It was into this roiling pop cultural stew that the Stones released “Fool to Cry”/“Crazy Mama” as a single at the end of April 1976: it reached the Top Ten in both England and America in May. The album Black and Blue was initially promoted by a blatantly sadomasochistic ad campaign that displayed a tied-up, beaten, and bruised blond model, her clothes torn, her legs spread wide, tongue out, her face a mask of demented desire. Angry women defaced the Black and Blue billboard when it went up over Sunset Boulevard in L.A., and the ads were withdrawn.
Black and Blue was a funk-informed collage of guitarists, ballads, and halfhearted stabs at reggae. It led off with “Hot Stuff,” the Stones posing as the Ohio Players, hanging on a riff and a prayer, with Billy Preston on piano, Harvey Mandel on guitar, and Mick rapping in dreadful urban blackface, the Al Jolson of rock. “Hand of Fate” was an old-time rocker with Wayne Perkins on guitar, playing like a Mick Taylor clone. “Cherry Oh Baby” was Keith and Ron’s half-earnest, semiparodic cover of a classic Jamaican hit, with lead-footed Charlie Watts failing to play properly and Keith shouting the Rastafarian hail—“Irie!”—in the middle of the track. The side ended with “Memory Motel,” the story of Hannah, a honey of a girl from Boston, an unusually romantic and affecting ballad of admiration. Keith sang the bridge—“She’s got a mind of her own”—with more soul than he’d put into a song since “You Got the Silver.” Mick and Keith both played keyboards on this song of road fever, wounded loneliness, and bittersweet recollection.
Ron Wood played chopped-up lead guitar over Billy Preston’s chaotic piano on “Hey Negrita” on side two, a slice of Wood-inspired funk/reggae. (Negrita was a nickname Mick had for his dark-complected wife.) “Melody” (which Bill Wyman said was actually written by Billy Preston) was a lounge-gospel throwaway. “Fool to Cry” was another Mick Jagger ballad, haunted and newly vulnerable, about his love for a woman in a poor part of town. With Mick on keyboard and Nicky Hopkins on string synthesizer, it had a long, hypnotic carousel of an instrumental tag as Mick begged and pleaded with a sincerity that seemed real. The winding guitars and old-school crunch of “Crazy Mama” ended the album in a molten lava of fanfare guitar and big rock chorale.
Black and Blue was a hit album that spring. It reached no. 1 in America and no. 2 in England, surprising everyone, including the Stones. But the record sickened the rock critics who’d grown up worshiping the Stones. The acerbic Lester Bangs, the conscience of the rock press, let fly in Creem magazine: “There are two things to be said about the Stones’ album before closing time. One is that they are perfectly in tune with the times (ahead some times, trendies), and the other is that the heat’s off, because it’s all over, they really don’t matter anymore or stand for anything, which is certainly lucky for both them and us. I mean, it was a heavy weight to carry for all concerned. This is the first meaningless Stones album, and thank god!” Bangs’s ironic relief was nothing compared to the poisonous critical venom spewed on the Stones by English writers imbued with fashionable punk no-future ideology.
The Rolling Stones’ eight-week European tour began in Frankfurt on April 28, 1976. A hundred-strong crew of roadies, techs, accountants, and assistants hurtled the Stones along with fifteen big trucks, tons of lights and speakers, Keith’s twenty-two guitars, a big custom stage, a pagoda-shaped white tent for the outdoor shows, and the flying penis and green dragon. The superb Meters, powered by the impeccably sharp drummer Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste and probably the best band in America, opened the shows. There was major drug traffic around the tour, with Keith personally signing laminates for his favorite dope dealers. Skeletal and supposedly “elegantly wasted,” according to his press agents, Keith looked awful and played worse. He fell down on opening night during the finale, couldn’t get up, kept playing anyway.
There was so much heroin around the tour that even the crew was scoring in the special dealers’ lounge, found backstage at every show. There was serious harassment as they crisscrossed European borders, with constant luggage and body searches. Keith’s seven-year-old son, Marlon, was along with him, playing wildly with his expensive toys backstage, or calmly sitting on a barstool watching his dad drink doubles of Scotch whisky, keeping him company, providing a bit of focus in the blur.
