Bianca did not travel with Mick or visit him on the tour. He commented on her absence belittlingly. ‘There’s really no reason to have women on tour unless they’ve got a job to do. The only other reason is to screw. Otherwise they get bored. They just sit around and moan.’ None the less he consented to pose in his dressing room with Liza Minnelli on one arm and Raquel Welch on the other.
Ronnie Wood was part of the band by April, 1976, when the tour reconvened for a thirty-nine-date European tour destined to keep Jagger in perpetual motion throughout that spring and summer. When Black and Blue was released on April 20, after eleven months in cold storage, its sleeve showed Woody’s anteater countenance floating with the others’ like profiles for a punk Mount Rushmore. The album disappointed many with its rather hollow attempts at black ethnic idioms, disc-funk and salsa, and the audible one-upmanship between guest guitarists competing for Mick Taylor’s job. Nor could it be concluded, from Ronnie Wood’s solos on Cherry Oh Baby and Hey, Negrita, that even the second-best instrumentalist had won.
Before May, 1976, British pop fans were believed to care for nothing but Abba and the Brotherhood of Man. For the Stones’ first London concert in three years, almost a million postal applications were received. Doubling their three-concert series at Earls Court arena still satisfied barely one-tenth of the demand. Jagger impressed his British promoter, Harvey Goldsmith, by personally touring the unlovely hangar, checking on seats and audience facilities. ‘He’s the governor,’ Goldsmith was heard to whisper reverently. As Jagger drove away from Earls Court after rehearsals, he stopped his car and handed out free tickets to boys and girls on the street. On his order, refreshments were handed out free of charge to the box-office queue.
On August 21, the Stones played their first rock festival since Altamont, performing to 200,000 in the grounds of Knebworth House, Hertfordshire, in company with Todd Rundgren, Lynyrd Skynyrd and 10cc. The Stones’ show began four hours late and was described by The Times’s critic as ‘a shambling parody’. 10cc, the hit of the afternoon, had earlier played a song containing words that The Times reviewer found all too apposite: ‘Old men of rock ’n’ roll come bearing music. Where are they now? They are over the hills.’
Knebworth was Les Perrin’s final appearance as the Stones’ press officer. The hepatitis he had contracted on the ’73 Far East tour had been followed by a stroke from which he was never fully to recover. Frail as he had become, he insisted on turning out for the Knebworth festival. Seeing his determination, Jagger sent a car to collect him, with strict instructions that he wasn’t to think of doing any work that day. Taking things easy came hard to the energetic little man in the old-fashioned suit whose promise was the same to all journalists, ‘You can call me twenty-four hours a day’, and whose uncompromising saneness had steered Mick Jagger through so many media ordeals. Unimpeachably respectable as he was, Les had shared in the Stones’ notoriety, his telephone intermittently tapped, his wife Janey subject to disquieting police visits. At one point in the Sixties, impressed by his PR job for pop music’s make-believe criminals, some real criminals had approached Perrin and asked his help in getting more positive press coverage. Reggie Kray himself, using the code name ‘Mister James’, would ring up Janey Perrin and ask if Les had reconsidered his decision not to take on the Kray brothers’ account.
On the European tour, one of Jagger’s executive decisions had to be finding a successor to Les Perrin. He had someone in mind already – the ex-music journalist Keith Altham. But none of the Stones wanted Les to think he was being sacked.
His meeting with Jagger at the Knebworth festival betrayed the mutual affection that both habitually concealed within staccato offhandedness. ‘You wrote me a letter …’ Jagger said. ‘… Why didn’t you answer it?’ Perrin said. ‘I didn’t have a stamp,’ Jagger said, emphasizing each answer by pulling Les’s trilby hat a little further down over his eyes.
A BBC-TV crew, returning from Knebworth, sighted Bianca Jagger, all in white, standing by her ditched limousine and trying to thumb a ride back to London. The BBC men offered her a place in their car. Sharing the joint she offered them, the BBC men were surprised how friendly, warm and funny Bianca turned out to be.
