, he asks them in for tea.

  Going inside, Keith and Michael Cooper tend to their cuts and bruises as Nicky phones for a limo to take them to Bowden House. When Keith calls Anita to tell her what happened, she screams hysterically at him, “Just get me some H or I’m checking out of here right now. This minute!”

  Leaving the facility the next day so she can score some heroin, Anita returns to Bowden House only to then begin snorting cocaine. At some point, a doctor who is on staff there informs Keith that Anita now has more drugs in her system than when she first entered the facility. Seemingly unable to kick any other way, Anita undergoes what was then known as “the sleeping cure.” After being heavily sedated for a week, she finally manages to withdraw from heroin.

  A month after Keith and Marlon have left England, Anita joins them in the South of France during the first week in May. With the English tour having long since faded in everyone’s memory, the Rolling Stones are now about to start what they believe will be a bright and shiny brand-new chapter in their career. And so it will. What no one in the band understands is how great a price each of them will have to pay to make this happen.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  MAIDENHEAD, MARCH 30, 1971

  WHAT BETTER WAY TO WASH AWAY THE BAD TASTE that the fiasco at the Marquee Club has left in everyone’s mouth than by swilling as much champagne as possible at a party to which the Rolling Stones have invited a very select group of friends to help them bid farewell to the land of their birth. Adding to the allure, the gala will be taking place in a rather fashionable small hotel on the banks of the River Thames.

  Just forty minutes by train from London’s Paddington Station, Skindles Hotel in Maidenhead sits right on the river by a very picturesque stone bridge. Although both Winston Churchill and Princess Margaret have stayed at Skindles in the past, the hotel has also earned itself a somewhat notorious reputation as the place where those engaged in adulterous affairs in London often go to have it off with one another in relative privacy.

  The Rolling Stones will be spending their last night together in England there because Lady Elizabeth Anson has determined that Skindles is the perfect site for this particular celebration. Having spent the last eleven years putting on gala parties virtually every night of the week for those who can afford her services, Lady Elizabeth is not only really good at what she does but also a cousin of the Queen and the younger sister of one of Mick’s good friends, the well-known photographer Patrick Lichfield.

  As Lady Elizabeth will later say, “Mick himself seemed to really care about the details. He explained to me that because the party might get out of control, we didn’t really want to have it in a historically listed building or some place with a fine collection of art where if people decided to trash things, we would get ourselves in deep trouble.

  “And so I began thinking along the lines of ‘Where can I find somebody who is pretty desperate and would like the notoriety of having such a party because of the business it would bring them and won’t mind terribly if a bit of trashing goes on?’ Skindles was going through a very, very tough time financially, and so they were very pleased indeed to have the rental.”

  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.’”