The after-show action was usually in Woody’s room, with blues tapes (Furry Lewis, Big Maceo, Robert Johnson) alternating with throbbing reggae: Peter Tosh’s “Legalize It,” Culture, Max Romeo, Gregory Isaacs, the Itals. One night some British writers were allowed upstairs to interview the Stones. They found Keith chopping cocaine and candidly dumping on outcast Bill Wyman for the mediocrity of his solo album Stone Alone. When Mick discovered they were the same journos who had slagged Black and Blue, he became agitated. “Throw these cunts out,” he hissed to their press agent. Keith, ever the gent, apologized to the hacks as they were herded out. Mick usually kept his distance from the rest of the tour. “Nobody hangs out in my fuckin’ room,” he told one writer, “except the band. What are you doing here, anyways?”
As if to prove to the punks that they were right and the Stones were truly obsolete, they played terribly almost every night: long shows with draggy tempos, sloppy guitar work, phoned-in funk, pathetic sing-alongs, ending with Mick flying around like a doomed Wallenda at the end of his trapeze. Keith found playing “Fool to Cry” so boring that he occasionally nodded off during the song. On May 19, Keith was driving Marlon and some friends home at dawn from a viscerally bad Stones show in Stafford when he nodded off at his customary 100 mph, bounced off the center barrier of the M1 motorway, and ditched his Bentley in a field. He got rid of most of the drugs before police arrived, but forgot about the silver coke stash and spoon he wore around his neck. The cops arrested him for the cocaine and also found some LSD in the car.
That night, the Stones began a sold-out six-night stand at cavernous Earls Court, an acoustically challenged exhibition hall with the ambience of an airplane hangar. “This is the worst toilet I’ve played in,” Mick was quoted, “and I’ve seen toilets.” Even the usually sharp Meters sounded terrible. Sleepless for five days, ill from heroin, out on bail again, Keith was unable to conjure up his requisite Evil and played like a zombie. Mick yelled at the band—“No mistakes this time!”—as he moved to his keyboard for “Fool to Cry.” The Stones got the worst reviews of their career. Their act was called a sham, and “a charade inflated into a carnival.” (Martin Amis on Mick Jagger: “This well-put-together, vitamin-packed unit of a human being does not really dance any more: it’s simply that his head, his shoulders, his pelvis, both his arms, both his legs, both his huge feet and both his buttocks are wiggling, at great speed, independently, all the time . . . Mick is, without doubt, one of our least sedentary millionaires.”) Mick’s friend Princess Margaret, sister of the queen, popped backstage one night, further wrecking the band’s street cred.
While playing in London, Mick called up Bryan Ferry, effete lead singer of the group Roxy Music, and invited him to one of the Earls Court shows. Ferry came with his fiancée, Jerry Hall, the ravishingly beautiful blond Texas girl who was one of the highest-paid fashion models in the world. They went to dinner with Mick after the show, Mick in his “mockney” persona, then went back to Ferry’s house, where Mick flirted outrageously with his host’s girlfriend until the disgusted Ferry stomped upstairs to bed. When Mick finally left, Jerry wouldn’t kiss him good night, but Bryan Ferry’s days as Jerry’s man were numbered from that moment on.
The Stones knew the tour sucked. “I don’t think our capabilities are stretched enough. We’re slightly locked into being the Rolling Stones,” Mick said. After the London debacle, the Stones went back to Germany, then to Spain and Yugoslavia for the first time. In early June, they arrived in Paris for three concerts at Les Abattoirs that would be recorded for a live album. Backstage on the first night in Paris, the jealous boyfriend of a girl Mick was seeing pointed a pistol at Mick before he was tackled by the bodyguards and hustled away.
