Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  In June, most of the Stones were in New York. They saw Jimmy Cliff’s show at the Ritz nightclub, where a few days later Keith and Patti went backstage to greet Chuck Berry after one of his shows. Drunk-looking Keith came up behind Chuck and pawed him—“Chuck, man, how ya doin’?”—whereupon the irascible legend whirled around and punched Keith in the face before storming out. Keith, eyes blackened, was philosophical: “He didn’t recognize me.” Berry later apologized to Ron Wood, thinking he was Keith.

  With the tour starting in September and the band rusty after three years off the road, the Stones needed a place to regroup and rehearse. Late in July, Stu and Alan Dunn checked out Longview Farm, a studio complex in the quiet central Massachusetts countryside. A week later, Keith flew up to inspect the place, and like the homey, farmlike vibe so much he crashed for three days.

  Bringing their families, the Rolling Stones arrived at Longview Farm in Brookfield, Massachusetts, toward the middle of August and began six weeks of rehearsals, costume fittings, and business meetings with the burgeoning Stones tour staff and financial empire. The stadium-size tour would be seen by 2 million fans and gross $50 million. Newly designed merchandise—T-shirts, belt buckles, tongue decals—would bring in another $10 million. An obscure perfume company, Jovan, coughed up $4 million in production costs. This was one of the first rock tour sponsorship deals, which allowed Jovan to plaster the logo of their cheap fragrances over everything. Bill Graham Presents ran the tour with its massive apparatus—three stages, fleets of trucks, and huge crew—in a military-style operation designed to get the artists onstage in a contented frame of mind. Despite past battles, Graham still seemed to worship the Rolling Stones. “Wherever they went,” he later said, “was the rock and roll capital of the world on that day.”

  Mick, his daughter Jade, and Jerry settled in at the farm, with Mick taking morning jogs along the country lanes. Bill and Astrid flew in from France, while the Watts family came in from England. Ron Wood and his family arrived a little later, with Woody in frail condition, barely able to play. Keith told him bluntly that his job in the band was in jeopardy if he didn’t get himself together. Mick gave Ron an ultimatum that no hard drugs be present at the farm. Ian McLagan, playing keyboards on the tour, noted that Woody, hopelessly addicted to freebasing, was puffing base-laced cigs in the studio when he thought no one was around. A rumor circulated that boogie guitar expert George Thorogood, whose band the Destroyers would open many of the Stones’ shows, would take Ron Wood’s place on the tour if Woody proved too schwacked to play.

  The Stones rehearsed on a specially built stage at the end of Longview’s open-beamed barn, playing on small combo amplifiers without the usual Marshall stacks of amps. Ted Jones’s tenure as Keith’s guitar valet was over, and now all the instruments—the black Telecasters tuned to open G, the venerable Gibson Les Pauls from the sixties, the priceless customized Sunburst and rosewood Teles, the Stratocasters and Broadcasters, the Epiphones, Bill Wyman’s basses—were handled by tech Alan Rogan. This would be the first completely wireless tour for the Stones, the guitars now free of electric cable forever.

  On August 26, Mick announced the upcoming tour at a press conference in Philadelphia, where it would begin. A few days later, Tattoo You was released, and it was like punk never happened. The grandiose three-note riff of “Start Me Up” erupted from car radios all over America as a clarion blast from the past. It was the Stones calling in the faithful for a revival of classic rock values, and their audience responded by making the single no. 1 for nine weeks in the United States.

  “Start Me Up” had begun as reggae. The Stones had cut twenty takes of it on the same night in the spring of 1978 that they recorded “Miss You.” Only one take was done rock style, but it was the one Chris Kimsey salvaged. Growling, rubbery guitars were overdubbed, and Mick bawled out new lyrics about a girl who could make a grown man cry and make a dead man come. The next track, “Hang Fire,” was also from 1978, an acid portrait of a lazy and backward England with a falsetto chorus and Stu on piano. “Slave” was a remixed Black and Blue track from 1974, with another hoodoo falsetto vocal and Sonny Rollins’s tenor sax. Keith Richards’s “Little T&A” was a cheerfully callous love song to Patti Hanson—“tits and ass with soul”—with minimalist guitars and a dub-style Keith mix at the end. “Black Limousine” was another old Paris track, with three guitars and Ian McLagan on keys. In 1981, it got a new guitar solo by Ron (who received a songwriting credit) and a strange harp part by Mick Jagger. Tattoo You’s first side ended with the New York saga of “Neighbors,” the only new song on the record, inspired by Keith’s community relations problems in his downtown ’hood, illustrated by Sonny Rollins’s perfectly cubist, cutup sax solo.

