Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  The shimmering bottleneck riff of “Silver Train” started side two. Mick’s harp was a loaded freight train rolling down the Cotton Belt over Stu’s pounded piano. “Hide Your Love” came off as a loose and relaxed jam over Mick’s basic piano track. “Winter” (on which Keith didn’t play) was another big production ballad that drew upon the cold malaise of Let It Bleed for its atmosphere of melancholy and longing. Mick’s lyric evoked a curious combination of Californian languor and intellectual cravings (Mick as Van Morrison), with strings again supplying an orchestral cushion.

  This was followed by the curious pastiche of “Can You Hear the Music.” Tibetan bells, shepherds’ flutes (played by Jim Horn), burbling clavinet, and inchoate chanting aimed for cave-light ritual as the Stones tried to capture a tribal feel. More to the point was Goat’s Head Soup’s final track, the censored “Star Star.” This was more like the old Stones, a faux Chuck Berry anthem about a bicoastal groupie into “lead guitars and movie stars.” The Steve McQueen line had stayed in the song, but on the American pressings Atlantic Records bleeped through Mick’s line “I bet you keep your pussy clean.” “Star Star” had a great, vamping rock tag at the end, a thrilling burst of raw energy that would accompany giant inflatable penises sprouting from their stage in years to come.

  Goat’s Head Soup received middling and puzzled reviews, Exile being a tough act to follow. Ian Stewart, the conscience of the Rolling Stones, called the album “bloody insipid” when it came out. It was the no. 1 album in America and England that autumn.

  * * *

  The Devil’s Right-Hand Man

  While staying in London in the spring of 1973, Keith was at Tramps one night when he met Chrissie Wood, sultry blond wife of matey lovable Ron Wood, who played guitar in the Faces, everyone’s favorite drunken rock band. Keith fancied her, offered her a ride home in his yellow Ferrari. When they got to Ron’s house, a Georgian mansion in Richmond called the Wick, she invited him in for coffee. Keith couldn’t believe his luck.

  Chrissie showed Keith around the beautiful house, which had been owned by the actor John Mills. She showed him the bedroom of Hayley Mills, the child actress who had grown up in the Wick. Keith was about to make his move when Chrissie asked him if he’d like to come downstairs and meet Ronnie, who was working in his basement studio. Somewhat crestfallen, Keith descended the stairs to find Mick Jagger, working on “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll” with Ron Wood.

  It was an awkward scene for a few moments. Keith, like everyone else, had heard the rumors that Ron Wood might be asked to join the Stones if Keith’s drug problems got any worse. But Ronnie’s bluff good humor, liquid hospitality, and brittle laughter diffused the tension, and things got sorted out eventually. They were upstairs in the Wick’s oval living room, sipping cognac, when a beautiful blond German model named Uschi Obermeier walked in. Mick immediately hit on the Woods’ sexy houseguest, but she seemed to prefer Keith. Knowing a cool scene when he fell into one, Keith immediately moved into a small cottage in the garden of the Wick. He cemented his brotherly new friendship with Ronnie Wood while seeing Uschi constantly, and for the next year the Wick became Keith’s London squat. It was the beginning of Ron Wood’s eventual absorption into the Rolling Stones.

  The Stones toured Europe, with Billy Preston on keyboards, during September and October 1973—a depraved drug tour, everyone out of their minds. Even once-innocent Mick Taylor was using heroin now. The tour started with a ten-day rehearsal in a Rotterdam warehouse at the end of August and opened in Vienna on September 4. They played some dates in Germany and did several shows at Wembley after a big publicity party at Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill’s birthplace, on September 6. Tout London was there, the press and Mick’s posh friends. Anita refused to attend the party and waited in the car instead. When Keith spent too long inside fixing smack with Bobby Keys, she marched into the party—disheveled, hair akimbo, Teutonic fury—and started to scream at Keith for keeping her waiting. Mick whispered to Keith to get her out at once or it was fucking front-page news tomorrow. Keith took Anita to the car, got in, and she tried to scratch his eyes in full view of partygoers as the car sped off into the night. Their son, Marlon, looked quietly out the window, pretending to ignore what was going on as his parents punched each other in the backseat.

