Old Gods Almost Dead (65 page)

Back in London, their absent drummer and Ian Stewart organized the Charlie Watts Big Band, featuring the cream of London's jazz players. They played a week at Ronnie Scott's club and later made an album,
Live at Fulham Town Hall.
It was Charlie's jazz ambition realized, a welcome respite from the dissolution of the Stones.

                

In December,
Ian Stewart was in London, preparing to fly to New York to help put the Stones' album to rights, when he began having breathing problems. The forty-seven-year-old Stu, the acknowledged cofounder and conscience of the Stones, had been depressed over the band's chronic problems. On December 12, he died of a heart attack while waiting to see his doctor in a West London clinic. Stu's funeral, the capper to a horrendous year for the Rolling Stones, was attended by the whole band and the upper echelon of the English rockocracy. No one had ever seen Mick Jagger tearful in public before, as Stu's favorite song, “Boogie Woogie Dreams,” was played at the end of the service. Keith nudged Ron Wood and whispered dolefully,
“Now
who's gonna tell us off when we fuck up?”

Stu's death sent the Stones into catalepsy. In New York, Keith told friends that it was the final nail in the coffin. Stu's bluff authenticity and common touch had been a long-term constant that had helped hold the Rolling Stones together. When asked to comment on Stu's death by the fanzine
Beggar's Banquet,
Keith blurted out, “Why'd you have to leave us like that, you sod?”

Straight to Jagger's Head

January 23, 1986.
Keith Richards, fidgeting with nerves, half-drunk to avoid soiling himself, was in the kitchen of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, waiting to induct the unpredictable Chuck Berry as the first member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Around tables in the ballroom sat the upper echelon of the music business and many of Keith's idols: Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis. Keith pulled it off by being candid: “I lifted every lick he ever played, man.” Then a little magic happened for Keith in the all-star jam after the ceremony, as he and Chuck Berry, for once in a good mood, actually managed to play together for the first time. The thing meshed. It rang. It was
music.
Keith closed his eyes and seemed transported. It was a moment Keith would try to recapture later in a tumultuous year that saw the Rolling Stones stop working after twenty-four years on the job.

                

In the weeks
after Ian Stewart's death, the Stones were grieving and traumatized. Those who understood the Stones knew that the loss would have a severely negative effect on the band's immediate future. “It was Stu's band, really,” Keith shrugged to friends. On February 28, billed as Rocket 86, the Stones played a private tribute show for Stu at the 100 Club in Oxford Street, in part to squash rumors of the death of the Stones as well. It was the first time the Stones had played a gig together in four years. Charlie was late, subbed for by Simon Kirke of Bad Company until he arrived. When Watts sat down, the Stones played like a muddy R&B band again, with Keith ripping off ferocious leads and urging the others on. Eric Clapton sat in, along with Jeff Beck and other friends of Stu's, for a sweaty rock and roll wake for the Stones' irreplaceable straight man. At the end of the night, Keith and Mick left the club with arms around each other's shoulders, visibly moved by all the emotion of the night.

                

Dirty Work
was ready for release that winter. In February, the Stones gathered in Manhattan to appear in a partly animated video for “Harlem Shuffle” directed by Ralph Bakshi. A cartoon also figured on the inner sleeve of the album, which had a funny strip about a sadistic gym trainer named Olga brutalizing her clients. In fact, the whole album was like a cartoon, including the nightmarish cover shot of the undead-looking Stones lounging in Day-Glo jackets, the first album photo of the band since
Between the Buttons
in 1967. In the photo, Keith appears to be kneeing Mick Jagger in the crotch.

Dirty Work
was produced by Steve Lillywhite and the Glimmer Twins and dedicated to Ian Stewart. Often viewed as a flop and the least interesting Rolling Stones album, it can be seen instead as the model for Keith's solo albums and the beginning of a presentation style that would sustain the band when it regrouped several years later. The backing voices on the first track, “One Hit (to the Body),” prefigured the chorus of singers the Stones would later deploy in their shows. “One Hit” launched the album on its anxious, contentious course, a narrative program of the Stones breaking up over the course of a year. Jimmy Page rumbled two turbulent guitar solos over cowriters Wood and Richards, whose mean streak continued with the power chords of “Fight,” another passive/aggressive challenge to Mick. “Harlem Shuffle” changed the mood of Sturm und Drang halfway through the first side (and this was the last Stones album to actually have sides, as the compact disc would be the dominant delivery system for music the next time they released an album). It was the old Stones “shuffle and eighths” adapted to the hitchhike rhythm, with Chuck Leavell's electric piano lick and Don Covay and Bobby Womack singing along with Mick. It clicked on the radio as a novelty Top Ten single that spring.

