Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  In January 1994, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were in Los Angeles to complete Voodoo Lounge. Five years had passed since Steel Wheels, the longest silence ever for the Stones. With another megatour scheduled through 1995, the Stones needed a murderously good album to carry them through, and insiders thought they had it. The basic tapes from Dublin sounded like the real, authentic Stones of Ian Stewart and Elmo Lewis. They sounded “live” and very rocky, with an intimate, unproduced feel that suggested the X-Pensive Winos with Charlie Watts. Keith called it “recording the room.”

  This Irish ambience didn’t survive a transplant to Los Angeles. Don Was had already steered the Stones away from the odd grooves and African licks they’d started with. Now, at his studio in L.A., he was giving the ballads and rockers they’d recorded in Ireland a retrofitting: vocals were buried down in the mix and the funk got filtered. Mick complained that Don Was was trying to work with Exile on Main Street. Meanwhile, Was won a Grammy Award for his production of Bonnie Raitt the previous year, which made him much harder to argue with.

  No time for a rethink. When Virgin needed the album title quickly, Mick told them it was Voodoo Lounge because he was looking at Keith’s shingle, which had followed the sessions across the oceans. The Stones’ machine was kicking in. Mick called it “the virtual corporation.” While overdubbing and mixing at A&M Studios, Mick and Charlie were supervising the design of the next $4-million stage to be paid for by a brewery. Borrowing technology developed for recent tours by U2, Pink Floyd, and Michael Jackson, Mark Fisher designed another concept stage. This time it was the Rolling Stones driving along the Information Highway to Wired City in all its gigabyte enormity, with a three-hundred-foot gridlike wall of light and an immense, unearthly Jumbotron video screen behind the band. Instead of stacks of amps, the music pushed out of slender columns on both sides of the stage. A ten-story tower shaped like a cobra loomed over the set, recalling the mythic nagas, giant serpents that protected Lord Buddha as he meditated. When exploding in barrages of pyro, Voodoo Lounge would look like a nuclear power plant melting down.

  Keith finished the album at the end of April with Wood, Ivan Neville, and Bernard Fowler. This team completed “Love Is Strong” and Keith’s “Through and Through,” which ended the album. On May 3, 1994, from the deck of John Kennedy’s old presidential yacht docked in the Hudson in New York, the Stones announced their tour: America through the rest of 1994, followed by the Pacific markets and Europe in 1995. Darryl Jones was announced as the new man on bass guitar.

  The Munch gave the Stones a jolt when the band gathered in Toronto that June to begin rehearsals at the Crescent School, a boys’ academy in the suburbs. (The school’s cafeteria was transformed into a lounge with leather sofas, pinball machines, a snooker table, and a huge satellite-fed TV.) Mick had told Jones not to bother copying Bill Wyman’s signature style. “Some of those classic bass lines aren’t so classic anymore,” Jones told an interviewer. “Since I joined the band, I’ve changed them around a lot.” Chuck Leavell was back in the band with his arsenal of Korg, Kurzweil, Midi-B, and Yamaha keyboards. So were singers Lisa Fischer and Bernard Fowler. Bobby Keys led the New West Horns, a trio of New York musicians who had played on the album. For a month, this twelve-piece Rolling Stones relearned old songs by listening to the CD versions, then copying them. Mick relied on a dog-eared Stones songbook for the lyrics. The band developed fifty-four songs in Toronto, for a basic two-and-a-half-hour show using twenty-two to twenty-five numbers.

  Voodoo Lounge was released in July 1994 with a whiff of brimstone and Santeria iconography. In publicity photos, Keith wore the black top hat of the vodun god Baron Samedi, while Mick sported a pair of satanic-looking horns. Dancing skeletons and malign ectoplasms pervaded the album design, which cast the Stones as demonic entities risen from an Afro-Caribbean underworld to harrow the planet with Plutonian mischief. Even the Stones’ once invitingly lascivious tongue logo was now armed with barbed thorns that promised pain, not pleasure, in the age of AIDS. Keith’s carefully sharpened sound bites maintained the Undead pose. “String us up,” he larfed. “We still won’t die.”

