It's Only Rock 'n' Roll

by Jo Wood

  The New Barbarians got off to an ideal start – opening for the two Rolling Stones concerts in aid of the blind in Toronto that had been part of the court deal on Keith’s drug charge. Their warm-up man on the first night was none other than John Belushi and the pair of us hit it off instantly. While the boys were on stage, we spent the night being really silly and joking around.

  When the tour stopped in New York a few days later, we went round to John’s house after the gig. He was running around me like a puppy. ‘Is everything all right, Jo? Can I get you anything? Do you need another drink?’ It was blindingly obvious that he fancied me – and I’m sorry to say I made the most of it.

  ‘John,’ I’d say, ‘I’m feeling a bit cold.’ He’d run off and turn on the heating.

  ‘Sorry, I’m a little too hot now!’ He’d jump up to open a window.

  Over the next few years, John would be a regular visitor at our LA home. One day, while Ronnie was in the studio, he took me to the Playboy Mansion. There I was, surrounded by all these chicks in tiny little dresses with great big boobs and blonde hair. Ronnie was so furious when he found out; it’s one of the only times I remember him being jealous. But John made no attempt to hide the fact he had a crush on me. The phone would go in the night and it would be John.

  ‘Jo, guess what I’m doing?’

  ‘I don’t know, John.’

  ‘I’m playing with myself while I’m speaking to you.’

  ‘JOHN!’

  Then one night we were all hanging out together – Ronnie had passed out on the couch – when John suddenly asked me to run away with him. ‘Please, Jo, I love you,’ he said earnestly, while Ronnie snored a few feet away.

  ‘I can’t run away with you! I’ve got a boyfriend!’

  ‘Please, just say you’ll think about it,’ he said.

  ‘No, John, I think it’s better that we just stay as friends, okay?’

  The New Barbarians were on the road for two wild weeks, and from what I can remember – not much, if I’m honest – the tour was a brilliant success. Even the fact that Ronnie had funded it out of future proceeds from the solo album (and ended up in debt to his record label) didn’t take the shine off the satisfaction I knew he felt at how well everything had come together.

  And now that I was free to party with the guys again I went absolutely ballistic. Ronnie chartered a plane and we partied our way across the States. There’s a photo of me dressed up as a sexy soldier in a peaked cap and miniskirt, marching along waving a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, leading Ronnie, Keith and Lil across the tarmac from our jet. I went crazy on that tour – up all night every night, as high as a kite on coke and adrenalin – and the madness continued when we got back to LA. I had always been a proficient partier, but now I went hardcore–quite literally. Chuch had a team of roadies who prided themselves on being able to stay up all night, take drugs and still do their jobs the next day, and they called their gang Hardcore. One morning, after we’d had another wild night’s partying, those boys were all crashed out on my sofas. While I collected all the dirty glasses and emptied the overflowing ashtrays, it suddenly occurred to me that, as I was the only one who was still awake, I was probably the most hardcore of the lot.

  Later that day, I cornered Chuch.

  ‘Chuch, I think I should be in Hardcore,’ I said. ‘You should really make me the only female honorary member.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, with a smile. ‘If you go round and ask all the guys in Hardcore, we’ll see what we can do.’

  Over the next few weeks I went round and got everyone’s approval, and from that day on I was officially Hardcore.

  Our lives were one long party. At times, Ronnie and I would wake up around 2 p.m. and have a bit of breakfast, usually yogurt with honey, often followed by a line of coke. I’d spend the rest of the afternoon running errands, doing household chores and hanging out with the kids. When the sun went down I’d have my first drink and more lines, and then we would be up all night partying. Ronnie loved having people around, so there would always be a houseful – friends, dealers, musicians, actors. I suppose the only time the two of us spent together alone and sober was when we were asleep, but it didn’t matter – we were crazy for each other! The pair of us barely argued, and the sex was fantastic. Sure, Ronnie could be annoying when he was drunk, but I was drunk, too, so it didn’t matter.

