Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  The year began with bad feelings between Mick and Keith over their executive assistant, Jane Rose, who had worked for the band since 1974. Mick had fired her at the end of 1981, and Keith had immediately hired her to look after his affairs as his manager. This made Mick crazy, and the more authority Keith gave Jane, the angrier Mick became. “If I’d given up on Jane,” Keith said later, “I could have maybe kept the Stones together. It actually got down to things like that.”

  In London on April 28, Mick announced the Euro leg of the Stones’ tour at a press conference. Ian McLagan was replaced on keyboards by Chuck Leavell from Macon, Georgia, late of the Allman Brothers Band. Leavell had been recommended to Mick by Bill Graham, and he’d first played with the Stones at their Fox Theater shows in Atlanta the year before. A facile musician and amiable team player, Leavell would become Mick Jagger’s long-term arranger and accompanist. Ernie Watts was replaced by Bobby Keys, finally brought in from the cold at Keith’s insistence, along with trumpeter Gene Barge.

  The tour began at the end of May in Scotland with the same show as the American tour. George Thorogood and the J. Geils Band opened many of the shows, with Thorogood again prepared to go on if Woody broke down. Mick openly wanted Wood out, and banished him from the Stones’ hotels in case his drug use drew police attention. Keith kept him in the band out of loyalty and bloody-mindedness in the face of Jagger’s disdain. On May 31, they played the tiny 100 Club in Oxford Street, nearly twenty years after their Soho debut as the Rollin’ Stones in 1962. Then on through stadiums and soccer fields in the Low Countries, Germany, France (a rocking “Chantilly Lace” added to the Paris dates), and Scandinavia (body searches at the Swedish border) in June before they landed back in London for two crucial shows at Wembley Stadium.

  Keith and Mick did a round of interviews for the Wembley concerts. With J. Geils and the reggae bands Third World and Black Uhuru opening, both shows sold out, much to the relief of the Stones. Mick complained (with a wink) that Princess Diana’s new baby, William, was stealing the Stones’ limelight. Keith was asked how he was approaching the Stones’ big Wembley homecoming and quipped, “From Heathrow.” He continued to stubbornly defend his heroin addiction. “I don’t like to regret heroin,” he told the Evening Standard, “because I learned a lot from it. I’d regret it if I’d OD’d.” Keith did regret Ron Wood’s drug habit. At the second Wembley show, when Keith forgot the changes to “She’s So Cold” and Wood failed to cover for him because he was spaced out, Keith charged over and punched Ron hard in the face, nearly knocking the drowsy guitarist off the stage, drawing a rousing cheer from fans in front. The Stones got good reviews in England for the first time in years, and the concerts were chalked up as victories for the band.

  Keith hadn’t seen his father in twenty years. While in London, prompted by Patti Hanson, he was finally moved to renew contact. Bert Richards, now in his seventies, an old tippler in a cloth cap who drank even more than his son, had mellowed as well, and he immediately became a cosseted fixture in Keith’s entourage. Keith astounded the crew when he even offered his dad a slice of his sacrosanct shepherd’s pie, the classic English dish of mashed potatoes, ground beef, and gravy that was the daily staple of Keith’s touring diet. (Keith once pointed a loaded gun at a roadie who had unknowingly tasted Keith’s private pie.) Bert soon started moving around with Keith and Marlon as they commuted between England, Jamaica, and New York.

  The 1982 tour lasted through July. Mick and Keith weren’t speaking at all. When Jagger ranked on J. Geils’s singer, Peter Wolf, for always hanging out in Keith’s room, Keith bitterly told Wolf, “That’s a fair example of the kind of cunt I’ve had to deal with for twenty-five years.” In Norway, Keith hijacked Mick’s cherry picker and played a long aerial guitar break while Jagger fumed below, ordering poor Ron Wood to somehow get Keith down. In Sweden, Keith collapsed, drunk, during “Beast” and played the solo on his back, smoking a cigarette.

  These final 1982 shows proved to be the last of the old-style Rolling Stones concerts, featuring the core band, keyboards, and a horn or two. When they started playing again late in the decade, the shows were transformed into immense spectacles with operatic stages, a chorale of backup singers, brass quartets, and a glitzy Las Vegas aura. Something precious was gone forever.

