Old Gods Almost Dead (45 page)

It was the first Stones tour of Europe in three years, with a sixty-five-man crew, American-style production, and high ticket prices that bought criticism from angry fans. The Stones played an augmented 1969 set, with Stu on piano for the Chuck Berry songs and no encores. According to Jo Bergman, who planned much of it, the entire tour schedule revolved around year-old Marlon Richards, who came along with his mum.

The tour opened on September 2 in Helsinki. Opening was guitarist Buddy Guy's white-hot Chicago blues band with elite soloist Junior Wells on harmonica—often booed by loutish young fans on the tour. The first few Stones shows were like public rehearsals, but they soon tightened up. The new song “Dead Flowers” was played fast and fierce. A turbo-charged version of Chuck Berry's late boogie chef d'oeuvre “Let It Rock” was added to the set a few shows in. Mick Jagger, inspired by Junior Wells's star-quality nightly improvs, blew his harp the entire length of “Midnight Rambler,” joining the band as an instrumentalist, breaking into jazzy jams prior to the “Don't Do That” segment of the Stones' rock theatrical.

Bobby Keys and Keith bonded well because they liked the same things, and he joined the self-contained Richards family entourage. Their heroin was carried across borders in custom-built devices such as hollow fountain pens and fake shaving cream bottles. When they ran out of dope, they forced the local promoters to find some. “No smack, no show, baby.” Audiences were kept waiting for hours until the necessary drugs were supplied.

While they were touring, Decca and London released
“Get Yer Ya-Yas Out”: The Rolling Stones in Concert,
overdubbed live tracks from the '69 tour. This was the last authorized Rolling Stones album on their old label. David Bailey's cover photo depicted many layers of inside jokes. Charlie Watts jumps in the air, clutching guitars and wearing Mick's Uncle Sam stage hat. Behind him a donkey, bearing his drum kit and another guitar, has necklaces and binoculars hanging from its neck, a reference to the jewels and binoculars hanging from the neck of a mule in Dylan's “Visions of Johanna.” The “Ya-Yas” in the title was a phonetic mishearing of an old New Orleans term for bosoms. The album's real charm lay in its nonmusical moments: the cutup tape collage of Sam Cutler's introductions; the girl who yells, “Paint it black, you devil”; Mick's stage patter about the busted button and “Charlie's good tonight, inne?” The album got to no. 1 in England and no. 5 in America.

                

September 22, 1970.
By the time the tour got to Paris, the Stones were back on form. The fans were too, with many arrests in Berlin and minor trouble in Hamburg. The Paris show at L'Olympia was a big event, with many friends of the band backstage and at a big party at the Hotel George V afterward, where Mick met a stunning twenty-one-year-old Nicaraguan girl, Bianca Perez Moreno de Macias. She was introduced to Mick by the French record executive Eddy Barclay as his fiancée.

Bianca Perez was tiny, birdlike, dark-complected, and utterly beautiful, with a cheekbone resemblance to Mick that everyone noticed. She was intelligent, had won a scholarship to study in Paris at seventeen, before entering the party circuit on the arm of actor Michael Caine. Mick Jagger fell for this sultry gamine immediately, and she ditched Barclay for him. She wouldn't sleep with Mick, which intrigued him no end. He left for Vienna with Bianca much on his mind.

When the tour got to Rome, Anita contacted her family. She hadn't seen them since taking up with Brian Jones, but had made contact again after her son was born. “We sent a limo for my father,” she recalled, “so he could come to the show. Outside the hall, the car was attacked by anarchists who threw rocks, thinking the Stones were inside. This was my father's introduction to the world I was living in. But he was fair-minded about it, enjoyed the show, and I think he was pleased that I was with a musician, because that's what he was.”

Bianca Perez arrived in Rome to be with Mick and then stayed with the tour. Bianca and Mick merged into a top-secret and passionately inseparable, look-alike, glamour-radiating couple. The tour ended in Munich on October 11. Mick and Bianca flew back to London together. She moved into Mick's London home within weeks and became pregnant that winter.

On November 10, Marsha Hunt gave birth to Mick's first child, a daughter she named Karis. This was at first kept secret from everyone, including Mick's family. He didn't want his mother to know. With the advent of Bianca, Mick's relationship with Marsha Hunt was officially over.

