The shows began, tongue of Kali firmly in cheek, with the recorded trumpets of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. The Stones emerged onstage to cherry bomb wargasms as the roadies set off explosions and Keith fired off the chords to “Honky Tonk Women.” “If You Can’t Rock Me” segued through Ollie Brown’s congas into a jokey, disco-tinged “Get Off My Cloud,” now a stage-business duet with Billy Preston. The show progressed through a sequence of hits and high spirits: “Happy” got a scorching slide guitar lift-off from Ronnie while Keith shouted his slurred, smacked-out lyrics, his voice now lost to tobacco abuse but still full of gruff character. Ron Wood’s choppy chord solos replaced Mick Taylor’s fluid groove on “Tumbling Dice.” “Starfucker” had a thrilling vamp section at the end while Mick rode the white penis that blew up into an arena-size erection. The live performances of “Fingerprint File” had an extra-cool guitar lick over dub-style fills and an interlude for some paranoid stage business: “Who dat man in de corner? Not dat corner, de one over there!”
“You Gotta Move” was transformed into a vocal quartet, as Mick, Keith, Wood, and Preston gathered around the mike and sang soul-style harmonies over Charlie’s Salvation Army drumbeat. This often got a gospel-style reprise from Billy Preston. With no horns, Billy played the intro to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” on the synthesizer instead. Ron Wood played Brian Jones’s slide guitar licks expertly on “Little Red Rooster.” They ignored “Satisfaction” entirely.
Billy Preston’s set usually ended with Mick coming out in his Giorgio di Sant’Angelo striped crepe “clown suit,” tied at the waist and fashionably cross-gartered, and dancing the bump and suggestive homoerotic grinds with Preston, who performed in stacked heels and a massive Afro wig. The finale was a burning “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll,” “Brown Sugar,” “Street Fighting Man,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (with Mick flying around the halls at the end of a trapeze rope), and the winding guitars and samba drums of “Sympathy for the Devil.”
TOTA had no single opening act. Instead, various bands—the Meters, Little Feat, the Eagles, the Outlaws—opened in different parts of the country.
For the TOTA shows, limos were out. The band was driven in low-profile station wagons and vans. Peter Rudge had hired a new, heavyweight layer of security. Despite the anti-FBI jibes in “Fingerprint File,” moonlighting FBI officers and Secret Service agents protected the Stones from local police departments. Spanish Tony claimed that Keith told him he was supplied unusually pure heroin by these operatives. Fred Sessler was also along with his licensed Peruvian marching powder. Carefully delineated lines of cocaine and heroin on the amplifiers were available during the shows, and any roadie who put his flashlight on them was fired. The heroin lines were for Keith and Woody exclusively, while the coke was for the rest of the band. Keith and Woody also smoked “dirty fags”—heroin-laced cigarettes—during the shows.
The Stones opened far out of town on June 1, 1975, at Louisiana State University. The Meters, Creole-funk heroes from New Orleans’s 13th Ward, opened with their strutting “second-line” syncopations and the mellow harmonies of the Neville Brothers. Then to the airport and the waiting Starship, a customized Boeing 720 jetliner with a bar, an organ, sofas, maroon shag carpeting, a fireplace, various lounges, and a bedroom in the back. The Starship was the ultimate new amenity in the booming world of seventies rock, affordable only by the Stones, Led Zepp, and Elton John. Peter Rudge and security chief Bill Carter, a lawyer and former Secret Service agent, ran such a tight ship that Bianca Jagger referred to the atmosphere around that tour as “a fascist state.” But tough measures were often required. At the second stop, San Antonio, the local vice squad threatened the band with arrest if they deployed their flying penis. Cops flooded backstage during the show, ready to pounce, but were faced down by Bill Carter, who knew how to talk to local police chiefs.
Ron Wood put his mark on the tour early, made himself indispensable, worked hard to fit in, got people drinks. Manic laughter in the tuning room before the show did wonders for the Stones. He was everyone’s little bro. Keith: “Good to be with in a tune-up room and inspiring to all in attendance, Ronnie is. He gives everyone courage for the show.” Wood was the first antic stage presence Mick had to deal with since 1967, with his flash guitar posturing and his attempts to bait the stone-faced Wyman, who barely moved or smiled during the shows. Mick bounced off Woody during the shows, jumped on him, kicked him, mugged in his face, did physical shtick, licked his cheeks onstage.
