AT LONG LAST, A GIG THAT REALLY MATTERS. On Sunday in London, everyone lucky enough to get their hands on a ticket to see the Rolling Stones washes their hair and then stands in the long, curling line that winds its way around the Roundhouse on Chalk Farm Road.
Originally built to serve as a railway engine turntable shed, the massive circular concrete structure is a unique and unbelievably funky venue where members in good standing of the London underground regularly assemble to fill the air with fuming clouds of hash smoke as they watch bands like Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies perform at deejay Jeff Dexter’s regular Sunday night concert series known as “Implosion.”
When the Stones last played here in London at the Saville Theatre and the Lyceum in the West End in December 1969, they performed before an audience of what Dexter would later call “the Chelsea elite.” As anyone can plainly see, tonight’s crowd bears no resemblance whatsoever to that particular aspect of London society.
Looking as though the Sheriff of Nottingham just evicted them all from Sherwood Forest, a horde of long-haired freaks of both sexes decked out in fringed buckskin, dark green velvet, and hand-crocheted cloaks of many colors comes streaming toward the hall from the Chalk Farm Tube stop across the road. Ignoring the scalpers who are now working the street for all they are worth by quoting prices no one can afford, those who have already paid for their tickets slowly make their way toward the portal that leads into the Roundhouse.
Outside the backstage door where only those whose names have been written down by hand on the guest list will be permitted to enter, an entirely different scene is taking place. Because this is London and these are the Rolling Stones, a multitude of music business luminaries as well as the crème de la crème of the underground have turned out in force to see these shows. Unaccustomed to ever having to stand in line at any gig, they also wait patiently to be allowed inside the hall.
Backstage, a freak show of major proportions is under way. Packed in so tightly that they might as well be standing on the Tube during rush hour, forty-two people jam the Stones’ dressing room. As Mick eyes a lady with henna hair who looks pretty much naked down the front, one very formidable-looking black man with a huge Afro passes a joint to another and says, “Are you black, man?”
Because someone has come up with the bright idea of keeping the cold water in the showers running full blast so all the cans of beer and soda will not get warm, the roaring sound makes it just that much harder to hear what anyone is saying. Bottles of tequila and bowls of sliced lemons, bananas, nuts, and raisins line a table against the wall but the scene is such a groupie’s who’s who of rock in London circa 1971 that no one can be bothered to eat or drink a thing.
Mick and Bianca arriving in Newcastle for the first show of the tour. CREDIT: Mirrorpix Archive.
Bill Wyman and Astrid Lundstrom leaving the train in Newcastle with Charlie Watts directly behind them. CREDIT: Mirrorpix Archive.
Chip Monck and Charlie Watts. CREDIT: Nevis Cameron, Chipmonck Archive.
Chip Monck and his crew erecting the light truss in Newcastle City Hall. CREDIT: Nevis Cameron, Chipmonck Archive.
Keith, Marlon, and Anita leaving the hotel in Newcastle. CREDIT: Mirrorpix Archive.
As your correspondent looks on from the left, Nicky Hopkins, Jim Price, Mick Taylor, and Rose Millar leave the hotel in Newcastle. CREDIT: Mirrorpix Archive.
Mick on stage in Manchester. CREDIT: Mirrorpix Archive.
Rose Millar, baby Chloe, and Mick Taylor. CREDIT: Mirrorpix Archive.
Gram Parsons, mistakenly identified as Donovan for lo these many years in the Daily Mirror archive. CREDIT: Mirrorpix Archive.
Keith in Coventry with Boogie in hand. CREDIT: Mirrorpix Archive.
Keith on stage in Liverpool. CREDIT: Mirrorpix Archive.
The Stones on stage in Leeds with Bobby Keys and Jim Price. CREDIT: Nevis Cameron, Chipmonck Archive.
Ian Stewart with Mick. CREDIT: Out-Take Ltd.
