Old Gods Almost Dead (54 page)

By early August, the Tour of the Americas should have continued in South America, but these shows were canceled due to political chaos, security concerns, and Stones burnout. Keith didn't want to stop. Peter Rudge added a few more big American shows—Louisville, Hampton Roads, and a final outdoor show in Buffalo. The Louisville show on August 4 was harassed by police acting on a tip that mass quantities of narcotics were being used in the dressing rooms. The cops were held off by a defensive force of lawyers, bodyguards, and extra security men. Bill Carter called the local district attorney and demanded he appear in person to call the cops off. The official duly arrived, posed for some pictures with Mick, and told the police to leave the band alone.

For the last show in Buffalo, Mick, Keith, and Ronnie all dropped LSD, annoying Charlie and Bill Wyman. The big crowd had been drinking beer outdoors all day, with more than a hundred arrests during the Outlaws' opening set. Then a long delay because Mick didn't want the Stones to play until dark. The crowd got tense, with medical teams treating six hundred for injuries and ODs, provoking nervous jokes about another Altamont finale on this tour. The Stones finally took the stage and played a long, loopy show. Mick performed “Street Fighting Man” while the band was playing “Brown Sugar.”

                

At tour's end,
the Stones scattered to the winds. Mick went to New York, Charlie to England. Bill Wyman started his second solo album,
Stone Alone,
in L.A. Unable to return to Jamaica without Anita, Keith reunited with her in Los Angeles, where she became pregnant in a holding action to preserve her family.

Keith was back in Montreux by October, when the rest of the Stones and Ron Wood arrived to work on their new album at Mountain Studio. These
Black and Blue
sessions continued in December at Musicland in Munich, where Jimmy Page was just completing the guitar overdubs on the new Led Zeppelin album,
Presence.

Ron Wood had gone directly from the Stones' tour to Miami, where the Faces were rehearsing for their tour, but the writing was on the wall. Wood dutifully played with the Faces that fall, but at the end of 1975, he was staying in a rented house in Munich where the Stones stashed their auditioning guitar players, when he learned that Rod Stewart had quit the Faces, leaving him free to join the Stones. “I've got a plan,” Keith told him. “Let's not tell the press you're in the band or make any announcement.” “I just
appeared,
” Wood later said. In the studio, when Wood tried to get the Stones to listen to a new song he'd written, Charlie Watts stopped and cracked, “Fucking hell, will you look at him? He's bossing us around
already
!” But it was said in a kindly way. “I kind of got a clue that I was in,” Wood later said. “It was like coming into a gang that I knew I would be at home with.”

The London police happily welcomed Wood and his family into the Stones. While he was in Munich, they raided his home in Richmond, probably looking for Keith, since they broke into the garden cottage before forcing their way into the Wick. The cops found Chrissie Wood in bed with a girlfriend, arrested them both for cocaine possession, and leaked the sleeping arrangements to the press. It would take many months and 12,000 pounds in legal fees to get Chrissie Wood off.

                

January 1976.
The Stones in New York. Mick was buying a house on West 72nd Street, preparing to move from the hotel where he and Bianca were living. Business talks with Ron Wood, haplessly negotiating his permanent entry into the gang. The Stones decided to keep him on salary, which over the years would lead to occasional (relative) poverty and dependence on his sideline as an artist for cash flow. In London, Mick Taylor sold his gold record of
It's Only Rock 'n' Roll
at auction for seventy-five pounds.

The new Stones album,
Black and Blue,
was being mixed in New York at Atlantic Studios, heavy on drums and funk, faux-black vocals, and pseudo-reggae chops. The Stones flew to Florida in February to be photographed for the album sleeve at sunset on a Sanibel Island beach by Japanese fashion photographer Hiro. Ron Wood's membership in the band was announced in New York on February 28, 1976, when the Stones confirmed that they would tour Europe that summer. Wood relocated his family to a beachfront house in Malibu and started hanging out with Eric Clapton at The Band's cozy Shangri-La Studio, near Bob Dylan's cliffside home.

Keith and Anita were living in Switzerland that winter while she waited for her third child. On March 26, she had a premature baby boy in a Geneva clinic. They named him Tara, after Tara Browne.

Not the
Chandelier
!

