It's Only Rock 'n' Roll

by Jo Wood

  Being a mum is my proudest achievement and I would happily have had more kids, but I never got pregnant again. I was quite surprised, really, as I’d had the others so easily.

  I hadn’t been on tour for the best part of a decade so it was a very different Jo who got back on the road with the Stones in the early 1990s. Not only had my illness made me reassess what was important in my life, I’d spent nearly 10 years at home with my kids – and the thought of leaving them for months at a time nearly killed me. There was a moment on Steel Wheels in 1989, our first tour for many years, when the kids came for a brief visit. When it was over we all went to the airport together, where they were to board a plane to London and Ronnie and I were to fly to New York. We said tearful goodbyes, and as I watched their three little heads disappearing into the crowd, accompanied by an air stewardess, I made a decision. From now on, whenever we go on tour, the kids come too. And when I started bringing our kids along, Patti brought her girls, Theodora and Alexandra, and Jerry brought James, Lizzie, then later Georgia and Gabriel. Charlie’s daughter, Seraphina, came too. There would still be groupies and Freddie Sessler, but now there were nannies and tutors as well. From now on, Rolling Stones tours would become a family affair.

  23

  Back in the old days I had to worry about just one thing when the Stones were on tour: having fun. And I was really good at it. Sure, I helped out with Ronnie’s stage outfits and ran errands for Chuch, but only in a pretty haphazard way between all the partying.

  Nowadays, however, I had four roles to perform on tour: Jo the mum, Jo the wife, Jo the PA and, last but by no means least, Jo the rock chick. While the fun might have had to take a back seat every now and then, we still had a laugh and partied hard, even if I was on organic wine rather than Southern Comfort and lines of coke. After all, what could be more of a blast than travelling around the world on a magnificent magical adventure with all the people you love best in the world? There were a few far-flung places to which the whole of the Stones establishment – the band, the crew, the staff and the extended entourage – would fly together and we’d all get on this specially chartered jumbo jet on which I would know every single passenger. That’s something like 350 friends. As you can imagine, trips to the bathroom took some time: ‘Hey, Jo, stop and have a chat!’ ‘Jo, how are you?’ ‘Do you want a drink?’ And so on . . .

  It was on one of those long-haul flights that Keith suddenly declared he loved the word ‘labia’ so much that it should be the name of a country. By the time we had landed he had come up with a national anthem–‘Labia, oh, Labia, the place I long to be!’–and formed a government. Ronnie was going to be Minister for Internal Affairs, Keith was going to be Minister for Foreign Affairs and I was the female Cunt-stable. I’m not sure if Keith ever got round to designing the flag.

  So, my overriding memory of being on the road with the Stones is laughter. As I wrote in my diary during the Voodoo Lounge tour, ‘The best thing about my life is I have a good laugh nearly every day – and that is great.’

  Nevertheless, from the band’s first ‘professional’ tour – Steel Wheels, in 1989–until A Bigger Bang nearly 20 years later, I took my responsibilities as Ronnie’s PA very seriously, and not just in terms of organizing his wardrobe and schedule. On later tours I had the far more challenging task of trying to keep him sober. And when there were tough times, usually thanks to big nights and bigger egos, I’d try to remain my sunny, silly self; one of the riggers, Kenny, used to say I made his day because I was always smiling. He let me try out his harness once and I remember swinging from the scaffolding, several storeys high above the stage, while Ronnie and Mick played far beneath me. Wheeee! I’d always try to inject a bit of fun into the day’s jobs, such as leaving funny little notes for Spin, the guy who was in charge of the band’s luggage, to let him know how many bags we had that day:

  Berlin, Friday 28 August

  What’s this box, Jo?

  It’s okay Spin, it will go.

  I tried to pack in cases, you know,

  But the case just said NO.

  So in a box to Hamburg it must go.

  Don’t worry, next week to London this box will blow!

