Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye (13 page)

What I did come to realize as that seemingly endless afternoon wore on was just how much time the Stones spent waiting to go onstage while they were on the road. At times it must have seemed even to them that the waiting was all there really was. Which back then was about as existential as I ever got.

Backstage at the Empire Theatre, twenty people doing their best to pretend they have no idea what time it is crowd a very small dressing room waiting for Keith to arrive. With the first show already an hour late and Tony McPhee and the Groundhogs having long since finished their opening set, Chip Monck is now playing an extended version of his greatest hits collection to keep the crowd from freaking out.

Looking for all the world as though he was brought here by the same swirling black funnel cloud that transported Dorothy and Toto from Kansas to Oz, Keith Richards suddenly bursts through the dressing room door with Boogie in his arms. Although Keith’s hair looks a bit ruffled, his face is completely unmarked and he does not seem to be bleeding from any of his extremities which means he should be able to go onstage tonight.

Having made what even on the Broadway stage would have to rank as one hell of a dramatic entrance, Keith does not bother to offer a single word of explanation as to why it has taken him this long to get here. Looking around the dressing room, he says instead, “Is there anything to smoke?”

Slouched on a couch next to Bianca in the far corner, Mick answers the question by quietly saying, “We have to go on. They’ve been waiting.”

What makes Mick’s statement truly remarkable is the complete lack of emotion in his voice. Having been through all this before with Brian Jones, Mick is not about to offer any kind of judgment whatsoever about Keith’s behavior or let him know just how overwrought some people have been all afternoon long. In situations like this, that is simply not what Mick Jagger does. And while everyone including Mick would love to know where the hell
Keith Richards has been all day long, this is neither the time nor the place to ask that particular question.

Since Keith always arrives at the hall in the same clothes he wears onstage, the good news is that no one will have to wait for him to select an outfit in which to perform this evening. As Keith charges into the next room to find his guitar, Anita sinks into a chair across from Mick and Bianca while balancing Marlon on her lap. Essentially naked tonight in a skimpy pair of silver lamé hot pants and a black push-up bra over bare skin, she looks every inch like the queen of rock ’n’ roll.

Acting as though he now has all the time in the world and nothing better to do, Mick gets Marlon laughing by making funny faces at him. “You been on the road now for eighteen months, Marlon,” Mick says. “How do you like this life, eh?”

As soon as Keith appears with a guitar in his hand, the Stones get to their feet and head out the dressing room door. Trailing in their wake, everyone else follows them toward the stage. Decked out this evening in what looks like a coat made from human hair and a see-through blouse, Bianca unwittingly steps in front of Anita as they both head down the hall.

Coming to a dead stop as Bianca keeps right on walking, Anita shoots her a killing look and hisses, “Fuck-eeng bourge-oise cunt voo-man!” Fortunately for all concerned, no one else hears her say this and then at long last, the first show finally begins.

For reasons that may have nothing whatsoever to do with Keith’s as yet still unexplained disappearance this afternoon, the Stones do the only truly bad show of the tour. While others have been less than perfect musically, there has always been electricity, excitement, and real contact with the audience. Tonight there is
nothing. While the set is not unrepresentative of the music the Stones have been making on the tour and the show might actually be considered a good one by some lesser band, the magic that makes the Rolling Stones so special when they perform onstage simply is not there.

After the show is over, the band gathers in the dressing room for a postmortem that quickly comes to resemble the kind of group therapy session in which none of them would ever willingly participate. Looking even sadder than usual, Bill Wyman sits on the couch staring disconsolately at the floor for so long that Keith finally tells him, “Bill, I’m just saying, don’t be so brought down.”

“I just want everyone to say it was shit,” Bill says. “They queued for five hours and….”

“If you think it’s my fault ‘cause I missed the train,” Keith says, “just say it, Bill.”

“I do, yeah,” Bill tells him.

Still not exhibiting a shred of guilt about any of this, Keith says, “I was two minutes late at the station. We went to the airport and the jet broke down. Then they brought in a prop and it broke down.”

