Old Gods Almost Dead (74 page)

                

In Brazil, Mick
met a twenty-year-old lingerie model named Luciana Morad at a party at a rich man's house. According to Luciana, she stayed on the road with Mick for several months. When she pursued him for child support later on, she sued him under the names Mick Jagger and David James, his
nom d'hôtel.

While in Rio, Ron Wood and his family went for a boat ride. The cabin cruiser caught fire and Wood and Co. had to be rescued by the paparazzi who were following them in a chase boat. The rapacious photographers had gotten a lot of bad press when they were accused of causing the death of Diana Spencer the year before. Wood now had a different view. “Thank God for the paparazzi. Sometimes they save lives.”

                

The Stones did
thirty-six shows in rain-soaked Europe that summer. Early dates were postponed when Keith cracked some ribs in May, supposedly falling off a library ladder. (This provoked puzzlement among those who wondered why a rock star was reaching for a book in the first place.) Many of the shows were washouts, and Mick was fighting laryngitis. His voice went south in Spain, and there were canceled shows in Italy and France. At the immense Nuremburg Zeppelinfeld, Keith began his part of the show by saying, “Great to be back. Great to be here. Great to be
anywhere.
”

Five nights in the hash-hazed Amsterdam Arena were reviewed by the London critics. “His face looks like month-old cat litter,” wrote one, “but Keith Richards still plays like a gifted yet disturbed child.” One writer called them “cynical nostalgia merchants who rely on antique hits. Thank God.” At the Dutch shows, the Stones' backup singers were joined by pretty blond Leah Wood, twenty. After she sang on “Thief,” Keith brought her up, kissed her cheek, and introduced her: “She's not mine, she's one of Ronnie's.”

In August, the Stones finally made it to Russia. They'd tried to play Moscow in 1967 but had been told
nyet
by the cultural commissars. Back then, Stones albums circulated on underground discs cut from used X-ray film on which the grooves of vinyl records could be stamped. (These were known as “bones” for the faintly visible X-ray images.) The Stones played in Luzhniki Stadium in a cold rain before fifty thousand mostly middle-aged Russians, who couldn't believe the Stones had come at last. “Better late than never,” Mick announced. They chanted “Satisfaction” word for word with the band at the top of their lungs. “I was a communist in college,” Mick said before the show. “But then things tend to fall away, and you become more pragmatic.”

The Bridges To Babylon tour ended with a show in Istanbul, Turkey, in late August, done mostly as a favor to Ahmet Ertegun. Keith skipped the end-of-tour party. The Stones had played 107 shows to 4.75 million fans over two years, grossing almost $300 million. After thirty-six years, they were still the biggest band in the world.

After the last show, Mick took his family to the Turkish coast for a vacation, then slipped back into tax exile in a discreet Paris hotel, where he was joined by his Brazilian girlfriend. He gave an interview to the
Times
in which he said his life was like “being trapped in a soap opera.” He revealed that his kids liked to ransack his stage clothes from the seventies. “Dad,” they'd say, “how could you wear
that
?”

                

The record company
wanted
Bridges To Babylon Live at the Stadium,
and that's what it got, except the ten-track live album was called
No Security
instead. Rather than duck the problem of gigantism, they attacked instead, recording the ambience of packed soccer stadium sing-alongs and windswept acoustics. Most of the tracks were taken from the Amsterdam shows. A sing-along “Saint of Me” and a dark, driven “Out of Control” were from Buenos Aires. Other tracks were from Nuremberg, St. Louis, and a 1997 MTV broadcast. Released in early November 1998, in time for the Christmas market,
No Security
promptly bombed. Ridiculed in the press, it became the first Stones album in years not to make the Top Ten, and sold only in the low six figures. Mick later claimed he listened to it only once.

The Stones decided to stay on the road to promote the album. On November 16, designer Tommy Hilfiger announced that his clothing company would sponsor the Stones' No Security arena tour beginning in January 1999. “How can we stop?” Keith asked a reporter.
“You
tell me. When you've got a band rocking under you like that, you can give up thinking and just let it flow. I don't make plans. Why should I stop?”

