Old Gods Almost Dead (59 page)

As the hearing began, the judge threw out some of the prosecution's evidence and declared Keith's arm-long rap sheet inadmissible. When the heroin trafficking and cocaine possession charges were also dropped, seasoned observers had the impression that a colossal and costly fix was in. After Keith made some properly contrite noises and pleaded guilty only to heroin possession, he received a year in jail, suspended to probation. Other wrist-slap conditions included continued drug treatment and a benefit concert for the Canadian Institute for the Blind within six months.

Keith raised his fist in the air when the judge was finished, immensely relieved he wasn't going to prison. Fists in the air and cheers outside the courtroom. The deal and the legal fees had cost him a reported $3 million, but he didn't care. The best part was who
really
got him off—if the legend is true.

Keith: “There was this little blind girl, Rita, following us around on the previous [1975] tour, and I asked the roadies to look after her . . . It turns out that this little girl knows or is related to the judge who's trying the case. So totally unbeknownst to me, she goes to see this judge at his home, tells him a simple story—how I've looked after her and all that, and the upshot is that he passes a ruling that as the major payment for this offense we have to play a free concert at this blind school. My blind angel came through, bless her heart.” In addition, the sentence settled Keith's legal situation enough that he was ultimately able to get a green card, the permanent entry visa to live in the United States.

There was some outrage in Canada's conservative press and judiciary circles over the leniency of the sentence, and the government was forced to announce it would appeal. Things dragged on for another year, until the heat died down. Keith Richards has never been arrested since.

                

November 1978.
Keith recuperated in Jamaica, then flew back to New York. Peter Tosh's
Bush Doctor
album was out and selling well along with its single, Peter and Mick duetting on “Don't Look Back.” This gave the Stones massive new credibility in the music world because it seemed so right for the band that had helped rescue the blues to now use its resources to catalyze a new black music that inspired them. Tosh and his band were selling out their shows, playing the militant “rockers” style with astonishing drama and power, riding the true cutting edge of popular music. Mick caught their act at the Bottom Line in New York. When Tosh called on him to sing, Mick was bodily lifted up and passed over the heads of the audience from the back of the room to the stage. On December 12, Mick and Keith arrived at NBC, where Mick would sing “Don't Look Back” with Tosh on
Saturday Night Live.
There was a tumult of Rastas, comedians, and rock stars in the dressing room as Mick and Keith smoked a spliff with Tosh and posed for photographers. More spliffs, and Mick bounced around the nerveless Tosh as Sly and Robbie popped their rhythms. Then Mick disgraced Tosh (in the eyes of all watching Jamaicans) by licking Tosh's lips in a lunatic replay of his lingual assault on Wood a few weeks earlier.

On December 18, Keith went to a thirty-fifth-birthday party for himself in New York, then flew home for Christmas with Marlon and Anita. Airport photographers didn't recognize her. Bloated from alcohol, with stringy hair and gaps in her teeth, the hag who was once the toast of Europe staggered past them incognito.

The New Barbarians

January 1979.
Jamaica was so politically unstable that reggae's international wing had to relocate. Chris Blackwell built a new recording studio at his Compass Point property in the Bahamas, where the Rolling Stones gathered that month to work on their next album, the hotly anticipated follow-up to
Some Girls.
The new album had cynical working titles like
Certain Women
and
More Fast Ones.
There was a lot left over from Paris the previous year: “Start Me Up” and “Claudine,” with its funny chant “Clau-dine's back in jail again” to a rub-a-dub reggae beat, a little like what a new wave band called the Police was doing: a few bars of reggae whipped up in the chorus by a burst of rock rimfire. “Jah Is Not Dead” was another experiment with rockers-style reggae and R&B, Mick vocalizing in fake West Indian patois. Visiting San Francisco musician Boz Scaggs also played at that session. The tape features Mick angrily telling some coke-snorting hangers-on to leave the studio.

The Stones long disco-rock piece called “Dance” began as a Latin jam at Compass Point with Michael Shrieve playing percussion and Max Romeo on vocals. “I am what I am,” Mick sang on the early versions, “and I know I've got my faults.” He was fighting Bianca in court at the time; she wanted half of his estimated 10-million-pound fortune (she wouldn't get close). He was also battling Keith, who began to assert himself regarding production details he'd ignored during years of drug coma. The control-driven Mick Jagger couldn't believe Keith was back and wanted in, and often responded with eye-rolling contempt at his suggestions.