Back to hell on the next track, the tuneless chant “Hold Back,” set to a Keith riff with Ivan Neville on funky bass. “Too Rude” was a dub-wise take on Sly and Robbie's reggae song, with Jimmy Cliff singing beautifully along with Keith and Ron.

Side two began with Mick and the girls (Janice Pendarvis and Dollette MacDonald) singing “Winning Ugly,” a rollicking song about competition that could have been on
She's the Boss.
Same with a funk workout written with Chuck Leavell, “Back to Zero,” another inter-Stones memo about dissolution. “Back to zero,” Mick shouts (there being little “singing” on this mostly chanted and rapped-out record), “that's where we're heading.” There was more of this on “Dirty Work,” which actually sounded like a Stones song with an impassioned, no-nonsense vocal (“I'm beginning to
hate
you”) from Mick before the track faded into humid, free-floating rage—the angriest song the Stones ever did.
Dirty Work
skidded toward the finish line with the great “Had It with You,” a hot Anglo-rockabilly workout with Mick playing good harp and rapping a Slim Harpo vocal. Keith's “Sleep Tonight” was an ominous warning and threat delivered straight to Mick Jagger's head, a dark ballad (in homage to Hoagy Carmichael's vintage style) about the loss of dignity that built to a climax and ended in a strange and portentous chorus.

The last track on
Dirty Work
was thirty seconds of Ian Stewart playing some expert barrelhouse piano. The album's liner notes ended with “Thanks, Stu, for 25 years of boogie-woogie.”

Dirty Work
was Keith's album, and everyone knew it. He wrote the songs because Mick had gone off on his own. With so many guests, with the Stones' rhythm section mostly absent, there was grumbling at Black Rock, CBS's imposing headquarters on 52nd Street, that
Dirty Work
wasn't really a Rolling Stones album at all. But, in a pop era dominated by Bon Jovi, power ballads, and the big-hair metal bands that prevailed on MTV,
Dirty Work
did quite well, reaching no. 3 in England and no. 4 in America.

It would have sold a lot better if Mick Jagger hadn't decided it would be impossible for him to tour that year. He didn't like the album, couldn't see himself performing any of the songs, didn't think the Stones could physically make it on the road. Before leaving for Mustique to write his next solo album in early April, he sent the band a “Dear Stones” letter.

Keith was disturbed when he read it, incredulous that Mick didn't tell them in person, humiliated that he was the last to know. “He said, 'I don't need you bunch of old farts. You're just a millstone around my neck. You're too much of a hassle.' There's times I could've killed him.” The Stones hadn't toured in four years, and Keith had been counting on playing with his band again. CBS was pissed off. The rest of the band was miserable at missing an estimated $40-million payday, but Mick wouldn't come around.

“Touring
Dirty Work
would have been a nightmare,” Mick later told Jann Wenner. “Everyone was hating each other. Everybody was so out of their brains, and Charlie was in seriously bad shape. It would have been the worst Rolling Stones tour. Probably would have been the end of the band.” He told a French writer, “The band was in no condition to tour. The album wasn't very good. Health was diabolical. I wasn't in good shape, and the rest of the band couldn't walk across the Champs-Élysées, much less do a tour.”

So the Rolling Stones flamed out for three years, and Keith Richards had to get on with his life.

                

In London
that spring, Charlie Watts was stopped by a reporter on the street near the Stones' office. Looking dapper but dazed, Charlie claimed he didn't even know
Dirty Work
was out because he'd been playing with his jazz band. “Does it sound good, then?” he asked. He also said he couldn't even imagine touring with the Stones.

