Mick went through three or four producers. There was no consistency in what he wanted to do. So with all these producers and musicians, including a total of eight bass players, it got out of hand. We actually ended up for the first time almost making separate records—mine and Mick’s. Everybody was playing on the record except the Stones half the time. At one point—when things were really strained between me and Mick—collaboration consisted of Don Was sitting and hammering out lyrics with Mick. Don’s like my lawyer, representing me, and he’s reading out all the scribbles of my improvised lyrics that were taken down by some Canadian girl while I was blabbering into a mike, and he’s using these notes as input when they’re looking for a rhyme or whatever line. A long way from Andrew Oldham’s kitchen—a collaboration without us actually being together. Mick had hired everybody he wanted to work with, and I wanted Rob Fraboni as well. No one knew who was doing what, and Rob has this annoying habit of turning round to guys and saying, “Well, of course you know that if that goes through the M35 microphone it’s absolutely useless,” and, in fact, they don’t know this.
Nevertheless, I still very much like Bridges to Babylon; there’s some interesting stuff on it. I still like “Thief in the Night,” “You Don’t Have to Mean It” and “Flip the Switch.” Rob Fraboni had introduced me to Blondie, real name Terence Chaplin, when we were mixing Wingless Angels in Connecticut, and Blondie came along to do some extra work in the studio. He’s from Durban. His father is Harry Chaplin, who was a top banjo player in South Africa and used to work the Blue Train from Jo’burg to Cape Town. Together with Ricky Fataar, the drummer who works a lot with Bonnie Raitt, and Ricky’s brother, Blondie had a band called the Flames. They were the biggest band in South Africa, in spite of the fact that Blondie was classified as “colored” with the rest of his band, though he passed as white in other respects. Such was apartheid. When they came to the US, they were taken up by the Beach Boys and moved to LA. Blondie became Brian Wilson’s stand-in and sang the vocal on the Beach Boys hit “Sail On, Sailor,” and Ricky became the drummer. Fraboni produced the album Holland for the Beach Boys and so another musical family tree spread some branches. Blondie began to hang, at my request, around the Bridges to Babylon rehearsal period, and we’ve been close ever since. These songs I was developing were very much based on the work I was doing with Blondie and Bernard—their background vocals were part of the composing process. Now he works with me all the time. One of the best hearts I’ve known.
It’s often in the songs and their composition that a parallel narrative takes place—the story beside the story. So here are a few that have tales attached.
“Flip the Switch” was a song on Bridges to Babylon that I wrote almost as a joke but that, as soon as I’d written it, turned out to have a chilling prescience.
I got my money, my ticket, all that shit
I even got myself a little shaving kit
What would it take to bury me?
I can’t wait, I can’t wait to see.
I’ve got a toothbrush, mouthwash, all that shit
I’m looking down in the filthy pit
I had the turkey and the stuffing too
I even saved a little bit for you.
Pick me up—baby, I’m ready to go
Yeah, take me up—baby, I’m ready to blow
Switch me up—baby, if you’re ready to go, baby
I’ve got nowhere to go—baby, I’m ready to go.
Chill me freeze me
To my bones
Ah, flip the switch.
Ninety miles away in San Diego, just after I finished this song—maybe three days later—a mass suicide took place of thirty-nine members of a UFO cult called Heaven’s Gate, who decided that the Earth was about to be destroyed and they’d better link up with the incoming UFO that was following the fatal comet. The boarding card was phenobarbital, applesauce and vodka, administered in relays. Then lie down in your uniform and await transport. These guys were actually doing it, and I had no idea until I woke up the next day and heard that these people had topped themselves, all laid out neatly, waiting to go to this new planet. It was, to say the least, a bizarre situé of which I don’t relish a repeat. The cult leader looked like something out of E.T., and his name was Marshall Applewhite.
I wrote jauntily:
Lethal injection is a luxury
I wanna give it
To the whole jury
I’m just dying
For one more squeeze.
