Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

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  The Glory, Darling

  Summer 1989. The Stones were in London, annoyed at Bill Wyman for opening a memorabilia-filled burger joint called Sticky Fingers without asking for permission. They were also put off by having to attend, with their grumbling wives, Wyman’s June wedding to Mandy Smith, a certified tabloid carnival.

  Late in June, they put the final touches on Steel Wheels, a double-entendre title that referred both to locomotive power and to the wheelchairs of the aged and infirm. Mick had this album and tour pegged as emblematic of Industrial Age decline and the dawn of the Digital Age of megabytes, cyberpunks, and Blade Runner–style decay. His conceit was reflected in the stadium production designed by London architect Mark Fisher for the Steel Wheels tour. An immense sculptured scaffold artwork with catwalks, chutes, and antennae suggested a closed steel mill, a redundant oil refinery, or a useless launching pad—all the obsolete detritus of a once-great but now-rusting civilization. With sixty-two American shows scheduled for the fall, the Stones ordered two of these stages built and hired a 350-man crew to hopscotch them around the country in a fleet of fifty tractor trailers. Total cost: $4 million. There was also a traveling retinue of about fifty managers, assistants, publicists, and security. Keith said it was like having four hundred guys in the band instead of five.

  In July, the Rolling Stones gathered at a secluded girls’ boarding school, Whykham Rise, near Keith’s house in ex-urban Connecticut to regroup as a Vegas-style show band. Chuck Leavell was back on piano, with Matt Clifford working the samples, synthesizers, and orchestrations. Three singers were hired: Bernard Fowler, Lisa Fischer, and Cindy Mizell. The Uptown Horns, a busy New York quartet, came to play, but it didn’t click. Keith: “A whole brass section had been hired—good guys. But something wasn’t happening, so I call Bobby Keys: ’Not gettin’ any answers, Bobby. So just come up to New York. Just come to rehearsals. Be there. I’ll guarantee you.’” Keys took charge of the horn players, which added up to a touring band of fifteen musicians.

  Amid rehearsals and business meetings projecting a $200-million gross, protected by security goons whose roadblock enraged the townspeople of sleepy Washington, Connecticut, Mick was jogging five miles a day through the green summer hills with an Olympic trainer. Keith, eager to verify the Baudelaire maxim concerning the systematic derangement of the senses, maintained a daily regimen of vodka, pills, hash, and cocaine. Over the next month, they built a show that began with the rush of “Start Me Up” and progressed through a mix of oldies and songs from Wheels in a theatrical pageant spanning almost thirty years. “Paint It, Black” got a new Anatolian/klezmer arrangement. “2000 Light Years from Home” was dusted off to be performed as a psychedelic nugget for the acid-house generation under a throbbing Frisco light show. “Little Red Rooster” got a new, lazy-slow arrangement featuring Ron Wood on slide guitar. With women onstage with the Stones for the first time, some flirtatious stage business was choreographed for Mick and sultry Lisa Fischer during “Miss You.” The twenty-eight-song set tried to touch on every major era of the Stones since 1964, and seven weeks were spent working the singers and horns into the act.

  Apropos of the railway theme, the Steel Wheels tour was announced at a press conference on July 11 at Grand Central Terminal in New York. The Stones arrived in an old caboose, debuted the new single “Mixed Emotions” on a little boom box (which gave Mick some trouble), and took the usual questions. Are you doing this for the money? Mick looked pained, since they obviously weren’t doing it for their sanity. “What about love and fame and fortune?” he responded innocently. “Have you forgotten about all those things?” Keith leaned into the mike and croaked, “It’s the glory, darling. The glory.” Everyone laughed except Bill Wyman, who collapsed a day later from food poisoning.

  On August 12, the Rolling Stones ambushed Toad’s Place, a three-hundred-seat club in New Haven, on a Saturday night. The regular band, Sons of Bob, didn’t even know who the night’s other group was until they saw the Stones’ gear being loaded in. Without a word, Keith crashed into “Start Me Up” for a delirious bar crowd that saw a terse, fifty-minute show.

  Steel Wheels was released on the eve of the tour in September, reaching no. 1 in America and no. 2 in England. “Mixed Emotions” was the (unsuccessful) first single, backed with “Fancyman Blues,” a twelve-bar blues in the manner of Jimmy Reed (Mick tasty on harp), recorded in Montserrat.

