Old Gods Almost Dead (56 page)

One of the cops started slapping him. He came around enough to hear the cops say, “You're under arrest for conspiracy to traffic in narcotics.”

Next day: major headlines. The Stones borrowed $100,000 in cash from Canadian promoter Michael Cohl, but Keith was bailed at only $1,000. He begged the cops for a couple of grams of heroin to tide him over, but they weren't amused. Meetings with lawyers, who confirmed that Keith could go to jail for life for this sixth drug arrest in ten years (no one in Canada had beaten a drug-dealing rap lately). The Stones were upset, Mick despondent. Their new record deals were seriously threatened, and there were fears the new live album could be the Stones' last.

There was nothing to do but press on. Keith tried cold-turkey withdrawl in his bathroom. Ronnie and Bill Wyman dropped in while he was having a seizure. Worried that Keith was dying, they found some heroin for him. Keith then pulled himself together enough to work. The Stones, with Billy Preston and Ollie Brown, rehearsed at El Mocambo early in March. Under pressure, they morphed into a bar band again and just let it rock. Keith: “Everyone's talking doom and disaster, but we're up onstage and never felt better. We sounded great! People were asking, 'Is this the end of the Rolling Stones?' In actual fact, it was a period of real productivity for us.”

The first gig took place on March 4 in front of three hundred radio contest winners. Opening was local band April Wine, which got the slot as a favor to the guy who had helped out the Stones when their truck was bombed in Montreal in '72. Keith recalled how purely amazed the packed Canadian kids looked as they jammed in within touching range of the band. The Stones played a long set in the wild, smoky atmosphere, enjoying the lost intimacy of a club date. Sitting near the front of the crowd was a large saucer-eyed woman, grooving and having a good time. She was twenty-eight-year-old Margaret Trudeau, the wife of the Canadian prime minister, and she was about to enter the Rolling Stones legend forever.

Madcap Maggie (as the Canadian press called her) had married Pierre Trudeau, almost thirty years older, six years earlier. He was the preeminent Canadian politician of his era, holding power between 1968 and 1984, a dashing liberal intellectual who symbolized an invigorated Canada. The Trudeaus had been the nation's golden couple, with three children and a seemingly happy marriage. But free-spirited, ex-hippie Maggie had chafed under the tight security forced on her family by the same Quebec separatists who'd firebombed the Stones in Montreal in 1972. She had been hospitalized for mental strain several times and was considered unstable, with a taste for pot and recklessness. In early 1977, she and her husband had separated, secretly and informally, and she was visiting a friend in Toronto when the Stones came to town that winter.

Mrs. Trudeau moved into a suite at the Harbour Castle and joined the party. “Someone said she wanted to go to the gig, so we took her,” Mick said. “I had never met her before, but I guess she likes to go out to clubs and go rocking and rolling just like everyone else—a young girl, you know.” Margaret threw a champagne party for the Stones in her suite after the show. Mick took her aside and pointed to his portly press agent. “Don't talk to Wasserman,” he whispered. “He's trying to get publicity for us, but he's an arsehole.” Later that night, Maggie answered a knock on her door, in her white pajamas, to find the press agent offering her a bottle of champagne. She accepted it and closed the door. In the morning, Paul Wasserman leaked a story that Mrs. Trudeau had been seen in the corridors of the Stones' hotel in her pajamas. The next day's headlines
—PM'S WIFE AND ROLLING STONES—
signaled the end of her marriage as the rumor spread that she was having an affair with Mick Jagger. But it was actually Woody she was friendly with. They were both going through marital separations, and they bonded with each other over mutual pain. Bill Wyman described their relationship as a “liaison.” On Saturday, the second night at El Mocambo, Ronnie invited her along with her camera to take pictures of the band. Sitting up front as the Stones blasted forth, she shot Mick with his jumpsuit unzipped to his pubis as young ladies fondly massaged his crotch, trying to get him hard between songs. “It was great up to a point,” Mick said the next day, “but then it got difficult to sing.” The Stones were paid half the night's bar money, $371.

