Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  The idea of Mick touring by himself embittered the other Stones, especially when they heard he would play Japan first, a lucrative market the Stones had never penetrated because of past drug problems. Charlie Watts told a London paper that “Mick’s decision virtually folded up twenty-five years of the band.” Keith took it very hard, and his public comments grew harsh as he called Mick a wimp and a back-stabbing cunt.

  Needing to regroup, Mick retreated to his French chateau, where a team of English landscape designers was restoring the house’s once-elegant parterre gardens. Ron Wood was touring clubs with Bo Diddley, and Bill Wyman was again seeing Mandy Smith, who at seventeen was no longer jailbait.

  * * *

  Talk Is Cheap

  January 1988. It was Mick Jagger’s turn at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions in New York. He introduced the Beatles, sang “Like A Rolling Stone” with their fellow inductee Bob Dylan, and finished off the obligatory superstar jam afterward with a torrid reading of “Satisfaction,” with Jeff Beck on guitar.

  As the Stones’ feud continued to fester, people close to the band noticed a strange phenomenon: Mick and Keith began to take on subtle aspects of each other’s personality. Keith became more fey and self-referential, more “camp,” while Jagger was noticeably earthier and more human. Jerry Hall told friends that Mick was having trouble sleeping, seemed preoccupied, always had his nose in a book.

  Mick toured Japan at the end of March, not without serious misgivings. Guitarists Joe Satriani and Jimmy Ripp replaced Jeff Beck in what Keith derisively called “Jagger’s little jerk-off band” in a Rolling Stone interview. Simon Phillips and bassist Doug Wimbish anchored the group, with two black singers, Bernard Fowler and Lisa Fischer, adding a massive attack to Mick’s vocals. They opened shows with “Honky Tonk Women” and deployed a Stones-heavy set with intense pyro effects and silly guitar-hero posing by the histrionic Satriani. The encores were “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Satisfaction.” In Tokyo one night, Tina Turner joined Mick to sing “Brown Sugar” and “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll.”

  Mick was jazzed and invigorated by the tour. Ron Wood was also playing in Japan, and when the two Stones met for a drink in Osaka, Ron told him he thought Keith would be eager to patch things up. So, after fighting off a $7-million plagiarism suit by a Jamaican singer against “Just Another Night” in New York in April, Mick asked for a Stones sit-down in London the following month.

  They met at the Savoy Hotel on May 18, 1988. Mick said he wanted the Stones to tour in the fall, but Keith demurred, saying he was too busy with a solo album already in production and his own tour planned late in the year. But they finally agreed to make a new Stones album and tour in 1989. “We had a meeting to plan the tour,” Mick said later, “and as far as I was concerned it was very easy. Everyone was asking, ’Wow, what was it like? What happened? How did it all work?’ But it was a nonevent. What could have been a lot of name-calling, wasn’t. I think everyone decided we’d done all that.” The atmosphere of conciliation was helped by bulletins of the megamillions the Who had been guaranteed for an American tour that summer. If the Stones could get it together, they were looking at the biggest paychecks in history.

  “Listen, darling,” Keith acknowledged to Mick at the end of the day, “this thing is bigger than both of us.”

  Mick Jagger was forty-five years old that summer. He and Jerry weren’t getting along because she wanted to marry and he didn’t. A projected solo tour of the United States that autumn was canceled due to Primitive Cool’s low sales. Keith was still sniping away at Mick in the press, and the industry buzz on Keith’s new album was that it was brilliant.

  Keith and his African-American rhythm section (“I got three niggers and a Jew”) had been working on his album all year, on and off. Engineer Rob Fraboni had given Keith a tape of pop music from the South African township of Soweto—guitar-crazy, jumping street jive with a sweet spirit. It fascinated Keith to hear Africans throwing rock and roll back where it came from with twining guitars and a twist of Zulu funk, and it informed some of the touches Keith added when mixing his album that summer. When the record was ready for release that fall, Keith told friends that he was really scared to be putting out something he alone was responsible for.

  Talk Is Cheap was released in October 1988 on Virgin Records, to positive reviews from critics relieved that something of the dormant Stones magic still existed, like a hot coal at the bottom of a cold campfire. Many of Keith’s fans thought it was the best Rolling Stones album since Exile on Main Street, sixteen years earlier.