  “Sad Sad Sad” began the album with a hard rock blast and a corrosive message of trouble in the air, as if to reassure their fans that all was not well with the Rolling Stones. “Mixed Emotions” seconded that emotion with its demand to “Button your lip, baby” and honest ambivalence about staying together to work out deeply personal problems. The harmonizing chorus singing with Mick was a new format the Stones would use for the rest of the decade and beyond.

  “Terrifying” was a Jagger/Clifford collaboration about the singer’s “strange desires” and anxiety-provoking obsessions, delivered with cool detachment and synthetic washes of pop-jazz ambience. The punkish minimalism of “Hold On to Your Hat” was followed by “Hearts for Sale” with its loping vibe of serial infidelity. “Blinded by Love” was a countrypolitan history lesson with Professor Jagger recounting the romantic miseries of famous suckers for love—Marc Antony, Samson, the prince of Wales.

  “Rock and a Hard Place” was the album’s failed Big Statement. Its vague global concerns tried to echo the political tumult of 1989—velvet revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of communism in Europe—but the moment was too big to be captured in a guitar-band anthem. “Can’t Be Seen” was more to the point, as Keith led the Stones (without Mick) in a churning, passionate romance of pursuit and escape, a quest decorated with blazing guitars and the first real passion to appear on the album. Mick and his chorus sang the Richards/Jordon “Almost Hear You Sigh,” which had some beautiful acoustic guitar fills by Keith.

  “Continental Drift” announced itself as Serious Art in the first moments of sampled rhaita music from the Jajouka musicians. After lyrics inspired by Andalusian love poetry, “Drift” evolved into a complex, synthetic representation of the dance of Bou Jeloud under a full moon—an extended foray into mysticism, trance music, and the certain magic of repetition. It was the last Mellotronic echo of Brian Jones and his Panic obsessions on a Rolling Stones record. The long track ends in a mountain travelogue of cane flutes and a Sufic conference of the birds, in what appeared to be a nostalgic dreamscape of the misty 1960s.

  “Break the Spell” brought the album back to earth with a blues shuffle; Ron Wood on dobro, Mick Jagger as Tom Waits. The finale was Keith’s “Slipping Away,” a rock ballad (cut without Mick) that limned the composer’s existential philosophy of loss, impermanence, and detachment.

  Steel Wheels was another Stones album made by two different factions within the band, with a lot of outside help on both sides. Critics and fans found the music cold and without much soul, an attitude mirrored in the gray, high-tech ripsaw design of the album package. It was as if the Rolling Stones saw no further point in trying to fool anyone about what was going on. Mick maintained his hard gloss of glamour and cynicism, while Keith fought in his corner as the beating heart of the band. If it was now all an act, it was at least well played.

  Any doubts about the marketplace viability of the Rolling Stones in 1989 were dispelled when 2 million fans tried to get tickets for the opening shows in Philadelphia. The Canadian promoters were so overwhelmed by demands for backstage passes from the self-entitled that they created a VIP pass that got the badge-holder into an empty room. On August 31, after black heavy metal band Living Colour opened the show, the Stones took the stage at JFK Stadium amid explosions and a hundred-yard wall of fire as Keith cuffed the chords to “Start Me Up.” Outside, the ticketless were fighting with the cops, who made twenty-eight arrests as the Stones thundered through their set. All went well until halfway through “Shattered,” when the Stones’ eighty-ton, half-mill
ion-watt sound system went dead. After three minutes of horrible silence, the sound crew (supervised by Benji Lefevre of Led Zeppelin fame) fixed a faulty generator and the set resumed. The fabulous “Shattered,” presumed jinxed, was dropped for the rest of the tour.

  It was a new Rolling Stones in 1989, with new rules imposed by the magnitude of the business they were now in. Everyone had to be on time. No hard drugs backstage, sound checks before every show. The tour’s insurers had demanded physical checkups; Keith passed his, to the amazement of all. No longer sequestered in drugdom, the band was virtually living at the gigs. “Backstage” now meant a mobile village of dressing rooms, dining areas, a meet-and-greet bar, tuning rooms, and a traveling lounge with comfy sofas, potted plants, and a pool table. In its enormity and almost military precision, Steel Wheels became the model for the road tours the Stones deployed from then on.

