Old Gods Almost Dead (58 page)

Keith Richards's extraordinary “Before They Make Me Run” was a different type of farewell, a tacit commitment to retirement from a life of calamitous addiction and permanent death watch. Keith also wrote the love song “Beast of Burden,” another Stones salute to Motown cut in the same groove as “Imagination.” “Beast” was an explicit plea from Keith to Anita to not drag him down into degradation and despair. It was the most passionate song on a snake-eyed, dispassionate, market-calculated album.

Some Girls
ended with the subway rumble of “Shattered,” a journey through the Seventh Avenue anxieties of New York life in the seventies, when the great city seemed to be deteriorating into a bankrupt, decadent Calcutta. “Looka me!” shouted Mick, summoning all the sleazy, coked-up neurosis of an urban hustler desperately on the make.

Some Girls
recaptured the Rolling Stones' distracted and aging audience. The record's fearless attack and astute, nonpreachy social commentary was an artful mirror of the times. In England, the album reached no. 2, but in America, it was an almost instant no. 1 and stayed high in the charts for the rest of 1978. After selling 8 million copies,
Some Girls
proved to be the biggest Stones album ever.

Summer Romance

May 1978.
The Rolling Stones convened in Woodstock, the old bohemian village a hundred miles north of New York City, to rehearse for their summer tour. Mick and Jerry moved into a rented house and prepared to start work at the nearby Bearsville studio complex owned by Albert Grossman, ex-manager of Bob Dylan and The Band. Keith arrived in Woodstock with Anita. He was so wasted from heroin toxicity that he had to be carried from the car to his house. With millions of dollars in the balance, Keith had to get off heroin so the tour could be insured. He moved in with Mick and self-administered another black box cure, this time using pot, pills, and alcohol to ease the excruciating pain of withdrawal instead of going cold turkey. All the Stones tried to support Keith in what seemed his most dire hour. When the electrodes fell off his head, Jerry Hall (whom Keith disliked) would plug them back in again. Writhing in a semiconscious state on the living room couch, Keith managed to wean himself from heroin. Now he turned into a serious alcoholic instead, but one who could at least function well enough to rehearse and undertake a lucrative national tour.

Peter Tosh's first album for Rolling Stones Records also came together in Woodstock that spring. Recorded mostly in Kingston studios with synthesizers playing the melody lines, two of Tosh's tracks got guitar overdubs by Keith and Wood: “Stand Firm” and the title song, “Bush Doctor.” Mick worked on Tosh's first single, a reggae-soul version of Smokey Robinson's Motown classic “Walk and Don't Look Back.” It had a popping Sly and Robbie “riddim” format and a funny spoken dialogue between Mick and Tosh, who wasn't exactly known for comedy routines. This was an attempt to tone down Tosh's stern outlaw image (although Tosh had previously recorded the song in Jamaica in 1966) and replace it with a more dance-friendly vibe. This was incongruous because Tosh was foremost among reggae's rabidly antidisco preachers, denouncing disco's “get down” philosophy, urging his black audience to “get up” instead. But the Stones were totally committed to him, and he would open for them in stadiums all over America that summer. When they finally toured Africa, Tosh told Mick, the Stones would open for
him.

                

The Stones' 1978
American tour started in Florida in June. Backstage at Lakeland, the first stop—where they appeared incognito as the Stoned City Wrestling Champs—Keith bought a stolen .38 Special revolver from a local security man. Ian McLagan had to learn twenty songs on two days notice, since Ronnie had brought him in at the last minute. A few days into the tour, having summoned Mac to his reggae-drenched hotel suite, Keith taught him how to skank, reggae style, with left and right hands bouncing off the keyboard. Mac had some problems with the tour contracts the Stones' management ordered him to sign. When he balked, Mick sarcastically demanded to know if Mac was going to hold them for ransom, as Billy had done.

By the second date in Atlanta (where they played as the Cockroaches), the Stones were already dispirited. They were trying to retool their arena shows for football stadiums, playing on a bare stage surrounded by a huge red lips and tongue logo painted on a scrim. A pair of giant tonsils floated over Charlie's drums, the old 1960s Gretsch kit which he'd gotten out of storage for the tour. Mick was dressed in his concept of cheap disco fashion, dubbed the “F train look” after the New York subway that ran through immigrant Queens: red Puerto Rican trousers, white After Six dinner jackets, rakishly tilted Kangol cap. He looked too dopey for words, and the Stones were getting condescending reviews.