There’s a brothel near Ocho Rios, where my house is in Jamaica, called Shades, run by a bouncer I used to know from the Tottenham Court Road. It looks like a classic house of ill repute, with balconies and archways and a dance floor with a cage and poles and a large supply of local beauties. All silhouettes and mirrors and blow jobs on the floor. I went down there one night and hired a room. I needed to get out of my house. I was having a beef with the Wingless Angels, who weren’t playing properly, and the electricity had gone. So I left them alone to sort the shit out, took Larry Sessler and Roy and went down to Shades. I wanted to work on a song, so I asked the proprietor to bring me two of his best chicks. I didn’t want to do anything with them, just have a place to hang and be comfortable. I’ll give you my best, he said. So I installed myself in one of his rooms, with the fake-mahogany bed, one plastic light against the wall, broom cupboard, red bedcover, a table, a chair, a red, green, and gold couch, low red lighting. I had my guitar, a bottle of vodka and some slosh, and I told the girls to imagine we were there forever, together, and how would they decorate the place. Leopard skin? Jurassic Park? What did they say to the Canadians who came? Oh, they’re all over in two seconds, they said. You say anything—say you love them. Don’t have to mean it. Then the chicks slept, breathing quietly in little bikinis. This was not the normal gig for them, and they were tired. If I couldn’t think of a lyric, I would wake them up and we’d talk more, I’d ask them questions. What do you think of it so far? OK, you go back to sleep now. So I wrote “You Don’t Have to Mean It” that night at Shades.
You don’t have to mean it
You just got to say it anyway
I just need to hear those words for me.
You don’t have to say too much
Babe, I wouldn’t even touch you anyway
I just want to hear you say to me.
Sweet lies
Baby baby
Dripping from your lips
Sweet sighs
Say to me
Come on and play
Play with me, baby.
Love has sold more songs than you’ve had hot dinners. That’s Tin Pan Alley for you. Though it depends if people know what love is. It’s such a common subject. Can you come up with a new twist, a new expression of it? If you work at it, it’s contrived. It can only come from the heart. And then other people will say to you, is that about her? Is that about me? Yeah, there’s a little bit about you, the second bit of the last verse. Mostly it’s about imaginary loves, a compilation of women you’ve known.
You offer me
All your love and sympathy
Sweet affection, baby
It’s killing me.
’Cause baby baby
Can’t you see
How could I stop
Once I start, baby.
“How Can I Stop.” We were in Ocean Way studios, in Los Angeles. Don Was was producer and he’s on keyboard. He put a lot of hints and helps in on it. As the song developed, it became more and more complex, and then—how the hell do we get out of here? And we had Wayne Shorter, who Don had brought in, maybe the greatest living jazz composer, let alone sax player, on the planet, who had grown up playing in Art Blakey’s and Miles Davis’s bands. Don has a great connection with musicians of all stripes, shapes, sizes and colors. He’s produced most of them—almost all the good ones. And also LA’s been his hometown for many years. Wayne Shorter, a jazzman, said he was going to get ribbed for coming down and playing what they call duty music. Instead he t
ook off onto this wonderful solo. I thought I’d come in and play duty music, he said, and I’m wailing my ass off. Because for that last bit on the song, I said, feel free, go any way you want, take it. And he was fantastic. And Charlie Watts, who is the best jazz drummer of the goddamn century, was playing with him. It was a brilliant session. “How Can I Stop” is a real song from the heart. Perhaps everyone’s getting old. What’s different from those earlier songs is how it exposes feelings, wears them on the sleeve.
