There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll

by Robinson, Lisa

  We talked about sex. He admitted that he probably deserved his reputation as a roué. But he said he wasn’t concerned about AIDS. Even with random sex on the road, he didn’t think it was a problem if he was just getting blow jobs. He said that sex was a motivating factor in his relationships, but it didn’t rule his life. It was, he said, in balance. “If you’re being fucked to death in the morning, then there’s no way you can go picking up girls at midnight, right? Being in tune with somebody that way is great. It makes everything else go along so beautifully.” I asked what he was like when he didn’t have a lot of sex in his life. “Nervous, vicious, mean, narcissistic, homosexual,” he said. Homosexual? “That was a joke,” he said. “Don’t take everything I say seriously just because I’m trying to make the interview more interesting.” When pressed, he said, “Basically it’s been girls all the way.” Then he talked about how he knew a lot of gay people and how, at one time in his life, it had been nice to be attractive to men, that he liked the attention. That it had been new, something he hadn’t considered before, and, he emphasized, this was during “that androgynous era, in the 1960s.”

  I asked him why English men, sooner or later, at some point, have a propensity to wind up in drag. “English men don’t need much convincing to dress up as women,” Mick admitted. “If you get bored at the weekend and you’ve got friends over and you want to dress as women and go down to the pub, it doesn’t take more than just asking. With English guys, it’s in the blood.” We discussed marriage. He wasn’t keen on marriage. “It’s like signing a 365-page contract,” he said, “without knowing what’s in it.” (A few years after he said this, Mick and Jerry, who would eventually have four children together, got married in some mumbo-jumbo ceremony on the top of a mountain in Bali. Most people assumed it wasn’t really legal.)

  We talked about age. Mick was forty-one at the time, and while he said he didn’t know anyone who wouldn’t be more comfortable being twenty-one, there wasn’t much to be done about it. When he turned forty, he said, Pete Townshend hadn’t helped much when he wrote some “garbage” (Mick’s term) in the London Times. “I found it rather strange,” Mick said. “As far as I could see, it was all about him and his problems getting older. He has more problems with it than I do.”

  In 1991, Mick was in Los Angeles, making his third solo album (Wandering Spirit) with producer Rick Rubin. Rick was also working with a blues band called the Red Devils. They performed at a club on La Brea and 6th Street called King King. Members of ZZ Top, the Black Crowes and the Red Hot Chili Peppers would stop by and jam. There were a lot of great-looking girls in the club and Mick occasionally went to check out the scene. He’d get onstage and sing with the band. At some point, Rick produced an entire album of Mick singing blues with the Red Devils. It was done live at Ocean Way Studios. While it’s been heavily bootlegged, it was never officially released. For me, it was then, and still is now, the best solo album Mick has ever done.

  *

  Keith Richards and I talked all throughout the 1980s and the 1990s. Largely because of my friendship with his manager Jane Rose, we’ve stayed in touch to this day. After he stopped using heroin, and long before his extraordinary 2010 memoir Life, Keith’s interviews were candid, honest and forthcoming. No frills. Like he told me in 1975—no flab. We would meet at his apartment on East 4th Street between Broadway and Lafayette. Or in various hotels. Or at his house in Westport, Connecticut. Or where the Stones rehearsed for tours—like Long View Farm, in Massachusetts. It was there that Keith recorded the now famous bootleg of him singing Hoagy Carmichael songs and playing piano. In 1981, after John Lennon’s murder, I asked Keith if he was ever afraid of crazed fans. In typical Keith fashion, he said, “There’s always nutters around. I don’t think this is a high point for nutters; they’ve just had a lucky year. I mean the Pope . . . Reagan . . . On the average, they’re lousy shots. Which gives you some hope.” We talked about his “rebel” image. “With the Stones it all gets put under a magnifying glass,” he said. “And it gets concentrated until it comes down to . . . HIM. The green one, over there. He’s going too far. So I got lumbered with it all. I do time for these guys. Well, by an incredible stroke of luck, I haven’t yet.” He talked about how he got bored with heroin. “It gets to a point where all you’re doing is getting to where you feel normal. You don’t get high. Dope is full time. You want to talk about seduction, it’s unbelievable. But don’t let anybody fool you—it ain’t that hard to kick dope. I’d rather kick dope than stop smoking cigarettes.”

