Although Keith somehow managed to talk his way out of the situation, he was banned from ever staying again at the Londonderry Hotel. “There had been a fire while we had been recording at Nellcôte and then Keith’s house in Sussex had burned down as did Mick Taylor’s house during that period. Wherever he went back then, Keith was always followed by a trail of fire.”
While Keith may have never known he was about to be replaced in the Rolling Stones by Jesse Ed Davis, a talented guitarist who would himself eventually die of a drug overdose, the fact that Mick Jagger was ready to do this to keep the band on the road spoke volumes about how their relationship had changed over the past two years. Although neither of them knew it at the time, the writing was also on the wall for both Jimmy Miller and Andy Johns.
By the time the Rolling Stones went to Munich in 1974 to record Black and Blue, Miller had been replaced as the producer of the album by Mick and Keith, aka The Glimmer Twins. After showing up late for the first session because one of Keith’s friends had stolen his stash and then subsisting for a while on heroin that Mick “was kind enough to steal from Keith for me,” Andy Johns was told not to come back after the Christmas break. Neither he nor Jimmy Miller ever worked for the band again.
Despite how dire the scene in Jamaica had seemed, it soon became just another dark chapter in the never-ending story of the Rolling Stones. In time, both Mick Taylor and Bill Wyman would leave the band. For wildly different reasons, Jo Bergman, Marshall Chess, Chip Monck, and Peter Rudge would also soon be gone.
In 1985, Ian Stewart would die of a massive heart attack at the age of forty-seven while sitting in his doctor’s waiting room. After doing a show in his memory at the 100 Club on Oxford Street, the Stones would go right on touring just as they always had done before. In time, Mick and Bianca would part company as would Keith and Anita but the Stones still soldiered on.
As their former manager Andrew Loog Oldham, whom the Stones had also left behind, wrote of them, “Stars must be killers, always striking first and last…. There’s no remorse when they kill, no regrets when they pimp and no shame when they whore. And it’s really a fair exchange: the world needs them and they need the world.”
While some may view this as the devil’s bargain, the truth was that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards simply could not survive without making music and then walking out onstage to perform before huge crowds all over the world. As everyone would learn over the course of the next five decades, it would never be over for the Rolling Stones until Mick and Keith were finally done.
EPILOGUE
HAIL AND FAREWELL
AFTER FINDING MYSELF A SMALL CABIN overlooking the ocean in northern California for the princely sum of $125 a month, I started working on the book that came to be entitled S.T.P.: A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones. Sitting at a desk a carpenter friend had built for me, I wrote a chapter a week and then went out on Friday nights to celebrate.
The first full-length account ever written about a rock tour, the book has since been republished in America and the United Kingdom and remains in print to this day. Having said that, the reviews that greeted S.T.P. when it first appeared were most definitely mixed.
In Rolling Stone magazine, the late Chet Flippo wrote, “Greenfield is perhaps too much the objective observer, too much the disinterested journalist. He never explains why he was kicked off the tour, he never develops a coherent viewpoint. At different times, he appears as ‘I,’ as ‘this writer,’ and ‘anyone.’ Ultimately, S.T.P. is part of the endless coverage of the Stones, who … manage either to be substanceless people or project a public image of vacuity.”
In NME, the weekly English music business trade paper, the late Mick Farren, the former lead singer of the Deviants who was himself no mean writer, noted, “I fear this book may be the one that could finally O.D. the reader on rock writing, particularly that flat, conscientious, detailed, post–Truman Capote style that has made Rolling Stone what it is today…. The book shows that writers like Greenfield can get locked in by rock and roll. Instead of wearing out his buns hanging around on a Stones tour, he should be with the real action.”
To all these charges even at this late date, I do plead guilty, Your Honor. For the record, I should also like to state that when someone half my age recently asked me if there was anything left to say about the Rolling Stones, I said, “No.” Which of course did not stop me from going on at length about them here for the third time in my career.
And now at long last, we come to the title of this book. As all dyed-in-the-wool fans of the band already know, it happens to be a line from “Angie,” a song that Keith wrote while kicking heroin in Switzerland shortly after Exile on Main St. had finally been deemed ready to be delivered to Atlantic Records.
As Nick Kent, the mild-mannered English rock journalist who went into a phone booth in London one day only to reemerge as the second coming of Keith Richards, wrote in NME when “Angie” was released, “This is positively the most depressing task I’ve had to undertake as a rock writer. This single is a dire mistake on as many levels as you care to mention. ‘Angie’ is atrocious.”
Although “Angie” ranked fifty-ninth in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the Stones’ top one hundred songs and remains the only ballad by the band ever to go to number one on the charts while also featuring Mick Jagger’s faintly audible guide track—also known as a “ghost vocal”—I cannot say I disagree with Nick Kent’s appraisal of it.
As a song, “Angie” still seems pretty soppy and far too sweet for my taste but there you go. My original title for this book was Goodbye, Johnny B. Goode but after a good deal of discussion about whether anyone would know what this meant, the marketing director at Da Capo Press came up with Ain’t It Time We Said Goodbye and I decided to go with that instead. Having said this, I am really glad I did.
After lo these many years, the time has indeed finally come for me to say goodbye to the band without whom my career, not to mention my life, would have been radically different in so many ways. Perhaps because I walked before they made me run, I have nothing but positive memories of the time I spent with the Rolling Stones.