The Stones stayed in town for a few days after the shows, mixing the Toronto tapes in a local studio. Mrs. Trudeau had dinner with Woody and Charlie Watts, and ended up shooting dice and smoking hash with Wood and friends until nine the next morning, which fueled further headlines:
SEX ORGY IN CANADIAN PM'S WIFE'S SUITE.
Late that afternoon, a frightened Marlon Richards knocked on her door. “Where's everybody gone?” the little boy asked. “Daddy's lying on the floor crying, and I don't know what to do.”

Margaret went with Marlon to Keith's filthy, cluttered suite. Anita had gone shopping. Keith was lying in a fetal position and moaning. She knew he was due in court to face narcotics charges the next day. She got Keith into bed, covered him up, and played with Marlon until Anita returned.

The press fury grew into a crisis and the prime minister was under fire. The Canadian dollar dropped in value. Pierre Trudeau had to deny that his wife had run off with the Rolling Stones. Opposition newspapers attacked the credibility of the government, and Margaret Trudeau's official duties were suspended. Charlie Watts sniffed, “I wouldn't want
my
wife associating with us.”

On March 7, Keith appeared in court to hear that he was being charged with possessing cocaine in addition to heroin. On the way out of court, he was pushed and spat on by unknown bystanders. That afternoon, there was a heavy-duty band meeting. Keith was still using heroin and Mick was jittery, worried they were under surveillance and certain another bust was coming down. The hotel was full of undercover cops, and the Stones fretted there was an informer on their staff. Mick decided the Stones would leave Keith in Canada until his case was resolved. The album had to be mixed while Keith tried another detox. Bill Carter was deputized to somehow persuade the U.S. government to let Keith enter the country on an emergency visa, to try to save his life.

On March 8, Keith was bailed again for $25,000 and given his passport back. Disgusted, Mick left Canada, but was stopped at the airport and searched before he was allowed to get on a plane. The rest of the band followed him the next day. Ron Wood's departure hurt Keith badly. “They all
vanished,
” Anita said bitterly. Margaret Trudeau flew to New York as well, further igniting press speculation that she and Jagger were an item, despite firm denials by both of them. Whatever had or hadn't happened in Toronto, she never saw any of the Rolling Stones again. Her marriage ruptured, and she spent two years in New York, becoming part of the Studio 54 disco scene. Bianca, undisputed sultana of Studio 54, believed the stories about her and Mick and refused to speak to her.

                

Stranded with
his family in Toronto, facing an uncertain future as he shuffled between court dates, Keith sought some solace in music. Ian Stewart booked him into Sounds Interchange studio on March 12–13, where he cut a sequence of brokenhearted country songs in a Bakersfield mood, with Stu on piano, to have product in the can if his bail was revoked and he went to prison. The songs, never released but often bootlegged, plumbed the depths of his feelings in the poignant voice of the debauched ex-chorister that Keith had become.

Keith's situation in Canada gave new meaning to the concept of persona non grata, but in New York and Washington, Keith's people pleaded with the new administration of President Jimmy Carter to let Keith enter the country to detox. Early in April, he and Anita were permitted by special dispensation to fly to New York for treatment. No one was more shocked by this than Keith. “I was down-and-out in Toronto, stuck there, right? And America let me in to clean up—gave me a medical visa to clean up. And that
amazed
me, y'know? You don't ever expect from government the helping hand, y'know?”

Keith entered a private rehab clinic near Philadelphia and was on ice for the next six weeks. Mick sent him cassettes of his favorite New York reggae radio shows to help keep his spirits up. He and Anita went through a “black box” cure that used electric shocks to stimulate the brain to overproduce narcotic-like bio-endorphins, allowing a narcotics addict to detox slowly.

The cure worked—for a few weeks. But although Keith got into heroin again, he now really wanted to let it go. The thing that most pleased him was the looks on the faces of the drug dealers when he began to turn them down. He later admitted that the Toronto bust had been a huge blessing and had saved his life. “I wanted to come back,” he said, “and prove that what I had gone through had made a difference, to justify this kind of suffering.”

