Keith: “Yes—and the next five.”
The tour would start in Chicago in September. Darryl Jones was still in the band. Opening acts included the Dave Matthews Band, Sheryl Crow, Blues Traveler, Foo Fighters, and Smashing Pumpkins. The stage was another Mark Fisher environment, supposed to evoke a lost Sumerian city in the desert. An eye-shaped sixteen-hundred-square-foot Jumbotron screen, the most sophisticated yet built, presided over the set like an omnipotent, all-seeing deity. Naked forty-foot big-nippled Golden Amazons in chains were built by the balloon company, and Mick had ordered a telescoping bridge that would arc over the crowd and carry the Stones to the rising small stage in the middle of the stadiums where they would play their old-school club set. The sound, lights, video, and pyro were all controlled by backstage technicians using laptop computers.
Keith Richards explained the big-bridge metaphor to the French magazine Rock et Folk: “Babylon, you see, is the outside world. And our music is the bridge between that world and mine.”
The black and blue funk riff that opened “Anybody Seen My Baby” was a signal that the Stones were back with another radio-friendly rock ballad when the single was released at the end of August 1997. The song came out as Princess Diana was killed in a car wreck with Dodi al-Fayad, a London playboy who’d dated Jo Howard just before she met Woody. The idolatrous public mourning for the divorced princess annoyed Keith, and he lashed out in the press at Elton John, who had sung at her funeral, as an opportunist who “writes songs for dead blondes.” Bitchy Elton shot back that Keith looked like a monkey with arthritis.
Bridges To Babylon came out in September as the Stones were playing warm-up gigs at small clubs in Toronto and Chicago. An often-superb collection of thirteen tracks, Bridges was about a third Mick’s, a third Keith’s, and a third a mix of the two. It was also an unexpected work of art, played with more fire and conviction than the Stones had deployed in years. The rearing Parthian lion that guarded the CD jewel box seemed emblematic of the fierce energy that inhabited the work. Surprised reviewers even compared Bridges to exalted Exile on Main Street.
In a long career of black albums, Babylon was an especially noir dream. “Flip the Switch” was manic hard rock from the death chamber and the fastest song they’d ever cut. “Anybody Seen My Baby” was stark urban isolation and dementia. Keith’s “Lowdown” was a swaying threat display and a demand for the bitter truth in an ambiguous sexual situation. “Already Over Me” was drenched in regret. Danny Saber’s torchy production of “Gunface” gave it a rusty edge of sexual rage, validated in Mick’s comment that it was a song about a guy who wanted to kill his woman’s lover.
The sun came out briefly for Keith’s “You Don’t Have to Mean It,” the best reggae song the Stones ever cut. Then “Out of Control” and its turbulent descent into obsession and emotional dislocation. No song of Mick Jagger’s, with its hothouse ambience of hotel sex with a stranger, had ever come so close to describing its writer’s desires and compulsions as “Out of Control,” and the Stones backed it up with a churning throb that approximated a wandering spirit in serious torment. “Might as Well Get Juiced” was now a dusted drama of techno-funk, tinged with alcoholic despair. “Always Suffering” was another Jagger Bakersfield-style country weeper. The burning open G rock and roll of Keith’s “Too Tight” had ominous warnings and furious threats buried in the lyrics. His “Thief in the Night” was the dark, stalking rumination of a jealous husband in a brooding soul setting. “Yeah, it’s a story,” Keith later said. “Every guy’s been there, been thrown out and tried to get back in again. That’s what it’s about.” “Thief” faded into the gentler reconciliation of “How Could I Stop,” Keith in his Hoagy Carmichael sentimental mode, with a soul chorus. The album ended with Wayne Shorter blowing a moonlight mile on sax, and Charlie’s cymbals ringing like a Javanese gamelan—music for antique shadow puppets in the Digital Age.
September 1997. There was a big press campaign for the album and the tour (sample London headline: “Would You Let Your Granny Go with a Rolling Stone?”). In public, Keith preached peace in the valley. “Mick’s my mate, the longest friendship I’ve ever had. There’s no possibility of divorce—we have to take care of the baby.” He also preached war, calling in print for all the gang-banging gansta rappers to finish each other off after Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. had been murdered. “We never had the Temptations killing the Four Tops,” Keith dryly observed.