                

Further recording
took place at Olympic Studio that autumn to finish
Sticky Fingers.
Billy Preston played gospel organ on “I Got the Blues.” “Can't You Hear Me Knocking” got its guitar overdubs, with Mick Taylor playing in Carlos Santana's jazzy, repetitive style. String sections for magisterial “Sway” and evocative “Moonlight Mile” were scored by Paul Buckmaster, Elton John's arranger, in November. “Moonlight Mile” was Mick, Jim Price on piano, and Mick Taylor playing what Jagger called a “real dreamy, kind of semi–Middle Eastern piece.” Keith was too stoned to make it to the studio, so “Mile” became the first Rolling Stones track whose credits didn't include him.

Around this time, the Stones gathered in a Soho screening room to watch the Maysles brothers' film, now titled
Gimme Shelter
and ready for release. Afterward, they had an argument about whom the late Meredith Hunter had wanted to shoot. As they were leaving, Mick said to Keith, “Flower Power was a load of crap, wasn't it?”

                

Work on the new
album continued into December at Olympic. “Good Time Woman” was in development, and “Sweet Virginia” came to life as another Stones hillbilly joke. On December 18, a studio party was held for Keith's twenty-sixth birthday. Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Bobby Keys, and Al Kooper all came, and all but Harrison played on a convulsive live version of “Brown Sugar,” recorded after the party had been cleared away. With Clapton burning blue on slide guitar, this new version of “Brown Sugar” was so good it almost made it onto
Sticky Fingers.

A Sunny Place for Shady People

The seventies
got under way in January 1971 with the Rolling Stones' affairs in flux. The Beatles had officially disbanded the month before when Paul McCartney sued the others, who had signed with Allen Klein. The Stones were bitter about their losses and leaving England, furious about their tax situation, and concerned about their new record deal. Atlantic Records, designated distributor of Rolling Stones Records, had been sold to a corporation that managed parking lots, and despite Ahmet Ertegun's assurances to Mick that he retained control, no one quite knew what would happen.

Keith didn't want to move to France, but the United States was off limits because Mick's recent drug conviction prevented him from even visiting for a year. Keith was also upset because Mick was besotted with Bianca Perez, and Keith was jealous. He hated Bianca almost at once. He thought her pretentious, self-absorbed, square, too young, and not at all rock and roll, and he worried that she would come between Mick and the Stones.

Keith was addicted to heroin and lived permanently in its twilight world with Anita and their fellow junkie Michael Cooper. Keith skin-popped his doses, injecting them into his muscles instead of his veins, which provided an illusion of self-control. Concerned about his health and probable supply problems, he decided to clean up before the move to France. He spoke to Mick about it, and Mick consulted William Burroughs, with whom Mick was meeting at Burroughs's Duke Street flat about a possible movie based on
Naked Lunch.

Burroughs had been famously cured of a twenty-year narcotics habit by a British doctor, John Dent, who used the metabolic regulator apomorphine to achieve controlled and relatively painless withdrawals for his patients. Burroughs explained that although Dent had died, his veteran nurse, known as Smitty, continued to get satisfactory results from the apomorphine protocol.

Smitty duly arrived at Redlands in early February and put Keith through four howling, shivering days of heroin withdrawal, which left Keith a pale, emaciated ghost, though free of his usual craving for dope. The cure lasted about seventy-two hours, when Michael Cooper arrived at Redlands with a taste of good smack. Then Gram Parsons arrived in mid-February to hang out, which snuffed the whole cure idea. Keith now switched from pure heroin to skin-popping speedballs, a heroin-cocaine cocktail he found particularly conducive to songwriting. The drugs occasionally percolated in the muscle tissue of his arms, causing abscesses that left ghastly-looking scars.

Anita saw that the apomorphine cure didn't take, so a month later she tried a seven-day sleep cure at Bowden House clinic. While she was away, Keith nodded off in the London suburbs while driving down to the country, wrecking the now Pink Lena. Grabbing his stash, with police sirens wailing in the distance, he vaulted a nearby wall and found himself in the back garden of Nicky Hopkins's house. Nicky, home from a stint playing with Quicksilver Messenger Service in San Francisco, offered Keith a cup of tea. The Pink Lena was replaced with a red E-type Jaguar.

