Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  “I bottomed out for about five years. I was depressed, didn’t move from the couch. We lived on Long Island after that kid shot himself in my house, staying in various places because they used to throw us out. Sands Point. Old Westbury. I had a neighbor who kept retired racehorses. She’d take a bottle of beer and inject horse tranquilizers with a syringe and I would drink it. Three days, no idea what I was doing. I’d wake up in New York, didn’t know how I’d got there.

  “Then my son started to intervene, hide the bottles, hide the money—some things a child shouldn’t have to do. No friends over, lots of arguments. I was accident-prone—falling down, emergency room, straitjackets . . . Oh, man.

  “I went to London [in the early 1980s] to renew my visa—I was still an Italian citizen—but started having visa trouble with the U.S. and decided to stay. I was drinking heavily, stumbling around. I tore my hip out of its socket falling out of bed. There was an operation, then pneumonia. I ended up in a famous alcoholic ward: horrible withdrawal from drink and drugs, mattresses on the wall, sweating, paralyzed. Nightmare NA [Narcotics Anonymous] meetings where everyone seemed stoned to me.

  “After eight weeks, I had to leave the hospital. I managed to find a flat—Marlon was living with Keith’s father and a friend—and I stayed clean for six months, then relapsed. I was able to detox at a clinic in Kent after that, then moved to a halfway house in Notting Hill Gate. It was on Portabello Road, the front lines of London drug addiction every day . . . but it managed to stick. I did a lot of service, worked on the telephone help line, did office work. I rode my bicycle every day, and gradually the drug obsession was replaced by something physical. I went to the gym. My bicycle was almost like a crutch to me. I rode everywhere, spoke at meetings, treatment centers. You know—’serve by example.’ I went back to school at St. Martin’s College and studied textile design for four years.

  “I’ve stayed sober now for a long time. Now I feel I can do anything I want to, a great sense of freedom. Getting this back was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, also the most rewarding. But it still didn’t change my role in society. I’m still an outsider in a world where everyone drinks and you don’t. Now I’m looking for a niche, a place where I can fit in. I feel like I’ve got all the time in the world. My children and grandchildren are around me, and I’m clean. Keith and I are friends again. He’s married, and I’m respectful of that. On New Year’s, the whole family gets together in Jamaica and we all have a good time.

  “Life is more graceful for me now, more dignified. I see Ringo and Eric and Elton—all the people who made it over—and it’s fascinating.

  “Don’t ask me about the past anymore. It’s just mythology anyway. I do believe that the rock heroes are part of mythology. The comparisons are almost bewildering. When you talk about the Stones, you might as well be talking about Cadmus, Mercury, Artemis. It’s the same thing.

  “I always had loads of imagination, but not much business sense. This always made me feel like a failure, a weak link in the chain of the Stones. I felt like I was supposed to come across as something gigantic and marvelous. Now I’m happy doing what I’m doing.”

  In September 1998, Anita and Keith’s daughter Angela Richards married a carpenter in a London church. Raised in Dartford by Keith’s mother, Angela was a young woman of twenty-six who loved horses and lived in a modest flat near where she’d grown up. With the whole Richards family present, she was escorted down the aisle by her proud father, to the strains of “Angie.”

  * * *

  Gather No Moss

  In January 1999, the Rolling Stones moved back indoors, starting the thirty-four show No Security tour at the Oakland Arena. This was a lite edition of their stadium show, crammed with jukebox hits and light on gimmicks. The stage was bare except for the black and yellow tailboard motif at the edges. Fabric covers on the stage monitors, visible only to the musicians, bore pictures of Bob Marley and Little Walter.

  The show began with a video clip of the band walking through the bowels of an arena like gladiators or the last gang in town. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” was given a high-speed launch before the Stones settled into a two-hour routine that ignored recent songs except “Out of Control” and “Saint of Me,” which had been a popular sing-along in Europe. In Oakland, the Stones gave the concert debuts of “Moonlight Mile” and “Some Girls.” Mick singing about some girls giving him children—and he’d only made love to them once!—got a knowing cheer from the audience. Keith Richards, sporting doodads and ribbons in his spiky gray coiffure, played a miniset that included “You Got the Silver” and “Before They Make Me Run” to the delight of his fans.

  The tour sold out through the West and Midwest that winter. The Stones, liberated from the artistic shackles of their operatic stage set, were mixing surprise oldies into the shows. Bobby Keys’s horns punched in and out with show band discipline. The Stones were a well-oiled dynamo that year, master musicians who sometimes seemed like they really could play the stars from the sky.

  Those close to Mick Jagger knew that his current intensity was related to the disintegration of his family in London. Jerry wanted a chunk of his estimated half-billion-dollar fortune. His lawyers responded to her divorce petition by claiming that their 1990 wedding in Bali was invalid. Even Mick’s friends thought that effectively bastardizing his four children with Jerry was too much. The press let fly. “Was it ever cool to be despicable?” asked the Daily Mail. “Was it ever sexy to be penny pinching and selfish? Of course not!” The Times mocked Jagger as “a rather pathetic old roué, desperately trying to recapture his long vanished youth by pursuing girls as young as his two older daughters.”