  The album began with the hoodoo whisper of “Love Is Strong,” with good bluesy harmonica by Mick. “You Got Me Rocking” was a banging war chant about dissipation and redemption. Keith’s “Sparks Will Fly” was a seventies-style lust anthem (Mick: “I wanna fuck your sweet ass!”). Keith’s “The Worst” featured Ron Wood on pedal steel guitar, Irish fiddler Frankie Galvin, and the composer’s emotionally plangent lead vocal. Then three ballads by Mick: “New Faces” (with Lady Jane’s harpsichord), “Moon Is Up,” and “Out of Tears” with Mick on piano, backing his own maudlin and insincere vocal.

  “I Go Wild” had a Keithian two-chord chug and meaningful lyrics from Mick: “waitresses with broken noses checkout girls in striking poses and politicians garish wives with alcoholic cunts like knives.” “Brand New Car” was a funny, simmering reexamination of the auto-vaginal metaphor, with the obligatory horns. “Sweethearts Together” was a lovey-dovey Latin cha-cha, sung by Mick and Keith face-to-face in the studio, with an accordian solo by Tex-Mex legend Flaco Jimenez. “Suck on the Jugular” was a funk riff with some good guitar, followed by Mick’s “Blinded by Rainbows,” a Semtex-scented ballad about “the troubles” in Northern Ireland. It sounded like a leftover from Wandering Spirit.

  Voodoo Lounge wound down with the Memphis rhythm of “Baby Break It Down” and Keith’s dark soul ballad “Through and Through,” which painted a gloomy portrait of betrayal and discovery. This ended the vinyl and cassette release; the CD version had an extra track, “Mean Disposition,” an old-school rockabilly hummer with a Chuck Berry tribute tagged onto its tail end. Extra tracks from the Lounge sessions (all written by Mick) used as B-sides on the four singles included “The Storm,” inspired by the earthquake that rocked L.A. while they were mixing; “I’m Gonna Drive”; “So Young” (Mick resolves to “put my dick back on a leash”); and “Jump on Top of Me,” a fast Stones shuffle that was also loaned out to director Robert Altman for his movie on the fashion industry, Prêt-à-Porter.

  Voodoo Lounge wasn’t a great Rolling Stones album, and everyone knew it. Reviews were niggling at best, and “Love Is Strong” didn’t sell; but the album reached no. 1 in England and no. 2 in America. It eventually sold a respectable 5.2 million units during the year the band was on the road. Mick was stoic about the record as he prepared to tour. “The ballads are rather nice,” he told Rolling Stone later, “and then the rock & roll numbers sound enthusiastic—like we’re into it. I think it’s a good time-and-place album of what the Stones were about during that time in Ireland in that year.” He also complained that Don Was and engineer Don Smith were retro-sluts and that they’d “gone too far” trying to make the Stones sound stuck in 1972.

  After a publicity and merchandising blitz that included a week of Stones videos on the cable channel VH-1 and a warm-up club gig in Toronto, the Stones nervously began the “Budweiser Voodoo Lounge 1994 Tour” on August 1 in RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. Neo-ruralists Counting Crows opened, sounding like The Band, before the Stones played (poorly) in a ninety-degree steam bath. Pyro sparks landed on Charlie in the fiery climax and burned through his drumheads. The next night in D.C. went a bit better.

  With tickets at $50, sales were initially slow and the Stones played to empty seats some nights. Young fans were distracted by new heroes—Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soul Asylum, Blind Melon. The Woodstock twenty-fifth-anniversary concerts broke a lot of rock budgets that summer. The Stones would be on the road for three months before the tour broke even.

  The band sounded ragged, and Mick had to make excuses for the first few gigs. Charlie looked to Keith and Darryl to pace the Stones, and to Keith and Chuck for the song endings. Watts had the demeanor of a well-dressed, solid old man: “Lloyd Bentsen on drums,” New York radio star Don Imus called him. Despite the teasing, Watts drove the Stones like a Porsche and invariably received the longest ovation
of the night when the musicians were introduced.

  In the middle of August in the middle of America, the Stones finally began to cook, at least on the old songs. An Olympian thunderstorm at Giants Stadium in New Jersey on August 14 drenched the band and provoked the best show of the year. Mick licked the raindrops off the tops of Lisa Fischer’s heaving breasts. “God joins the band whenever we play outdoors,” Keith said soon after this. “Suddenly there’s this other guy in the band, and he shows up in the form of wind and rain. And we’ve got to be ready to play with him.” The Stones’ families were along with them for the first dates. Backstage the nomad village looked like a company picnic, with blond kids running around the portable dressing rooms and trailers. Bert Richards presided over a running domino tournament. A white tent—the actual Voodoo Lounge—served as the bar and reception suite. Ronnie’s tipple was cranberry juice and vodka. Keith didn’t bother with the cranberry juice. It was an ambience in which the regulars could gather round the piano in the tuning room at the end of the day, harmonize on a few songs together, and then go out and play them for sixty thousand customers on the other side of the scrim.

