Old Gods Almost Dead (63 page)

Dream Things I Can't Keep Inside

The tensions
and psychic kung fu among the Rolling Stones sharpened the band's creative edge as work on
Undercover
progressed in Paris in January 1983. Keith's mature style in the studio was now becoming fixed. “The way I write songs,” he said at the time, “is to sit down and play twenty-five great songs by other people, and hope one of mine drops off the end.” Keith would arrive at the sessions in a long cape, brandishing a lethal sword-stick that alarmed the guests of the other band members. Mick had written rubbery raps that were evolving into the episodic scenarios of “Undercover of the Night” and “Too Much Blood.” While tempers were sometimes short at Pathé-Marconi, with arguments over tempos and keys, the sessions (with Chris Kimsey as associate producer) hatched what some Stones fans consider to be the Stones' last authentic album, the culmination of the Paris cycle that had begun with
Some Girls.

The concert film
Let's Spend the Night Together
was finished early in 1983 and released that spring to no great acclaim. Critics seemed to think that anything less than murder and mayhem in a Stones film seemed anticlimactic after the carnage of
Gimme Shelter.

Charlie Watts bought an old estate deep in the Devonshire landscape, with stables for the family's Arabian horses and kennels for the eighteen Best in Show sheepdogs. Bill Wyman and his girlfriend of fourteen years, Astrid Lindstrom, returned to England after many years in France, then split up. Astrid told a gossip columnist that she was tired of sharing Bill with thousands of other women.

In May, Mick and Ron began mixing
Undercover
at the Hit Factory in Manhattan. Keith joined them late in the month, but left for Jamaica in June before the album was complete, a gesture that ignited further gossip. Mick finished the record by overdubbing riffing horns and some African percussionists from the Sugar Hill hip-hop tribe onto his violent songs about murder, repression, and sexual domination. Chuck Leavell overdubbed an organ part on “Undercover.” Keith's guitar tech Jim Barber played guitar on “Too Much Blood.”

In July, Keith flew to Los Angeles to appear with Jerry Lee Lewis on a TV broadcast. At the airport, he ran into Chuck Berry, who seemed to recognize Keith this time. So glad was Chuck to see him that, in the crush of Keith's embrace, he dropped a lit cigarette down the front of Keith's shirt.

Jerry Hall got pregnant that summer. Woody and Jo had a baby boy, Tyrone.

In August 1983, the Stones signed their new American distribution deal with CBS Records. The contract called for four new Stones albums at $6 million apiece. Guaranteed promo budgets brought the deal to the $28-million mark, which at the time was the richest ever signed by a pop group. More significantly the CBS contract included the rights to Rolling Stones Records' back catalog dating from 1971, which soon earned the company its money back after it reissued the old records on compact disc. Most important to Walter Yetnikoff, whose winning bid reportedly doubled his closest competitor's, was Mick Jagger's explicit commitment to make solo albums for Columbia.

In New York, desperate to get their new videos played on MTV, Mick hired the hot young British director Julian Temple, who'd made the Sex Pistols' film
The Great Rock and Roll Swindle,
to direct videos for “Undercover of the Night,” “Too Much Blood,” and “She Was Hot.” On their first meeting, Keith swung open his ratchet, put the blade to Temple's throat, and told him he'd better not fuck up. Temple shot footage at the club Bains-Douches in Paris and in Mexico that October. Following the murky “Undercover” storyline of political murder in contemporary Central America, Temple depicted
bandito
Keith Richards kidnapping and then executing bourgeois oppressor Mick Jagger in a lurid romance of surreal wish fulfillment.

Undercover
was released in November 1983, in a sleazy blue sleeve showing a vintage peep-show pinup whose earthly delights were strategically plastered with stickers. The title track, “Undercover of the Night,” was a bubbling, gripping fantasia on the dirty war in El Salvador, the Contra revolt in Nicaragua, the “disappeared” young leftists in Argentina. Set in a humid, sadistic milieu of revolt and intrigue, “Undercover” was Mick's attempt at relevance in a vapid era of heavy metal bands and jive MTV fodder. Its long-form format was influenced by Michael Jackson's “Thriller,” but had more serious ideas about the sex police, the race militia, and other agencies of social control.

