Concerning his feelings about the country where the Rolling Stones were currently wanted by the police for questioning, Mick sighed and said, “Do you know there are no more salmon in the rivers of France? They’ve killed them all with pollution. In Nice and Cannes, the French are thieves. I’ll never live there again.”
After going upstairs to gather his things together so he could go to the studio, Mick walked back into the dining room and said, “People have asked me if I’m not frightened to go out onstage and work every night in America. Maybe you shouldn’t even print anything about that. But, I mean, if we can’t play here, in our other home so to speak, what good is it?” Knowing he had just delivered the perfect exit line, Mick then headed out the door.
After having driven down Sunset Boulevard in a big black Mercedes, Mick walked into the studio so he could make yet another attempt to come up with a final mix for the song that after much discussion he had already selected to be the first single from the new album.
As Andy Johns would later say, “We had recorded ‘All Down the Line’ at Nellcôte and then overdubbed it in Los Angeles. It was the first song that actually got finished, and Mick said, ‘This is a single. This is a single!’ And I thought, He’s out of his fucking mind. This is not a single. So I said to him, ‘You’re wrong about this. This is not a single.’ And he went, ‘Really? Do ya think so?’ And that was the first time I realized, ‘Jesus, he’ll actually listen to me.’
“I was having a hard time mixing it and I said, ‘Jeez, I just can’t imagine this on the radio.’ And Mick said, ‘Do you want to hear it on the radio?’ And I said, ‘Yeah. How do you …,’ and he said, ‘Oh, we can do that.’ And he went, ‘Stu, call up that radio station. Go round there with the tape. We’ll call you from the limo. Have ’em put it on.’
“I was tooling up and down the Sunset Strip in the back of this limo with Keith and Mick and Charlie listening to a mix on the radio. I mean, how surreal is that? And Mick says, ‘What do you think?’ The sound system was so ratty in the limo that I said, ‘I don’t know, man.’ And he said, ‘We’ll have Stu play it again.’ Picking up the phone, he said, ‘Stu, have ’em play that again.’ Sure enough. There it was again. I thought that was pretty cool. But in the end, they decided ‘Tumbling Dice’ was the single.”
Despite having made this decision, Mick still looked none too pleased as he walked through the control room door of studio number 3 at Wally Heider’s that night. “Was this the Beach Boys’ studio?” he asked. “I mean, I’ve been here before. You lose all the highs.”
Hesitantly, the regular studio engineer, who would not be allowed to touch a single knob or dial that night, said, “Uh, actually it was completely rebuilt a while ago. You might still think there’s too much bottom but that’s because the top is going out over your head.” Not at all happy with this answer, Mick grimaced and decided to just try to make the best of it.
Sitting alongside producer Jimmy Miller at the board, Andy Johns cued up a rough mix of “Tumbling Dice.” From out of the speakers came a raging river of sound. Four guitars, two playing rhythm, one tracked through a Lesley, Bobby Keys on saxophone, Jim Price on trumpet and trombone, Nicky Hopkins on piano, Mick Taylor on bass, Charlie Watts on drums, Jimmy Miller on drums in the coda, and Clydie King and Venetta Fields on backup vocals. When the song finally ended, it seemed very quiet indeed in the room.
“Well,” Andy Johns said. “What do you think?”
Looking up at the soundproof ceiling, Mick said, “I want the snares to crack and the voices to float. It’s tricky all right. You think you’ve got the voices sussed and all of a sudden the backing track seems so….” Stopping for a moment to find the proper word, Mick finally said, “ … so … ordinaire.”
After rewinding the tape, Andy Johns began flicking knobs and turning dials so he could come up with a brand-new mix. Like magic, the bass guitar receded and the drums sounded crisp as the guitars began to overlap as they had not done before. Not at all certain that he liked this version any better than the last, Mick was suddenly distracted when Bianca walked into the room. Looking just as fabulous as ever, she sat down on the couch and began smoking a cigarette as Andy Johns rewound the tape yet again.
