Old Gods Almost Dead (70 page)

They started focusing together in Barbados in April at Blue Wave studio, leaning on Winos-type rockabilly and Afro-Parisian grooves for inspiration. Keith wrote “The Worst” in the studio kitchen, then “Through and Through” in the studio at dawn after a night out with guitar tech Pierre de Beauport, who played guitar on it. Charlie Watts joined them ten days later, relieved to find the atmosphere friendly and relaxed. The drummer plunged into the sessions and seemed a changed man. Now an experienced bandleader and record producer, Watts began to assert himself more in the Stones' production. “Turn me up,” he barked at the astonished engineers.

Keith always took over a corner of the studio as his territory. At Blue Wave in Barbados, it was designated by a hand-lettered sign: Doc's Office. One night Keith was running from his cottage to the studio in a thunderstorm when he found a soaked and bedraggled kitten. It was the runt of a big litter and had been rejected by its mother. So Keith tucked the kitten under the plastic sheet that was keeping him dry and brought it to the studio. “This cat's Voodoo,” he announced, and the kitten moved into Doc's office and made itself at home. Someone amended Keith's sign to read:
DOC'S OFFICE + VOODOO LOUNGE.

The three Stones worked until May 18, when Mick and Charlie returned to England. Keith flew home, and eventually his kitten made its way to Connecticut too. Soon she had three kittens of her own. In June, the Stones were back in New York, auditioning twenty bass players, all of them great. Each musician got about an hour in a room at S.I.R. studio, playing “Brown Sugar,” “Miss You,” then a jam to see how they meshed with Charlie.
“Next!”
Living Colour's Doug Wimbish was rumored to have the job for a while, but when the Stones gathered at Ron Wood's Irish farm to rehearse in July, both Wood and Keith were playing bass. Keith moved into the granny flat Wood had built for his mother, and taped his Voodoo Lounge sign in the window.

The whole band, including the recently remarried Bill Wyman, attended Mick's fiftieth-birthday party for three hundred at Walpole House, the Victorian manor across the river from Richmond. The theme of the party was the ancien régime and the French Revolution. Jerry Hall presided as Marie Antoinette.

They were back in Ireland in September, working at the farm, when Darryl Jones arrived. He was a funky, mesomorphic, black bassist from Chicago who had made his name playing in Miles Davis's 1980s electric band (Miles called him “the Munch”). Jones had also toured with Sting, Peter Gabriel, Eric Clapton, and Madonna; he knew how to rock a house or a stadium. He was friends with the Winos' rhythm section. He had never seen the Stones play, but when he heard the job might still be open, he called the Stones' office and asked to audition. The Miles Davis gig counted for a lot. Darryl Jones was hired for the album and tour on Charlie Watts's say-so. At thirty-one, he was twenty years younger than the rest of the band.

“It's a big deal to change your rhythm section after thirty years,” Keith said later. “It was a hell of a deal. We tried all the best bass players in the world, and there's no basis to make up your mind because they're all so good. We used Charlie as an arbitrator and said, '
You
choose the rhythm section,' and he said, 'You're putting me on the hot seat.' C'mon, Charlie—only once in thirty years! He plumped for Darryl straight off, and he slotted right in. I'm still trying to figure him out.”

                

Ron Wood
had an alcohol problem and a licensing deal with Guinness that kept his private pub stocked with the thick black fluid. The atmosphere at the farm was summertime-loose, and Keith spent hours in the studio playing acoustic guitar and singing by himself. One night Keith and Wood were tending a bonfire when a shower of sparks burst out of the flames. “Incoming!” Keith yelled as inspiration hit, and he ran to the studio to demo “Sparks Will Fly” with Charlie. The two Stones tenderly nursed the track for months, allowing no one else to touch it until they got it right.

Six weeks later, they returned to Dublin and cut the basic tracks of
Voodoo Lounge
with Darryl Jones on bass and American producer Don Was. Was had helped Bonnie Raitt relaunch her career and had produced Bob Dylan's
Under the Red Sky.
He was known as a musical eccentric who worked fast and took it seriously. Don Was reminded Keith of Jimmy Miller because he was a producer who was also a musician. Was helped the Stones pare an avalanche of new songs down to a manageable two dozen. Longtime coproducer Chris Kimsey was given a rest, and he did a clever album of symphonic Stones arrangements. Matt Clifford wasn't invited back, because, according to insiders, he had tried to bridge the social gap in the band. Clifford was said to be crushed.