Kansas City, June 5, with the Eagles opening. The Stones played outdoors for the first time under a white stage tent for eighty thousand kids, a sea of waving arms, topless girls hoisted onto brawny shoulders, and a constant, chanting roar. Backstage the musicians and crew wore T-shirts that asked “Who the fuck is Mick Jagger?” Keith, who’d been awake for a week, jamming through the night and listening to reggae with Ronnie, debuted a pair of skintight white leather pants in which he would live for the rest of the tour.
Municipal Stadium, Cleveland, 83,000 customers on June 13. Next day, before the Buffalo show, the crew took a boat ride under Niagara Falls. “Don’t show this to Jagger,” Rudge said as they beheld the mammoth cascade. “He’ll want it onstage.”
In Toronto, word got backstage that a young girl, blind since birth, was following the tour, hitching from show to show. Keith started noticing her up front every night, squeezed in the crunch of fans, and became concerned for her. He arranged for the roadies to look after her, let her ride in the trucks, see that she got in all right every night. It was a simple gesture, a karmic gift that would pay off down the road.
Six shows at Madison Square Garden in New York at the end of June, with the blossoming lotus stage deployed for the first time. A round of parties and jams with Eric Clapton at Jimi Hendrix’s old studio. Bob Dylan backstage one night, with Carlos Santana onstage with the Stones on the last night of the week. At this show, the Stones were joined by a hundred steel drummers, masters of pan music recruited from Brooklyn’s West Indian community to add a Carnival vibe to the New York finale. When Keith crashed into “Happy,” the Garden brimmed with communal joy as the fans sang along with the bombed-out guitarist. After this show, the Stones threw a big party for the Steel Band Association drummers and their girlfriends in Brooklyn, with reggae songs turned up to full watts all night. The next day’s papers reported that the six shows had grossed over a million dollars.
Fred Sessler drove the Stones crazy by disappearing for a few days. A New York record executive, Stu Werbin, got some cocaine for Ronnie and was invited to have a snort with the band. He observed that Mick was playing games with Bianca, pretending not to notice that she wanted a toot. This went on for a while until Keith, in spiteful defiance of Mick, served Bianca several crystalline lines. Sessler reappeared before the Stones left town, his supplies replenished. Money never changed hands with him because he never sold drugs and wasn’t a dealer. His only compensation was hanging with the Stones and being seen with them.
After a few days off, the Stones plunged right back in with a Washington, D.C., show on July 1. To Mick’s annoyance, Bianca was photographed in the embrace of President Ford’s son Jack while visiting the White House with Andy Warhol. She was spotted dancing with Disco Jack at decadent Studio 54 in New York a few days later, which got Mick really steamed.
Memphis a few days later. The Starship arrived late at night without Mick, who was driving. They were greeted on the runway by eighty-three-year-old Beale Street blues legend Furry Lewis, who sat on a couple of cases of whiskey, singing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” Enchanted, Keith sat down on the tarmac to listen awhile. Later that afternoon, at the Stones’ July 4 show at Memorial Stadium, they refused to play until Furry Lewis did a couple of songs for 51,000 half-nekked kids who’d already been waiting five hours in the hot summer sun. Furry told them a joke about eating pussy, got a big roaring laugh, and played the crowd “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.”
The Stones bla
sted off at nine, Mick in a lavender silk cape, Keith in a Bob Marley T-shirt, tearing off the chunky chords to “Honky Tonk Women” as the whole stadium began to quake. Police in riot gear threatened to arrest the Stones if they performed “Starfucker” and exposed their big balloon dick in Memorial Stadium. Bill Carter took the police chief aside and advised: “If you bust the Stones tonight, these kids will burn down this stadium and your city along with it. Plus, this band will litigate you forever. These ain’t some broke hippies, Chief. I guarantee you, they will sue!” The Stones played “Starfucker” that night like it had a nitrous oxide hookup, and the flying phallus wasn’t exposed in big outdoor shows anyway. After the show, in honor of American Independence Day, Mick had Jimi Hendrix’s bitterly sardonic “Star-Spangled Banner” played over the P.A. Afro-headed Ollie Brown earnestly read a selection of revolutionary texts (Lenin, Che, Thomas Jefferson) chosen by Mick, ending with Chairman Mao’s rhetorical query “Is one revolution enough?” Thousands of Stones fans remained in the stadium to listen to Jagger’s Godard-like guerrilla theater piece.
