Old Gods Almost Dead (72 page)

Accompanying
Stripped
was a TV documentary about the unplugged Stones, and a
Voodoo Lounge
CD-ROM computer game that featured a “Blues Room” where the Stones paid tribute to their Delta/Chicago ancestors. There also appeared on the bootleg market two sets of boxed CDs that appeared to come from inside the Stones themselves. Both
Voodoo Brew
and
Voodoo Stew
offered console-quality rehearsals and alternative mixes of the
Voodoo Lounge
music. It was all better than the album. One bootlegger released a disc of what appeared to be a secretly recorded haggle with Mick Jagger over the price for some tapes Mick was selling.

When they had finished promoting
Stripped
for the Christmas market, the Stones scattered again. Charlie went back to his Arab horses and his collections in Devonshire, then took Shirley on an African safari. Mick went home to Richmond, then to Indonesia (where he and Jerry could walk around unrecognized) and then to Mustique for the holidays. There was a cancer scare for Ron Wood, who had some minor surgery. At home in Ireland, he had Bo Diddley in his studio and threw a New Year's Eve bash that consumed fourteen hundred pints of stout.

Keith Richards returned to Point of View, his house above Ocho Rios on the north coast of Jamaica. Soon the local Rastas from the village of Steertown came around, and it was, “Hey Bredda Keet—yu ready fe drum?”

Keith: “I went to Jamaica to kick back after the Lounge tour, and there they were, my Rasta friends, who I'd been jamming with since 1972, and they were ready to go. The guy that made some drums for me in 1975 told me they took twenty years to sound good, and he was right on the money, baby.”

They spent five days recording a Rastafarian groundation
—Niyabinghi
praise songs accompanied by hand drums—on an eight-track recorder in Keith's living room, with one wall open to the sea. Working at night, they were joined by a jungle chorus of atmospheric tree toads and peepers. Keith worked with a guitar, barefoot and shirtless, and tuned the Rastas to piano keys so he could dub over the music later on. Keith and lead singer Justin Hines had been talking about doing this for many years, but even Keith was surprised by how soulful and fervent the old hymns and chants sounded. He called it “marrow music” and would spend the next year tinkering with his Jamaican tapes.

Platinum Teeth for Everyone

While Keith
developed his Rastafarian project in 1996, Charlie Watts made his fourth and best album of jazz standards,
Long Ago and Far Away,
with the now-ubiquitous Bernard Fowler's smooth and creamy vocals. Charlie toured America that summer and talked about some of his bad times back in the eighties. “They used to call me Dracula,” he said. “I was drunk at my father's funeral, and I regret that.” Charlie's mother had died earlier in the year, which gave his record a veil of melancholy and memory. Keith dropped in when the Charlie Watts Quintet gigged in New York, along with Marlon and his wife and Keith's two-month-old granddaughter, Ella Rose Richards. Another night, Keith and Patti went to see Marianne Faithfull's cabaret show. Marianne's cigarette lighter failed while she was doing “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Keith yelled, “I'll give you a light, baby.” Marianne, sultry sandpaper voice and slight smile: “I'll give you a
smoke,
baby.”

                

In May 1996,
Donald Cammell shot himself at home in the Hollywood Hills. The auteur of
Performance
left behind a short trail of perverse films, music videos, and missed opportunities, having never again risen to the brilliance of his collaboration with Mick Jagger. Cammell was depressed that his last film,
The Wild Ride,
had been shelved by its producers. Perverse to the end, Cammell shot himself in a way that allowed him to bleed to death in a forty-five-minute necro-narcotic stupor. He watched himself die in a mirror. His last words to his wife were, “Do you see Borges?”

                

Around this time,
singer Don Covay suffered a stroke that left him almost blind and in a wheelchair. Mick Jagger had patterned his falsetto style after Covay's and felt he owed him something. The Stones quietly bought Covay a custom-built van with a chair lift and various computer-assisted amenities. “Everyone knows the Stones are a great band,” their old friend Bobby Womack said, “but I know them as some of the finest people I've ever met.”