Even for Los Angeles back then, an awful lot of cocaine began going around the room. Since no one was going home anytime soon that night and the entire process was so laborious for those who had now been working on this album for nearly a year, it definitely seemed better to be wired than to fall asleep during the session.
After playing Mick yet another mix that did not seem to please him, Andy Johns said, “I thought you liked cymbals like that.”
Shaking his head, Mick said, “They sound like dustbin lids.”
Pouting for a moment, Andy Johns then began rewinding the tape so they could start all over again. And so it went until long after I had left the studio and gone back home.
That Keith Richards was nowhere to be seen in the studio that night spoke volumes about who was now running the show insofar as the new album was concerned. Whether this was because Mick was the one who always took over at this stage of the proceedings or because Keith had far more serious personal issues to deal with at the time was hard to say.
After having made my way up the very hip and fashionable Stone Canyon Road in Bel Air the next day, I found Keith lying on the roof of the big two-tone Chevrolet parked in front of his house making faces at his son Marlon through the windshield. Because Keith only ever existed in present time, our conversation began as though it had only been a few days since we had last seen one another at Villa Nellcôte. That we now both somehow found ourselves in Los Angeles was also of no great concern to him.
Climbing down from the roof of the car, Keith put out his hand and said, “Hallo. Have you heard? They’re at it again. They decided to remix the whole album. Been up for thirty-one hours so far, I hear.” Laughing, he said, “Always happens. The more you mix, the better it gets.” Picking Marlon up in his arms, Keith then led me into the house where he had been living for the past four months.
Everything there was even more chaotic than usual because Keith and Anita were packing so they could board the four o’clock flight to Geneva the next day. Looking hugely pregnant, Anita walked past us into the kitchen. Explaining how this came about, Keith said, “We figured Marlon was lonesome so we let it happen.” Asked if she was carrying twins, Anita sternly replied, “No, it is the dress.” Without further ado, she then began throwing her belongings into the first of the nineteen pieces of luggage they planned to take with them the next day.
Sitting down at the table in his dining room just as Mick had done in his house, Keith began telling me how nice it had been for him to make the new album at Villa Nellcôte even though what with the band playing all night long in the blazing heat, things had gotten a bit hectic in the house. “But,” he said, “with the truck always outside and ready, we could just go downstairs whenever we felt like it and work on a riff.”
Concentrating on coloring circles on a piece of paper with a yellow crayon he had just found, Keith said, “I’m not even thinking about this tour. I’m just going to show up and be on it. I wish we’d work some places we haven’t been like Kansas City. We’ve only been to Memphis once but that’s because you get hung up in the same old circuit of cities all the time. We’ve got a short list of people we’d like to take with us. The Staple Singers or Joe Tex. An old bluesman would be nice but they’re pretty fragile.”
Asked if this would be the Stones’ last tour, Keith suddenly looked up and said, “I doubt it. We need the money.” Launching into full stream-of-consciousness mode, Keith then began talking about his recent fairly disastrous attempt to perform onstage in Los Angeles with Chuck Berry, how he had really wanted to release “Sweet Virginia” as an easy listening single, and what a gas it might be if the Stones decided to play a festival in Lebanon this summer.
Whatever he was about to say next was cut short by the sound of the phone r
inging. After picking it up and listening for a moment, Keith mumbled something into the receiver and then hung it back up again. Looking at me like the real fun was about to begin, he said, “They’ve got the new mixes at Marshall’s house. Let’s go!”
In the little pool house up on Mulholland Drive where Marshall Chess was living within spitting distance of Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, the scene was fairly frantic. Chris O’Dell, who was now working for the Stones in Los Angeles and for whom Leon Russell had written “Pisces Apple Lady,” was on the phone looking for a piano player in case Mick decided he wanted to cut a promotional radio jingle for the new album.
More or less talking to the room at large, she said, “Billy Preston wasn’t home. Stevie Wonder is available but I haven’t asked Mick about him. I called Carole King and she said that what with the new baby and all, she wasn’t working much anymore.”