  Autumn 1982. A London publisher signed up Mick Jagger’s ghostwritten autobiography for a million pounds. The advance would later be returned when Mick supposedly couldn’t remember anything of interest. Jerry Hall wanted to get married, but Mick couldn’t be bothered. Soon she was seen in public with a portly, horse-owning plutocrat who, Jerry intimated, could buy and sell Mick with a phone call. Mick fled to New York, where he went out with a local debutante and, reportedly, actress Valerie Perrine.

  In November, the Stones returned to Pathé-Marconi in Paris to begin work on their last album for Atlantic. Ahmet Ertegun wasn’t interested in re-signing for the demanded tens of millions, and Mick was being courted by the flamboyant, shpritzing CBS Records chief Walter Yetnikoff, who wanted the Stones, plus Mick’s much-rumored solo career. Back in their favorite room, the Stones and Stu ran through their stash of old material. Not much was left after Tattoo You had scraped the barrel, so Mick and Keith began writing in a rented basement room. They put “Wanna Hold You” together, with Mick playing drums and Keith singing. Mick was reading William Burroughs’s visionary new sci-fi novel Cities of the Red Night, which would inspire the psychic template for the dance club politics of “Undercover of the Night,” which Mick was working out on guitar by himself. Ron Wood had a promising track that the band worked on. Its creator’s low status in the Stones was evident in the working title someone scrawled on the tape can: “Dog Shit.”

  On November 12, Jerry Hall flew in from New York, fresh from two months of horsey escapades and headlines. Mick started in on her in front of reporters the minute she stepped off the plane. But Mick told Jerry he would marry her, and they patched things up. She gave an interview to a London paper about how weird and sexually dirty Mick was. When she had to get sexy at a photo shoot, she blabbed, she just thought of some of the nasty things he did to her. When the Stones broke off recording for Christmas, Mick took her to Mustique, where his new house was going up. Keith and Patti were also about to marry, but her father died and the wedding was postponed. Keith helped carry his coffin at the funeral early in January 1983.

  * * *

  Dream Things I Can’t Keep Inside

  The tensions and psychic kung fu among the Rolling Stones sharpened the band’s creative edge as work on Undercover progressed in Paris in January 1983. Keith’s mature style in the studio was now becoming fixed. “The way I write songs,” he said at the time, “is to sit down and play twenty-five great songs by other people, and hope one of mine drops off the end.” Keith would arrive at the sessions in a long cape, brandishing a lethal sword-stick that alarmed the guests of the other band members. Mick had written rubbery raps that were evolving into the episodic scenarios of “Undercover of the Night” and “Too Much Blood.” While tempers were sometimes short at Pathé-Marconi, with arguments over tempos and keys, the sessions (with Chris Kimsey as associate producer) hatched what some Stones fans consider to be the Stones’ last authentic album, the culmination of the Paris cycle that had begun with Some Girls.

  The concert film Let’s Spend the Night Together was finished early in 1983 and released that spring to no great acclaim. Critics seemed to think that anything less than murder and mayhem in a Stones film seemed anticlimactic after the carnage of Gimme Shelter.

  Charlie Watts bought an old estate deep in the Devonshire landscape, with stables for the family’s Arabian horses and kennels for the eighteen Best in Show sheepdogs. Bill Wyman and his girlfriend of fourteen years, Astrid Lindstrom, returned to England after many years in France, then split up. Astrid told a gossip columnist that she was tired of sharing Bill with thousands of other women.

  In May, Mick and Ron began mixing Undercover at the Hit F
actory in Manhattan. Keith joined them late in the month, but left for Jamaica in June before the album was complete, a gesture that ignited further gossip. Mick finished the record by overdubbing riffing horns and some African percussionists from the Sugar Hill hip-hop tribe onto his violent songs about murder, repression, and sexual domination. Chuck Leavell overdubbed an organ part on “Undercover.” Keith’s guitar tech Jim Barber played guitar on “Too Much Blood.”

  In July, Keith flew to Los Angeles to appear with Jerry Lee Lewis on a TV broadcast. At the airport, he ran into Chuck Berry, who seemed to recognize Keith this time. So glad was Chuck to see him that, in the crush of Keith’s embrace, he dropped a lit cigarette down the front of Keith’s shirt.