  And the harder I partied, the thinner I got. I started to lose interest in food; there were days I’d wake up shaking because I hadn’t eaten anything for so long. But I didn’t care: I was skinny! I’d always struggled to lose weight, but now I was so tiny that I could fit into kids’ clothes. At my thinnest I was seven stone and comfortably fitting a size 24 waist jean. It wasn’t until I saw a video of myself on a trampoline in our garden at Mandeville Canyon that I realized quite how thin I’d got. I remember staring at this scrawny, stick-limbed figure in a black leotard, miniskirt and pink shiny leggings with a big bow in her hair, crazily jumping around, still wearing her high heels, and thinking, Oh, my God, it’s Olive Oyl!

  Looking back, I have no idea how I managed to make that lifestyle work, but there were always home-cooked meals on the table, the house was tidy and my kids were secure and happy. Like many working mothers, I became adept at juggling – it was just that, rather than working in an office, my job was partying. My brother Paul, then 21, was staying with us to help out, plus, of course, I had the wonderful Jaye, who had quickly been promoted from housekeeper to nanny to both. Meanwhile, I had enrolled Jamie in the local nursery school, where Rod Stewart and Alana were sending their daughter, Kimberley. During the hours I spent with the kids, we had something resembling a really normal home life. And it was normal to us. I’m sure our lifestyle would have raised a few eyebrows, but we were living in this wonderful, crazy bubble, and we didn’t really concern ourselves with what was going on outside.

  In September the band returned to Paris to continue work on the album they’d started in Nassau. We rented a lovely apartment on avenue Victor Hugo and it felt great to be back where it had all begun for Ronnie and me. His mum came to visit – the first time she had ever left England – and they drank every pub in Paris out of Guinness. We had a beautiful first-birthday party for Leah in France, followed with a stop in England before we headed back home to LA. And that was when our perfect little bubble suddenly burst.

  14

  It started with a knock on the front door one Thursday night. Ronnie went to answer it and came back into the living room with Bobby Keys, the Stones’ sax player. I always loved seeing Bobby – I still do today. He was born on exactly the same day as Keith–18 December 1945–and, although one of them is from Dartford and the other the heart of Texas, the pair of them are as close as twins. Bobby is brilliant company and, in those days, totally wild, even by Ronnie and Keith’s high standards. Bobby would snort, sniff or smoke whatever you put in front of him, then just keep going until he fell over. It’s a wonder they got him on stage; in fact, many times it was hit and miss. On one occasion on tour the roadies had to break into Bobby’s hotel room just before he was due on with the band and found him lying on the floor, passed out in a pile of sick. They shoved him in the shower, dragged him down to the gig and pushed him on stage, just in time for him to do a perfect sax solo.

  Anyway, as Bobby sauntered into our living room that night he looked as excited as a kid on Christmas morning. ‘Guys, you are not going to believe this.’ He grinned. ‘I just found the most fantastic new way to do coke without fucking up your nose. Man, you are gonna love it!’

  Bobby’s new discovery was called freebase. He led us into the bathroom and showed us how to prepare it by mixing the coke with baking soda and heating it in water until it solidified into little rocks. You then flaked a bit off, put it in a water pipe and inhaled the fumes. I watched as Bobby and Ronnie had a go, and then it was my turn. Always up for trying something new, I sucked on the pipe and–whoooooosh! The feeling was an incredible rush: an insane, intense euph
oria. Wow. But in moments it had gone. Immediately, I wanted to do it again – and again and again. It wasn’t a physical craving, like heroin, but the hit was so short and so extreme that I was desperate to recapture that initial high.

  For the rest of that night, under Bobby’s expert tuition, we learnt how to prepare it ourselves – and it turned out that I wasn’t just good at roast lamb, I was good at cooking freebase, too!

