Old Gods Almost Dead (52 page)

The band met in November in Montreux to plan a tour for 1975 and discuss recording plans. Mick Taylor—under pressure from his wife to leave the Stones, already talking to bassist Jack Bruce about forming a new band, and unable to confront Mick Jagger (with whom he was friendly) and Keith (with whom he was not) about his many grievances—said nothing.

Mick Jagger was all over the place: Paris nightclubs with Rudolf Nureyev, New York parties with Bianca, London rock concerts. While he and Bianca were in Nicaragua in late November, Mick Taylor phoned the Stones' office to say he was leaving the band. Bill Wyman thought he was bluffing, trying to cut a better deal for himself.

But after an Eric Clapton show on December 4, at a party at promoter Robert Stigwood's house, Taylor tried to hand Jagger his resignation. “Mick told me he wanted to do something else,” Jagger said. “He'd played with us for five years and he felt he wanted to play some different kind of music. So I said, 'Okay, that's fine,' and that was that.” Later that evening, Jagger was sitting in a car with Ron Wood and Marshall Chess. Jagger told Wood, “Look, I don't want to split up the Faces. I really dig the band, but if you ever want to move on, would you come with us?”

Wood was incredibly flattered, but still felt committed to the Faces and told Mick it would be better to find someone else. “If you get
real
desperate, though,” Wood said, “ring me up.”

The Rolling Stones were furious with Mick Taylor. Their guitar player was quitting the band three days shy of going back into the studio. On December 7, the Stones returned to Munich to begin the
Black and Blue
sessions as a quartet with Nicky Hopkins. On December 12, in a series of polite but clipped press releases, the Stones announced Mick Taylor's departure from the band. Everyone tried to put a good face on it. Keith sent Taylor an insincere telegram: “Really enjoyed playing with you the last five years. Thanks for all the turn-ons. Best wishes and love.” (Taylor's wife said he cried when he read this.) Jagger, in mischievous mode, told the press, “No doubt we'll be able to find another six-foot-three guitarist who can do his own makeup.”

Within a week, the London papers were full of rumors that Taylor had quit the Stones because of money, which he repeatedly denied. “There was no personal animosity in the split,” he told
Sounds.
“There was no row, no quibbling. I'm very disturbed at the stories going around that it was all to do with credits and royalties. I'm very upset because I like all the guys in the Stones.”

Keith was raging. “No one leaves this band except in a fucking pine box,” he fumed to friends. Later he said, “The man's timing was incredibly bad. Why wait until a few days before we were going to start [recording]?” The others—having seen how Keith had treated him—were more puzzled than angry.

“He wanted to leave to make his own records,” Charlie Watts said later. “I thought he'd be incredible, like a Pat Metheny or something. And it didn't happen. Nothing happened when he left us.” Keith was less sympathetic. “Mick figured he'd learned enough. He was bored and thought he was now a songwriter of great stature. He had a million plans. Mick is a beautiful guitar player, amazing. But I'm still waiting.”

“I still don't really know why he left,” Mick Jagger said. “He never explained, at least to me. He wanted to have a solo career. I'm guessing he found it difficult to get on with Keith.”

Mick Taylor would spend many years recovering from being a Rolling Stone. “The whole experience made me more cynical,” he said long afterward. “One of the reasons I don't bother to make records on my own is because I don't get paid for some of the biggest-selling records of all time. Frankly, I was ripped off. You get cynical about the music business, and it stops you playing.”

                

Munich, December 1974.
The Stones worked, sullenly, with Nicky Hopkins on a series of long, funk-based jams. Glyn Johns was back as engineer/producer, totally bored as Keith slogged the band through nine-hour versions of the new ballad “Fool to Cry,” Eric Donaldson's early reggae smash “Cherry Oh Baby,” and a track labeled “Black and Blue Jam” (with visiting Jeff Beck), which years later developed into “Slave.” The Stones' turn to funk was another intraband compromise, in the same way R&B had been the medium between Brian's blues and Keith's rock and roll. Now funk—the dominant black American popular music of the time—became the meeting ground of Mick's fascination with disco/dance music and Keith's scholarly obsession with reggae. “Hot Stuff” was the result.

