by Marc Spitz
“State of Shock” laid the groundwork for Mick’s 1985 solo debut, She’s the Boss. MTV was in. CBS was in. Chic’s Nile Rodgers, who’d just produced Duran Duran’s smash Seven and the Ragged Tiger as well as INXS’s The Swing (and who kept David Bowie afloat during the MTV deluge with the smash Let’s Dance), was in. The best session players in the world were in: Sly and Robbie, Herbie Hancock, Jeff Beck. The only men out were the Rolling Stones.
“The album is further proof that Jagger, unlike most forty-plus performers, can stake out contemporary musical territory without embarrassing himself,” Rolling Stone raved. Unfairly lumped in with Mick’s lesser solo material (or compared with the Stones’ best) She’s the Boss is indeed a good record, in that the singing is good, the songs have hooks, the production is peerless. What’s really missing if anything is us . . . the listener. We have nothing to do with it and that’s its fatal flaw. When we listen to the Stones, we always think of the larger “we.” When we listen to Mick (or Keith, for that matter) solo we only think “he.” We are all Rolling Stones. “The Stones still have the strength to make you feel that both we and they are hemmed in and torn by similar walls, frustrations, and tragedies,” Lester Bangs wrote. But there is only one Mick. We cannot embody him without Keith and Charlie around.
We also forget, when seen now within the context of a solo career that’s seen quite a few commercial flops, just how big these singles were in ’85. Mick gets very little credit for actually achieving his goal. He absolutely succeeded at crossing over to the MTV audience. He was a video star at forty-two years of age.
In a post-“Thriller” universe, it wasn’t enough to simply do a three-minute video clip. Real superstars issued mini movies to MTV and the channel heralded them as events. Bowie had made the lengthy slapstick Jazzing for Blue Jean in ’84 with Julien Temple, whom Jagger hired to make his. Mick’s 1985 foray into video bloat would be longer than Thriller. Longer than Jazzing for Blue Jean. Longer than The Color Purple (but perhaps not as long as Out of Africa). Running Out of Luck had ambition. What it lacked was a script.
“There were notes on a bar napkin that only Mick and Julien saw,” Rae Dawn Chong, Mick’s costar, tells me. It’s ostensibly a make-believe account of Mick Jagger, his wife, and lovers navigating the very real chaos of the new video age. Mick and Jerry Hall (playing themselves) are bickering on the Brazilian video shoot for the She’s the Boss song “Half a Loaf.” Dennis Hopper, shortly before his sobriety and Blue Velvet comeback, plays the video director (“You’re ready to rock, right?”). Dozens of dancers, tons of lights and equipment, and hours of footage were expended in the service of . . . what exactly remains unclear. “It was posh chaos,” Chong says. “Dennis Hopper was this wild, scary dude who would ask me to go out and photograph drag queens with him. I declined. Something about Rio was dangerous. I was a kid, really. I had a small child and I wanted to make it home in one piece. Brazil was no joke, especially Rio.”
True enough, Mick is rolled by some Brazilian trannies, and ends up in the back of a meat truck before finding himself in a workers’ camp, a jail cell, and, later, a London nightclub, singing his single “Just Another Night” in a spangled coat and very heavy makeup.
There were Hollywood movies in the ’80s with even flimsier plot hinges (most of them starred Andrew McCarthy).
Running Out of Luck was Mick selling the “idea” of Mick. The funniest scene is also metaphorical for his ’80s plight. He stumbles, hungry and tired, into a general store and asks to use the “telephone, you know, the blower,” and tries to get the proprietors to recognize him by pulling out an album (the best-of Through the Past Darkly) in which his face is obscured, pressed against glass) and miming to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” A neat trick, reminding people who he is, while not resorting to the oldies power. “I felt he was anxious for his record to do well. He was pretty nervous,” Chong says.