Looking very cool in a dark green velvet jacket, Traffic lead guitarist Dave Mason stands talking to ex–Mad Dogs and Englishmen drummers Jim Gordon and Jim Keltner. Out in the hallway where various members of Family, the Edgar Broughton Band, and the Faces are hanging out, some girl no one knows suddenly passes out and Ian Stewart has to carry her past all the musicians into the Stones’ dressing room so she can be revived.
Upstairs, legendary disc jockeys Tom Donahue, who has come to England to interview Mick for a promotional LP that will be distributed to radio stations all over America, and John Peel, who will soon be given an hour-long tape of the Stones’ show in Leeds to broadcast on his popular BBC Radio 1 show, jockey for elbow room in the unbelievably crowded balcony. Gathered around them tonight is the entire English pop press, a good deal of the English straight press, a gaggle of thoroughly wired rock ’n’ roll PR people, a clutch of high-powered record executives, and a collection of incredibly well-dressed upper-class hippies, all of whom look as though they have never done an honest day’s work in their lives.
A dead ringer for Daisy Callahan as she sits in front of a mirror in the Stones’ dressing room in a cloche hat decorated with green peacock feathers, a floral skirt, and an outrageous black ostrich feather jacket, Bianca smokes a cigarette from an ivory holder that has to be at least eight inches long. Calmly minding her own business, she watches as Mick asks Gram Parsons if he can borrow his belt to wear onstage tonight because he has forgotten his own.
As though she was born to pop stardom and has every right in the world to be here tonight, Joyce the Voice, whose trip it is to be all trippy and sometimes walk out onstage to grab the microphone for unscheduled raps no one wants to hear, suddenly appears before the mirror. Talking directly to Bianca, she says, “Excuse me, but didn’t I see you with Osibisa in their dressing room last week?”
What? What is this? I mean, hold on. Joyce the Voice has just asked Bianca, she of the inscrutable face, blinding smile, mysterious eyes, and gin rummy ways, Joyce has just asked Mick Jagger’s lady, “Excuse me, but aren’t you a groupie for this band I know?”
Although the question deserves no response, Bianca is nothing if not polite and so says, “What is Osibisa?”
“Oh wow,” Joyce says with a completely straight face, not knowing she has just been cut dead and left lying face down on the dressing room floor. “There is someone with your exact vibration around. I mean, like a twin sister. You know? Someone who is walking around with your face.”
As Bianca rolls her eyes upward, Joyce is promptly escorted out the door. Slowly working his way across the room, a skinny old man holding a sheet of paper in his hand comes up to Mick and says, “Who’s Mick Jagger now? It’s not for me. It’s an autograph for a little girl, a spastic she is, no legs neither. C’mon now. You are in the group, ain’t ya?”
And while you might think Mick would waste no time having this old man shown the door as well, he very softly says, “Yeah, I am,” and then signs his name on the sheet of paper. “Should I steer you to the others?” Mick asks. “That’s Charlie right over there.”
Out in the hallway, someone is trying to get Gram Parsons to sign a record contract. As all the people who have only just been thrown out of the Stones’ dressing room file past him on their way into the hall, Gram casts a baleful eye in their direction and says, “Après moi, le déluge.”
Proving that Gram definitely knows of what he speaks, the Stones come rushing right by him a moment later on their way to the stage. While the first show of the night leaves nothing to be desired, it does not come close to meeting the expectations of those who have been waiting to see this gig since tickets first went on sale more than a month ago. For this, no one can blame the Stones. The audience is just so super-hip and spaced out that people dance only because they think this is what they are supposed to do.
Although the scene backstage between shows is far quieter than it was before, the kind of high-society buzz that could be found nowhere else on the tour is still going around the dressing room. As joints are passed, shots of tequila knocked back, and cocaine sniffed from tiny silver spoons, neither Mick nor Keith seems in any hurry for this party to end.
Going onstage an hour late for the second show, the Stones power their way through a tough set during which the microphones suddenly go dead in the middle of “Street Fighting Man.” To celebrate the end of the tour and amuse himself as well as the Stones and the audience, Chip Monck has assigned a member of his crew to sit at the very edge of the balcony holding a string fastened to the plywood top of a large canvas hamper. As the show nears the end, Chip cues the guy to pull the string. The plywood top swings open and from the hamper come thousands of ping-pong balls painted in bright fluorescent colors.
