Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  In its exhaustive, embittered coverage of Altamont, Rolling Stone, never shy about its total adulation of its main inspirers, called it “perhaps rock and roll’s all-time worst day.”

  Let It Bleed took on new resonance. Right after Altamont, it broke into the Top Ten.

  Much was made of the absurd notion that the Altamont disaster was the end of Innocence, Community, the Movement, the Sixties, the Stones. It was an easy tag for the media, and the Stones suffered for years. Mick Jagger had little time for it. “Of course some people wanted to say Altamont was the end of an era,” he said later. “People like that are like fashion writers. Perhaps it was the end of their era, the end of their . . . naiveté.”

  Debate continued for years. Keith tried to be philosophical about it when interviewed two years later. He said Rock Scully and the Dead should have known what would happen, but that it all had fallen apart too fast. All the planning occurred while they were making a record in Alabama. They didn’t know. The Dead told them that Ken Kesey had cooled the Angels out.

  Keith thought the gang-stompings were cowardly. “If someone tries to do [me], it’s between him and me. I don’t call in Bill Wyman to come in and do him for me, with one of his ankle-twisters or vicious Chinese burns.”

  Still, “Who do you want to lay it on? Do you want to blame somebody, or do you want to learn from it? I don’t really think anyone is to blame.

  “Altamont, it could only happen to the Stones, man. Let’s face it. It wouldn’t happen to the Bee Gees.”

  On Sunday night, December 21, in London, the Stones played at the Lyceum Theater, the last Rolling Stones concert of the sixties. Two shows, at five and eight, tickets sold out for weeks, thousands of fans in the streets and enough cops to stop a riot. It had been seven years since they started. Brian Jones was dead, and the new guy would never become one of them. Some think their best work was already behind the Rolling Stones, and that they would spend the next three decades and the rest of their career defending, often successfully, their self-bestowed heavyweight title as the greatest rock and roll band in the world.

  Music’s meaning to people is one of the great mysteries.

  Keith Richards

  * * *

  Blame It on the Stones

  In early 1970, the Rolling Stones were still in England, but their Blue Period was over and their lives would now evolve and change. The Beatles disbanded that year, and Bob Dylan retreated into near seclusion. This left the Stones standing alone in the arena, soon to be outdone in heavyosity by the younger, louder, more intense Led Zeppelin.

  The Stones adapted to the 1970s by mutating into a gypsy band, always on the move, adding and dropping musicians for a tour here, an album there. Moving beyond its roots in blues, R&B, soul, rock and roll, and rock, the Stones added horns to become a Memphis-style roadhouse band, used Mick Taylor to explore jazz-style textures, delved into the seventies pop discoveries—funk, reggae, disco, power pop—in order to stay alive. The Greatest R&R Etc. would become a ballad band, at least on the radio (“Wild Horses,” “Angie,” “Fool to Cry”), until forced to deploy a stripped-down response to the punk bands later in the decade.

  The Stones remained stoic about Altamont. To Keith, “It was just another gig where I had to leave fast.” The Stones’ more pretentious critics postulated that the contemptuous politics of Beggar’s Banquet and Let It Bleed had come to life in the bleak California hills. Incredible blather was written about the death of the sixties and the loss of innocence by the Stones and their generation, but in the end no one really cared except the lawyers who worked the lawsuits that began to fly around California like bats at sunset. A young Hell’s Angel, already doing time in Soledad prison on a parole violation, was charged with murdering Meredith Hunter at Altamont after six crews documented the knifing on film. He was acquitted by a jury in 1971.

  “After Altamont,” wrote Stanley Booth, who’d been on the ’69 tour with the band, “the Stones would for reasons of self-preservation turn toward comedy.” Songwriter Kris Kristofferson composed a funny ditty called “Blame It on the Stones.”

  In January 1970, the Stones remixed and overdubbed their New York concert tapes at Olympic and Trident studios in London. Mick tried to sell Decca a double live album, with B. B. King and Ike and Tina on the second disc. “Decca wasn’t interested,” Mick said later. “ ’Who is B. B. King? Who are these people?’ So in the end I gave it all up. I’ve still got that part of the album and it’s good.”