In 1977, Jerry Hall was just ‘Jerry’, a twenty-one-year-old American model internationally in demand for her bright gold hair, her lovely, equine face and a merry mouth recognizable even when magnified fifty times for lip gloss ads on the sides of London buses. Her boyfriend was Bryan Ferry, a rock singer several eras newer than the Stones. Though their careers meant long separations, they seemed a settled pair. ‘There goes Jerry,’ Ferry would say as another bus displaying her lips passed by.
When Ferry heard that Jerry had left him for Mick Jagger, he was in London preparing to go on tour with his band Roxy Music. His initial response was true to his native Tyneside. He said he would fly over to New York and punch Jagger on the nose. Friends dissuaded him by pointing out that Jagger was looking very fit these days and might give back as good as he got.
Jerry had captivated Jagger for reasons that made it hard to understand why he ever chose a wife like Bianca. There was nothing exquisite, proud or intense about Jerry Hall. She was an ebullient Texan, a truck-driver’s daughter who liked horse-riding and leg-wrestling and committed numerous social faux pas at which she herself laughed uproariously. That laughter – perhaps that leg-wrestling, too – seemed the more appealing to a man who had spent five years with a mirror-image, different from himself only in that it frowned.
At first, Jerry seemed no different from the many women with whom Jagger had affairs while outwardly insisting that his marriage remained intact. Bianca corroborated this idea of a relationship deeper than mere monogamy. ‘[Mick] sleeps with many women, but rarely has affairs with them,’ she said. ‘They are all trying to use him. They are all nobodies, trying to be somebodies. Mick would say “go ahead” if I wanted an affair … but he knows I won’t do it.’
Such friends as they had in common were long accustomed to the uncomfortable sight of Mick and Bianca trying to maintain this façade in public. At one New York dinner party, given by Halston the designer, Bianca arrived alone, in a man’s tuxedo; Mick did not appear until after dinner. She berated him for the way he treated people who offered him hospitality. He mocked her for caring too much about ‘the fuckin’ jet set’.
By 1977, they were leading virtually separate lives and had dropped any pretence of monogamy. While Mick went around with Jerry Hall, Bianca was escorted by a succession of beaux including the actor Ryan O’Neal, the photographer Helmut Newton and, for a brief period, Jack Ford, son of US President Gerald Ford. Based mostly in New York, she was part of the circle who congregated around Andy Warhol at his downtown loft-salon, the Factory. A poignant paparazzo shot of the period shows her in Warhol’s ultra-trendy, cheerless industrial space, sharing a table with William Burroughs. Bianca looks like an earnest little schoolgirl, desperate to hear something from the great writer’s lips whenever they shall unclamp themselves from the straw in his Coca-Cola bottle. Jagger, the literary social climber, would still sometimes join her on these excursions, although his encounter with Burroughs should have won some kind of medal for gaucherie. ‘Are you married, Bill?’ Jagger asked, seemingly unaware that Burroughs had shot his spouse dead with a handgun while attempting to shatter a glass of gin balanced on her head.
Jagger, however, continued to deny his marriage was foundering and, from an increasing distance, tried to be a good father to Jade, the daughter he idolized. The little girl, already a stunning beauty, spent her life shuttled between her mother in New York and Jagger’s parents in Westgate-on-Sea. Whenever he could spare the time, he devoted himself to her. He would collect her from her nursery school and linger there, quizzing the teachers about her progress and behaviour. Her teachers, privately, considered Jade a bit of a problem child. At one moment, she would disrupt the class with her moods and tantrums; at others, she would climb on to her teacher’s lap, seemingl
y desperate for attention and affection.
In 1978, while Bianca was on holiday in California, Mick and Jerry flew into Los Angeles, openly ‘an item’. Bianca had talked to various lawyers inconclusively over the months, but now her mind was made up. She filed suit to divorce Jagger on the grounds of ‘irreconcilable differences’.
Keith Richard’s third child by Anita Pallenberg, his longed-for second son, was born in Geneva in March, 1976. They named him Tara, after Tara Browne the Guinness heir, John Lennon’s ‘man who blew his mind out in a car’. Keith then left in a mood of high euphoria to tour Europe with the Stones. In Frankfurt it was announced that, after seven years together, Keith and Anita finally intended to marry. Keith maintained it was purely for convenience, to qualify Anita for a British passport that would cover their three children. The date and place of the wedding were not announced. Keith toyed briefly with the idea of having it onstage at Earls Court arena.