                

The end of 1998
was rough for Mick Jagger, and it would get worse. Luciana was four months gone and told Mick the baby was his. The papers in London got the story and reported she was being paid to keep her mouth shut. Jerry and Mick patched things up for the holidays, with the massive rift between them passed off as a spat over fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Jagger's modeling career.

In January 1999, as the Stones prepared to go back on the road in America, Jerry Hall filed for divorce. “Every day it was in the papers,” she told an interviewer. “Public humiliation and private heartbreak. It's not easy for any woman, and it doesn't do a lot for your confidence.” When her children began to be disrespectful and mocking to her, Jerry told Mick not to come home. “I realized I was setting a terrible example,” she said. The whole year would be spent in a battle over divorce and money, but Jerry Hall never seemed to lose her esteem for the wayward father of her children. “Mick's a wonderful man,” she said, “and a terrible husband.”

Anita, Recalled to Life

By the end
of the 1990s Anita Pallenberg had created a new kind of legend for herself on the streets of London, where she could be seen speeding by on her ten-speed bike. Sober for more than a decade, she lived in an elegant flat by the river, a stone's throw from her old house in Cheyne Walk. To those who knew her story, Anita was now seen as an inspirational and still-beautiful symbol of recovery and the road back from addiction and its harrowing half-life.

Anita: “After the [1977] Toronto bust, we were supposed to clean up, but I never did. We did this electric [“black box”] treatment with Meg Patterson, which didn't work because there was no input from us. I went along, happy that I could do as much drugs as I wanted, by myself. Then Keith and I got separated by the lawyers. I went on a deadly binge, scoring in [Manhattan's] Alphabet City, a nonstop party for years. If I ran out, I'd drink—even more lethal.

“I bottomed out for about five years. I was depressed, didn't move from the couch. We lived on Long Island after that kid shot himself in my house, staying in various places because they used to throw us out. Sands Point. Old Westbury. I had a neighbor who kept retired racehorses. She'd take a bottle of beer and inject horse tranquilizers with a syringe and I would drink it. Three days, no idea what I was doing. I'd wake up in New York, didn't know how I'd got there.

“Then my son started to intervene, hide the bottles, hide the money—some things a child shouldn't have to do. No friends over, lots of arguments. I was accident-prone—falling down, emergency room, straitjackets . . . Oh, man.

“I went to London [in the early 1980s] to renew my visa—I was still an Italian citizen—but started having visa trouble with the U.S. and decided to stay. I was drinking heavily, stumbling around. I tore my hip out of its socket falling out of bed. There was an operation, then pneumonia. I ended up in a famous alcoholic ward: horrible withdrawal from drink and drugs, mattresses on the wall, sweating, paralyzed. Nightmare NA [Narcotics Anonymous] meetings where everyone seemed stoned to me.

“After eight weeks, I had to leave the hospital. I managed to find a flat—Marlon was living with Keith's father and a friend—and I stayed clean for six months, then relapsed. I was able to detox at a clinic in Kent after that, then moved to a halfway house in Notting Hill Gate. It was on Portabello Road, the front lines of London drug addiction every day . . . but it managed to stick. I did a lot of service, worked on the telephone help line, did office work. I rode my bicycle every day, and gradually the drug obsession was replaced by something physical. I went to the gym. My bicycle was almost like a crutch to me. I rode everywhere, spoke at meetings, treatment centers. You know—'serve by example.' I went back to school at St. Martin's College and studied textile design for four years.

“I've stayed sober now for a long time. Now I feel I can do anything I want to, a great sense of freedom. Getting this back was the hardest thing I've ever done, also the most rewarding. But it still didn't change my role in society. I'm still an outsider in a world where everyone drinks and you don't. Now I'm looking for a niche, a place where I can fit in. I feel like I've got all the time in the world. My children and grandchildren are around me, and I'm clean. Keith and I are friends again. He's married, and I'm respectful of that. On New Year's, the whole family gets together in Jamaica and we all have a good time.

“Life is more graceful for me now, more dignified. I see Ringo and Eric and Elton—all the people who made it over—and it's fascinating.

“Don't ask me about the past anymore. It's just mythology anyway. I
do
believe that the rock heroes are part of mythology. The comparisons are almost bewildering. When you talk about the Stones, you might as well be talking about Cadmus, Mercury, Artemis. It's the same thing.