There was seismic
activity in pop music in 1976, and the tremors forced some changes on the Rolling Stones. In America, hard rock's big era was over. Led Zeppelin, plagued by car crashes and addiction, was off the road, its empire in shambles, leaving American rock acts Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, and Lynyrd Skynyrd to carry the flame. Disco music was in its Babylonian ascendance, fought to the death by reggae musicians. English soft rock avatars like Peter Frampton and a reconstituted Fleetwood Mac began selling megamillions of albums in America on the strength of two or more hit singles per album. Overnight, many stations that used to play the Stones switched to soft rock or disco formats. In England, the scuzzy young underground musicians in their spiky hair and torn clothes, a coalescing shock wave of punk bands—the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Jam, the Damned, the Slits, Generation X—despised the Stones, Zeppelin, Elton with a passion. The punk bands blurted out inarticulate antirock manifestos and condemned rich, dope-addled, out-of-touch rock stars as—and this hurt—“boring old farts.” Their revolt was partly against the bombastic grandiosity of rock as a rite of worship, and partly simple hatred of decadent older musicians. Punk music was crude, simple, jam-packed with speed and crazed energy, and it put the older musicians to shame. (Among the Stones, it was Mick the punks reviled; Keith's open defiance and lack of pretense seemed to earn him an unspoken pass from the pantheon of punk.) In the vanguard of the punk bands, the Clash issued a widely publicized antirock challenge, demanding the death penalty: “No Stones or Who in '77.”

It was into this roiling pop cultural stew that the Stones released “Fool to Cry”/“Crazy Mama” as a single at the end of April 1976: it reached the Top Ten in both England and America in May. The album
Black and Blue
was initially promoted by a blatantly sadomasochistic ad campaign that displayed a tied-up, beaten, and bruised blond model, her clothes torn, her legs spread wide, tongue out, her face a mask of demented desire. Angry women defaced the
Black and Blue
billboard when it went up over Sunset Boulevard in L.A., and the ads were withdrawn.

Black and Blue
was a funk-informed collage of guitarists, ballads, and halfhearted stabs at reggae. It led off with “Hot Stuff,” the Stones posing as the Ohio Players, hanging on a riff and a prayer, with Billy Preston on piano, Harvey Mandel on guitar, and Mick rapping in dreadful urban blackface, the Al Jolson of rock. “Hand of Fate” was an old-time rocker with Wayne Perkins on guitar, playing like a Mick Taylor clone. “Cherry Oh Baby” was Keith and Ron's half-earnest, semiparodic cover of a classic Jamaican hit, with lead-footed Charlie Watts failing to play properly and Keith shouting the Rastafarian hail—“Irie!”—in the middle of the track. The side ended with “Memory Motel,” the story of Hannah, a honey of a girl from Boston, an unusually romantic and affecting ballad of admiration. Keith sang the bridge—“She's got a mind of her own”—with more soul than he'd put into a song since “You Got the Silver.” Mick and Keith both played keyboards on this song of road fever, wounded loneliness, and bittersweet recollection.

Ron Wood played chopped-up lead guitar over Billy Preston's chaotic piano on “Hey Negrita” on side two, a slice of Wood-inspired funk/reggae. (Negrita was a nickname Mick had for his dark-complected wife.) “Melody” (which Bill Wyman said was actually written by Billy Preston) was a lounge-gospel throwaway. “Fool to Cry” was another Mick Jagger ballad, haunted and newly vulnerable, about his love for a woman in a poor part of town. With Mick on keyboard and Nicky Hopkins on string synthesizer, it had a long, hypnotic carousel of an instrumental tag as Mick begged and pleaded with a sincerity that seemed real. The winding guitars and old-school crunch of “Crazy Mama” ended the album in a molten lava of fanfare guitar and big rock chorale.

Black and Blue
was a hit album that spring. It reached no. 1 in America and no. 2 in England, surprising everyone, including the Stones. But the record sickened the rock critics who'd grown up worshiping the Stones. The acerbic Lester Bangs, the conscience of the rock press, let fly in
Creem
magazine: “There are two things to be said about the Stones' album before closing time. One is that they are perfectly in tune with the times (ahead some times, trendies), and the other is that the heat's off, because it's all over, they really don't matter anymore or stand for anything, which is certainly lucky for both them and us. I mean, it was a heavy weight to carry for all concerned. This is the first meaningless Stones album, and thank god!” Bangs's ironic relief was nothing compared to the poisonous critical venom spewed on the Stones by English writers imbued with fashionable punk no-future ideology.