Cascading down through shafts of light, the ping-pong balls nearly bury Mick as he stands at the very edge of the stage. Doubling up with laughter, Mick actually stops singing for a moment. Far too busy trying to grab the ping-pong balls that are now bouncing crazily in every direction so they can take them home as souvenirs, no one in the crowd seems to notice.
As yellow flowers and white confetti fly around the stage, Mick and Keith celebrate by swigging champagne straight from the bottle. Since the Tube in London shuts down at eleven-thirty on Sunday night and this is the way most of those here tonight will be going home, the Rolling Stones leave the stage for the final time on their farewell tour of England at the stroke of eleven.
Filing out into the damp and foggy night through the wide-open doors of the Roundhouse, the crowd begins heading off down Chalk Farm Road. Behind them, they leave the smell of stale sweat and hash smoke and patchouli as well as the empty stage on which the Rolling Stones just performed. Having already left the building, they have no expectations to ever pass through here again.
For the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, an era had just come to an end. Never again would the Rolling Stones board trains and buses to play two shows a night in aging city halls and theaters that could only accommodate 2,000 people. Like a hydra-headed monster no one could control, the music business was about to expand so exponentially that in just a few years’ time it would bear no relationship to what it had once been.
As always, the Rolling Stones were right at the forefront of this revolution. And so when the band returned to London in 1976, they performed at Earl’s Court with the kind of over-the-top production that was required to entertain the audience in such a massive venue.
At the Roundhouse on the final night of the tour, there were no fabulous special effects, no light show, and no larger-than-life video screens. The Stones were just a great band playing onstage. And even though many of those in the audience that night had come there to see and be seen rather than just lose themselves in the music, there were moments when the joint was really rocking and going round and round.
Before bidding a fond farewell to the Roundhouse, I feel compelled to detail what I can only describe as my very own moment of truth with Mick Jagger. As I stood in the dressing room between shows that night wondering how long it was going to take me to write my piece about the tour, Mick came up to me for what I thought would be just another friendly little chat.
Leaning forward until his face was just inches from mine, he flashed me a truly chilling smile and said, “You’ve been as stoned as anyone on this tour, haven’t you?” Not about to deny the obvious, I just laughed and said, “Yeah, well, I guess that could be true.”
Continuing to pursue this line of inquiry like a prosecutor at the Old Bailey, Mick said, “You haven’t even taken a single bloody note, have you?”
While I could have told Mick about all the time I had spent during the previous ten days writing down everything I had seen and heard in freezing cold and unbelievably filthy lavatories all over England, I just laughed again and mumbled a reply so thoroughly incoherent that it does not bear repeating here. Sneering at me like I had just proven his point beyond any shadow of a doubt, Mick said, “The real truth is—you’ve got no bloody idea at all what’s happened on this tour, have you?”
Had I been someone other than a fairly clueless rock journalist trying to claw his way to fame and fortune on the backs of the Rolling Stones, I could have said, “Mick, what about that village in Bali where people stay up all night listening to concerts you said we were going to rap about? Can’t we talk about that now instead?” Instead, I just stood there without uttering a single word in my own defense.
Because Mick could not have cared less about what kind of article I was going to write concerning the tour, I now know that nothing I might have said to him back then would have made the slightest bit of difference. What Mick was really doing was rattling my cage and jangling my chain as loudly as possible so he could see how I would react. On some level, none of it was even personal.
At some point, nearly everyone who had not been around the Rolling Stones since the beginning had to pass through Mick Jagger’s burning ring of fire. If you did, then you were worthy and could continue your association with the band. If you failed Mick’s test, then the Stones would just move on without you as they had already done with more people than anyone could name.
Based on Mick’s completely one-sided conversation with me in the dressing room at the Roundhouse between shows, there was no doubt in my mind as to which side of that line I was now on. As I trudged back up Haverstock Hill to my flat that night, I knew my brief career with the Rolling Stones had just come to a sudden end.