  David and Albert Maysles came to London and filmed the Stones watching their grisly Altamont snuff footage. Mick walked out without saying a word, followed by the rest of the band. The Maysles couldn’t find a distributor for the film and wondered if it could even be released.

  Blasted by postpartum depression and loneliness, Anita Pallenberg had become a heroin addict while Keith was on tour. When Keith returned, he joined her in the arms of Morpheus, an addiction that would last for seven years and cede near-total control of the Rolling Stones to Mick Jagger. Keith and Anita holed up in their house in Cheyne Walk, employing Spanish Tony Sanchez, who talked like Peter Lorre on pills, to buy their drugs. Keith avoided marrying Anita after Les Perrin’s press campaign got the government off their backs.

  The Stones began recording new tracks that winter, about the time Bill Wyman—who didn’t use drugs—stopped talking to Keith, this silence that lasted until 1981. They set up in an empty parlor off a main hall at Stargroves, the mouldering country manor that Mick had bought years before. The room’s old oak floor and plaster walls gave the music an intimate, woody flavor. The Stones’ thirty-four-foot mobile studio (with a nervous Andy Johns, younger brother of Glyn, at the controls) was outfitted with sixteen-track tape machines, mixing board, microphones, and effects units. “Sway” was the first song cut, with Mick Taylor’s amp placed in the big fireplace and the microphones in the chimney. Charlie’s drums were in a big bay window. Nicky Hopkins was on piano, and Mick Taylor began to deliver the solo virtuosity that marked the first important directional change for the Stones since 1968. Mick Jagger’s “Bitch” evolved from a jam between him, Charlie Watts, and Bobby Keys, a rhythm with a horn kick. Keith’s demo melody called “Japanese Thing” later became “Moonlight Mile.” Other Stargroves tracks included the second version of “Cocksucker Blues,” Mick’s low, moaning soliloquy about a teenage hustler; “Mean Woman Blues”; “Alladin Story”; “Good Time Woman,” an early version of “Tumblin’ Dice” with Stu on piano and Mick Taylor on slide guitar; a track called “Green Bent Needles” that became “Sweet Black Angel”; and Robert Johnson’s boasting blues “Stop Breakin’ Down.” Keith also overdubbed his National steel guitar onto the Stones’ 1969 version of “Sister Morphine.” Already in the can from the Muscle Shoals sessions: “Wild Horses,” “Brown Sugar,” and “You Gotta Move.” All the Stargroves tracks would be worked on over the next year, especially when Bobby Keys and Jim Price joined the band that fall.

  It was a turbulent time for Mick Jagger. Contemptuous of drug addiction, he got addicted to love instead. After their pot bust was resolved, he won Marianne back and they were living together again by March 1970. But she was miserable, using smack, and spoke openly of her desire to really get into it, to experience the doomed floating freedom of the junk world, while he worried that they could get busted for heroin at any moment. She despised her acting career and let it go. She called Mick at the studio, crying and complaining of loneliness, while he was trying to work, which led to big fights and more tears. Marianne’s public behavior began to slip. Mick would take her for a country weekend at a duke’s castle and she’d nod off into the soup. They’d have to carry her upstairs, and Mick would be embarrassed. He was spending more time with Marsha Hunt at her place in St. John’s Wood.

  One day that summer at Cheyne Walk, after Marianne overheard Ahmet Ertegun tell Mick she was a business liability, a possible obstacle to the Stones’ signing with Atlantic Records, she packed up her little boy, slung a f
avorite Persian carpet under her arm, and walked out of Mick’s house, never to return. Mick tried to get her back. He played “Wild Horses” and said he’d written it for her, but Marianne was already out the door. She let herself go and put on weight so Mick wouldn’t want her anymore. Her husband divorced her and got custody of their son. True to the legend she’d decided to write for herself, Marianne Faithfull traded life with Mick Jagger for the existence of a registered heroin addict on the streets of Soho.

  Mick rarely spoke about any of this. For a time, he took up with Patti D’Arbanville, a good-lookin’ American girl of nineteen who was a friend of Miss Pamela’s. Years later Mick remembered, “Marianne, y’know—she almost killed me. Forget it! I wasn’t going to get out of there alive! Marianne and Anita, I mean—help!”