Hard times for the Stones, despite creative revival and a hit album. Mick and Wood were both being divorced. Their trusted press agent, Les Perrin, died. Black radio boycotted the album because of the line “black girls just wanna get fucked all night,” which prompted Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights activist, to denounce the Stones. Threatened with jail in Canada, Keith and Anita had split. When Anita left Woodstock, Keith moved in with Ronnie and his new girlfriend, Jo Howard, who was pregnant. Keith started seeing a friend of Jo's, a beautiful blond Danish model named Lily Wenglass. Lil, as she was called, was intelligent and sexy. She brought Keith back into the world of desire after his cure had taken hold, and made a lot of enemies early on by keeping his old friends away from him while he was trying to stay (relatively) straight.

As the tour progressed, the shows often split in two, with the Stones playing listlessly on the old battle hymns, and with a brittle power pop surge on the new songs—“Respectable,” “Beast of Burden,” “Miss You,” and especially “Shattered,” which turned into an explosive trance riff that blew minds all over the United States that summer. It was Keith's band on the old stuff, but Mick drove the new songs, playing fast rhythm guitar. Early in the tour, they taped a New Jersey theater show that captured a screaming, maniacal “When the Whip Comes Down” and Keith croaking out “Happy” with a saw-toothed fury that showed that even on this, perhaps the low point of their concert career, the Stones were still capable of transcendence on any given night. Few missed Billy Preston's fuzzy gospel stylings, and on their best nights the Stones still managed to play stripped-down, grease-gun rock and roll. When shows went well, Keith credited the new guy. “With Ron Wood, the band's playing more like the way it did when Brian and I used to play at the beginning.” Asked about writing songs, Keith said he was “more interested in creating sounds, something that has a different atmosphere and feel to it.” Asked what inspired him, he answered, “The latest stuff coming out of Jamaica.”

The tour divided into camps—vivacious Mick and Jerry versus truculent Keith, with Wood as the tenuous link. Keith avoided Jerry and didn't like that she was now making appearances with the Stones. Emerging from his long drug stupor, he tried asserting himself in business matters, annoying Mick, who had run the Stones alone for most of the decade. “I thought I was doing Mick a favor,” Keith said later, “but he saw it as a power grab.”

Off heroin, Keith was becoming more human. He even let Woody bring Bill Wyman to his room one night for a hatchet-burying session that allowed the two Stones—who'd never gotten on—to begin speaking again. “Woody's come along and pulled both sides together,” Wyman told an interviewer. “He's the reason for the band getting closer, being able to talk to each other, even saying unheard-of things like 'You were great tonight.' Woody started to get that happening. He's
fabulous
! He made this band come to life again.”

After playing Soldier Field in Chicago in July, the Stones (without an ailing Bill) jammed with their mentor Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon at Muddy's regular club gig at the Quiet Knight. Muddy was on a high, riding a successful album (
Hard Again
) recorded with Johnny Winter. The Stones gathered round the venerable Delta legend, who performed sitting on a stool, and did hammy versions of “Mannish Boy” and “Rollin' Stone Blues.”

The Stones were flying this tour on a smaller plane, a Convair 580 turboprop. In Texas, Mick explained the Stones' lackluster performance to their restive audience: “If the band seems slightly lacking in energy, it's because we spent all last night fucking. Ha ha! We do our best.” In Tucson, hometown girl Linda Ronstadt (in silk hot pants) joined Mick onstage to sing “Tumbling Dice.” Keith freaked out when he saw the sign outside the hall billboarding “Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones.”

The tour began to wind down in California. Bobby Keys and Nicky Hopkins joined the Stones for the finales of the huge Anaheim Stadium shows—listless disasters that the band tried to phone in. Keith was doing heroin again (“Hollywood—it always kills you in the end”), the crowd choked on the red dust of the baseball infield, and everyone said the shows sucked. Marsha Hunt's lawyers tried to seize Mick's money from these shows for unpaid child support.

