Old Gods Almost Dead (71 page)

The band sounded ragged, and Mick had to make excuses for the first few gigs. Charlie looked to Keith and Darryl to pace the Stones, and to Keith and Chuck for the song endings. Watts had the demeanor of a well-dressed, solid old man: “Lloyd Bentsen on drums,” New York radio star Don Imus called him. Despite the teasing, Watts drove the Stones like a Porsche and invariably received the longest ovation of the night when the musicians were introduced.

In the middle of August in the middle of America, the Stones finally began to cook, at least on the old songs. An Olympian thunderstorm at Giants Stadium in New Jersey on August 14 drenched the band and provoked the best show of the year. Mick licked the raindrops off the tops of Lisa Fischer's heaving breasts. “God joins the band whenever we play outdoors,” Keith said soon after this. “Suddenly there's this other guy in the band, and he shows up in the form of wind and rain. And we've got to be ready to play with him.” The Stones' families were along with them for the first dates. Backstage the nomad village looked like a company picnic, with blond kids running around the portable dressing rooms and trailers. Bert Richards presided over a running domino tournament. A white tent—the actual Voodoo Lounge—served as the bar and reception suite. Ronnie's tipple was cranberry juice and vodka. Keith didn't bother with the cranberry juice. It was an ambience in which the regulars could gather round the piano in the tuning room at the end of the day, harmonize on a few songs together, and then go out and play them for sixty thousand customers on the other side of the scrim.

As the shows started, guests took their seats, the entourage took their places, and backstage became empty and quiet. The band met in the tent and walked to the stage together, up some metal stairs and through a tunnel, bantering with the crew along the way. The African drumming on the P.A. slowed to the Bo Diddley beat (“a war-dance fanfare of primal sexual libido and the life force itself”—Camille Paglia). Charlie sat down at the drums and Mick high-stepped to the front of the stage in a curious bopping lope and declaimed, “I'm gonna tell ya how it's gonna be,” amid a colossal roar from the multitudes. It was lean and hungry Mick's big maracas number in 1963: now he was a mullet-headed granddad whippet in a shiny knee-length coat, the first of many costumes during the show.

Lisa Fischer became a major stage presence on this tour as she undulated beside dreadlocked Bernard Fowler. During the “Miss You” foreplay, she and Mick used their tongues. On sexy nights, she licked his nipples.

During “Honky Tonk Women,” the Jumbotron flashed old porno strips intercut with live shots of girls near the stage. “Live with Me” became the hottest number of the night, sliding into a
Sticky Fingers
Latin jam with Bobby Keys. Mick performed “Sympathy” as a top-hatted Lucifer in a Victorian frocked coat. After two hours, the giant balloons came out (Elvis, Kali, and a hydrocephalic baby) for the Big Four: “Start Me Up,” “It's Only Rock 'n' Roll,” “Brown Sugar,” and “Jumpin' Jack Flash.” Thunderous fireworks split the evening into wild magnolias of fire as the band ran for their Dodge Ram getaway vans and headed back to the hotel or their custom 727 jet, with four staterooms for the band. As always, especially when their families finally left them alone after two weeks, the party was in Keith's room.

                

In September 1994,
the Stones were staying at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston when they learned that Nicky Hopkins had died of Crohn's disease in Nashville, aged fifty. Bobby Keys went for a long walk by himself on Boston Common, and the plane ride to North Carolina was very subdued.

Late that month, Jimmy Miller died of liver failure at fifty-two.

The Rolling Stones played Las Vegas for the first time in mid-October, two nights in the Big Room at the MGM Grand, as their old Rat Pack tormentor Dean Martin lay dying in Beverly Hills. Mick seemed subdued at the second show. A rumor circulated in Voodoo village that Jerry Hall had intercepted a fax from Carla Bruni concerning a rendezvous with Mick at the MGM Grand.

Voodoo Lounge ended in America with a record-setting gross said to be $140 million, but the tour had taken a toll on the Rolling Stones legend and the group's self-esteem. Mick was upset that the
Voodoo Lounge
songs “really didn't quite stand up” on the tour. Highbrow critics compared the vulgar spectacle to decadent seventeenth-century court masques that had bankrupted kings and burned down the theaters. Pop pundits found new ways of calling the Stones irrelevant dinosaurs. The whole thing was courting ridicule, and Mick was determined to play down the Stones' gigantism on the rest of the tour. It led to the downsized, “Stripped” shows of 1995.