On June 4, the ten-week-old baby boy died. The cause of death was given officially as a flu virus. Keith heard the news in Paris, shortly before he was due to go onstage with the Stones. Stricken as he was, he insisted that the performance must go ahead. His face that night was skull-like as his arm pumped out the old infantile vocabulary of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.
He continued the tour, drowning his desolation in mindless noise and light, the Southern Comfort bottle on his amplifier, and the company of his surviving son. At seven years old, Marlon Richard had long ago exchanged the role of child for that of friend and father confessor. He was with Keith onstage, on the next bar-stool; at whatever hour of night up in the hotel suite, playing with the video cassettes and toys and telephones they used in common, Marlon would keep his father company.
Keith’s – and Anita’s – engulfing love for Marlon, redoubled after their baby’s death, was contrasted by the apparent indifference towards their daughter, Dandelion. The little girl suffered from a speech defect and, at the age of almost four, was barely able to talk. Anita seemed to reject her, leaving her in a state of lovelessness which others in the Stones’ circle – notably Mick and Bianca Jagger – did their best to assuage. When Dandelion fell ill in Paris, it was Bianca who took her to hospital and visited her there. Over-indulged as Marlon was, he too sometimes lacked more mundane forms of child care. Bianca was putting him to bed once and found she could not take off his socks; they were literally stuck to his feet. Marlon told her he’d been wearing the same pair for almost a month.
While Marlon played underfoot, Keith and Anita faced each other like captives in a cell padded with everything that could be ordered by telephone: sharing a life-sentence of luxury from which the sole escape came via the needles they plunged into their arms. Anita almost exulted in her addiction – she called heroin ‘Henry’ and enjoyed initiating others, like Mick Taylor’s wife, into its use. She would tease Keith mercilessly for his inability to handle his habit, as when he tried to hide the syringe from servants or hotel waiters and for the way drug use had dampened down his sex-drive.
Making him jealous, like Brian Jones before him, was a trick Anita could accomplish even in her present unkempt condition, with junk-dilated eyes and deteriorating teeth. In Jamaica, when the Stones were recording there, she caused such a scandal by running around with the local Rastafarians that Keith returned to London without her. She subsequently got herself arrested and was badly beaten up by the local police before staggering back to England and Keith’s forgiving arms. In 1976 she was in trouble with him again for visiting clubs devoted to the new punk rock music, where teenage boys strapped their legs together and stuck safety pins into their cheeks. The archetypal punk guitarist, whom many wild young bands took as their inspiration, told Anita sternly to stay away from such places.
The mutual tolerance that had kept the Stones together through so many trials and aberrations, showed signs of severe strain in the late Seventies as Mick Jagger rose higher into society with his new supermodel girlfriend and Keith Richard sank lower into drug dependency. The more respectable Mick became, the greater seemed Keith’s determination to remain a Sixties outlaw, crashing cars, carrying guns and knives, destroying hotel rooms and letting his teeth turn black. For the first time since the age of six, their inseparably opposite natures were in open conflict. Keith criticized Mick for social climbing reflected in the ‘theatrical shit’ with which he had dressed up the ’75 tour. Mick was disdainful about Keith’s inability to stop being busted, and the schoolboy pranks with Woody, like invading the Jagger hotel suite and bouncing on the Jagger bed, shouting that they were ‘the Trampolini Twins’.
For Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, the effect of keeping Mick and Keith simultaneously in focus had become almost schizophrenic. Bill, at least, seemed to be tiring of the effort. His first solo album – Monkey Grip, in 1974 – had shown him he need not stand at the back of the stage for ever, and he had almost resigned after Mick Taylor in 1975. Even stoical Charlie disliked the atmosphere of bitchiness between Mick and Keith, and was talking about going off to find some peace and quiet in a jazz band.
The first part of 1977 was already planned. In February the Stones would meet in Toronto and give a series of performances at a small club called the El Macombo. These club dates would be the basis of a live album and would also keep them sharp for the following year’s North American tour.