“She Was Hot” moved into familiar territory as Mick shouted out a song about passion with a black girl he picked up on an unpromising Sunday night. It featured Chuck Leavell and Stu on piano in a lusty romp, with a passionately raunchy guitar solo from Ron Wood. “Tie You Up (The Pain of Love)” was an
Exile-
type jam (Ron Wood on bass) on the old Stones theme of sadomasochism. Keith's “I Wanna Hold You” was methodical generic rock. His reggae track, “Feel On Baby,” was a sweaty bowl of goat's-head soup with Sly Dunbar on synthesized Simmons drums.

“Too Much Blood” began side two with Charlie playing Afro-beat drums and some “Moroccan” horn vamps. Based on the true-crime story of a Japanese student at the Sorbonne who killed and ate his girlfriend, “Blood” was rapped out by Mick in a mix of voices and personae to a beat-box dance floor rhythm that owed a lot to Michael Jackson's “Thriller.” The sax solo was played by New York session man David Sanborn, who also played on the following track, Ron Wood's “Dog Shit” demo, retitled (by Mick) “Pretty Beat Up.” “Too Tough” was an embittered and sardonic song of regret, followed by “All the Way Down,” the contemptuous, morning-after side of “She Was Hot,” sung in Mick's hilariously snotty “Shattered” persona. The album ended with “It Must Be Hell,” a downer in honky-tonk open G, with Ron Wood on slide guitar and quasipolitical lyrics echoing the vibe of oblique engagement with the issues of the day in “Undercover.”

MTV started playing the Stones' violent new “Undercover of the Night” video and it looked like the record might take off. The album made it to no. 1 in England, but in the United States
Undercover
only got to no. 4, and the “Undercover of the Night” single only reached no. 9. (A twelve-inch remix of “Undercover” was also released with the dub-style “Feel On Baby” track on the B side.) Reviews were predictably tepid for the Stones' last album for Atlantic, and there was contempt from feminists for the album's multiple songs about sexual domination, bondage, and pain. When British TV banned the “Undercover” video, Mick tried to protest on Channel 4's
The Tube:
“It just follows the song, and it's a song about repression and violence. We're not trying to glamorize violence. We're trying to say something that has a point.” The video had to be reedited (without Mick's execution) so it could be shown on the BBC's
Top of the Pops.

Despite the album's relative failure,
Undercover
had a certain integrity that became more evident with the passage of time. Subsequent Rolling Stones albums were blander and fragmented in comparison, as solo careers and old animosities sapped the band's strength. Some fans felt that after
Undercover,
the Stones flamed out, with only rare glimpses of that old black magic down the road.

                

December 1983.
Keith and Patti decided to marry in Mexico. She had given up her career for Keith, and he was persuaded he could make a life with her and start a second family. “I know I couldn't have beaten heroin without Patti,” he said. “I ain't letting that bitch go!” Mick flew in to serve as best man at the wedding, Keith's first, on his fortieth birthday, December 18. His parents, Doris and Bert, saw each other for the first time in twenty years. The jam session at the bachelor party featured old rock and roll songs, mostly Jerry Lee Lewis hits. (Anita Pallenberg, who was living in London, had broken her leg falling out of bed and had gotten busted again, so was unable to attend.) The Lutheran ceremony was conducted in Spanish, and Keith broke a glass with his foot in the ancient Jewish tradition. At the reception afterward, he sang Hoagy Carmichael's “The Nearness of You” to Patti, and his smoke-coarsened voice cracked open with feeling.

Shortly after the wedding, the authorities in Baja quietly advised Keith that a good way of avoiding a Mexican prison stay for drug trafficking would be to make himself and his entourage scarce. Keith left town immediately and didn't come back.

On December 21, Mick and Jerry gave a Christmas party for the famous at their new house on West 81st Street in New York. Christmas meant a lot to Mick, and invitations to his annual party became prized tokens of social acceptance in the worlds through which he moved. Even then a new world was unfolding, since Mick Jagger was already writing songs for the solo album that would soon stop the Rolling Stones dead in their tracks.

World War III

Keith Richards
would later refer to the Rolling Stones' mid-1980s crisis and collapse as World War III. Looking for an escape hatch from the not-happening Stones, Mick Jagger stretched his luck with a solo career that first sent Keith into a rage, then prodded him to seek his own artistic life beyond the Stones, which resulted in his best music in years. But acting out the mixed emotions of love and hate the two Stones felt for each other so damaged their once-conspiratorial bond that it would never be the same again. Years of negativity and bad karma eventually came home to roost, and all the other Rolling Stones went haywire as well.