Keith Richards was unapologetic, as if every day the Stones kept rolling was a gift from the gods. “We're the only band to take it this far,” he mused, “and if you see us trip and fall, you'll know that's how far it can be taken.”

Working for Jah

The Rolling Stones
took their Voodoo Lounge machine to South America in 1995, inspiring fan mania unseen in years. They did four nights in Mexico in January, followed by massive shows in Brazilian soccer stadiums. A February 4 broadcast from Rio over TV Globo was seen by an estimated 100 million people throughout the continent. While in Buenos Aires for five shows, the Stones were mobbed by wildly passionate Argentine kids determined to kiss the group. Several thousand bivouacked outside their hotel, skirmishing with nervous security squads, effectively holding the band prisoner. Argentina's “Dirty War” against its leftist youth had been especially brutal, and Mick made it a point to include “Undercover” during every show at River Plate Stadium.

The Stones spent most of March 1995 in Japan, playing shows in Tokyo and Fukuoka, before an April swing through Australia and New Zealand. They had hoped to play in Beijing, but were refused admittance to China by the communist government, who told the Stones they represented “cultural pollution.”

In Japan, the Stones booked into Toshiba/EMI studios to retool some classic tracks for an
Unplugged-
style acoustic concert album instead of what Keith said he dreaded
—Voodoo Lounge Live at the Stadium.
Don Was came in to produce and help arrange the material. In Tokyo, they recorded new versions of “The Spider and the Fly,” “I'm Free,” “Wild Horses,” “Love in Vain” (Ron Wood crying on slide guitar), “Shine a Light” (Don Was on Hammond B3 organ), “Black Limousine,” and “Slipping Away.” The Stones also cut Willie Dixon's “Little Baby,” a revision of Little Walter's “My Babe” that had been recorded by Howlin' Wolf. The Tokyo rehearsals were also filmed for possible broadcast, but the tapes were rejected by the band. “The dullest TV I've ever seen,” Mick said, “and boring without an audience.” Deploring MTV's
Unplugged
format of old guys on stools, Mick decided to film a few semiacoustic club gigs in Europe that summer.

                

On May 25,
at an auction in London, a thirteen-song tape of Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys—Mick, Keith, and Dick Taylor playing a dozen rock and roll tunes in 1961—was sold to an anonymous buyer for 50,000 pounds. The tape had been found in an attic in Dartford. London papers revealed a few days later that the new owner of the old tape reel was Mick Jagger.

                

The Stones built
their new club show during rehearsals in Amsterdam in early May by assiduously mining their past. Ron Wood made the group rehearse its first single, “Come On,” and even got them to do the flip side (“I Want to Be Loved”) as well. The crude mix of folk-blues crusade and electric mojo that was the original Rolling Stones had long been hidden in the repetitious, grandiose posturing of their stadium act. Almost in desperation, the Stones morphed into a hot, pounding rock band that still had something to prove. That summer's Euro tour evolved into a mobile taping party stretching from Holland through France into Portugal and enlivening the thirty-nine shows they performed to mostly sellout crowds.

The Stones recorded and filmed four nights without the horn section at the Paradiso, an Amsterdam cannabis café in an old synagogue, in early May. The Stones' printed set list described the Paradiso shows as “The Toe-Tappers and Wheel Shunters Club Gig.” Richards and Wood brought eighty guitars between them. Playing to seven hundred fans, the Stones delivered a blistering acoustic/electric set that began with a jammy “Not Fade Away” and ended with the trio of “Respectable,” “Rip This Joint,” and “Street Fighting Man,” driven by two ringing Martin guitars, as on the old record. “Gimme Shelter” was a stunning showpiece for Lisa Fischer, whose high note at the song's climax was a time portal to the era of
Performance.
Another song from that year, “Live with Me,” was now a diamond-hard rap extended in a Sticky jam by Bobby Keys. They played “Connection” like the punk anthem from hell that it was. The apex of the show was introduced by Mick: “This is a song Bob Dylan wrote for us.” They gave “Like A Rolling Stone” an almost reverential, anthemic reading, with Mick playing harp more like Little Walter than Dylan. The audience roared along with the chorus, so the Stones kept it in the show for the rest of the tour.