  Keith was at one of his lowest points, and there were even rumors in London that the Human Riff was dying. Drugs had wrecked his crucial musicianship. He only played rhythm guitar on that tour, kept dropping his pick, forgot the words to “Happy” most nights. Mick was making sarcastic onstage comments when Keith disgraced himself, saying, “Thanks, Keith, that was . . . amazing,” and rolling his eyes. Stu called him “a walking bloody tragedy.” Bill Wyman let it be known that this tour might be his last. The music business projected its collective death fantasies on him as the Next OD (like Nils Lofgrin’s pleading song “Keith Don’t Go.”) Writers competed for lurid metaphors to describe Keith’s skeletal aura. Now he became “the devil’s right-hand man” and “a bone-faced hoodlum raunch connoisseur toting a powerful drug-oriented misterioso.” Keith took it all in stride. “The drugs thing was just an extra side of the image that was forced on us by political circumstances,” he said. “You’ve got a particular image, and people expect you to live up to it, so I continued to get very wasted. I was the odds-on favorite as rock’s next celebrity death. It didn’t happen, despite everything. I’m a survivor.”

  The Stones were playing in Manchester in September when Bobby Keys told Keith that Gram Parsons had overdosed and died alone in a seedy Los Angeles motel. Gram’s road manager had then stolen his body from an airport loading dock and tried to burn it on a makeshift pyre in the desert at Joshua Tree. Keith and Keys retired to the hotel bar to meditate on this, staring into their drinks, saying little. Keith’s friends were dying all around him. Michael Cooper, wasted on heroin and confined to a wheelchair, had killed himself with an overdose. Keith’s beloved grandfather Gus Dupree also passed away. In Manchester that night, Keith assumed control of the Stones and seemed to be playing for his own life, running off poignant guitar solos and singing his throat raw.

  Keith tried to get off dope again after the Stones played in Innsbruck, Austria, on September 23. He and Marshall Chess rented a Swiss villa and underwent a three-day hemodialysis treatment that slowly filtered heroin from their bloodstreams, which led to the urban legend that Keith was having his blood regularly transfused in Switzerland to support his narcotics habit. This was widely interpreted as an extreme new low mark in rock star decadence.

  In October, Bobby Keys collapsed in Germany, too sick with heroin addiction to play any more. The Stones were furious at Keys for letting them down on the road, an unforgivable fuckup. Peter Rudge had a roadie dump Keys in a taxi and put him on the first plane back to America. Bobby Keys was forgotten. It would be decades before he was allowed onstage with the Rolling Stones again.

  On October 19, the Stones played the Deutschlandhalle in Berlin, and played really well, meshing gears on a killer five-song finale: “Silver Train,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “All Down the Line,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” and “Street Fighting Man.” It was a great show before a hyped-up crowd. No one knew then it would be the last concert ever played by Mick Taylor as a member of the Rolling Stones.

  There was a party for the Stones in an elegant Berlin hotel afterward, with naked girls in high heels dancing with record company executives. At three in the morning, as Mick and Keith watched from two thronelike chairs, two girls stripped to some Turkish music and then proceeded to make love on a fur rug. One of Billy Preston’s band threw a candle at them, the rug caught fire, and the girls got singed. Naked and humiliated, one of the girls got up and spat some guttural German curses in Jagger’s impassive face.

  While the Stones were touring, Keith and Anita were fined and given suspended sentences by a French court for their drug use at Nellcote two years earlier (both were banned from France for two years), and on October 24 a London
court fined them for the dope and gun charges from the Cheyne Walk bust. Celebrating at the Londonderry Hotel a few days later, Keith nodded off and set his bed on fire.

  Keith and Mick were both spending time with Ronnie Wood, enjoying the continuous good vibes and woozy hospitality at the Wick. “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll,” the Stones’ next anthemic single, came from these basement jams, with the basic track laid down by the band Wood was rehearsing for his upcoming first solo record. As they prepared early material for their new album, Mick and Keith decided to jettison dope-addled Jimmy Miller and produce the new record themselves. “Jimmy went in a lion and came out a lamb,” said Keith later. “We wore him out completely. Jimmy was great, but the more successful he became, the more he became like Brian. [He] ended up carving swastikas into the wooden console at Island studios. It took him three months to carve a swastika. Meanwhile Mick and I finished up Goat’s Head Soup.”

