Old Gods Almost Dead (55 page)

The Stones knew the tour sucked. “I don't think our capabilities are stretched enough. We're slightly locked into being the Rolling Stones,” Mick said. After the London debacle, the Stones went back to Germany, then to Spain and Yugoslavia for the first time. In early June, they arrived in Paris for three concerts at Les Abattoirs that would be recorded for a live album. Backstage on the first night in Paris, the jealous boyfriend of a girl Mick was seeing pointed a pistol at Mick before he was tackled by the bodyguards and hustled away.

Anita was in Switzerland with the children. On June 6, the final night of the Paris shows, Keith was called to the phone. He was told that his eleven-week-old son, Tara, had suffocated in his crib. The news was kept from the rest of the tour, so no one except a few insiders knew why Keith Richards came to life that night in Paris, playing long and luscious blues guitar solos on “Hot Stuff” and a painful, crying aria on “You Can't Always Get What You Want.” Most of the tracks used on the concert album
Love You Live
were taken from this show.

Anita flew to Paris to be with Keith. Dumb with grief, they clung to each other like two wraiths with a hellhound on their trail. “No longer the Scott and Zelda of the rock and roll age,” wrote Nick Kent, “they looked like some tragic, shell-shocked couple leading each other out of a concentration camp . . . I thought they were going to die.” There was talk of canceling the remaining dates, but Keith refused, and would have carried on even longer. The last show was in the Stadthalle in Vienna on June 23. Afterward, the Stones wrecked their hotel in a furious orgy of vandalism. “No, no!” Mick could be heard shouting. “Not the
chandelier
!” The bill for cleaning this up was 5,000 pounds. Mick later blamed it on Ahmet Ertegun.

Tara JoJo Gunne Richards's earthly remains were cremated in Geneva. After the tour, Keith and Anita flew to London and checked into a hotel. They never returned to Switzerland again.

Two Sevens Clash

Summer 1976.
John Phillips, ex-Papa, forty years old, former pop king and alpha wolf of Los Angeles, was living in London, working on the sound track for Nicholas Roeg's movie
The Man Who Fell to Earth
(starring David Bowie). He and his wife, actress Genevieve Waite, lived near Cheyne Walk, around the corner from Mick. While Mick was on tour that summer, Phillips enjoyed a dalliance with Bianca Jagger. His suspicious wife burst in on them one night, and there was a small scandal in Chelsea. Keith and Anita, deep in drugdom and crippled by guilt and despair, were then invited to vacate their suite at Claridges by the management. They brought Marlon over to play with Phillips's son one day and then didn't leave. Within a few weeks, John and Gen were junkies too.

Mick responded to Phillips's seduction of Bianca by inviting him to cricket matches, staying up all night, and playing guitar with him. Phillips, composer of “California Dreaming” and “Monday Monday,” had a batch of new songs, which Mick suggested they record, using the Stones as the studio band.

On August 21, the Stones headlined a huge outdoor rock festival at Knebworth Park. It was their last show of the year and was widely rumored to be the last Stones show ever, since Keith Richards was expected to die at any moment. The Stones went on at eleven-thirty after Lynyrd Skynyrd, 10cc, Hot Tuna, and Todd Rundgren had played. The Stones' thirty-song set included oldies like “Route 66” and “Dead Flowers” and was judged a huge success. Keith and Ronnie finally relaxed and played as a team, bouncing licks and runs off each other. Mick worked the ten-yard catwalk that extended into the crowd, a harbinger of the future, and a massive fireworks barrage was set off right after “Street Fighting Man.”

Right after that, the Stones began working with John Phillips at Olympic Studio. Mick was enthusiastic, and Phillips got Keith and Mick Taylor into the studio for the first time since Taylor had left the Stones two years earlier. Phillips had a handshake deal with Mick to have the Stones play on his album and release it on their own label, an incredible opportunity to which he responded by self-destructing. The sessions went well until Phillips's heroin addiction alienated Mick. Then, in late September, session engineer Keith Harwood was killed in a car wreck when, floating on heroin, he nodded off at the wheel. When Mick lost interest, Keith Richards took over helping Phillips, but then Keith's own drug problems got in the way.