  It took half a dozen concerts for the Stones to feel comfortable on their stage, which was longer than a football field. Charlie Watts could only see the heads and legs of the rest of the band, and when Mick was off on the ramps or Keith decided to take a walk, the drummer sometimes lost visual contact with them for twenty minutes. From the top rows of a stadium, the stage looked like a high-tech puppet theater, with tiny figures running around.

  With its prerecorded samples and hundreds of cues for lights and pyrotechnics, there was little room for improvisation in the performances, and fans who attended multiple shows heard virtually the same set every night. During “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll,” the big video screens on either side of the stage showed clips of rock heroes from Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly to Bowie and Zeppelin. Gargantuan inflatable bimbos (Angie and Ruby) ballooned voluptuously over the stage during “Honky Tonk Women” every night. The show’s coup de théâtre would come when Mick vanished from the stage while being whisked eight floors to the top of the set by express elevator, appearing seconds later to sing “Sympathy for the Devil” amid a sulfurous curtain of smoke. The set ended in a finale of “Brown Sugar,” “Jack Flash,” and a rocking, soul-posturing “Satisfaction” before a Big Bang of fifty tons of fireworks and a pompous recording of Bizet’s “March of the Toreadors” from Carmen.

  On the road for the first time in seven years, everyone got along by doing his own thing. The after-show party was always in Keith’s suite, with Otis Redding and obscure old reggae songs as background music. Although the Mick/Keith feud was supposedly history, Matt Clifford was deputized by Mick to keep him company after hours at dinner, a nightclub, or a movie. Clifford would get in trouble by trying to keep one foot in Mick’s camp and one in Keith’s.

  Keith played almost every show on that tour with a pair of his wife’s panties in his back pocket. Sellouts at Shea Stadium in New York, the Astrodome in Houston, the Gator Bowl and Orange Bowl in Florida, the Pontiac Silverdome, Montreal’s Olympic Stadium. Rock monsters Guns ’N Roses opened four nights at the Los Angeles Coliseum, with Axl Rose in full skull costume in Keith’s honor.

  The American leg of the Steel Wheels tour ended in Atlantic City, New Jersey, a once-faded resort that had been successfully repositioned by legalized gambling as Las Vegas East. The final show at the Convention Center was simulcast over cable TV and FM radio networks. The Stones’ special guests included seventy-two-year-old John Lee Hooker chanting his monochromatic boogie to the largest audience of his life; Eric Clapton painting a busy, pointillistic guitar solo on “Rooster”; and Axl Rose singing with Mick on “Salt of the Earth.” The Stones’ broadcast set a record for pay-per-view television in America. The tour itself, in which 3.4 million customers had seen the band in fifty-nine shows, was the biggest ever mounted at the time.

  As they parted ways to spend the last Christmas of the 1980s with their families, the Stones were jubilant and unapologetic about the incredible success of their comeback. Only a year earlier, the band didn’t exist and weren’t even speaking.

  Keith: “We asked ourselves, ’Why are we doing this? Do we really want to?’ And the answer was that we have to. Not from the money viewpoint as from the fact that none of us was about to let the Stones drift away. We’re still looking for the ultimate Rolling Stones. We’re never going to find it, but it’s like the Holy Grail. It’s the quest that’s important, not finding it.”

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  Tanks Roll Out, Stones Roll In

  In February 1990, after a month’s rest, the Rolling Stones played their first-ever concerts in Japan. They flew in early without Bill, whose father was ill and whose young wife was convalescing from a severe intestinal disease. Arriving ten days early, they did a round of press conferences and receptions featuring samurai honor guards and barrels of sake, a traditional welcoming gift. After watching Buster Douglas win the world heavyweight boxing championship from Mike Tyson, the Stones played ten sold-out Steel Wheels shows at the Tokyo Dome, the immense covered stadium (called the Big Egg) usually used for baseball games. Japanese audiences took some getting used to: thunderous applause was followed by pin-drop silence as the immense crowds waited for the next number.

  Architect Mark Fisher came to Tokyo to consult on a new set for the European leg of the tour that summer. The Steel Wheels rig was too big and expensive to trot around the continent, and the late European summer twilight made the intense Wheels lighting unnecessary. Fisher’s new set was a lighter, summery curtain of colorful cloth scrims hung from the scaffolds. Instead of industrial apocalypse, the 1990 Urban Jungle tour would imply a derelict plantation amid tropical decay and wild beasts.

