by Marc Spitz
No young band wants to bear this burden, but this was the beginning for Living Colour. “We’ve done interviews where not a tune has been talked about,” Reid told the paper the following year. It was a time when hip-hop lyrics were becoming increasingly angry, profane, and violent, and the still powerful Tipper Gore led P.M.R.C. (Parents Music Resource Center), which succeeded in stickering certain objectionable bands. N.W.A., who released their debut Straight Outta Compton in late 1988, were, by decade’s end, being publicly targeted by the F.B.I. “We were coming out of the Reagan years and ’88 was the year of the Willie Horton ad and Jesse Jackson running his second, bigger campaign for president. There was a debate going on about race at that time that was different than what had been there before,” says Light. “It was a couple of years after crack, and Reagan-tolerated urban decay. A lot of that stuff was on the table. 1989 was also the year of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. I remember reading an article in New York magazine saying ‘This movie is going to cause rioting in the streets.’ ” Public Enemy had recorded the opening theme to Spike Lee’s scorching tale of an explosion of racial tension between blacks, whites, and Asians in one Brooklyn community on one of those mind-meltingly hot New York City summer days. Do the Right Thing was prescient cinema. That summer sixteen-year-old Yusuf Hawkins would be shot on the streets of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, by a gang who were randomly targeting blacks and Latinos. Two years later, in 1991, Public Enemy’s “Welcome to the Terrordome” single would come under fire for allegedly anti-Semitic lyrics, and the Crown Heights riots would pit blacks against Hasidic Jews following an automobile accident that claimed the life of a seven-year-old child of Guyanese immigrants. Reid had played on the Public Enemy’s 1987 debut Yo Bum Rush the Show, and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back was now the go-to cassette on the bus as the band toured America in support of Vivid. “Public Enemy shifted the conversation massively,” Reid recalls. “We started to hear the n-word. It’s difficult. It’s a difficult thing. Something no black artist would put on a record. You know offstage it was cats—cats going to talk the talk but the idea of putting it on a record for sale was unthinkable. It was a real generational shift in values. Part of makes the n-word in pop a very difficult thing.”
As they traveled from gig to gig, Living Colour would, as they had in New York, build their reputation on their live show, a swirl of color and dexterity and passion. They performed “Cult of Personality” on Saturday Night Live and Arsenio Hall’s talk show and slowly the song caught on and Vivid climbed the charts.
Meanwhile, smarting from the commercial failure and critical drubbing of Primitive Cool and Keith Richard’s better-received but still commercially marginalized Talk Is Cheap, the Glimmer Twins had a summit and soon were laughing about the bitchy barbs they’d hurled at each other in the press. Inevitably, Mick and Keith began writing songs while a megatour, the first of its kind, was quickly planned. Steel Wheels, the Stones’ first outing since their tour in support of Tattoo You in the early ’80s, would be the biggest the band had ever played and the biggest rock and roll had yet seen. They had a massive band: five backup singers, a full brass section, the Uptown Horns, the return of Bobby Keys (ousted by Mick in the mid-’70s for his drug use), and two keyboardists. The stage (designed by Mick and Charlie Watts) seemed like an actual cityscape. Everything about it would be unprecedented in its hugeness, except for the scrappy support act; the band from the punk club on the Bowery, who couldn’t find a record executive to take a chance on them, would now open every show.
The Rolling Stones might have been the biggest band in the world in terms of ticket sales in ’89, but those who followed rock and roll knew who the real new kings were.
Guns ’n’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction, released in late 1987, was like Vivid, another slow build, but by ’89 it was on its way to becoming the best-selling debut of all time. The rushed follow-up, a hodgepodge of acoustic tracks and their faux live demo, was released as the EP. The lead single, “Patience,” was a “Wild Horses”–indebted ballad. The last track on the album was a harder-edged song called “One in a Million.” Like their breakthrough single, “Welcome to the Jungle,” it’s a farmboy’s tale of coming to the big city and being fascinated and aghast by what he sees. Lead singer and lyricist Axl Rose cited “Police and niggers” as oppressive figures from the urban nightmare he was portraying. A lyric attacking “immigrants and faggots” made the track even more controversial. Rose did little to help the situation by agreeing to an interview for a Rolling Stone cover story. Asked about the inflammatory lyrics, Rose explained: “I’d been down to the downtown L.A. Greyhound bus station. If you haven’t been there, you can’t say shit to me about what goes on and about my point of view. There are a large number of black men selling stolen jewelry, crack, heroin, and pot, and most of the drugs are bogus. Rip-off artists selling parking spaces to parking lots that there’s no charge for. Trying to misguide every kid that gets off the bus and doesn’t quite know where he’s at or where to go, trying to take the person for whatever they’ve got. That’s how I hit town.”