Anita was in Swit
zerland with the children. On June 6, the final night of the Paris shows, Keith was called to the phone. He was told that his eleven-week-old son, Tara, had suffocated in his crib. The news was kept from the rest of the tour, so no one except a few insiders knew why Keith Richards came to life that night in Paris, playing long and luscious blues guitar solos on “Hot Stuff” and a painful, crying aria on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Most of the tracks used on the concert album Love You Live were taken from this show.
Anita flew to Paris to be with Keith. Dumb with grief, they clung to each other like two wraiths with a hellhound on their trail. “No longer the Scott and Zelda of the rock and roll age,” wrote Nick Kent, “they looked like some tragic, shell-shocked couple leading each other out of a concentration camp . . . I thought they were going to die.” There was talk of canceling the remaining dates, but Keith refused, and would have carried on even longer. The last show was in the Stadthalle in Vienna on June 23. Afterward, the Stones wrecked their hotel in a furious orgy of vandalism. “No, no!” Mick could be heard shouting. “Not the chandelier!” The bill for cleaning this up was 5,000 pounds. Mick later blamed it on Ahmet Ertegun.
Tara JoJo Gunne Richards’s earthly remains were cremated in Geneva. After the tour, Keith and Anita flew to London and checked into a hotel. They never returned to Switzerland again.
* * *
Two Sevens Clash
Summer 1976. John Phillips, ex-Papa, forty years old, former pop king and alpha wolf of Los Angeles, was living in London, working on the sound track for Nicholas Roeg’s movie The Man Who Fell to Earth (starring David Bowie). He and his wife, actress Genevieve Waite, lived near Cheyne Walk, around the corner from Mick. While Mick was on tour that summer, Phillips enjoyed a dalliance with Bianca Jagger. His suspicious wife burst in on them one night, and there was a small scandal in Chelsea. Keith and Anita, deep in drugdom and crippled by guilt and despair, were then invited to vacate their suite at Claridges by the management. They brought Marlon over to play with Phillips’s son one day and then didn’t leave. Within a few weeks, John and Gen were junkies too.
Mick responded to Phillips’s seduction of Bianca by inviting him to cricket matches, staying up all night, and playing guitar with him. Phillips, composer of “California Dreaming” and “Monday Monday,” had a batch of new songs, which Mick suggested they record, using the Stones as the studio band.
On August 21, the Stones headlined a huge outdoor rock festival at Knebworth Park. It was their last show of the year and was widely rumored to be the last Stones show ever, since Keith Richards was expected to die at any moment. The Stones went on at eleven-thirty after Lynyrd Skynyrd, 10cc, Hot Tuna, and Todd Rundgren had played. The Stones’ thirty-song set included oldies like “Route 66” and “Dead Flowers” and was judged a huge success. Keith and Ronnie finally relaxed and played as a team, bouncing licks and runs off each other. Mick worked the ten-yard catwalk that extended into the crowd, a harbinger of the future, and a massive fireworks barrage was set off right after “Street Fighting Man.”
Right after that, the Stones began working with John Phillips at Olympic Studio. Mick was enthusiastic, and Phillips got Keith and Mick Taylor into the studio for the first time since Taylor had left the Stones two years earlier. Phillips had a handshake deal with Mick to have the Stones play on his album and release it on their own label, an incredible opportunity to which he responded by self-destructing. The sessions went well until Phillips’s heroin addiction alienated Mick. Then, in late September, session engineer Keith Harwood was killed in a car wreck when, floating on heroin, he nodded off at the wheel. When Mick lost interest, Keith Richards took over helping Phillips, but then Keith’s own drug problems got in the way.
John Phillips’s career-reviving project with the Stones was shelved. Some saw Mick’s avenging hand in this, but Ahmet Ertegun was also reportedly reluctant to have the Stones competing with their own next album. Mick wasn’t quite through with Phillips, though. A few months later, he invited Papa John and his daughter Mackenzie to his place for lunch. She was then an eighteen-year-old TV star with a sitcom and a thousand-dollar-a-day cocaine habit. While he was making sandwiches, Mick sent Phillips out to buy mayonnaise and then locked him out of the house. Mick told Mackenzie, “I’ve been waiting for this since you were ten years old,” and jumped her in a flash. When Phillips returned and realized what was going down, he pounded on the door in a rage, then eventually left. Mackenzie Phillips later revealed that her tryst with Mick Jagger was “unbelievable. One night. Wham-bam. Bye-bye.”