Looking as though they had both just been launched from a cannon at the circus, Jimmy Miller and Andy Johns charged in through the front door. Holding album sleeves in his hands, Miller said, “Take that shit off and play something good. We’ve redone five songs.”
After the final chords of the brand-new mix of “Tumbling Dice” had faded away, Mick shut his eyes and said, “You know, Jimmy, they’re both good.”
“Maybe the old one,” Keith mumbled.
“I think the new one is more commercial,” Miller said.
The two mixes sounded so much alike that not even Mick could tell which one he had just heard. After a long discussion about the relative merits of each version, Keith asked which mix would sound better in mono. For a moment, no one said a word.
“Okay,” Jimmy Miller conceded, “the old one. We’ll go back now and play with it.”
“Yeah,” Andy Johns agreed. “Just a fraction more top on it. It’s still a bit dull.”
As they started collecting the mixes, Mick grabbed a piece of paper and began drawing the album title the way he wanted to see it appear on the cover. Talking to himself on the far side of the room, Marshall Chess said, “Fanatics.” Laughing softly, he then repeated the word far more emphatically than before. Ten months after they had first begun recording at Villa Nellcôte in the South of France, the new Rolling Stones album was finally done.
With the sun fading behind the hills and the light failing outside the windows of the little pool house, Mick and Keith sat slumped side by side on a couch in the middle of the living room. In the gathering gloom, all you could see were their pale white faces and dark feathered hair. For what may have been the last time in their lives, they looked like brothers.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
VANCOUVER, JUNE 3, 1972–NEW YORK CITY, JULY 26, 1972
WHILE I CERTAINLY ENJOYED MYSELF on the Rolling Stones 1972 tour of America, the tour itself was most definitely not fun. Rather, it was a military campaign of the first order, a rock ’n’ roll version of General Sherman’s March to the Sea that enabled the Stones to cross over into a brand-new market that would continue to expand exponentially with each passing year.
In terms of the zeitgeist, the tour was precisely what the age demanded. Over the top, loud, violent, angry, decadent, and incredibly lucrative, it bore no resemblance whatsoever to the extremely civilized cakewalk I had experienced with the Stones in England just fifteen months earlier. The real miracle was that I even managed to get myself on the tour in the first place.
Despite all the time I had spent with the band over the course of the previous year, I discovered to my great shock that I was not the fair-haired boy at Rolling Stone that I had imagined myself to be. And so I had to call in as many favors as I could from those who worked for the Stones before the magazine agreed to let me cover the tour. Although I also wanted to write a book about the tour, the man who ran the magazine’s publishing division simply could not have been less interested in the idea.
Even though I had to put my great dream of becoming a published author on hold, the good news for me far outweighed the bad. At long last, I was going to get to write about something big. Exactly how big, I had no idea until I began hanging out at the Beverly Rodeo Hotel in Los Angeles where the bar was always filled with hookers and tour manager Peter Rudge, Jo Bergman, Alan Dunn, and Chris O’Dell were frantically working to put together shows by the Rolling Stones in thirty-two cities over the course of the next fifty-three days.
Unlike my account of the English tour which had focused solely on the Stones and their offstage adventures, what I wanted to do this time around was cut back and forth between the band, the supporting musicians, the people working on the tour at every level, and all the insanely obsessed fans who were willing to go to impossible lengths just to see a single show.
What I did not realize until the tour actually began was that in order to do this I would find myself spending just as much time outside the awful hockey arenas where the Stones performed as I did backstage with the band. As I soon learned, the hordes of angry kids who assembled out there each night had not come to hear the music but rather to do some fighting in the street.
And so instead of helping Keith Richards break into a locked dressing room, as I had done on the English tour, I found myself hanging alongside Peter Rudge on a large corrugated metal door that forty kids without tickets had already managed to lift four feet off the ground at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver so they could come rushing in for free.
