Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  The last shows were in New York City. The Hell’s Angels asked for a sit-down with Peter Rudge and demanded the Stones play a concert to help them recoup legal expenses from Altamont. Rudge told the Angels he would discuss it with the band, then changed hotels and hired extra security instead. The final Madison Square Garden show ended in a massive pie fight. Ahmet Ertegun threw a huge party for the band after the last show on July 26, Mick’s twenty-ninth birthday. Muddy Waters, gracious blues Buddha still recovering from a near-fatal car wreck, played “Rollin’ Stone Blues” for his erstwhile protégés. Count Basie’s orchestra also entertained, with Charlie Watts impressed by Basie’s ancient drummer, Papa Jo Jones. A stripper emerged from the cake. Bob Dylan came; so did Woody Allen, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Andy Warhol, and Truman Capote. Capote, consummate publicity hound, had disliked traveling with the Stones, where the only limelight was reflected. He slagged the Stones to his friends and didn’t bother to write his article for Rolling Stone.

  Capote on the Stones: “They’re complete idiots.” On Mick Jagger: “He’s about as sexy as a pissing toad.” On Mick Taylor: “Pretty, dumb, uninteresting.” On Nicky Hopkins, chronically ill with a digestive disorder and painfully thin: “Has the mark of death on him.” On Bobby Keys: “Totally undisciplined and headed for disaster.” The novelist, himself addled on pills and drink, could have been talking about himself, because he never wrote anything of value again.

  The Stones returned to California after the tour. There was another birthday party in L.A. for Mick, at which Little Richard entertained. The band had survived two months on tour in America during the summer of 1972, unlike most of their entourage, who were never the same again. The casualty list was high. Marshall Chess was addicted to heroin. Jimmy Miller was a pale ghost of himself. Gram Parsons had lost it. Jo Bergman and Chris O’Dell left. Gary Stromberg was so wasted that friends kidnapped him after the New York shows and left him on a boat off Fire Island with no dingy so he could dry out. Robert Frank’s film, a ropy, cinéma-vérité newsreel titled Cocksucker Blues, was never released because the Stones feared they wouldn’t be allowed back into America. A concert album of the tour was killed when Decca refused permission to use live versions of songs recorded on their label. The concert film, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones, was mediocre and never went into general release.

  Only the battle-hardened Stones were left standing. They’d made about $1.5 million on the tour: each took home perhaps $250,000. Mick was upset when he learned that Led Zeppelin, touring at the same time to larger crowds than the Stones, had demanded and got a 90/10 split with the local promoters.

  Mick took his family and went back to England to watch cricket matches. Keith returned to his family in Switzerland. He rented a house near Montreux and resumed a relatively quiet life. His cars were brought over, dope deliveries arranged, and when it snowed, he took up skiiing. He immersed himself in the revolutionary new reggae music coming out of Jamaica, turned on by the Wailers’ first album, Catch a Fire, and the brilliant songs on the sound track album from the film The Harder They Come. Still passionate about music, Keith knew reggae was the wave of the future, much as R&B had been ten years earlier. Keith would ride this cultural wave as adroitly as any white musician who ever tried to master reggae’s steel pulse.

  The rest of the band returned to France, where they were arrested, harassed, and investigated by the police for the rest of 1972, based on widening allegations of heroin trafficking and other crimes at Nellcote the year before.

  * * *

  The Third World Nashville

  By late 1972, the Stones had been rolling for a decade. The old band of ambitious kids and the bonds that had unified them were history. They were all turning thirty now, lived in different countries, were often out of touch. From then on, their music came much harder, and at a greater cost. Exile on Main Street, still selling well by year’s end, was the last of their four midperiod, era-defining masterpieces. With Keith debilitated, barely capable of even living up to his cartoonlike “outlaw” persona as the Human Riff, Mick Jagger was forced to assume complete control.

  Quite cleverly, he turned the Rolling Stones into a ballad group, which succeeded in keeping them on the radio through the seventies, when soft rock and disco made it hard to get a real rock and roll song played on the air in America. During the next four years, the Stones’ mid-seventies albums were less like Bulletins from the Edge and more like formulaic “product”: a hit single, some ballads, two cool rock and funk numbers, and plenty of filler. Coasting on their mystique, the Rolling Stones rode out the seventies until they found their new muses later in the decade.

