Old Gods Almost Dead (62 page)

As the tour moved around the land, attracting plenty of media attention (but without the frenzy of previous eras), the question now arose: Who are the Rolling Stones? Critic Robert Palmer tried to answer this with the sympathy of an old-school Stones fan: “They're a grown-up rock and roll band, with fans ranging in age from under ten to sixty and more, and with a history as rich and various as the histories of the early bluesmen and first generation rockers they've always admired. They have something else in common with those blues singers and early rockers, too: they have their dignity.”

                

Various bands
opened for the Stones: Van Halen, Heart, the Neville Brothers, Etta James, J. Geils, the Stray Cats, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, George Thorogood and the Destroyers. Thorogood was said to be rehearsing the Stones' set in secret in case Ronnie got fired or crapped out, an issue that came to a head in a California hotel when Keith heard a rumor (probably from Jo) that Ronnie was freebasing again and diddling girls in a floater suite. “I'd
guaranteed
he wouldn't do this shit,” Keith said later, “and then I found out he was up there doing it.” In a rage, Keith headed for the elevator, with Patti, Jo, Stones executive Jane Rose, and a few security guys trying to talk him out of murdering Woody. “My old lady was going, 'Keith, don't make a scene.' And by the time I'd gotten [to Wood's room], she'd ripped the back of my shirt off.” Keith barged in with his shirt in shreds and a vigilante squad behind him. He took hold of Wood—“You stupid fucker!”—and punched him hard in the nose.

Keith: “The next day, Ronnie and I had a bit of a
hah-hah,
and it was all over.” The little fight at least cleared the air, with both guitarists playing better together for the rest of the tour.

A new act called Prince opened shows for the Stones on some of the Southern California dates. Prince sang falsetto and spun like a dervish. Jagger thought he was totally hot. At the Los Angeles Coliseum on October 9, Prince came out wearing only a black knit bikini bottom, a tiny elfin boy in what looked like a pair of panties. The Stones, incredulous, watched the video feed in their dressing room (Charlie: “Cor! 'E's in his bloody
underwear
!”) as a barrage of cans and homophobic curses started flying toward the stage. Prince stayed on for five minutes while flying objects and food landed around him. Then he was booed off the stage. The next night, he lost the black bikini and wore some clothes, but was still hit by fruit and a roasted chicken a few minutes into his act. He left the stage and the tour, abandoning five more gigs opening for the Stones, whose audience clearly hated him.

November 5, 1981. Tina Turner, shed of Ike and basking in solo stardom, opened for the Stones at their stadium shows in New Jersey's Meadowlands. She came out at the end of the Stones' set to sing “Honky Tonk Women” with the man she taught to dance back in 1965.

After a month touring the Midwest, the Stones fetched up in Chicago. Before a run of three nights at the Rosemont Horizon, they showed up at the Checkerboard Lounge on the South Side to jam with Muddy Waters. On a crowded stage with Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, they backed Muddy as he ran through “Mannish Boy,” “Long Distance Call,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” and “Baby Please Don't Go.” Keith: “For that gig, Ronnie and I dressed up in white shirts and black vests, like really going to work. When we play[ed] with Muddy Waters, we dressed for business.” Sitting on a stool surrounded by his acolytes, Muddy was a magisterial presence in what was his last recorded performance, forty years after Alan Lomax turned up at his cabin in the Delta. Lung cancer had struck Muddy Waters, and he died at home in Chicago in 1983. The Stones sent a huge floral arrangement to his funeral with a note that read, “In memory of a wonderful man dear to us all. We shall never forget you Muddy.”

                

December 1981.
Immense crowds at Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan, and the Superdome in New Orleans, where the Stones threw a party on a Mississippi riverboat. Film director Hal Ashby, famous for
Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Coming Home,
and extreme Hollywood drug use, joined the tour with a movie crew to shoot the Stones' Phoenix-area show in 35mm for a concert film. After a near-perfect show at Sun Devil Stadium (during which Keith tried to brain a stage-crasher with his guitar), Ashby overdosed on drugs at the party in Mick's suite and was carried out of the hotel on a stretcher with an IV needle in his arm.

