Old Gods Almost Dead (61 page)

In March, Rolling Stones Records released
Sucking in the Seventies,
a subpar anthology of late-decade tracks with a remix of “Dance Pt. 2” and a live “When the Whip Comes Down” from a 1978 theater gig. A long instrumental version of “Dance” was also issued on a twelve-inch single, closer in spirit to the stirring, thematic Richards/Wood rock-disco experiments of 1979.

That same month, Mick and Keith and their women met up in Barbados to plan the upcoming tours and work on song lyrics. Mick and Jerry went on to Mustique, a tiny private island in the eastern Caribbean, an exclusive tropical getaway for British aristocracy and millionaires. Mick would soon build a winter vacation home there. Keith worked on reggae crooner Max Romeo's album
Holding Out My Love to You
with Sly and Robbie at Channel One studio in Kingston, and kept an eye on Peter Tosh, who was about to release his third album for the Stones' label. Tosh's lung-busting ganja habit was making him increasingly deranged, and Bob Marley's death from cancer that May sent him off the deep end. He started waving a scimitar in his shows and had a guitar made in the shape of a machine gun. Tosh correctly predicted that he would be the next major reggae star to die.

Tattoo
(the original title; “You” was added at the last moment by Mick) was in rush-job production. Chris Kimsey had been digging in the vaults, rounding up old riffs and ideas from as far back as Jamaica ten years earlier. Finding songs like “Waiting On a Friend” from the
Goat's Head Soup
and
Black and Blue
sessions, he added outtakes from the 1977–79 Paris sessions. When he had enough for an album, Kimsey gave the tapes to Mick, who quickly threw them together: “I recorded some of it in a broom closet, literally, when we did the vocals. The rest of the band were hardly involved.”

Mick also supervised the saxophone overdubs in New York by Sonny Rollins, the hard-bop saxophone improviser who played in various styles on several tracks. Rollins got the inspiration for his melodic solo on “Waiting On a Friend” by asking Jagger to dance for him while he played, translating Mick's body language into jazz. The finished tracks were mixed uniformly by engineer Bob Clearmountain so the new Stones album didn't sound like the touring-fodder grab bag that it was.

                

In June,
most of the Stones were in New York. They saw Jimmy Cliff's show at the Ritz nightclub, where a few days later Keith and Patti went backstage to greet Chuck Berry after one of his shows. Drunk-looking Keith came up behind Chuck and pawed him—“Chuck, man, how ya doin'?”—whereupon the irascible legend whirled around and punched Keith in the face before storming out. Keith, eyes blackened, was philosophical: “He didn't recognize me.” Berry later apologized to Ron Wood, thinking he was Keith.

With the tour starting in September and the band rusty after three years off the road, the Stones needed a place to regroup and rehearse. Late in July, Stu and Alan Dunn checked out Longview Farm, a studio complex in the quiet central Massachusetts countryside. A week later, Keith flew up to inspect the place, and like the homey, farmlike vibe so much he crashed for three days.

Bringing their families, the Rolling Stones arrived at Longview Farm in Brookfield, Massachusetts, toward the middle of August and began six weeks of rehearsals, costume fittings, and business meetings with the burgeoning Stones tour staff and financial empire. The stadium-size tour would be seen by 2 million fans and gross $50 million. Newly designed merchandise—T-shirts, belt buckles, tongue decals—would bring in another $10 million. An obscure perfume company, Jovan, coughed up $4 million in production costs. This was one of the first rock tour sponsorship deals, which allowed Jovan to plaster the logo of their cheap fragrances over everything. Bill Graham Presents ran the tour with its massive apparatus—three stages, fleets of trucks, and huge crew—in a military-style operation designed to get the artists onstage in a contented frame of mind. Despite past battles, Graham still seemed to worship the Rolling Stones. “Wherever they went,” he later said, “was the rock and roll capital of the world on that day.”

Mick, his daughter Jade, and Jerry settled in at the farm, with Mick taking morning jogs along the country lanes. Bill and Astrid flew in from France, while the Watts family came in from England. Ron Wood and his family arrived a little later, with Woody in frail condition, barely able to play. Keith told him bluntly that his job in the band was in jeopardy if he didn't get himself together. Mick gave Ron an ultimatum that no hard drugs be present at the farm. Ian McLagan, playing keyboards on the tour, noted that Woody, hopelessly addicted to freebasing, was puffing base-laced cigs in the studio when he thought no one was around. A rumor circulated that boogie guitar expert George Thorogood, whose band the Destroyers would open many of the Stones' shows, would take Ron Wood's place on the tour if Woody proved too schwacked to play.