With Mick Taylor gone, over the next five months the Stones turned their recording sessions into auditions testing the world's best electric rock guitarists. When word got out there was a vacancy to be filled, a parade of famous ax heroes dutifully made the trek to studios in Rotterdam and Munich, with varying degrees of success. Fiery Irish guitar star Rory Gallagher dropped by to play, prompted by Glyn Johns, who thought he'd be perfect for the Stones, but Mick and Keith barely said hello to him. Peter Frampton was reportedly considered, highly recommended by Bill Wyman and Stu, then dismissed. Rumor had it that Eric Clapton again declined the job.

Keith moved back to the Wick, where Ron Wood was working on another solo album. They were joined by Wayne Perkins, a longhaired Texas session star and slide guitar wizard who'd rocked up the Wailers' first album,
Catch a Fire,
and a host of big-name sessions. Keith and Perkins meshed nicely in London, and when Keith invited him to Munich for the March recording sessions, Perkins thought he had joined the Rolling Stones. In Munich, he played (superbly) on “Fool to Cry” and “Hand of Fate,” and the job seemed to be in Perkins's grasp. But Keith was starting to feel that he played too much like Mick Taylor.

Mick invited the brilliant but erratic Jeff Beck to Munich. Beck was a big star and hot off his best-selling jazz-rock
Blow by Blow
album. Beck cut several (unused) tracks with the Stones, then left Germany after saying insulting things about the rhythm section. Mick vetoed Wayne Perkins as a Rolling Stone and brought in another American blues virtuoso, Harvey Mandel, who played on “Memory Motel” and “Hot Stuff,” the Stones' new tribute to James Brown's “The One” funk riff.

                

Ron Wood arrived
in Munich late in March 1975. His wife, Chrissie, had run off with Jimmy Page, so Woody was at loose ends. He worked on “Crazy Mama” and “Hey Negrita” and was pressured by Keith and Mick to join the Stones, not as a permanent member, but as a temporary hired guitarist on the tour scheduled to begin in only a couple of months.

“Either you're joining,” Mick told Wood, “or we aren't doing the tour.”

Keith: “Ronnie Wood walked in and any other consideration collapsed. We had to own up that we were an
English
rock and roll band, and not just English, but
London.
That's why Ronnie and I burst into gales of laughter at a certain word. Those little things become a big advantage on the road.”

Many Rolling Stones fans were disappointed by Ron Wood's elevation. He wasn't a soloist like Mick Taylor or a sonic avatar like Brian Jones. He was an entertaining, journeyman-quality rock guitarist with contagious energy and a prodigious life force. Glyn Johns thought Wood the worst choice the Stones could have made, a major disaster both for the talented Wood's development and for the Stones. Ron was often stoned silly, usually half-drunk, appeared stupid at times. He was Keith's butt-boy and became the Rolling Stones' clown and jester, sometimes appearing to degrade himself by flattering his new bosses—the least threatening bloke they could have found. People closer to the Stones realized Wood was hired as a surrogate younger brother, foil and mediator between Mick and Keith. “He brought musical vitality and a powerful, likeable personality into our ranks,” Bill Wyman wrote. “He has always been a positive force in soothing tensions in the band. He's able to hang with all of us in turn. Acting as a foil for both Keith and Mick, on and off stage, couldn't have been easy.”

Ron Wood's temporary appointment to the Rolling Stones was announced on April 14, 1975, and he was put on salary for the duration of the tour. This arrangement continued when Rod Stewart left the Faces at the end of the year and Woody joined the Stones for good. It would be eighteen more years before Ron Wood was officially made a member of the Rolling Stones and invested with a commensurate financial share.

A Certain Magic in Repetition

A fascist-looking
jet-propelled eagle was the logo of the Rolling Stones' 1975 Tour of the Americas—TOTA for short—a money-spinning forty-seven shows in twenty-seven venues throughout Gerald Ford's disco-besotted United States that summer, to be followed by a tour of South American capitals that fall. Charlie Watts helped supervise the design of the tour, with its two lotus-shaped stages, one with “petals” extending into the audience, the other with hydraulic petals that unfolded around the band at the start of the shows. It was to be a showbiz tour, with Mick relying on stage props for the first time. Outlandish inflatables, trapeze swings, and Billy Preston's minstrel-like disco act would, he hoped, compensate Stones fans for what was missing from that tour—any new creative edge and a sense of mission. The spark of the band was low, so they depended on old-fashioned flash to get them through. Much of the year, flash worked well for the Rolling Stones, who managed to play some of the best rock shows ever performed.