  As the shows started, guests took their seats, the entourage took their places, and backstage became empty and quiet. The band met in the tent and walked to the stage together, up some metal stairs and through a tunnel, bantering with the crew along the way. The African drumming on the P.A. slowed to the Bo Diddley beat (“a war-dance fanfare of primal sexual libido and the life force itself”—Camille Paglia). Charlie sat down at the drums and Mick high-stepped to the front of the stage in a curious bopping lope and declaimed, “I’m gonna tell ya how it’s gonna be,” amid a colossal roar from the multitudes. It was lean and hungry Mick’s big maracas number in 1963: now he was a mullet-headed granddad whippet in a shiny knee-length coat, the first of many costumes during the show.

  Lisa Fischer became a major stage presence on this tour as she undulated beside dreadlocked Bernard Fowler. During the “Miss You” foreplay, she and Mick used their tongues. On sexy nights, she licked his nipples.

  During “Honky Tonk Women,” the Jumbotron flashed old porno strips intercut with live shots of girls near the stage. “Live with Me” became the hottest number of the night, sliding into a Sticky Fingers Latin jam with Bobby Keys. Mick performed “Sympathy” as a top-hatted Lucifer in a Victorian frocked coat. After two hours, the giant balloons came out (Elvis, Kali, and a hydrocephalic baby) for the Big Four: “Start Me Up,” “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll,” “Brown Sugar,” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Thunderous fireworks split the evening into wild magnolias of fire as the band ran for their Dodge Ram getaway vans and headed back to the hotel or their custom 727 jet, with four staterooms for the band. As always, especially when their families finally left them alone after two weeks, the party was in Keith’s room.

  In September 1994, the Stones were staying at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston when they learned that Nicky Hopkins had died of Crohn’s disease in Nashville, aged fifty. Bobby Keys went for a long walk by himself on Boston Common, and the plane ride to North Carolina was very subdued.

  Late that month, Jimmy Miller died of liver failure at fifty-two.

  The Rolling Stones played Las Vegas for the first time in mid-October, two nights in the Big Room at the MGM Grand, as their old Rat Pack tormentor Dean Martin lay dying in Beverly Hills. Mick seemed subdued at the second show. A rumor circulated in Voodoo village that Jerry Hall had intercepted a fax from Carla Bruni concerning a rendezvous with Mick at the MGM Grand.

  Voodoo Lounge ended in America with a record-setting gross said to be $140 million, but the tour had taken a toll on the Rolling Stones legend and the group’s self-esteem. Mick was upset that the Voodoo Lounge songs “really didn’t quite stand up” on the tour. Highbrow critics compared the vulgar spectacle to decadent seventeenth-century court masques that had bankrupted kings and burned down the theaters. Pop pundits found new ways of calling the Stones irrelevant dinosaurs. The whole thing was courting ridicule, and Mick was determined to play down the Stones’ gigantism on the rest of the tour. It led to the downsized, “Stripped” shows of 1995.

  Keith Richards was unapologetic, as if every day the Stones kept rolling was a gift from the gods. “We’re the only band to take it this far,” he mused, “and if you see us trip and fall, you’ll know that’s how far it can be taken.”

  * * *

  Working for Jah

  The Rolling Stones took their Voodoo Lounge machine to South America in 1995, inspiring fan mania unseen in years. They did four nights in Mexico in January, followed by massive shows in Brazilian soccer stadiums. A February 4 broadcast from Rio over TV Globo was seen by an estimated 100 million people throughout the continent. While in Buenos Aires for five shows, the Stones were mobbed by wildly passionate Argentine kids determined to kiss the group. Several thousand bivouacked outside their hotel, skirmishing with nervous security squads, effectively holding the band prisoner. Argentina’s “Dirty War” against its leftist youth had been especially brutal, and Mick made it a point to include “Undercover” during every show at River Plate Stadium.

  The Stones spent most of March 1995 in Japan, playing shows in Tokyo and Fukuoka, before an April swing through Australia and New Zealand. They had hoped to play in Beijing, but were refused admittance to China by the communist government, who told the Stones they represented “cultural pollution.”