                

Keith had to
play his Canadian benefit concert by the end of April to fulfill his sentence. This coincided with Ron Wood having to promote
Gimme Some Neck,
his third solo album and his first for Columbia. The label, in a major coup for Wood, had loaned him the services of Bob Dylan and a new Dylan tune called “Seven Days,” which Wood had recorded in Malibu, with Mick Fleetwood on drums.
Neck
was Wood's best record. Its songs about anxiety, reggae jams, Faces-style raunch, and acoustic interludes amounted to a proto-Stones album, since most of them played on it.

So Keith and Ronnie put together a road band, the New Barbarians (name courtesy of Neil Young; the “New” had to be tacked on when they learned there was already a Barbarians). The band included the two guitarists, Bobby Keys on sax, Ian McLagan on keys, Meters drummer Zigaboo Modeliste, and jazz-rock star Stanley Clarke on bass.

The New Barbarians rehearsed in Los Angeles in February 1979, playing all night at Wood's house in Mandeville Canyon as John Belushi laid out generous lines of the devil's dandruff. They were buying Persian Brown heroin from Belushi's friend Kathy Smith and chasing the dragon to relax. The comedian was also the master of ceremonies when the New Barbarians made their world debut in front of five thousand fans in Oshawa, Ontario, on April 29, opening for the Rolling Stones.

Belushi: “I'm just a sleazy actor on a late-night TV show, but here's some real musicians! Come on up here! Keith Richards! Ron Wood! The New Barbarians
—go nuts!!”
Powered by one of the best drummers of the era, the New Barbs gave the basic Richards/Wood guitar attack a funky second-line hop. They did Wood's songs in a loose, jamming style, then powered up for Keith's numbers: “Happy” and “Before They Make Me Run.” Both of these benefit shows concluded with the unrehearsed Stones, whose entire touring apparatus had been driven up from storage in Dallas for the only concerts the Stones would play anywhere that year.

The New Barbarians spent April and May on the road, selling out all their shows. Keith was traveling with his girlfriend Lil and played well almost every night, usually drinking a quart of vodka during the shows. He sang “Love in Vain” with Woody and did solo turns on Sam Cooke's “Let's Go Steady” and “Apartment #9” in the heartache style of his Toronto recordings. Living on alcohol and cocaine, Keith assumed a particularly spectral appearance as his hair began to gray and his face caved in, and rumors of his impending demise again spread through the music industry. Reporters who got backstage noted that the post-performance Keith looked like he'd just been crucified. Bobby Keys was redeeming himself after years of scuffling in bars. His playing on the big finale, “I Can Feel the Fire,” was often the high point of the set. The tour ended at the Forum in Los Angeles on May 21. Expenses had been so lavish that Woody and Keith made no money, and
Gimme Some Neck
stiffed as well. Keith and Woody's brotherly bond began to strain under financial pressures and Wood's rapid ascent into drugdom's First Division.

                

On June 21,
Anita was at home with her son and some houseguests, Fred Sessler's son Jeffrey and seventeen-year-old Scott Cantrell, a local kid Anita had taken in. Cantrell was lying in Anita's bed, watching television and toying with the .38 pistol that Keith had bought in Florida on the previous Stones tour. While supposedly playing Russian roulette, Cantrell shot himself in the head and died in what the headlines called Keith Richards's bed.

The police arrested Anita. They later cleared her of involvement with Cantrell's death but charged her with possession of stolen firearms. Suddenly “Claudine” didn't seem so funny when Anita was looking at four years in prison. If the suicide weapon could be tied to Keith, no one knew what would happen. The New York papers smeared Anita with accusations of black magic, animal sacrifice, orgies with the local youth, witchcraft, and poor housekeeping. Keith called her from Paris, furious that she had lost his gun.

This was the final nail in the coffin of the Keith and Anita saga. Keith's life with Anita in all its bloody and sordid glory was the subject of Spanish Tony's recently published memoir,
Up and Down with the Rolling Stones,
which portrayed them as callous libertines and pathetic junkies. Keith's Canadian case had been reopened, to appeal the perceived leniency of his sentence, and that decision was hanging in the balance. His American visa was jeopardized, and now the lawyers warned him to stay clear. “That boy who shot himself in my house really ended it for us,” Anita said later. “It was the end of our personal relationship.” Separated from his family, Keith was virtually homeless. He spent most of the summer of 1979 hiding at Fred Sessler's house in Florida, and his long affair with Lil began to cool.

