Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye by Robert Greenfield Read Free Book Online

could not get enough of Bobby Keys on this tour. With a mouth and a heart as big as Texas, he was every rock writer’s dream come true, an endless source of colorful stories about how he had once shot craps with Major Lance in a nightclub in Muncie, Indiana, and seen Billy “Fat Boy” Stewart pull a gun on someone during an argument after a show.
    Because it was all such great stuff, I dutifully reported what Bobby Keys told me word for word in the article I wrote about the tour for Rolling Stone magazine only to learn many years later that on this tour Bobby was working just as hard at creating hisown legend as he did each night playing saxophone onstage with the Stones. Taking it point by point, here is the actual truth.
    Far too young to have ever actually played or recorded with Buddy Holly, Bobby Keys was eleven years old when he saw Holly perform on the back of a flatbed truck at the grand opening of a gas station in Lubbock. Since Alan Freed did his first show at the Brooklyn Paramount in 1955 when Bobby was just twelve years old and neither Buddy Holly and the Crickets, nor Clyde McPhatter, nor the Everly Brothers appeared on the bill, that story was also not true. Nor had Bobby already been on the road for sixteen years in 1971.
    What does seem to be true is that while he was working with singer Bobby Vee at the Texas State Fair in San Antonio in July 1964, Bobby Keys did see the Rolling Stones perform before a decidedly indifferent crowd who could not have cared less about their music. When the Stones came back to do their second show that night, Bobby told Brian Jones that pop groups in America always changed their clothes before going onstage, thereby prompting the members of the band to exchange what they were wearing with one another.
    As Jim Price would later tell me, he and Bobby Keys had both flown to London after completing Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour with drummer Jim Gordon, bassist Carl Radle, and keyboard player and vocalist Bobby Whitlock to join forces with Eric Clapton in a new band that came to be called Derek and the Dominos. After rehearsing for about a week at Abbey Road studios, they realized, in Price’s words, “Hey, this is a guitar and keyboard band and they don’t need any horns.”
    Both musicians were about to return to Los Angeles when Mick Jagger called and asked them to come play on the sessionsfor Sticky Fingers. A trained musician who could also play piano, Price came up with all the horn arrangements in which Bobby played the sax solos. Both Keys and Price then accompanied the Stones on their 1970 European tour.
    While I am certainly not the only journalist ever to be taken in by a charming but unreliable source, Bobby Keys was so completely irresistible in so many ways that even now I cannot find it in my heart to hold any of this against him. Thanks to the energy he and Jim Price brought to the Stones’ music each night onstage, the band seemed in many ways to be completely reborn.
    Despite all the braggadocio, Bobby had in fact spent most of his adult life out on the road smoking pot, drinking to excess, and taking as much Benzedrine as he could while traveling from one small town to another with a variety of bands on a bus. Which was why Bobby Keys was the way he was.

    Shutting off his cassette recorder in the dressing room, Bobby Keys carefully pulls a velvet jacket on over his ruffled black stage shirt. Grabbing his horn, he charges out into the hallway like a runaway Brahma bull. Bumping right into Mick, he says, “You gotta teach me some French, man.”
    Laughing out loud, Mick says, “Sure, Bobby.”
    “Want me to write some songs too?” Bobby asks. “They won’t sell as much as yours but….”
    Before he can complete the sentence, the Stones walk out onstage. And just like in the movies, the second show is a bitch. With the lights all green and purple in their faces, Mick and the boys incite the crowd to a near-riot. As Charlie cooks like