Old Gods Almost Dead (64 page)

                

The four original
Rolling Stones convened in Paris in June 1984 without bothering to invite Ron Wood. Mick had insisted Wood enter an English clinic for drug detox when Wood's cocaine habit reached $5,000 a day and he seemed near death. (Wood left the treatment after three weeks, and Mick was annoyed that the clinic called him to complain.) During a contentious business meeting, in which Keith accused Mick of deserting the band, they agreed to start making the next Stones album in Paris that fall, and tour in 1985.

                

When Ron Wood
got out of rehab, Keith took him on again as bosom buddy. They began jamming on song ideas in Wood's new basement studio in New York with soul singer Bobbie Womack, who'd written “It's All Over Now” and was making an (unreleased) album with Wood. Keith called the ever-hospitable and only partly rehabilitated Wood “the holy host,” as he began to take Mick's place as Keith's songwriting foil.

In September, Keith Richards's oft-cleansed blood began to boil when Mick postponed the Stones' record because he was still working on his own album. Keith was mad Mick was writing all the songs by himself, the first formal breach of a twenty-year writing partnership. Worried that a Jagger bomb would damage the Stones, he bluntly warned Mick: “Don't make a shit album.”

                

In early October 1984,
the Stones gathered in Amsterdam to talk about the new album. Mick reassumed the role of dictator. He was condescending and preoccupied with his solo career, to which—he made clear—the Rolling Stones took a backseat in his datebook. One night Keith got Mick drunk. Mick picked up the phone in Keith's hotel room and called Charlie Watts upstairs. It was five in the morning. Charlie was asleep but picked up the phone.

“Izzat my drummer, then?” Mick bawled. “Where's my fucking drummer? Get yer arse down here right away!”

(Keith: “Mick, drunk, is a sight to behold.”)

Charlie got up, shaved, put on a fresh white shirt and a tailored Savile Row double-breasted suit, tied his tie, slipped on bench-crafted shoes from Lobb in St. James.

“Charlie came down,” Keith said, “grabbed Mick, went
boom
! Dished him a left hook that knocked him into a plate of smoked salmon and then he almost floated out the window and into a canal in Amsterdam. My favorite jacket, which Mick was wearing, got ruined.”

“Don't
ever
call me 'your drummer' again,” Charlie growled between clenched teeth. “You're
my
fucking singer.”

Keith: “It was Charlie's way of saying, 'I've
had
it. It's
over,
man.' If there was one other friend Mick had, it was Charlie.”

The Biff Hitler Trio

January 1985.
It was rough in Paris when Mick showed up at the
Dirty Work
sessions with no material, having shot his wad on his solo album. Keith, of course, had known this would happen, and he was not pleased: “In 1985, we started getting into solo shit, and I
told
him I didn't want to be put in that position after all these years, because I
knew
it was a conflict of interests. I fought him like a dog—not to do that. I knew right then that I'm gonna write songs and think, 'That's mine. Stones can't have that. Oh, the Stones can have this.' What do I do? Give 'em the best I got? The second best?”

What dialogue there was on this issue was mostly carried on later in the press. Mick was defensive: “When we signed the contract with CBS, I had a provision to make a solo record. Keith knew all about it, so it wasn't a bolt from the blue. [All the sniping] was Keith's way of getting back at me. He just liked to mouth off about it. I thought he overreacted, because making a solo record seemed a natural thing for me to want to do.”

When Mick left the Stones in Paris after a few weeks to promote his solo album, Keith took over the sessions and assumed control of the Rolling Stones. Ron Wood, who by then had been in the band longer than Brian Jones or Mick Taylor, stepped in as Keith's creative foil and wound up with four song credits on
Dirty Work.
Keith was Ron's best man when he married Jo in a country church in Buckinghamshire that month. Mick didn't show up.

Mick's all-star album was released in March.
She's the Boss
was a mostly opaque and colorless “product” that got mediocre reviews, though the album was a Top Ten record in America and England and sold a respectable 2 million copies. Mick was disappointed. To Keith's immense relief, Mick's solo career looked like it wouldn't happen. Keith kept threatening to kill Mick if he toured with another band and was contemptuous of Jagger's relative failure.

