Old Gods Almost Dead (66 page)

After the birth of his daughter Alexandra in July, Keith Richards moved his large female household to rural Connecticut, an hour north of Manhattan. Heroin-free, he sustained himself with daily doses of vodka, ganja, and the odd line of cocaine in the evening. He spent September assembling the band for the Chuck Berry gig: Bobby Keys on sax, Chuck Leavell on keyboards, Steve Jordon on drums, Joey Stampinato (from the New York band NRBQ) on bass. Eric Clapton, Robert Cray, Linda Ronstadt, and Etta James were recruited to appear in the concert and film, directed by Taylor Hackford (
An Officer and a Gentleman
). In October, Keith arrived in St. Louis to begin working with Chuck Berry, an ordeal that almost made heroin addiction attractive again.

Chuck Berry, self-described schizophrenic, was waiting for Keith at Berry Park, his public amusement complex in Wentzville, Missouri. Porno tapes played constantly in his music room, and Chuck would later be arrested when it was discovered that the ladies' toilet in his restaurant was equipped with a video camera—inside the bowl. Everyone was nervous about the concert. Berry was used to doing things his way, and Keith was after the kind of precision that would work on film, “a very intimate, combo thing,” as he put it. Berry had never rehearsed in his life, and when the rock stars started to come in, there were diffident rows over interpretation. Berry was less than effusive and would sometimes go into a hypnotic trance in the middle of rehearsal. When he interrupted Keith's playing and reprimanded him for getting the opening of “Carol” wrong, Keith stifled his instinct to retaliate or walk out, and just took it. He let Berry patronize him, often when the movie cameras were rolling, since the rehearsals were being filmed. (Berry kept calling Keith “Jack.”) Keith later said he worked on the concert “not so much as musical director as an S&M director—social director of the S&M band. When you're working with Chuck, you've got to be prepared for anything. I had to remind myself that, to be second guitar to Chuck Berry—'Shit, man, when you started, you'd have thought you'd died and gone to heaven.' ”

Keith was on a crusade. He'd gotten Berry together with Johnnie Johnson (“two big guys with hands the size of plates”), who'd been driving a bus for twenty-five years and still gigged six nights a week. Keith felt this was a last opportunity to get some good live music out of them. Berry fought Keith right up to the two concerts on October 16 at the Fox Theater in St. Louis. Chuck refused to sing at the sound check until Keith kissed him on the cheek and begged, “Chuck,
please,
just once.” When they finally took the stage after ten days of rehearsals, all their work was forgotten as Chuck launched “Maybelline,” “Around and Around,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” and his other hits in completely different arrangements, some in different keys. “The band's looking at me onstage,” Keith later recalled, “and I could only look back at 'em, you know?
'Wing it, boys.' ”

The concerts went well enough to be the basis for a successful film in 1987 titled
Hail Hail Rock 'n' Roll.
Anita and Marlon were in the audience as Eric Clapton played the blues on “Wee Wee Hours” and Robert Cray did “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” with regal confidence. When it was over, an exhausted Keith Richards went back to a beautiful Connecticut autumn and slept for a month.

Keith came out of the Chuck Berry project still respecting his mercurial idol, and armed with a new, highly marketable skill. He told biographer Victor Bockris, “The whole process of putting those bands together for Aretha and Chuck made me realize I had this ability . . . to put certain guys together in the right situation and create a band. If you gave me the right guys, in ten days I could give you a band that sounded like they'd been together for ten years.”

Meanwhile, Mick Jagger worked on his new solo album in Holland with Dave Stewart from the band Eurythmics until late in the year. He had a better fix on his solo style, some strong new songs, and Jeff Beck on guitar. In early 1987, Mick and Jerry Hall moved on to work at a studio in Barbados, where Jerry was arrested with twenty pounds of ganja at the airport on January 21. After a month of hearings in which she claimed she had been framed, she was let off and Mick's sessions moved to Right Track Studio in New York.

Across town, in a studio on Broadway near 19th Street, Keith Richards was writing songs with Steve Jordon, with Charlie Drayton playing bass. Ivan Neville was on keys. When Keith got wind that Mick was planning to tour his new album, he started to take his own solo career more seriously and opened negotiations with Virgin Records tycoon Richard Branson. When their studio caught fire on April 8, they dragged their amps into the street and kept jamming until the fire trucks arrived.