  Jerry Hall got pregnant that summer. Woody and Jo had a baby boy, Tyrone.

  In August 1983, the Stones signed their new American distribution deal with CBS Records. The contract called for four new Stones albums at $6 million apiece. Guaranteed promo budgets brought the deal to the $28-million mark, which at the time was the richest ever signed by a pop group. More significantly the CBS contract included the rights to Rolling Stones Records’ back catalog dating from 1971, which soon earned the company its money back after it reissued the old records on compact disc. Most important to Walter Yetnikoff, whose winning bid reportedly doubled his closest competitor’s, was Mick Jagger’s explicit commitment to make solo albums for Columbia.

  In New York, desperate to get their new videos played on MTV, Mick hired the hot young British director Julian Temple, who’d made the Sex Pistols’ film The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, to direct videos for “Undercover of the Night,” “Too Much Blood,” and “She Was Hot.” On their first meeting, Keith swung open his ratchet, put the blade to Temple’s throat, and told him he’d better not fuck up. Temple shot footage at the club Bains-Douches in Paris and in Mexico that October. Following the murky “Undercover” storyline of political murder in contemporary Central America, Temple depicted bandito Keith Richards kidnapping and then executing bourgeois oppressor Mick Jagger in a lurid romance of surreal wish fulfillment.

  Undercover was released in November 1983, in a sleazy blue sleeve showing a vintage peep-show pinup whose earthly delights were strategically plastered with stickers. The title track, “Undercover of the Night,” was a bubbling, gripping fantasia on the dirty war in El Salvador, the Contra revolt in Nicaragua, the “disappeared” young leftists in Argentina. Set in a humid, sadistic milieu of revolt and intrigue, “Undercover” was Mick’s attempt at relevance in a vapid era of heavy metal bands and jive MTV fodder. Its long-form format was influenced by Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” but had more serious ideas about the sex police, the race militia, and other agencies of social control.

  “She Was Hot” moved into familiar territory as Mick shouted out a song about passion with a black girl he picked up on an unpromising Sunday night. It featured Chuck Leavell and Stu on piano in a lusty romp, with a passionately raunchy guitar solo from Ron Wood. “Tie You Up (The Pain of Love)” was an Exile-type jam (Ron Wood on bass) on the old Stones theme of sadomasochism. Keith’s “I Wanna Hold You” was methodical generic rock. His reggae track, “Feel On Baby,” was a sweaty bowl of goat’s-head soup with Sly Dunbar on synthesized Simmons drums.

  “Too Much Blood” began side two with Charlie playing Afro-beat drums and some “Moroccan” horn vamps. Based on the true-crime story of a Japanese student at the Sorbonne who killed and ate his girlfriend, “Blood” was rapped out by Mick in a mix of voices and personae to a beat-box dance floor rhythm that owed a lot to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” The sax solo was played by New York session man David Sanborn, who also played on the following track, Ron Wood’s “Dog Shit” demo, retitled (by Mick) “Pretty Beat Up.” “Too Tough” was an embittered and sardonic song of regret, followed by “All the Way Down,” the contemptuous, morning-after side of “She Was Hot,” sung in Mick’s hilariously snotty “Shattered” persona. The album ended with “It Must Be Hell,” a downer in honky-tonk open G, with Ron Wood on slide guitar and quasipolitical lyrics echoing the vibe of oblique engagement with the issues of the day in “Undercover.”

  MTV started playing the Stones’ violent new “Undercover of the Night” video and it looked like the record might take off. The album made it to no. 1 in England, but in the United States Undercover only got to no. 4, and the “Undercover of the Night” single only reached no. 9. (A twelve-inch remix of “Undercover” was also released with the dub-style “Feel On Baby” track on the B side.) Reviews were predictably tepid for the Stones’ last album for Atlantic, and there was contempt from feminists for the album’s multiple songs about sexual domination, bondage, and pain. When British TV banned the “Undercover” video, Mick tried to protest on Channel 4’s The Tube: “It just follows the song, and it’s a song about repression and violence. We’re not trying to glamorize violence. We’re trying to say something that has a point.” The video had to be reedited (without Mick’s execution) so it could be shown on the BBC’s Top of the Pops.