The next morning, Keith and Woody left Memphis by limo, along with Fred Sessler and their big English security man, Jim Callaghan, to drive through the South to the next gig at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. They stopped for some pork barbecue in tiny Fordyce, Arkansas, where the car and the two exotic musicians attracted not a little attention. Keith was wheeling the limo out of town when he swerved across the road while trying to tune in KFFA in Helena. A cop pulled them over and busted Keith for carrying a ratchet knife. They went back to Fordyce, where the cops pried open the trunk and arrested Sessler for cocaine possession. As a crowd of longhairs gathered around the courthouse, some calls were made, and Arkansas native Bill Carter soon arrived. Keith’s bail, set at $162, was paid and he was released. Sessler, described in subsequent press reports as a hitchhiker, paid $5,000. A chartered plane hastily ferried the miscreants off to Dallas.
* * *
Most Glamorous Gladiators
That summer of 1975, the Stones stayed on the road in America, playing some nights much better than others, standing on their laurels, a strategy that almost begged for contempt. Their presentation was criticized as “a generally unrevealing set of reinterpretations of their old songs.” Critic James Miller, covering the tour for Newsweek, wrote that “the Stones became the Seventies’ most glamorous gladiators, but the shows grew slick and the music slack. Here was rock royalty gone cynical . . . fabulously moneyed superstars with enough nasty habits and jet-set sidekicks to keep the gossip juicy.”
When TOTA reached Los Angeles, the Stones were joined by their wives at the Beverly Wilshire. Anita, recently deported from Jamaica after her drug conviction, was absent, so Keith stayed at a canyon hideaway owned by Fred Sessler. Movie stars—Raquel Welch, Liza Minnelli, Bianca’s rumored boyfriend Ryan O’Neal—clamored for tickets and backstage passes. Bianca commandeered the best seats for her friends. “You should write something bitchy about her,” Mick told Lisa Robinson. “She’s very rude to people.” Ron Wood and Bill Wyman skipped Ahmet Ertegun’s party for the Stones at Diana Ross’s house and went to see Bob Marley and the Wailers play at the Roxy nightclub instead.
In San Francisco, the Stones were in the middle of the second of two desultory concerts when Mick’s assistant, Alan Dunn, passed him a note onstage that read, “She’s on the plane.” Bianca had left the tour and gone home, to Mick’s relief. Later that night, he and Keith went to see reggae stars Toots and the Maytals. Stray cats were soon observed padding out of Mick’s hotel room in the morning. The daily tour memo warned “Loose lips cost wives.” Fred Sessler flew in Uschi Obermeier to elevate Keith’s flagging spirits.
Elton John called Mick at his hotel and asked if he could sit in with the Stones in Denver that night. Though Mick had agreed to let him join for only one number, Elton refused to leave, stayed for six songs, fucked up the arrangements, and annoyed everyone.
In Chicago, Mick and Billy’s disco grind got a little Out There, with Mick stripping and Billy miming fellatio, drawing accusations of poor taste in the papers. Keith crashed in Chicago after a five-day binge. He woke up to find a “Dear Keith” letter from Uschi, who had fled. Keith crumbled for the rest of the tour despite Ron Wood’s strenuous efforts to keep him going. “You want a psychiatrist,” Keith mused, “go see Ronnie. He’s a one-man suicide line. I could make a fortune selling tickets. Suicide court! They’d come out laughing their heads off, with a new vision of life.”
By early August, the Tour of the Americas should have continued in South America, but these shows were canceled due to political chaos, security concerns, and Stones burnout. Keith didn’t want to stop. Peter Rudge added a few more big American shows—Louisville, Hampton Roads, and a final outdoor show in Buffalo. The Louisville show on August 4 was harassed by police acting on a tip that mass quantities of narcotics were being used in the dressing rooms. The cops were held off by a defensive force of lawyers, bodyguards, and extra security men. Bill Carter called the local district attorney and demanded he appear in person to call the cops off. The official duly arrived, posed for some pictures with Mick, and told the police to leave the band alone.
For the last show in Buffalo, Mick, Keith, and Ronnie all dropped LSD, annoying Charlie and Bill Wyman. The big crowd had been drinking beer outdoors all day, with more than a hundred arrests during the Outlaws’ opening set. Then a long delay because Mick didn’t want the Stones to play until dark. The crowd got tense, with medical teams treating six hundred for injuries and ODs, provoking nervous jokes about another Altamont finale on this tour. The Stones finally took the stage and played a long, loopy show. Mick performed “Street Fighting Man” while the band was playing “Brown Sugar.”
