Old Gods Almost Dead (73 page)

Would You Let Your Granny?

August 1997,
and the Stones rolled into Toronto to rehearse for the Bridges to Babylon tour. Keith was in rough shape, trying to stay off dope against heavy odds. (Reportedly he was dabbling with heroin for the first time in years.) His old drummer friend Bongo Jackie (Vincent Ellis) had died in Jamaica while they were finishing the Rasta album, and Keith was very upset. Patti Hanson's sister died, a tragedy that staggered the whole family. Keith missed his grandfather and displayed a framed picture of Gus Dupree in his scarf-draped, incense-fumed rooms. His rented house was called Doom Villa by his minders and the tour crew.

Keith snapped like a guitar string one Saturday night while he stewed and paced alone in the rehearsal studio as Ron Wood led a raucous group watching a prizefight in the next room. Keith had to carry his sister-in-law's coffin the next day and had asked Wood to stay with him. But Wood had money on Julio Cesar Chavez. No one dissed the guv'nor like this,
no one.
When the clueless Wood finally staggered into the studio, Keith grabbed his neck and started to throttle him in a red-face fury until he was physically pried off him. Everyone was deeply shocked. “I made a mistake,” Keith said later. “I wasn't compos mentis. But in a band, anyone got a problem, it's best to flash it out straightaway.”

On August 18, the Stones were in New York, driving across the Brooklyn Bridge in a red '55 convertible, Mr. Jagger at the wheel. Cameras beamed their progress to two hundred journalists waiting at a site under the bridge, enduring speeches by the presidents of Virgin and the phone company Sprint, the tour sponsor. When Mick arrived, he mocked the scribes, announcing he'd always wanted to be a journalist. He jumped down among them and started the questions: “Rolling Stones—I have a question. Will this be your last tour?”

Keith: “Yes—and the next five.”

The tour would start in Chicago in September. Darryl Jones was still in the band. Opening acts included the Dave Matthews Band, Sheryl Crow, Blues Traveler, Foo Fighters, and Smashing Pumpkins. The stage was another Mark Fisher environment, supposed to evoke a lost Sumerian city in the desert. An eye-shaped sixteen-hundred-square-foot Jumbotron screen, the most sophisticated yet built, presided over the set like an omnipotent, all-seeing deity. Naked forty-foot big-nippled Golden Amazons in chains were built by the balloon company, and Mick had ordered a telescoping bridge that would arc over the crowd and carry the Stones to the rising small stage in the middle of the stadiums where they would play their old-school club set. The sound, lights, video, and pyro were all controlled by backstage technicians using laptop computers.

Keith Richards explained the big-bridge metaphor to the French magazine
Rock et Folk:
“Babylon, you see, is the outside world. And our music is the bridge between that world and mine.”

                

The black and blue
funk riff that opened “Anybody Seen My Baby” was a signal that the Stones were back with another radio-friendly rock ballad when the single was released at the end of August 1997. The song came out as Princess Diana was killed in a car wreck with Dodi al-Fayad, a London playboy who'd dated Jo Howard just before she met Woody. The idolatrous public mourning for the divorced princess annoyed Keith, and he lashed out in the press at Elton John, who had sung at her funeral, as an opportunist who “writes songs for dead blondes.” Bitchy Elton shot back that Keith looked like a monkey with arthritis.

Bridges To Babylon
came out in September as the Stones were playing warm-up gigs at small clubs in Toronto and Chicago. An often-superb collection of thirteen tracks,
Bridges
was about a third Mick's, a third Keith's, and a third a mix of the two. It was also an unexpected work of art, played with more fire and conviction than the Stones had deployed in years. The rearing Parthian lion that guarded the CD jewel box seemed emblematic of the fierce energy that inhabited the work. Surprised reviewers even compared
Bridges
to exalted
Exile on Main Street.

In a long career of black albums,
Babylon
was an especially noir dream. “Flip the Switch” was manic hard rock from the death chamber and the fastest song they'd ever cut. “Anybody Seen My Baby” was stark urban isolation and dementia. Keith's “Lowdown” was a swaying threat display and a demand for the bitter truth in an ambiguous sexual situation. “Already Over Me” was drenched in regret. Danny Saber's torchy production of “Gunface” gave it a rusty edge of sexual rage, validated in Mick's comment that it was a song about a guy who wanted to kill his woman's lover.