The final Stones shows were in San Francisco. Keith wanted to keep the tour energy going, so the Stones and Ian McLagan stayed in L.A. and cut some tracks at an old haunt, RCA Studios in Hollywood. The sessions were closed, with only drummer Jim Keltner allowed in to hang with his pal Charlie Watts. Working from midnight on, the Stones cut a dozen songs, including the basic tracks of “Summer Romance” and “Where the Boys All Go.” On his own, Keith cut a version of Jimmy Cliff's reggae anthem “The Harder They Come,” with Ronnie on guitar, which would be the B side of “Run Rudolph Run” later in the year.

For a while, Keith, Woody, and Jo lived in a house rented from the Getty family. Keith and Ron bought pure Iranian heroin from a Los Angeles dealer named Kathy Smith and spent their time “chasing the dragon”—smoking fumes from smack cooking in foil. Keith dropped an ice pick on his bare foot while cutting chunks from an opium ball, but didn't seem to mind. Then Woody and Jo moved into a new house they'd bought in Mandeville Canyon, while Keith and Lil hid out in a house nearby. It caught fire while they were in bed one morning, and they had to climb out a window, naked. With fire engines wailing in the distance and Keith's ammunition exploding in the burning house, Keith and Lil were trying to cover themselves when a car pulled up, driven by a cousin of Anita's who lived nearby. They jumped into the car and disappeared just as the police arrived.

The Blind Angel

Autumn 1978.
Keith Moon, the Who's volcanic drummer, the raucous Bacchus of London pop excess, overdosed on antidepressants after detoxing from drugs and alcohol. Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts went to the funeral representing the Stones, who all felt that they'd lost a friend.

By October,
Some Girls
had sold almost 4 million units. “Respectable” was released as a single, quickly followed by “Shattered” (with the quasi-reggae “Everything Is Turning to Gold” on the B side). To promote these, the Stones agreed to appear on American TV's premier venue—the opening show of that season's
Saturday Night Live,
in New York's NBC studios.

The show was in its fourth year and at the zenith of its hipness. Hot comedians John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd had spun their Blues Brothers skits into a hit album and a crack R&B homage band (with Steve Jordan on drums). It would be the Stones' first live television broadcast in ten years.

The Stones rehearsed with the
SNL
cast the first week in October, staying at the Plaza Hotel. But Olympian intoxication sabotaged this meeting of the gods. The Stones, especially Keith, proved incapable of delivering comedy lines, and the druggy skits involving the band were dropped. Regarding Keith, who could barely stand, let alone remember the single line he was given, cast member Laraine Newman observed dryly, “It's interesting to be standing there working with someone who's dead.” The Stones guzzled Scotch and vodka and openly snorted lines of cocaine in the studio. The network's censor told producer Lorne Michaels that Mick would have to wear underwear for the broadcast because of the bulge problem. After hours, there was jamming and high-octane dope intake in Belushi's “vault,” a soundproof music room in his apartment. On the day of the broadcast, the Stones showed up at NBC mostly drunk. Mick had rehearsed till he was hoarse, and they had to play “Beast” an octave lower so he could sing it. They played brilliantly at the dress rehearsal but choked at airtime, giving mediocre and nervous performances of “Miss You,” “Beast of Burden,” and “Shattered.” Mick grossed out the nation by licking Ronnie's lips during a close-up at the microphone. The consensus at the show was that the Stones had blown it.
SNL
broadcast the Stones' better dress rehearsal tape when the show was rerun later that year.

                

Ronnie Wood's
daughter Leah was born later that month, just before her dark Uncle Keith had his big day in court. It was eighteen months after the Toronto busts, a period of strategic delays and legal maneuvering that had its denouement when Keith appeared in court on October 23, 1978. Supporting him were his girlfriend Lil and Canadian citizens Dan Aykroyd and Lorne Michaels. Press interest in the case had intensified after the Sex Pistols' recent disintegration on their first American tour, and the subsequent indictment of bassist Sid Vicious for murdering his American girlfriend in New York. The press gallery was jammed with reporters eager to report Keith Richards's sad downfall as well. But the detective who had arrested Keith had been killed in a car accident earlier in the year, and there were rumors that the Canadian government was embarrassed and that Keith might walk.