On January 13, at Aylesbury Crown Court, Keith Richard was found guilty of possessing a cocaine-snorting tube, found in his Bentley after he had crashed it on the M1 the previous September. The jury rejected his counsel’s plea that the snorter wasn’t his but accepted that some LSD also found in the car might have belonged to someone else. Keith was fined £750, with £250 costs, and warned that if he committed another drug offence in Britain, he would be sent to prison. During the three-day trial, Mick Jagger had flown in unexpectedly from Los Angeles to lend him moral support and give evidence if necessary. As he left the court with Mick, Keith described the verdict as ‘a good old British compromise’.
Bad feeling boiled up again on February 20, when Mick arrived in Toronto as planned to rehearse for the El Macombo dates, and discovered that Keith had not yet even set off from Britain. For five more days, as the Stones awaited him in Canada, Keith dawdled on at Redlands, deaf to transatlantic calls and even a furious joint telegram from the others reading WE WANT TO PLAY. YOU WANT TO PLAY. WHERE ARE YOU?
At Toronto airport on February 25, customs officers, searching Anita’s bag, discovered a piece of hashish and a burnt spoon, later found to be encrusted with heroin. Anita was held for questioning, then released pending analysis of the spoon and a blue Tic Tac mint also confiscated from her.
Three days later, a squad of Royal Canadian Mounted Police burst into Keith’s suite at the Harbour Castle Hilton Hotel, bearing a warrant for Anita’s arrest. Lying about the suite they found cocaine and an ounce of pure heroin worth £2,500 – enough to warrant a charge, not merely of possession but of intent to traffic. Keith was taken to Toronto police headquarters and booked for an offence which under Canadian law carried a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.
Jagger had intended the Toronto visit to be a discreet, low-profile affair. Instead, thanks to what seemed nothing less than insanity on Keith’s part, the Stones were facing their long-postponed Judgement Day. They spent the next forty-eight hours trying to rehearse in a warehouse in downtown Toronto while the world’s media announced their imminent disintegration. In a further stroke of almost farcical ill-luck, they had also acquired a camp follower not exactly calculated to smooth their path with the Canadian authorities. This was no less than Margaret Trudeau, wife of prime minister Pierre Trudeau, a woman long given to embarrassing her husband with her excursions into non-diplomatic life. Mrs Trudeau, having somehow attached herself to Ronnie Wood, had booked a suite at the Harbour Castle and was hanging out with Woody and the Stones there.
On March 2, Jagger suddenly left Toronto for New York. His excuse was that Jade had appendicitis and Bian
ca was not in town to look after her. Keith held the night’s rehearsal without him, wearing a sheepskin coat and making pointed remarks like ‘Let’s go back to the hotel, read all Mick’s books and get ourselves properly educated.’
Jagger was back again on March 4 when the Stones began their drastically cut-down taping sessions, two nights instead of the projected five, before a live audience at the El Macombo Club. Against all the odds, both performances were brilliant with Keith, seemingly unmindful of what hung over his head, pulling out Chuck Berry licks not heard since he was a boy at the Crawdaddy Club. On March 7, he appeared in court to be told he would be additionally charged with possessing one-fifth of an ounce of cocaine. Next day, he returned to the same courtroom on the charge of intent to traffic heroin. He was remanded for a week on bail of $25,000, and had his confiscated passport returned to him.
At this point, Jagger seemed to wash his hands of his fellow Glimmer Twin, departing for New York once more with only the curtest farewell to Keith by telephone. After much agonizing, Ronnie Wood followed suit, still accompanied by Margaret Trudeau. The American press by now had decided that Jagger, rather than Woody, had been dallying with Mrs Trudeau. Her husband, the Canadian premier, was obliged officially to rebut charges that she had been seen ‘partying’ in the vicinity of Jagger’s suite wearing only a bathrobe. For a bizarre few days, the future of the Trudeau government seemed every bit as much in doubt as the Stones’ was.
Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts hung on in Toronto until March 10, then they, too, left to carry on lives which, having been denied all fruits of the Jagger-Richard partnership, could not be expected to share in its terminal crisis. Shortly afterwards, Keith, Anita and Marlon visited Niagara Falls. ‘Shall I jump?’ Keith asked, not altogether rhetorically.
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