  With a total of 17 in all, packed and ready from me, Jo x

  We spent much of the nineties on the road and my diaries give a good idea of what life was like as I tried (usually pretty successfully) to juggle my various responsibilities. Here’s an extract from 1995, during the Stones’ Voodoo Lounge tour:

  10 July – LONDON

  Phone woke me about 2.00 p.m. and didn’t stop. Sorted tickets, tour bus, etc. Went to Waitrose with Leah and saw Georgia May [Jagger] with nanny and cook. Made dinner and phoned to arrange tickets for Ronnie’s cousin. Ronnie drove me mad with wanting to talk to Keith. Watched Jack Dee – v funny.

  21 July – SPAIN

  Left Richmond around 3.15 for Gatwick. Leah, Ty, Ronnie and me arrived second after Charlie and Shirley and then we were off to Gijón. Not

  a good hotel as Keith LET IT BE KNOWN HIS ROOM WAS TOO SMALL. Went to dinner and had paella – very good. Ronnie finally got out of Keith’s room around 3 a.m. and into my arms.

  25 July – LISBON

  Up with a cough most of last night. So today I felt rough. Did a lot of sleeping. Ronnie went off to record with the guys. In the evening I packed up everything while Leah and Ty went with Richard the tutor to see an old refugee camp.

  26 July – FRANCE

  On the way to the hotel after the flight our driver hit the crash barrier. Really scary! We are staying at the most beautiful hotel in a medieval village. Had birthday dinner for Mick. Keith pulled a moody at 3 in the morning. Ronnie and me saw a star move 45° (i.e. 10 o’ clock to 1 o’clock) then dull and disappear. I wonder if anybody will believe us? I waved.

  28 July – SWITZERLAND

  Left at 4.30 today for Swiss-land. Good hotel. Alexandra’s birthday–9 years old! Bought her and Theo a fab doll each. When we arrived I took the girls (Theo, Alex, Leah, myself and one male, Ty) to dinner on river, then joined by Patti, next Keith, then Ronnie. Afterwards entertained the Black Crowes – Johnny (bass), Mark (guitar), Chris (LV) [lead vocals]. Keith left about 4.30 a.m. to be attacked by his loo seat in the dark!

  29 July

  SHOW DAY in Basel. V. hot. Kids to show. Gave Jamie his new kick-ass T-shirt at gig. He loved it. Tomorrow kids leave at 9 a.m. for the Sound of Music tour – it will be a good break for them. Party night number two with Black Crowes. GREAT NIGHT.

  30 August – NETHERLANDS

  LAST SHOW. Party in our room in Amstel Hotel in Rotterdam. I dressed up to shock! Finished work now and I am his wife again. Just having fun doing it!

  31 August

  Party still going on, so I had to stay up cos I had to pack . . .

  It might sound like a recipe for grey hair and high blood pressure, but I can honestly say that being a parent on tour was wonderful. The first that we went on as a family was the international leg of Steel Wheels in 1990, when Leah was 10 and Tyrone just 6 (although Jamie, then 16, had to stay at school in England). It was surprisingly easy to manage two young children on the road. They would usually stay awake for the show – if Ty grew sleepy we’d just make him a little nest on some chairs backstage – and then I’d take them straight back to the hotel and put them to bed. Any attempt at a strict routine would have been pointless, as we were living in hotels and jumping on flights every few days, but there were loads of fascinating distractions and a whole bunch of fun grown-up friends to keep the kids entertained. Leah, in particular, adored the whole experience: helping me with the packing, going into Wardrobe to prepare the costumes, watching the riggers set up the stage, seeing the sights of whatever city we ended up in that week and hanging out with her unofficial big sister, Lisa Fischer, and, of course, big brother Bernard Fowler, the band’s backing vocalists. On later tours the kids would have a tutor with them to keep up with their schooling, but life on the road really did provide its ow
n education.

  As the kids got older they would have their own hotel rooms (although I always made sure they were next to ours and that I had a key) and they would hang out with their friends, watching movies. On one occasion Ronnie and I were going out to dinner, so I told Leah and Ty to get whatever they wanted from room service. It wasn’t until I saw the bill that I discovered that, instead of burgers or club sandwiches, they had ordered several hundred dollars’ worth of caviar – with French fries and ketchup, naturally. Clearly, our kids had rock ’n’ roll in their blood. I suppose I should have been grateful they hadn’t chucked the TV out of the window!