                

With
Sticky Fingers
almost completed, the Stones booked sessions at Olympic in February to begin the next album. They played badly, usually without Keith, and the tapes were later scrapped. Howlin' Wolf, the grand master of the blues, was in town to record with English rock stars in sessions arranged by Marshall Chess. Charlie, Bill, and Ian Stewart served as Wolf's rhythm section while he taught Eric Clapton the right way to play “Little Red Rooster.” Ringo Starr and Steve Winwood sat in as well. The sometimes-thrilling tracks would be released later in the year as
The London Howlin' Wolf Sessions
on the Stones' label in England and by Chess Records in America.

                

In March 1971,
the Rolling Stones undertook a farewell tour of England. Their first English tour in five years, and they stunk. Everyone said so.

They went out as an eight-piece show band, with the horns and Nicky Hopkins on piano, playing mostly in the north. The rhythms were sluggish because Keith was so stoned. Traditionally Keith set the tempos. He would start playing, quickly followed by Charlie, but if Keith was off—and he was really off that year—it could take time, often the whole set, for Charlie to catch up. Mick couldn't hear the piano through the stage monitors, so his vocals were often off too.

Keith was traveling with his gang (Anita, Marlon and the nanny, Gram Parsons) and his dog, a puppy named Boogie. After the Glasgow show, he tried to smuggle the dog onto a commercial flight, but the pilot wouldn't take off. The cops were called. Keith was holding enough heroin to land him back in Wormwood Scrubs for a few years, but he gave the cops a hard time anyway. After a big hassle, Boogie rode in the cargo hold and the band got back to London that night.

Although almost all the shows on the farewell tour sucked, the set did have its moments. Mick, in a pink satin suit with a floppy, multicolored cap, still got the girls screaming every time he turned his back and wiggled his bum. “Midnight Rambler” got a major rethink, with the harp, drums, and piano providing a Bo Diddley overture to a cool, fast version of the three-year-old charger. During the rape scene, Mick gurgled, “Go down on me, bay-beh, ooooh yeah,” and assorted blow-job-recipient moans. “Satisfaction” had a vamping, soul-show intro, bump-and-grind with the horns, and then a long jam with Mick Taylor improvising floral arrangements. The unfamiliar new songs—“Wild Horses,” “Dead Flowers,” “Bitch” (“a song for all you whores in the audience”)—were received quietly by the fans. The chugging finale “Let It Rock” woke everyone up when Keith started to play his ass off, sometimes taking three hot guitar choruses when his tired blood got boiling. No encores on this tour either. Keith kept missing trains and planes, and shows would start hours late. The Stones were so-so in Bristol, sloppy in Leeds, late in Liverpool. Bill Wyman got upset that they were playing so badly. “I just want everyone to say it
was
shit,” he complained in the Liverpool dressing room, after a show that started five hours late. Bored Mick Jagger told Bill and everyone else that he just didn't care. Mick had the label deal to worry about, and still had to cut verses out of “Moonlight Mile,” sequence
Fingers,
supervise the cover, design the new logo, and leave the country. Plus, Bianca was along, distracting him, her cruel features a mask of elegant, hot-blooded
froideur.
She was a couple of months pregnant and lovelier than ever as her tiny figure began to blossom. Completely upstaged in the crucial glamour department, Anita started to hate Bianca too, tried to mind-fuck her and put her down, but Bianca had a steely determination and the adoring support of Mick. She treated Anita with blithe detachment, like a vulgar relative, which made Anita really livid. Mick told Bianca she had to put up with Anita. Anita was one of the Stones.

The tour ended with shows at the Roundhouse in London. The band's families came, everyone's parents. “It was weird wigglin' me bum at me mum,” Mick said, “like an incestuous thing.” On March 26, the Stones played before an invited audience at the Marquee, taping TV shows for Europe and Brazil. Backstage, Keith cursed at his old enemy, the club's owner, Harold Pendleton. Keith swung at him, missed. It took Mick an hour to persuade Keith to get onstage. Keith was schwacked, played poorly, and the audience got bored with the band stopping numbers and starting again. So Mick had them all thrown out, and the band taped a set in an empty club. The result was so inert that the tapes weren't broadcast.