Mick Jagger formally announced in late November 1993 that Bill Wyman had left the Rolling Stones, which would continue with four principal members “and a cacophony of bass players.” Around that time, Ron Wood was finally made a junior member of the Rolling Stones, with a percentage. He'd been on salary since 1976. “I didn't mind doing, like, a seventeen-year apprenticeship,” Wood said. “But it's a hard nut to crack, the Stones' financial side. Luckily the
big
money only came when I got cut in.” Mick was said to have opposed Wood's elevation, but was outvoted by Charlie and Keith. “He's not grown-up,” Charlie said. “He's not at all sensible, Ronnie. It's not his role. He's a maniac. He has the attention span of a gnat.”

Keith Richards celebrated his own fiftieth birthday in December with all his children, Bobby Keys, Eric Clapton, and 150 friends who took over a restaurant on Manhattan's West Side and jammed late into the night.

String Us Up. We Still Won't Die

In January 1994,
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were in Los Angeles to complete
Voodoo Lounge.
Five years had passed since
Steel Wheels,
the longest silence ever for the Stones. With another megatour scheduled through 1995, the Stones needed a murderously good album to carry them through, and insiders thought they had it. The basic tapes from Dublin sounded like the real, authentic Stones of Ian Stewart and Elmo Lewis. They sounded “live” and very rocky, with an intimate, unproduced feel that suggested the X-Pensive Winos with Charlie Watts. Keith called it “recording the room.”

This Irish ambience didn't survive a transplant to Los Angeles. Don Was had already steered the Stones away from the odd grooves and African licks they'd started with. Now, at his studio in L.A., he was giving the ballads and rockers they'd recorded in Ireland a retrofitting: vocals were buried down in the mix and the funk got filtered. Mick complained that Don Was was trying to work with
Exile on Main Street.
Meanwhile, Was won a Grammy Award for his production of Bonnie Raitt the previous year, which made him much harder to argue with.

No time for a rethink. When Virgin needed the album title quickly, Mick told them it was
Voodoo Lounge
because he was looking at Keith's shingle, which had followed the sessions across the oceans. The Stones' machine was kicking in. Mick called it “the virtual corporation.” While overdubbing and mixing at A&M Studios, Mick and Charlie were supervising the design of the next $4-million stage to be paid for by a brewery. Borrowing technology developed for recent tours by U2, Pink Floyd, and Michael Jackson, Mark Fisher designed another concept stage. This time it was the Rolling Stones driving along the Information Highway to Wired City in all its gigabyte enormity, with a three-hundred-foot gridlike wall of light and an immense, unearthly Jumbotron video screen behind the band. Instead of stacks of amps, the music pushed out of slender columns on both sides of the stage. A ten-story tower shaped like a cobra loomed over the set, recalling the mythic nagas, giant serpents that protected Lord Buddha as he meditated. When exploding in barrages of pyro, Voodoo Lounge would look like a nuclear power plant melting down.

Keith finished the album at the end of April with Wood, Ivan Neville, and Bernard Fowler. This team completed “Love Is Strong” and Keith's “Through and Through,” which ended the album. On May 3, 1994, from the deck of John Kennedy's old presidential yacht docked in the Hudson in New York, the Stones announced their tour: America through the rest of 1994, followed by the Pacific markets and Europe in 1995. Darryl Jones was announced as the new man on bass guitar.

The Munch gave the Stones a jolt when the band gathered in Toronto that June to begin rehearsals at the Crescent School, a boys' academy in the suburbs. (The school's cafeteria was transformed into a lounge with leather sofas, pinball machines, a snooker table, and a huge satellite-fed TV.) Mick had told Jones not to bother copying Bill Wyman's signature style. “Some of those classic bass lines aren't so classic anymore,” Jones told an interviewer. “Since I joined the band, I've changed them around a lot.” Chuck Leavell was back in the band with his arsenal of Korg, Kurzweil, Midi-B, and Yamaha keyboards. So were singers Lisa Fischer and Bernard Fowler. Bobby Keys led the New West Horns, a trio of New York musicians who had played on the album. For a month, this twelve-piece Rolling Stones relearned old songs by listening to the CD versions, then copying them. Mick relied on a dog-eared Stones songbook for the lyrics. The band developed fifty-four songs in Toronto, for a basic two-and-a-half-hour show using twenty-two to twenty-five numbers.