  Keith was also philosophical about the death of Gram Parsons (whose remains were retrieved and buried in a New Orleans cemetery under a small stone inscribed “God’s Own Singer”). “Anything that Gram was involved in had a touch of magic about it. Unfortunately many of my closest friends have died suddenly . . . While they were with me, I could always hold ’em down. I could take care of Gram. But once he’d moved back to L.A., I started to hear stories. Oh, shit!” The Eagles took over Gram’s country rock music and spun it into multiplatinum success.

  The Stones needed a change, a new act. This is when Mick and Keith began to recast themselves as a newly productive post-glitter unit within the Rolling Stones—the Glimmer Twins.

  Just to put yourself up on that stage, you’ve got to have an enormous ego. It’s what you do with it in your spare time. People expect me to be a wild man: “Keith Richards—crazy fuck.”

  Keith Richards

  * * *

  Give Us a Glimmer

  The Glimmer Twins—jet-riding rock nomads, heavy-duty tax exiles, funk-faking jive turkeys—got started in Munich in November 1973 when the Rolling Stones began their German Period in the easygoing, artsy Bavarian city where Adolf Hitler had risen to fame fifty years earlier. Hitler was endlessly fascinating to Keith Richards, who could speak knowledgeably and admiringly of Hitler’s mesmeric stage presence and uncanny control over immense crowds—attributes only a contemporary rock star could really experience.

  All the big English bands wanted to record at disco producer Giorgio Moroder’s hot new Musicland Studio in the basement of the Arabella Hotel, but Mick Jagger was able to get a priority booking on short notice. All the Stones came to Munich in the middle of November except Mick Taylor, who was officially ill but actually disgruntled with being the underpaid, uncredited, and disrespected guitar player in a group that failed to appreciate him. They woke like vampires at sunset, had some breakfast and an alcohol fix, walked a little if it wasn’t raining, and then went down to the studio. They worked long hours past midnight with Billy Preston, so hot a property in 1973–74 that Miles Davis named a track on his new album after him. The Stones began rebuilding “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll” (originally recorded at the Wick by Mick and Ron Wood with Faces drummer Kenny Lane, American bassist Willie Weeks, and David Bowie adding some sub-rosa vocal hysteria on the song’s laddish chorus). Keith erased Wood’s guitar track and dubbed in his own Berryish riffing, and Wood later had to be content with an album-sleeve noncredit for inspiring “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll” instead of a (very lucrative) credit for cowriting it.

  When in doubt, the Rolling Stones had always turned to black music for direction. In 1973, lining up with prevailing contemporary taste and Billy Preston, they began to reposition themselves as a funk band. Funk was the bass-driven pop music of black America, a hybrid of James Brown’s precision-tooled groove, the black hippie chants of Sly Stone, and the flamboyant styles of the Black Panther Party and professional procurers. The stars of early-seventies funk (Earth, Wind and Fire; Funkadelic; Rick James; Curtis Mayfield; the Meters) were the ghetto superstars of the era. Mick Jagger especially liked their stage clothes, colorful costumes that cast the musicians as space travelers, African princes, and wildly successful pimps.

  So in Munich, the Stones began to fake the funk in earnest, relying on Billy Preston’s expert chops. They covered the Temptations’ 1966 Motown hit “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” in a crypto-funk arrangement. They tried a new song, “Luxury,” in the same groove, but it later developed into a lame reggae experiment. (Reggae’s pulse proved difficult for Charlie Watts to master. A contemporary Jamaican conceit held that only illiterate, spliff-nourished Rastafarian drummers could play reggae’s backward, inside-out “riddims.”) More successfully the Stones cut the first versions of “Fingerprint File,” Mick Jagger’s funk-saturated take on modern paranoia, powered by his own crudely evocative lashes of blaxploitation guitar.

  Breaking for Christmas, the band dispersed. Bill Wyman booked a studio in Los Angeles to record his first solo album, Monkey Grip, a tuneless and charmless LP released by Rolling Stones Records in the spring of 1974. Monkey Grip had an all-star cast that included Mick Jagger on some backing vocals and Mick Taylor on guitar, but Keith hated it and was openly resentful that any Rolling Stone would go outside the band to make music on his own.