On every level, the pleasure was definitely all mine, and I would not have wanted to miss any of it for the world. Or as Keith wrote to Mick Taylor after learning he had left the Rolling Stones, “Thanks for all the turn-ons.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FIRST AND FOREMOST, I would like to thank Ben Schafer, my editor of long standing at Da Capo Press and fellow aficionado of beatnik literature, who gave me the go-ahead to write this book. My thanks also go to Kevin Hanover who came up with a title that I liked more than my own.
As always, I would like to thank all those who were kind enough to make the time to speak to me concerning the Rolling Stones’ 1971 tour of Great Britain. In alphabetical order, they are Lady Elizabeth Anson, Jeff Dexter, Alan Dunn, Chip Monck, Noel Monk, David Noffsinger, Jerry Pompili, Jim Price, Jeff Stacy, and Tony Smith.
For his invaluable help in finding information about The Big Apple in Brighton, I would like to thank Robert Allan. For helping me sort out exactly what happened in Belfast in the spring of 1971, my thanks to Joe Stevens.
For being a lifelong pal and going through his archives for me, I would like to thank Phil Franks, whose excellent website, the Philm Freax Digital Archive, is a treasure trove of information about the underground scene in England during the early 1970s.
For providing me with the wonderful photograph of Ian Stewart and Mick Jagger, I would like to thank Will Nash. Anyone interested in his remarkable book about Ian Stewart can contact Will at [email protected]. I would also like to thank the great Chip Monck for providing me with photographs from his own extensive archive.
For directing me to the Daily Mirror archive, where I was astonished to find a photograph of myself from the 1971 tour I had never seen before, my thanks to Adam Cooper. David Scripps at the Mirrorpix Archive made it possible for me to use these photographs in this
book. Thanks as well to Peter Everard Smith for the photo of the Stones performing at the Roundhouse in London that graces the cover of this book.
Closer to home, I would like to thank Chris Cochran, who kept me working through his computer magic. For their friendship and never-ending support, I would like to thank Jeffrey Greenberg, Paul Goldman, and Janice and Brian Higgins.
My gratitude for all they did for me goes to Dr. David Dansky, the incredible human heavy metal beat box machine also known as Dr. Scott Smith, Dr. Jeremy Silk, Ryan Vereker, and all the nurses and incredibly caring staff at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula.
As always, I could not have written this book without Donna, and I thank her for sticking with me through some truly hard times. I should also like to send special love to Sandy and Anna.
If you will permit me, I should like to add one final thought. Whether we know it or not, we are all closing by secondary intention. Along the way, the least we can do is try to shed some light on the process.
SOURCES
MUCH OF WHAT APPEARS IN THIS BOOK comes from the two spiral-bound notebooks I filled during the 1971 Stones farewell tour of Great Britain. I have also drawn on interviews I conducted in the past with Marshall Chess, Andy Johns, Glyn Johns, Astrid Lundstrom, Rose Millar, and Keith Richards.
ARTICLES
Robert Greenfield, “The Rolling Stones on Tour: Goodbye Great Britain,” Rolling Stone, April 15, 1971.
Robert Greenfield, “Keith Richard: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, August 19, 1971.
Robert Greenfield, “The Rolling Stones in LA: Main Street Exiles,” Rolling Stone, April 27, 1972.
BOOKS
Julian Dawson, And on Piano … Nicky Hopkins: The Extraordinary Life of Rock’s Greatest Session Man. San Francisco: Backstage Press, 2011.
Pete Fornatale, with Bernard M. Corbett and Peter Thomas Fornatale, 50 Licks: Myths and Stories from Half a Century of the Rolling Stones. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Robert Greenfield, S.T.P.: A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974.
Robert Greenfield, Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones. New York: Da Capo Press, 2006.
Bill Janovitz, Rocks Off: 50 Tracks That Tell the Story of the Rolling Stones. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013.
Bobby Keys, with Bill Ditenhafer, Every Night’s a Saturday Night: The Rock ’n’ Roll Life of Legendary Sax Man Bobby Keys. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2012.
Lisa A. Lewis, ed., The Adoring Audience. London: Routledge, 1992.
Prince Rupert Loewenstein, A Prince Among Stones: That Business with the Rolling Stones and Other Adventures. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013.
Will Nash, Stu. London: Out-Take Limited, 2003.
Philip Norman, Mick Jagger. New York: Ecco Press, 2012.
Andrew Loog Oldham, Stoned: A Memoir of London in the 1960s. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001.
Keith Richards, with James Fox, Life. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2011.
Dominique Tarlé, EXILE: The Making of Exile on Main St. Guildford, UK: Genesis Press, 2001.
Bill Wyman, with Richard Havers, Rolling with the Stones. New York: DK Publishing, 2002.
FILMS
Charlie Is My Darling: Ireland 1965, produced by Andrew Loog Oldham, photographed, edited, and directed by Peter Whitehead. ABKCO Films, 1966.
Crossfire Hurricane, written and directed by Brett Morgen. Eagle Rock Entertainment, 2012.
Gimme Shelter, directed by Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin. Maysles Films, 1970.
WEBSITE SOURCE
Robin Millar, “Rose and the Stones,” available at: http://www.robinmillar.org.uk/autobiography/rose_stones.htm.
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