Mick opted to play Live Aid that summer separately from the other Stones backed by fellow veteran rockers turned MTV superstars Hall and Oates. In case nobody got the message, he also brought on ’60s survivor turned MTV superstar Tina Turner to sub for Jackson on the duet. After Live Aid, Mick reunited with the Stones to record a new studio album, their first for CBS Records, but spent much of the sessions at odds with Richards, who was still quite put out by the secret solo deal. The Dirty Work set produced a Top 10 hit with a great cover of the 1963 R&B hit “The Harlem Shuffle” (originally by Bob and Earl). Keith wanted to tour in support of the album but Mick preferred to resume his pursuit of a solo career. He recorded yet another synergistic track, the theme to the Danny Devito and Bette Midler hit Ruthless People, with Hall, and began work on the follow-up to She’s the Boss with Dave Stewart of yet another MTV-dominating act, the Eurythmics. Stewart had modernized Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ sound with “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” and promised to do the same for Mick. Keith went apoplectic, and this time, his worry that Mick would be swallowed up by fashion had some weight to it.
Primitive Cool is extremely ’80s-generic, with the wailing guitar-face licks, Miami Vice synths, and forward-mixed but oddly canned rhythms. It could be a Pointer Sisters record with the vocals wiped and recorded over. “I’m so greasy, I’m so slick, I leave no traces, I just get out quick,” Mick sings on “Throwaway,” and for the first time his nitty-gritty confessions aren’t attractive. The title track is pretty and satisfying in its lyrical candor. Mick sounds his age: “It all seemed so different then,” he admits. The lead single, “Let’s Work,” however, seemed wildly insensitive and any irony is lost in its implicit message (the poor just needed to work harder?). At least the video was hilarious. Mick runs up a street trailed by various examples of the common workforce. At one point, a chef follows him waving a dead pig.
Primitive Cool also marks the beginning of Jagger’s unfortunate untucked-shirt phase, in which he tops an array of sherbet colored T-shirts with a loose-fitting buttoned-up shirt, open all the way. It seemed to take him forever to ditch that look, and thankfully he finally has, preferring a tight black T-shirt and trousers, which suit his still trim frame nicely. The hair, too, is a problem. Whereas on the pugnacious video for the Stones single “One Hit to the Body” the previous year, it is lush and Steven Tyler–like, by the late ’80s it seems oddly cut, almost a mullet. He’s still in great shape, but whereas Keith seems to ease into his graying hair and slightly sagging flesh, its jarring to see Mick age. In 1987, the year “Let’s Work” failed to stay on the charts, Mick and Keith’s cronies in the Grateful Dead scored a surprise radio and MTV hit with “Touch of Gray,” which honestly and affectionately addressed the issue of boomers becoming middle aged. The Dead were giving up the ghost with a little grace, and were rewarded for it. Mick refused to do the same and eventually suffered.
Ironically, the synergy that broke Mick the solo star and nearly killed the Stones would make them stronger and more lucrative than ever once their lost decade drew to a close.
In August of 1986, Nick Kent wrote a Spin magazine cover story showing Mick, circa the early ’80s, bare-chested and grimacing, with the headline “It’s Almost All Over Now,” which spoke of the band’s imminent breakup. After the crash and burn of Primitive Cool, Mick would resort to a “State of Shock”–style superstar duet to restart his career after the failure of his Primitive Cool solo effort. This time, however, his superstar duet partner would be . . . Keith Richards.
17
“Look in My Eyes, What Do You See?”
Opening for the Rolling Stones, while great exposure, can often be a thankless gig. Just ask Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane, coldcocked by a Hells Angel at Altamont in 1969, or the aforementioned Prince, sandwiched between George Thorogood and the Destroyers and the J. Geils Band and bombarded with bottles and garbage until he was forced to flee the stage in ’81. Some bands try to blow them off the stage, like Lynyrd Skynyrd did at Britain’s massive Knebworth venue in 1975, and barely enjoy the experience of playing to an oce
an of rock and roll fans. If they choose you, it means, in part, you’ve arrived—but good luck enjoying the moment. Most of the time, you are allowed to meet the Stones for fifteen minutes, exchange good lucks, and pose for quick photos before you go on and do your set as the arena or stadium slowly fills. There’s no pyro, no backing band and horn section to help the sound fatten and travel to the back rows, 150 yards away. And yet, for forty-plus years, it has remained a coveted gig.