One could argue that Axl’s use of the n-word might have been innocent. He’d heard the word used repeatedly on Straight Outta Compton or It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back or any number of hip-hop singles and thinking it was up for grabs, he’d use it too, in an enlightened Lenny Bruce sort of way. “I don’t think he’s thinking that far ahead,” Reid says. “And—it was hidden for a long time that Slash was a black guy—hidden top hat just became this character—says so much about the dynamics of race in rock—that that’s like—it took a long time to see. He was always in sunglasses always in a top hat, took years to literally see his face—You gotta wonder about that. If Slash was two shades darker, what they would have done? Would he even have been in the band? It’s horrible to think these things—to be forced to have to think these things. One of the things that bothers me about racist things in rock,” Reid says, “there’s almost a presumption there are no black fans. It’s OK to say this because no black people are listening to what I’m saying. It’s thinking in reverse. N.W.A.’s huge, Ice Cube is huge, and it’s because just black people are buying it? I was a huge fan of Appetite for Destruction. It’s one of the problems with commoditization of the n-word. It’s not going to a select group of people.”
Living Colour were already on the bill for the entire North American leg of the tour through the fall, and would be forced to think about these things directly when Guns ’n’ Roses were added for four nights at the Los Angeles Sports Coliseum in October of 1989. They’d already been turned into pariahs. “We were supposed to play a David Geffen AIDS benefit concert,” recalls then Guns bassist Duff McKagan, “We got pulled off that because of the faggots line. The song started a lot of tension.”
It begs the question, why add them? “I think Guns ’n’ Roses could not be denied as a force in rock and roll,” Reid explains. “At that point the impact of Guns ’n’ Roses couldn’t be overstated. The Stones had to respect and recognize that they were heirs apparent on some level. It was a threat and it was also like L.A. was their town. There was no way around Guns ’n’ Roses. They wouldn’t be on the bulk of the tour, but for three days in L.A., they would be there. I completely saw the logic of it. Completely.”
This was business as usual for the Stones. This is what they do; they absorb the hot new band into their orbit and in a way neutralize them, so it makes sense, but it can also be argued that Mick wanted to put them in their place. It’s jujitsu: using the opponents’ own fury against them and watching them destroy themselves. Guns ’n’ Roses were a weird mix of Stones acolytes and punks. They almost were obliged to take potshots at the band, as the punks had a decade earlier. “Mick Jagger should have died after Some Girls, when he was still cool,” was a quote attributed to Slash, the band’s top-hatted guitarist. The truth was that Guns had been, as early as the previous year, just another club act, hustling for support slots on larger tours lik
e Aerosmith’s or Mötley Crüe’s. They worshipped the Rolling Stones and were as nervous as hell to be on the bill. “The thing that stuck out was that ‘This is the fucking Rolling Stones and we’re playing with them.’ It just kind of terrified me. This is the big leagues now. This is the real deal.” Mick couldn’t resist tweaking the already jangling nerves of these, his latest potential rivals. “I wore cowboy boots all the time,” says McKagan. “It was raining, and Mick came up to me before we went on that first night and said, ‘Hey, mate. You gonna wear those boots on our stage? You’re gonna slip. I have some tennis shoes you can borrow. What size are you?’ I said, ‘I’m an eleven.’ He said, ‘Me too. We must have the same size willies.’ And that was my first conversation with Mick Jagger.”
