A Prince Among Stones (24 page)

I was also struck by the band's choice of stage wear. Their garb was a rare motley: Charlie dapper as anything, wearing beautiful co-respondent shoes, cricket whites and a maroon waistcoat. Mick had a frogged open tailcoat and white tie (the ‘faded aristo look', as Tony King, Mick's assistant and PR adviser, remarked). Keith and Ronnie affected black evening garments – a long black dress coat with medals and a bizarre form of dinner jacket like something found in a dressing-up chest at a country house for a modest charity event. Bill Wyman had a marmalade rinse and sports clothes, with acrylic turquoise accessories.

As the tour went round the world, some of the old issues were still concerning us. There was a point where there was a question mark over whether the band could perform in Japan. The money on offer was substantial but there remained some doubt as to whether they would be let in (due to Keith's and Ronnie's drug convictions) and how they would behave once they were there. A further drug offence, committed in Japan, would certainly land them in gaol and would seriously embarrass us all. In the event, we ended the tour with ten dates at the Tokyo Dome.

On these and other tours, I tried to maintain a balance with my regular life by seeing my old friends in any particular city the band were performing in. I would often introduce the Stones to those friends, which gave me an opportunity to counterbalance the meet and greets and the after-show parties with that instant rock'n'roll familiarity, where all the
perbeni
would be on instant first-name terms (disconcerting if one didn't want to be) and in open shirts.

One major change since the previous tours had been the pulling down of the Berlin Wall and the opening up of Eastern Europe. In Prague we were invited to attend a formal meeting with President Václav Havel. Prague was, of course, of staggering beauty – destroyed not by Anglo-American banks, only by the depredations of the Communists.

Earlier we had been to lunch in a pub that Havel apparently went to quite often to ‘hear what the people think'. We were there with Karel Schwarzenberg, the Chancellor appointed by Havel, and a bunch of bearded artists and musicians. It really was Bohemian . . . However, the conversation was somewhat stilted because of the language barrier. At the formal event President Havel gave an equally stilted and translated address accompanied by nervous smoking and attended by the Chancellor and three ‘rock star' MPs. As I remarked to Mick, it was as though Mick ran a country with the band as MPs and with me in the Chancellor role. What an odd revolution.

 

During the European leg of the tour we had to cancel three nights at Wembley Stadium, including the final show to which all the VIPs were coming, because Keith had damaged his plucking hand. We substituted two of the shows later on, but perhaps Mick did not mind missing the third, since he always said that the English audiences were so inhibited they could only enjoy themselves in the dark, when they become anonymous – or unobserved – or when they are drunk.

Shortly afterwards we went to a party at Chatsworth House given by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire for their grandson's eighteenth birthday. It was a marvel: some courtyards were tented over, some rooms open, including the private sitting room, but most of the rooms were
not
used. Even so, the 1,000 guests invited caused no crush at all, including 200 of their grandson's friends scrubbed and pink for their first ball, some arriving with rucksacks in time for a magnificent fireworks display given in the park to the sound of Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

During that tour we were in Italy while the 1990 World Cup was taking place. We had received advances from the Italian promoter based on a normal Stones sale, but that particular year ticket sales were noticeably down. We were not the only act affected: Madonna and Prince had suffered, too. I wondered whether it might indicate a change of fashion among the young, the tickets becoming too expensive and the seats in the higher tiers of a huge stadium too far away to enjoy the show. However, it seemed more likely to be a combination of other factors: the concerts falling rather too late in July, the fearsome heat, the holidays, Italia 90 and sorrow after the national team's defeat.

The situation had become so bad that the Italian promoter was trying to cancel the entire Italian leg, since he could not sell enough tickets to cover his outlay, and the guarantees we had shrewdly got him to give us, in England, before the shows. Things were fraught: at one point the promoter raised the threat of arrest, saying the band's lyrics encouraged drug use, and telling us that because the drug laws in Italy had been tightened up,
proselitismo
(in other words incitement to use drugs) in front of an audience including persons under fourteen, carried a stiff prison sentence. Dora, my daughter, painstakingly copied out the lyrics in question and sent them over to a lawyer in Rome. She thought that ‘You Can't Always Get What You Want' and ‘Brown Sugar' were at risk . . . after more than twenty years! It all turned out to be a storm in an espresso cup.

When we did turn up in Turin for the shows, never had I seen so many dope pushers as there were at the rather second-rate hotel we stayed in. I told Michael Cohl to tell the promoter to rid the hotel of all of them as a ‘plant' would really be too much.
Carabinieri
did then appear, thank goodness. Just before the press conference there, Mick asked me, ‘What on earth am I going to say about why we are playing Turin and Rome instead of Milan and Naples?' I said, ‘It's very easy, Mick. You say they were also the capitals of the ancient monarchies . . .'

The whole Italian saga ended in pure
opera buffa
. The promoter wanted us to pay him the rebate we had agreed on his guarantee before the trucks and stage left Italy. We wanted to pay the money only after they had left the country – as had been agreed in writing. There was a lot of hot air along the lines of ‘You don't trust me, you doubt my word, you are terrible people, always contracts, contracts, here in Italy nothing is official'.

At 11.59 (we had to leave at midnight) I told Joe Rascoff, the tour accountant, who was livid with rage with the promoter, ‘Joe, you will never hear me say this again, but pay them! We can't risk the equipment, or the people. Remember, there are young children in the tour party.' These weren't people we wanted to wrangle with. We paid the money, the wagons rolled and we escaped unscathed. The rest of the tour was a breeze by comparison.