  Of course, it wasn’t all fun and games on tour. I never let my children run wild; in fact, I was quite strict. They always said it was the glint in my eye when I was angry that made them behave, but occasionally I needed more than that to keep them in order – especially as they hit the teenage years. During the Voodoo Lounge tour we were in Boston and, having finished my jobs backstage, I decided to go and watch the show from the mixing desk, which is situated in the middle of the stadium and is where security always put any VIP guests. I made my way there through the crowd to see who was around and found Lenny Kravitz, who had opened for the boys that night, sitting with his arm around my teenage daughter.

  ‘Um, hi, Leah,’ I said, warily.

  ‘Hi, Mum!’ Leah beamed up at me.

  It wasn’t like they were snogging, but I was a little concerned; while Lenny was in his thirties, Leah had just turned 15 and was very innocent for her age. The following day the phone rang in my room.

  ‘Hello?’ I said.

  ‘Hey, Leah, I’m waiting for you downstairs on the bike.’ It was a man’s voice – and I recognized it at once.

  ‘This is Leah’s mother, Lenny,’ I said, sternly. ‘I’m afraid she won’t be coming downstairs.’

  ‘Oh, hey, Jo, sorry, I thought this was Leah’s room.’ He quickly put the phone down.

  Well, I went straight round to see Leah. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I asked. ‘You can’t go out on a motorbike with a grown man!’ She was upset with me, but I didn’t care. No way was my young daughter getting mixed up with a rock star – especially not one who was 20 years older than she was. I knew exactly what those boys were like . . .

  It was sometimes hard to enforce strict rules on our kids when they knew what their parents had got up to over the years. Things calmed down dramatically on the later tours, but this was the Rolling Stones: it was hardly going to be early nights with a mug of cocoa. And we were working so hard that at the end of the day we just wanted to let our hair down with a drink or two. One night in Florida we were having a late-night party in our hotel room when Spin stumbled through the window.

  ‘Spin!’ I shrieked. ‘How the hell did you get here?’

  ‘I took the outside path,’ he said, nodding to the window.

  ‘But we’re on the third floor!’

  It turned out there was a ledge running around the outside of the hotel and Spin had been so drunk he’d simply climbed out of his window and strolled all the way round to ours.

  Another particularly memorable incident happened while we were in Memphis. In our room Ronnie and Keith were playing together while I fussed around, lighting candles and being barmaid. After a while, Keith noticed the guitar that Ronnie was playing.

  ‘Where did you get that from?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s one I borrowed from Mick,’ said Ronnie.

  Without a word, Keith got up, fetched two pillows from our bedroom, put one against the wall, laid the guitar against it, put the other pillow over the top, then opened his doctor’s bag and took out his gun.

  ‘Keith,’ I shrieked, ‘what are you doing?’

  ‘I’m going to shoot that fucking guitar.’

  ‘You can’t do that in our room!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why not? Well . . .’ Really, there was no point in trying to argue with Keith. ‘Oh, all right, then,’ I said, ‘go on.’

  So he did. He shot a bullet straight through the guitar, leaving a perfect hole with pillow fluff sticking out of it. The gunshot was so loud I still can’t believe that nobody came up to find out what was going on.

  The next day at the gig I went to find Pierre, Keith’s roadie.

  ‘You won’t believe what Keith did to Mick’s guitar last night!’ I said, and told him about Keith using our room as a shooting range.

  ‘Which guitar was it?’ asked Pierre. ‘The acoustic? Dark brown?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘That wasn’t actually Mick’s guitar,’ he said.

  ‘It wasn’t?’

  ‘No,’ grinned Pierre. ‘Mick borrowed it from Keith.’

  As Leah spent many years watching her dad get up on stage, night after night, it’s no surprise that she caught the performing bug. She was developing a really nice little voice and in 1998, on the Bridges to Babylon tour, would sing backing vocals with Lisa Fischer during rehearsals. She was good enough to impress Keith, who one day said to her, ‘Come on, Princess, I want you up on stage to sing with me on my song.’