  So began the transformation of our Mandeville Canyon home into Freebase Central for much of celebrity LA. At first it seemed like a dream of a drug. There were no physical side effects (apart from a total loss of appetite, but I wasn’t really eating anyway), and sex on freebase was mind-blowing. We set up our own little home lab, complete with Pyrex flasks, test tubes, spatulas, glass plates and rubber tubing. Ronnie had never studied chemistry at school, so he used to joke that this was his way of catching up on his education, while I gave our freebasing sessions a typically fun Jo touch by putting food colouring and the little plastic people you get in Christmas crackers into the water pipe, so when you took a hit from the pipe they’d be bobbing about. It all seemed fun and fabulous, but when you realize that freebasing was an early form of crack you’ll appreciate exactly what we were getting ourselves into. Nowadays, crack couldn’t have a worse image, but back then no one had even heard of it and, initially at least, freebasing didn’t seem any riskier or more harmful than our usual way of doing coke.

  As the months went on, our freebasing expanded to include our neighbours: Sly Stone from next door, David Crosby of Crosby, Stills and Nash, John Belushi – in fact the whole of LA’s A-list seemed to be doing it. Even Tony Curtis came round. I was very excited to meet him because he’d had sex with Marilyn Monroe – and now he was in our bathroom!

  When we weren’t freebasing at home, we found ourselves at the house of Alan Pariser, the bushy-bearded music producer who had been behind groundbreaking shows like the Monterey Pop Festival in the late 1960s, and who had taken Bobby’s enthusiasm for ‘new’ coke to a whole new level. He had put together a bespoke electric burner from an assortment of 1940s vintage parts and used ether rather than baking soda, which gave the freebase a distinctive flaky quality – the connoisseurs’ freebase, if you will. I persuaded Alan to give me some of his vintage elements and, to Ronnie’s delight, made a Pariser burner of our own, adding some improvements, including a dimmer switch so you could control the heat – those hours watching my dad make things as a child really paid off! As our freebase circle expanded, my little burner became famous and people would say to Ronnie, ‘I’ll give you an eighth [that’s about three and a half grams] if Jo will make me one of her burners,’ and soon I had a nice little business going on the side – although I had to beg Alan for more of the elements, and he was really stingy with them.

  On one of our rare trips out of LA during this time – the kids safe at home with the blessed Jaye – Ronnie and I had a break in Miami, although it was a bit of a busman’s holiday as we went to stay with a drug dealer. Rob, his name was – nice guy. This was before smoking was banned on planes, but I can only imagine what other passengers, not to mention the aviation authorities, would have done had they known that during this flight Ronnie darted into the toilet with a full-sized butane burner and cooked up freebase. After he’d been in there for what seemed like hours, he came back to the seat and whispered, ‘Your hit’s ready, Jo. I’ve hidden the pipe and burner under the sink.’ So off I went for my share.

  When we arrived in Miami I was so out of it that I forgot to pick up my suitcase from the luggage carousel, and when I finally remembered, I couldn’t be bothered to go back and get it. I don’t have many regrets in life, but that suitcase is one of them. I had some really great clothes in it!

  We hadn’t been at Rob’s for long and were busy cooking when a black stretch limo pulled up, and out stepped a gang of heavy-looking older dudes in shades and suits. They couldn’t have looked more like Mafia bosses if they’d been carrying violin cases.

  The most senior of the bunch nodded at Ronnie. ‘So what’s da most you’ve freebased in a day?’

  ‘I dunno,’ said Ronnie. ‘Maybe an eighth?’

  ‘What were you doin’?’ the guy scoffed. ‘Sleepin’ all day?’

  And with that he got out a huge Pyrex flask, poured a whole bag of coke into it and started cooking up mountains of the stuff. When it was ready he put a bit into a pipe and beckoned to me. ‘Hey, you, come here.’

  I tottered over to where this guy was standing. I was drunk, high and had been up for days, so was in an ultra-silly mood.

  ‘Hiiii,’ I trilled. ‘I’m Joooo!’

  He took a hit of his pipe, made me open my mouth, then took a straw and blew a mouthful of the fumes straight down my throat.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ I screeched. ‘What did you have for breakfast?’

  The whole room went quiet. With hindsight, telling a Mafioso that his breath stank was a stupid thing to do. But slowly the big dude started to smile. ‘I like this girl,’ he said to Ronnie. And that, thankfully, was that.