Mick Jagger was setting up his movie production company, Jagged Films, in 1996 and was spending a lot of time in Los Angeles. He got in trouble in October following an incident in which bodyguards pounded a photographer who had snapped Mick tonguing actress Uma Thurman at the Viper Room. A day later, he allegedly spent the night with a young Czech model at the Beverly Hills Hotel. This got into the British press and Jerry Hall hired Princess Diana's divorce lawyer. Mick flew home to put out the fire, and let it be known that he and Jerry would stay together for the sake of their children.

                

By autumn 1996,
the Stones had been off the road for a year, and Keith and Ron were getting itchy feet. There wasn't much talk about the Stones doing a record, so Mick was writing for another solo album, working on “Saint of Me” and “Might as Well Get Juiced.” In October, as Allen Klein was finally releasing the 1968
Rolling Stones Rock & Roll Circus
as an album and video, the Stones gathered in New York for a meeting. Mick thought it too soon for the Stones to make another record, but Keith and Ron insisted. The five years between
Steel Wheels
and
Voodoo Lounge
had made it much harder to sustain the Stones' market position, according to the businesspeople. So Mick gave in, with the provision that they use multiple producers on the new record. Mick didn't want to remake
Voodoo Lounge.
He wanted “his” tracks realized with hot young techno-producers—the very studio geeks Keith enjoyed deriding as tape doctors, knob turners, and loop gurus.

In early November, Keith and Mick got started at Dangerous Music, a little demo room in Greenwich Village. With Mick on drums and Keith on guitar, they worked on Keith's winding riff for “Lowdown” and three Mick tracks: “Already Over Me,” “Always Suffering,” and “Anybody Seen My Baby.” To London in December and a succession of studios, where Keith's “Too Tight” was developed. As he noodled on a little Mozart or Otis Redding on the piano, Keith waited for new songs to come in. “I realized a long time ago that you don't write songs, you receive them,” he said. “You Don't Have to Mean It” started out as a Buddy Holly rock and roll number. Mick cut a rumbling crotch-shot demo of “Might as Well Get Juiced” that was thought by studio insiders to be the best thing he'd ever done. Mick called the song “fake blues for the nineties.”

Just before Christmas, a band spokesman announced that the Stones would tour again in 1997. There was critical speculation that doing another tour so soon after Voodoo Lounge meant that the Stones were only in it for the money, but nothing was further from the truth. The Stones and their huge entourage were like a family now, a nomad tribe that had to migrate to survive. “Nobody wants to get off the bus while it's still going, y'know,” Keith growled. “It's very difficult. You hurt yourself getting off buses while they're moving.”

The working title for the new Stones album was
Blessed Poison.
The ancient songwriting firm of Jagger/Richards met in Barbados in January 1997 for writing sessions. “You Don't Have to Mean It” was taking shape as a reggae groove, and they developed “Out of Control” from the bass line of “Papa Was A Rolling Stone.”

In March, the Stones gathered in Los Angeles to record at Ocean Way Studios, where Mick had finished his last solo record. (Ocean Way's venerable Room One was the site of many classic sessions for Frank Sinatra, Phil Spector, and Quincy Jones, among many others.) Mick arrived first and started working with local producers. He cut five tracks with the Dust Brothers (Beck, Beastie Boys) in their studio in the Silver Lake neighborhood; hired hot producer Danny Saber (U2, Garbage) to work on various tracks; took “Already Over Me” to slick R&B producer Babyface for sweetening. Co-executive producer Don Was cranked Dr. Dre's rap masterpiece
The Chronic
through Charlie Watts's headphones and had him play along with the whole album, using the tapes as a looping source for the new songs.

When Keith arrived at the end of the month, he was madder than hell. He heard what the Dust Brothers had done to the great “Juiced” demo and went to Silver Lake to see for himself. “Keith hated the Dust Brothers,” according to one engineer. “They were two stoners; one had the record collection and a bong, the other was the knob turner. They got this little drum machine called an 808 that everyone used, and it's ticking away back there. Keith couldn't believe these loop gurus were producing Rolling Stones tracks. He went like out of his way to insult them in public.” Keith met Kenny “Babyface” Edmunds and told him, “You cut with Mick, your face is gonna look like
mine.
You may be Babyface now, but you're gonna be
Fuckface
after you get out of the studio with that guy.” One night Keith came to work, found Danny Saber rattling a guitar overdub on a Stones track, and expelled him from the studio. Don Was had to work with Keith and Mick in separate rooms after that. The first thing Keith cut, “You Don't Have to Mean It,” was done without Mick. Keith didn't play on “Anybody Seen My Baby,” “Saint of Me,” and “Out of Control.”