The Human Riff in Paris

May 1977.
Bianca Jagger's birthday party at Studio 54 featured Mrs. Jagger riding around the club on her husband's present, a white Arab pony led by almost naked, glitter-sprinkled black model Sterling St. Jacques—a tabloid image flashed around the world. The waiters all wore diapers and nothing else. The other Stones could only shake their heads. The Jaggers' marriage was over, a casualty of his serial infidelity and her longtime affair with actor Ryan O'Neal. Mick now made a big play for Jerry Hall, the brassy, sensual Texas model with a sense of humor and a straight-up sexuality. Everyone always had fun around Jerry Hall. When Jerry danced, the whole world seemed to undulate around her, and she was known for dispensing cheerful, up-to-the-minute tips on oral sex. She liked to say the best method of keeping a man was to drop everything for two seconds and give him a blow job. When her father died while Bryan Ferry was touring in Australia, Mick was there with massive bouquets and sympathy. He won her heart by the end of the year.

In June, Mick and Keith began the final mixes of
Love You Live.
Billy Preston brought his own mixing engineer to Atlantic Studios one night, an act of hubris that got him fired from the band by Keith. (Preston had never signed his 1975–76 touring contracts with the Stones, and was able to hold up the live album for a considerable percentage of the action.) As part of their new record deal, Atlantic gave the Stones an office suite in the Warner Communications building in Rockefeller Center. Atlantic executive Earl McGrath replaced Marshall Chess as president of Rolling Stone Records. Chess was grateful to the Stones, who'd backed him up as a heroin addict in charge of their careers. “They stuck up for me,” he later said. Within a year of leaving, Chess recovered from his addiction.

They were also writing songs. Keith was living at the Mayflower Hotel in a suite stuffed with reggae singles acquired in nightly forays to Jamaican shops in the Bronx. If a primal reggae group like the Heptones was playing out on Long Island, Keith was there. He and Wood were jamming from 3
A.M.
to noon, often at Mick's West Side house, working on his last plea to Anita, “Beast of Burden.”

Bebe Buell's baby girl, Liv, was born in New York on July 1. Her first visitors were Mick and Ron Wood. Mick tried to convince Woody the tiny thing with huge lips was his child, and there
was
some slight resemblance, since her real father, Steven Tyler, had big lips too. (“Aerosmith was
really
wild,” Bebe Buell said later. “They made the Rolling Stones look like a kindergarten!”)

That summer, Keith and Anita moved to a secluded estate in South Salem, New York, about an hour north of Manhattan. Commuting to the city to work with John Phillips, Keith stumbled back into heroin use. He went through yet another rehab at the Stevens Clinic in New York and was told by his lawyers that he had to live separately from Anita if he intended to stay dope-free and out of prison. Blamed by Mick for the Toronto bust and for Keith's decline, Anita began to be treated as a scapegoat and an outcast. It was the end of her era as a member of the Rolling Stones.

Mick flew to Paris to look at the studios they would start to use later in the year. Then he and Bianca took off on a cruise around the Aegean Sea on a last attempt to patch things up. By the time they returned to New York, they had broken up.

                

With a lurid cover
by Andy Warhol, part of a sequence of distasteful photos of the Stones biting each other,
Love You Live
was released in September 1977. It bore a dedication to Keith Harwood: “Those whom the gods love, grow young.” The Stones held a party for the album at Trax, the West Side music hangout. Three sides of the double album were from the previous year's Paris shows, with one side reserved for a selection of Chicago blues cut at El Mocambo.
Love You Live
was a Top Ten album on both sides of the Atlantic that fall.

In October, the Stones gathered in Paris to begin recording. Keith and Woody flew in on the Concorde supersonic jet. Keith got in a cab, forgot the address of the apartment he'd owned for years in Paris, and had to be rescued. Mick was staying in L'Hôtel, small and discreet, where he was joined by Jerry Hall, who moved in with Mick permanently soon after.

It was now do-or-die for the Stones, who had to make a great album in the wake of the punk/new wave challenges of pathetic Old Fartism. And there was serious strain within the band. Ron Wood was firmly allied with Keith, who openly ridiculed Mick's artificial, chameleon personality and social pretentions. Mick patronized Keith, telling Nick Kent they would never tour “with a geezer pushin' a heroin charge.” Charlie was put off by the bitchiness, and extremely annoyed that his daughter, Seraphina, was taunted at school with “Your dad's a junkie too.” Hardly anyone spoke to Bill. Stu was alienated and had to be begged to come to Paris at all.