A Prince Among Stones (20 page)

At a very advanced stage in these negotiations the band and I were staying at the Ritz in Paris – remarkably, in retrospect, since only very recently had the Stones even been allowed by the hotel management to be guests there.

A meeting was set up at the Ritz between ourselves, our lawyers and Walter Yetnikoff's team. This was intended to be nothing more than a rubber-stamping of everything that had been agreed in advance during the course of countless meetings. We had worked out all the small print and were, as far as I was concerned, going through the formality and courtesy of taking the Stones through each element of the contract.

The meeting had been arranged for 6.30 or 7.00 in the evening, and the head of CBS Records in Paris had booked us into a grand, fashionable restaurant for dinner to mark the completion of the deal and to celebrate this new phase in the Stones' relationship with the record company, the role of good food in any business arrangement being taken much more seriously in Paris than in New York. A two-hour meeting, we thought, should be perfectly sufficient to run through everything.

When the Stones arrived it was obvious that they were all the worse for wear, including Charlie Watts. And, therefore, as we came to the clause concerning the deductions made for packaging costs or something normally of completely minimal interest to the band, Mick or Keith would suddenly cut in with, ‘Whoa, well, I don't see why we should pay for
that
.' And so one had to explain, patiently, in what capacity this clause would be implemented, and how much money might be involved. ‘Well, I don't understand that . . .' they'd moan. This happened with nearly every clause and became extremely irritating. They were showing off, simply messing around, but consequently messing both CBS and myself around. They were making no sense at all, of course. This tomfoolery went on and on and on. The meeting was going very badly.

Walter Yetnikoff asked for a break. He took me to one side and said without further ado, ‘If this rubbish goes on, I'm calling the deal off. Unless we can get this arranged in the next ten minutes I am closing the relationship.' I realised that he was obviously concerned as to whether in the future he would constantly be having to deal with this sort of nonsense, and he was so irritated by the Stones' mindless nitpicking, purely for effect, that he was quite capable of tearing up the whole contract there and then. This was an extremely serious moment.

I asked Keith and Mick to come outside with me so we could have a little chat about this. As we came out of the Ritz they started laughing, sniggering like schoolboys – two very vociferous schoolboys. ‘We just thought we'd get a bit of fun going.' As we walked around the Place Vendôme, I said, ‘Well, the “fun” that you're having could result in you having no contract.'

With those few magic words, the pair sobered up almost immediately. ‘Now,' I asked sternly, ‘is everything going to be all right when we go in to the meeting again?' ‘Yes, fine,' they said contritely. ‘Your concerns are trivial. I want you to come back into the meeting, say that you are looking forward to the dinner and that you are sure that everything is under control.' The meeting reconvened, Mick said, ‘Clause y is OK, and of course we understand that you will listen to our views, so we needn't have any differences about that.' It was hilarious . . . And so the meeting passed off without incident. As did dinner. Disaster, for the time being, had been averted.

And thank goodness it had – not least from a commercial point of view. This was a period when the compact disc was in its very early days. And one contractual point which I had managed to achieve was to get the same percentage for CDs as we did on LPs. Walter Yetnikoff had not conceded that with any of his other artists: the record companies were trying to pay artists smaller percentages for CDs on the basis that this was an expensive new technology.

As I discussed this with our lawyers, I said, ‘I tell you what we are going to do. We will say to him that we want the same percentage but that we are prepared to accept that the higher level only comes into effect when CDs represent 20 per cent or 25 per cent of the US market' – of course, it turned out that it didn't take very long for that to be the case.

Thankfully, we had not reached that particular clause in the contract before I was able to bring Mick and Keith back into line, because the Stones had not the faintest idea about what the really important elements were, and, if they had argued about the CD percentages, that small but significant victory would have been very difficult to reinsert into the deal.

At the time for me, that meeting had been a moment of annoyance over their lack of professionalism, frustration that the hours and days of detailed contractual negotiations might be undermined, and concern that Mick and Keith's
lack
of concern meant that they had given up on the idea of continuing as the Rolling Stones.

Now, as I reflect on that particular moment, it may well have represented a significant turning point after all the ructions and rifts between the two of them, as their schoolboy pranking in fact meant they were now feeling playful, and had rediscovered something of their old anti-authority, band of brothers spark.

That walk around the colonnades of the Place Vendôme in Paris was in a way a physical manifestation of my continuing relationship with them. How many times before had I – and afterwards would I – take them for a stroll around a virtual Place Vendôme, taking time out from all the excitement, alarums and shenanigans to try and interject a moment of calm consideration? It was the rock'n'roll equivalent – though substantially less lofty – of one of Aristotle's walks through the shady colonnades of the Lyceum in Athens.

I once described my role with the band as ‘a combination of bank manager, psychiatrist and nanny'. Above all my job was always to focus their minds on the true value and the commercial realities of a situation that could drastically affect their ability to achieve the two things that were most important to their existence as a band: continuing to make music together and earning their just deserts as a result.

With the CBS deal signed, for the time being the relationship between Mick and Keith was back in place, but underneath tensions were still bubbling and there was much more to come before they settled their differences.

9

 

 

‘A lion is at liberty who can follow the laws of his own nature'

 

R. H. Benson

 

 

 

With the CBS deal finally signed off in 1983 and a temporary, rather uneasy truce established between Mick and Keith, there followed a phase of relative inactivity in the Stones' endeavours as a group entity, certainly so far as going out on the road was concerned. Their own solo projects continued – as did the tours connected with those releases – and a couple of Rolling Stones albums emerged. Behind the scenes there was plenty of continuing work involved in making sure the Stones' machinery churned from day to day. The legal wrangles with Allen Klein also rumbled on, flaring up from time to time.

