As the tour progressed, the shows often split in two, with the Stones playing listlessly on the old battle hymns, and with a brittle power pop surge on the new songs—“Respectable,” “Beast of Burden,” “Miss You,” and especially “Shattered,” which turned into an explosive trance riff that blew minds all over the United States that summer. It was Keith’s band on the old stuff, but Mick drove the new songs, playing fast rhythm guitar. Early in the tour, they taped a New Jersey theater show that captured a screaming, maniacal “When the Whip Comes Down” and Keith croaking out “Happy” with a saw-toothed fury that showed that even on this, perhaps the low point of their concert career, the Stones were still capable of transcendence on any given night. Few missed Billy Preston’s fuzzy gospel stylings, and on their best nights the Stones still managed to play stripped-down, grease-gun rock and roll. When shows went well, Keith credited the new guy. “With Ron Wood, the band’s playing more like the way it did when Brian and I used to play at the beginning.” Asked about writing songs, Keith said he was “more interested in creating sounds, something that has a different atmosphere and feel to it.” Asked what inspired him, he answered, “The latest stuff coming out of Jamaica.”
The tour divided into camps—vivacious Mick and Jerry versus truculent Keith, with Wood as the tenuous link. Keith avoided Jerry and didn’t like that she was now making appearances with the Stones. Emerging from his long drug stupor, he tried asserting himself in business matters, annoying Mick, who had run the Stones alone for most of the decade. “I thought I was doing Mick a favor,” Keith said later, “but he saw it as a power grab.”
Off heroin, Keith was becoming more human. He even let Woody bring Bill Wyman to his room one night for a hatchet-burying session that allowed the two Stones—who’d never gotten on—to begin speaking again. “Woody’s come along and pulled both sides together,” Wyman told an interviewer. “He’s the reason for the band getting closer, being able to talk to each other, even saying unheard-of things like ’You were great tonight.’ Woody started to get that happening. He’s fabulous! He made this band come to life again.”
After playing Soldier Field in Chicago in July, the Stones (without an ailing Bill) jammed with their mentor Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon at Muddy’s regular club gig at the Quiet Knight. Muddy was on a high, riding a successful album (Hard Again) recorded with Johnny Winter. The Stones gathered round the venerable Delta legend, who performed sitting on a stool, and did hammy versions of “Mannish Boy” and “Rollin’ Stone Blues.”
The Stones were flying this tour on a smaller plane, a Convair 580 turboprop. In Texas, Mick explained the Stones’ lackluster performance to their restive audience: “If the band seems slightly lacking in energy, it’s because we spent all last night fucking. Ha ha! We do our best.” In Tucson, hometown girl Linda Ronstadt (in silk hot pants) joined Mick onstage to sing “Tumbling Dice.” Keith freaked out when he saw the sign outside the hall billboarding “Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones.”
The tour began to wind down in California. Bobby Keys and Nicky Hopkins joined the Stones for the finales of the huge Anaheim Stadium shows—listless disasters that the band tried to phone in. Keith was doing heroin again (“Hollywood—it always kills you in the end”), the crowd choked on the red dust of the baseball infield, and everyone said the shows sucked. Marsha Hunt’s lawyers tried to seize Mick’s money from these shows for unpaid child support.
The final Stones shows were in San Francisco. Keith wanted to keep the tour energy going, so the Stones and Ian McLagan stayed in L.A. and cut some tracks at an old haunt, RCA Studios in Hollywood. The sessions were closed, with only drummer Jim Keltner allowed in to hang with his pal Charlie Watts. Working from midnight on, the Stones cut a dozen songs, including the basic tracks of “Summer Romance” and “Where the Boys All Go.” On his own, Keith cut a version of Jimmy Cliff’s reggae anthem “The Harder They Come,” with Ronnie on guitar, which would be the B side of “Run Rudolph Run” later in the year.