While Keith spent the summer of 1987 in Jamaica, Mick finished
Primitive Cool
with high hopes. He had bared his soul, made a Big Statement, sung some candidly personal lyrics. Released in September 1987,
Primitive Cool
sold poorly despite its hard rock attack from Jeff Beck and his drummer Simon Phillips on “Throwaway,” with its jaded palette of “cheap champagne, brief affairs, backstage love.” Mick wrote his most insightful and soul-baring lyrics in years for nostalgic songs like “War Baby” and “Primitive Cool.” The album was a paradigm of slick 1980s rock, and the finest work Mick Jagger had done that decade, but it still bombed. Mick's single, “Let's Work,” didn't make the Top Forty. It seemed obvious that the Stones' loyal army of fans wasn't interested in Mick Jagger's solo act.

Privately Keith sort of enjoyed Mick's album, but felt duty-bound to smear it in public, especially since the record contained a song, called “Shoot Off Your Mouth,” aimed right between Keith's eyes. Keith accused Mick of having a Peter Pan complex about not wanting to grow up. He was quoted on Jagger's isolation and his lack of friends, but later in 1987 his comments were more sad than barbed. “The fact is that I wanted to keep the Stones together and he didn't,” Keith told a reporter. “He has to justify it one way or the other, but the guy just wasn't there. It was very frustrating. I love him and he's my friend, but I don't really feel he's mine. And there's no way I can express my friendship if someone doesn't accept it . . . But I'm not going to give up easily. I'm trying to keep a great band together, and I figure that any day maybe he'll come around—you know, male menopause, whatever—and the next week it'll be all right.”

Keith had been in Montreal since August, recording a solo album with his band. Bobby Keys was now on board, and Keith hired L.A. session guitarist Waddy Wachtel to fill out the group he was calling the X-Pensive Winos after he found them passing a bottle of Château Lafite during a break one night.

Mick rehearsed with Jeff Beck for about a month to take
Primitive Cool
on the road, but the chemistry between the two rock stars didn't work. Beck didn't like playing old Stones songs and finally walked out when Mick insulted him with a low offer for the tour. “Mick's problem is that he's a meanie,” Beck told the
Sun.
“He's no better than a glorified accountant. I'd love to go on tour with the old geezer, but I can't believe how tight he is.”

The idea of Mick touring by himself embittered the other Stones, especially when they heard he would play Japan first, a lucrative market the Stones had never penetrated because of past drug problems. Charlie Watts told a London paper that “Mick's decision virtually folded up twenty-five years of the band.” Keith took it very hard, and his public comments grew harsh as he called Mick a wimp and a back-stabbing cunt.

Needing to regroup, Mick retreated to his French chateau, where a team of English landscape designers was restoring the house's once-elegant parterre gardens. Ron Wood was touring clubs with Bo Diddley, and Bill Wyman was again seeing Mandy Smith, who at seventeen was no longer jailbait.

Talk Is Cheap

January 1988.
It was Mick Jagger's turn at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions in New York. He introduced the Beatles, sang “Like A Rolling Stone” with their fellow inductee Bob Dylan, and finished off the obligatory superstar jam afterward with a torrid reading of “Satisfaction,” with Jeff Beck on guitar.

As the Stones' feud continued to fester, people close to the band noticed a strange phenomenon: Mick and Keith began to take on subtle aspects of each other's personality. Keith became more fey and self-referential, more “camp,” while Jagger was noticeably earthier and more human. Jerry Hall told friends that Mick was having trouble sleeping, seemed preoccupied, always had his nose in a book.

Mick toured Japan at the end of March, not without serious misgivings. Guitarists Joe Satriani and Jimmy Ripp replaced Jeff Beck in what Keith derisively called “Jagger's little jerk-off band” in a
Rolling Stone
interview. Simon Phillips and bassist Doug Wimbish anchored the group, with two black singers, Bernard Fowler and Lisa Fischer, adding a massive attack to Mick's vocals. They opened shows with “Honky Tonk Women” and deployed a Stones-heavy set with intense pyro effects and silly guitar-hero posing by the histrionic Satriani. The encores were “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Satisfaction.” In Tokyo one night, Tina Turner joined Mick to sing “Brown Sugar” and “It's Only Rock 'n' Roll.”

