Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  In the wake of Some Girls’ massive success, there was a spurt of Stones-related music released that year. Another anthology, Time Waits for No One, featuring tracks from 1971 to 1977, was released in Europe as the last album due under the old WEA contract. The one true masterpiece of this era was Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English, a harrowing song cycle about betrayal and decay, declaimed in a ravaged gravel-alto amid a ferociously new wave band setting. It was a stunning comeback for Marianne after years of living her Burroughsian dream of abject addiction and helplessness, an existential conceit that fundamentally worked out, considering the magisterial power of the Broken English music and persona. (Critic Camille Paglia claimed Marianne’s album was one of the greatest works of art ever produced by a woman.) The title song was about the anarchist Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany and burned with a low flame that caught the edgy, terror-obsessed mood of 1979, the year of the Red Brigades. The searing “Why’d Ya Do It?” was perhaps the most directly penetrating song about infidelity ever written, and took enormous courage and skill to pull off. Broken English was an avant-garde sensation, one of the great Rolling Stones albums, even though none of them played on it.

  Less successful were the other Stones-related records. Gimme Some Neck was followed by Mick Taylor’s first solo album, Leather Jacket, a Big Statement album without any real songs. The title track was a bitter portrait of Keith and Anita, while the rest of the album sounded like familiar, recycled guitar moves. The third album in this continuum was Ian McLagan’s Troublemaker, recorded in Los Angeles later that year.

  In November, while Ron Wood was working on Mac’s record in L.A., Bobby Keys brought something special to the studio one night. It was a new kind of cocaine, little rocks one cooked and smoked instead of snorted. One big toke provided a bolt of crystal-clear energy. It wore off a few minutes later: time for another hit. “Freebasing” cocaine was even more addictive than heroin, even more of a job, involving a chemistry set of retorts and burners that often exploded in the user’s face. It was the immediate precursor of the crack epidemic that seriously threatened black culture later on.

  Woody got totally addicted right away. John Belushi started freebasing at his house. Mac got totally hooked. The dope bills skyrocketed as Troublemaker was recorded in a haze of reggae smoke and the jivey backbeat of Faces rock and roll. Mac’s album soon joined Gimme Some Neck and Leather Jacket in the bargain bins after its release the following year.

  The Stones tensely finished the major recording for Emotional Rescue in Paris that fall.

  They took their tapes to New York in November, mixing at Electric Lady. Epic struggles in the studio over mixes, levels, sequencing, everything. “Dance” was supposed to have been a Stones instrumental jam, but Mick insisted on putting words to it, writing what Keith derided as an opera. Keith: “It was supposed to just have this minimal lyric. Instead, Mick comes up with Don Giovanni.” Huge fight over whether “All About You” or “Let’s Go Steady” would be the token Keith song on the album. Stories of serious bad blood circulated around New York amid published (and denied) reports that Bill Wyman was leaving the Stones and that Ron Wood was killing himself with freebase. Mick took Keith’s pithy criticisms in the studio as personal attacks and saw his primacy over the Stones threatened. Word got back to Keith that Mick wished out loud that Keith would go back to being a full-time junkie.

  The seventies were all over now, and the Rolling Stones were tattered but erect. Bianca got her divorce and custody of Jade. Mick and Jerry bumped into her at Woody Allen’s 1980 New Year’s party in New York, and everyone got on well. Charlie and Stu were touring in a boogie-woogie revival band called Rocket 88. Bill Wyman was photographing his neighbor, artist Marc Chagall, in Provence. Ron Wood was making his next album with a glass pipe. Anita Pallenberg pleaded guilty to a reduced weapons charge and was fined. Marianne Faithfull stayed true to her vocation, refusing to give up her beloved drugs. Keith Richards remained the standard-bearer of the old rock star style. “I’ve studied this shit,” he said of dope. “I’m a walking laboratory. I’m Baudelaire rolled in with a few other cats.” But his tone, and his attitude, soon changed after he found a new girlfriend in New York, one who helped him grow into another way of living.

  We were just tired of being the Rolling Stones, and since we couldn’t find a way out, we started fighting and smashing it all to pieces. If we made it through the eighties, we can go on forever.