John Phillips's career-reviving project with the Stones was shelved. Some saw Mick's avenging hand in this, but Ahmet Ertegun was also reportedly reluctant to have the Stones competing with their own next album. Mick wasn't quite through with Phillips, though. A few months later, he invited Papa John and his daughter Mackenzie to his place for lunch. She was then an eighteen-year-old TV star with a sitcom and a thousand-dollar-a-day cocaine habit. While he was making sandwiches, Mick sent Phillips out to buy mayonnaise and then locked him out of the house. Mick told Mackenzie, “I've been waiting for this since you were ten years old,” and jumped her in a flash. When Phillips returned and realized what was going down, he pounded on the door in a rage, then eventually left. Mackenzie Phillips later revealed that her tryst with Mick Jagger was “unbelievable. One night. Wham-bam. Bye-bye.”

                

October 1976.
The Stones were in Los Angeles, where Ron Wood had relocated with pregnant Chrissie. He and Mick spent nights listening to 150 hours of concert tapes, picking tracks for the new live album. Mick talked to record execs—MCA, EMI, Polydor—about the Stones' new record deal. The British papers were publishing rumors that Mick's marriage was over. “I got married for something to do,” he told a reporter. “I've never been madly, deeply in love. I'm not an emotional person.”

Mick resumed an earlier affair with Bebe Buell in New York that autumn. The gorgeous former
Playboy
pinup loved Mick without being in love with him, and as an expert on affairs was keenly observant of Mick as a lover. “The first time I was with him I was a bit shocked,” she says, “shocked by how small he was, how frail he seemed with his tiny bones. I was two inches taller than Mick, but he seemed to love it. He was aggressive in the sack, very self-assured but considerate too. When I would be with him, I knew that flowers, perfume, or something in silk would arrive next day.

“You didn't just go out with Mick. He wanted his women to look the part. He'd check me out before we left my house, and if he didn't approve, I was sent back for another outfit. He was also a total genius with skin. He'd come into my bedroom and say, 'Let me look at your face, Bebe.' He'd take out a little jar of specially formulated cream and start putting it on for me. He taught me how to steam my face, what herbs to use. He knew more about facials and cosmetics than any woman.

“No one was monogamous back then. Everybody in that world cheated, but I think that Mick loved Bianca much more than he ever admitted to anyone. He called her B, and I thought she was a good woman. She referred to me as Mick's little friend.”

Mick had other girlfriends as well: Sabrina Guinness in London, socialite Barbara Allen in New York, and model Apollonia von Ravenstein, among others. Bebe says that she was once invited by Mick and David Bowie to an orgy with four black men on Long Island. “There's no stopping Mick Jagger,” she says. “Sexually, he's completely without prejudice, and he pushes himself to the limit.”

When Bebe Buell became pregnant that fall (by Aerosmith's Steven Tyler), Mick proudly told his New York friends that the child was his.

Ron Wood joined the Malibu gang of Bob Dylan confederates, started a new solo album at The Band's Shangri-La Studio, became a father when his wife had a baby boy they named Jesse James. Woody appeared briefly with The Band in their Thanksgiving Day concert in San Francisco in late November, a farewell show famous as The Last Waltz. Ron and Chrissie Wood separated shortly after that.

In December, Keith was listening to concert tracks when he decided to use the studio time to cut a Christmas single. He played guitar and bass on Chuck Berry's “Run Rudolph Run,” with Stu on piano and Mike Driscoll (from Mick Taylor's blues band) on drums. The song was released in time for Christmas—two years later.

In Jamaica, where Keith was living toward the end of 1976, the big reggae song was “Two Sevens Clash” by Joseph Hill's group, Culture. The song prophesied that the year 1977, when two sevens clashed, would be an apocalyptic one. Sure enough, in 1977 martial law was declared in Jamaica to prevent civil war. In England, reggae musicians linked up with the punks (the Clash named themselves after Culture's song), an alliance commemorated by Bob Marley's militant jam “Punky Reggae Party.” For the Rolling Stones, 1977 would bring enormous changes, portents of dissolution, threats of prison, international scandal, and, ultimately, some of the finest music they would ever create.