  Mick refused comment, but later blamed his solicitors. His daughter Elizabeth kept him company while the Stones stayed on tour. In Rio, a pregnant Luciana Morad flaunted her belly on a Carnival float, as if she were carrying the child of some god. Jerry Hall declared war. She called Patti Hanson and warned her that Rupert Lowenstein might not be their friend, and they better find out where their money was. Then Patti got annoyed because Keith didn’t seem to give a shit where his money was. “I don’t talk to Mick about his love life,” Keith said, “because it’s like, ’Whoops—you’ve skidded on another banana skin.’ ” Keith remained stoic about his friend’s amourettes. “I’m always sorry for Mick’s women, because they end up crying on my shoulder. And I’m like, ’How do you think I feel? I’m stuck with him.’ ”

  No Security opening acts included the GooGoo Dolls, the Corrs, and blues infant Johnnie Lang. Mick and Keith notched some serious blues cred by starring on three tracks of Blues Blues Blues, a tribute album by Chicago guitarist Jimmy Rogers. (“Don’t Start Me to Talkin’,” “Trouble No More,” and “Goin’ Away Baby” had been recorded at Ocean Way as a favor to Ahmet Ertegun.) The Stones reshuffled their show when the tour reached the Northeast in March and April. Keith was doing “Thief” and “You Don’t Have to Mean It,” with Leah Wood joining the singers for his set. Bobby Troupe died during the tour, so the Stones added “Route 66” to the B-stage set, along with “Cloud” and a spare, harp-driven “Midnight Rambler,” now devoid of sadomasochist belt-whomping. “Respectable” was transcendent on some nights. Charlie Watts was incredible on a revived “Paint It, Black.” Lisa Fischer pretended to chase Mick during “Brown Sugar,” and the encore was usually “Sympathy for the Devil.”

  After some shows, Mick went on the prowl. He made a date with Andrea Corr, but she had the sense to show up with her brother and their manager. In Boston for two nights, Mick picked a pretty girl out of the crowd at the first show and shouted at her to come to the Four Seasons Hotel. She dutifully showed up and spent the night with “David James.” She returned the next night as well, but was told Mr. James had checked out. He was really upstairs, partying with a new friend.

  Johnnie Lang opened the last few No Security shows, joined onstage by Leah and, in her singing debut, Elizabeth Jagger. They sang with him again at a club show in Chicago with Mick loo
king on. (Lang wanted to hire the girls but was told to forget it.) The tour ended on April 20 in San Jose. “Good night! You’ve been great! God bless you!” Mick shouted as the band walked off. The cheering went on for so long that Keith finally came back, in his bathrobe, to wave a last good-bye.

  May 1999. The Stones rehearsed in Amsterdam for eleven postponed Bridges To Babylon shows (with a No Security flavor) outdoors in Europe that spring. Sheryl Crow opened in Poland, France, Spain, and Italy, joining the Stones onstage to do “Honky Tonk Women” with Mick. In London on June 8, they played a theater gig at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. With the balcony full of guests (Anita, Jerry, Marianne, Pete Townshend, Page and Plant, Aerosmith, a Spice Girl), the Stones erupted into “Shattered” and shook everyone up. There had been buzz in the press that Marianne wanted to sing “Sister Morphine” with Mick, but instead he joked that she was going to do a number with Charlie. Then the Stones slipped “All Down the Line” and “Melody” into the show, perhaps in tribute to Billy Preston, who was doing prison time in California for a drug conviction.

  A few nights later, the Stones finally played the Wembley Stadium concerts they had notoriously postponed for tax reasons. Still recovering from Shepherd’s Bush, the jaded troupers listlessly phoned the shows in—to many empty seats. Keith, garrulous and looking loaded as he dipped into the crowd for high fives, was laughed at for the jujus in his hair. Mick’s performance resembled an aerobic workout. Ron Wood seemed distracted. Charlie’s roll-collar shirt was described in the papers as unforgivable.

  But it didn’t really matter. When the tour ended in Cologne, Germany, late that June, it was reported that the Stones had grossed $300 million. In America, Amusement Business magazine calculated that the Rolling Stones had become the highest-earning band in history. It was all about folklore now, and the Stones could do no wrong.

  The Stones then disappeared for years.