There are other bands that the Stones support more aggressively ; the bands who are permitted entry into their inner circle. Usually it’s a rhythm and blues hero like B.B. King, Ike and Tina Turner (who opened the 1969 tour), Buddy Guy, or ZZ Top. More recently Sheryl Crow and Jack White have been adopted by the Stones, but in the history of the “Rolling Stones support act culture,” only one band has been truly nurtured by them and placed in the eye of a media storm. The band was Living Colour. The year was 1989 and the Stones’ return to the road would see them navigating a country if not as fraught with racial tension as the one they first visited in 1964, then certainly addressing some serious questions about race, free speech, and responsibility. Eventually, the Rolling Stones would liberate the Eastern Bloc, playing at the invitation of new president Václav Havel (“Stones Roll In, Tanks Roll Out”) but the roots of this new restoration of equality would begin down on the Bowery in Lower Manhattan.
Vernon Reid, Living Colour’s intense and thrilling guitar player, not yet thirty, with a hawk-like gaze and a ringed explosion of dreadlocks piling up from his skull, already knew Mick Jagger. He’d auditioned to play on the ill-fated Primitive Cool in 1987. A fan of blues, jazz, pop, punk, reggae, heavy metal, and hip-hop, he already knew the weird paradox that a black man playing heavy rock and roll guitar was looked upon as strange by both fans and the music industry. For many, Jimi Hendrix and his white rhythm section were the first, and the last, to be accepted as such. Funkadelic had moments of shining guitar brilliance like Eddie Hazel’s solo on the title track of their trippy, creepy Maggot Brain, and the Bad Brains were produced by Ric Ocasek, a major new wave rock star, but these feats were often appreciated by small, knowing cults of rock fan boys or willfully isolated punk communities. Things are so cross-pollinated in 2011 that it seems silly, but the prejudice was so rigid in ’87 that it went both ways. Hip-hop, under the guidance of future Mick Jagger producer Rick Rubin, was borrowing rock and roll guitars from heavy metal and classic rock: people like AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and even Billy Squier, but even that was looked upon suspiciously. Run-DMC famously blanched when Rubin suggested they remake the entire song they’d been cutting up and rapping over—with Aerosmith themselves. The result was a visionary hit. Artists like Schooly D, and Boogie Down Productions enjoyed hits in its wake. But the divide between the reality of black rock and the public perception was such an issue that Reid cofounded (with journalist Greg Tate) a group of black musicians, the Black Rock Coalition, to take it on.
“The difficulty that a band like Living Colour presented was in the eyes and ears of those people who make decisions was no small thing at the time,” Reid recalls. “Things were still very compartmentalized. Prince doing ‘Little Red Corvette’ was considered edgy and revolutionary. Now ‘Little Red Corvette’ is a nice song. But it couldn’t be a milder rock song. And it was one guy who had this one song that kind of sort of broke through. It was still incredibly rare. We already had interest (before meeting Mick). We had people who passed on the band. We had a really close call with Elektra Records. We got all the way to the top to the president at the time. And he said nope.”
Mick, who was grappling with such issues as what a black man can play and what a white man can play credibly before Reid ever picked up a guitar, was not aware that he was about to again have a hand in correcting an unjust perception. He was just looking for a badass guitarist. In typical Mick fashion, he’d grown weary of the abundance of ace session men who were available to him. He sensed that the future sound would be a bit rougher, more jagged and street. Via Doug Wimbish, who was playing bass on the record and was a founding member of Living Colour, Reid got the call. “Mick wanted to step outside of the normal guys he would just call,” Vernon Reid says today. “There’s a bunch of cats [who only work] with upper-echelon people; they always get the calls. [Mick] wanted to hear other stuff, wanted to hear other people—he reached out to several folks to ask who was cool. Doug and Kurt Loder suggested me.” Reid was a lifelong fan of the Stones. “It was unsettling to have heard ‘Brown Sugar’ on the radio and there he is in front of you. I don’t think I’d been more nervous. It was kind of nerve-wracking. It was like a cattle call at the studio. A lot of people waiting to go in to play with them. He basically just jammed with people. We played ‘Just My Imagination’ and ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine.’ I think he wanted new voices—certainly wanted younger people and also, aside from younger people, he just wanted people with a different take on it. He said ‘I heard you have a really cool band. I think I’m gonna come see you play.’—I was like ‘Ah, OK.’ ”
When we think of Living Colour today, distracting visions of spandex bike shorts first come to mind and we tend to forget what a thrilling dervish they were, how heavy and melodic their songs truly were three years before Nirvana took that formula to the world. The lead singer, Corey Glover, muscular and aggressive like a metal frontman, with long, thin braids clumped together like a great rope, had a gospel-worthy voice he could take high or low. Reid shredded his multicolored guitar like Steve Vai or Eddie Van Halen, and the rhythm section, Wimbish and drummer Muzz Skillings, didn’t play just nimble funk or jazz riffs but also connected on a heavy, Zeppelin-like stomp. In 1987, the band held an unofficial residency at CBGB. At the time they seemed utterly unique among New York City bands. “We were all going to CBs to see them play,” former Vibe and Spin editor Alan Light (then an intern at Rolling Stone) recalls. “They were phenomenal in an enclosed space. They had the energy and the look, what they were drawing from hip-hop and from culture in New York City. They weren’t signed yet, but that was the band everybody was talking about and everybody was watching. Those shows were packed with critics and media and everybody was asking, ‘Why can’t these guys get a deal?’”