The Bridges tour opened in Chicago on September 18, 1997, with astonishing digital sound clarity but without a bridge, whose arrival was delayed until ten shows in. The ensemble was the same as on Voodoo Lounge, with the addition of Blondie Chaplin on vocals and percussion on Keith’s songs. The shows were roughly divided by Mick into four acts. Act One started with the Stones’ logo on the “Eye of the Lion” Jumbotron, dissolving into a ghastly liquid gold tongue as Jurassic roars flooded the air. Explosions! Nothing less than a rogue comet burst in the Eye of the Lion as Keith strode up in a fake-tiger-fur jacket to start “Satisfaction” amid erupting fireworks. A sampling of oldies—“19th Nervous Breakdown,” “Let’s Spend the Night Together”—led into the new songs of Act Two: “Anybody Seen,” “Saint of Me,” and the showstopping “Out of Control.” Act Three was a random song chosen nightly by absent friends on the Internet; this was so often “Under My Thumb” that they added it to the show. Then Keith’s pair of songs: “All About You” and “Wanna Hold You” early in the tour; “Thief in the Night” and “You Got the Silver” later on. The Stones then traversed their bridge and became the B-stage Bar Band, which often featured “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll,” “The Last Time” (provoking a shower of bras and knickers), and “Like A Rolling Stone.” Act Three ended with the band walking the bridge back to the main stage while samba drums pounded on tape and Mick changed costume in the dark for “Sympathy.” Act Four was the Warhorse Suite: “Dice,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Start Me Up,” “Jack Flash.” The encores were often “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Brown Sugar” amid a stupefying barrage of explosive glitter and fireworks.
The tour gathered momentum as it lurched around America during a chilly autumn. Blues Traveler (from New Jersey) opened the early shows, and Mick broke their harp player’s heart when he refused to allow him onstage with the Stones during their last opening gig in Philadelphia. Mick complained that John Popper played too many notes and ordered Wood to fuck off when he tried to intercede for Popper. Missouri rock chanteuse Sheryl Crow joined the tour as opening act in Boston in October, an arrangement more suitable to Keith and Wood, who liked hanging out with the thirty-something ingenue, who idolized them. Unsubstantiated romantic rumors about Keith and Crow were allowed to filter out from the tour.
The fall months were unseasonably cold that year, and Mick Jagger, freezing, was working in a coat and hat. His hands were often too cold to play guitar on “Miss You,” now an obituary piece as the screen flashed images of revered dead musicians: Muddy, Duke, Brian. “I don’t know how you do it,” he told the rest of the shivering band in a backstage huddle before the bridge came out in frigid Nashville.
In Oklahoma the next day, Sheryl told Keith and Ron that she’d been cold onstage too. “I bet your nipples were fucking huge,” Wood deadpanned. “They were as hard as—” Crow started, but Wood interrupted her. “I bet you could get Radio Luxemburg on them!” They were in the Baboon Cage, Keith’s hotel suite (so-called after a reviewer described him as “an ageless, grinning baboon”), doing an interview for an English rock mag. Keith was rolling joints while Wood poured and planted smooches on good-natured Sheryl’s cheek. Wood sent a minder up to his suite for a harmonica and then tried to teach Sheryl “Ain’t Got You.” Keith got annoyed, snatched the harp, and tried to throw it out the window.
Ronnie, loaded on vodka and cranberry juice, tried to tell the interviewer that he was working all the time when Keith erupted. “You do shit-all! Working all the time? I’m working all the time. You do fucking nil, a
sshole.”
Wood: “Keith, man, I’m working with you. C’mon . . . just ’cause you covered my ass in Nashville . . .”
Keith: “I’m the fucking sucker who covers your fucking arse all the time, shithead.” Dead quiet in the room.
Wood: “Well, just for the last couple of weeks.”
They looked over at a dumbstruck Sheryl Crow amid shocked silence and started to laugh. Keith: “Sorry about that.”