  Despite the album’s relative failure, Undercover had a certain integrity that became more evident with the passage of time. Subsequent Rolling Stones albums were blander and fragmented in comparison, as solo careers and old animosities sapped the band’s strength. Some fans felt that after Undercover, the Stones flamed out, with only rare glimpses of that old black magic down the road.

  December 1983. Keith and Patti decided to marry in Mexico. She had given up her career for Keith, and he was persuaded he could make a life with her and start a second family. “I know I couldn’t have beaten heroin without Patti,” he said. “I ain’t letting that bitch go!” Mick flew in to serve as best man at the wedding, Keith’s first, on his fortieth birthday, December 18. His parents, Doris and Bert, saw each other for the first time in twenty years. The jam session at the bachelor party featured old rock and roll songs, mostly Jerry Lee Lewis hits. (Anita Pallenberg, who was living in London, had broken her leg falling out of bed and had gotten busted again, so was unable to attend.) The Lutheran ceremony was conducted in Spanish, and Keith broke a glass with his foot in the ancient Jewish tradition. At the reception afterward, he sang Hoagy Carmichael’s “The Nearness of You” to Patti, and his smoke-coarsened voice cracked open with feeling.

  Shortly after the wedding, the authorities in Baja quietly advised Keith that a good way of avoiding a Mexican prison stay for drug trafficking would be to make himself and his entourage scarce. Keith left town immediately and didn’t come back.

  On December 21, Mick and Jerry gave a Christmas party for the famous at their new house on West 81st Street in New York. Christmas meant a lot to Mick, and invitations to his annual party became prized tokens of social acceptance in the worlds through which he moved. Even then a new world was unfolding, since Mick Jagger was already writing songs for the solo album that would soon stop the Rolling Stones dead in their tracks.

  * * *

  World War III

  Keith Richards would later refer to the Rolling Stones’ mid-1980s crisis and collapse as World War III. Looking for an escape hatch from the not-happening Stones, Mick Jagger stretched his luck with a solo career that first sent Keith into a rage, then prodded him to seek his own artistic life beyond the Stones, which resulted in his best music in years. But acting out the mixed emotions of love and hate the two Stones felt for each other so damaged their once-conspiratorial bond that it would never be the same again. Years of negativity and bad karma eventually came home to roost, and all the other Rolling Stones went haywire as well.

  January 1984. Alexis Korner died of cancer at fifty-five on New Year’s Day. Pathé-Marconi Studios were bulldozed for a parking garage. The Stones would have to find a new room somewhere for their next record.

  They returned to Mexico later in January for the video shoot of “She Was Hot.” Julian Temple’s piece featured Charlie as a talent agent and the voluptuous Broadway dancer Anita Morris doing Jayne Mansfield’s bosomy sex goddess
part in The Girl Can’t Help It. As flaming Ms. Morris undulated to the song, the buttons of the band’s bulging trousers popped off, an image that proved too risqué for MTV, which banned the video when “She Was Hot” was released that winter.

  In February, Bill Wyman started dating Mandy Smith, aged thirteen, whom he had spotted dancing with her sister at the British Rock Awards at the Lyceum Theater in London. Mandy looked ten years older, and Bill—forty-eight years old and single for the first time in years—fell hard. “I was totally besotted by Mandy the minute I saw her.” He sent Julian Temple over to arrange an introduction, then showed up at her family’s home to ask permission of her mother to see her. Mandy Smith’s real age stayed a well-kept secret for two years as Bill took her around with him. When the British press found out, the Bill and Mandy saga became a staple of the tabloids, tinged with ridicule for the supposedly menopausal Stones.

  Walter Yetnikoff managed to convince Mick Jagger that his first solo album should be the first record released by Columbia under the Stones’ new contract. Keith was apoplectic. “If he tours with another band,” he hissed in an interview, “I’ll slit his fucking throat.” Undaunted, Jagger pressed on. After the birth of his third daughter, Elizabeth Scarlett Jagger, on March 2, 1984, he took his family to the Bahamas, where he would later record, then on to Mustique, where he wrote the bulk of She’s the Boss.