Mick had been going down to CBGB since the days when the Ramones and Richard Hell played there. He was always checking out new music whenever he was in New York; disco at Danceteria, new wave at the Mudd Club; always searching for inspiration and a new sound. He slipped in one night in the company of guitarist Jeff Beck (a fellow ’60s blues-rock icon who’d become a pal and collaborator during the Keith freeze) and took in the band’s set. Vernon Reid got word that he’d be coming down but took care not to inform the band for fear they’d crumble with stage fright. “I made a conscious decision to not mention it to the band,” Reid says. “Our manager at the time said ‘Jeff Beck and Mick Jagger are in the audience,’ and I said, ‘OK, got it,’ and immediately proceeded to tell myself they didn’t show. I did it so thoroughly I completely managed to forget that they were there. Some part of me knew that it would have been disastrous. We played one of our better CBGB shows that night.”
Mick was blown away by the set and met Reid and the band after she show. “Would you let me produce a demo?” he asked. “And it wasn’t false,” Reid recalls. “It wasn’t like ‘I can do things that you can’t do.’ He was really like ‘Would you let me?’ ” Primitive Cool was about to be mixed and Mick sometimes found this process a bit boring. He was looking for something to excite him. “I’m going to be here for a while,” he told the band. “It was like a request,” Reid says, “musician to musician. A lot of the guys of that generation, the rock royalty that I’ve met, it’s amazing how they operate on a couple of different levels. They are rock stars—but they’re also weirdly humble. They know ‘this is really fragile,’ and they tend to be less arrogant about music. I thought he was a great producer. One of the first things he did was make a mix tape for our singer Corey Glover. Really old rari
ties. Blues. He made him a mix tape!”
The two-song demo (featuring future hit “Glamour Boys” and the politically charged “Which Way to America?”) was taken to Mick’s label at CBS Records, who on the basis of their famous champion and the quality of the tape, offered Living Colour a deal, and the band quickly began work on their debut, Vivid. Mick, who opted not to tour the last Stones album, Dirty Work, agreed to a tour of the Pacific Rim in support of Primitive Cool, further infuriating Keith, who took issue with a set that would feature Rolling Stones classics essentially played by lookalikes, with a scattering of solo material. “I had no idea the level of what that was,” says Reid. “Mick, for his part, never said anything bad about Keith. The subject of the Rolling Stones never came up. When I met Keith a bit later he couldn’t be warmer or more friendly. I mentioned Mick’s name and it was almost as if I’d never seen a transformation on a person’s face at the mention of a name—literally darkened like Larry Talbot turning into the werewolf. It couldn’t have been more grim.”
Things would look up for both the Stones and Living Colour. Vivid was a brilliant debut. The association with Mick Jagger contributed to an early buzz and got the door open, but the quality of the songs and the ferocity of the performances (and yes, those biker shorts) would kick it down. Sales built slowly at first. Radio didn’t know what to make of the band. They dressed like David Lee Roth but sounded bluesy and bold. The more intelligent rock press loved them. Influential Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn (an early champion of both Bruce Springsteen and U2) listed them alongside Sonic Youth and Metallica as one of the “twenty bands that matter,” and perfectly encapsulated the race issues with the band. “This fast-rising New York quartet’s place on the list is no more tied exclusively to the fact that its members are African-American than Los Lobos’ place is based on the fact that the majority of its members are Mexican-American. Still, the success of both bands represents an undeniable sociological breakthrough.”