                

The Stones' sessions
in Paris resumed in April 1985, after Keith had taken time off to attend the birth of his daughter Theodora Dupree Richards at New York Hospital. They draped a gown over him and led him into the delivery room, and he was close to tears as he watched a child of his born for the first time. Marlon was off in boarding school, while daughter Angela was living in Dartford with his mum. Anita Pallenberg, living through cycles of addiction and recovery in London, staying on peaceful terms with Keith and Patti, knitted a sweater for the baby.

Battle stations at the new Pathé-Marconi studio. Mick was annoyed that Keith was running the show and began using a different studio in the building, usually arriving at midnight from the flat he and Jerry were renting in suburban Neuilly. When Mick was finished, he often left without seeing the others. The vibe was terrible. Charlie Watts was having a bad time—his daughter had been expelled from her school for smoking pot—and he was medicating himself with drink and beginning to quietly use heroin, to everyone's shock. Bill Wyman was morose and bored. Ian Stewart thought the Stones were over and wouldn't play on any of the tracks. “We just got fed up with each other,” Mick said. “You've got a relationship with musicians that depends on what you produce together. But when you don't produce, you get bad reactions. Bands break up.”

Keith was determined to complete the new album, whose working title was briefly
19 Stitches
after a stoned tape op fell into a glass table with great loss of blood. They worked on the reggae oldie “Too Rude” (copped from a Frankie Paul record) and began to develop Bob and Earl's late soul classic “Harlem Shuffle,” which Keith had been trying to get Mick to do for years. One day Mick came in, tore straight through the song in two takes, and left the studio. Bobby Womack later filled out the vocal in New York.

A lot of the anger Keith and Ron felt at Mick's defection went into harsh new songs of conflict and aggression: “Fight,” “Had It with You,” “One Hit (to the Body).” Wood later recalled, “There were a few times when Keith and I felt like killing people, but we picked up our guitars and wrote songs instead.” They kept telling themselves that the Stones' open sores would heal when the record came out and they got back on the road.

In May, the Rolling Stones were approached to do the Live Aid concerts to be held in July in London and New York and broadcast around the planet to benefit Ethiopian famine relief. The Stones begged off as a group, but then Mick offered his services to organizer Bob Geldof as a solo act.

By early June, the Stones had about twenty-five new tracks finished, including “Cook Cook Blues,” Mick and Bobby Womack singing “Strictly Memphis,” and Keith's “You're Too Much.” Abandoning Pathé-Marconi for good, they left Paris and moved the sessions to New York.

In London, Mick Jagger and David Bowie made a record and video of “Dancing in the Street” for the Live Aid broadcast. Later in the month, Mick began rehearsing with Hall and Oates's blue-eyed soul band. As an extra blast of energy for his first-ever solo show, Mick asked Tina Turner, now an international icon of survival, vitality, and glamour, to appear with him at Live Aid.

Two days before the July 13 concert in New York, Bob Dylan stopped by Ron Wood's house on New York's Upper West Side. Dylan said that Bill Graham, who was running the New York show, had arranged for Dylan to close the concert after Mick Jagger had performed. “It's a big charity thing,” Dylan murmured to Wood. “Bill Graham's got a band for me, and I have to go along with it. Do you think maybe you and me could play together?”

Wood said he'd do it, and would get Keith too. He called Keith up. “Get over here,” Ron rasped. “Bob wants us to do Live Aid with him.”

There was a pause while Keith considered this reversal of fortune that could trump Mick's big moment. He said, “You better not be lying, Woody,” and hung up. Keith came right over, and after some uncomfortable posturing by Dylan and some diplomacy by Wood, Dylan asked Keith to do the show. They began jamming in Wood's basement, working on Bob's songs and some acoustic Stones numbers.

                

Saturday, July 13, 1985,
was a big day for the rock world, a vast communitarian revival show broadcast to 1.6 billion people around the world. In Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, the top musicians of the day played for the starving in Ethiopia, inspired by horrendous scenes of famine and death televised daily in the West.

