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

crazy,Mick puts the microphone between his legs and bends over so far during “Midnight Rambler” that his forehead actually touches the painted white wooden stage. Out in the house, everyone sweats and dances and then goes home happy.
    Or as Bobby Keys shouted as the Stones trooped back onstage in Newcastle for their encore, “Goddammit, rock ’n’ roll is on the road again!” And beyond any shadow of a doubt, so it is.

    Long after the tour was over, the single image that stayed with me from Coventry was seeing Bianca standing in an empty backstage hallway playing with a yo-yo on a string she had wrapped around the wrong finger of her hand. Wholly engrossed in what she was doing and looking much like a young girl dressed up in black and white for a big Saturday night on the town, Bianca seemed completely oblivious to everything that was going on around her.
    Along with her incredible beauty and the obvious hold she had on Mick, it was this quality that had driven many of those traveling with the Stones to utter distraction. A completely self-created creature who never spoke about herself, Bianca was, as Winston Churchill once said of Russia, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
    Nor did any of the quotidian details of her life to this point in time help explain who she really was. That Bianca had once been Michael Caine’s girlfriend and had been living with the famed French record executive and world-class playboy Eddie Barclay when she had first met Mick six months earlier at a Stones show in Paris revealed precious little about her character or precisely what agenda she was now pursuing with Mick.
    Unlike Anita Pallenberg, who had been a full-fledged member of the Rolling Stones’ inner circle ever since she had first become Brian Jones’s girlfriend, Bianca was a rank outsider. Making the current situation even more difficult for all concerned, she never tried to hide her complete disdain for the always funky, drug-fueled world of rock ’n’ roll.
    Doing his best to make a joke of it, Ian Stewart had rearranged the letters of Bianca’s first name and begun calling her “Binaca.” While driving at breakneck speed from Newcastle to Manchester, Stu had let Jo Bergman know how he really felt about Bianca’s influence on Mick by muttering darkly under his breath, “That bird, she’s pushin’ him.”
    And so she was but in precisely which direction no one could say for sure. Because Bianca had such a deep connection to Mick, and because the Rolling Stones could not exist without him, her silent presence on this tour represented a distinct threat to the well-being of one and all. And so everyone always kept a watchful eye on her when she and Mick were together while doing their best to conceal their concern about what their future might entail.
    As Astrid Lundstrom would later say, “There was a big split between Mick and Keith on the tour because Bianca was there. Because of her mere presence, Mick became totally different. Before, he was much more approachable and more of an artist, but Bianca fed all that social narcissistic stuff of his.”
    What no one then knew was that Bianca was two months pregnant with Mick’s child. Considering the way everybody but Mick seemed to feel about her, this was on more than one level clearly a blessing in disguise.

CHAPTER FOUR
    GLASGOW, MARCH 8, 1971
    WELCOME TO GLASGOW, a city so drab and gray and hard and mean that it makes Newcastle and Manchester seem like Paris by comparison. As everyone boards the bus that will take them from the airport to the hall, Mick Jagger decides for reasons known only to him to sit down right beside me. Looking very French indeed today, Mick is wearing a tightly ribbed sweater, a long brushed-suede maxi-coat with a sheepskin lining and collar, and a plaid woolen cap perched backward atop his long, flowing hair. In the corner of his left eye, there is a tiny spot of blood.
    Catching sight of a gaggle of giggling teenage girls