I always thought that’s what songs are really about; you’re not supposed to be singing songs about hiding things. And when my voice got better and stronger, I was able to communicate that raw feeling, and so I wrote more tender songs, love songs, if you like. I couldn’t have written like that fifteen years ago. Composing a song like that, in front of a mike, is like holding on to a friend in a way. You lead me, brother, I’ll follow behind and we’ll sort the bits out later. It’s like you’ve been taken for a blind ride. I might have a riff, an idea, a chord sequence, but I’ve no idea what to sing over it. I’m not agonizing for days with poems and shit. And what I find fascinating about it is that when you’re up there on the microphone and say, OK, let’s go, something comes out that you wouldn’t have dreamt of. Then within a millisecond you’ve got to come up with something else that adds to what you’ve just said. It’s kind of jousting with yourself. And suddenly you’ve got something going and there’s a framework to work with. You’re going to screw up a lot of times doing it that way. You’ve just got to put it on the mike and see how far it can go before you run out of steam.
“Thief in the Night” had a dramatic, deadline-busting journey to the mastering studio. I got the title from the Bible, which I read quite often; some very good phrases in there. It’s a song about several women and actually starts when I was a teenager. I knew where she lived and I knew where her boyfriend lived, and I would stand outside a semidetached house in Dartford. Basically the story goes on from there. Then it was about Ronnie Spector, then it was about Patti and it was also about Anita.
I know where your place is
And it’s not with him.…
Like a thief in the night
I’m gonna steal what’s mine.
Mick put a vocal on the song, but he couldn’t feel it, he couldn’t get it, and the track sounded terrible. Rob couldn’t mix it with this vocal, so we tried to fix it one night with Blondie and Bernard, barely able to stand from fatigue, snatching sleep in turns. We came back and found the tape had been sabotaged in the meantime. All kinds of skulduggery went on. Eventually Rob and I had to steal the two-inch master tapes of the half mixes of “Thief in the Night” from Ocean Way studios in LA, where we’d recorded it, and fly them to the East Coast, where I had now returned homewards to Connecticut. Pierre found a studio on the north shore of Long Island where we remixed it to my liking for two days and two nights, with my vocal. Sometime during one of those nights Bill Burroughs died, so in homage to his work I sent angry Burroughsian cut-ups to Don Was, the producer in the middle—you rat, this is going to be finished my way, nobody else’s way, with screaming headline cuttings and headless torsos. Batten down the hatches; we’re going to war. I just had a beef with Don. I love the man and we got over it right away, but I was sending him terrible messages. When you’re coming to the end of a record, anybody who gets in the way of what you want to do is the Antichrist. This was near to the deadline, so the quickest way to get the tapes back to LA was to take them by speedboat from Port Jefferson, Long Island, to Westport, the nearest harbor to my house on the Connecticut coast. We did this at midnight, under a very nice moon, roaring across the Long Island Sound, successfully avoiding the lobster pots with a swerve here and a shout there. Next day Rob got them to New York and they were flown back to LA to the mastering studio to be inserted into the album.
Exceptionally for a Stones song, Pierre de Beauport got a writing credit on the track, along with me and Mick.
The big problem now was that it was looking as if I was going to be singing three songs on the album, which was unheard-of. And to Mick unacceptable.
Don Was: I firmly believed in Keith’s right to have a third vocal on the record, but Mick was having none of it. I’m sure Keith is totally unaware of all that it took to get “Thief in the Night” on that record. Because it was a total standoff between these two guys, neither one was backing down, and we were going to miss the release date and the tour was going to start without a new album out there. And the night before the deadline, I had a dream, and I called Mick up and I said, I know your point about him singing three songs, but if two were at the end of the record and they were together as a medley, if there wasn’t a lot of space between the two songs, then they would be seen as one big Keith thing at the end of the record. And for the people you’re concerned about, who don’t love Keith songs, they could just stop after your last vocal, and for those people who love Keith stuff, it would be one last Keith, so view it not as a third song, but as a medley, and we’ll leave a space before it begins, and we’ll leave very little space between the two songs. And he went with that. And I’m sure Keith has no idea, or Jane, no one knows what happened. So that gave Mick an out, basically, because it was a standoff. And so those two became one song. However, the song that it got paired up with is “How Can I Stop,” which is one of the best Rolling Stones songs ever.