  In Japan, the Stones booked into Toshiba/EMI studios to retool some classic tracks for an Unplugged-style acoustic concert album instead of what Keith said he dreaded—Voodoo Lounge Live at the Stadium. Don Was came in to produce and help arrange the material. In Tokyo, they recorded new versions of “The Spider and the Fly,” “I’m Free,” “Wild Horses,” “Love in Vain” (Ron Wood crying on slide guitar), “Shine a Light” (Don Was on Hammond B3 organ), “Black Limousine,” and “Slipping Away.” The Stones also cut Willie Dixon’s “Little Baby,” a revision of Little Walter’s “My Babe” that had been recorded by Howlin’ Wolf. The Tokyo rehearsals were also filmed for possible broadcast, but the tapes were rejected by the band. “The dullest TV I’ve ever seen,” Mick said, “and boring without an audience.” Deploring MTV’s Unplugged format of old guys on stools, Mick decided to film a few semiacoustic club gigs in Europe that summer.

  On May 25, at an auction in London, a thirteen-song tape of Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys—Mick, Keith, and Dick Taylor playing a dozen rock and roll tunes in 1961—was sold to an anonymous buyer for 50,000 pounds. The tape had been found in an attic in Dartford. London papers revealed a few days later that the new owner of the old tape reel was Mick Jagger.

  The Stones built their new club show during rehearsals in Amsterdam in early May by assiduously mining their past. Ron Wood made the group rehearse its first single, “Come On,” and even got them to do the flip side (“I Want to Be Loved”) as well. The crude mix of folk-blues crusade and electric mojo that was the original Rolling Stones had long been hidden in the repetitious, grandiose posturing of their stadium act. Almost in desperation, the Stones morphed into a hot, pounding rock band that still had something to prove. That summer’s Euro tour evolved into a mobile taping party stretching from Holland through France into Portugal and enlivening the thirty-nine shows they performed to mostly sellout crowds.

  The Stones recorded and filmed four nights without the horn section at the Paradiso, an Amsterdam cannabis café in an old synagogue, in early May. The Stones’ printed set list described the Paradiso shows as “The Toe-Tappers and Wheel Shunters Club Gig.” Richards and Wood brought eighty guitars between them. Playing to seven hundred fans, the Stones delivered a blistering acoustic/electric set that began with a jammy “Not Fade Away” and ended with the trio of “Respectable,” “Rip This Joint,” and “Street Fighting Man,” driven by two ringing Martin guitars, as on the old record. “Gimme Shelter” was a stunning showpiece for Lisa Fischer, whose high note at the song’s climax was a time portal to the
era of Performance. Another song from that year, “Live with Me,” was now a diamond-hard rap extended in a Sticky jam by Bobby Keys. They played “Connection” like the punk anthem from hell that it was. The apex of the show was introduced by Mick: “This is a song Bob Dylan wrote for us.” They gave “Like A Rolling Stone” an almost reverential, anthemic reading, with Mick playing harp more like Little Walter than Dylan. The audience roared along with the chorus, so the Stones kept it in the show for the rest of the tour.

  At the party after the last Paradiso gig, Keith said it was the best he could ever remember doing. Mick said, “We’re reinforcing that part of our music by doing it in a small place like this. It’s part of the band we always need to remember, so we can keep on drawing on it.”

  The Voodoo Lounge toured Europe through the summer of 1995. The German magazine Der Spiegel, noting that the timing of several shows seemed suspiciously identical, accused the Rolling Stones of miming to prerecorded tapes, prompting howling denials and legal threats (the magazine printed a retraction one year later). In early July, the Stones taped and filmed their acoustic show before a berserk and sweltering mob at L’Olympia in Paris, where Charlie Watts got a five-minute chanting ovation during the band introductions. In Paris, Mick gave a birthday party for Jerry attended by Jack Nicholson and many friends. Then on to England for their first shows at home in five years. The three shows at Wembley Stadium were sellouts and received unusually affectionate reviews in the press (which noted that playwright Tom Stoppard, a friend of Mick’s, was the only person in the crowd not wiggling his bum). Bill Wyman walked out of one concert after Mick told the audience, “I know you’re all worried about our new bass player, but this time we’ve got one that dances and smiles.” Bill was hurt and began slagging the Stones in the press as an oldies group.