Keith’s Jamaican album was released that autumn on his own new label, Mindless Records. Wingless Angels was an hour of Rastafarian passion and tree toads, a documentary of spirit, smoke and laughter. Keith took the Jamaican heartbeat rhythms and decorated them with airs from the Irish and English sea chanties and quadrilles that informed traditional Jamaican melody. He got the idea of adding a bass after hearing the old Wailers song “This Train.” This soulful synthesis even impressed Justin Hinds, who loved the album—much to Keith’s relief. Wingless Angels was the work of a scholar and a true connoisseur. Critics called it Keith Richards’s Jajouka. Keith insisted that listening to the Wingless Angels was good for you. “These people understand the necessity for trance in one’s life,” he advised.
By the end of the year, with the tour settling in for a long haul, Mick introduced Ron Wood as “stark raving bonkers.” (Other nights he called him “barking mad.”) The heart of the show was “Out of Control.” On the instrumental break the Stones cut loose and turned into a harp-driven, fire-breathing blues dragon presenting a tense, tightly organized blues movie, as cogent and vital as any in their career. Despite all the jokes about the Stones as leathery relics, the Rolling Stones were the kings of showbiz, the biggest act in the world. They had already grossed 90 million dollars. Bridges To Babylon sold about 4 million copies in its first year of release. They had nowhere to go but onward.
On December 12, Jerry Hall gave birth to Mick’s second son, Gabriel Jagger. Soon Mick’s romantic life would spin out of control, and change everything for the true king of rock and roll.
* * *
Cynical Nostalgia Merchants
January 1998. The Rolling Stones moved their Babylonian circus indoors in New York and ratcheted up their price: $300 got you a seat around the B-stage for one of three nights at sold-out Madison Square Garden. Indoors, the Stones and their video screen were a lurid, vivid visitation. “When the Whip Comes Down” and “Rip This Joint” were revived. A diaphanous cloud of expensive, freshly shed lingerie enveloped the band during the miniset of “Little Queenie,” “Let It Bleed,” and “Like A Rolling Stone.” Mick hung the biggest bras and sexiest knickers as trophies on his mike stand. The Stones grossed $6.5 million from the shows. In February in Las Vegas, they charged $500 a night at the Hard Rock Hotel with Sheryl Crow opening. “It’s only money,” Mick shrugged to Rolling Stone. Then Pepsi-Cola paid the band $3 million for a private concert for its employees at a beach resort in Hawaii after they’d spent a million to use “Brown Sugar” in a commercial. No one except the Stones seemed to recall that the song was named for potent Chinese heroin and a black dancer.
Meanwhile, Bill Wyman was touring Europe with a new R&B band, the Rhythm Kings, playing clubs and dumping on the Stones. He told interviewers that he left the Stones because their music annoyed him. Georgie Fame was in his band, and Eric Clapton sat in on some dates as well. “My life is more exciting now that I’m not a Rolling Stone,” the luckiest man in the world said, at the age of sixty-one.
In Brazil, Mick met a twenty-year-old lingerie model named Luciana Morad at a party at a rich man’s house. According to Luciana, she stayed on the road with Mick for several months. When she pursued him for child support later on, she sued him under the names Mick Jagger and David James, his nom d’hôtel.
While in Rio, Ron Wood and his family went for a boat ride. The cabin cruiser caught fire and Wood and Co. had to be rescued by the paparazzi who were following them in a chase boat. The rapacious photographers had gotten a lot of bad press when they were accused of causing the death of Diana Spencer the year before. Wood now had a different view. “Thank God for the paparazzi. Sometimes they save lives.”
The Stones did thirty-six shows in rain-soaked Europe that summer. Early dates were postponed when Keith cracked some ribs in May, supposedly falling off a library ladder. (This provoked puzzlement among those who wondered why a rock star was reaching for a book in the first place.) Many of the shows were washouts, and Mick was fighting laryngitis. His voice went south in Spain, and there were canceled shows in Italy and France. At the immense Nuremburg Zeppelinfeld, Keith began his part of the show by saying, “Great to be back. Great to be here. Great to be anywhere.”
Five nights in the hash-hazed Amsterdam Arena were reviewed by the London critics. “His face looks like month-old cat litter,” wrote one, “but Keith Richards still plays like a gifted yet disturbed child.” One writer called them “cynical nostalgia merchants who rely on antique hits. Thank God.” At the Dutch shows, the Stones’ backup singers were joined by pretty blond Leah Wood, twenty. After she sang on “Thief,” Keith brought her up, kissed her cheek, and introduced her: “She’s not mine, she’s one of Ronnie’s.”
