AFTER FINDING MYSELF A SMALL CABIN overlooking the ocean in northern California for the princely sum of $125 a month, I started working on the book that came to be entitled S.T.P.: A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones. Sitting at a desk a carpenter friend had built for me, I wrote a chapter a week and then went out on Friday nights to celebrate.
The first full-length account ever written about a rock tour, the book has since been republished in America and the United Kingdom and remains in print to this day. Having said that, the reviews that greeted S.T.P. when it first appeared were most definitely mixed.
In Rolling Stone magazine, the late Chet Flippo wrote, “Greenfield is perhaps too much the objective observer, too much the disinterested journalist. He never explains why he was kicked off the tour, he never develops a coherent viewpoint. At different times, he appears as ‘I,’ as ‘this writer,’ and ‘anyone.’ Ultimately, S.T.P. is part of the endless coverage of the Stones, who … manage either to be substanceless people or project a public image of vacuity.”
In NME, the weekly English music business trade paper, the late Mick Farren, the former lead singer of the Deviants who was himself no mean writer, noted, “I fear this book may be the one that could finally O.D. the reader on rock writing, particularly that flat, conscientious, detailed, post–Truman Capote style that has made Rolling Stone what it is today…. The book shows that writers like Greenfield can get locked in by rock and roll. Instead of wearing out his buns hanging around on a Stones tour, he should be with the real action.”
To all these charges even at this late date, I do plead guilty, Your Honor. For the record, I should also like to state that when someone half my age recently asked me if there was anything left to say about the Rolling Stones, I said, “No.” Which of course did not stop me from going on at length about them here for the third time in my career.
And now at long last, we come to the title of this book. As all dyed-in-the-wool fans of the band already know, it happens to be a line from “Angie,” a song that Keith wrote while kicking heroin in Switzerland shortly after Exile on Main St. had finally been deemed ready to be delivered to Atlantic Records.
As Nick Kent, the mild-mannered English rock journalist who went into a phone booth in London one day only to reemerge as the second coming of Keith Richards, wrote in NME when “Angie” was released, “This is positively the most depressing task I’ve had to undertake as a rock writer. This single is a dire mistake on as many levels as you care to mention. ‘Angie’ is atrocious.”
Although “Angie” ranked fifty-ninth in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the Stones’ top one hundred songs and remains the only ballad by the band ever to go to number one on the charts while also featuring Mick Jagger’s faintly audible guide track—also known as a “ghost vocal”—I cannot say I disagree with Nick Kent’s appraisal of it.
As a song, “Angie” still seems pretty soppy and far too sweet for my taste but there you go. My original title for this book was Goodbye, Johnny B. Goode but after a good deal of discussion about whether anyone would know what this meant, the marketing director at Da Capo Press came up with Ain’t It Time We Said Goodbye and I decided to go with that instead. Having said this, I am really glad I did.
After lo these many years, the time has indeed finally come for me to say goodbye to the band without whom my career, not to mention my life, would have been radically different in so many ways. Perhaps because I walked before they made me run, I have nothing but positive memories of the time I spent with the Rolling Stones.
On every level, the pleasure was definitely all mine, and I would not have wanted to miss any of it for the world. Or as Keith wrote to Mick Taylor after learning he had left the Rolling Stones, “Thanks for all the turn-ons.”