Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  In August 1974, the Stones made some videos with Michael Lindsay-Hogg. “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll” was mimed to a new backing track, with the band in heavy makeup, camping in U.S. Navy uniforms as soap bubbles gradually filled the tent in which they were supposed to be playing. With the Stones off the road that year, the videos were a newly crucial promotional tool broadcast on Top of the Pops in England and on the late-night syndicated American rock TV shows Midnight Special and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert.

  It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll was released in October 1974 with a blare of radio play for the Stones’ anthemic title single, a dumb song (with a great hook) about the perils and satisfactions of being a rock star, suggesting suicide right onstage. Recognized as a muddled holding action by critics, indifferently received by European fans, the album went to no. 1 in America and definitely had its moments. “If You Can’t Rock Me” led off in a laddish, Faces-style rock-funk groove. “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” continued the funk thing in a soul context. “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll” was a philosophical statement—“Well, I like it”—set to a relaxed chug. The lyrics seemed to echo the opening track’s threat of romantic abandonment in the face of marital strain. “Till the Next Goodbye” was an insincere love song set in Manhattan, where Mick was spending much of his time. The first side ended with “Time Waits for No One,” Mick Taylor’s luminous swan song with the Stones, a pretty ballad of fateful regret that seemed to definitively close out the band’s fruitful midperiod.

  The dreadful, faux-reggae “Luxury” started side two. Actually more ska than reggae, Mick essayed a lame parody of Jamaican patois, giving the song the same jokey treatment Jagger applied to the Stones’ “country” songs. “Dance Little Sister” was a hard, stuttering funk jam with Stu on piano. “If You Really Want to Be My Friend” was an attempt at soul music neoclassicism, with the vocal group Blue Magic (an Atlantic Records act) on background vocals. “Short and Curlies” was another riffing jam with Stu, a taunting song from Keith full of mockery and resentment: “She got you by the balls!” The album ended with Mick’s “Fingerprint File.” His great guitar lick—discordant, disturbing shards of nervous racket—led to a black Hollywood movie about suspicion and surveillance, complete with coke-sniffing effects and an expertly timed one-sided phone contact. “All secrecy, no privacy,” Mick whispered. “Lay low, bye bye.”

  It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll was the first Rolling Stones album whose production was credited to the Glimmer Twins, Mick and Keith. Asked about this by an interviewer, Mick said, “Our motto has always been ’Give us a glimmer.’ ” This was a long-standing joke dating from their 1968 ocean voyage to South America, when a fellow passenger tried to discover the identities of Mick and Marianne, Keith and Anita, who were traveling incognito. This woman kept saying, “Give us a glimmer,” to the mysterious hippies, who thought this very funny.

  Keith’s take on the Glimmer Twins: “A touch of glimmer can be more addicting than smack.”

  * * *

  The Great Guitar Hunt

  By the fall of 1974, Mick Taylor had his fill of life in the Rolling Stones. The band hadn’t toured in more than a year, and he was bored. His marriage was coming apart. He was alienated by not being credited with cowriting songs on It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll. Recording with the Stones was so painful that he didn’t like listening to the records. He was getting more deeply into heroin as well. It was all over for Mick Taylor. He’d never really been one of the Stones anyway.

  The band met in November in Montreux to plan a tour for 1975 and discuss recording plans. Mick Taylor—under pressure from his wife to leave the Stones, already talking to bassist Jack Bruce about forming a new band, and unable to confront Mick Jagger (with whom he was friendly) and Keith (with whom he was not) about his many grievances—said nothing.

  Mick Jagger was all over the place: Paris nightclubs with Rudolf Nureyev, New York parties with Bianca, London rock concerts. While he and Bianca were in Nicaragua in late November, Mick Taylor phoned the Stones’ office to say he was leaving the band. Bill Wyman thought he was bluffing, trying to cut a better deal for himself.

  But after an Eric Clapton show on December 4, at a party at promoter Robert Stigwood’s house, Taylor tried to hand Jagger his resignation. “Mick told me he wanted to do something else,” Jagger said. “He’d played with us for five years and he felt he wanted to play some different kind of music. So I said, ’Okay, that’s fine,’ and that was that.” Later that evening, Jagger was sitting in a car with Ron Wood and Marshall Chess. Jagger told Wood, “Look, I don’t want to split up the Faces. I really dig the band, but if you ever want to move on, would you come with us?”