For a while, Keith, Woody, and Jo lived in a house rented from the Getty family. Keith and Ron bought pure Iranian heroin from a Los Angeles dealer named Kathy Smith and spent their time “chasing the dragon”—smoking fumes from smack cooking in foil. Keith dropped an ice pick on his bare foot while cutting chunks from an opium ball, but didn’t seem to mind. Then Woody and Jo moved into a new house they’d bought in Mandeville Canyon, while Keith and Lil hid out in a house nearby. It caught fire while they were in bed one morning, and they had to climb out a window, naked. With fire engines wailing in the distance and Keith’s ammunition exploding in the burning house, Keith and Lil were trying to cover themselves when a car pulled up, driven by a cousin of Anita’s who lived nearby. They jumped into the car and disappeared just as the police arrived.
* * *
The Blind Angel
Autumn 1978. Keith Moon, the Who’s volcanic drummer, the raucous Bacchus of London pop excess, overdosed on antidepressants after detoxing from drugs and alcohol. Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts went to the funeral representing the Stones, who all felt that they’d lost a friend.
By October, Some Girls had sold almost 4 million units. “Respectable” was released as a single, quickly followed by “Shattered” (with the quasi-reggae “Everything Is Turning to Gold” on the B side). To promote these, the Stones agreed to appear on American TV’s premier venue—the opening show of that season’s Saturday Night Live, in New York’s NBC studios.
The show was in its fourth year and at the zenith of its hipness. Hot comedians John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd had spun their Blues Brothers skits into a hit album and a crack R&B homage band (with Steve Jordan on drums). It would be the Stones’ first live television broadcast in ten years.
The Stones rehearsed with the SNL cast the first week in October, staying at the Plaza Hotel. But Olympian intoxication sabotaged this meeting of the gods. The Stones, especially Keith, proved incapable of delivering comedy lines, and the druggy skits involving the band were dropped. Regarding Keith, who could barely stand, let alone remember the single line he was given, cast member Laraine Newman observed dryly, “It’s interesting to be standing there working with someone who’s dead.” The Stones guzzled Scotch and vodka and openly snorted lines of cocaine in the studio. The network’s censor told producer Lorne Michaels that Mick would have to wear underwear for the broadcast because of the bulge problem. After hours, there was jamming and high-octane dope intake in Belushi’s “vault,” a soundproof music room in his apartment. On the day of the broadcast, the Stones showed up at NBC mostly drunk. Mick had rehearsed till he was hoarse, and they had to play “Beast” an octave lower so he could sing it. They played brilliantly at the dress rehearsal but choked at airtime, giving mediocre and nervous performances of “Miss You,” “Beast of Burden,” and “Shattered.” Mick grossed out the nation by licking Ronnie’s lips during a close-up at the microphone. The consensus at the show was that the Stones had blown it. SNL broadcast the Stones’ better dress rehearsal tape when the show was rerun later that year.
Ronnie Wood’s daughter Leah was born later that month, just before her dark Uncle Keith had his big day in court. It was eighteen months after the Toronto busts, a period of strategic delays and legal maneuvering that had its denouement when Keith appeared in court on October 23, 1978. Supporting him were his girlfriend Lil and Canadian citizens Dan Aykroyd and Lorne Michaels. Press interest in the case had intensified after the Sex Pistols’ recent disintegration on their first American tour, and the subsequent indictment of bassist Sid Vicious for murdering his American girlfriend in New York. The press gallery was jammed with reporters eager to report Keith Richards’s sad downfall as well. But the detective who had arrested Keith had been killed in a car accident earlier in the year, and there were rumors that the Canadian government was embarrassed and that Keith might walk.
As the hearing began, the judge threw out some of the prosecution’s evidence and declared Keith’s arm-long rap sheet inadmissi
ble. When the heroin trafficking and cocaine possession charges were also dropped, seasoned observers had the impression that a colossal and costly fix was in. After Keith made some properly contrite noises and pleaded guilty only to heroin possession, he received a year in jail, suspended to probation. Other wrist-slap conditions included continued drug treatment and a benefit concert for the Canadian Institute for the Blind within six months.
Keith raised his fist in the air when the judge was finished, immensely relieved he wasn’t going to prison. Fists in the air and cheers outside the courtroom. The deal and the legal fees had cost him a reported $3 million, but he didn’t care. The best part was who really got him off—if the legend is true.