  In 1988, Keith and I talked about age, the Stones, and the blues. He talked about Muddy Waters, who died in 1983. “With Muddy,” Keith said, “there was a gig booked. And one day, people had to have their tickets refunded because the guy kicked the bucket right before the gig. To me, that’s the way to go. That, to me, is commitment. If you’re going to do it, do it all the way. You retire only if your functions fail.” And, as always, we talked about Ian Stewart. “Stu was so down to earth,” Keith said. “Bullshit is bullshit and it stopped with Stu. We always had a piano on the stage for him. It was his choice whether to play it or not. He may have had Golf Digest on the stand and have a read-through during the show, but he was the glue for all the madness. Stu was always there. He was the rock. The greatest compliment he would ever give you was ‘not bad.’ He was the anchor for us. He was the conscience of the Rolling Stones.” I asked Keith if he was amazed that the band’s career had lasted as long as it had, and that they made so much money. He replied: “Yes, I’m amazed. And I’m still waiting for the money.”

  In 1989, the Stones left Bill Graham and employed a new promoter for the band’s “Steel Wheels” tour. Bill Graham’s life was producing concerts. Getting the Stones had been a big coup. He was certain he’d get the 1989 tour. He went to Mick again and again, and made concessions unheard of at that time. Instead, Mick chose the Canadian promoter Michael Cohl, who presumably offered more money. It broke Bill Graham’s heart. He referred to the Stones as “whores.” He never recovered from the rejection. By the time the Stones did their “Bridges to Babylon” tour in 1998, I had seen them in concert for twenty-nine years. I had been backstage at their concerts for twenty-three years. I had seen them rehearse in airplane hangars and school gyms. I saw them in small clubs (Toronto’s El Mocambo, New Haven’s Toad’s) and stadiums. I saw Mick and Keith jam at friends’ apartments and in hotel rooms. I especially saw some great shows at Madison Square Garden. But the one on January 14, 1998, was different. The VIP tickets, at $300 each, were sky-high for the time. The backstage area for friends was a small hallway. Much of the rest of the backstage was roped off for “corporate suites”—which basically were cubicles separated by curtains. For $500 a ticket, people could have a beer, some potato chips and a fast meet-and-greet with Ronnie Wood. I thought about how, in 1975, years before corporate sponsorship and the new Stones’ promoters, Bill Graham had set up hot dog carts and egg cream stands backstage at the New York shows. By 1998, it was all about business. Ghosts were everywhere. Ian Stewart, especially. The songs were great, the band still played great. But none of it seemed to matter anymore. With my memories, I left midway through the show.

  *

  I once talked to Bono about my writing this book. He suggested that I start in 1969 when I first saw the Stones at Madison Square Garden and end with that 1998 show. I told him there was still more to the story. In 1999, I was getting bored because so much music was getting so bad. Then, I discovered Jon Brion at his regular Friday night one-man show at the Largo in Hollywood. Jon can play “Purple Rain” on a ukulele in the style of Les Paul. Or something from the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds on electric guitar and make it sound like the Velvet Underground. Through extemporaneous sampling and layering of drums, bass, piano and guitar, Jon creates little symphonies all by himself. Onstage, right in front of your eyes. Countless Friday nights when I was in California, no matter where I was or what else I was doing—at a press junket in Santa Ba
rbara to watch Matchbox 20, or at the bedside of a sick friend at Cedars-Sinai hospital—I would make it my business to race back to the Largo to see Jon Brion’s magic act. Not unlike the way one goes to Lourdes. He has never disappointed me. His talent reaffirms my faith. It makes me remember why I got into this racket in the first place.

  *

  In 1999, when I started writing for Vanity Fair, I began to oversee photo shoots for the magazine’s music issue portfolios. I assisted Annie Leibovitz with her American Music book. I went back to the South. This time, I was prepared. In 2002, Annie and I went to Memphis where she shot a Stax Records reunion photo in front of the original Stax studios at 926 East McLemore Avenue. We stayed at the Peabody Hotel where, twice a day, ducks line up in the lobby and walk into a pond. The night before the Stax shoot, we had a dinner in a private room at the Peabody. Isaac Hayes, Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Carla Thomas, David Porter, William Bell, Eddie Floyd, Mavis and Yvonne Staples, Stax executive Deanie Parker and the label’s co-founder Al Bell all reminisced for hours. I was furious at myself for not bringing a video camera.