  The Stones left Japan and took some time off. At the end of April, the band gathered at a chateau in Normandy to rehearse in its ballroom. “Street Fighting Man” was resurrected as a big production number during which four giant saber-toothed dog balloons would unfurl. The cartoonish rabid canines (equipped with hard-ons) became the Urban Jungle logo, inspired by “Terrifying,” released as a European single to go with the tour.

  The forty-five Urban Jungle shows began in Rotterdam’s Olympic Stadium on June 2, 1990. “Blinded by Love” and “Terrifying” were added to the set, and Keith alternated “Can’t Be Seen” with a skewed, cubist “Happy” in his solo spot. Mick prodded one of the four dog balloons (Top Dog, Kennel Dog, Skippy, and Shagger) in its balls with a long pole, and was eaten by Shagger at the end of “Street Fighting Man.” The ancient Stones rave-up “I Just Want to Make Love to You” was rumbled out before seventy thousand on the first of three nights in Paris, sending older fans into paroxysms of nostalgia. The former outlaw blues band now found itself politically attractive. Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris, gave the Stones the keys to the city. In Madrid, Mick was received by Spanish premier Felipe González. Keith was drinking heavily and playing louder than bombs. At Berlin’s Olympic Stadium on June 6, Mick made the mistake of telling Keith it would be the largest crowd the Rolling Stones had ever faced. Keith turned up the juice even higher, and Mick complained that his ears were bleeding.

  The Urban Jungle stages could be built in six days instead of the ten required by Steel Wheels. This kept ticket prices down, but cash was tight for European kids that summer and many shows failed to sell out. In Rome at the end of July, an embarrassing three thousand customers were scattered around Stadio Flaminio for what had been billed as Mick’s forty-seventh birthday party. It was also a wet summer, and many shows were performed in a downpour.

  In August, the Urban Jungle careened through Scandinavia and, for the first time, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, dates added late to the schedule. In Prague, the Stones were received like a liberating army by the country’s new president, Václav Havel, the dissident playwright often jailed by the communists who had relinquished power in November 1989. “Tanks are rolling out,” the poster for the concert read, “and the Stones are rolling in!” The Czech government even let a giant yellow tongue logo be placed on a hill overlooking historic Prague, a spot where a giant statue of Stalin once stood. President Havel, a longtime rock fan, told the Stones over drinks in an O
ld Town bar how crucial their music had been for the postwar generation that had grown up behind the Iron Curtain. This seemed to validate one of Keith’s most devoutly espoused theories. “It was rock and roll and blue jeans that took down that Iron Curtain in the long run,” Keith insisted. “It wasn’t all those atomic weapons, and facing them down, and all that big bullshit. What finally crumbled the wall was the fuckin’ music, man. You cannot stop it. It is the most subversive thing . . . You can build a wall to stop people, but eventually the music—it’ll get across that wall.”

  The Stones played at Prague’s Strahov Stadium on August 19. Havel and 107,000 fans saw the band in the open air under a stunning downpour. A ticket to the concert served as a one-day passport so thousands of Hungarians and Poles could attend as well. The Stones’ fee was donated to a children’s charity run by Havel’s celebrated wife, Olga.

  The Stones flew back to London on the Czech president’s plane, and the tour ended with two shows at Wembley Stadium on August 24 and 25. Since these shows were filmed with IMAX cameras (Julian Temple directed), the huge Steel Wheels set was re-created, minus the fireworks, which were banned by local authorities for safety reasons. Both shows sold out, and the Stones pulled out the stops for the London crowd, who got an extended, smoking Keith Richards blues guitar solo during Mick Taylor’s old spot in “Sympathy for the Devil.”

  The last Wembley show was the 115th of the Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle cycle. The shows always ended with the whole ensemble taking their bows together in a line. Then the auxiliaries would fade off, leaving the five Rolling Stones standing alone as waves of cheering broke over them. (An old inside joke required that Charlie Watts always held a guitar at the final bow.) The nostalgic and affectionate Wembley crowd on that final night had no inkling that it was also Bill Wyman’s last appearance with the Rolling Stones.