Old Gods Almost Dead (69 page)

The Stones played at Prague's Strahov Stadium on August 19. Havel and 107,000 fans saw the band in the open air under a stunning downpour. A ticket to the concert served as a one-day passport so thousands of Hungarians and Poles could attend as well. The Stones' fee was donated to a children's charity run by Havel's celebrated wife, Olga.

The Stones flew back to London on the Czech president's plane, and the tour ended with two shows at Wembley Stadium on August 24 and 25. Since these shows were filmed with IMAX cameras (Julian Temple directed), the huge Steel Wheels set was re-created, minus the fireworks, which were banned by local authorities for safety reasons. Both shows sold out, and the Stones pulled out the stops for the London crowd, who got an extended, smoking Keith Richards blues guitar solo during Mick Taylor's old spot in “Sympathy for the Devil.”

The last Wembley show was the 115th of the Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle cycle. The shows always ended with the whole ensemble taking their bows together in a line. Then the auxiliaries would fade off, leaving the five Rolling Stones standing alone as waves of cheering broke over them. (An old inside joke required that Charlie Watts always held a guitar at the final bow.) The nostalgic and affectionate Wembley crowd on that final night had no inkling that it was also Bill Wyman's last appearance with the Rolling Stones.

The band gave a party at the Kensington Roof Gardens later that night to thank the crew. Anita Pallenberg came, on her way back from years of addiction. After a cure finally stuck, she was working with a narcotics help line, going to the gym, riding her bicycle around London, about to go to college to study textile design. Marianne Faithfull, off heroin and recovering her beauty and her career, made a low-key appearance. The end-of-tour relief and fatigue were offset by high spirits. The whole venture was counted a big success: it reunited the Stones, generated a reported $200 million, and gave the rock music community a much-needed boost of glamour and grit. The Stones had pioneered a new standard with their dressed-up stadiums, raising the bar for all the big rock acts that tried to follow them.

                

September 1990,
and the Stones scattered to their other lives: Keith to Jamaica, Charlie to England, Wood to Ireland. Mick took his family on a long Asian holiday. Surrendering to the romance of the South Pacific, Mick married Jerry Hall (without papers) in Bali, in a ceremony officiated by a Hindu priest and witnessed by their two children and Alan Dunn. (Jerry reportedly signed a prenuptial agreement limiting a divorce settlement to $10 million. The British press looked into the legality of the wedding and decided it wasn't binding under Indonesian law.)

Bill Wyman published his memoirs,
Stone Alone,
that autumn. A compulsive diarist and collector, Bill also proclaimed himself sexual champion of the band, detailing his countless conquests around the world. Keith: “I could never understand this thing about counting women. I was there, and he's probably got the number right—I'd see nine or ten go in there, but they were only there for ten minutes. What are you gonna do with a chick in ten minutes, for Christ's sake? It takes them half that long to get their drawers down.” By years end, Bill's marriage had broken down after seventeen months. The couple had never lived together. Mandy's weight was down to seventy pounds, and she had a religious awakening that left her husband out. “Everyone knew it was a terrible mistake,” Keith said later, “but what could you say?”

Keith lay low in Jamaica until December, when he flew to England to begin mixing the concert tapes for a new live album. At a band meeting, Mick and Keith told the others they didn't want to work for a couple of years. Keith missed Mick and Jerry's London wedding celebration on December 7, going instead to New York, where he celebrated his forty-seventh birthday and third wedding anniversary at home in Connecticut. No rest for the wicked, though, as the Stones would find themselves back in the studio in early 1991 as England prepared to go to war.

Pay Us in Crude

With hostilities
about to break out in the Persian Gulf states in the aftermath of Iraq's sack of Kuwait, the Rolling Stones interrupted work on their concert tapes in London during January 1991 to record a topical new single, “High Wire.” Mick Jagger's deeply ambivalent lyrics about international oil politics and the arms trade (“You can pay us in crude,” he sneers) was set to the “Honky Tonk Women” chords. “High Wire” was an antiwar song that still expressed sympathy for the allied pilots flying the bombing runs on Baghdad that began on January 16, the day the Stones recorded the track. Released on the day the Gulf War ended in February, “High Wire” (“We got no pride, don't care whose boots we lick”) managed to provoke Tory demands in Parliament for a BBC radio ban. Working with producer Chris Kimsey, the Stones also cut “Sex Drive,” a Jamesian funk chant set to a “Hot Stuff” lick, as the single's B side. “Sex Drive” was possibly the most self-explanatory lyric Mick ever wrote, a candid psychodrama of erotic compulsion.