  Wood was incredibly flattered, but still felt committed to the Faces and told Mick it would be better to find someone else. “If you get real desperate, though,” Wood said, “ring me up.”

  The Rolling Stones were furious with Mick Taylor. Their guitar player was quitting the band three days shy of going back into the studio. On December 7, the Stones returned to Munich to begin the Black and Blue sessions as a quartet with Nicky Hopkins. On December 12, in a series of polite but clipped press releases, the Stones announced Mick Taylor’s departure from the band. Everyone tried to put a good face on it. Keith sent Taylor an insincere telegram: “Really enjoyed playing with you the last five years. Thanks for all the turn-ons. Best wishes and love.” (Taylor’s wife said he cried when he read this.) Jagger, in mischievous mode, told the press, “No doubt we’ll be able to find another six-foot-three guitarist who can do his own makeup.”

  Within a week, the London papers were full of rumors that Taylor had quit the Stones because of money, which he repeatedly denied. “There was no personal animosity in the split,” he told Sounds. “There was no row, no quibbling. I’m very disturbed at the stories going around that it was all to do with credits and royalties. I’m very upset because I like all the guys in the Stones.”

  Keith was raging. “No one leaves this band except in a fucking pine box,” he fumed to friends. Later he said, “The man’s timing was incredibly bad. Why wait until a few days before we were going to start [recording]?” The others—having seen how Keith had treated him—were more puzzled than angry.

  “He wanted to leave to make his own records,” Charlie Watts said later. “I thought he’d be incredible, like a Pat Metheny or something. And it didn’t happen. Nothing happened when he left us.” Keith was less sympathetic. “Mick figured he’d learned enough. He was bored and thought he was now a songwriter of great stature. He had a million plans. Mick is a beautiful guitar player, amazing. But I’m still waiting.”

  “I still don’t really know why he left,” Mick Jagger said. “He never explained, at least to me. He wanted to have a solo career. I’m guessing he found it difficult to get on with Keith.”

  Mick Taylor would spend many years recovering from being a Rolling Stone. “The whole experience made me more cynical,” he said long afterward. “One of the reasons I don’t bother to make records on my own is because I don’t get paid for some of the biggest-selling records of all time. Frankly, I was ripped off. You get cynical about the music business, and it stops you playing.”

  Munich, December 1974. The Stones worked, sullenly, with Nicky Hopkins on a series of long, funk-based jams. Glyn Johns was back as engineer/producer, totally bored as Keith slogged the band through nine-hour versions of the new ballad “Fool to Cry,” Eric Donaldson’s early reggae smash “Cherry Oh Baby,” and a track labeled “Black and Blue Jam” (with visiting Jeff Beck), which years later developed into “Slave.” The Stones’ turn to funk was another intraband compromise, in the same way R&B had been the medium between Brian’s blues and Keith’s rock and roll. Now funk—the dominant black American popular music of the time—became the meeting ground of Mick’s fascination with disco/dance music and Keith’s scholarly obsession with reggae. “Hot Stuff” was the result.

  With Mick Taylor gone, over the next five months the Stones tur
ned their recording sessions into auditions testing the world’s best electric rock guitarists. When word got out there was a vacancy to be filled, a parade of famous ax heroes dutifully made the trek to studios in Rotterdam and Munich, with varying degrees of success. Fiery Irish guitar star Rory Gallagher dropped by to play, prompted by Glyn Johns, who thought he’d be perfect for the Stones, but Mick and Keith barely said hello to him. Peter Frampton was reportedly considered, highly recommended by Bill Wyman and Stu, then dismissed. Rumor had it that Eric Clapton again declined the job.

  Keith moved back to the Wick, where Ron Wood was working on another solo album. They were joined by Wayne Perkins, a longhaired Texas session star and slide guitar wizard who’d rocked up the Wailers’ first album, Catch a Fire, and a host of big-name sessions. Keith and Perkins meshed nicely in London, and when Keith invited him to Munich for the March recording sessions, Perkins thought he had joined the Rolling Stones. In Munich, he played (superbly) on “Fool to Cry” and “Hand of Fate,” and the job seemed to be in Perkins’s grasp. But Keith was starting to feel that he played too much like Mick Taylor.