  Mick Taylor finally joined the Stones when they regrouped in Munich in January 1974. Engineer Andy Johns, deemed unfit for duty due to heroin use, wasn’t invited back. His brother, Glyn Johns, completed his mixes on “Fingerprint File.” The young English engineer Keith Harwood, a favorite of Led Zeppelin’s, was brought in to replace Andy Johns and finish the album.

  These second Munich sessions were hard on Mick Taylor, and people around the studio thought that Keith was trying to humiliate him. Taylor would get to Musicland early to work on a bass part or try something on guitar, and Keith would erase the tapes later that night. Mick Taylor wrote the melody and played beautifully on “Time Waits for No One,” but despite vague promises got no songwriting credit. At one session, Taylor was playing well when Keith began to curse him. “Oi! Taylor—you’re playing too fuckin’ loud.” Keith stopped playing and let fly. “I mean, you’re really good live, man, but you’re fucking useless in the studio. Lay out, play later, whatever.” Some thought this was Keith’s way of letting Taylor know he wanted Ron Wood in the Stones.

  While they were working, Mick summoned the Dutch graphic artist Guy Peellaert to Munich to design the album jacket for It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll. Peellaert’s sensational 1972 book Rock Dreams, a vivid fantasia of airbrushed photomontages, had depicted the Stones as sadomasochistic child-molesting Nazis. For their album cover, Peelaert painted them as triumphant gods descending from a classical temple, feted by hundreds of diaphanous, petal-strewing handmaidens.

  The new tracks were mixed down at Island Studio in London that spring. “Time Waits for No One,” originally from the 1970 Stargroves sessions, was resurrected for the album and got a sinuous slide guitar treatment from Mick Taylor. Percussionist Ray Cooper, from Elton John’s band, overdubbed almost every track.

  Keith was living with Uschi Obermeier in the garden cottage at the Wick, spending days in bed with her, working on Wood’s solo album in his basement by night, along with both Micks. By living at the Wick, Keith was avoiding both Anita and the constant police surveillance of his house in Cheyne Walk. “It was pure accident that I started helping Woody on his first solo album,” Keith said later. “I went over to his place one day and stayed three months, working and playing snooker, worked nonstop putting Ronnie’s album together. That was my first extended period of working with somebody else outside the Stones, because up till then it was the Stones or nothing. I wasn’t inclined to work with anybody else, but Ronnie caught my fancy.”

  Mick and Keith wrote “Sure the One You Need” and “Act Together” for Wood’s album. Keith sang on several tracks with Wood, while Mick’s voice was prominent on the reggae-style “I Can Feel the Fire.” Wood’s American producer had brought in a
load of MDA, brain-damaging psychedelic speed, so some of these sessions got a little nuts. When released later in 1974, Wood’s I’ve Got My Own Album to Do sounded more like an adjunct Stones album than a solo project by one of the Faces. The title was a poke at Rod Stewart, who always used to whine that he couldn’t work with the Faces because he had to work on his own solo album.

  Summer 1974. Keith wanted the Stones to tour, but Mick vetoed the idea. With Mick running the Stones, Keith was in no shape to organize anything himself and had to defer.

  Keith: “I was devoting most of my time to scoring dope. I was completely out of it, and Mick had to cover for me. He took over completely. I managed to make the gigs and write some songs, but Mick took care of everything through most of the seventies. He covered my ass.”

  Keith wanted to go out because, he told Barbara Charone, “every minute spent off the road I either turn into an alcoholic or a junky, ’cause I’ve got nothin’ else to do.” Instead, Keith played—looking cadaverous—at a couple of Ron Wood’s London solo gigs in July, cuffing rhythm guitar and singing with the band. With their black shag hairdos, Keith and Ron looked like identical crows when they sang together at the mike—“degenerate Everly Brothers,” according to Nick Kent.

  After finishing the new Stones album, Mick and Bianca spent the rest of the summer at Andy Warhol’s six-acre compound of houses at Montauk, on the eastern tip of Long Island. Warhol adored Bianca’s aloof, hard-edged chic. He called her “the greatest movie star who never made a movie,” and remained close friends with her for the rest of his life. Warhol and Mick Jagger—two master manipulators—were never close, but they did use each other, each to his own advantage.