Keith: “There was this little blind girl, Rita, following us around on the previous [1975] tour, and I asked the roadies to look after her . . . It turns out that this little girl knows or is related to the judge who’s trying the case. So totally unbeknownst to me, she goes to see this judge at his home, tells him a simple story—how I’ve looked after her and all that, and the upshot is that he passes a ruling that as the major payment for this offense we have to play a free concert at this blind school. My blind angel came through, bless her heart.” In addition, the sentence settled Keith’s legal situation enough that he was ultimately able to get a green card, the permanent entry visa to live in the United States.
There was some outrage in Canada’s conservative press and judiciary circles over the leniency of the sentence, and the government was forced to announce it would appeal. Things dragged on for another year, until the heat died down. Keith Richards has never been arrested since.
November 1978. Keith recuperated in Jamaica, then flew back to New York. Peter Tosh’s Bush Doctor album was out and selling well along with its single, Peter and Mick duetting on “Don’t Look Back.” This gave the Stones massive new credibility in the music world because it seemed so right for the band that had helped rescue the blues to now use its resources to catalyze a new black music that inspired them. Tosh and his band were selling out their shows, playing the militant “rockers” style with astonishing drama and power, riding the true cutting edge of popular music. Mick caught their act at the Bottom Line in New York. When Tosh called on him to sing, Mick was bodily lifted up and passed over the heads of the audience from the back of the room to the stage. On December 12, Mick and Keith arrived at NBC, where Mick would sing “Don’t Look Back” with Tosh on Saturday Night Live. There was a tumult of Rastas, comedians, and rock stars in the dressing room as Mick and Keith smoked a spliff with Tosh and posed for photographers. More spliffs, and Mick bounced around the nerveless Tosh as Sly and Robbie popped their rhythms. Then Mick disgraced Tosh (in the eyes of all watching Jamaicans) by licking Tosh’s lips in a lunatic replay of his lingual assault on Wood a few weeks earlier.
On December 18, Keith went to a thirty-fifth-birthday party for himself in New York, then flew home for Christmas with Marlon and Anita. Airport photographers didn’t recognize her. Bloated from alcohol, with stringy hair and gaps in her teeth, the hag who was once the toast of Europe staggered past them incognito.
* * *
The New Barbarians
January 1979. Jamaica was so politically unstable that reggae’s international wing had to relocate. Chris Blackwell built a new recording studio at his Compass Point property in the Bahamas, where the Rolling Stones gathered that month to work on their next album, the hotly anticipated follow-up to Some Girls. The new album had cynical working titles like Certain Women and More Fast Ones. There was a lot left over from Paris the previous year: “Start Me Up” and “Claudine,” with its funny chant “Clau-dine’s back in jail again” to a rub-a-dub reggae beat, a little like what a new wave band called the Police was doing: a few bars of reggae whipped up in the chorus by a burst of rock rimfire. “Jah Is Not Dead” was another experiment with rockers-style reggae and R&B, Mick vocalizing in fake West Indian patois. Visiting San Francisco musician Boz Scaggs also played at that session. The tape features Mick angrily telling some coke-snorting hangers-on to leave the studio.
The Stones long disco-rock piece called “Dance” began as a Latin jam at Compass Point with Michael Shrieve playing percussion and Max Romeo on vocals. “I am what I am,” Mick sang on the early versions, “and I know I’ve got my faults.” He was fighting Bianca in court at the time; she wanted half of his estimated 10-million-pound fortune (she wouldn’t get close). He was also battling Keith, who began to assert himself regarding production details he’d ignored during years of drug coma. The control-driven Mick Jagger couldn’t believe Keith was back and wanted in, and often responded with eye-rolling contempt at his suggestions.
Keith had to play his Canadian benefit concert by the end of April to fulfill his sentence. This coincided with Ron Wood having to promote Gimme Some Neck, his third solo album and his first for Columbia. The label, in a major coup for Wood, had loaned him the services of Bob Dylan and a new Dylan tune called “Seven Days,” which Wood had recorded in Malibu, with Mick Fleetwood on drums. Neck was Wood’s best record. Its songs about anxiety, reggae jams, Faces-style raunch, and acoustic interludes amounted to a proto-Stones album, since most of them played on it.