                

The Rolling Stones'
eight-week European tour began in Frankfurt on April 28, 1976. A hundred-strong crew of roadies, techs, accountants, and assistants hurtled the Stones along with fifteen big trucks, tons of lights and speakers, Keith's twenty-two guitars, a big custom stage, a pagoda-shaped white tent for the outdoor shows, and the flying penis and green dragon. The superb Meters, powered by the impeccably sharp drummer Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste and probably the best band in America, opened the shows. There was major drug traffic around the tour, with Keith personally signing laminates for his favorite dope dealers. Skeletal and supposedly “elegantly wasted,” according to his press agents, Keith looked awful and played worse. He fell down on opening night during the finale, couldn't get up, kept playing anyway.

There was so much heroin around the tour that even the crew was scoring in the special dealers' lounge, found backstage at every show. There was serious harassment as they crisscrossed European borders, with constant luggage and body searches. Keith's seven-year-old son, Marlon, was along with him, playing wildly with his expensive toys backstage, or calmly sitting on a barstool watching his dad drink doubles of Scotch whisky, keeping him company, providing a bit of focus in the blur.

The after-show action was usually in Woody's room, with blues tapes (Furry Lewis, Big Maceo, Robert Johnson) alternating with throbbing reggae: Peter Tosh's “Legalize It,” Culture, Max Romeo, Gregory Isaacs, the Itals. One night some British writers were allowed upstairs to interview the Stones. They found Keith chopping cocaine and candidly dumping on outcast Bill Wyman for the mediocrity of his solo album
Stone Alone.
When Mick discovered they were the same journos who had slagged
Black and Blue,
he became agitated. “Throw these cunts out,” he hissed to their press agent. Keith, ever the gent, apologized to the hacks as they were herded out. Mick usually kept his distance from the rest of the tour. “Nobody hangs out in
my
fuckin' room,” he told one writer, “except the band. What are
you
doing here, anyways?”

As if to prove to the punks that they were right and the Stones were truly obsolete, they played terribly almost every night: long shows with draggy tempos, sloppy guitar work, phoned-in funk, pathetic sing-alongs, ending with Mick flying around like a doomed Wallenda at the end of his trapeze. Keith found playing “Fool to Cry” so boring that he occasionally nodded off during the song. On May 19, Keith was driving Marlon and some friends home at dawn from a viscerally bad Stones show in Stafford when he nodded off at his customary 100 mph, bounced off the center barrier of the M1 motorway, and ditched his Bentley in a field. He got rid of most of the drugs before police arrived, but forgot about the silver coke stash and spoon he wore around his neck. The cops arrested him for the cocaine and also found some LSD in the car.

That night, the Stones began a sold-out six-night stand at cavernous Earls Court, an acoustically challenged exhibition hall with the ambience of an airplane hangar. “This is the worst toilet I've played in,” Mick was quoted, “and I've seen toilets.” Even the usually sharp Meters sounded terrible. Sleepless for five days, ill from heroin, out on bail again, Keith was unable to conjure up his requisite Evil and played like a zombie. Mick yelled at the band—“No mistakes this time!”—as he moved to his keyboard for “Fool to Cry.” The Stones got the worst reviews of their career. Their act was called a sham, and “a charade inflated into a carnival.” (Martin Amis on Mick Jagger: “This well-put-together, vitamin-packed unit of a human being does not really dance any more: it's simply that his head, his shoulders, his pelvis, both his arms, both his legs, both his huge feet and both his buttocks are wiggling, at great speed, independently, all the time . . . Mick is, without doubt, one of our least sedentary millionaires.”) Mick's friend Princess Margaret, sister of the queen, popped backstage one night, further wrecking the band's street cred.

While playing in London, Mick called up Bryan Ferry, effete lead singer of the group Roxy Music, and invited him to one of the Earls Court shows. Ferry came with his fiancée, Jerry Hall, the ravishingly beautiful blond Texas girl who was one of the highest-paid fashion models in the world. They went to dinner with Mick after the show, Mick in his “mockney” persona, then went back to Ferry's house, where Mick flirted outrageously with his host's girlfriend until the disgusted Ferry stomped upstairs to bed. When Mick finally left, Jerry wouldn't kiss him good night, but Bryan Ferry's days as Jerry's man were numbered from that moment on.