  Keith Richards

  * * *

  From the Neck Down

  Keith Richards was thirty-six years old on December 18, 1979. His old London friend David Courts made him a silver skull ring as a present, a grinning death’s head that became a trademark, emblematic of its owner’s precarious address on the edge of mortality. Keith was wearing the ring at the birthday party held for him the night he met his wife.

  She was a twenty-two-year-old model named Patti Hanson. She was a wholesome, bright-looking blonde with lovely eyes and a perfect smile. She had been modeling since she was sixteen, had been in a couple of movies, was one of that year’s top models in New York. She was the youngest daughter of a religious family from Staten Island, very intelligent and sweet, and mutual friends had been trying to fix her up with Keith for weeks. Playing Cupid, Jerry Hall had invited her to Keith’s party at the Roxy Roller Disco, but Anita had also showed up in case Keith wanted to come back to his family in the wake of breaking up with Lil.

  Keith called Patti a few days later and she joined his midnight entourage—Fred Sessler, poet Jim Carroll, Max Romeo, and assorted Rastas—in lightning raids by limo on Trax, restaurants, crash pads, and obscure reggae shops in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Patti Hanson started to really like this guy. He was kind to her, didn’t bother her for sex, seemed to want a friend more than anything else. She saw he needed someone to keep away the dope dealers who pestered him day and night. It wasn’t exactly love at first sight, but on the last day of 1979, she went home to Staten Island to be with her family. When she returned after midnight, she found Keith sitting on the steps of her apartment building, waiting for her in the cold. After that, with this American girl at his side, Keith’s worst days were behind him. She even gave him a set of keys to her apartment.

  Supposedly off heroin, Keith had been scoring dope in secret armed forays to Eighth Avenue by himself, buying just enough to keep going. Patti helped him clean up after he moved in with her in March 1980. “After ten years of trying to kill myself,” Keith reported, “I decided I’d better get on with my life.” Keith again switched his addiction to a more socially acceptable alcoholism. Patti kept the dealers away, and even old comrades like Fred Sessler were taboo for a while. Keith was dead drunk the first time he met Patti’s parents, who weren’t thrilled their girl had brought home the prince of darkness. But as their affair stabilized into domestic routine, Keith actually managed to stay off smack.

  But people could only shake their heads about Ron Wood, raving freebase fiend. In January 1980, he and Jo were busted on the Caribbean island of St. Martin with 260 grams of cocaine. After three days, they were released and deported without being charged, after they complained that the police had planted the coke in their rented house. Five years after joining the Stones, Wood was impoverished from keeping up with Keith’s and Mick’s lavish styles while earning less than half of what the other Stones made. His drug use so enfeebled him that he spent the next five years expecting to be fired at any moment.

  Bill Wyman told the press he was quitting the band in 1982. At a dinner party in New York, Mick Jagger told Warhol and Burroughs that the Stones probably wouldn’t be around for the band’s twentieth anniversary. Charlie Watts, now famous in certain English country circles as a sheepdog breeder, told an interviewer that rock and roll was just a load of bollocks anyway, and he hated playing it.

  The early-1980 skirmishes of the War of the Stones began in various Manhattan studios as Mick and Keith traded volleys while they mixed their next album, Emotional Rescue, tha
t spring. Keith chafed at Mick’s autocratic control over the band and its hundred employees. Mick hated dealing with Keith in his often-incoherent, ratchet-knife-flicking state. Keith wanted to go on the road, while Mick wanted to go on vacation. The band wanted “Claudine” on the album, but the lawyers said it was libelous and the song was killed. Keith almost took “All About You” off the album as well, fearing he’d stolen the melody from something he’d heard on the radio. The only thing they agreed on was the first single, “Emotional Rescue,” which was released in June 1980 with “Down in the Hole” on the B side. Despite its fey, quasi-reggae structure, the song defied some pessimistic predictions and was a Top Ten record in America and Europe in the summer of 1980.

