Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye (6 page)

In the world of rock ’n’ roll circa 1971, no one had a more impressive onstage résumé than Edward Beresford Monck, who had always been called “Chip” ever since he was a boy. Best known as the reassuring voice from the stage that had warned the crowd at Woodstock to stay away from the brown acid, Chip had been dosed by Owsley at Monterey Pop, helped Bill Graham renovate the Fillmore East, and lost five teeth after a Hells Angel smacked him in the mouth with the weighted end of a pool cue at Altamont.

A tall, lean, and rangy man with long reddish-brown hair, a huge mustache, and the regal bearing of a New England aristocrat, Chip had first seen the Stones perform at the Boston Garden in 1967. As he would later say, “They just stood there and played and so I tried to do something more decorative and creative with them.”

After being hired by the band for their 1969 American tour, Chip put together the first lighting system ever to go out on the road with a rock ’n’ roll band. To a great degree, what happened each night on this tour when the Stones performed “Midnight Rambler” was due to Chip. For when Mick Jagger slapped that
studded belt against the stage and all the lights suddenly went blood red in his face, everyone in the house knew they were watching an authentic theater piece.

Before each show began, Chip would help set the mood for what was to come by playing songs like “Hard Headed Woman” by Cat Stevens. Once the show was over, Chip would send the audience home by playing a version of “Lady Jane” from which he had removed the vocal track, thereby making it into what he would later call “a beautiful piece of instrumentation. Like a madrigal, really. ‘Have a good evening, get home safely, we look forward to seeing you the next time around.’”

An artist in his own right who would sometimes laughingly refer to Mick Jagger when he was not around as “His Ladyship,” Chip always made it plain to his crew that being on the road with the Stones was not a party and they were not to associate with the band under any circumstances unless they were asked to do so—which of course never happened.

And although Chip would later say that by this point in his career he had “already gotten to the point where I realized production was three fingers under the elbow as the artist crossed the street and not something that was supposed to rival the music,” his nightly contribution to what the Stones were then doing onstage was most definitely a significant part of the overall mise-en-scène.

Sitting together in a corner of the dressing room between shows, Charlie Watts turns to Bill Wyman and says, “Why aren’t we staying in the Piccadilly Hotel here?”

“Banned,” Bill tells him.

“What?” Charlie says. “Banned? Not us. Jagger’s a film star now.”

“Not him,” Bill says. “Us. Last time we were here, Brian was throwing pillows out of a fourteenth-floor window. Blame it on the night porter then.”

As he would soon demonstrate in no uncertain terms on this tour, Bill Wyman was already the walking history of the Rolling Stones. Unlike Mick and Keith, Bill forgot nothing and had only to consult the extensive journals he had so carefully kept over the years to know precisely what the band had been doing on any given day. A compulsive collector, Bill also saved virtually every last piece of Stones memorabilia that ever came through his hands.

When it came to putting up with Mick and Keith, Bill was in many ways just as long-suffering as Charlie, and there were endless tales of Bill walking into the studio only to discover that Keith had gone ahead and put his own bass line on a song without ever bothering to inform Bill about what he was doing.

A sexual privateer of the first order who also kept a complete log of all the women he slept with on the road, Bill was accompanied on this tour by the lithe and lovely Astrid Lundstrom, whom he had met in 1967 when she was an eighteen-year-old Swedish schoolgirl studying in London. Having been around the Stones long enough to be completely accepted by everyone, Astrid was then still so shy that she usually spoke only to Bill.

As she would later say, “Bands are male tribes and the Stones were always kind of making fun of Bill because he was too straight
for them. In my opinion, he was incredibly straight. A bit rigid, a bit anal, and the sort of person who cataloged things. But quirky, no. I would have found that very appealing. I like quirkiness. But Bill was not quirky at all.”