At the party after the last Paradiso gig, Keith said it was the best he could ever remember doing. Mick said, “We're reinforcing that part of our music by doing it in a small place like this. It's part of the band we always need to remember, so we can keep on drawing on it.”

                

The Voodoo Lounge
toured Europe through the summer of 1995. The German magazine
Der Spiegel,
noting that the timing of several shows seemed suspiciously identical, accused the Rolling Stones of miming to prerecorded tapes, prompting howling denials and legal threats (the magazine printed a retraction one year later). In early July, the Stones taped and filmed their acoustic show before a berserk and sweltering mob at L'Olympia in Paris, where Charlie Watts got a five-minute chanting ovation during the band introductions. In Paris, Mick gave a birthday party for Jerry attended by Jack Nicholson and many friends. Then on to England for their first shows at home in five years. The three shows at Wembley Stadium were sellouts and received unusually affectionate reviews in the press (which noted that playwright Tom Stoppard, a friend of Mick's, was the only person in the crowd not wiggling his bum). Bill Wyman walked out of one concert after Mick told the audience, “I know you're all worried about our new bass player, but this time we've got one that dances and smiles.” Bill was hurt and began slagging the Stones in the press as an oldies group.

On July 19, the Stones deployed their club show at Brixton Academy, the most coveted ticket in London in many years. They kicked off with “Honky Tonk Women” and watched with surprise at how reserved the three thousand fans and friends were. But the emotional dam broke after “Live with Me” and the slide guitar explosion of “Black Limousine.” Keith: “Well, you looked down and thought, 'This is like Richmond Station Hotel in '62 and '63.' ” At Brixton, the Stones revived “Faraway Eyes” in honor of Jerry, to whom Mick blew kisses. They also plugged away at the old blues “Meet Me at the Bottom.”

One of their guests in the balcony was Marianne Faithfull, whose just-published autobiography revealed that she'd had a secret affair with Keith just before she'd taken up with Mick, and that Keith was the best she'd ever had. (“I'm a
lover,
” Keith commented proudly. “I've been trying to tell people this for
years.
”) Marianne had fought back her addictions and reemerged as an iconic tortured artist and cabaret star, interpreting the Brecht-Weil canon of Weimar torch songs. She had wanted to sing onstage with Mick in Brixton, but he turned down her request.

On July 27, at a Voodoo Lounge show at Montpelier in southern France, Bob Dylan was the opening act. Dylan was on another leg of his years-long “Never Ending Tour”; like the Stones, he was revisiting his old songs with a great new band and new arrangements.

Ron Wood was dispatched to ask Dylan to sing “Like A Rolling Stone” with them. Dylan, nervous about appearing with the Stones, asked how they handled the chorus. “We leave that to the audience,” Wood laughed, and Dylan seemed reassured. “The man who wrote this song is here
in person,
” Mick announced. Dylan came out and stood behind Charlie's drum kit as the song started. Ronnie gently shoved him onstage, but the wise old owl seemed dazed by the lights and wasn't singing. Keith finally gestured him up to the mike, and Dylan managed to croak along with Mick in the chorus.

The tour ended in Rotterdam at the end of August. The numbers—126 shows to 8 million people grossing more than half a billion dollars—added up to the biggest tour ever. The Voodoo Lounge troupe had been together for more than a year, and the last show was emotional. During “Miss You,” Mick blurted, “Lisa, I've got to kiss you good-bye,” and the scantily clad but vocally formidable Ms. Fischer burst into tears during the band introductions. The tour's final act, before the gear was stored away, was a September 21 video shoot for a single release of “Like A Rolling Stone” at a studio in London's King's Cross, before an audience of two hundred friends.

                

Stripped
was released that November, containing fourteen tracks from the Tokyo, Amsterdam, Paris, and Lisbon taping sessions. Reviewers called it the best of all the Stones' live albums, and it reached no. 9 in America. Veteran fans found it charming that the machine operator in “The Spider and the Fly” now looked about fifty, rather than about thirty. “Stop Breaking Down” was again credited to Mr. Traditional, rather than Robert Johnson. Compact disc singles of “Like A Rolling Stone” and “Wild Horses” were released, both with superb concert performances of classic songs. “Gimme Shelter” from the Paradiso, part of the “Wild Horses” CD, is possibly the single greatest live recording of the Stones' career.