  We were moments from the beach, but didn’t leave Rob’s house the whole time we were there. Then, after a week or so, our new buddies asked Ronnie to get hold of the Stones master tapes from the Paris studio so they could bootleg them, which was when we decided we’d better make a swift exit back to LA.

  So, it was all crazy and fun and rock ’n’ roll at first – but it doesn’t take long for freebase to turn you into a loony. It’s a very antisocial drug. While you’re doing it you don’t want to face the world, just the other people locked in the bathroom with you passing round the pipe. During one session I cut my finger quite badly on the glass tubing and blood was gushing everywhere, but instead of going to hospital, like a normal, sane person, I just bandaged the cut with gaffer tape and carried on.

  And then there was the paranoia. You can’t look at anyone when you’re doing it as you’re always keeping an eye out in case you’ve dropped a tiny precious crumb of the stuff on the floor. Ronnie banned meringues from the house after he’d tried to freebase sugar for the umpteenth time. The singer-songwriter, Bobby Womack, was a regular guest to the Wood bathroom and on one visit I realized he had disappeared. I found him in our hall cupboard, crouched cowering in the dark among all the coats.

  ‘Bobby, what are you doing?’

  ‘There’s somebody outside,’ he muttered.

  ‘There isn’t,’ I said. ‘It’s all fine, just come out.’

  ‘Yes, there is,’ said Bobby, his eyes wild. ‘I can’t see them, but I know they’re coming . . .’

  The drug started to affect my relationship with Ronnie, too. ‘Ronnie not in best of moods. Seems really low,’ I wrote in my diary, near the end of 1980. ‘Something is bothering him, but don’t know what. Wish he’d only let me know. Maybe it’s me, or someone else. Just let me know so I can do something. Whatever way.’ I made a little checklist of possible ways to help him out of it, and how pointless each of them seemed: ‘Sex – not too keen. Affection – not wanted. Encouragement – no thanks.’

  Ronnie was even more into the drug than I was – his freebasing period went on for four years – and he would stay locked in the bathroom for days at a time. I’d pass milkshakes through the window to him just so he’d put something in his stomach. One day I saw him and Bobby Keys out in the garden, crawling through the bushes, and when I asked what they were doing Ronnie furiously accused me of hiding a stash in the flowerbed.

  There’s an entry in my diary on 30 August that I obviously wrote in a rage – the pen pressed so hard against the paper that the indentation of the words is obvious well into September. ‘I know that I’m not crazy but it still goes on,’ I wrote. ‘What must I say, what must I do for his trust! I AM NOT A LIAR OR THIEF!’

  It was obvious our new hobby wasn’t the wonder drug we had first thought. Even Keith, who must have sampled more narcotics than most, wouldn’t touch the stuff. He said it was a revolting habit and that we were mad t
o do it. He was right, of course, but it’s difficult to get much perspective on a situation when you’re so heavily involved in it. Gradually, however, my world narrowed until its sole focus was freebasing. My diary for 1980 (my freebase year) is almost completely empty. There are just a handful of entries, including this scrawled under 11 June: ‘Woke up this morning, I think.’

  As you can imagine, all that cocaine didn’t come cheap. We might as well have been burning our savings in that pipe. And Ronnie had never been good with money. When we first moved to LA he never opened any of his mail, just tossed it into a box. It was only when the pile of unopened letters started to spill over the floor that I asked Ronnie about it – shouldn’t I at least check if there were any bills? He airily assured me that if anything important came up his lawyers would be sure to let him know. From then on I took care of the post.

  At this time, Ronnie’s laissez-faire attitude to our finances landed us in serious trouble. We had met an English guy living near us in LA called Seth Bigland, who described himself a ‘businessman’, although we didn’t find out exactly what business he was in until it was too late. Seth seemed to be a huge fan of Ronnie and was always inviting us over to his house where he’d give us huge amounts of coke to freebase.

  It was great at first – never look a gift horse in the mouth and all that – but after a while I started to get suspicious. ‘He’s giving us all this coke, but he’s never asked for any money,’ I said to Ronnie, one night. ‘It’s weird. He must want something in return.’

  But Ronnie insisted it was just because he was a fan, so I shut up about it.