  Mostly a collection of funk-style riffs (all written with Steve Jordon) overlaid with Keith’s misterioso rasped vocals, Talk was the opposite of Mick Jagger’s commercially generic solo style. Keith was after groove and feel, his lyrics little more than catchphrases. Free of Jagger’s outré posturing, it was the record that Keith’s fans needed to hear. “Keith wanted it to be antiformula, anticommercial,” Waddy Wachtel said. “He wanted it to be art.”

  The album’s masterpiece was “You Don’t Move Me,” Keith’s desperate J’accuse. Starting as a dub-wise reggae track, it moved into a swampy, hypnotic song about alienation and lost friendship, a “Dear Mick” letter. Quoting old Stones riffs behind a keening, disconsolate chorus, with Keith singing in a minor, arabesque key, the song touched on many of Keith’s public criticisms of Mick: the ambition, avarice, cruelty, and shallowness that Keith deplored in his old friend. “What makes you so greedy,” Keith sang, “makes you so seedy. You don’t move me anymore.” Touring with Mick in Australia, singer Bernard Fowler noted that whenever anyone put on Talk Is Cheap, Mick immediately left the room.

  “You Don’t Move Me” was the last shot fired in World War III, the war between the Stones. Keith, in interviews, denied the song was about Mick, but nobody believed it. Talk Is Cheap wasn’t the big success that Keith’s camp had prayed for and that Mick Jagger had dreaded. It stayed on the charts for six months, got to no. 24, and sold about a million copies. Its success or failure seemed to mean little to Keith. He told interviewers that he felt guilty because he couldn’t keep the Stones on track. At first, doing a solo record seemed like a defeat.

  Keith: “And then I ask myself, ’What am I so scared about?’ Was I trying to keep the Stones together because I was scared of being left out there on my own? What was really my reason for this desperate fight? Was it that I wanted to keep in the cocoon and not break out?” In the end, he admitted to Stanley Booth, the fact that he was forced out on his own had been a great thing for him.

  Keith Richards and the X-Pensive Winos began a three-week tour on November 24, 1988, in Atlanta. “You wanna hear some good music?” Keith told the audience. “Here’s some guys that wanna play it for you.” Dressed as a Transylvanian count in a black jacket and white tuxedo shirt, smoking like a devil (an ashtray was bolted to his mike stand), Keith prowled the stage and used crouching body language to get his songs over. Unlike Mick’s solo shows, Keith played his album instead of the Stones’ catalog. But, halfway through, ex-Bluebelle Sarah Dash brought the house down with a churchy “Time Is on My Side.” The first encore, after the obligatory “Happy,” was a faithful rendition of “Connection,” the first Stones song on which Keith sang the lead vocal.

  Keith loved the Winos because they’d become his friends rather than a hired band. He loved what he called “this feeling of unity” and told people he was in awe of the cats in the band because they knew even more than he did. They got stronger as they crossed America that fall, and were at their zenith for a Los Angeles show taped and recorded on December 15. The last show was at the Brendan Byrne Arena in New Jersey on December 17, with Johnnie Johnson playing piano on a rough Wino version of “Run Rudolph Run.” Afterward a party was held in the hall’s bar to celebrate both a successful tour and Keith Richards’s forty-fifth birthday. Patti and the girls were there, as well as a healthier Anita Pallenberg. Mick Jagger couldn’t make it.

  “Talk Is Cheap didn’t
just recharge my batteries,” Keith said later. “It brought me back to life. I felt like I’d just got out of jail.” For the X-Pensive Winos, the atmosphere was bittersweet. They knew that the boss was going back to the Stones and that it would be years before they worked together again. Whatever happened, they had all been part of the process that allowed the Rolling Stones to regroup and attempt the most difficult trick in show business—the comeback.

  I never intended to be a sex symbol. I thought of myself as a serious musician. I didn’t want to be a stripper. But then, in the end, I turned out to be just another girl on the runway.

  Mick Jagger

  You never know what the sound’s gonna be like in those stadiums. You’re relying on God, who joins the band every night in one form or another.