The Stones rehearsed on a specially built stage at the end of Longview's open-beamed barn, playing on small combo amplifiers without the usual Marshall stacks of amps. Ted Jones's tenure as Keith's guitar valet was over, and now all the instruments—the black Telecasters tuned to open G, the venerable Gibson Les Pauls from the sixties, the priceless customized Sunburst and rosewood Teles, the Stratocasters and Broadcasters, the Epiphones, Bill Wyman's basses—were handled by tech Alan Rogan. This would be the first completely wireless tour for the Stones, the guitars now free of electric cable forever.

On August 26, Mick announced the upcoming tour at a press conference in Philadelphia, where it would begin. A few days later,
Tattoo You
was released, and it was like punk never happened. The grandiose three-note riff of “Start Me Up” erupted from car radios all over America as a clarion blast from the past. It was the Stones calling in the faithful for a revival of classic rock values, and their audience responded by making the single no. 1 for nine weeks in the United States.

“Start Me Up” had begun as reggae. The Stones had cut twenty takes of it on the same night in the spring of 1978 that they recorded “Miss You.” Only one take was done rock style, but it was the one Chris Kimsey salvaged. Growling, rubbery guitars were overdubbed, and Mick bawled out new lyrics about a girl who could make a grown man cry and make a dead man come. The next track, “Hang Fire,” was also from 1978, an acid portrait of a lazy and backward England with a falsetto chorus and Stu on piano. “Slave” was a remixed
Black and Blue
track from 1974, with another hoodoo falsetto vocal and Sonny Rollins's tenor sax. Keith Richards's “Little T&A” was a cheerfully callous love song to Patti Hanson—“tits and ass with soul”—with minimalist guitars and a dub-style Keith mix at the end. “Black Limousine” was another old Paris track, with three guitars and Ian McLagan on keys. In 1981, it got a new guitar solo by Ron (who received a songwriting credit) and a strange harp part by Mick Jagger.
Tattoo You
's first side ended with the New York saga of “Neighbors,” the only new song on the record, inspired by Keith's community relations problems in his downtown 'hood, illustrated by Sonny Rollins's perfectly cubist, cutup sax solo.

“Worried About You” began side two with a remixed song that first surfaced in Munich in 1974 and was then revived in Paris five years later. Mick's original “Fool to Cry” falsetto got a new descant vocal from Keith, who was himself learning to sing again. “Tops” was a remix of a great Jamaica-era outtake, a brilliant conflation of cynicism and poignancy about the old show business come-on: “I'll take you to the top.” (Mick Taylor heard himself playing guitar on “Tops” and later had to sue the Stones to receive his royalties.) “Heaven” came next, with its Latin mood and seductive falsetto mutterings, followed by “No Use in Crying” from the Compass Point sessions. Ron Wood got his unprecedented second songwriting credit for coming up with its bluesy melody.

Tattoo You
ended with “Waiting On a Friend,” from Jamaica in 1972. A perverse cha-cha with Billy Preston on piano and Sonny Rollins blowing tenor on the fade, “Friend” was not only an instant classic but also a clever attempt to repair the sleazy and feuding image of the Stones as they were about to make some real money again on the road.

It worked.
Tattoo You,
with its comic-art cover of a tribally tatted Mick Jagger, sold almost a million copies in America during the first week of September 1981 and became the Rolling Stones' first simultaneous no. 1 album in the U.S. and U.K. in years.

Who Are the Rolling Stones?