Mick was jazzed and invigorated by the tour. Ron Wood was also playing in Japan, and when the two Stones met for a drink in Osaka, Ron told him he thought Keith would be eager to patch things up. So, after fighting off a $7-million plagiarism suit by a Jamaican singer against “Just Another Night” in New York in April, Mick asked for a Stones sit-down in London the following month.

They met at the Savoy Hotel on May 18, 1988. Mick said he wanted the Stones to tour in the fall, but Keith demurred, saying he was too busy with a solo album already in production and his own tour planned late in the year. But they finally agreed to make a new Stones album and tour in 1989. “We had a meeting to plan the tour,” Mick said later, “and as far as I was concerned it was very easy. Everyone was asking, 'Wow, what was it like? What happened? How did it all work?' But it was a nonevent. What could have been a lot of name-calling, wasn't. I think everyone decided we'd done all that.” The atmosphere of conciliation was helped by bulletins of the megamillions the Who had been guaranteed for an American tour that summer. If the Stones could get it together, they were looking at the biggest paychecks in history.

“Listen, darling,” Keith acknowledged to Mick at the end of the day, “this thing is bigger than both of us.”

                

Mick Jagger
was forty-five years old that summer. He and Jerry weren't getting along because she wanted to marry and he didn't. A projected solo tour of the United States that autumn was canceled due to
Primitive Cool
's low sales. Keith was still sniping away at Mick in the press, and the industry buzz on Keith's new album was that it was brilliant.

Keith and his African-American rhythm section (“I got three niggers and a Jew”) had been working on his album all year, on and off. Engineer Rob Fraboni had given Keith a tape of pop music from the South African township of Soweto—guitar-crazy, jumping street jive with a sweet spirit. It fascinated Keith to hear Africans throwing rock and roll back where it came from with twining guitars and a twist of Zulu funk, and it informed some of the touches Keith added when mixing his album that summer. When the record was ready for release that fall, Keith told friends that he was really scared to be putting out something he alone was responsible for.

Talk Is Cheap
was released in October 1988 on Virgin Records, to positive reviews from critics relieved that something of the dormant Stones magic still existed, like a hot coal at the bottom of a cold campfire. Many of Keith's fans thought it was the best Rolling Stones album since
Exile on Main Street,
sixteen years earlier.

Mostly a collection of funk-style riffs (all written with Steve Jordon) overlaid with Keith's misterioso rasped vocals,
Talk
was the opposite of Mick Jagger's commercially generic solo style. Keith was after groove and feel, his lyrics little more than catchphrases. Free of Jagger's outré posturing, it was the record that Keith's fans needed to hear. “Keith wanted it to be antiformula, anticommercial,” Waddy Wachtel said. “He wanted it to be art.”

The album's masterpiece was “You Don't Move Me,” Keith's desperate
J'accuse.
Starting as a dub-wise reggae track, it moved into a swampy, hypnotic song about alienation and lost friendship, a “Dear Mick” letter. Quoting old Stones riffs behind a keening, disconsolate chorus, with Keith singing in a minor, arabesque key, the song touched on many of Keith's public criticisms of Mick: the ambition, avarice, cruelty, and shallowness that Keith deplored in his old friend. “What makes you so greedy,” Keith sang, “makes you so seedy. You don't
move
me anymore.” Touring with Mick in Australia, singer Bernard Fowler noted that whenever anyone put on
Talk Is Cheap,
Mick immediately left the room.

“You Don't Move Me” was the last shot fired in World War III, the war between the Stones. Keith, in interviews, denied the song was about Mick, but nobody believed it.
Talk Is Cheap
wasn't the big success that Keith's camp had prayed for and that Mick Jagger had dreaded. It stayed on the charts for six months, got to no. 24, and sold about a million copies. Its success or failure seemed to mean little to Keith. He told interviewers that he felt guilty because he couldn't keep the Stones on track. At first, doing a solo record seemed like a defeat.

Keith: “And then I ask myself, 'What am I so scared about?' Was I trying to keep the Stones together because I was scared of being left out there on my own? What was really my reason for this desperate fight? Was it that I wanted to keep in the cocoon and not break out?” In the end, he admitted to Stanley Booth, the fact that he was forced out on his own had been a great thing for him.