  Keith Richards

  * * *

  Speed of Light

  The small private jet carrying Keith Richards dropped over the aquamarine Caribbean and landed on the green island of Barbados on January 12, 1989. He was on his way to meet with Mick Jagger at Blue Wave Studios to resuscitate the Rolling Stones, and the road was going to be rocky. For the long-absent and estranged Stones to come back, they had to not only recapture their own generation but also seduce young fans currently owned by post-punk bands like Guns ’N Roses—groups that had molded themselves on Keith’s death’s-door legend. The Stones were competing with their sons now.

  Keith was unsure if he and Mick could work together again. He was pessimistic. Leaving his girls in Connecticut, Keith had told Patti that he’d be home in either two weeks or two days. Mick was already at work on new music when Keith arrived late in the afternoon.

  “I drove up to the rehearsal place,” Keith recalled, “and I heard him playing [“Hold On to Your Hat”]. I just sat in the car for five minutes and listened, and I said, ’Yeah, no problem, this year’s made.’ ” It was almost that simple, mostly because they were so rushed. The Stones planned to tour in the fall as the biggest single-act rock extravaganza ever attempted, which demanded that a new Stones album be finished by May at the latest. Their schedule didn’t give the Stones much time to kill each other.

  Mick and Keith started right away in Barbados, playing guitars together. Keith had ideas left over from his solo album: “Almost Hear You Sigh” and “Slipping Away.” Seizing the edgy vibe at Blue Wave by the throat, Keith found the tonally complex and evocative chords to “Mixed Emotions” the day after he arrived. “Rock and a Hard Place” was next, and “Can’t Be Seen with You.” After a few days, Patti got through to Keith on the phone. “Two weeks, then?” she asked. “Happily, yes,” he replied.

  They interrupted their work on January 16 to fly to New York. Back in the Waldorf ballroom, the Rolling Stones were inducted into the Hall of Fame by Peter Townshend. Ron Wood came in from England without Bill and Charlie, killing any hope the Stones would play. (Bill slagged the Hall of Fame honors as too little recognition too late, and even Mick and Keith were concerned lest the Stones now be perceived as museum relics rather than a fire-breathing rock band.) Mick Taylor, who was living in New York, helped accept the award from Townshend, who delivered an idolatrous induction tirade that ended: “Guys, whatever you do, don’t try to grow old gracefully. It wouldn’t suit you.” In his turn, Mick spoke of Brian Jones and Ian Stewart, and nervously added that the Stones weren’t quite ready to hang up their number yet.

  Back to Barbados in February 1989. Mick and Keith jammed and trolled for songs on a hotel balcony, waves crashing below, with guitars, a keyboard, tape recorder, and bottle of vodka. Keith: “Once we cleared the air, something entirely different took over. I can’t define it. It’s what always happens. I just start banging out a little riff. He’ll go, ’That’s nice,’ and he’ll come up with a top line. Once Mick and I settle down to work, everything else goes out the window.” At night, Mick dragged Keith out to nightclubs; Keith hated it, but Mick liked to go dancing and wanted Keith along, since Jerry Hall refused to return to Barbados.

  Soon Prince Rupert Lowenstein joined them for a business meeting. The Stones would now pioneer a new way of presenting themselves that changed the concert business for the biggest acts in the world. They sold their whole tour—concerts, merchandising, TV and film rights—to their longtime Canadian promoter, Michael Cohl of Toronto’s Concert Productions International, for about $70 million. Backed by big beer money (Budweiser would be the official tour sponsor), Cohl guaranteed the Stones their paychecks, assuming all financial risk in return for a share of the tour’s profits. CPI paid out millions for stage design and construction, manufactured the T-shirts and tongue decals, handled promotion, and kept ticket prices down to a top of $31.50.

  It was a landmark deal, one that almost killed Bill Graham. Graham had run the last Stones tour in ’81–’82, and Mick had toured Australia under the aegis of his company, Bill Graham Presents. But Graham had missed some of Jagger’s solo shows due to other commitments, and it may have cost him dearly. Mick was determined to make a change. The Stones’ lawyers only told Graham about the CPI deal after the fact, and wouldn’t let him bid on the tour. They offered him $500,000 to consult on the tour, which the volatile impresario took as an insult. He fought back, put his own deal together, made a counteroffer to Mick on a Concorde flight to London in early March. He told Mick that with his offer, the Stones would take home $16 million apiece. The Canadian deal would give them each $18 million. Pleading with Mick, trying to appeal to his sense of their long history together, Graham rhetorically asked him what—after all these twenty years in business together—was really the difference between $16 and $18 million.