  Rupert Lowenstein, the Stones’ new financial adviser, gave them the bad news that summer. They all had to get out of England. They were all broke and in debt. Their business manager hadn’t paid their British taxes in years, and each of them had a six-figure tax bill. Allen Klein’s contract with the band was about to expire, but he still controlled their publishing and catalog and would probably not let go without a fight. Lowenstein told them there was no chance of settling their debts and rebuilding their fortunes unless they made an immediate break with Klein and left England to avoid its ruinous taxation and possible bankruptcy proceedings. Keith didn’t want to be forced out of England, but he was eventually convinced to join the Stones’ exile by April 5, 1971, the start of the next British tax year.

  On July 30, 1970, the Rolling Stones announced that Allen Klein was no longer authorized to act on their behalf. Their Decca recording contract expired the same day. Owing one more new single to their despised label, they sent Decca a tape of “Cocksucker Blues,” the explicitly obscene demo whose lyrics asked, “Where do I get my ass fucked? Where do I get my cock sucked?” Decca declined to release the single. “I’d rather the Mafia than Decca,” Keith said later.

  Performance was released in America in August 1970, only weeks after the awful Ned Kelly had bombed. Heavily reedited and censored after Warner’s executives objected to nude sequences of Mick and the explicit sadism of the violence, Performance still had a shocking impact that bore witness to its turbulent creation. Donald Cammell had fought the studio for two years while they shelved the project, then revived it after a management shake-up. Cammell reedited the film using cutup techniques that caused his codirector, Nicholas Roeg, to try to take his name off the film. Dialogue was redubbed when studio executives complained they couldn’t understand the cockney accents of the gangsters. Repeatedly delayed and almost sabotaged by the studio, Performance delighted and mystified Stones fans but bored the mainstream critics, who didn’t understand it. Stones fans flocked to see Mick, and the film did respectable business during its first run. Released in England the next year, it was recognized as a serious work of art, but ran for only two weeks before being pulled out of the theaters. Decca released the scorching song “Memo from Turner” as a Mick Jagger single in England, and it became for many the most thrilling rock moment of the year, quivering with devilish malice and bad attitude, a cynical, perverse rock masterpiece featuring Ry Cooder’s menacing slide guitar. “Memo from Turner” kept the Stones’ street cred alive until their next album came out months later.

  * * *

  Let It Rock

  Summer 1970. The Rolling Stones announced the formation of Rolling Stones Records right after their Decca contract expired. Marshall Chess became the new label’s president. He was short, dark, bearded, funny, intense, full of entrepreneurial energy and ideas of how to sell the Stones. He made the effort to get to know the whole band, not just Mick and Keith, and succeeded in winning their trust. It didn’t hurt that he’d filled Mick Jagger’s mail orders for blues records in his role as stockroom boy at Chess ten years before. “He was a hustler, street,” Keith said of Marshall. “He was Chicago, the South Side, and the world of black records that none of us really knew.” Marshall Chess also became the band’s de facto manager in the first part of the seventies. He lived on the top floor of Keith’s house in Cheyne Walk for a year, and soon got in dope trouble too.

  In August, the Stones began rehearsing for a European tour scheduled for that fall. Bobby Keys and Jim Price were hired as the new horn section when their gig with Eric Clapton’s band Derek and the Dominos fell through. One night Keys ran into Mick at a club in London. Mick: “We’re out here in the country. Why don’t you drop by and bring your horn?” Keys played sax on “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking?” He also played a blistering solo on “Brown Sugar,” and he and Price overdubbed their horns on “Bitch.”

  Bobby Keys: “After we played on Sticky Fingers, Jim Price and I weasled our way into a gig. We’d woven our way into the fabric, and we thought, ’Thank God.’ These guys had some real rockin’ fans. People were going to burn the place down.”

  Keith was thrilled to have Keys in the band. The twenty-six-year-old Keys, a big and beefy Texan with a helmet of brown hair and serious reedman jowls, had been on the road since he was thirteen, had played on Buddy Holly’s first record date at KLLL radio in Texas, had played with Holly and the Crickets at Alan Freed’s first rock and roll show at the Brooklyn Paramount in 1958. “It’s a gas not to be so insulated and play with some more people like Bobby Keys,” Keith told Robert Greenfield in Rolling Stone. “Bobby’s like one of those things that go all the way through. He was there, man.”