These were Bill Wyman's last sessions as a Rolling Stone, and he subsequently refused to appear on the “High Wire” video.

Keith Richards kept working in 1991, playing on albums by Johnnie Johnson, John Lee Hooker, and Tom Waits. The three songs Keith recorded with Waits were the maximum allowed under the Stones' record contract. He owed Virgin Records another solo album and began working with Steve Jordon and Ivan Neville in New York that spring. Virgin's Richard Branson was eager to sign the Rolling Stones as well, since
Flashpoint,
the Wheels/Jungle concert album released that spring, was the last record of the old CBS deal. CBS had been sold to Sony, Walter Yetnikoff was gone, and Mick was very interested in a new deal with Virgin, even if industry gossip whispered that Branson was selling the label and only wanted the reigning heavyweight champions of rock to boost its value.

While Mick Jagger was filming his villain's role in the sci-fi movie
Freejack,
Charlie Watts promoted his jazz album
From One Charlie,
a tribute to Charlie Parker. Ron Wood had successful art shows in London and Japan, and built an art studio, a recording studio, and a pub at his Irish farm. Bill Wyman told friends he was never getting on an airplane again and was leaving the Stones, this time for real. Keith downplayed this, telling an interviewer that Bill was of a different generation and on his third menopause.

Mick Jagger moved his pregnant wife and family back to England that summer, buying a Georgian mansion called Downe House (mature gardens, Adam ceilings, views of the Thames, $4 million w/AGA) on Richmond Hill, near Rupert Lowenstein's house. His daughter Elizabeth was starting school, and Mick wanted his children properly brought up and educated in England.

In November 1991, the Rolling Stones signed with Virgin Records for a reported $45 million at a meeting at Prince Rupert's London office. The contract granted Virgin the distribution rights to the Rolling Stones Records catalog and guaranteed the label three new albums. Bill Wyman, now almost fifty-five, fearful of flying and bored with playing oldies in stadiums, refused to sign the Virgin contract. No one quite believed he would quit, and the terms of the deal gave him almost a year to think about it. Richard Branson took his new clients and their wives out to dinner, a liquid affair that broke up at dawn. Four months later, Branson sold Virgin Records to Thorn-EMI and used the proceeds to start an airline.

                

Word that
Bill Wyman had left the Rolling Stones leaked out in January 1992. Keith speculated in public that Wyman had gone mad, but others thought that crafty old Bill had spotted a trend. By 1992, the rock music movement was almost finished. The beginnings of Brit-pop, the riff-banging of heroin-fueled Seattle grunge, and the radical murder music of the rappers took over a new generation that had never known a world without the Stones. The new audience was as far removed from the English rock stars of the 1960s as the Stones had been from the primal bluesmen of the 1930s. U2's
Achtung Baby
and Aerosmith's
Pump,
both released in 1990, can arguably be called the last great rock albums.

Jerry Hall had a baby girl in January 1992, named Georgia May. After a decent interval, Mick flew to Japan to promote the Stones' movie
At the Max,
then flew to a Thai resort where he was spotted with the model Carla Bruni, whom he'd been seeing for a couple of years. This assignation got into the press and there were big problems at Downe House. Jerry kicked Mick out, told the
Daily Mail
that a man oughta stick by his woman after she's just had a baby, and started talking divorce.

So Mick stayed on the road, developing a new solo album with guitarist Jimmy Ripp in Los Angeles. He jammed with the Red Devils blues band at a club in the Valley and did a studio session with them that covered Little Walter, Muddy, Wolf, Elmore, Slim Harpo, and Bukka White—as if Mick were trying to jump-start the old Terraplane. In June, he attended his daughter Karis's graduation from Yale. In July, the forty-nine-year-old pop star, who'd sworn in 1969 he'd never find himself singing “Satisfaction” at fifty, became a grandfather when Jade Jagger had a baby girl in London.