Doing her best to cheer Bill up, Astrid says, “They don’t know the difference, Bill. The audience enjoyed themselves. It doesn’t matter to them.”

Shaking his head stubbornly from side to side, Bill says, “We were shit and you all know it.”

Trying to make everyone feel better, Bobby Keys says, “Ah was great. Ah was fantastic. Ah carried y’all.” Although a few people smile weakly at the remark, everyone still looks just as grim as they did before.

“It’s the house,” Keith says. “There’s no contact.”

Putting an end to the conversation as only he can, Mick says, “I don’t care. I don’t give a shit. Well, when I’m onstage, maybe. But I’m off now.” Reaching out to ruffle Boogie’s brown-and-white fur, Mick says, “Right now, I’m petting this little dog here, and that’s what I care about.” Getting to his feet, he then slowly walks out of the room.

After Mick is gone, Keith looks around the room and says, “Anyone have a joint?”

“Yeah,” Gram Parsons says. “Where are the dope dealers when you really need them?”

Sticking his head out of the door, Gram cups both hands around his mouth and yells, “Dope dealers?”

Two minutes later as I was making my way up a backstage staircase looking for a bathroom in which I could relieve myself and write down some notes, I nearly stumbled headfirst over Mick Jagger. Looking very much like a lovelorn high school kid, he was sitting on a landing as Bianca held him tightly in her arms. The scene was so intensely personal that all I could do was turn around silently and go right back down the way I had come. So much for Mick Jagger as the devil incarnate or a rock star so utterly jaded that he could not be bothered to care about anything once he was done with it.

For me, this was the night when I realized for the first time just how much the Rolling Stones still really cared about what they were doing. As I would later see proven again and again in the music business, great talent could only take you so far. Right
from the start, both Mick and Keith had always shared a laser-like focus on the music. Without it, the Rolling Stones could never have stayed together long enough to be upset about having played one bad show in Liverpool.

And yes, just as I had seen them do in Coventry six nights earlier, the band then went back out onstage for the second show and kicked ass in every way imaginable. At one point, as a skinhead began waltzing an aging usher around in circles and a fifty-five-year-old matron wearing eyeglasses bumped her pelvis obscenely to the beat, Mick Jagger actually found himself standing on top of the piano. It was all great stuff and for the first time on the entire tour the crowd actually applauded Mick Taylor’s scorching blues solo in “Love in Vain,” which I suppose showed just how really cool the audience in Liverpool still was even in 1971.

Before we leave the city where the Mersey Beat first came spilling into the street from the cellar full of noise on Mathew Street known as the Cavern Club and the Beatles then proceeded to change the face of popular music only to have so recently fallen apart thanks in part to the influence of Linda McCartney and Yoko Ono, the time has come for us to examine what was really going on between Bianca and Anita on this tour.

As Anita herself had so plainly demonstrated while walking toward the stage before the first show, there was absolutely no love lost between her and Bianca. Nor had they liked one another before the tour began. The two women had first met on the night of September 22, 1970, when Bianca came to see the Stones perform at the Palais des Sports in Paris. Standing in the wings in a flowing black cloak, she immediately caught Mick’s eye.

As Rose Millar would later say, “I remember when Mick first saw Bianca. She was with Eddie Barclay in Paris and Mick came
over to me at the dinner table and said, ‘I really like her. But she belongs to somebody else.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s not going to stop you, is it?’ I always thought they were wonderful together. Real foils for one another. She was feisty and had lots of spirit and was very bright. Apparently, she thought I was boring, but I really liked her and thought she was great.”

As everyone soon learned, Bianca had absolutely nothing in common with Anita. Then twenty-seven years old, Anita was a former model and actress who had appeared in six films, most notably the shocking and utterly scandalous
Performance,
in which she not only was frequently naked on screen but also shared a bath with her costars Michele Breton and Mick Jagger, with whom she was then having a torrid on-set affair.

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?”