The Stones assembled in April to begin rehearsals at a Montauk Point house rented from Andy Warhol's film director, Paul Morrissey. Keith's U.S. visa problems had been fixed by Mick, who intervened with a social contact, American ambassador Walter Annenberg. After another Swiss hemodialysis cure, Keith passed a blood test in London and got his visa. Ron Wood finished mixing his album
Now Look
at Electric Lady Studio in New York and went directly to Montauk to join the Stones. Security around the house was tight due to renewed threats from the Hell's Angels, still bent on Altamont revenge and rumored to be planning an amphibious landing on the beachfront property.

Billy Preston was the tour's musical director, helping to plan the set and rearranging some of the Stones' warhorse numbers. Drummer Ollie Brown was hired away from Stevie Wonder's band to play percussion, and his timbales, cowbells, and congas freed Charlie Watts from rock timekeeping, allowing him to play in a lighter, more swinging style. Preston's manager had demanded his client perform a mini-set of his two radio hits, “Outta Space” and “Nothin' from Nothin',” during the shows, so the Stones got even deeper into funk during rehearsals. Preston's songs would come near the end of the concerts so Mick could rest for the five-song finales. Missing entirely was Bobby Keys; Keith wanted him back, but Mick refused. Keys was broke and living in Los Angeles, where he played bar gigs as “Mr. Brown Sugar.” The Stones toured without horns that year.

A press conference was scheduled to launch the tour in Manhattan on May 1. They needed a gimmick, something catchy. Charlie remembered that the old Harlem jazz bands used to advertise their shows by playing in the streets on flatbed trucks. So as a big crowd of the New York press gathered at lunchtime at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Greenwich Village, the Rolling Stones pulled up front in a light drizzle, blasting “Brown Sugar” with amps set at ten on the back of an eighteen-wheel tractor trailer. Surprised journalists poured into the street, and Ian Stewart threw them leaflets listing the tour dates. The truck pulled away, the band in full cry. Two blocks away, the Stones jumped into waiting limos and disappeared.

Mick and Bianca were living in Manhattan, but soon Mick was back in Montauk as rehearsals continued, and Bianca began to be seen around New York on the arms of other men. Andy Warhol made the series of Jagger photos that were turned into silkscreen portraits, and took pictures of the Stones biting each other. On May 18, Mick accidentally slashed his wrist on a glass door in a restaurant, requiring twenty stitches. A few days later, the band gathered in an airplane hangar at Stewart Airport in Newburgh, New York, to rehearse on their lotus stages for the first time. The new production included lights designed by Broadway technical director Jules Fisher and huge speakers suspended above the stage, since the lotus wings had no room for amps. Mick used a wireless microphone for the first time, freeing him from the tyranny of wires forever. Mick also test-drove the giant inflatable white penis that burst out of the stage during the guitar vamps on “Starfucker” in a coup de théâtre of ironic ribaldry and blatant self-parody. Another balloon, a confetti-spewing green dragon, would be manipulated by Mick and Ollie Brown during the last song of the set.

Mick did a round of interviews to promote their tour, answering innumerable queries about the new Rolling Stone. “I wanted someone that was easy to get on with and that was a good player and used to playing onstage . . . Woody's personality seemed to fit the bill. Onstage he's got a lot of style, and it's got to be fun on the road. That's what it's all about.”
Rolling Stone
reporter Dave Marsh asked him why he was touring. “It's my
job,
” Mick said. “My vocation. No musician is beyond that, until he gets too old. There's a certain magic in repetition.”

With no new album to promote, Rolling Stones Records released the compilation
Made in the Shade,
a ten-track post-1971 anthology that delivered hit singles and concert faves in a poolside-by-the-pyramids sleeve. Allen Klein trumped this with
Metamorphosis,
a mislabeled, scattershot collection of old Stones demos and outtakes recorded in the sixties. Though not without interest for the band's hard-core followers,
Metamorphosis
had replaced a Bill Wyman–proposed project known as
The Black Box.
This was an insider's collection, assembled by Wyman from the Stones' archive, with carefully selected rarities and historically minded production notes. The
Black Box
project was ultimately vetoed by ABKCO for not including enough publishing-rich Jagger/Richards songs. The Stones were annoyed by
Metamorphosis
but powerless to make it go away.