“I always had loads of imagination, but not much business sense. This always made me feel like a failure, a weak link in the chain of the Stones. I felt like I was supposed to come across as something gigantic and marvelous. Now I'm happy doing what I'm doing.”

                

In September 1998,
Anita and Keith's daughter Angela Richards married a carpenter in a London church. Raised in Dartford by Keith's mother, Angela was a young woman of twenty-six who loved horses and lived in a modest flat near where she'd grown up. With the whole Richards family present, she was escorted down the aisle by her proud father, to the strains of “Angie.”

Gather No Moss

In January 1999,
the Rolling Stones moved back indoors, starting the thirty-four show No Security tour at the Oakland Arena. This was a lite edition of their stadium show, crammed with jukebox hits and light on gimmicks. The stage was bare except for the black and yellow tailboard motif at the edges. Fabric covers on the stage monitors, visible only to the musicians, bore pictures of Bob Marley and Little Walter.

The show began with a video clip of the band walking through the bowels of an arena like gladiators or the last gang in town. “Jumpin' Jack Flash” was given a high-speed launch before the Stones settled into a two-hour routine that ignored recent songs except “Out of Control” and “Saint of Me,” which had been a popular sing-along in Europe. In Oakland, the Stones gave the concert debuts of “Moonlight Mile” and “Some Girls.” Mick singing about some girls giving him children—and he'd only made love to them once!—got a knowing cheer from the audience. Keith Richards, sporting doodads and ribbons in his spiky gray coiffure, played a miniset that included “You Got the Silver” and “Before They Make Me Run” to the delight of his fans.

The tour sold out through the West and Midwest that winter. The Stones, liberated from the artistic shackles of their operatic stage set, were mixing surprise oldies into the shows. Bobby Keys's horns punched in and out with show band discipline. The Stones were a well-oiled dynamo that year, master musicians who sometimes seemed like they really could play the stars from the sky.

                

Those close to
Mick Jagger knew that his current intensity was related to the disintegration of his family in London. Jerry wanted a chunk of his estimated half-billion-dollar fortune. His lawyers responded to her divorce petition by claiming that their 1990 wedding in Bali was invalid. Even Mick's friends thought that effectively bastardizing his four children with Jerry was too much. The press let fly. “Was it ever cool to be despicable?” asked the
Daily Mail.
“Was it ever sexy to be penny pinching and selfish? Of course not!” The
Times
mocked Jagger as “a rather pathetic old roué, desperately trying to recapture his long vanished youth by pursuing girls as young as his two older daughters.”

Mick refused comment, but later blamed his solicitors. His daughter Elizabeth kept him company while the Stones stayed on tour. In Rio, a pregnant Luciana Morad flaunted her belly on a Carnival float, as if she were carrying the child of some god. Jerry Hall declared war. She called Patti Hanson and warned her that Rupert Lowenstein might not be their friend, and they better find out where their money was. Then Patti got annoyed because Keith didn't seem to give a shit where his money was. “I don't talk to Mick about his love life,” Keith said, “because it's like, 'Whoops—you've skidded on another banana skin.' ” Keith remained stoic about his friend's
amourettes.
“I'm always sorry for Mick's women, because they end up crying on my shoulder. And I'm like, 'How do you think
I
feel? I'm
stuck
with him.' ”

                

No Security
opening acts included the GooGoo Dolls, the Corrs, and blues infant Johnnie Lang. Mick and Keith notched some serious blues cred by starring on three tracks of
Blues Blues Blues,
a tribute album by Chicago guitarist Jimmy Rogers. (“Don't Start Me to Talkin',” “Trouble No More,” and “Goin' Away Baby” had been recorded at Ocean Way as a favor to Ahmet Ertegun.) The Stones reshuffled their show when the tour reached the Northeast in March and April. Keith was doing “Thief” and “You Don't Have to Mean It,” with Leah Wood joining the singers for his set. Bobby Troupe died during the tour, so the Stones added “Route 66” to the B-stage set, along with “Cloud” and a spare, harp-driven “Midnight Rambler,” now devoid of sadomasochist belt-whomping. “Respectable” was transcendent on some nights. Charlie Watts was incredible on a revived “Paint It, Black.” Lisa Fischer pretended to chase Mick during “Brown Sugar,” and the encore was usually “Sympathy for the Devil.”