The next night, Mick Taylor joined his old band in Kansas City for a chilly onstage reunion. The tour was almost over now, and the Stones were beat, but there was just enough petrol in the tank for the last two shows in Hampton Roads, Virginia. The first, on Keith's thirty-eighth birthday (December 18), was broadcast nationally on the HBO cable TV network. Directed by a recovered Hal Ashby, the show started with a Dionysian “Under My Thumb,” after which Mick, nervously pacing the immense stadium stage, urged his national television audience to get drunk and smoke joints. It was a long way from Ed Sullivan on Sunday night.

The Stones cracked on with “When the Whip Comes Down,” which hit like a heat wave, then played a long version of their show, augmented by Bobby Keys on “Brown Sugar” as Mick flew like a hydraulic angel over the seething crowd. Introducing the band, he called out Charlie Watts, who always got a huge cheer. Then the inevitable: “Ernie Watts on saxophone—no relation.” After Mick had the big crowd sing “Happy Birthday” to Keith, they ended with “Satisfaction,” the whole band riffing hard as Mick testified: “Luv ya, luv ya, luv ya, got ta leave ya. Wo-yay! Wo-yay! Wo-yay! Wo-yay! Good night everybody—thank you!”

And, with a wave, they were gone. Real gone, since the fractious 1980s would see “ism and schism,” dissolution and spite within the Rolling Stones, and it would be eight years before they toured America again. There was a party backstage after the broadcast for Keith and Bobby Keys. Keith cut the cake. The next night, the last show of the tour, Keith gave Bill Graham a package wrapped in newsprint with a single rose attached. The gift was the brown boots he'd worn every night, good-luck seven-league boots patched with tape and holed through the sole, as tattered and beat-looking as their former owner.

Hijacking the Cherry Picker

MTV changed
the music business in America in 1982, and although the aging Rolling Stones never made a huge impact on youth market video, MTV had a huge impact on the Stones. Traditionally musicians had always traveled to their audiences to sell their music. Now, with a video in heavy rotation to a select audience, a band could appear before several million fans several times per day. For rich bands like the Stones, video obviated the ancient need to keep moving or die. MTV also became a major launching pad for solo stars: Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, and—in epic fashion—Michael Jackson, whose
Thriller
album became the biggest seller in recording history on the strength of short- and long-form videos. Among the video audience, bands became almost passé. The video revolution's cameras loved a face more than a band, a fact not lost on ever-ambitious Mick Jagger as the Stones' record contract was about to come on the market again. The fallout from all this would cripple the Stones in the 1980s and lead to damaging public rancor.

                

The year began
with bad feelings between Mick and Keith over their executive assistant, Jane Rose, who had worked for the band since 1974. Mick had fired her at the end of 1981, and Keith had immediately hired her to look after his affairs as his manager. This made Mick crazy, and the more authority Keith gave Jane, the angrier Mick became. “If I'd given up on Jane,” Keith said later, “I could have maybe kept the Stones together. It actually got down to things like that.”

In London on April 28, Mick announced the Euro leg of the Stones' tour at a press conference. Ian McLagan was replaced on keyboards by Chuck Leavell from Macon, Georgia, late of the Allman Brothers Band. Leavell had been recommended to Mick by Bill Graham, and he'd first played with the Stones at their Fox Theater shows in Atlanta the year before. A facile musician and amiable team player, Leavell would become Mick Jagger's long-term arranger and accompanist. Ernie Watts was replaced by Bobby Keys, finally brought in from the cold at Keith's insistence, along with trumpeter Gene Barge.

                

The tour began
at the end of May in Scotland with the same show as the American tour. George Thorogood and the J. Geils Band opened many of the shows, with Thorogood again prepared to go on if Woody broke down. Mick openly wanted Wood out, and banished him from the Stones' hotels in case his drug use drew police attention. Keith kept him in the band out of loyalty and bloody-mindedness in the face of Jagger's disdain. On May 31, they played the tiny 100 Club in Oxford Street, nearly twenty years after their Soho debut as the Rollin' Stones in 1962. Then on through stadiums and soccer fields in the Low Countries, Germany, France (a rocking “Chantilly Lace” added to the Paris dates), and Scandinavia (body searches at the Swedish border) in June before they landed back in London for two crucial shows at Wembley Stadium.