  In November 1972, Mick went to Montreux to work on new songs with Keith. But there was contempt between them, and their old collaborative flame was just a glimmer. Keith mostly ignored Mick, or kept him waiting, or thrust half a riff at him. “This one goes, ’Angieeeee,’ ” he’d say, and expect Mick to make a song out of it.

  “Up to then Mick and I were inseparable,” Keith said later. “We made every decision for the group. We loved to get together and kick things around. But after we split up, I started going my way—downhill to Dopesville—and Mick ascended to Jet Land . . . Mick and I have different attitudes, and during the seventies I was living in a different world from him. I don’t blame him; he’s earned the right to do what he wanted. And even if I could’ve related to it, I was too busy being busted, which is equally dumb. But it got up my nose, his jet set shit, and the flaunting of it. But then he’s a lonely guy too. He’s got his own problems.”

  The Stones had to go somewhere to record the new album, but where? France was out because the cops were after them. Their American work visas had run out. They were in tax exile from an England preoccupied with David Bowie and glam rock, which Keith despised. There was no creative vibe in Switzerland. Almost stateless, Keith came up with the idea of recording in Jamaica while listening to the Slickers sing “Sweet and Dandy” on a throbbing reggae album in the Richards chalet in the cold mountains above Montreux, as the Swiss winter began to close in.

  Kingston, Jamaica, was the new third world Nashville. The funky port city’s recording studios were churning out an incredible stew of innovative music that would propel reggae’s new stars—Bob Marley and the Wailers, Burning Spear, the deejay Big Youth, Toots and the Maytals—into planetary sainthood within just a few years. Jamaica also had tropical beaches and an experimental socialist government, and the whole island was a garden of the best marijuana in the world. Kingston’s studios were known to be primitive, but singer Paul Simon had recently recorded at bandleader Byron Lee’s Dynamic Sound Studio (where Jamaican star Jimmy Cliff had cut his hit single “Wonderful World, Beautiful People”), so the Stones decided to try Jamaica themselves.

  On November 23, 1972, they moved into small rooms at the Terra Nova Hotel in uptown Kingston, once the family home of Chris Blackwell, the owner of Island Records and the man behind Bob Marley’s rise. Kingston was a violent town, locked down at night by factional fighting in the ghettos, and there were huge bullet holes in the heavily guarded studio’s control room walls. Bill Wyman’s girlfriend Astrid was reportedly raped in their hotel room while Bill was forced to wait under the bed until her attacker had left.

  The Stones plunged into new music with Nicky Hopkins and let fly. Byron Lee had upgraded the studio for them, adding previously unknown amenities like headphones, vocal mikes, a grand piano, and a Hammond B3 organ. The Stones worked from sundown to dawn, seven days a week.

  Keith: “The backing tracks [for Goat’s Head Soup] were all done in Jamaica. We started off with ’Winter,’ which was just Mick strumming guitar in the studio. ’Angie’ and ’Dancing with Mr. D’ came in the middle of the sessions. ’Starfucker’ was about last.” Mick resurrected “A Hundred Years Ago,” an elegiac song about his days with Marianne, written three years earlier. Keith wrote and sang the stark sexual infidelity confession “Coming Down Again,” while “Starfucker” was all Mick’s.
The voodoo stew of “Dancing with Mr. D” was Keith’s riff and Mick’s lyric. Outtakes included “You Should’ve Seen Her Ass,” “Four and In,” and early versions of “Waiting on a Friend” and “Tops.” The sessions were productive because the Stones had nothing else to do. There wasn’t much of a scene because reggae was then mostly recorded music, not a live one, so there weren’t any bands to go see. They would leave the studio and return to the hotel, where they had trouble finding things to eat once their taste for curried goat and boiled akee began to wane.

  In late November, the Stones flew to Los Angeles to plan a Stones tour of the Far East that would take them back to Australia, and then to Japan for the first time. While in L.A., they jammed at Elektra Studio, producing high-grade experimental tracks starring Mick Taylor and Nicky Hopkins. These included rambling jams like “Travellin’ Man,” “Leather Jacket,” “Potted Shrimp,” and a later version of “Blood Red Wine” that was close in spirit to “Winter.” Never officially released, these Elektra jams would take on lives of their own in the bootlegged netherworld of fascinating but unfinished songs.