At tour’s end, the Stones scattered to the winds. Mick went to New York, Charlie to England. Bill Wyman started his second solo album, Stone Alone, in L.A. Unable to return to Jamaica without Anita, Keith reunited with her in Los Angeles, where she became pregnant in a holding action to preserve her family.
Keith was back in Montreux by October, when the rest of the Stones and Ron Wood arrived to work on their new album at Mountain Studio. These Black and Blue sessions continued in December at Musicland in Munich, where Jimmy Page was just completing the guitar overdubs on the new Led Zeppelin album, Presence.
Ron Wood had gone directly from the Stones’ tour to Miami, where the Faces were rehearsing for their tour, but the writing was on the wall. Wood dutifully played with the Faces that fall, but at the end of 1975, he was staying in a rented house in Munich where the Stones stashed their auditioning guitar players, when he learned that Rod Stewart had quit the Faces, leaving him free to join the Stones. “I’ve got a plan,” Keith told him. “Let’s not tell the press you’re in the band or make any announcement.” “I just appeared,” Wood later said. In the studio, when Wood tried to get the Stones to listen to a new song he’d written, Charlie Watts stopped and cracked, “Fucking hell, will you look at him? He’s bossing us around already!” But it was said in a kindly way. “I kind of got a clue that I was in,” Wood later said. “It was like coming into a gang that I knew I would be at home with.”
The London police happily welcomed Wood and his family into the Stones. While he was in Munich, they raided his home in Richmond, probably looking for Keith, since they broke into the garden cottage before forcing their way into the Wick. The cops found Chrissie Wood in bed with a girlfriend, arrested them both for cocaine possession, and leaked the sleeping arrangements to the press. It would take many months and 12,000 pounds in legal fees to get Chrissie Wood off.
January 1976. The Stones in New York. Mick was buying a house on West 72nd Street, preparing to move from the hotel where he and Bianca were living. Business talks with Ron Wood, haplessly negotiating his permanent entry into the gang. The Stones decided to keep him on salary, which over the years would lead to occasional (relative) poverty and dependence on his sideline as an artist for cash flow. In London, Mick T
aylor sold his gold record of It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll at auction for seventy-five pounds.
The new Stones album, Black and Blue, was being mixed in New York at Atlantic Studios, heavy on drums and funk, faux-black vocals, and pseudo-reggae chops. The Stones flew to Florida in February to be photographed for the album sleeve at sunset on a Sanibel Island beach by Japanese fashion photographer Hiro. Ron Wood’s membership in the band was announced in New York on February 28, 1976, when the Stones confirmed that they would tour Europe that summer. Wood relocated his family to a beachfront house in Malibu and started hanging out with Eric Clapton at The Band’s cozy Shangri-La Studio, near Bob Dylan’s cliffside home.
Keith and Anita were living in Switzerland that winter while she waited for her third child. On March 26, she had a premature baby boy in a Geneva clinic. They named him Tara, after Tara Browne.
* * *
Not the Chandelier!
There was seismic activity in pop music in 1976, and the tremors forced some changes on the Rolling Stones. In America, hard rock’s big era was over. Led Zeppelin, plagued by car crashes and addiction, was off the road, its empire in shambles, leaving American rock acts Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, and Lynyrd Skynyrd to carry the flame. Disco music was in its Babylonian ascendance, fought to the death by reggae musicians. English soft rock avatars like Peter Frampton and a reconstituted Fleetwood Mac began selling megamillions of albums in America on the strength of two or more hit singles per album. Overnight, many stations that used to play the Stones switched to soft rock or disco formats. In England, the scuzzy young underground musicians in their spiky hair and torn clothes, a coalescing shock wave of punk bands—the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Jam, the Damned, the Slits, Generation X—despised the Stones, Zeppelin, Elton with a passion. The punk bands blurted out inarticulate antirock manifestos and condemned rich, dope-addled, out-of-touch rock stars as—and this hurt—“boring old farts.” Their revolt was partly against the bombastic grandiosity of rock as a rite of worship, and partly simple hatred of decadent older musicians. Punk music was crude, simple, jam-packed with speed and crazed energy, and it put the older musicians to shame. (Among the Stones, it was Mick the punks reviled; Keith’s open defiance and lack of pretense seemed to earn him an unspoken pass from the pantheon of punk.) In the vanguard of the punk bands, the Clash issued a widely publicized antirock challenge, demanding the death penalty: “No Stones or Who in ’77.”
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