October 1976. The Stones were in Los Angeles, where Ron Wood had relocated with pregnant Chrissie. He and Mick spent nights listening to 150 hours of concert tapes, picking tracks for the new live album. Mick talked to record execs—MCA, EMI, Polydor—about the Stones’ new record deal. The British papers were publishing rumors that Mick’s marriage was over. “I got married for something to do,” he told a reporter. “I’ve never been madly, deeply in love. I’m not an emotional person.”
Mick resumed an earlier affair with Bebe Buell in New York that autumn. The gorgeous former Playboy pinup loved Mick without being in love with him, and as an expert on affairs was keenly observant of Mick as a lover. “The first time I was with him I was a bit shocked,” she says, “shocked by how small he was, how frail he seemed with his tiny bones. I was two inches taller than Mick, but he seemed to love it. He was aggressive in the sack, very self-assured but considerate too. When I would be with him, I knew that flowers, perfume, or something in silk would arrive next day.
“You didn’t just go out with Mick. He wanted his women to look the part. He’d check me out before we left my house, and if he didn’t approve, I was sent back for another outfit. He was also a total genius with skin. He’d come into my bedroom and say, ’Let me look at your face, Bebe.’ He’d take out a little jar of specially formulated cream and start putting it on for me. He taught me how to steam my face, what herbs to use. He knew more about facials and cosmetics than any woman.
“No one was monogamous back then. Everybody in that world cheated, but I think that Mick loved Bianca much more than he ever admitted to anyone. He called her B, and I thought she was a good woman. She referred to me as Mick’s little friend.”
Mick had other girlfriends as well: Sabrina Guinness in London, socialite Barbara Allen in New York, and model Apollonia von Ravenstein, among others. Bebe says that she was once invited by Mick and David Bowie to an orgy with four black men on Long Island. “There’s no stopping Mick Jagger,” she says. “Sexually, he’s completely without prejudice, and he pushes himself to the limit.”
When Bebe Buell became pregnant that fall (by Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler), Mick proudly told his New York friends that the child was his.
Ron Wood joined the Malibu gang of Bob Dylan confederates, started a new solo album at The Band’s Shangri-La Studio, became a father when his wife had a baby boy they named Jesse James. Woody appeared briefly with The Band in their Thanksgiving Day concert in San Francisco in late November, a farewell show famous as The Last Waltz. Ron and Chrissie Wood separated shortly after that.
In December, Keith was listening to concert tracks when he decided to use the studio time to cut a Christmas single. He played guitar and bass on Chuck Berry’s “Run Rudolph Run,” with Stu on piano and Mike Driscoll (from Mick Taylor’s blues band) on drums. The song was released in time for Christmas—two years later.
In Jamaica, where Keith was living toward the end of 1976, the big reggae song was “Two Sevens Clash” by Joseph Hill’s group, Culture. The song prophesied that the year 1977, when two sevens clashed, would be an apocalyptic one. Sure enough, in 1977 martial law was declared in Jamaica to prevent civil war. In England, reggae musicians linked up with the punks (the Clash named themselves after Culture’s song), an alliance commemorated by Bob Marley’s militant jam “Punky Reggae Party.” For the Rolling Stones, 1977 would bring enormous changes, portents of dissolution, threats of pr
ison, international scandal, and, ultimately, some of the finest music they would ever create.
February 1977. The Stones were on a roll just before the whip came down in Toronto. They had a good live album in the can, the last record they owed Atlantic under their old contract. There was stiff competition for their services among other record labels, a deal potentially worth tens of millions to the musicians. The Stones were rehearsing, playing well, the new guy working out nicely. Mick and Keith had some early songs for the next album—Keith’s “Beast of Burden,” Mick’s “Faraway Eyes”—which they felt was going to be very strong, the first complete Stones album with their new lineup.
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