  The Japanese shows sold out as soon as they were announced, and the Stones looked forward to going there despite portents that the government wouldn’t let them into the country because of their drug arrests. To help clear the air, the Stones (without Keith) returned to France in early December. French arrest warrants had been issued for Keith and Anita; the charges involved distribution of heroin to minors. Press stories implied the whole band was involved, which Mick, Bill, Charlie, and Mick Taylor all heatedly denied. The Stones released a statement that they had not been arrested in France and were free to come and go.

  While his band was dealing with the cops in Nice, Keith and his family went to Ocho Rios, on Jamaica’s tropically lush north coast. Installed in a rented house called Casa Joya overlooking Mammee Bay, Keith and Anita fell in love with the lush scenery, the relaxed “soon-come” atmosphere, and the local Rastas who emerged from jungle villages to hang out and turn Keith on with the giant ganja cigars called spliffs. These included local stars like singer Justin Hines, who showed up one evening with a band of Rastas bearing hand drums, coconut shell “chalices” for smoking ganja, and the hypnotic Rasta burru rhythm that induced a trancelike state of meditation and peace. Keith Richards had found a new spiritual home. He and Anita bought a villa (from British rocker Tommy Steele) called Point of View for its 360-degree panorama of the mountains of St. Anne parish and the aquamarine waters of the Caribbean. For Keith, Point of View would become as important a refuge as Redlands had been.

  Billy Preston joined the last two weeks of the interrupted Kingston sessions, which were over by Christmas. Mick’s cool hard rock demo of the groupie tribute “Starfucker” was one of the last tapes in the can. Japanese reporters trooped down to interview the Stones about their impending series of concerts at Tokyo’s Budokan martial arts arena. A reporter from Melody Maker found Keith frail and gaunt, and noted Jagger’s obvious concern and support for him. “This album will be less freaky, more melodic than the last one,” Mick told the reporter. “We’ve recorded a lot of fast numbers, maybe too many.” The tracks would be mixed in L.A. in the new year.

  * * *

  Lead Guitars and Movie Stars

  January 1973. The Rolling Stones were poised to tour the Far East, but with French arrest warrants out for Keith and Anita, the Australian government banned them, followed by the Japanese. Australia soon relented, but Tokyo stood firm, refusing to allow convicted drug users Mick and Keith to enter. This left a ten-day hole in the tour, but the band decided to go ahead. On January 18, they warmed up with a benefit show in L.A. for Nicaraguan earthquake relief before flying to Hawaii for two shows. Instead of touring in Japan, the Stones returned to Los Angeles to work on their Jamaican tracks at the Village Recorder.

  In February, the Stones played Hong Kong, Australia (body searches at customs), and New Zealand with Nicky Hopkins, Bobby Keys, and Jim Price. Keith returned to Jamaica after the tour to try to put his house in order. Bored and lonely while he was away, Anita had taken up with the local Rastas, dreadlocked and red-eyed, who now flocked to Point of View. But Keith’s house was in an elite enclave of Jamaican politicians’ and millionaires’ gardens, where Rastafarians were regarded as dangerous. Anita’s public affection for her Rasta friends began to draw fire, and Keith was bluntly warned that the law would come down on her if she didn’t cut it out. Humiliated, he left the island and went to London, where he binged with Spanish Tony for a few weeks, picking (and losing) fights with Italian gangsters in sleazy clubs like Tramps in Jermyn Street.

  Anita Pallenberg was too wild to let colonial social pressure stop her from playing with her Rasta entourage. While Keith was away in London, Jamaican cops raided Point of View and arrested Anita for ganja possession. They threw her into a cell with male prisoners, who beat and repeatedly raped her. Some of the guards had their way with her as well. It took a $10,000 cash bribe to get her out of jail, and when Keith met her at Heathrow, Anita was badly bruised. Sobbing, she ran into Keith’s arms. The doctor who examined her at Cheyne Walk confirmed evidence of multiple rape. Chastened, the couple tried to resume their lives in Cheyne Walk and at Redlands, but Keith was mad as hell.