In Seattle, I watched Mick Jagger walk toward the band’s private plane with a blond girl who might have been twenty years old. In a plain cotton dress with no makeup on her face, she would not have looked out of place selling cookies and lemonade at a high school dance. After bidding her goodbye, Mick looked at me with a lascivious grin on his face and said, “Yeah, I had a nice bit of sex last night. Know what I mean?”
Why Mick had even gone to the trouble of telling me this, I had no idea. No more than five minutes later, he was clutching the armrest of his seat in abject fear while explaining that the power turn the Stones’ private jet was now making was the single most dangerous moment in any flight. As always, it was just Mick being Mick. On the road in America, I soon learned there was no way of knowing what he might say or do in any given situation.
Unlike the English tour when I had been the only reporter traveling with the band, the Stones were now accompanied from city to city by a press contingent so large that it would not have looked out of place on a presidential campaign. To protect Mick from physical harm and ensure that Keith would not get busted for drugs by local cops, they were both surrounded by several concentric circles of heavy-duty security. Unless you were doing heroin, there were also certain rooms into which you simply could not go once the show was over. Despite these constraints, certain moments that occurred while I was out on the road with the Stones that summer have stayed with me ever since.
After visiting Dealey Plaza so I could look up at the sixth-floor window in the Texas School Book Depository from which the Warren Commission claimed that a lone gunman had assassinated John F. Kennedy, I found myself drinking dark beer and eating pizza with Charlie Watts late one night in a very collegiate bar in Dallas. Delighted not to be recognized by anyone, Charlie stared at his food and said, “It’s not much of a way to see the country, is it? All you care about is how the bed is and can you get something to eat after the show?”
Before the show in Houston the next night, I was banging away on my portable typewriter in the little trailer the Stones used to leave the arena each night when Charlie stuck his head in through the window. After watching me for a moment, he said, “Doin’ your homework then, are you?” With his drumsticks spinning like helicopter rotors in his hands, he then walked out onstage to play.
In New Orleans, Ahmet Ertegun threw what must still rank as the greatest party I have ever attended in my life. As Roosevelt Sykes, a sixty-six-year-old Chicago-based boogie-woogie piano player known as “The Honeydripper,” Snooks Eaglin, a blind guitarist, and the fabled Professor Longhair performed, people danced the
mselves into a daze in a room where the temperature was easily 100 degrees. When a New Orleans street band began strutting across the floor led by a magnificent old black man in a black hat and white gloves with a starred white sash across his chest and a stuffed pigeon dangling off one shoulder, everyone began walking behind them in time to the second line while waving white handkerchiefs in the air.
In Mobile, Alabama, I saw what I still believe to have been a moment of authentic social change in America when an audience comprised mainly of white kids got on their feet to dance as Stevie Wonder, who opened so brilliantly for the Stones each night, launched into “Superstition.” Once the show was over, Ian Stewart, who would log an astonishing 8,000 miles in rental cars before the tour was over and then sleep for three straight days on the ocean liner taking him back to England, drove me at top speed through Biloxi, Gulfport, and Bay St. Louis in Mississippi on Highway 90.
By the time my first article appeared in Rolling Stone, I had already been ordered to leave the tour. Whether this decision was based on how much money the magazine was spending to keep me on the road, the quality of my writing, or the fact that Rolling Stone had also decided to have Truman Capote write his own account of what it was like to journey through America with the Rolling Stones, I had no idea either then or now.
All I knew was that Truman was in and I was out. Leaving the tour at its midway point in Nashville, I flew back to Los Angeles and began cranking out what was to be my final massive report about the Stones at play in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion in Chicago, the incredible saga of Cynthia Sagittarius, the twenty-one-year-old hippie girl who hitchhiked to every city on the tour and then just waited outside the hall until someone gave her a ticket, and how it felt to be surrounded by thick-necked cops in the Deep South who hated everyone and everything having to do with the Rolling Stones.
Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye Page 14