  Mick invited the brilliant but erratic Jeff Beck to Munich. Beck was a big star and hot off his best-selling jazz-rock Blow by Blow album. Beck cut several (unused) tracks with the Stones, then left Germany after saying insulting things about the rhythm section. Mick vetoed Wayne Perkins as a Rolling Stone and brought in another American blues virtuoso, Harvey Mandel, who played on “Memory Motel” and “Hot Stuff,” the Stones’ new tribute to James Brown’s “The One” funk riff.

  Ron Wood arrived in Munich late in March 1975. His wife, Chrissie, had run off with Jimmy Page, so Woody was at loose ends. He worked on “Crazy Mama” and “Hey Negrita” and was pressured by Keith and Mick to join the Stones, not as a permanent member, but as a temporary hired guitarist on the tour scheduled to begin in only a couple of months.

  “Either you’re joining,” Mick told Wood, “or we aren’t doing the tour.”

  Keith: “Ronnie Wood walked in and any other consideration collapsed. We had to own up that we were an English rock and roll band, and not just English, but London. That’s why Ronnie and I burst into gales of laughter at a certain word. Those little things become a big advantage on the road.”

  Many Rolling Stones fans were disappointed by Ron Wood’s elevation. He wasn’t a soloist like Mick Taylor or a sonic avatar like Brian Jones. He was an entertaining, journeyman-quality rock guitarist with contagious energy and a prodigious life force. Glyn Johns thought Wood the worst choice the Stones could have made, a major disaster both for the talented Wood’s development and for the Stones. Ron was often stoned silly, usually half-drunk, appeared stupid at times. He was Keith’s butt-boy and became the Rolling Stones’ clown and jester, sometimes appearing to degrade himself by flattering his new bosses—the least threatening bloke they could have found. People closer to the Stones realized Wood was hired as a surrogate younger brother, foil and mediator between Mick and Keith. “He brought musical vitality and a powerful, likeable personality into our ranks,” Bill Wyman wrote. “He has always been a positive force in soothing tensions in the band. He’s able to hang with all of us in turn. Acting as a foil for both Keith and Mick, on and off stage, couldn’t have been easy.”

  Ron Wood’s temporary appointment to the Rolling Stones was announced on April 14, 1975, and he was put on salary for the duration of the tour. This arrangement continued when Rod Stewart left the Faces at the end of the year and Woody joined the Stones for good. It would be eighteen more years before Ron Wood was officially made a member of the Rolling Stones and invested with a commensurate financial share.

  * * *

  A Certain Magic in Repetition

  A fascist-looking jet-propelled eagle was the logo of the Rolling Stones’ 1975 Tour of the Americas—TOTA for short—a money-spinning forty-seven shows in twenty-seven venues throughout Gerald Ford’s disco-besotted United States that summer, to be followed by a tour of South American capitals that fall. Charlie Watts helped supervise the design of the tour, with its two lotus-shaped stages, one with “petals” extending into the audience, the other with hydraulic petals that unfolded around the band at the start of the shows. It was to be a showbiz tour, with Mick relying on stage props for the first time. Outlandish inflatables, trapeze swings, and Billy Preston’s minstrel-like disco act would, he hoped, compensate Stones fans for what was missing from that tour—any new creative edge and a sense of mission. The spark of the band was low, so they depended on old-fashioned flash to get them through. Much of the year, flash worked well for the Rolling Stones, who managed to play some of the best rock shows ever performed.

  The Stones assembled in April to begin rehearsals at a Montauk Point house rented from Andy Warhol’s film director, Paul Morrissey. Keith’s U.S. visa problems had been fixed by Mick, who intervened with a social contact, American ambassador Walter Annenberg. After another Swiss hemodialysis cure, Keith passed a blood test in London and got his visa. Ron Wood finished mixing his album Now Look at Electric Lady Studio in New York and went directly to Montauk to join the Stones. Security around the house was tight due to renewed threats from the Hell’s Angels, still bent on Altamont revenge and rumored to be planning an amphibious landing on the beachfront property.