  The Emotional Rescue album was also released that month. Eclectic and sometimes daring, it turned out to be a genre-crossing experiment that honorably ignored its obvious opportunities as the sequel to Some Girls. Keith and Ron Wood’s “Dance” began the album as an attempt to fuse rock’s dynamics and spaciousness to the disco format. Mick locates the album on the corner of 8th Street and Sixth Avenue in the opening lines, continuing the Londoner-in-Gotham ambience of their previous album. “Dance” introduced a newly martial Stones persona, backed by Bobby Keys’s growling, multitracked saxes. It had the epic feeling of a sound track to a war movie and seemed to launch the Rolling Stones into the 1980s with an almost militant seriousness.

  Rescue continued as a sometimes-bizarre mélange of styles. “Summer Romance” was fast and punky. “I’m a serious man with serious lusts,” Mick bawled, “and have to do away with this crucifix stuff.” An original Stones reggae song followed, “Send It to Me,” Charlie having finally figured out reggae rhythm, with Ron Wood playing bass. “Let Me Go” was a country rocker with Woody playing pedal steel guitar and Keith applying some Jamaican “dub-style” mixing techniques. Side one ended with the bizarre lament “Indian Girl.” Set in the Nicaragua of the Sandinista era as guitars strum, a marimba bubbles, and Jack Nitzsche’s mariachi horns blare horribly, “Indian Girl” was Mick’s sympathetic depiction of a revolution struggling against Yankee aggression, delivered in a series of absurd accents and skewed viewpoints. Critics and fans agreed that “Indian Girl” was one of the strangest things the Stones had ever done.

  Side two: “Where the Boys Go” was more yobbo punk, music for soccer hooligans. Stu played piano, and there were some synthetic “girls” singing on the tag in what sounded like a chorus from the musical Grease. Keith played the blues on “Down in the Hole” as Sugar Blue wailed on harp and Mick went “down in the gut-tah” with his tale of trading sex for cigarettes and nylons in the American zone.

  “Emotional Rescue” was set behind the surreal scrim of Mick’s African “covered voice” falsetto, sung to a rub-a-dub reggae-disco format previously unknown to mankind. Stu played electric piano, Wood played bass, and Bobby Keys’s sax entered during the vocal shift when Mick started his barefaced hokum (ad-libbed in the studio) about coming to Jerry Hall’s emotional rescue on a fine Arab charger. This was followed by “She’s So Cold,” a tepid but sweet rocker that had evolved from an enervated studio jam in the Bahamas.

  Keith Richards’s “All About You” closed Emotional Rescue in what was widely interpreted as a devastating kiss-off to Anita Pallenberg. “So sick and tired of dogs like you—the first to get laid—always the last bitch to get paid.” As the quiet ballad reached its climax, Keith audibly choked himself up and moaned, “So how come I’m still in love with you?”

  The Stones spent the early summer of 1980 doing press interviews at their office at 75 Rockefeller Plaza in New York. Mick, dressed in pastel summer cottons, offered clipped bromides about Rescue, which he described as a piss-taking pastiche and the chaotic result of two years of recording. He said rock and roll was “a false vision” as a powerful social force and answered queries about whether Keith actually helped produce Rescue with, “You’ve got to be joking.” Keith received the press with an open bottle of Jack Daniel’s, generous helpings of snowy Peruvian crystals, and flamboyant flourishes of his ratchet knife. Stone drunk for many of his interviews, Keith often put a framed photo of Charlie Watts in front of his interrogators, explaining that Charlie was the Rolling Stones. After manfully fending off rumors about infighting among the band and Bill Wyman’s supposed retirement, Keith inevitably had to answer questions on “All About You.” He parried these by saying the song was about his constantly farting dalmatian, hence all the dog references in the song. Bobby Keys and others close to Keith thought the song was as much about Mick Jagger as about Anita.

  Emotional Rescue was really hated by the British press. New Musical Express slagged the record as “devoid of passion, bloated with clumsy posing and artifice.”

  Even a revitalized John Lennon put down the Stones in an interview published in Playboy: “They’re still congratulating the Stones for being together 112 years. Whoopee! At least Charlie’s still got his family. In the Eighties they’ll be asking, ’Why are these guys still together? Can’t they hack it on their own? Why do they have to be surrounded with a gang? Is the little leader frightened someone’s gonna knife him in the back?’ . . . They’ll be showing pictures of the guy with lipstick wriggling his ass and the four guys with the evil black make-up trying to look raunchy. That’s gonna be the joke in the future. Being in a gang is great when you’re a certain age. But when you’re in your forties and you’re still in one, it just means you’re still 18 in the head.”