  Sessions for Goat’s Head Soup continued in London during the spring of 1973. “Hide Your Love” was recorded at Olympic with Mick Jagger playing piano, as was “Heartbreaker.” “Silver Train” (originally written for guitarist Johnny Winter) was recorded by the Stones at Island Records’ studio in Basing Street. Several unreleased songs date from this era, including “Criss Cross Man” and “Through the Lonely Nights,” with Jimmy Page adding a bit of guitar. New horn players (Jim Horn, Chuck Finley) were brought in to shore up the faltering Stones brass section as Keys and Price became drug casualties. Andy Johns was also strung out; unable to finish the sessions, he was replaced by Keith Harwood, who worked with Led Zeppelin. Jimmy Miller was reduced to playing on percussion tracks with African master drummer Reebop Kwaku Baah. One of the last songs recorded was “Starfucker,” a backhanded rock and roll tribute to the band’s groupie friends. The song’s title and graphic lyric about “giving head to Steve McQueen” caused the album to be delayed when Atlantic’s lawyers balked. “But it’s our label,” Mick complained to Ahmet Ertegun, who wouldn’t budge. They changed the name of the song to “Star Star” and got a release from Steve McQueen, who didn’t mind the publicity.

  When he was in Jamaica, Keith was in his element, guarded by his Rasta pals, playing with his collection of ratchet knives. One night the drummers who came to Keith’s house to play and chant in the evenings took Keith to meet the master drum maker in the hills above nearby Steertown. Keith bought a set of his akete drums and was told that the drums needed to age for twenty years. To Keith, that was no problem. He could wait.

  On June 26, there was, as usual, a party at Keith’s house at Cheyne Walk. Reggae records were blasting away. Marshall Chess and Stash de Rola were there, very high. Keith was playing his psychedic piano in his purple music room. Others were in the tripping parlor with its huge gothic candlesticks and a shrine to Jimi Hendrix. Suddenly, police broke into the house. Keith, Anita, and the luckless Stash were arrested for possession of heroin, cannabis, Mandrax, and firearms—three of Keith’s guns—and released late that night on bail.

  Keith and Anita were down at Redlands on July 31 when the house caught fire. They carried antiques out of the burning farmhouse, but the thatched roof lit up and soon collapsed. A few things were saved, but Keith lost some guitars. Redlands needed to be completely rebuilt and would be lost to him for years.

  Goat’s Head Soup was released that August. The first single, “Angie”/ “Silver Train,” was their first American no. 1 single in five years, since “Honky Tonk Women.” As a touching ballad of uncharacteristic vulnerability, “Angie” was wildly popular in Latin countries and signaled a major switch for the Stones into the saccharin power ballad. A simple perform
ance video for “Angie” was taped in London by Michael Lindsay- Hogg.

  The Stones were photographed by David Bailey for the album’s gatefold sleeve in makeup and glam-style gauze. The title, Goat’s Head Soup, meant to evoke the atmosphere of Jamaican obeah voodoo in which they pretended the album had been recorded, was unsubtly illustrated by an insert photo of a goat’s head boiling in a stewpot.

  “Dancing with Mr. D” started the album with Keith’s devilish, repeating guitar riff as Mick droned a chanting lyric about possession and fear. Like many of the tracks on Soup, “Mr. D” was held together by Mick Taylor, whose tastefully eloquent guitar unified this disparate collection of songs. “100 Years Ago” continued with its changing tempos, moving from poignant pastoral reverie to urgent jamming, with Billy Preston on organ. It was one of Mick Jagger’s best, most emotional vocals ever. “Coming Down Again” was Keith’s song, illuminated by Nicky Hopkins on piano. A pretty drug ballad with a turgid sax solo by Bobby Keys, it had an unnerving air of edgy quiescence, the wistful downside of a good high. It was also a stark message to Anita, as Keith sang about sticking his tongue in someone else’s pie, and how good it tasted.

  Billy Preston’s urgent clavinet stutter empowered “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker),” a hard-rocking number about a ten-year-old girl addicted to smack in New York. Mick sang his tough lyric in a fury as the horns backed him up with martial flourishes. The first side of Soup finished with “Angie,” a lovesick bohemian rhapsody that turned out to be highly radio-friendly. “Let me whisper in your ear—Angie,” sang Mick with an intimacy that hadn’t been heard from the Stones before. A swelling string section helped move “Angie” along with a bit of sonic grandeur.