  “Worried About You” began side two with a remixed song that first surfaced in Munich in 1974 and was then revived in Paris five years later. Mick’s original “Fool to Cry” falsetto got a new descant vocal from Keith, who was himself learning to sing again. “Tops” was a remix of a great Jamaica-era outtake, a brilliant conflation of cynicism and poignancy about the old show business come-on: “I’ll take you to the top.” (Mick Taylor heard himself playing guitar on “Tops” and later had to sue the Stones to receive his royalties.) “Heaven” came next, with its Latin mood and seductive falsetto mutterings, followed by “No Use in Crying” from the Compass Point sessions. Ron Wood got his unprecedented second songwriting credit for coming up with its bluesy melody.

  Tattoo You ended with “Waiting On a Friend,” from Jamaica in 1972. A perverse cha-cha with Billy Preston on piano and Sonny Rollins blowing tenor on the fade, “Friend” was not only an instant classic but also a clever attempt to repair the sleazy and feuding image of the Stones as they were about to make some real money again on the road.

  It worked. Tattoo You, with its comic-art cover of a tribally tatted Mick Jagger, sold almost a million copies in America during the first week of September 1981 and became the Rolling Stones’ first simultaneous no. 1 album in the U.S. and U.K. in years.

  * * *

  Who Are the Rolling Stones?

  September 1981. Deep in tour rehearsals at Longview Farm in autumnal, maple-red Massachusetts, the Rolling Stones tried to get it together one more time. Mick Jagger, cementing his hard-won rep as rock music’s ultimate showman, carried a calculator and appointment book around the farm, taking meetings, telling Woody’s old lady, Jo, to keep her “brats” (Jesse and Leah) out of his face. Keith turned a basement room into his pool hall and barroom, where he and Woody drank, jammed, and complained about “Brenda,” one of their many names for the prissy, diffident Jagger. Mick had insisted the musicians sign a “no dope at the gigs” clause in their tour contracts, and Keith, who hated freebase, had personally guaranteed that Ron Wood wouldn’t use base on the tour. Another clause provided that Mick stay completely off the stage while Keith did his single number of the set, “Little T&A.” Mick had made a lot of unilateral decisions about the tour that annoyed Keith. He didn’t like the cheap-looking Japanese pop art stage sets. He didn’t care about the film and cable TV rights Jagger was selling, and didn’t think the Stones were in any shape to do a concert film. He was irked that Mick refused to hire Bobby Keys for the tour and instead had signed up Ernie Watts, a black reed player with a big, muscular tone (from Quincy Jones’s Los Angeles studio team). Keith despised Mick’s industrial “cherry picker,” a crane-mounted bucket that would project Mick way over the heads of the kids in the stadium shows like a ludicrous pop preacher. This was such a sore point that Mick tried to leverage Keith with it, offering to lose the cherry picker if Keith promised there would be no hard drugs on the tour. The cherry picker stayed in the show.

  The band’s huge entourage and visitors to the farm were all told not to give any drugs to Wood, who was in disgrace. Even Ian McLagan thought Wood a risky gamble on this tour. His per diem allowance was too small to buy drugs. Mick wouldn’t even talk to him. When Woody staggered into an interview Keith was giving, he
was ordered to disappear. “That’s one boy,” Keith muttered in disgust, “who hasn’t got much longer the way he’s going.” Keith himself was guzzling rivers of vodka. His cocaine was flown in on a private plane once a week. He fell off a porch in the middle of a six-day binge, and it was feared for a horrid few hours that he’d broken his ankle, aborting the tour. But it was just a sprain, and painkillers were not in short supply.

  Despite, or because of, the internal hatreds, the Stones started to roar like a Ferrari once again, and gradually the tour set cohered on a hundred-foot rehearsal stage. “Under My Thumb” started the show, a relaxed reading that got the band into a Memphis-sounding soul groove before Mick came out and began to sing. “When the Whip Comes Down” came next in murderous style, an incredible blast of energy in shattered mode. Ernie Watts on horn powered “Just My Imagination.” Ian Stewart pounded the grand piano for Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” before Charlie went into the tom-tom Motown beat of the Miracles’ “Going to A Go Go.” A rocket-fueled “Satisfaction” was the lone encore, with scraping, riffing guitars that vulcanized football stadiums all over the country. Tickets for the tour were priced at $15, and astute rock tycoon Mick Jagger wanted his customers to get their dollar’s worth.