However, this comparative hiatus in touring activity, coupled with the fact that I was no longer tied into the demands of working for Leopold Joseph, allowed me a hitherto unusual freedom. Consequently I was able to devote a certain amount of time to counterbalancing the work I had been doing in the music business by tending to the more private side of my life. That side had been ever-present throughout, but, in general, I had tried to avoid it impacting on – or perhaps more accurately, being impacted
by
– my involvement with the sometimes godless world of rock'n'roll.

It was not, however, always possible to avoid such a clash. During one of their European tours the Stones were due to perform at a large outdoor show in Naples. Ever since I had become involved with the band I had always obtained their consent to donate a certain percentage of the profits of each tour to such charitable organisations as each of the band, myself and the tour promoter wished to support.

At the time of this particular tour I was the President of the British Association of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (BASMOM), an ancient Catholic order founded nearly a thousand years earlier. In my capacity as President I wrote a letter directly to the Cardinal-Archbishop of Naples offering a donation at the end of the Stones' tour and asking for details of the right recipient, whereupon I received a brusque reply from the Cardinal to the effect that he refused any donation from the concert, saying he could not possibly accept such ‘tainted' money as he was not prepared to sully the good reputation of the hierarchy in Naples by benefiting from the questionable moral values of the Rolling Stones . . .

I had a similar response from Catholic cardinals in two South American countries – and on a later tour in Argentina this tension even more strongly underlined by the fact that a section of the videos that the band had been using as part of the stage show showed crucifixes falling through the air. In this instance I brought myself to suggest to the band that this element should be amended or eliminated as this background imagery might well give offence. I was pleased to see that they did take notice of my advice and made some suitable alterations for the background videos at the shows in Buenos Aires.

There was always a delicate balance between the business and private halves of my life. I tried hard to work around the demands of both schedules, and we would plan for major family occasions to fall outside Stones tours if at all possible. There were times, though, when I could not go to a Stones event because of a private commitment having been entered into long before, and vice versa, usually for funerals, which of course could never be planned in advance. When I ever wondered ‘Why wasn't I at that wedding or requiem?' I would then remember it was because I had been at a Stones concert.

In the same way, although religion has played an important part in my life I avoided the temptation of introducing my beliefs into my relationship with the Stones. Nor did I try and probe their own beliefs. Keith certainly would believe in a ‘power', no doubt about that, and Mick, I would have thought, was the normal Christian. Do they distinguish between good and evil? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, but I don't think organised religion plays a significant role in any of their lives. Yet they always respected my own commitment and fully understood how important it was to me.

Only if we were entertaining in a primarily Catholic country would I have ever raised the point that their lyrics, or the staging – as with the flying crucifixes in Argentina – might be seen locally as either obscene or religiously insulting, and therefore that it would be foolish to include them, since taking them out temporarily would not materially affect the overall impact of the show.

As a committed Catholic, to be working so closely with the Rolling Stones, a band who had recorded a song called ‘Sympathy For The Devil' and released an album titled
Their Satanic Majesties Request
, might seem to pose a dilemma, but I always felt that the public perception of the band was somewhat skewed. In my journals I once wrote of Mick: ‘The church however sees him as a purveyor of satanified obscenity, which is not so: the group has always been saucy but not satanic. A Halloween pumpkin satanism.'

Perhaps it is a characteristic of mine that I do not approve or disapprove of things very easily. If people behave extremely badly I do not immediately leap to any judgement – good or bad – of their actions, which is why, when my partners in Leopold Joseph said that they disapproved of the Rolling Stones' personal lives, I pointed out that many directors of important companies had precisely the same faults. What did anybody's private failings or preferences have to do with making money for them? Only if their activities threatened to lose money for the bank would we even attempt to intervene. ‘We're not there as priests,' I told them. ‘We are there as bank managers.'

When I was a stockbroker with Bache & Co., I had taken precisely the same stance. When people said that they did not wish to buy shares in companies which manufactured bombs or other weapons of destruction, I always told them, ‘In so far as your financial life is concerned you should look at whether the company is successful in making money rather than how it does it. Don't judge the scenery from a murky pond.'

Catholicism was always part of my life. I knew that I was a Roman Catholic from as far back as I can remember, whatever ‘being Roman Catholic' would have meant to a child of five or six. Some of my earliest memories are of Christmas, which in southern Germany is always celebrated on Christmas Eve, when the children are shown the tree surrounded by their presents, all gathered sing ‘Stille Nacht', and then the adults go to church very late, once the children are in bed. Although we might have been living in Paris or London we always followed that German tradition, and I would have been taken to church every Sunday unless we were travelling.

 

My father, although he would call himself a Roman Catholic, was also much interested in Oriental religions and the Egyptian religions of the Pharaohs (an interest he shared with his brother Hubertus). My mother once said to him, ‘It would be much better if you stayed a bad Catholic than became a good Egyptian.'

She had not forced Catholicism on me, however, and she had indeed sent me to St Christopher School where Quakerism was blended with the beliefs of the Theosophical Society – which had been founded in New York towards the end of the nineteenth century and at the time embraced a world of reincarnation and high crankery – although, to be fair, the school authorities saw to it that I attended Sunday Mass and took instruction from the Catholic priest.