  In 2006, I went back to Nashville. I visited the great country singer George Jones at his estate—where musical notes decorate his front gates. He had a hair salon in his house. He was obsessive about mowing his lawn. He had an entire cupboard stocked with green Eclipse gum. He told me tales about how, when he was so drunk that they took away the keys to his cars and trucks, he drove a tractor into town to a bar. I set up a photo with the singer/violinist Alison Krauss and the legendary bluegrass banjo player Ralph Stanley. Ralph Stanley sang “O Death” in the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? He is old-time Appalachian mountain music personified. Hearing his voice is like walking through the valley of the shadow of death. Mark Seliger photographed Alison and Ralph in the back of the Hatch Show Print poster shop with the old printing presses. I can still smell the inks. In 2003 I went to Willie Nelson’s seventieth birthday concert at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, where I introduced Norah Jones to Keith Richards. That same year in Memphis, I got Emmylou Harris, Dwight Yoakam, Lyle Lovett and Rosanne Cash together for a photo at Sun Studios in Memphis. Johnny Cash had died three and a half years earlier. It was the first time Rosanne had gone back to the studio where her father began his career. When she got out of the car in the parking lot, she started to cry. I told her how all this music had been passed on. Full circle. Then I went inside to the studio to make sure that the photos of her father, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins were all still on the wall. For some reason, the picture of Bono had been taken down. And that same summer, I organized a photo in San Antonio with T Bone Burnett, Stephen Bruton, Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Waylon Jennings’ wife Jessi Colter and other Texas musicians in front of the Alamo—where Ken Regan had photographed the Rolling Stones in 1975.

  In 2003, I was apprehensive about hearing the country-rock singer Lucinda Williams’ newest album in her presence. She had recorded it in a big house in Silverlake, Los Angeles. The house looked like a Moorish palace. It had wall-to-wall Persian carpets. Two years later, Jon Brion moved in and recorded and lived there for a few years. But on that day, with just Lucinda and me and the engineer, I was reminded how there are very few things as uncomfortable as listening to new music in a studio with the musician right there . . . hovering. But Lucinda—wacky, brilliant, sad, poetic, hopeful, lustful, fun—knew she had done something special. “I felt,” she said, “that I needed to do something important.” From a lesser talent, this would have been an embarrassing boast. From Lucinda, especially during the Bush administration and after September 11th, it was a fact. World Without Tears had songs that captured the best of the Stones, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline and Muddy Waters. Jazz and blues and country and folk and rock and roll. It was “Americana” before the Grammys turned that word into a category. Highway 61 revisited.

  *

  In 2007, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss recorded an album together with producer T Bone Burnett. Robert was an Englishman who had, from the very beginning, been in love with American music. The Honeydrippers, his side group after Led Zeppelin disbanded, was influenced by R&B and Elvis Presley. It was music of the American South. The fact that Robert and Alison’s Raising Sand won the 2009 Album of the Year Grammy was a miracle. When he was a teenager, Robert’s very first band was called the Band of Joy. They had played black music, like the songs of Otis Clay. Almost forty years after I first saw Led Zeppelin perform in Jacksonville, Florida, I watched Robert perform with his new Band of Joy. They played Led Zeppelin songs, but they didn’t sound the way they had with Led Zeppelin. Robert slowed “Rock and Roll” down to a shuffle. He turned “Black Dog” into a sensual, dark, swampy groove. In the 1970s, Robert was a young man inspired by old men. Now, in the 21st century, he is an older man going back to his roots. He smiled at his band. I got the feeling that despite the many millions he’s been offered to reunite Zeppelin, he might prefer to be able to just smile at his band. Maybe. We’ll see. He seems at peace with himself and the music he loves. He’s been to that mountaintop. He’s known tragedy and the blues. And no matter what the idiots thought about Led Zeppelin being a cheesy heavy metal band, their music was always also about banjos, fiddles, blues, boogie-woogie, and the shuffle. Music from the Smoky Mountains. Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters and Chicago. The Mississippi Delta. Highway 61 revisited.