After the tour, with the band having proved they were firmly back in business, we signed to a new record company, Richard Branson's Virgin Records. Richard reminded me that he had first tried to sign the Stones in 1975 when we were looking for a new distributor for Rolling Stones Records. He had indeed: at the time I didn't know him personally, but had certainly heard about him. He'd telephoned me and, although I was happy to listen to his pitch, I said that I thought the money would be more than he could afford,  since at the time Virgin was still a small-scale operation, its one big hit being Mike Oldfield's
Tubular Bells
.

Richard was not at all fazed. Just as Michael Cohl did when we had a similar conversation, Richard told me he knew the situation, and that he would in fact offer significantly more than my estimate. I responded that since time was of the essence as we were very close to agreeing a deal, if he could show me a bank guarantee the following Monday we would definitely consider his offer seriously. I didn't think he would be able to get the money, so I was amazed when he turned up on the Monday morning, bank guarantee in hand. Virgin joined the auction, although in the end they were outbid by EMI, but Richard had proved to me that he was a gutsy young man.

Sixteen years later he finally achieved his wish when the Stones signed a three-album deal with Virgin in December 1991. One of the Stones did not sign the contracts: Bill Wyman was leaving the band after thirty years before the mast. He had decided, he said later, to get his personal life in order – he was coming to the end of his much publicised relationship with Mandy Smith, and wanted to start all over again, which he indeed did, settling down with a new wife, Suzanne Acosta, with whom he has three daughters.

I was looking for other ways of extending and supporting the commercial interests of the remaining Stones. Mick was diversifying into film making by setting up his film production company, Jagged Films. He had always dabbled in acting, of course:
Performance
was a good vehicle for him, because he was effectively playing himself, but when he played the lead role in
Ned Kelly
– he was filming in Australia at the time I telephoned him to say ‘Drop Klein and go' – I did not think he looked like a great film star in the making.

I continued to hope, however, that I might find another film deal for him. I had lunch at Mark Birley's club one day in the late 1970s with Barry Spikings, who had won an Oscar as a co-producer of
The Deer Hunter
. A bottle of rather good champagne encouraged me to ask Barry whether, after his success with
The Deer Hunter
, he could see himself having Mick in a film. ‘No,' Barry said, ‘Mick isn't appropriate. Have you seen
Ned Kelly
?' I asked, ‘What is it particularly that you don't like about his portrayal?' ‘Well, Rupert, he can't project his voice.' ‘But he projects his voice to hundreds of thousands of people on tour.' ‘That's different. He's holding a mike. That's not the way you speak as an actor.'

In the 1970s actors still enunciated. I remember staying in Venice with Anna Maria Cicogna. John Gielgud was also a guest in her house and over the few days we chatted away. He said, ‘The real thing is the voice training.' He reminded me of a TV documentary he had made during which he had been taken to RADA and asked for his views. ‘It was so embarrassing for me, because I had to say, “You're well taught, but you're not taught how to speak.” All that is going out.'

We also had an ongoing film drama with the IMAX company who, during the
Steel Wheels
/
Urban Jungle
tour, had shot a concert film called
Rolling Stones At The Max
to show on their vast screens. An early casualty of that project was the director, Bob Rafelson, who got on extremely well with Mick but for some reason not at all with IMAX. Consequently he was fired and IMAX decided to direct the film themselves. They were technically brilliant but slightly weird Canadians: the inventor only had seven fingers, which meant he had a somewhat disconcerting handshake. When we met I rather obviously patted him on the shoulder – luckily he was no Richard III.

The film world always had its own social norms. One day in Los Angeles I was taken to a glamorous, if tarnished, Hollywood film party where there was an excited gaggle of people gathered round a good-looking young man, whom I assumed was a star. It turned out that he was – a porn star. My host, Earl McGrath, in somewhat impressed tones, asked the young man how he managed his functions so well and for so long a time. His answer: ‘I always have a stand-in for the insertion work . . .'

Away from Hollywood I was also seeking out new sponsorship and merchandising opportunities. We set up deals with Visa and Mastercard for cards with the Stones logo on, for example. But sometimes the best-laid plans would be scuppered. At one stage I had conversations with one of the top managing directors of General Motors who thought there might be an opportunity for an advertising campaign for a new car. The money being talked about was not in the millions but in the tens of millions, but Mick's opening comment was ‘I can't see us being the lackeys of a big American corporation'.

Unfortunately the deal did not materialise since, when the proposal had to be endorsed by the three executives whose responsibility it was, it failed: they felt that the Stones were not able to approach the right age group. These were still early days for the advertising specialists to have such a close link with contemporary rock stars.

The problem was with the corporations. Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, who had made a huge fortune, was interested in a sponsorship involvement. He and his chief legal adviser came to my house in Los Angeles, where I also had one of our chief legal eagles. Phil Knight said he was prepared to agree to various conditions I was asking for, ‘because all that we care about is our sportswear. And we think we could pay you . . .' he paused, ‘$250,000.' Given the exposure Nike would be getting if the band wore their clothes and shoes on tour, we didn't do the deal.

I continued to talk to potential partners throughout the 1990s. During one tour, a mutual friend suggested I should go and speak to Microsoft, who were looking for a jingle to launch one of their Windows operating systems. I took a plane from Los Angeles up to Seattle and was met at the aerodrome by a huge limousine driven by an equally huge black chauffeur who must have been six foot five with his chauffeur's cap perched on top of his hair, and mirrored dark glasses. As we drove towards the Microsoft headquarters, he asked me, ‘You come from England, don't you? And you've just come up from Los Angeles. What do you think of the OJ Simpson case?' The case was being re-examined at the time.

I was about to reply, when he interrupted, ‘Before you answer, let me tell you something. I was a Black Panther, and I come from Georgia, where my parents' house was torched by the Klan. I think the outcome of the trial was a completely crooked verdict. It was a complete travesty of justice. The man was clearly guilty. All I am scared of is that you guys in Europe will think that American justice doesn't exist.'