                

Voodoo Lounge
was released in July 1994 with a whiff of brimstone and Santeria iconography. In publicity photos, Keith wore the black top hat of the vodun god Baron Samedi, while Mick sported a pair of satanic-looking horns. Dancing skeletons and malign ectoplasms pervaded the album design, which cast the Stones as demonic entities risen from an Afro-Caribbean underworld to harrow the planet with Plutonian mischief. Even the Stones' once invitingly lascivious tongue logo was now armed with barbed thorns that promised pain, not pleasure, in the age of AIDS. Keith's carefully sharpened sound bites maintained the Undead pose. “String us up,” he larfed. “We still won't die.”

The album began with the hoodoo whisper of “Love Is Strong,” with good bluesy harmonica by Mick. “You Got Me Rocking” was a banging war chant about dissipation and redemption. Keith's “Sparks Will Fly” was a seventies-style lust anthem (Mick: “I wanna fuck your sweet ass!”). Keith's “The Worst” featured Ron Wood on pedal steel guitar, Irish fiddler Frankie Galvin, and the composer's emotionally plangent lead vocal. Then three ballads by Mick: “New Faces” (with Lady Jane's harpsichord), “Moon Is Up,” and “Out of Tears” with Mick on piano, backing his own maudlin and insincere vocal.

“I Go Wild” had a Keithian two-chord chug and meaningful lyrics from Mick: “waitresses with broken noses checkout girls in striking poses and politicians garish wives with alcoholic cunts like knives.” “Brand New Car” was a funny, simmering reexamination of the auto-vaginal metaphor, with the obligatory horns. “Sweethearts Together” was a lovey-dovey Latin cha-cha, sung by Mick and Keith face-to-face in the studio, with an accordian solo by Tex-Mex legend Flaco Jimenez. “Suck on the Jugular” was a funk riff with some good guitar, followed by Mick's “Blinded by Rainbows,” a Semtex-scented ballad about “the troubles” in Northern Ireland. It sounded like a leftover from
Wandering Spirit
.

Voodoo Lounge
wound down with the Memphis rhythm of “Baby Break It Down” and Keith's dark soul ballad “Through and Through,” which painted a gloomy portrait of betrayal and discovery. This ended the vinyl and cassette release; the CD version had an extra track, “Mean Disposition,” an old-school rockabilly hummer with a Chuck Berry tribute tagged onto its tail end. Extra tracks from the
Lounge
sessions (all written by Mick) used as B-sides on the four singles included “The Storm,” inspired by the earthquake that rocked L.A. while they were mixing; “I'm Gonna Drive”; “So Young” (Mick resolves to “put my dick back on a leash”); and “Jump on Top of Me,” a fast Stones shuffle that was also loaned out to director Robert Altman for his movie on the fashion industry,
Prêt-à-Porter.

Voodoo Lounge
wasn't a great Rolling Stones album, and everyone knew it. Reviews were niggling at best, and “Love Is Strong” didn't sell; but the album reached no. 1 in England and no. 2 in America. It eventually sold a respectable 5.2 million units during the year the band was on the road. Mick was stoic about the record as he prepared to tour. “The ballads are rather nice,” he told
Rolling Stone
later, “and then the rock & roll numbers sound enthusiastic—like we're into it. I think it's a good time-and-place album of what the Stones were about during that time in Ireland in that year.” He also complained that Don Was and engineer Don Smith were retro-sluts and that they'd “gone too far” trying to make the Stones sound stuck in 1972.

                

After a publicity
and merchandising blitz that included a week of Stones videos on the cable channel VH-1 and a warm-up club gig in Toronto, the Stones nervously began the “Budweiser Voodoo Lounge 1994 Tour” on August 1 in RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. Neo-ruralists Counting Crows opened, sounding like The Band, before the Stones played (poorly) in a ninety-degree steam bath. Pyro sparks landed on Charlie in the fiery climax and burned through his drumheads. The next night in D.C. went a bit better.

With tickets at $50, sales were initially slow and the Stones played to empty seats some nights. Young fans were distracted by new heroes—Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soul Asylum, Blind Melon. The Woodstock twenty-fifth-anniversary concerts broke a lot of rock budgets that summer. The Stones would be on the road for three months before the tour broke even.