The day of the show, Reid had called into local radio station KROQ to take Axl Rose to task for his lyrics, something that had gotten back to him. Backstage on that night with GNR, the Stones were in the middle of a storm, protected in their gentlemen’s club while security and tour teams for all camps tried to keep everyone calm.
“After we played on that first show, I wanted to check out Guns’n’ Roses to see if they were good live,” Living Colour’s drummer Muzz Skillings has said. “I was standing backstage. I saw Axl coming down the stairs and he walks by. But then five minutes later somebody taps me on the shoulder. I look up and it’s him.”
“You got a problem with me?” Rose asked, his face red.
“What are you talking about? Skillings asked.
“It’s in the media that I’m some sort of racist, man. I ain’t no damn racist.“ He went down this long list: “I don’t think you’re a nigger. Anyone can be a nigger. If you’re a bad person you’re a nigger. I don’t think black people are niggers. I don’t think black bands are niggers.”
“And he just went on and on,” Skillings recalled. “So then he sticks out his hand and I say we should talk about it, just talk about it.”
The Jagger-jujitsu worked brilliantly over the three-day residency in Los Angeles. The following night, tensions escalated. Before Living Colour played their hit “Cult of Personality,” Reid addressed Guns’ racist lyrics, explaining his disapproval and disappointment to the crowd. “I thought ‘I gotta say something the next show’—I made my statement—we played—we came offstage and Keith was waiting for us and he shook my hand and said, ‘Man that’s right on.’” The Stones and the audience were clearly in Living Colour’s corner.
Guns ’n’ Roses, had they come on and played a killer set, might have swayed them. But this didn’t happen. “The pressure of it was too much,” Reid says. “They were human beings. They became kind of mawkish. It was very weird what happened with them.” Guns ’n’ Roses fell apart right there on that stage that night and were never really the same band again. Within a year, drummer Steven Adler and guitarist Izzy Stradlin would leave the group and Rose would be the band’s sole power player. There would be riots and shows that started hours late, and then, for a decade and a half, nothing. Whereas Living Colour just went out and met the challenge by playing, Rose used the stage as a bully pulpit, hard enough when you are not playing before a crowd waiting for the Stones. To be fair the third night saw the embattled band pulling it together a little. Slash wore a Betty Ford Center T-shirt and Axl addressed the crowd: “I’d like to apologize for my actions and comments last night. I just didn’t want to see my friends slip away.” They played a blazing set, but it would be, as far as the beloved original lineup was concerned, one of their last true highlights.
There’s a YouTube clip from a show during that tour when Axl Rose sings with Mick and Keith on the Beggars Banquet ballad “Salt of the Earth.” Axl sings it note-perfectly. You can detect Mick absorbing Axl’s power right there on the stage. He even does a split-second version of Axl’s snake dance. “Mick was incredibly jealous of Axl Rose,” said one observer on the tour. “Rose was preening around in his little jogging shorts and the girls were all going nuts. Mick is extremely sensitive about his age and how he looks, and here was a kid who was easily young enough to be his son, stealing his thunder. You could see from the way Mick watched Axl out of the corner of his eye that he was burning up. In that respect, Mick was sort of like a woman jealous of another woman.”
While privately supportive of Living Colour, the Stones never weighed in on the controversy; not a word. They barely acknowledged that they’d played host to a melee between two up-and-coming rock attractions. Come at the Rolling Stones, the message was, and they will destroy you, no matter how many years since Some Girls. The Steel Wheels tour in ’89 was not about black vs. white; it was about the Stones vs. everyone else. It was a restoration of dominion.
18
“An Evil Face”
“[Mick] has a sharp sense of cinema,” Martin Scorsese observed in the New York Times in 2010. The various working parts of filmmaking appeal to his sense of discipline and his intellect. Mick is at the top of the heap in terms of rock and roll, whereas when he makes a film, every few years, between tour and recording commitments, he can reconnect time and again with the spirit of the early ’60s, when he was wide-eyed. This really picked up as he entered middle age and felt those years slip further and further from memory. Mick founded his own film production company, Jagged Films, and took more roles. “Toward the latter part of the ’80s, Mick started to set his sights on Hollywood, being a producer and actor—I don’t know if he wanted to be a director—he saw it as a new frontier—[I give him credit] as an artist for wanting to pursue a new [career],” Bill German recalls. Mick’s film choices are so few (a half dozen at the time of this writing) that they are even more revealing than his recording career, politicking (or lack of politicking), and certainly his sexual conquests.