September 1981.
Deep in tour rehearsals at Longview Farm in autumnal, maple-red Massachusetts, the Rolling Stones tried to get it together one more time. Mick Jagger, cementing his hard-won rep as rock music's ultimate showman, carried a calculator and appointment book around the farm, taking meetings, telling Woody's old lady, Jo, to keep her “brats” (Jesse and Leah) out of his face. Keith turned a basement room into his pool hall and barroom, where he and Woody drank, jammed, and complained about “Brenda,” one of their many names for the prissy, diffident Jagger. Mick had insisted the musicians sign a “no dope at the gigs” clause in their tour contracts, and Keith, who hated freebase, had personally guaranteed that Ron Wood wouldn't use base on the tour. Another clause provided that Mick stay completely off the stage while Keith did his single number of the set, “Little T&A.” Mick had made a lot of unilateral decisions about the tour that annoyed Keith. He didn't like the cheap-looking Japanese pop art stage sets. He didn't care about the film and cable TV rights Jagger was selling, and didn't think the Stones were in any shape to do a concert film. He was irked that Mick refused to hire Bobby Keys for the tour and instead had signed up Ernie Watts, a black reed player with a big, muscular tone (from Quincy Jones's Los Angeles studio team). Keith despised Mick's industrial “cherry picker,” a crane-mounted bucket that would project Mick way over the heads of the kids in the stadium shows like a ludicrous pop preacher. This was such a sore point that Mick tried to leverage Keith with it, offering to lose the cherry picker if Keith promised there would be no hard drugs on the tour. The cherry picker stayed in the show.

The band's huge entourage and visitors to the farm were all told not to give any drugs to Wood, who was in disgrace. Even Ian McLagan thought Wood a risky gamble on this tour. His per diem allowance was too small to buy drugs. Mick wouldn't even talk to him. When Woody staggered into an interview Keith was giving, he was ordered to disappear. “That's one boy,” Keith muttered in disgust, “who hasn't got much longer the way he's going.” Keith himself was guzzling rivers of vodka. His cocaine was flown in on a private plane once a week. He fell off a porch in the middle of a six-day binge, and it was feared for a horrid few hours that he'd broken his ankle, aborting the tour. But it was just a sprain, and painkillers were not in short supply.

Despite, or because of, the internal hatreds, the Stones started to roar like a Ferrari once again, and gradually the tour set cohered on a hundred-foot rehearsal stage. “Under My Thumb” started the show, a relaxed reading that got the band into a Memphis-sounding soul groove before Mick came out and began to sing. “When the Whip Comes Down” came next in murderous style, an incredible blast of energy in shattered mode. Ernie Watts on horn powered “Just My Imagination.” Ian Stewart pounded the grand piano for Eddie Cochran's “Twenty Flight Rock” before Charlie went into the tom-tom Motown beat of the Miracles' “Going to A Go Go.” A rocket-fueled “Satisfaction” was the lone encore, with scraping, riffing guitars that vulcanized football stadiums all over the country. Tickets for the tour were priced at $15, and astute rock tycoon Mick Jagger wanted his customers to get their dollar's worth.

                

On September 14,
“Blue Monday and the Cockroaches” played a “surprise” gig at 350-seat Sir Morgan's Cove in nearby Worcester, Massachusetts. Five thousand fans showed up in jeans and black leather, and a riot was averted only when the club opened its doors so an abridged Stones set could be heard in the streets. The mayor of Boston banned two more small warm-up gigs at the Orpheum Theater. After another week of run-throughs, the Stones flew to Philadelphia, where they began a three-month, fifty-one-city American tour with a mistake-filled open rehearsal in front of eighty thousand fans that got clunker reviews in the press and demoralized everyone.

But as the Stones careered around the East Coast on their rented Boeing 707 jet, they found their sonic thing again. They were playing in front of giant stylized cartoons of guitars, race cars, and records (designed by Kazuhide Yamazari, the Warhol of Tokyo). A giant arc of colored balloons arched over the stage, which fell among the musicians during “Satisfaction.” Mick played in sports gear—baseball jackets, football pants, big numbered shirts, kneepads. In the sweaty finale, he danced in a spectacular flag cape, fashioned out of a Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes by designer Giorgio di Sant'Angelo, which to some cynics seemed like a tacit endorsement of the go-for-broke right-wing politics of the new Reagan-Thatcher era. Keith was resplendent in silver skull ring and steel handcuff bracelet, his unspeakable blue jeans tucked into his favorite Sherwood Forest brown suede boots, which Keith refused to go onstage without. A bandana kept Keith's salty hair off his face as, performing without heroin for the first tour in years, he began to play with his old passion again.

By the time the Stones reached the Fox Theater in Atlanta in mid-October,
Tattoo You
was no. 1 and the show was really clicking. The two guitars fought a saber duel in the hellacious “Shattered” as Bill Wyman's bass line churned a backwash of irresistibly funky bottom. “Twenty Flight Rock” and “Go Go” were the flash curios of the set as the Rolling Stones seemed intent on proving they were still the tits. If Charlie held the beat back, Keith would jump up on his drum riser and flail his playing arm until Charlie had to smile, give up, and kick the band up another notch.