  Late in July, Mick took Jerry to Morocco for his birthday and telexed Keith in New York that the Stones wouldn’t tour that year. Keith was livid but powerless to do anything about it.

  October 1980. The Rolling Stones convening in Paris, decided to tour America in 1981 and Europe the next year. Peter Rudge was out as tour director, replaced by Bill Graham. With the tour on and a new album needed, engineer Chris Kimsey, who always taped everything if a Stone was working in the studio, told the feuding Stones that he could pull together an album’s worth of songs from existing outtakes and lyricless instrumental tracks already in the can. Later that month, they started work at Pathé-Marconi on “Start Me Up,” transforming it from a reggae tune to a ballsy, anthemic rocker.

  They worked in Paris for much of November, fieldstripping old songs and recycling less-than-magic riffs from the Stones archive. One day a technician asked Charlie Watts about some old bits of confetti stuck under the rims of the drummer’s snares and tom-toms. “Hyde Park, 1969,” Charlie deadpanned without missing a beat, as the startled roadie realized that Watts had never bothered to change his drumheads.

  John Lennon was assassinated by a fan outside his Central Park West home on December 8, 1980, an event that deeply traumatized the Stones along with everyone else. Bill Wyman called a New York radio station from his house in France to vent his feelings over the air. When Mick returned to New York, he started carrying a gun.

  * * *

  Like Punk Never Happened

  January 1981. Appalled at his deafening, block-rocking, arena-grade sound system, Keith Richards’s neighbors tried to get him evicted from the downtown Manhattan flat he shared with Patti Hanson. Mick Jagger was in Peru filming Werner Herzog’s gonzo conquistador epic Fitzcarraldo (Mick’s first movie role in twelve years), but production was delayed when Amazon headhunters attacked the jungle location. Mick quit the film when Herzog’s reshoot conflicted with the Stones’ tour later that year.

  In March, Rolling Stones Records released Sucking in the Seventies, a subpar anthology of late-decade tracks with a remix of “Dance Pt. 2” and a live “When the Whip Comes Down” from a 1978 theater gig. A long instrumental version of “Dance” was also issued on a twelve-inch single, closer in spirit to the stirring, thematic Richards/Wood rock-disco experiments of 1979.

  That same month, Mick and Keith and their women met up in Barbados to plan the upcoming tours and work on song lyrics. Mick and Jerry went on to Mustique, a tiny private island in the eastern Caribbean, an exclusive
tropical getaway for British aristocracy and millionaires. Mick would soon build a winter vacation home there. Keith worked on reggae crooner Max Romeo’s album Holding Out My Love to You with Sly and Robbie at Channel One studio in Kingston, and kept an eye on Peter Tosh, who was about to release his third album for the Stones’ label. Tosh’s lung-busting ganja habit was making him increasingly deranged, and Bob Marley’s death from cancer that May sent him off the deep end. He started waving a scimitar in his shows and had a guitar made in the shape of a machine gun. Tosh correctly predicted that he would be the next major reggae star to die.

  Tattoo (the original title; “You” was added at the last moment by Mick) was in rush-job production. Chris Kimsey had been digging in the vaults, rounding up old riffs and ideas from as far back as Jamaica ten years earlier. Finding songs like “Waiting On a Friend” from the Goat’s Head Soup and Black and Blue sessions, he added outtakes from the 1977–79 Paris sessions. When he had enough for an album, Kimsey gave the tapes to Mick, who quickly threw them together: “I recorded some of it in a broom closet, literally, when we did the vocals. The rest of the band were hardly involved.”

  Mick also supervised the saxophone overdubs in New York by Sonny Rollins, the hard-bop saxophone improviser who played in various styles on several tracks. Rollins got the inspiration for his melodic solo on “Waiting On a Friend” by asking Jagger to dance for him while he played, translating Mick’s body language into jazz. The finished tracks were mixed uniformly by engineer Bob Clearmountain so the new Stones album didn’t sound like the touring-fodder grab bag that it was.