  Mick Jagger settled a reported $8 million on Jerry Hall and reluctantly admitted paternity of Lucas Jagger, born in May 1999, after the boy passed a court-ordered blood test. Though divorced, Mick moved next to his former Richmond home to be near his kids, but the arrangement didn’t work out because he was jealous of Jerry’s (much younger) dates. Learning the film business, he spent four years coproducing the independent thriller Enigma, with a screenplay by his friend Tom Stoppard, released in 2001. He also started a company that broadcast cricket matches on the Internet. Mick was present, with his mum, at his old school when Dartford Grammar opened the Mick Jagger Centre, a music facility he had helped pay for. On Mustique, Mick was elected chairman of the trust that oversaw the education of the island’s children. In his late fifties, Mick was a complex multiple of personae and interests, a connoisseur of high culture and low life, a micromanager and horn dog who lived for his work and his fun. His famous face was now heavily lined, with a broad crease down his left cheek. A full head of hair dyed a youthful brunette was incongruous with his weathered skin and pallor.

  When his mother died in the summer of 2000, friends said Mick took it very hard. Later that year, he had to rescue his daughter Jade, famous as a twenty-nine-year-old jewelry designer and party girl unhappy over a failed romance with the grandson of Harold Macmillan. When Jade and her two daughters, Assisi and Amba, were injured in a car wreck on Ibiza, where they lived, Mick evacuated them to London by private jet before the police could investigate. He also chaperoned Elizabeth, sixteen, while she modeled on the Manhattan catwalks during a week of fashion shows. Mick escorted Elizabeth and her friends to concerts and clubs, and none of the kids seemed to mind her old dad tagging along.

  Charlie Watts released The Charlie Watts/Jim Keltner Project, a CD with a global village twist that fused world beat, techno, and jazz in tribute to the pair’s favorite drummers, recorded mostly during the 1997 Bridges sessions. Bill Wyman toured Europe by bus with his low-key R&B group. In interviews, the sixty-something Bill (father of three young daughters by his second wife) spoke of his continuing relief at being retired from the Rolling Stones. Mick Taylor, still playing with his trademark melodic flow, was also touring with a good band of his own that mixed airy fusion jazz and hard rocking blues. Many fans still deeply regretted that Taylor had ever left the Rolling Stones.

  Ron Wood kept his head down while the Stones were on hiatus. Finally in the money, appearing to enjoy a permanent alcoholic binge, he bred thoroughbreds on his award-winning Irish farm and also lived comfortably in Richmond. He was the main investor in London’s newest private club, the Harrington, which served only organic food and closed at midnight. In June 2000, Ron Wood checked into the Priory clinic, Brian Jones’s old haunt, for alcohol rehabilitation.

  As for Brian, his fan club raised funds for a statue of the late Mr. Jones in Cheltenham by selling tiles from the swimming pool in which he had drowned. His white teardrop Vox guitar hung on a wall at the Hard Rock Cafe in Honolulu. A small but devoted cult remembered Brian Jones as a brilliant and troubled rebel and scapegoat, a reckless bastard angel who taught those who tried to follow him how a real rock star should live, and die.

  Keith Richards, who enjoyed his vodka mixed with Sunkist orange soda, moved between his homes in Jamaica and Connecticut. In the ragged glory of his late fifties, Keith seemed to embody Victor Hugo’s maxim: “He who is a legend in his own time is ruled by that legend.” He worked on an all-star blues album with guitarist Hubert Sumlin and turned up at film screenings, prizefights, and the occasional party in New York. He took his teenage daughters to see the boy band ’N Sync. He spent time with his ailing father, who winked at Keith just before he died in 2000. A few months later, Keith told a friend he was still getting off on that wink. That summer, Keith rented a house on the resort island of Martha’s Vineyard, off the New England coast. He brought along his own bottle of Stolichnaya when he went to hear reggae bands at the local nightclub, the Hot Tin Roof, and eyed the place as a potential tour rehearsal retreat for the Stones until his plans were derailed. The Stones had wanted to tour in 2001/2002 as a last big party before Mick and Keith turned sixty, but they were advised to lay low in an economic climate of recession and cutbacks. Old gods almost dead, malign, starving for unpaid dues . . . Late in 2001, Mick was scheduled to release his fourth solo album, Goddess in the Doorway, an eclectic, often introspective collection of songs coproduced in part with Matt Clifford and featuing cameos by Bono, Wyclef Jean, Pete Townsend, and Joe Perry. “I don’t believe in having bands for solo records,” Mick told Rolling Stone. “I mean, I’ve got a very good band in the other world.”

  One night during this period, Keith and Patti went to a movie premiere at Carnegie Hall in New York. When they came out the back door, a waiting fan handed Keith a vintage Telecaster and asked him to autograph it. Without breaking stride, Keith jumped into his limo with the guitar and took off. The fan chased the limo down 56th Street, begging for his guitar back. When he caught up with the car, Keith’s driver jumped out and snarled, “Go fuck yourself—buy another guitar.” Mr. Keith Richards sped off into the night, possibly playing a Chuck Berry lick—“You Can’t Catch Me”—on the latest addition to his famed guitar collection.

  Around then an interviewer had the temerity to ask Keith if he would ever retire. “Why in the world would you stop doing what you like to do?” he replied. “If we ever do a tour and nobody turns up, then I go back to the top of the stairs where I started. I’ll just play to myself.”

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