In August, the Stones finally made it to Russia. They’d tried to play Moscow in 1967 but had been told nyet by the cultural commissars. Back then, Stones albums circulated on underground discs cut from used X-ray film on which the grooves of vinyl records could be stamped. (These were known as “bones” for the faintly visible X-ray images.) The Stones played in Luzhniki Stadium in a cold rain before fifty thousand mostly middle-aged Russians, who couldn’t believe the Stones had come at last. “Better late than never,” Mick announced. They chanted “Satisfaction” word for word with the band at the top of their lungs. “I was a communist in college,” Mick said before the show. “But then things tend to fall away, and you become more pragmatic.”
The Bridges To Babylon tour ended with a show in Istanbul, Turkey, in late August, done mostly as a favor to Ahmet Ertegun. Keith skipped the end-of-tour party. The Stones had played 107 shows to 4.75 million fans over two years, grossing almost $300 million. After thirty-six years, they were still the biggest band in the world.
After the last show, Mick took his family to the Turkish coast for a vacation, then slipped back into tax exile in a discreet Paris hotel, where he was joined by his Brazilian girlfriend. He gave an interview to the Times in which he said his life was like “being trapped in a soap opera.” He revealed that his kids liked to ransack his stage clothes from the seventies. “Dad,” they’d say, “how could you wear that?”
The record company wanted Bridges To Babylon Live at the Stadium, and that’s what it got, except the ten-track live album was called No Security instead. Rather than duck the problem of gigantism, they attacked instead, recording the ambience of packed soccer stadium sing-alongs and windswept acoustics. Most of the tracks were taken from the Amsterdam shows. A sing-along “Saint of Me” and a dark, driven “Out of Control” were from Buenos Aires. Other tracks were from Nuremberg, St. Louis, and a 1997 MTV broadcast. Released in early November 1998, in time for the Christmas market, No Security promptly bombed. Ridiculed in the press, it became the first Stones album in years not to make the Top Ten, and sold only in the low six figures. Mick later claimed he listened to it only once.
The Stones decided to stay on the road to promote the album. On November 16, designer Tommy Hilfiger announced that his clothing company would sponsor the Stones’ No Security arena tour beginning in January 1999. “How can we stop?” Keith asked a reporter. “You tell me. When you’ve got a band rocking under you like that, you can give up thinking and just let it flow. I don’t make plans. Why should I stop?”
The end of 1998 was rough for Mick Jagger, and it would get worse. Luciana was four months gone and told Mick the baby was his. The papers in London got the story and reported she was being paid to keep her mouth shut. Jerry and Mick patched things up for the holidays, with the massive rift between them passed
off as a spat over fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Jagger’s modeling career.
In January 1999, as the Stones prepared to go back on the road in America, Jerry Hall filed for divorce. “Every day it was in the papers,” she told an interviewer. “Public humiliation and private heartbreak. It’s not easy for any woman, and it doesn’t do a lot for your confidence.” When her children began to be disrespectful and mocking to her, Jerry told Mick not to come home. “I realized I was setting a terrible example,” she said. The whole year would be spent in a battle over divorce and money, but Jerry Hall never seemed to lose her esteem for the wayward father of her children. “Mick’s a wonderful man,” she said, “and a terrible husband.”
* * *
Anita, Recalled to Life
By the end of the 1990s Anita Pallenberg had created a new kind of legend for herself on the streets of London, where she could be seen speeding by on her ten-speed bike. Sober for more than a decade, she lived in an elegant flat by the river, a stone’s throw from her old house in Cheyne Walk. To those who knew her story, Anita was now seen as an inspirational and still-beautiful symbol of recovery and the road back from addiction and its harrowing half-life.
Anita: “After the [1977] Toronto bust, we were supposed to clean up, but I never did. We did this electric [“black box”] treatment with Meg Patterson, which didn’t work because there was no input from us. I went along, happy that I could do as much drugs as I wanted, by myself. Then Keith and I got separated by the lawyers. I went on a deadly binge, scoring in [Manhattan’s] Alphabet City, a nonstop party for years. If I ran out, I’d drink—even more lethal.
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