For the rest of 1992, Mick worked with the young hip-hop producer/tycoon Rick Rubin on
Wandering Spirit.
His two previous solo albums hadn't established a separate identity for Mick, and he didn't bother to try too hard on
Spirit,
notable mostly for its three soul covers and an Irish song. He patched it up with Jerry that summer while he recorded at his French chateau, then moved the sessions to Olympic in London that fall and rejoined his family, the diamond in his tooth sparkling again. “I've led a very strange life,” Mick told a reporter as he cut a series of tracks about loneliness, loss, and aging.
Wandering Spirit
was completed that fall at Ocean Way, an inexpensive, retrofitted studio in a sleazy part of Hollywood. Billy Preston helped with the gospel-flavored “Out of Focus,” while retro-rocker Lenny Kravitz duetted with Mick on the old Bill Withers song “Use Me.” Mick and Rick Rubin listened to the playbacks and argued with each other in Rubin's mobile headquarters, an old Rolls-Royce parked in back of the studio.

                

Keith was recording
his second solo album with the Winos,
Main Offender,
a spare riff and roll guitar-band album of ten songs written with the group and done quickly in the spring and summer. The highlight and first single was the love song “Eileen,” a thrilling rocker sung by Keith with camel-voiced arabesques and trills.
Main Offender'
s October 1992 release was accompanied by an X-Pensive Winos world tour (playing mostly theaters) that extended well into 1993.

Main Offender
barely made it into the Hot Hundred in America, but Keith didn't care and stayed on the road. In interviews, he remained philosophical about what was important in life. “I love my kids and my wife most of the time,” he told
Guitar Player
late in '92. “Music I love
all
the time. It's the only constant joy in my life. You're never alone with a guitar. It's the one thing you can count on.”

Doc's Office + Voodoo Lounge

In 1993,
Keith Richards still wanted Bill Wyman to stay in the Rolling Stones, but they didn't speak. “I don't wanna change this lineup unless I really got to,” Keith muttered. “Playing guitar is one thing; playing the other guys in the band is another.” Keith put his spies out, talked to Bill's ex-girlfriends on the phone. Word came back that Bill was serious. He had settled about a million dollars on his divorced young wife, whom he had genuinely loved, and wanted to put his past behind him. Bill had a new American girlfriend, wanted to start another family, and was ready to retire from the Stones after thirty years.

Bill quit the Stones on live TV when he appeared on
London Tonight
on January 6, 1993. He said he just didn't want to do it anymore and was content with his fortune and his memories. “I don't think it will faze us that much,” Mick Jagger told the press. “We'll miss Bill, but we'll get someone good. A good
dancer.
” Bill told Charlie Watts he figured he only had twenty years left and didn't want to spend two of them with the Stones. “I could understand when Bill left,” Ron Wood cracked. “He was two thousand years old.”

                

February 1993.
While Keith kept touring, Mick's solo album
Wandering Spirit
was released on Atlantic Records as part of a two-album deal with Ahmet Ertegun. A blue and introspective album from the usually glib singer,
Spirit
tried to break through the heavier grunge and rap rhythms on the radio. It was a surprise success: there had been no new Stones album in four years, and it reached no. 11 in the United States. With no Mick Jagger solo tour, the album was promoted by a flurry of magazine covers and interviews (sample headline: “Have You Seen your Grandfather, Baby, Standing in the Shadows?”). The stories emphasized Mick's marital troubles, his social coldness and perceived isolation, his six homes in England, America, France, and Mustique. Mick handled it all like an old pro. “Either you're dead,” he told
Esquire,
“or you move along.”

Though Keith was obviously enjoying the creative space that the X-Pensive Winos gave, he was also ready to revive the Stones. He didn't relish the front-man role and said that the experience had given him new respect for Mick. Near the end of February, Keith visited Mick's house in New York to discuss the next record. Keith said he wanted to make a
Stones
record this time, a stripped-down modern sound, not operatic and baroque. Mick agreed that this time he wanted the oddball, offhand moments of genius left in this album. Keith: “We sat around Mick's kitchen and kicked ideas around. I said, 'I got stuff.' He says, 'Yeah, I got stuff.' I came out with one word—focus. We would have to get some grooves down . . . We'd all be looking down the same scope this time, we've got all the other ingredients, all we need to do is
focus.
”