So Keith and Ronnie put together a road band, the New Barbarians (name courtesy of Neil Young; the “New” had to be tacked on when they learned there was already a Barbarians). The band included the two guitarists, Bobby Keys on sax, Ian McLagan on keys, Meters drummer Zigaboo Modeliste, and jazz-rock star Stanley Clarke on bass.
The New Barbarians rehearsed in Los Angeles in February 1979, playing all night at Wood’s house in Mandeville Canyon as John Belushi laid out generous lines of the devil’s dandruff. They were buying Persian Brown heroin from Belushi’s friend Kathy Smith and chasing the dragon to relax. The comedian was also the master of ceremonies when the New Barbarians made their world debut in front of five thousand fans in Oshawa, Ontario, on April 29, opening for the Rolling Stones.
Belushi: “I’m just a sleazy actor on a late-night TV show, but here’s some real musicians! Come on up here! Keith Richards! Ron Wood! The New Barbarians—go nuts!!” Powered by one of the best drummers of the era, the New Barbs gave the basic Richards/Wood guitar attack a funky second-line hop. They did Wood’s songs in a loose, jamming style, then powered up for Keith’s numbers: “Happy” and “Before They Make Me Run.” Both of these benefit shows concluded with the unrehearsed Stones, whose entire touring apparatus had been driven up from storage in Dallas for the only concerts the Stones would play anywhere that year.
The New Barbarians spent April and May on the road, selling out all their shows. Keith was traveling with his girlfriend Lil and played well almost every night, usually drinking a quart of vodka during the shows. He sang “Love in Vain” with Woody and did solo turns on Sam Cooke’s “Let’s Go Steady” and “Apartment #9” in the heartache style of his Toronto recordings. Living on alcohol and cocaine, Keith assumed a particularly spectral appearance as his hair began to gray and his face caved in, and rumors of his impending demise again spread through the music industry. Reporters who got backstage noted that the post-performance Keith looked like he’d just been crucified. Bobby Keys was redeeming himself after years of scuffling in bars. His playing on the big finale, “I Can Feel the Fire,” was often the high point of the set. The tour ended at the Forum in Los Angeles on May 21. Expenses had been so lavish that Woody and Keith made no money, and Gimme Some Neck stiffed as well. Keith and Woody’s brotherly bond began to strain under financial pressures and Wood’s rapid ascent into drugdom’s First Division.
On June 21, Anita was at home with her son and some houseguests, Fred Sessler’s son Jeffrey and seventeen-year-old Scott Cantrell, a local kid Anita had taken in. Cantrell was lying in Anita’s bed, watching television and toying with the .38 pistol that Keith had bought in Florida on the previous Stones tour. While supposedly playing Russian roulette, Cantrell shot himself in the head and died in what the headlines called Keith
Richards’s bed.
The police arrested Anita. They later cleared her of involvement with Cantrell’s death but charged her with possession of stolen firearms. Suddenly “Claudine” didn’t seem so funny when Anita was looking at four years in prison. If the suicide weapon could be tied to Keith, no one knew what would happen. The New York papers smeared Anita with accusations of black magic, animal sacrifice, orgies with the local youth, witchcraft, and poor housekeeping. Keith called her from Paris, furious that she had lost his gun.
This was the final nail in the coffin of the Keith and Anita saga. Keith’s life with Anita in all its bloody and sordid glory was the subject of Spanish Tony’s recently published memoir, Up and Down with the Rolling Stones, which portrayed them as callous libertines and pathetic junkies. Keith’s Canadian case had been reopened, to appeal the perceived leniency of his sentence, and that decision was hanging in the balance. His American visa was jeopardized, and now the lawyers warned him to stay clear. “That boy who shot himself in my house really ended it for us,” Anita said later. “It was the end of our personal relationship.” Separated from his family, Keith was virtually homeless. He spent most of the summer of 1979 hiding at Fred Sessler’s house in Florida, and his long affair with Lil began to cool.
Old Gods Almost Dead Page 47