It’s amazing… Keith absolutely at his best, and Wayne Shorter, what an odd pairing, to have Wayne Shorter just blowing, it turns into Coltrane at the end, it turns into “A Love Supreme” at the end. There was something about it. There were like ten people playing at once, and it was a magical session. There were no overdubs to that thing; it just came out like that. And the other thing was, that night, when we cut it, Charlie was leaving, it was the end, it was the last track we cut for that album. They were tearing down the instruments the next day. And Charlie had a car waiting out in the alley. And so he does this big flourish at the end, that’s the last take, and it’s like a grand hurrah, and the way everyone was feeling at the end of that record, I didn’t think they’d ever make another. And so I saw “How Can I Stop” as the coda. I thought it was the last thing they were ever going to cut, and what a great way to end it. How can I stop once I’ve started? Well, you just stop.
Peter Pakvis / Getty Images
Chapter Thirteen
Recording the Wingless Angels in Jamaica. We set up a studio in my home in Connecticut, and I break some ribs in my library. A recipe for bangers and mash. A hungover safari in Africa. Jagger’s knighthood; we work and write together again. Paul McCartney comes down the beach. I fall from a branch and hit my head. A brain operation in New Zealand. Pirates of the Caribbean, my father’s ashes, and Doris’s last review.
Twenty-odd years after I began playing with local Rastafarian musicians, I went back to Jamaica with Patti for Thanksgiving 1995. I’d invited Rob Fraboni and his wife to come and stay with us—Rob had originally met this crew in 1973, when I first knew them. Fraboni’s holiday was canceled on day one because it turned out that at this moment all the surviving members were present and available, which was rare; there had been a lot of casualties and ups and downs and busts, but this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to record them. Fraboni somehow had bits of recording equipment available courtesy of the Jamaican minister of culture and promptly offered to record the setup. That was a gift from the gods!
A gift because Rob Fraboni is a genius when you want to record things outside the usual frame. His knowledge and his ability to record in the most unusual places are breathtaking. He worked as a producer on The Last Waltz; he remastered all the Bob Marley stuff. He’s one of the best sound engineers you can ever meet. He lives round the corner from me in Connecticut, and we’ve done a lot of recording together in my studio there, of which I’ll write more. Like all geniuses, he can be a pain in the arse, but it goes with the badge.
I christened the group the Wingless Angels that year from a doodle I made—whic
h is on the album cover—of a figure like a flying Rasta, which I’d left lying around. Somebody asked me what’s that, and just off the top of my head I said, that’s a wingless angel. There was one new addition to this group, in the person of Maureen Fremantle, a very strong voice and the rare presence in Rasta lore of a female singer. This is how we came together, as she tells it.
Maureen Fremantle: One night Keith was with Locksie in Mango Tree bar in Steer Town, and I was passing that night, so Locksie says, sister Maureen, come in, come and have a drink. And I go in and I meet this guy. Keith hug me and says, this sister look like a real sister. And then we started to have a drink; I was having rum and milk. And then it was like… I don’t know, the power of Jah. I just start to sing. Yes, just start to sing. And Keith said, this lady have to come by me. And it never turned back from then. I just start to sing. And I was reeling. And I started to sing, love, peace, joy, happiness, and it burst into one thing. It was something else.
Fraboni had a microphone in the garden, and at the beginning of the recording you hear the crickets and frogs, the ocean beyond the veranda. There are no windows in the house, just wooden shutters. You can hear people playing dominoes in the back. It has a very powerful feel, and feel is everything. We took the tapes back to the US and began to figure how to keep the intrinsic core. That’s when I met Blondie Chaplin, who came along to the sessions with George Recile, who became Bob Dylan’s drummer. George is from New Orleans, and there are many different races in there—he’s Italian, black, Creole, the whole lot. What’s startling is the blue eyes. Because with those blue eyes, he can get away with anything, including crossing the tracks.
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