Life (64 page)

It was Mick who had originally got hold of Don Was. Mick had always wanted to work with Don because Don is a groove producer. It’s groove, dance hall music. And when we’d finished with
Voodoo Lounge,
Mick said he wouldn’t work with Don again because he’d hired him to be a groove producer and Don wanted to make
Exile on Main St
. And Mick wanted to make Prince,
The Black Album
or something. Mick, again, wanted what he heard in the club last night.

Mick’s biggest fear at the time, as he kept on telling the press, was to be pigeonholed, as he put it, to
Exile on Main St
. But Don was more interested in protecting the legacy of what was good about the Stones; he didn’t want to do anything that was below the standard of that stuff from the late ’60s and early ’70s era. Why did Mick fear
Exile
? It was too good! That’s why. Whenever I heard “Oh, we don’t want to go back and re-create
Exile on Main St.,
” I thought, I wish you fucking could, pal!

So when it came to Bridges to Babylon, a tour and a record later in 1997, Mick wanted to make sure we made cutting-edge music of the moment. Don Was was still on board as producer despite Mick’s frustrations, because he was so good and worked so well with both of us, but this time Mick had what seemed at first like not a bad idea to get different producers to work under Don on different tracks. But when I got to LA to go to work, I found that he’d just hired who he wanted without asking. He’d hired a team of all these people who had won Grammys and were all cutting-edge. The only problem was none of it worked. I did try to accommodate one of these arrivals. If they asked for a retake, I did one, however good the take was, and another, until I realized they weren’t getting it. They didn’t know what they wanted. And that was it. Then Mick realized his mistake and said get me out of here. It wasn’t promising to discover that one of these producers had looped Charlie Watts—just put him on a drum machine on a loop. Well, that didn’t sound like the Stones. Ronnie Wood, lying on the couch, was heard to moan, “All that’s left is the ghost of Charlie’s left foot.”

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.

I
t’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.

T
here’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.

“
H
ow
C
an
I
S
top.”
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 took 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.

“
T
hief in the
N
ight”
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.