                

January 1984.
Alexis Korner died of cancer at fifty-five on New Year's Day. Pathé-Marconi Studios were bulldozed for a parking garage. The Stones would have to find a new room somewhere for their next record.

They returned to Mexico later in January for the video shoot of “She Was Hot.” Julian Temple's piece featured Charlie as a talent agent and the voluptuous Broadway dancer Anita Morris doing Jayne Mansfield's bosomy sex goddess part in
The Girl Can't Help It.
As flaming Ms. Morris undulated to the song, the buttons of the band's bulging trousers popped off, an image that proved too risqué for MTV, which banned the video when “She Was Hot” was released that winter.

In February, Bill Wyman started dating Mandy Smith, aged thirteen, whom he had spotted dancing with her sister at the British Rock Awards at the Lyceum Theater in London. Mandy looked ten years older, and Bill—forty-eight years old and single for the first time in years—fell hard. “I was totally besotted by Mandy the minute I saw her.” He sent Julian Temple over to arrange an introduction, then showed up at her family's home to ask permission of her mother to see her. Mandy Smith's real age stayed a well-kept secret for two years as Bill took her around with him. When the British press found out, the Bill and Mandy saga became a staple of the tabloids, tinged with ridicule for the supposedly menopausal Stones.

                

Walter Yetnikoff
managed to convince Mick Jagger that his first solo album should be the first record released by Columbia under the Stones' new contract. Keith was apoplectic. “If he tours with another band,” he hissed in an interview, “I'll slit his fucking throat.” Undaunted, Jagger pressed on. After the birth of his third daughter, Elizabeth Scarlett Jagger, on March 2, 1984, he took his family to the Bahamas, where he would later record, then on to Mustique, where he wrote the bulk of
She's the Boss.

In April, Keith took Patti to Point of View, his house above Ocho Rios on Jamaica's north coast. The idea was for the young marrieds to work on a baby, but the house had been occupied by a disgruntled Peter Tosh. Tosh had made two more albums (
Mystic Man
and
Wanted Dread or Alive
) for the Stones' label, but sales had fallen and the reggae star had stopped touring. Blasted on potent strains of Jamaica herb like Goatshit and Lamb's Breath, Tosh was irrationally claiming the Stones owed him millions. He was squatting at Point of View with an entourage of Rasta ganja traders and a flock of goats when Keith called him from the airport in Montego Bay and told him to get out. Tosh told Keith he'd be waiting with his AK-47.

Keith: “Then you better learn how to put the fucking magazine in, Peter, because I'll be there in an hour.”

When Keith arrived, he found his house completely trashed, with goat shit everywhere. He never spoke to Tosh again. A little while later, Tosh told a Philadelphia radio interviewer that he would cut Mick Jagger's throat the next time he saw him. Time passed, and one day Tosh dropped by one of Mick's solo sessions in New York. Mick saw Tosh through the glass and stopped working. He ran into the control room, bared his throat, and taunted Tosh. “Here, man. You wanna fucking kill me? Go ahead and do it
now.
Let's get it over with.”

Soon Peter Tosh was asking for his release from Rolling Stones Records. In 1987, he was murdered during a robbery at his home in Kingston.

In May 1984, Mick and Michael Jackson cut a riff-banging rock song called “State of Shock” for the Jackson brothers' album
Victory.
Michael insisted on singing two hours of scales with Mick before recording because he felt Jagger was singing flat. The simple chant was done in two takes. Released as a single, it went to no. 3, which Mick thought auspicious. Mick then returned to Compass Point in the Bahamas to make his solo record with producers Nile Rogers (Chic, Bowie, Madonna) and Bill Laswell. Jeff Beck played a lot of guitar, and Jagger also recruited Herbie Hancock, Peter Townshend, Jan Hammer, and “Fly and Rob-Me,” as Peter Tosh called his old bandmates Sly and Robbie. The sessions continued through the year as Jagger, now a huge fan of Prince's megaselling “Purple Rain,” sought to apply a similar sheen to his big solo debut.