                

February 1977.
The Stones were on a roll just before the whip came down in Toronto. They had a good live album in the can, the last record they owed Atlantic under their old contract. There was stiff competition for their services among other record labels, a deal potentially worth tens of millions to the musicians. The Stones were rehearsing, playing well, the new guy working out nicely. Mick and Keith had some early songs for the next album—Keith's “Beast of Burden,” Mick's “Faraway Eyes”—which they felt was going to be very strong, the first complete Stones album with their new lineup.

It was Mick's idea that the Stones convene in Toronto, Canada's cultural capital, in February. Keith had been found guilty of cocaine possession in January and fined, which again made his entry into the United States a problem. The Stones wanted to record some classic R&B songs in a nightclub atmosphere to include on their live album, partly as a “golden handshake” for departing executive Marshall Chess, whose family's publishing company still controlled the rights to the old Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry numbers the Stones would cut. By recording in Toronto, Mick could commute to the ongoing label negotiations and his family in New York, where the live album was also being mixed.

On February 16, the Stones announced their new record deal with the British company EMI to distribute Rolling Stones Records everywhere except America. One of the deal's perks involved EMI providing free studio time to the Stones at the company's famous Pathé-Marconi Studios in Paris, where they would record their next five albums. It was Marshall Chess's last deal for the Stones. Later that year, the Stones re-signed their North American distribution deal with Atlantic Records after Ahmet Ertegun coughed up a reported $20 million.

The Stones and their huge entourage, still captained by Peter Rudge, arrived in Toronto in mid-February to rehearse for a three-night stand at the suitably sleazy El Mocambo nightclub early in March. They checked into the Harbour Castle Hotel and waited for Keith, who didn't show up.

He and Anita were wintering at Redlands, where their only visitors seemed to be dope dealers making smack and coke runs from London. Still trying to recover from the death of their baby, struggling to cut down their drug intake by themselves, the couple seemed to sense that they were approaching some kind of tragic catharsis. With writer Barbara Charone present, Anita tore into Keith one night as he stared vacantly at the flickering TV. “It's impossible to get
laid
around here,” she yelled. “I'm going to walk the streets of the town. I'll probably have better luck.” When Keith pointedly ignored her, Anita let him have it.

“You think you're Superman, don't you? Well, you're only Superman when you play the guitar! You think you can handle drugs, but you can't! I know what I am, and I've been that way for seven years. You pretend! You're
afraid.
You pretend that you don't have a drug habit. You just go upstairs to the bathroom! You think people don't
know
? You're no different than anybody else. You can't handle drugs either!”

It had been a long time since Keith's last detox, and he was in a state of physical decline and a week late getting to Canada. He'd insisted the Stones rehearse before the club dates, but was unable to pack his things and get his family to Canada. Mick and the band sent him frantic “Where are you?” telegrams every day. Without Keith, the Stones were going into panic mode.

On February 23, Keith and Anita finally packed their clothes, guitars, and toys into twenty-eight cases, and locked Redlands up tight. They took Keith's dog Tabasco over to Doris Richards's house in Dartford and said good-bye to Angela, as daughter Dandelion was now called. Dressed in flamboyant, matching black and white silk suits, with Marlon in his usual shorts and Wellington boots, Keith and Anita boarded the British Airways flight that would take them to the final act of their ten-year romance.

Watch Yer Bottoms, Keith

Toronto, February 24, 1977.
At the airport, Keith looked like Lazarus before Jesus sorted him out. He'd cooked his last shot of smack on the plane, then gallantly tossed the burned spoon into Anita's bag. Anita seemed agitated going through customs and made a scene, so they brought in the dogs, found a lump of hash, the spoon, and the usual traces of residue in her luggage. The police busted her for suspected narcotics violations, but let her go on to the Stones' hotel.

Three days later, acting on a tip that Keith had a large stash on hand, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police came looking for him. Keith was sleeping in one of the many “floater” suites the Stones kept in the hotel, so it took the Mounties a couple of hours to even find him. When they did, his door was mysteriously unguarded by the security detail that usually protected him. Keith was deeply asleep, almost comatose. The cops were unable to wake him during a prolonged search, which uncovered enough dope to charge him with being a heroin trafficker under Canadian law.