Keith and Mick did a round of interviews for the Wembley concerts. With J. Geils and the reggae bands Third World and Black Uhuru opening, both shows sold out, much to the relief of the Stones. Mick complained (with a wink) that Princess Diana's new baby, William, was stealing the Stones' limelight. Keith was asked how he was approaching the Stones' big Wembley homecoming and quipped, “From Heathrow.” He continued to stubbornly defend his heroin addiction. “I don't like to regret heroin,” he told the
Evening Standard,
“because I learned a lot from it. I'd regret it if I'd OD'd.” Keith did regret Ron Wood's drug habit. At the second Wembley show, when Keith forgot the changes to “She's So Cold” and Wood failed to cover for him because he was spaced out, Keith charged over and punched Ron hard in the face, nearly knocking the drowsy guitarist off the stage, drawing a rousing cheer from fans in front. The Stones got good reviews in England for the first time in years, and the concerts were chalked up as victories for the band.

Keith hadn't seen his father in twenty years. While in London, prompted by Patti Hanson, he was finally moved to renew contact. Bert Richards, now in his seventies, an old tippler in a cloth cap who drank even more than his son, had mellowed as well, and he immediately became a cosseted fixture in Keith's entourage. Keith astounded the crew when he even offered his dad a slice of his sacrosanct shepherd's pie, the classic English dish of mashed potatoes, ground beef, and gravy that was the daily staple of Keith's touring diet. (Keith once pointed a loaded gun at a roadie who had unknowingly tasted Keith's private pie.) Bert soon started moving around with Keith and Marlon as they commuted between England, Jamaica, and New York.

The 1982 tour lasted through July. Mick and Keith weren't speaking at all. When Jagger ranked on J. Geils's singer, Peter Wolf, for always hanging out in Keith's room, Keith bitterly told Wolf, “That's a fair example of the kind of cunt I've had to deal with for twenty-five years.” In Norway, Keith hijacked Mick's cherry picker and played a long aerial guitar break while Jagger fumed below, ordering poor Ron Wood to somehow get Keith down. In Sweden, Keith collapsed, drunk, during “Beast” and played the solo on his back, smoking a cigarette.

These final 1982 shows proved to be the last of the old-style Rolling Stones concerts, featuring the core band, keyboards, and a horn or two. When they started playing again late in the decade, the shows were transformed into immense spectacles with operatic stages, a chorale of backup singers, brass quartets, and a glitzy Las Vegas aura. Something precious was gone forever.

                

Autumn 1982.
A London publisher signed up Mick Jagger's ghostwritten autobiography for a million pounds. The advance would later be returned when Mick supposedly couldn't remember anything of interest. Jerry Hall wanted to get married, but Mick couldn't be bothered. Soon she was seen in public with a portly, horse-owning plutocrat who, Jerry intimated, could buy and sell Mick with a phone call. Mick fled to New York, where he went out with a local debutante and, reportedly, actress Valerie Perrine.

In November, the Stones returned to Pathé-Marconi in Paris to begin work on their last album for Atlantic. Ahmet Ertegun wasn't interested in re-signing for the demanded tens of millions, and Mick was being courted by the flamboyant, shpritzing CBS Records chief Walter Yetnikoff, who wanted the Stones, plus Mick's much-rumored solo career. Back in their favorite room, the Stones and Stu ran through their stash of old material. Not much was left after
Tattoo You
had scraped the barrel, so Mick and Keith began writing in a rented basement room. They put “Wanna Hold You” together, with Mick playing drums and Keith singing. Mick was reading William Burroughs's visionary new sci-fi novel
Cities of the Red Night,
which would inspire the psychic template for the dance club politics of “Undercover of the Night,” which Mick was working out on guitar by himself. Ron Wood had a promising track that the band worked on. Its creator's low status in the Stones was evident in the working title someone scrawled on the tape can: “Dog Shit.”

On November 12, Jerry Hall flew in from New York, fresh from two months of horsey escapades and headlines. Mick started in on her in front of reporters the minute she stepped off the plane. But Mick told Jerry he would marry her, and they patched things up. She gave an interview to a London paper about how weird and sexually dirty Mick was. When she had to get sexy at a photo shoot, she blabbed, she just thought of some of the nasty things he did to her. When the Stones broke off recording for Christmas, Mick took her to Mustique, where his new house was going up. Keith and Patti were also about to marry, but her father died and the wedding was postponed. Keith helped carry his coffin at the funeral early in January 1983.