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

lined up outside the window to gawk at him, Mick laughs out loud and says he hasn’t seen anything like this since 1962. And then he begins to talk. In a rambling rap that seems to go in all directions at once, Mick starts telling me about the mystical aspects of Stonehenge and Glastonbury and then about all the time he recently spent in Bali, “which is a total culture for the arts where a whole village will stay up all night for an opera or a ballet.”
    For reasons that totally escape me, Mick and I then launchinto what soon becomes a long and very involved conversation in fairly rapid-fire French. When I ask Mick how he learned to speak the language, he replies, “En l’école [ in school ], en France un peu [ in France a bit ], et avec ma jeune fille [ and with my girl .]” Talking about Bianca as she herself never does, Mick tells me she has lived all over the world ever since she was fifteen years old and has spent time in France, Japan, Hawaii, and Canada.
    In response to a question about music that I finally break down and ask him, Mick says, “Oh, who listens to Chuck Berry anymore? I mean, I haven’t listened to that stuff for years. Rock ’n’ roll has always been made by white suburban bourgeoisie like Elton John. For God’s sake, I listen to the MC5. I don’t like to see one thing end until I see another beginning. Like, for instance, breaking up with a woman. Do you know what I mean?”

    While I was not about to say this to him then, my best answer to this question would have been, “Actually, I have no idea whatsoever.” In his own inimitable way, was Mick trying to tell me that the chapter in the band’s history that had begun on the fateful day in October 1961 when Keith Richards came over to talk to him on the train station in Dartford because of the albums Mick was carrying, Chuck Berry’s One Dozen Berrys foremost among them, was now over?
    Or was he referring to the manner in which he had finally decided to end his long-standing relationship with Marianne Faithfull after being told in no uncertain terms by Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary founder of Atlantic Records, that her increasingdependence on heroin was putting the future of the Rolling Stones in jeopardy?
    Unwilling to be so gauche as to try to conduct an actual interview with Mick as we rode together on that bus, I was not about to ask. What I also did not know back then was that the stage was not the only place on which Mick performed. Because Mick was always on, his entire life was a performance and so there was never any knowing what was real and what he was doing purely for the effect it would have on the audience for whom he was performing, which in this case happened to be me.
    What I can say for certain is that once Mick had given you his total attention, you found yourself willing to do almost anything to get it back again. At close range, his personality was just as addictive as any of the most powerful drugs known to man.

    Getting to his feet as the bus finally comes to a stop, Mick says, “I’m going to have to sit you down sometime so we can have a long rap about Bali.” And then just as quickly as he appeared by my side, Mick hops off the bus and makes his way into the hall through a backstage door.
    Located at 126 Renfield Street in central Glasgow, Green’s Playhouse first opened in 1927 and looks as though no one has bothered to clean it since then. Paint peels off all the walls in long curling strips, the air vents are covered with thick black soot, the entire backstage area is lit by bare bulbs, and the dressing rooms are so small that you literally cannot turn around without bumping into someone. When I ask a local stagehand why thesecond balcony has been closed tonight, he says, “To keep the rattles doon.”
    As a band that has been together for a week opens the show by playing two songs written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Bill Wyman sits backstage passing the time by talking about the days when a