  On September 14, “Blue Monday and the Cockroaches” played a “surprise” gig at 350-seat Sir Morgan’s Cove in nearby Worcester, Massachusetts. Five thousand fans showed up in jeans and black leather, and a riot was averted only when the club opened its doors so an abridged Stones set could be heard in the streets. The mayor of Boston banned two more small warm-up gigs at the Orpheum Theater. After another week of run-throughs, the Stones flew to Philadelphia, where they began a three-month, fifty-one-city American tour with a mistake-filled open rehearsal in front of eighty thousand fans that got clunker reviews in the press and demoralized everyone.

  But as the Stones careered around the East Coast on their rented Boeing 707 jet, they found their sonic thing again. They were playing in front of giant stylized cartoons of guitars, race cars, and records (designed by Kazuhide Yamazari, the Warhol of Tokyo). A giant arc of colored balloons arched over the stage, which fell among the musicians during “Satisfaction.” Mick played in sports gear—baseball jackets, football pants, big numbered shirts, kneepads. In the sweaty finale, he danced in a spectacular flag cape, fashioned out of a Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes by designer Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, which to some cynics seemed like a tacit endorsement of the go-for-broke right-wing politics of the new Reagan-Thatcher era. Keith was resplendent in silver skull ring and steel handcuff bracelet, his unspeakable blue jeans tucked into his favorite Sherwood Forest brown suede boots, which Keith refused to go onstage without. A bandana kept Keith’s salty hair off his face as, performing without heroin for the first tour in years, he began to play with his old passion again.

  By the time the Stones reached the Fox Theater in Atlanta in mid-October, Tattoo You was no. 1 and the show was really clicking. The two guitars fought a saber duel in the hellacious “Shattered” as Bill Wyman’s bass line churned a backwash of irresistibly funky bottom. “Twenty Flight Rock” and “Go Go” were the flash curios of the set as the Rolling Stones seemed intent on proving they were still the tits. If Charlie held the beat back, Keith would jump up on his drum riser and flail his playing arm until Charlie had to smile, give up, and kick the band up another notch.

  As the tour moved around the land, attracting plenty of media attention (but without the frenzy of previous eras), the question now arose: Who are the Rolling Stones? Critic Robert Palmer tried to answer this with the sympathy of an old-school Stones fan: “They’re a grown-up rock and roll band, with fans ranging in age from under ten to sixty and more, and with a history as rich and various as the histories of the early bluesmen and first generation rockers they’ve always admired. They have something else in common with those blues singers and early rockers, too: they have their dignity.”

  Various bands opened for the Stones: Van Halen, Heart, the Neville Brothers, Etta James, J. Geils, the Stray Cats, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, George Thorogood and the Destroyers. Thorogood was said to be rehearsing the Stones’ set in secret in case Ronnie got fired or crapped out, an issue that came to a head in a California hotel when Keith heard a rumor (probably from Jo) that Ronnie was freebasing again and diddling girls in a floater suite. “I’d guaranteed he wouldn’t do this shit,” Keith said later, “and then I found out he was up there doing it.” In a rage, Keith headed for the elevator, with Patti, Jo, Stones executive Jane Rose, and a few security guys trying to talk him out of murdering Woody. “My old lady was going, ’Keith, don’t make a scene.’ And by the time I’d gotten [to Wood’s room], she’d ripped the back of my shirt off.” Keith barged in with his shirt in shreds and a vigilante squad behind him. He took hold of Wood—“You stupid fucker!”—and punched him hard in the nose.

  Keith: “The next day, Ronnie and I had a bit of a hah-hah, and it was all over.” The little fight at least cleared the air, with both guitarists playing better together for the rest of the tour.

  A new act called Prince opened shows for the Stones on some of the Southern California dates. Prince sang falsetto and spun like a dervish. Jagger thought he was totally hot. At the Los Angeles Coliseum on October 9, Prince came out wearing only a black knit bikini bottom, a tiny elfin boy in what looked like a pair of panties. The Stones, incredulous, watched the video feed in their dressing room (Charlie: “Cor! ’E’s in his bloody underwear!”) as a barrage of cans and homophobic curses started flying toward the stage. Prince stayed on for five minutes while flying objects and food landed around him. Then he was booed off the stage. The next night, he lost the black bikini and wore some clothes, but was still hit by fruit and a roasted chicken a few minutes into his act. He left the stage and the tour, abandoning five more gigs opening for the Stones, whose audience clearly hated him.