In
Rolling with the Stones,
the massive, coffee table–sized book he co-authored with Richard Havers in 2002, Bill Wyman dutifully noted that shortly before the Stones began their farewell tour of Great Britain, he received a payment of $662 from former Stones’ manager Allen Klein. Charlie Watts, Ian Stewart, and the estate of Brian Jones were all sent checks for $251, while Mick and Keith each received more than $805,000 in royalties, an enormous sum that would now be worth six to eight times that much. And so, despite the incredible amount of money the Rolling Stones owed the Inland Revenue in England, it was not as though either Mick or Keith was exactly broke at the time.

According to Bill, precisely 34,400 people came to see the Stones perform on their farewell tour of Great Britain. Getting down to farthings and pence as only he could, Bill noted that the total gross receipts from the tour amounted to £25,800 (just a bit more than $60,000). After all the expenses had been deducted, the remaining sum was split so many ways among the Stones and their supporting cast of musicians that it seems clear even now that money was not the motivating factor for these shows.

In his book, Bill also included some of the articles about the Stones as well as reviews of their shows that appeared in various journals in England at the time, among them the
Financial Times,
the
Yorkshire Post,
the
Record Mirror,
and the
Newcastle Journal.
Although the notices were almost uniformly favorable, referring to the Stones “as a piece of social history” and “still the best little
rock ’n’ roll band in the world,” Bill himself was singled out for “his gravedigger’s smile” and for looking onstage “as though he was waiting for a bus. But he didn’t sound like it because he and the others played superbly.”

In the world according to Bill Wyman, that was just about all there really was to be said about the Rolling Stones’ farewell tour of England.

As the time for the band to go out onstage to do the second show draws near, Mick suddenly gets to his feet and says, “I’m so zonked out. I need some energy.” Like a boxer doing some fancy footwork before entering the ring for a championship fight, he starts running madly in place before leading the band out of the dressing room door.

Standing in what has now become my regular spot beside Chip Monck at the piano on the left side of the stage, I watch as the people sitting right down front reach out to the stage with their eyes closed and their hands held up before them like they are now praying that Mick Jagger will take them somewhere they cannot possibly go without him. Although none of this can hold a candle to the awful acid-induced madness that went down on the stage at Altamont, there is most definitely something truly frightening about it.

As we ride together to the hotel after the show in the backseat of a limo, Marshall Chess says, “You thought tonight was scary? You should have seen the show in Paris on the European tour last year. Real revolutionaries in that crowd, man. One guy wanted to pull me offstage because I was wearing a suit. Another guy came onstage and fell to his knees begging Mick to whip him. Three
naked chicks came dancing out. It was crazy. In Germany, this Hells Angel had a gun. It only shot blanks, but we took it away from him. If he’d pulled it out during the concert, he would have been killed. Chip had these metal pipes onstage he used like javelins to keep the crowd away. Compared to that, tonight wasn’t scary at all.”

Having been declared persona non grata by all the establishments where they would have preferred to stay tonight in Manchester, the Stones instead found themselves stuck all the way out of town in a classic red brick British railway hotel located not all that far from a sign pointing appropriately enough to T
HE
E
DGE
.

Out on the road with their girlfriends and small children in tow, the Stones no longer resembled the pop idols they had been back in 1966 in any way, shape, or form, and so the good news was that there was no way they would ever be banned from staying there again. The bad news was that they were all bored to death. With nowhere to go and nothing better to do, everyone congregated in a large room where no other guests were permitted to enter and proceeded to do all they could to entertain one another.

Speaking in a soft and halting voice, Gram Parsons, the brilliant singer-songwriter who left the Byrds to become a founding member of the Flying Burrito Brothers, and whom Marshall Chess now plans to sign to Rolling Stones Records, starts telling Charlie Watts about the night Bobby Keys walked into a studio to play on a session with Yoko Ono. “People were sniffing Excedrin and bouncing off the walls. And Yoko said, ‘Bobby, imagine there is a
cold wind blowing and you are a lonely frog.’ Bobby Keys a frog. He just laid down his sax and played marimbas and tambourine and said, ‘Lady, yew shore got a strange slant on things.’ Yeah, starting with your eyes.”