In his twenties and early thirties, Mick was being offered every part in films that called for a new, young antihero. Some of those movies, like Up the Junction, would go on to become classics, which surely instilled some sense of regret and made him think of opportunities lost and the sacrifice he made to be the frontman for the Rolling Stones.
Mick made his second film in the chaotic year of 1969. That film, a period piece called Ned Kelly, matched him with famed British director Tony Richardson. While regarded as a flop, Ned Kelly (remade three decades later with the late Heath Ledger in the title role) is underrated and has its charms. Mick, who has Aussie roots on his mother’s side, does his best as the wild colonial who ends up on the end of a noose. The movie begins at the end. Ned is in prison, preparing to be executed, to “die like a Kelly,” according to his proud mum. “Such is life,” Mick shrugs before going to the gallows; not exactly Hamlet, but it grabs the attention. Poised between 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde and 1973’s The Harder They Come, Ned Kelly was very much a vogue role, a modern antihero. The audiences were meant to draw parallels with the current struggles (cops are called “pigs”). The local color is intriguing (kangaroos hop across the screen), and the soundtrack by Waylon Jennings (in proto Dukes of Hazzard mode) and Kris Kristofferson doubles as a Greek chorus. Why didn’t it work? Perhaps because Mick wasn’t ever meant to be a leading man.
As his face grew less androgynous with age, it became clear that his calling was that of a character actor: the guy who plays a great and intensely watchable villain or hero. In 1977, eight years after Ned Kelly, Mick remarked, “I’d like to do some more films someday and people keep on offering me nasty roles. They reckon I’ve got an evil face.”
Mick began to consider larger parts in the ’70s and early ’80s. “He continues to yearn for a breakthrough in his long simmering movie career: something dignified to fall back on,” Kurt Loder wrote in a 1983 profile. By then, he’d signed with the powerful Creative Artists Agency (C.A.A.), and seemed poised to solidify himself as a credible musician/movie star like David Bowie, Cher, or Dolly Parton. He also began writing scripts (The Tin Soldier) and optioned properties (Gore Vidal’s Kalki) with an eye toward developing, producing, and starring in them. There was talk of him pl
aying mad genius writer and actor Antonin Artaud (who is quoted and clearly an influence on Performance) and more strangely the reporter Fletch in Gregory McDonald’s cult novels (the part, of course, went to Chevy Chase). He appeared in an episode of actress Shelley Duvall’s acclaimed children’s series Faerie Tale Theatre opposite Bud Cort, Barbara Hershey, and Edward James Olmos in The Nightingale. Mick plays a cockney-speaking Chinese emperor. He exchanges lines with a mechanical bird. (“Let no one know you have a little bird who tells you everything; then all will go well with your kingdom.”) As far as one on one’s go, I’ve seen worse. Mick even auditioned to play the title role in Milos Forman’s Amadeus (that part eventually went to Tom Hulce).
There’s a line of thought that suggests that the reason why Mick Jagger doesn’t have a heralded career as an actor is because he lacks talent. He was good playing himself in Performance, the way Madonna was good playing a version of herself in Desperately Seeking Susan, and little else, or Eminem was good playing himself in 8 Mile. At his worst, he chews dialogue (Ned Kelly is the hammiest of these instances). It’s as if someone instructed him to wrap his teeth around every consonant. For someone so perfectly physical onstage, thespian Jagger acts with his mouth and his eyes and hardly ever seems comfortable in his body. Madonna acts this way as well, as if Stella Adler had never been born. Both can be wonderful subjects, and even in extended, filmic music videos, you cannot help but connect with them. And yet, in scripted features, they have been captured speaking in a way that says, “I am speaking now. I know my lines, and I will say them at the right time. Now you say yours and I shall respond.” But both have gotten better and more comfortable over the years: Madonna in Dangerous Game and Evita and Mick in his character roles of the ’90s and 2000s.