                

In the wake
of
Some Girls'
massive success, there was a spurt of Stones-related music released that year. Another anthology,
Time Waits for No One,
featuring tracks from 1971 to 1977, was released in Europe as the last album due under the old WEA contract. The one true masterpiece of this era was Marianne Faithfull's
Broken English,
a harrowing song cycle about betrayal and decay, declaimed in a ravaged gravel-alto amid a ferociously new wave band setting. It was a stunning comeback for Marianne after years of living her Burroughsian dream of abject addiction and helplessness, an existential conceit that fundamentally worked out, considering the magisterial power of the
Broken English
music and persona. (Critic Camille Paglia claimed Marianne's album was one of the greatest works of art ever produced by a woman.) The title song was about the anarchist Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany and burned with a low flame that caught the edgy, terror-obsessed mood of 1979, the year of the Red Brigades. The searing “Why'd Ya Do It?” was perhaps the most directly penetrating song about infidelity ever written, and took enormous courage and skill to pull off.
Broken English
was an avant-garde sensation, one of the great Rolling Stones albums, even though none of them played on it.

Less successful were the other Stones-related records.
Gimme Some Neck
was followed by Mick Taylor's first solo album,
Leather Jacket,
a Big Statement album without any real songs. The title track was a bitter portrait of Keith and Anita, while the rest of the album sounded like familiar, recycled guitar moves. The third album in this continuum was Ian McLagan's
Troublemaker,
recorded in Los Angeles later that year.

In November, while Ron Wood was working on Mac's record in L.A., Bobby Keys brought something special to the studio one night. It was a new kind of cocaine, little rocks one cooked and smoked instead of snorted. One big toke provided a bolt of crystal-clear energy. It wore off a few minutes later: time for another hit. “Freebasing” cocaine was even more addictive than heroin, even more of a job, involving a chemistry set of retorts and burners that often exploded in the user's face. It was the immediate precursor of the crack epidemic that seriously threatened black culture later on.

Woody got totally addicted right away. John Belushi started freebasing at his house. Mac got totally hooked. The dope bills skyrocketed as
Troublemaker
was recorded in a haze of reggae smoke and the jivey backbeat of Faces rock and roll. Mac's album soon joined
Gimme Some Neck
and
Leather Jacket
in the bargain bins after its release the following year.

                

The Stones tensely
finished the major recording for
Emotional Rescue
in Paris that fall.

They took their tapes to New York in November, mixing at Electric Lady. Epic struggles in the studio over mixes, levels, sequencing, everything. “Dance” was supposed to have been a Stones instrumental jam, but Mick insisted on putting words to it, writing what Keith derided as an opera. Keith: “It was supposed to just have this
minimal
lyric. Instead, Mick comes up with
Don Giovanni.
” Huge fight over whether “All About You” or “Let's Go Steady” would be the token Keith song on the album. Stories of serious bad blood circulated around New York amid published (and denied) reports that Bill Wyman was leaving the Stones and that Ron Wood was killing himself with freebase. Mick took Keith's pithy criticisms in the studio as personal attacks and saw his primacy over the Stones threatened. Word got back to Keith that Mick wished out loud that Keith would go back to being a full-time junkie.

The seventies were all over now, and the Rolling Stones were tattered but erect. Bianca got her divorce and custody of Jade. Mick and Jerry bumped into her at Woody Allen's 1980 New Year's party in New York, and everyone got on well. Charlie and Stu were touring in a boogie-woogie revival band called Rocket 88. Bill Wyman was photographing his neighbor, artist Marc Chagall, in Provence. Ron Wood was making his next album with a glass pipe. Anita Pallenberg pleaded guilty to a reduced weapons charge and was fined. Marianne Faithfull stayed true to her vocation, refusing to give up her beloved drugs. Keith Richards remained the standard-bearer of the old rock star style. “I've
studied
this shit,” he said of dope. “I'm a walking laboratory. I'm Baudelaire rolled in with a few other cats.” But his tone, and his attitude, soon changed after he found a new girlfriend in New York, one who helped him grow into another way of living.