Mick Jagger (80 page)

Shortly afterward, the man seemed to do just that. He telephoned Jerry and asked her to meet him in Dallas. Three days later, they had lunch together very publicly in a Dallas hotel to let everyone know they were all right again. Only this time, no letter of apology from Jerry came to light afterward.

BEFORE THE WATERSHED of Mick’s fiftieth birthday, there were spasmodic attempts to revive the film career that had stalled with Performance and Ned Kelly more than twenty years earlier. He himself had never really stopped trying, though latterly his thoughts had run more on a screen partnership with David Bowie, who’d taken the role he refused in The Man Who Fell to Earth (and was now his neighbor on Mustique).

The pair put themselves up for two expensive Hollywood buddy movies, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Ishtar, but in the first lost out to Michael Caine and Steve Martin and in the second to Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty—luckily, since Ishtar proved a spectacular turkey. When plans were announced to film Tom Wolfe’s sprawling New York novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, Mick fancied the role of the sleazy British journalist, a breed he knew only too well, but in the end the part was rewritten for an American and given to Bruce Willis.

In 1992, the name “Mick Jagger” was finally seen on a film poster again, though he was soon to wish it hadn’t. Freejack was set in a future America where ailing rich people could have their brains transplanted into healthy bodies and young victims were hunted down for the purpose by so-called bonejackers. Mick was approached to play the ruthless “Bonejacker” Vacendak at short notice, happened to have a few spare weeks before starting a new solo album, so gave the firm yes that so many producers had sought, and then didn’t have time to chicken out. It was ironic that, having turned down dozens of prestigious and challenging roles, he should end up in exactly the kind of science-fiction dross he’d repeatedly sidestepped throughout the seventies—“not Philip K. Dick,” as one critic wrote, “more Philip K. Dildo.” Especially short shrift was given to “Jagger in sci-fi leather riot gear, looking extremely silly” as a character patently too young for him.

In a TV interview to promote the film, he let slip that, while on location in Atlanta, he’d made the rounds of the city’s strip clubs with his twenty-nine-year-old costar, Emilio Estevez. How did that square with his image as a family man? he was asked. The phrase seemed positively distasteful: “You can have five kids without being ‘a family man.’ ” But he had the grace to apologize, in case any of them were watching.

Nineteen ninety-three brought his third solo album, the making of which involved further prolonged absences of his big, warm foot from the marital bed. Learning the lessons of his eighties solo efforts, he stuck to a mainly soul/country/gospel formula and brought no celebrity helpers into the studio other than Billy Preston, jazz saxophonist Courtney Pine, Lenny Kravitz for one vocal, and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers playing bass. The album sold two million copies and earned a gold disc in America, though its title, Wandering Spirit, was something of a misnomer. Jerry, for one, might have argued that his spirit was not the bit of him that tended to wander. And that year’s real wandering spirit turned out to be Bill Wyman, who resigned from the Stones aged fifty-six.

At the beginning, back in 1962, it wasn’t Bill the others wanted so much as his impressive spare amp. The chemistry between them hadn’t been right then and had never come right since. In the Stones’ class-bound hierarchy, “Mister Formica” (as Andrew Oldham nicknamed him) had always been a figure of faint fun, snobbishly derided for his neatness and punctuality, for being so much older than the rest of them, for having a wife and child when they were still single, and for coming from the joke south London suburb of Penge. Even now, thirty-one years on, it was said of him (and by him) that he’d never really joined the band.

Electric-bass playing is not high art, but good rock bassists are rare and worth their weight in gold to any band. Paul McCartney was one such, Bill Wyman another. The Stones’ killer sound derived just as much, if less obviously, from the bass guitar Bill held at that odd, near-vertical angle as from Keith’s riffs. Yet Bill had never been made to feel indispensable. Other Stones frequently doubled on bass—Mick Taylor on “Tumbling Dice,” Woody on “Emotional Rescue” and “Fight,” Keith on tracks as far back as “Let’s Spend the Night Together” in 1966.

While Bill’s exterior life as a Stone mainly consisted of sharing blame for what Mick or Keith got up to, his interior one bristled with reminders of how much less important he was than either of them. If Mick wanted to go to the Olympic Games on impossibly short notice (no problem), there would be half a dozen acolytes eager to make the call; if Bill wanted to (problem), the assignment would bounce around the office like a game of pass-the-parcel. When Bill wanted studio time booked to work on a solo track, everyone would be far too busy trying to find Keith a new cook.

But by far his greatest grievance was over money. Publicly he maintained that the Stones’ collective income was distributed in scrupulously equal portions, with Charlie and himself receiving no less as NCOs than the officer class of Mick and Keith. He certainly looked the perfect pop plutocrat with his Suffolk stately home, Gedding Hall, and his villa on the Côte d’Azur, next door to the great artist Marc Chagall (each location the farthest conceivable from Penge). In reality, his income as a founder-member of the world’s highest-earning band was but a fraction of what was generally supposed—so much so that for long stretches he’d been forced to live on bank overdrafts.

A huge slice of the earnings, of course, went to Mick and Keith as songwriters, but even that did not seem enough for them—or, at any rate, for Mick. When Bill had written “In Another Land” for the Satanic Majesties album, he’d been pressured to hand over a share of the publishing to Jagger-Richard and, as a result, had never had a song on a Stones album since. Likewise, his contributions to major Jagger-Richard tracks had received no gratitude, let alone recompense. Coming up with the classic riff for “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” for example, might have brought a cowriting credit from more generous, democratic colleagues. With Mick and Keith, especially Mick, it wasn’t even worth asking.

Bill had thought of quitting the band at the same time as Mick Taylor, but had hung on, a disgusted but impotent spectator as Keith almost wrecked it in the seventies and Mick almost did in the eighties. To Bill, the distinction was that, however suicidal Keith’s behavior, he was always wholeheartedly for the Stones, whereas Mick was only ever for Mick. Ronnie Wood’s arrival made life in the ranks a little pleasanter for Bill but did nothing to correct the vast internal imbalance. Woody was a practiced and prolific songwriter but (in a reprise of the “In Another Land” situation) was expected to split the publishing on his compositions for the Stones with Jagger-Richard. Why should you put up with it? Bill often asked him. Happy-go-lucky Woody didn’t want a fight and, anyway, regarded the honor of having a song on a Stones album as worth more than any royalties.

The joke on his denigrators in the band was that quiet, unflamboyant Bill Wyman had turned into the best known of them all—Mick apart—both as a solo musician and personality. More than that, he had succeeded in the very areas where Mick had most conspicuously failed. He was not just the first Stone to release a solo album, but the only one ever to have a UK Top 20 single, “Si Si Je Suis un Rock Star.” He’d written the music for the 1981 film Green Ice, winning considerably more acclaim than Mick’s only movie-scoring effort, for Invocation of My Demon Brother. He had published a successfully ghostwritten autobiography, Stone Alone, a bestseller in 1990. Even in the area of priapism, he now ranked alongside Mick, claiming to have the names and addresses of one thousand different women he’d slept with stored on his computer.

Here, indeed, he had generated a scandal surpassing any of Mick’s, even the Mars bar. In 1984, at the age of forty-eight, he’d begun dating a thirteen-year-old London schoolgirl named Mandy Smith—purely platonically, so he later maintained, and with the full consent of her mother. The relationship had been exposed by the News of the World and consequently investigated by the Director of Public Prosecutions, giving Britain’s tabloids their yummiest feast since the Year of the Mars Bar: “BILL TAKES A TEENAGE LOVER”; “MANDY’S WAGES OF SIN”; “WYMAN TO FACE THE MUSIC”; and when the DPP decided to take no action, “LET OFF FOR SEX-PROBE STONE.”

The Mick-eclipsing headlines had continued until the decade’s end: first with fifty-two-year-old Bill’s lavish wedding to eighteen-year-old Mandy in June 1989; then with the eating disorder that struck the bride, reducing her weight to five and a half stone, or seventy-seven pounds; then with the couple’s speedy divorce, having spent barely a week of married life together; finally with the Gilbert and Sullivan plot twist when Bill’s twenty-seven-year-old son, Stephen, became engaged to Mandy’s mother, Patsy, transforming Bill’s recent mother-in-law into his prospective daughter-in-law.

The Mandy episode was a grievous misjudgment on Bill’s part—Eternal Teenager Syndrome at its most distasteful—and he lost no time in admitting as much. It still would always rankle with him that none of his bandmates ever offered a word in his support, publicly or privately. Keith might have felt especially motivated to stick his head above the parapet, as Bill had done for him in 1977 by scoring desperately needed smack for him in Toronto. But Keith’s sole comment, inaccurate as well as unhelpful, was that “[Bill] only thinks with his dick.” Mick was appalled by the whole affair, as behooved the father of two then eighteen-year-old daughters, although not much delving into history was needed to find him dating a seventeen-year-old, never mind singing “Stray Cat Blues” (“Ah can see that yaw fifteen years old / No, Ah don’ want yaw ID”).

Mick had always hated any of the other Stones intruding on his social life and now Bill, of all people, was starting to do it. Sometimes they would both separately be invited to concerts in aid of the Prince of Wales’s Prince’s Trust charity, attended by the gorgeous, pop-loving Princess Diana. Mick’s face, one onlooker recalls, would “turn gray” whenever he arrived in the VIP box to find Bill already there, chatting with the royals.

Occasionally it was convenient to pretend they were mates and equals. If Bill was in a restaurant having dinner with friends, Mick would join his table accompanied by a large entourage, order the most expensive champagne, then leave before the whopping check arrived. Then again Bill would request a one-to-one meeting with him to discuss some aspect of Stones business and be told he was too busy. Bill’s ghostwriter, Ray Coleman, witnessed more than one such brush-off. Even for Coleman, with his long experience of rock-star egomania, it was “unimaginable that the bass guitarist in the Stones rings the vocalist and is told he hasn’t got time to see him.”

The iron had finally entered Bill’s soul with the Steel Wheels tour of 1989–1990, which supposedly ended the warfare within the Stones and netted $260 million, almost three times the original estimate. After the tour ended, he told friends that the accountants had earned more than Charlie and himself put together.

His resignation in 1993 astonished the music business. In November 1991, the Stones had signed with a new label, Virgin—the least appropriate trademark they could have found—for their largest advance yet, $25 million; they were now lining up a world tour to promote their first Virgin album, Voodoo Lounge. As with Steel Wheels, the whole operation had been contracted out to the young Canadian Michael Cohl and his company, TNA (short for The Next Adventure). Cohl was already certain of breaking the Steel Wheels tour’s record with new revenue streams from sponsorship, merchandising, TV rights, and luxury “skyboxes” to end the long tradition of purgatorial discomfort at rock gigs, at least for those who could afford them. In short, it looked as if Bill was walking away from a gold mine.

His thirty years’ service with the Stones were not marked by any farewell ceremony or even public tribute. “Bass-playing can’t be all that difficult,” Mick commented. “If necessary, I’ll do it myself.” Keith sent a fax saying, “No one leaves this band except in a wooden box,” implying he had the box at the ready and the wherewithal to put the defector there. But in the media he contented himself with calling Bill “too wrinkly” to stay with the band. That was rich, coming from Keith; in any case, Bill was the only one of them to have remained virtually wrinkle-free.

No attempt was made to find a new Stone to play bass on the Voodoo Lounge tour. Instead, the job went to American Darryl Jones, a fine musician who had once backed Miles Davis, but who, like Mick Taylor and Woody, would merely be a salaried employee.

Leaving the band was not the end of Bill Wyman, as many predicted, but, in many ways, the making of him. Just before his final tour, he had opened a Tex-Mex restaurant named Sticky Fingers after the Stones’ 1971 album and decorated with memorabilia of their career from the archive he’d had the small satisfaction of withholding from Mick. His original plan had been a chain of restaurants named Rolling Stones, but Prince Rupert had warned that his sticky-fingered ex-bandmates would require 90 percent of the take. Just this one establishment, in Kensington, west London, was soon making him more per month than he’d ever earned with them.

A man of many enthusiasms outside music, he never became one of the industry’s numerous professional victims and whingers, or revealed his feelings about his former CO except on the odd private occasion. One such was when he happened to bump into Mick’s long-ago fiancée, the former Chrissie Shrimpton, accompanied by her daughter, Bonnie. “Your mother was lovely,” he told Bonnie, “and [Mick] treated her like shit … and all his girlfriends like shit … and all of us like shit.”

IN 1997, FORTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD Tony Blair became Britain’s youngest prime minister since 1812, leading a Labour Party rebranded, and supposedly rejuvenated, as New Labour. Blair had sung and played lead guitar with a student rock band in the early seventies, and had been swept to his landslide victory over John Major’s Conservatives on a tide of triumphalist pop music, notably D:Ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better.” His cabinet and closest advisers were mostly around his age, with the same history of shoulder-length locks, crushed-velvet flares, and bopping to “Brown Sugar” and “Honky Tonk Women.” As had already happened in America with President Bill Clinton, political as well as economic power passed to the baby boomers.