  Mick: “Two million dollars, Bill.”

  The other Stones flew to Barbados in March. Coproducer Chris Kimsey brought in a young English synthesizer whiz named Matt Clifford to sweeten and modernize the Stones’ ambient sound for the new digital era. As they worked, some of the feuds and bitterness of the past resurfaced and spilled over into the sessions, fueling the vibe of “Mixed Emotions.” Keith and Ron split into their own faction, while Mick paired with Matt Clifford. But by the end of the month, Mick and Keith had about twenty songs they liked, and after a break the sessions resumed at Beatles producer George Martin’s AIR studios on the green, idyllic (and doomed) volcanic island of Montserrat.

  They kicked Bill Wyman off the island for a week because he (fifty-three) had proposed to Mandy Smith (nineteen) by telephone from Barbados, and she had accepted. As London reporters began to descend, Bill was banished to Antigua to deal with them and keep the press away from the Stones’ sessions. Ron Wood took over on bass, and the Stones cut their best tracks without Bill, including “Sad Sad Sad,” “Hold On to Your Hat,” and “Call Girl Blues” (which became “Break the Spell”). A killer version of the Impressions’ 1958 “For Your Precious Love” would be left off the album, as would be the blues “Wish I’d Never Met You” and a mock-obscene song about underage girls called “So Young” (rumored to be about Mick’s new friend, teenage model Carla Bruni). Time pressure kept things rushed, a crammed schedule less than satisfying to Keith. Mick was playing guitar and trying to run the band’s traditionally long and slow instrumental sessions. Keith told friends that Mick hadn’t the knack for either job.

  Charlie Watts assumed a new role in the Stones as well, becoming an arbiter between Mick and Keith. If they couldn’t agree on something, it was “Let’s ask Charlie” now. During the five weeks the Stones banged out Steel Wheels in Montserrat, Charlie was often in the studio twelve hours a day. People familiar with the Stones felt that Charlie thought he had something to prove to Keith, who had dared to work with another drummer on his solo deal. Charlie drove Keith so hard that at the end of one of these fifteen-hour sessions Keith could hardly stand up. He’d be lying on the floor and Mick would say, “What’s wrong with you? It’s Charlie, man. I know it.”

  By May 1989, the Stones were back in London, mixing tracks at an old haunt, Olympic Studio. They were still working on Mick’s trippy song “Con
tinental Drift.” Written in Barbados on a Korg synthesizer programmed by Matt Clifford, timed by an almost subliminal rhythm track of Keith playing the spokes of a bicycle wheel, the neo-Sufi love poem was missing the trance-inducing melodic hook it needed. Then, out of the blue and after a twenty-year silence, Mick Jagger received a letter from the Master Musicians of Jajouka in Morocco.

  The Jajoukans were down on their luck. Many of the older musicians who had played for Brian Jones in 1968 had died or were retired, and their band was now led by Bachir Attar, the twenty-six-year-old son of the late chief. (Bachir was a dancing boy when Brian Jones had visited twenty years before.) Jajouka had never seen any money from Brian’s album, which by then was generally described as the alpha recording of the world music movement. The Jajouka musicians were broke and themselves split into traditionalist and modernist factions. Bachir Attar was married to an American photographer, Cherie Nutting, who contacted the Stones on the tribe’s behalf with the idea that both Jajouka and the Rolling Stones could breathe new life into each other.

  Mick: “When I was writing [“Drift”], I said, ’Oh, this would be great if we could have someone like Jajouka on it.’ And a week later I got a letter from them saying, ’Can we come and play on [the tour] that you’re doing?’ ”

  In mid-June, Mick, Keith, Ron, Matt Clifford, and a technical team arrived in Tangier. Bachir Attar brought a dozen musicians down from the mountains, and they spent a weekend recording their pipes and drums in the courtyard of the nineteenth-century casbah mansion known as Palais Ben Abou. Dressed in a silk caftan, Mick conducted the Jajoukans as a BBC crew filmed the sessions. Keith, Ron, and Jo watched from the shadows with Paul Bowles while the Moroccans sent waves of ethereal music into the North African air and the tapes rolled in a dark room off the sun-splashed tiled atrium.