Charlie Watts got through the chaotic and dysfunctional sessions by having drummer Jim Keltner always at hand. Hot off his own album and tour, Watts became the driving force in the all-night sessions, which generally lasted until Keith was exhausted at ten in the morning. The manic energy of “Flip the Switch” (originally a twenty-five-minute jam) and the percussive crunch of “Gunface” were Watts/Keltner collaborations. Keith often crashed out in the studio. “Once in the studio, I become a mole,” he explained. “Avoid sunlight at all costs.”

The sessions continued in L.A. through April, with Mick commuting between Hollywood and Silver Lake in his black Lincoln Continental. Keith's mood improved when he settled down. For years, tax and immigration problems had forced the band to record on little islands. “All very lovely,” Keith said, “but you feel isolated, get no feedback, have to draw on your own resources. In L.A., we had all kinds of great cats dropping by to lend a hand, guys who
suggest
things.” Keith's commandos included Waddy Wachtel, keyboard player Bernie Worrell (from Funkadelic), and Blondie Chaplin, a South Africa–born L.A. musician who had been in the late-period Beach Boys. Bernard Fowler was singing. Billy Preston arranged and played on “Saint of Me.” Charlie Watts recruited jazz star Wayne Shorter to play sax. Meanwhile, Mick was already meeting with the designers about the Stones' new touring stage. He went to see U2's Pop Mart tour in San Diego at the end of April and was impressed by their acoustic set, performed on a raised platform in the middle of the stadium, reached by a catwalk extending from the main stage.

Mick ended up not getting along with Babyface after all, and remixed “Already Over Me” himself.

By the time they finished the album, their best in twenty years, the Stones weren't on speaking terms. The last working week was incredibly tense, with Mick boycotting sessions that were completed by Keith's crew and Don Was. Keith and Rob Fraboni had to steal and remix the tapes of “Thief in the Night,” written by Keith and his guitar tech Pierre de Beauport. (There was gossip that this track related to problems in Keith's marriage. His wife was reportedly caught up in a Bible-thumping, charismatic Christian sect at home in Connecticut, much to the exasperation of her atheist husband.)

The last three tracks on the album—“Too Tight,” “Thief,” and “How Could I Stop”—were done without much input from Mick, who was sulking in his tent like Achilles. Mick hadn't wanted to do the record in the first place and had walked out. Keith now countered Jagger's techno-grooves by overdubbing upright bass (played by Jeff Sarli) on several key tracks for some extra-classic rockabilly bomp. “What about the
roll
?” Keith asked rhetorically. “I want the
roll.
Fuck the rock—I've had enough of it.”

On the morning of the last session (for “How Could I Stop”), Charlie Watts and Wayne Shorter played a crashing, wailing crescendo to end the album once and for all. “Right!” shouted Ron Wood. “That's platinum teeth for everyone in the room!” A few hours later, Charlie caught the night flight to London Heathrow and home.

Keith and his crew only heard that Mick liked their tapes when the girlfriend of Fred Sessler's son reported that a friend of hers, who was sleeping with Mick, confided that Mick had played them for her and said, “Isn't this great?”

                

July 1997.
Bob Dylan was staying with Ronnie in Ireland, working on the songs for his late-period masterpiece
Time Out of Mind.
Keith was at home at Redlands that summer, obsessively playing the tapes of the Stones' new album, now titled
Bridges To Babylon.
Late one afternoon, his daughter Angela and a friend were having their tea and listening to “Anybody Seen My Baby,” which would be the first single, when they started singing along with different words. It turned out Mick had unconsciously appropriated the melody to k. d. lang's “Constant Craving.” Keith made some quick calls and there was panic at the record company. The CD was already pressed, the video already shot in the New York subway. But k. d. lang said she was flattered and accepted a cowriting credit. Keith, who hadn't even played on the track, made Mick pay k.d. out of his pocket since it was Mick's mistake, one that Keith had long dreaded making himself.