  Billy Preston was the tour’s musical director, helping to plan the set and rearranging some of the Stones’ warhorse numbers. Drummer Ollie Brown was hired away from Stevie Wonder’s band to play percussion, and his timbales, cowbells, and congas freed Charlie Watts from rock timekeeping, allowing him to play in a lighter, more swinging style. Preston’s manager had demanded his client perform a mini-set of his two radio hits, “Outta Space” and “Nothin’ from Nothin’,” during the shows, so the Stones got even deeper into funk during rehearsals. Preston’s songs would come near the end of the concerts so Mick could rest for the five-song finales. Missing entirely was Bobby Keys; Keith wanted him back, but Mick refused. Keys was broke and living in Los Angeles, where he played bar gigs as “Mr. Brown Sugar.” The Stones toured without horns that year.

  A press conference was scheduled to launch the tour in Manhattan on May 1. They needed a gimmick, something catchy. Charlie remembered that the old Harlem jazz bands used to advertise their shows by playing in the streets on flatbed trucks. So as a big crowd of the New York press gathered at lunchtime at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Greenwich Village, the Rolling Stones pulled up front in a light drizzle, blasting “Brown Sugar” with amps set at ten on the back of an eighteen-wheel tractor trailer. Surprised journalists poured into the street, and Ian Stewart threw them leaflets listing the tour dates. The truck pulled away, the band in full cry. Two blocks away, the Stones jumped into waiting limos and disappeared.

  Mick and Bianca were living in Manhattan, but soon Mick was back in Montauk as rehearsals continued, and Bianca began to be seen around New York on the arms of other men. Andy Warhol made the series of Jagger photos that were turned into silkscreen portraits, and took pictures of the Stones biting each other. On May 18, Mick accidentally slashed his wrist on a glass door in a restaurant, requiring twenty stitches. A few days later, the band gathered in an airplane hangar at Stewart Airport in Newburgh, New York, to rehearse on their lotus stages for the first time. The new production included lights designed by Broadway technical director Jules Fisher and huge speakers suspended above the stage, since the lotus wings had no room for amps. Mick used a wireless microphone for the first time, freeing him from the tyranny of wires forever. Mick also test-drove the giant inflatable white penis that burst out of the stage during the guitar vamps on “Starfucker” in a coup de théâtre of ironic ribaldry and blatant self-parody. Another balloon, a confetti-spewing green dragon, would be manipulated by Mick and Ollie Brown during the last song of the set.

  Mick did a round of interviews to promote their tour, answering innumerable queries about the new Rolling Stone. “I wanted someone that was easy to get on with and that was a good player and
used to playing onstage . . . Woody’s personality seemed to fit the bill. Onstage he’s got a lot of style, and it’s got to be fun on the road. That’s what it’s all about.” Rolling Stone reporter Dave Marsh asked him why he was touring. “It’s my job,” Mick said. “My vocation. No musician is beyond that, until he gets too old. There’s a certain magic in repetition.”

  With no new album to promote, Rolling Stones Records released the compilation Made in the Shade, a ten-track post-1971 anthology that delivered hit singles and concert faves in a poolside-by-the-pyramids sleeve. Allen Klein trumped this with Metamorphosis, a mislabeled, scattershot collection of old Stones demos and outtakes recorded in the sixties. Though not without interest for the band’s hard-core followers, Metamorphosis had replaced a Bill Wyman–proposed project known as The Black Box. This was an insider’s collection, assembled by Wyman from the Stones’ archive, with carefully selected rarities and historically minded production notes. The Black Box project was ultimately vetoed by ABKCO for not including enough publishing-rich Jagger/Richards songs. The Stones were annoyed by Metamorphosis but powerless to make it go away.

  Old friends also noticed the Stones were a cranky lot. “The money’s got them in trouble,” Stu told press rep Lisa Robinson. “They can’t even live in their own country. They have to go from one hotel to another.” Mick complained bitterly that the tax laws had forced a whole creative community into exile and had killed British music.

  May 1975. The Stones gathered in New Orleans for the final rehearsals. Their new press agent, Paul Wasserman, an older, bearded guy from L.A., introduced himself to Keith and said he’d be handling the press. Keith hugged him, whispered, “Better you than me,” and walked away. The band sounded good. Ron Wood trembled in fear, but his blazing slide guitar gave the Stones a new screeching jolt. Playing with a younger black drummer woke up laconic, thirty-four-year-old Charlie Watts, empowered him to play with a funky kick in his drums. It was like the whole band had gotten its blood changed, and they came out swinging. The ’75 shows were the longest of the Stones’ career, as if they thought they had to compete with the three-hour marathons of the other big English bands like Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull.