Old Gods Almost Dead (50 page)

The Japanese shows sold out as soon as they were announced, and the Stones looked forward to going there despite portents that the government wouldn't let them into the country because of their drug arrests. To help clear the air, the Stones (without Keith) returned to France in early December. French arrest warrants had been issued for Keith and Anita; the charges involved distribution of heroin to minors. Press stories implied the whole band was involved, which Mick, Bill, Charlie, and Mick Taylor all heatedly denied. The Stones released a statement that they had not been arrested in France and were free to come and go.

While his band was dealing with the cops in Nice, Keith and his family went to Ocho Rios, on Jamaica's tropically lush north coast. Installed in a rented house called Casa Joya overlooking Mammee Bay, Keith and Anita fell in love with the lush scenery, the relaxed “soon-come” atmosphere, and the local Rastas who emerged from jungle villages to hang out and turn Keith on with the giant ganja cigars called spliffs. These included local stars like singer Justin Hines, who showed up one evening with a band of Rastas bearing hand drums, coconut shell “chalices” for smoking ganja, and the hypnotic Rasta
burru
rhythm that induced a trancelike state of meditation and peace. Keith Richards had found a new spiritual home. He and Anita bought a villa (from British rocker Tommy Steele) called Point of View for its 360-degree panorama of the mountains of St. Anne parish and the aquamarine waters of the Caribbean. For Keith, Point of View would become as important a refuge as Redlands had been.

Billy Preston joined the last two weeks of the interrupted Kingston sessions, which were over by Christmas. Mick's cool hard rock demo of the groupie tribute “Starfucker” was one of the last tapes in the can. Japanese reporters trooped down to interview the Stones about their impending series of concerts at Tokyo's Budokan martial arts arena. A reporter from
Melody Maker
found Keith frail and gaunt, and noted Jagger's obvious concern and support for him. “This album will be less freaky, more melodic than the last one,” Mick told the reporter. “We've recorded a lot of fast numbers, maybe too many.” The tracks would be mixed in L.A. in the new year.

Lead Guitars and Movie Stars

January 1973.
The Rolling Stones were poised to tour the Far East, but with French arrest warrants out for Keith and Anita, the Australian government banned them, followed by the Japanese. Australia soon relented, but Tokyo stood firm, refusing to allow convicted drug users Mick and Keith to enter. This left a ten-day hole in the tour, but the band decided to go ahead. On January 18, they warmed up with a benefit show in L.A. for Nicaraguan earthquake relief before flying to Hawaii for two shows. Instead of touring in Japan, the Stones returned to Los Angeles to work on their Jamaican tracks at the Village Recorder.

In February, the Stones played Hong Kong, Australia (body searches at customs), and New Zealand with Nicky Hopkins, Bobby Keys, and Jim Price. Keith returned to Jamaica after the tour to try to put his house in order. Bored and lonely while he was away, Anita had taken up with the local Rastas, dreadlocked and red-eyed, who now flocked to Point of View. But Keith's house was in an elite enclave of Jamaican politicians' and millionaires' gardens, where Rastafarians were regarded as dangerous. Anita's public affection for her Rasta friends began to draw fire, and Keith was bluntly warned that the law would come down on her if she didn't cut it out. Humiliated, he left the island and went to London, where he binged with Spanish Tony for a few weeks, picking (and losing) fights with Italian gangsters in sleazy clubs like Tramps in Jermyn Street.

Anita Pallenberg was too wild to let colonial social pressure stop her from playing with her Rasta entourage. While Keith was away in London, Jamaican cops raided Point of View and arrested Anita for ganja possession. They threw her into a cell with male prisoners, who beat and repeatedly raped her. Some of the guards had their way with her as well. It took a $10,000 cash bribe to get her out of jail, and when Keith met her at Heathrow, Anita was badly bruised. Sobbing, she ran into Keith's arms. The doctor who examined her at Cheyne Walk confirmed evidence of multiple rape. Chastened, the couple tried to resume their lives in Cheyne Walk and at Redlands, but Keith was mad as hell.

Sessions for
Goat's Head Soup
continued in London during the spring of 1973. “Hide Your Love” was recorded at Olympic with Mick Jagger playing piano, as was “Heartbreaker.” “Silver Train” (originally written for guitarist Johnny Winter) was recorded by the Stones at Island Records' studio in Basing Street. Several unreleased songs date from this era, including “Criss Cross Man” and “Through the Lonely Nights,” with Jimmy Page adding a bit of guitar. New horn players (Jim Horn, Chuck Finley) were brought in to shore up the faltering Stones brass section as Keys and Price became drug casualties. Andy Johns was also strung out; unable to finish the sessions, he was replaced by Keith Harwood, who worked with Led Zeppelin. Jimmy Miller was reduced to playing on percussion tracks with African master drummer Reebop Kwaku Baah. One of the last songs recorded was “Starfucker,” a backhanded rock and roll tribute to the band's groupie friends. The song's title and graphic lyric about “giving head to Steve McQueen” caused the album to be delayed when Atlantic's lawyers balked. “But it's
our label,
” Mick complained to Ahmet Ertegun, who wouldn't budge. They changed the name of the song to “Star Star” and got a release from Steve McQueen, who didn't mind the publicity.

                

When he was
in Jamaica, Keith was in his element, guarded by his Rasta pals, playing with his collection of ratchet knives. One night the drummers who came to Keith's house to play and chant in the evenings took Keith to meet the master drum maker in the hills above nearby Steertown. Keith bought a set of his
akete
drums and was told that the drums needed to age for twenty years. To Keith, that was no problem. He could wait.

On June 26, there was, as usual, a party at Keith's house at Cheyne Walk. Reggae records were blasting away. Marshall Chess and Stash de Rola were there, very high. Keith was playing his psychedic piano in his purple music room. Others were in the tripping parlor with its huge gothic candlesticks and a shrine to Jimi Hendrix. Suddenly, police broke into the house. Keith, Anita, and the luckless Stash were arrested for possession of heroin, cannabis, Mandrax, and firearms—three of Keith's guns—and released late that night on bail.

                

Keith and Anita
were down at Redlands on July 31 when the house caught fire. They carried antiques out of the burning farmhouse, but the thatched roof lit up and soon collapsed. A few things were saved, but Keith lost some guitars. Redlands needed to be completely rebuilt and would be lost to him for years.

Goat's Head Soup
was released that August. The first single, “Angie”/ “Silver Train,” was their first American no. 1 single in five years, since “Honky Tonk Women.” As a touching ballad of uncharacteristic vulnerability, “Angie” was wildly popular in Latin countries and signaled a major switch for the Stones into the saccharin power ballad. A simple performance video for “Angie” was taped in London by Michael Lindsay- Hogg.

The Stones were photographed by David Bailey for the album's gatefold sleeve in makeup and glam-style gauze. The title,
Goat's Head Soup,
meant to evoke the atmosphere of Jamaican obeah voodoo in which they pretended the album had been recorded, was unsubtly illustrated by an insert photo of a goat's head boiling in a stewpot.

“Dancing with Mr. D” started the album with Keith's devilish, repeating guitar riff as Mick droned a chanting lyric about possession and fear. Like many of the tracks on
Soup,
“Mr. D” was held together by Mick Taylor, whose tastefully eloquent guitar unified this disparate collection of songs. “100 Years Ago” continued with its changing tempos, moving from poignant pastoral reverie to urgent jamming, with Billy Preston on organ. It was one of Mick Jagger's best, most emotional vocals ever. “Coming Down Again” was Keith's song, illuminated by Nicky Hopkins on piano. A pretty drug ballad with a turgid sax solo by Bobby Keys, it had an unnerving air of edgy quiescence, the wistful downside of a good high. It was also a stark message to Anita, as Keith sang about sticking his tongue in someone else's pie, and how good it tasted.

Billy Preston's urgent clavinet stutter empowered “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker),” a hard-rocking number about a ten-year-old girl addicted to smack in New York. Mick sang his tough lyric in a fury as the horns backed him up with martial flourishes. The first side of
Soup
finished with “Angie,” a lovesick bohemian rhapsody that turned out to be highly radio-friendly. “Let me whisper in your ear
—Angie,
” sang Mick with an intimacy that hadn't been heard from the Stones before. A swelling string section helped move “Angie” along with a bit of sonic grandeur.

The shimmering bottleneck riff of “Silver Train” started side two. Mick's harp was a loaded freight train rolling down the Cotton Belt over Stu's pounded piano. “Hide Your Love” came off as a loose and relaxed jam over Mick's basic piano track. “Winter” (on which Keith didn't play) was another big production ballad that drew upon the cold malaise of
Let It Bleed
for its atmosphere of melancholy and longing. Mick's lyric evoked a curious combination of Californian languor and intellectual cravings (Mick as Van Morrison), with strings again supplying an orchestral cushion.

This was followed by the curious pastiche of “Can You Hear the Music.” Tibetan bells, shepherds' flutes (played by Jim Horn), burbling clavinet, and inchoate chanting aimed for cave-light ritual as the Stones tried to capture a tribal feel. More to the point was
Goat's Head Soup
's final track, the censored “Star Star.” This was more like the old Stones, a faux Chuck Berry anthem about a bicoastal groupie into “lead guitars and movie stars.” The Steve McQueen line had stayed in the song, but on the American pressings Atlantic Records bleeped through Mick's line “I bet you keep your pussy clean.” “Star Star” had a great, vamping rock tag at the end, a thrilling burst of raw energy that would accompany giant inflatable penises sprouting from their stage in years to come.

Goat's Head Soup
received middling and puzzled reviews
, Exile
being a tough act to follow. Ian Stewart, the conscience of the Rolling Stones, called the album “bloody insipid” when it came out. It was the no. 1 album in America and England that autumn.

The Devil's Right-Hand Man

While staying
in London in the spring of 1973, Keith was at Tramps one night when he met Chrissie Wood, sultry blond wife of matey lovable Ron Wood, who played guitar in the Faces, everyone's favorite drunken rock band. Keith fancied her, offered her a ride home in his yellow Ferrari. When they got to Ron's house, a Georgian mansion in Richmond called the Wick, she invited him in for coffee. Keith couldn't believe his luck.

Chrissie showed Keith around the beautiful house, which had been owned by the actor John Mills. She showed him the bedroom of Hayley Mills, the child actress who had grown up in the Wick. Keith was about to make his move when Chrissie asked him if he'd like to come downstairs and meet Ronnie, who was working in his basement studio. Somewhat crestfallen, Keith descended the stairs to find Mick Jagger, working on “It's Only Rock 'n' Roll” with Ron Wood.

It was an awkward scene for a few moments. Keith, like everyone else, had heard the rumors that Ron Wood might be asked to join the Stones if Keith's drug problems got any worse. But Ronnie's bluff good humor, liquid hospitality, and brittle laughter diffused the tension, and things got sorted out eventually. They were upstairs in the Wick's oval living room, sipping cognac, when a beautiful blond German model named Uschi Obermeier walked in. Mick immediately hit on the Woods' sexy houseguest, but she seemed to prefer Keith. Knowing a cool scene when he fell into one, Keith immediately moved into a small cottage in the garden of the Wick. He cemented his brotherly new friendship with Ronnie Wood while seeing Uschi constantly, and for the next year the Wick became Keith's London squat. It was the beginning of Ron Wood's eventual absorption into the Rolling Stones.

                

The Stones toured
Europe, with Billy Preston on keyboards, during September and October 1973—a depraved drug tour, everyone out of their minds. Even once-innocent Mick Taylor was using heroin now. The tour started with a ten-day rehearsal in a Rotterdam warehouse at the end of August and opened in Vienna on September 4. They played some dates in Germany and did several shows at Wembley after a big publicity party at Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill's birthplace, on September 6.
Tout
London was there, the press and Mick's posh friends. Anita refused to attend the party and waited in the car instead. When Keith spent too long inside fixing smack with Bobby Keys, she marched into the party—disheveled, hair akimbo, Teutonic fury—and started to scream at Keith for keeping her waiting. Mick whispered to Keith to get her out at once or it was fucking front-page news tomorrow. Keith took Anita to the car, got in, and she tried to scratch his eyes in full view of partygoers as the car sped off into the night. Their son, Marlon, looked quietly out the window, pretending to ignore what was going on as his parents punched each other in the backseat.

Keith was at one of his lowest points, and there were even rumors in London that the Human Riff was dying. Drugs had wrecked his crucial musicianship. He only played rhythm guitar on that tour, kept dropping his pick, forgot the words to “Happy” most nights. Mick was making sarcastic onstage comments when Keith disgraced himself, saying, “Thanks, Keith, that was . . . amazing,” and rolling his eyes. Stu called him “a walking bloody tragedy.” Bill Wyman let it be known that this tour might be his last. The music business projected its collective death fantasies on him as the Next OD (like Nils Lofgrin's pleading song “Keith Don't Go.”) Writers competed for lurid metaphors to describe Keith's skeletal aura. Now he became “the devil's right-hand man” and “a bone-faced hoodlum raunch connoisseur toting a powerful drug-oriented misterioso.” Keith took it all in stride. “The drugs thing was just an extra side of the image that was forced on us by political circumstances,” he said. “You've got a particular image, and people expect you to live up to it, so I continued to get very wasted. I was the odds-on favorite as rock's next celebrity death. It didn't happen, despite everything. I'm a survivor.”