  In 2012, I asked Gary Clark Jr., the twenty-eight-year-old guitarist from Austin, Texas, why more young black musicians didn’t play the blues. He said that, for many of them, it sounded like oppression, pre–Civil Rights. But, he added, “It’s the foundation, it’s where we come from.” Gary grew up in Austin and played onstage at Antone’s when he was a teenager. He met many of the same men I did. He played with a lot of them. Despite the fact that he had grown up listening to Motown and was a Michael Jackson fanatic, Gary was hit hard by the blues. Especially Jimi Hendrix (to whom he’s been compared) and Stevie Ray Vaughan. He talked to me about the blues. “In Memphis,” he said, “a woman put it in perspective for me. She said that Jimmy Reed sang ‘Big Boss Man.’ And, as a black man, he sang something he couldn’t say in the workplace. Guys like that were ballsy enough so that now, we can all say whatever the fuck we want to say. How can you deny that? How can you abandon it?”

  *

  In 2012, Led Zeppelin received the Kennedy Center Honors along with David Letterman, Buddy Guy and others. Kid Rock and Lenny Kravitz performed Zeppelin songs. President Obama nodded his head in time to “Stairway to Heaven” (not an easy feat until the song goes into the fast part). Heart’s Ann Wilson sang it backed by a choir whose members all dressed in John Bonham Clockwork Orange boilersuits and bowler hats. Robert Plant, watching from the honorees box, wiped a tear from his eye. I’ve no idea what he was thinking. What I was thinking was what Lillian Roxon had said to me years earlier about the perversion of culture. And how Mick Jagger had quoted Jean-Paul Sartre when the Rolling Stones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: “First you shock them, then they put you in a museum.”

  In that same year, the Stones performed a few concerts to celebrate their 50th anniversary. Lady Gaga was a special guest at the show in Newark’s Prudential Center. She did “Gimme Shelter” as a duet with Mick. She came onstage all wild, high energy and belted out the song. She nailed it, and then proceeded to twirl around on the stage—you couldn’t take your eyes off her. Then, later on in the Stones set, she went out into the audience, stood in front of the stage and, as a fan, danced through the rest of their show. And I remembered how, in 1978, when Patti Smith opened the show for the Stones at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre, after she and her band performed their set, she went into the crowd, stood in front of the stage, and danced and punched the air with her fists during the rest of the Stones’ performance. The Rolling Stones. Patti Smith. Lady Gaga . . . For me, it was like bringing it all back home.

  *

  Professor Longhair died in 1980. Bill Grah
am died in 1991. Tom Dowd died in 2002. Ahmet Ertegun died in 2006. His death was a result of a stroke after he fell backstage at a Rolling Stones concert at New York’s Beacon Theatre. Jim Dickinson died in 2009. (I haven’t been able to delete him from my address book.) His music lives on in Dickinson’s sons, Luther and Cody, who front the blues, punk, rock band the North Mississippi Allstars. Stephen Bruton died of cancer at T Bone Burnett’s house in Los Angeles on May 9, 2009. They were in the middle of recording the music for Crazy Heart. T Bone emailed me to say that when Bruton drew his last breath, a meditation bell rang in the house. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. T Bone’s father was a minister or something and he believes in this stuff. I can still hear Bruton’s voice, with that unmistakable “Darlin’,” on the phone. (And I haven’t been able to take Bruton out of my address book either.) Pinetop Perkins died in March 2011 at the age of ninety-seven. Duck Dunn died while on tour in Japan in May 2012 at age seventy. Hubert Sumlin died in December 2011. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards paid for his funeral.

  *

  In February 2012, I saw Jon Brion at Capitol Records’ recording studios in Hollywood. He was restoring Frank Sinatra’s great 1950s Capitol recordings (Only the Lonely, Come Fly with Me) back to the original masters. Those master recordings had been lying around in the basement of Capitol’s studios. Jon was taking off all the “gunk” that had “polished,” “improved” and digitized the original songs. When Jon played me the vocal track for “What’s New,” fifty years after Sinatra had recorded the song, you could hear Sinatra breathe. He was literally in the room with you. It was thrilling. They’re so great when they’re great. Jon was restoring songs with such lyrics as “What’s new, how is the world treating you,” and “One for my baby, and one more for the road.” And once again, it reminded me why I got into all of this in the first place. Ghosts everywhere. Passing it on. Let the good times roll. One more for the road. Full circle. The music remains. Some things last forever.