It was a rough patch for the drummer. His wife, Shirley, had gone into a clinic for alcoholism treatment, and Charlie was using heroin. Later he recalled: “Mid-eighties, maybe toward the end of '86, I hit an all-time low in my personal life and in my relationship with Mick. I was drinking a lot. I nearly lost my wife and family and everything. I took more speed than heroin, though. I slept one day in four for two years. I liked speed, because I'm naturally lethargic . . . In the end, you need someone who loves you to tell you that you aren't there anymore, because when you look in the mirror, you see someone else.”

By the end of 1986, after he'd brought his jazz band to America, Charlie Watts quietly cleaned up in London and got off drugs. Few knew of his problems until he had solved them.

                

In London
in May, the Stones shot a video for “One Hit (to the Body)” that dramatized the hard feelings among them, with Mick and Keith glaring menacingly and taking stylized pokes at each other. Patti was pregnant and couldn't travel by air, so she and Keith were aboard the
Queen Elizabeth II
when it pulled out of Southampton, bound for New York, three days away. During the voyage, Keith had time to think about his predicament.

Keith to Lisa Robinson: “I couldn't just sit around waiting for Mick to snap his fingers and put the Stones together—if ever. I'd go berserk, right? I've
got
to work. It was frustrating because we were in a unique position, having been together for so long, seeing if we could make this thing grow up. But suddenly I'm asking myself: who the fuck am I going to play with after all these years?”

Jane Rose knew that Keith had to keep on moving, so she got him into business with a vengeance. When the ship docked in New York on June 6, Keith kept right on going on a course that led to a creative renewal that no one could have foreseen. That night, he joined Chuck Berry onstage at a blues festival in Chicago's Grant Park, and a plan was hatched for Keith to take part in a concert on Berry's sixtieth birthday later that year. He flew on to Los Angeles where he joined blues singer Etta James at a bar gig. Then back to New York to promote the new Stones album on NBC's
Friday Night Videos.

Mick Jagger and David Bowie appeared at the Prince's Trust charity show in London before the prince and princess of Wales. Bill had to leave England when he split up with Mandy Smith, now sixteen, and the story broke in the press. By the time the headlines appeared, Bill had escaped, driving down to his house near St. Paul de Vence in France to avoid arrest until he was assured that Mandy's family and the police wouldn't press pedophilia charges.

Robert Fraser had never quite recovered from the prison term he served after the famous Stones bust of 1967. He lived in India for a while before returning to England and a series of failed businesses and art galleries. Always ahead of the curve, Robert was one of the first people in England to contract AIDS, and when his finances collapsed, he was supported by Paul Getty. Mick Jagger stayed in touch. “Mick was constant in his friendship for Robert,” Christopher Gibbs says. “He was very encouraging, tried to help Robert, stayed a good friend.” Robert Fraser died in 1986. Brion Gysin, the Stones' protean connection with Moroccan mysteries, died of cancer that summer.

In early July, Keith and his entourage flew to Detroit to help Aretha Franklin record “Jumpin' Jack Flash” for a film sound track. The drummer on the session was Steve Jordon, Keith's main sticksman while Charlie Watts was indisposed. Jordon was a versatile, tuneful, and dependable pro, a black musician in dreadlocks who became Keith's new creative partner. After Aretha, Keith flew to St. Louis in July to negotiate with Chuck Berry about Keith's role as music director for a birthday tribute concert and movie deal that depended on Keith's participation. He convinced an initially reluctant Berry to include Johnnie Johnson, the St. Louis piano star who had helped write the melodies of some of Berry's classic songs. Berry himself suggested they use Steve Jordon, who had drummed on the Hall of Fame jam. When the deal was done, Keith went back to New York to teach himself how to put a rock and roll band of his own together.

Cheap Champagne, Brief Affairs, Backstage Love

The Rolling Stones'
ten-year New York period came to an end in mid-1986. Mick Jagger began his second solo album,
Primitive Cool,
with producer Dave Stewart in Los Angeles and Holland. Ron Wood sold his house, returned to London, and set himself up in suburban Wimbledon. Bill Wyman was hiding in France from London headlines like
JAIL THIS WORM WYMAN FOR LOVING MANDY.
Charlie Watts was working on a brief American tour with his jazz band.