  I don’t know who was more thrilled – Leah or her very proud mummy. I wrote in my diary:

  I saw Lisa holding Leah and taking her on stage for Keith’s first song, ‘Thief in the Night’. At first I was worried, but then oh so happy. My girl was singing and looking SOOO good up there. It was wonderful. It just went too fast. I wanna see it all again . . . I could not control my smile. Oh! Oh! Oh! I loved, felt, smiled, smiled, chuckled, watched, knew, SO chuffed or whatever the words, I need better ones . . .

  Of course, it wasn’t just the music on tour that influenced the kids. Although I always kept them away from the worst of it, they had obviously been exposed to far more rock ’n’ roll behaviour than the average kids. When we lived in New York, Jamie tiptoed downstairs one morning to get a bowl of cereal and found Christopher Reeve, the Superman star, passed out on our sofa, clutching a bottle of booze. My poor child marched straight up to our bedroom in floods of tears. ‘Mum,’ he howled, ‘you killed Superman!’ He didn’t forgive me for days.

  When they reached an age at which they might experiment with drugs I took the decision that it was better in the first instance if they got them from me. I know that many people might be shocked to hear that, but it made sense to me that I should educate my kids about drugs rather than just say, ‘Drugs are bad, don’t do them,’ because I knew damn well that they would. Besides, it would have been hugely hypocritical if I’d lectured them about the evils of drugs when they knew full well that their parents (and all their parents’ friends) had been doing them for years.

  My plan met with varying degrees of success. When Leah was 15 I offered her a puff of a joint, but she was horrified and stormed out of the room: ‘I can’t believe my own mother is offering me drugs!’ So that totally backfired. A few years later, when Ty was 16, I found a little packet in his room of what looked like grass but was actually dried herbs, so I made sure he tried the real stuff in order that he would know what he was buying next time. I also gave him a small packet of coke to try one evening. Irresponsible? Perhaps. But I would much rather he learnt about these things under my roof, where I could keep an eye on him, rather than in some dodgy club taking God knows what.

  Jamie went through a really terrible period in his late teens. After getting expelled from school, he fell in with the wrong crowd and started getting into trouble; nothing serious at first, but then he discovered heroin. His addiction got so bad that I was sure he would either overdose or end up in prison. And despite my years of experience, when my son started shooting up I just didn’t know how to handle it.

  ‘Put him on a boat and send him to sea,’ said Keith. ‘That’ll straighten him out.’ While hardly a practical suggestion in this day and age, it got me thinking. Keith was right: we needed to get Jamie away from his ‘friends’ and keep him distracted with some physical work. In the absence of a merchant navy vessel with an
opening for a ship’s mate, we found the modern equivalent: working backstage on a Stones tour.

  So, in August 1994 Jamie joined the crew of the good ship Voodoo Lounge as it set sail in the States. He was given all the dirty, tedious jobs that no one else wanted to do: shifting furniture, laying carpets, setting up dressing rooms, cleaning. He didn’t get special treatment because Ronnie was his stepdad – quite the opposite. One day I come down to the gig to find my baby totally filthy and stinking like a sewer. ‘I’ve just unblocked a toilet,’ he told me, miserably.

  After a couple of months, Jamie begged me to let him go home.

  ‘You’ve got no idea how the other guys treat me,’ he said. ‘They tease me the whole time. They’re really awful to me. Please, I can’t do it any more, Mum.’

  But there was no way I was going to let him give up. ‘Jamie, you cannot let me down. You can’t just walk away. You owe it to me and to yourself to prove to everyone that you can do this.’

  So he stuck with it – and a few months later it was as if something just clicked into place. Suddenly he wanted to earn everyone’s respect by working hard and doing a really great job. From then on he went from strength to strength, and at the end of the tour he came to Ronnie and me with a business proposal. The guy who supplied the backstage furniture for all the tours had approached Jamie to ask him if Ronnie would be interested in investing in his business. But Jamie had realized that, rather than asking us for money on someone else’s behalf, he should set up his own business.

  With Ronnie’s help, Jamie set up Inner Sanctum, a furniture-hire business for concerts, and within a few years he had not only taken the Stones business from the other guy (well, obviously), but had started doing Madonna, U2–all the big tours. He made a huge success of it.