  November 5, 1981. Tina Turner, shed of Ike and basking in solo stardom, opened for the Stones at their stadium shows in New Jersey’s Meadowlands. She came out at the end of the Stones’ set to sing “Honky Tonk Women” with the man she taught to dance back in 1965.

  After a month touring the Midwest, the Stones fetched up in Chicago. Before a run of three nights at the Rosemont Horizon, they showed up at the Checkerboard Lounge on the South Side to jam with Muddy Waters. On a crowded stage with Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, they backed Muddy as he ran through “Mannish Boy,” “Long Distance Call,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” and “Baby Please Don’t Go.” Keith: “For that gig, Ronnie and I dressed up in white shirts and black vests, like really going to work. When we play[ed] with Muddy Waters, we dressed for business.” Sitting on a stool surrounded by his acolytes, Muddy was a magisterial presence in what was his last recorded performance, forty years after Alan Lomax turned up at his cabin in the Delta. Lung cancer had struck Muddy Waters, and he died at home in Chicago in 1983. The Stones sent a huge floral arrangement to his funeral with a note that read, “In memory of a wonderful man dear to us all. We shall never forget you Muddy.”

  December 1981. Immense crowds at Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan, and the Superdome in New Orleans, where the Stones threw a party on a Mississippi riverboat. Film director Hal Ashby, famous for Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Coming Home, and extreme Hollywood drug use, joined the tour with a movie crew to shoot the Stones’ Phoenix-area show in 35mm for a concert film. After a near-perfect show at Sun Devil Stadium (during which Keith tried to brain a stage-crasher with his guitar), Ashby overdosed on drugs at the party in Mick’s suite and was carried out of the hotel on a stretcher with an IV needle in his arm.

  The next night, Mick Taylor joined his old band in Kansas City for a chilly onstage reunion. The tour was almost over now, and the Stones were beat, but there was just enough petrol in the tank for the last two shows in Hampton Roads, Virginia. The first, on Keith’s thirty-eighth birthday (December 18), was broadcast nationally on the HBO cable TV network. Directed by a recove
red Hal Ashby, the show started with a Dionysian “Under My Thumb,” after which Mick, nervously pacing the immense stadium stage, urged his national television audience to get drunk and smoke joints. It was a long way from Ed Sullivan on Sunday night.

  The Stones cracked on with “When the Whip Comes Down,” which hit like a heat wave, then played a long version of their show, augmented by Bobby Keys on “Brown Sugar” as Mick flew like a hydraulic angel over the seething crowd. Introducing the band, he called out Charlie Watts, who always got a huge cheer. Then the inevitable: “Ernie Watts on saxophone—no relation.” After Mick had the big crowd sing “Happy Birthday” to Keith, they ended with “Satisfaction,” the whole band riffing hard as Mick testified: “Luv ya, luv ya, luv ya, got ta leave ya. Wo-yay! Wo-yay! Wo-yay! Wo-yay! Good night everybody—thank you!”

  And, with a wave, they were gone. Real gone, since the fractious 1980s would see “ism and schism,” dissolution and spite within the Rolling Stones, and it would be eight years before they toured America again. There was a party backstage after the broadcast for Keith and Bobby Keys. Keith cut the cake. The next night, the last show of the tour, Keith gave Bill Graham a package wrapped in newsprint with a single rose attached. The gift was the brown boots he’d worn every night, good-luck seven-league boots patched with tape and holed through the sole, as tattered and beat-looking as their former owner.

  * * *

  Hijacking the Cherry Picker

  MTV changed the music business in America in 1982, and although the aging Rolling Stones never made a huge impact on youth market video, MTV had a huge impact on the Stones. Traditionally musicians had always traveled to their audiences to sell their music. Now, with a video in heavy rotation to a select audience, a band could appear before several million fans several times per day. For rich bands like the Stones, video obviated the ancient need to keep moving or die. MTV also became a major launching pad for solo stars: Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, and—in epic fashion—Michael Jackson, whose Thriller album became the biggest seller in recording history on the strength of short- and long-form videos. Among the video audience, bands became almost passé. The video revolution’s cameras loved a face more than a band, a fact not lost on ever-ambitious Mick Jagger as the Stones’ record contract was about to come on the market again. The fallout from all this would cripple the Stones in the 1980s and lead to damaging public rancor.