Mick Jagger's 9
P.M.
performance in Philadelphia on Saturday was the triumph of the Live Aid broadcast. Wearing a bright yellow suit and working overtime, he did his new stuff and some crowd-pleasing Stones songs. Tina Turner was a sensation with her leonine wig and long legs as she sang “State of Shock” and “Honky Tonk Women” with Mick.

Bob Dylan's finale, backed by the two Rolling Stones guitarists, should have been a killer. But Ron Wood knew it was going to be a disaster when they arrived at the stadium that afternoon and Dylan muttered vaguely, “I wonder what Bill Graham wants me to do?” They jammed a little in the tuning room, but even when they went up the ramp to the stage, Keith and Ron still had no idea what Bob was going to play. As they were being introduced by actor Jack Nicholson, Dylan looked at them from behind his shades and said, “Maybe I should do 'All I Really Want to Do.' ” Keith and Ron looked at each other. They didn't know the song.

They came out onstage with acoustic guitars and sat just behind Bob as he started “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” instead. Keith and Ron tried to fake it. Behind the stage curtain, Lionel Richie was rehearsing his hideous anthem “We Are the World” with the whole cast, so Dylan and the two Stones couldn't hear themselves. The set was ramshackle and inaudible, with Keith and Ron cringing in smiling embarrassment as they tried to keep up with an improvising Dylan. “We came off looking like real idiots,” Wood said, “but I'd do it again for Bob.” Keith said it was a privilege to work with Bob. “I'll play with that asshole anytime.”

                

During the summer,
the Stones worked at RPM Studio in New York amid deathly vibes. Bill Wyman played bass on only half the album. Ian Stewart was ashamed of the band, didn't play on the record, told friends he wanted to retire. After an August photo shoot for the album sleeve in which he looked vacant and refused to make eye contact with the camera, Charlie Watts went back to England in disgust. “In twenty-five years with the Stones,” he complained to a reporter, “I've spent five years working and twenty years hanging about. I'd have been dead years ago if I'd thought about it.” After he left, Ron Wood played drums on some of the tracks. New York drummer Steve Jordon, who worked in David Letterman's TV studio band, played on several as well. Keith called the nucleus of himself, Wood, and Jordon the Biff Hitler Trio.

Mick Jagger worked separately with Chuck Leavell and singer Bernard Fowler, mainstays of
She's the Boss—
when Mick was even around. The birth of his first son, James LeRoy Jagger, on August 28, further distracted Mick from the Stones' fractured sessions. Bobby Womack, who had known the Rolling Stones for twenty-one years, thought he was watching them break up that summer. At home in the English countryside, Charlie Watts fell down a flight of stairs in his basement and broke his leg. The Stones' album was delayed until Christmas, but still wouldn't be finished in time. Sitting alone in the studio at 5
A.M.
with writer Robert Palmer, Keith kept muttering, “We've
got
to tour behind this fucker. It's our only hope.” Keith at this point was thinking a lot about the future of the Stones. He'd seen worse times than these, and insisted there was still hope and a good reason to carry on. “We can make this damn thing
grow up,
” he told a reporter during a break from a long jam with Wood on an Everly Brothers medley. “We're the only ones around who've kept it together this long. Is there a point in being a rock and roll band after twenty years? Can you make it grow up gracefully? Can you get it to mature, and make sense? I still love doing it, and we're at a point now where we'd like to make it grow up with us.”

So Keith stayed in the studio, mixing what he considered a crucial first Stones album for CBS and cracking the whip. “I'll work 'em till they drop,” he joked in an interview for
Spin
magazine, “but I'll drop with 'em.” He and Ron initiated U2's singer Bono into the cult of the blues in October, and Keith cut a track with him for the anti-apartheid
Sun City
album at Right Track Studio, which Keith liked so much he moved the Stones' sessions into the facility the following month. The album was finished by the end of 1985. CBS made them remove the word “cunt” from the hand-drawn lyric sheet by the New York cartoonist Mark Marek.