  It was the first Stones tour of Europe in three years, with a sixty-five-man crew, American-style production, and high ticket prices that bought criticism from angry fans. The Stones played an augmented 1969 set, with Stu on piano for the Chuck Berry songs and no encores. According to Jo Bergman, who planned much of it, the entire tour schedule revolved around year-old Marlon Richards, who came along with his mum.

  The tour opened on September 2 in Helsinki. Opening was guitarist Buddy Guy’s white-hot Chicago blues band with elite soloist Junior Wells on harmonica—often booed by loutish young fans on the tour. The first few Stones shows were like public rehearsals, but they soon tightened up. The new song “Dead Flowers” was played fast and fierce. A turbo-charged version of Chuck Berry’s late boogie chef d’oeuvre “Let It Rock” was added to the set a few shows in. Mick Jagger, inspired by Junior Wells’s star-quality nightly improvs, blew his harp the entire length of “Midnight Rambler,” joining the band as an instrumentalist, breaking into jazzy jams prior to the “Don’t Do That” segment of the Stones’ rock theatrical.

  Bobby Keys and Keith bonded well because they liked the same things, and he joined the self-contained Richards family entourage. Their heroin was carried across borders in custom-built devices such as hollow fountain pens and fake shaving cream bottles. When they ran out of dope, they forced the local promoters to find some. “No smack, no show, baby.” Audiences were kept waiting for hours until the necessary drugs were supplied.

  While they were touring, Decca and London released “Get Yer Ya-Yas Out”: The Rolling Stones in Concert, overdubbed live tracks from the ’69 tour. This was the last authorized Rolling Stones album on their old label. David Bailey’s cover photo depicted many layers of inside jokes. Charlie Watts jumps in the air, clutching guitars and wearing Mick’s Uncle Sam stage hat. Behind him a donkey, bearing his drum kit and another guitar, has necklaces and binoculars hanging from its neck, a reference to the jewels and binoculars hanging from the neck of a mule in Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna.” The “Ya-Yas” in the title was a phonetic mishearing of an old New Orleans term for bosoms. The album’s real charm lay in its nonmusical moments: the cutup tape collage of Sam Cutler’s introductions; the girl who yells, “Paint it black, you devil”; Mick’s stage patter about the busted button and “Charlie’s good tonight, inne?” The album got to no. 1 in England and no. 5 in America.

  September 22, 1970. By the time the tour got to Paris, the Stones were back on form. The fans were too, with many arrests in Berlin and
minor trouble in Hamburg. The Paris show at L’Olympia was a big event, with many friends of the band backstage and at a big party at the Hotel George V afterward, where Mick met a stunning twenty-one-year-old Nicaraguan girl, Bianca Perez Moreno de Macias. She was introduced to Mick by the French record executive Eddy Barclay as his fiancée.

  Bianca Perez was tiny, birdlike, dark-complected, and utterly beautiful, with a cheekbone resemblance to Mick that everyone noticed. She was intelligent, had won a scholarship to study in Paris at seventeen, before entering the party circuit on the arm of actor Michael Caine. Mick Jagger fell for this sultry gamine immediately, and she ditched Barclay for him. She wouldn’t sleep with Mick, which intrigued him no end. He left for Vienna with Bianca much on his mind.

  When the tour got to Rome, Anita contacted her family. She hadn’t seen them since taking up with Brian Jones, but had made contact again after her son was born. “We sent a limo for my father,” she recalled, “so he could come to the show. Outside the hall, the car was attacked by anarchists who threw rocks, thinking the Stones were inside. This was my father’s introduction to the world I was living in. But he was fair-minded about it, enjoyed the show, and I think he was pleased that I was with a musician, because that’s what he was.”

  Bianca Perez arrived in Rome to be with Mick and then stayed with the tour. Bianca and Mick merged into a top-secret and passionately inseparable, look-alike, glamour-radiating couple. The tour ended in Munich on October 11. Mick and Bianca flew back to London together. She moved into Mick’s London home within weeks and became pregnant that winter.