The sun came out briefly for Keith's “You Don't Have to Mean It,” the best reggae song the Stones ever cut. Then “Out of Control” and its turbulent descent into obsession and emotional dislocation. No song of Mick Jagger's, with its hothouse ambience of hotel sex with a stranger, had ever come so close to describing its writer's desires and compulsions as “Out of Control,” and the Stones backed it up with a churning throb that approximated a wandering spirit in serious torment. “Might as Well Get Juiced” was now a dusted drama of techno-funk, tinged with alcoholic despair. “Always Suffering” was another Jagger Bakersfield-style country weeper. The burning open G rock and roll of Keith's “Too Tight” had ominous warnings and furious threats buried in the lyrics. His “Thief in the Night” was the dark, stalking rumination of a jealous husband in a brooding soul setting. “Yeah, it's a story,” Keith later said. “Every guy's been there, been thrown out and tried to get back in again. That's what it's about.” “Thief” faded into the gentler reconciliation of “How Could I Stop,” Keith in his Hoagy Carmichael sentimental mode, with a soul chorus. The album ended with Wayne Shorter blowing a moonlight mile on sax, and Charlie's cymbals ringing like a Javanese gamelan—music for antique shadow puppets in the Digital Age.

                

September 1997.
There was a big press campaign for the album and the tour (sample London headline: “Would You Let Your Granny Go with a Rolling Stone?”). In public, Keith preached peace in the valley. “Mick's my mate, the longest friendship I've ever had. There's no possibility of divorce—we have to take care of the baby.” He also preached war, calling in print for all the gang-banging gansta rappers to finish each other off after Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. had been murdered. “We never had the Temptations killing the Four Tops,” Keith dryly observed.

                

The Bridges tour
opened in Chicago on September 18, 1997, with astonishing digital sound clarity but without a bridge, whose arrival was delayed until ten shows in. The ensemble was the same as on Voodoo Lounge, with the addition of Blondie Chaplin on vocals and percussion on Keith's songs. The shows were roughly divided by Mick into four acts. Act One started with the Stones' logo on the “Eye of the Lion” Jumbotron, dissolving into a ghastly liquid gold tongue as Jurassic roars flooded the air. Explosions! Nothing less than a rogue comet burst in the Eye of the Lion as Keith strode up in a fake-tiger-fur jacket to start “Satisfaction” amid erupting fireworks. A sampling of oldies—“19th Nervous Breakdown,” “Let's Spend the Night Together”—led into the new songs of Act Two: “Anybody Seen,” “Saint of Me,” and the showstopping “Out of Control.” Act Three was a random song chosen nightly by absent friends on the Internet; this was so often “Under My Thumb” that they added it to the show. Then Keith's pair of songs: “All About You” and “Wanna Hold You” early in the tour; “Thief in the Night” and “You Got the Silver” later on. The Stones then traversed their bridge and became the B-stage Bar Band, which often featured “It's Only Rock 'n' Roll,” “The Last Time” (provoking a shower of bras and knickers), and “Like A Rolling Stone.” Act Three ended with the band walking the bridge back to the main stage while samba drums pounded on tape and Mick changed costume in the dark for “Sympathy.” Act Four was the Warhorse Suite: “Dice,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Start Me Up,” “Jack Flash.” The encores were often “You Can't Always Get What You Want” and “Brown Sugar” amid a stupefying barrage of explosive glitter and fireworks.

The tour gathered momentum as it lurched around America during a chilly autumn. Blues Traveler (from New Jersey) opened the early shows, and Mick broke their harp player's heart when he refused to allow him onstage with the Stones during their last opening gig in Philadelphia. Mick complained that John Popper played too many notes and ordered Wood to fuck off when he tried to intercede for Popper. Missouri rock chanteuse Sheryl Crow joined the tour as opening act in Boston in October, an arrangement more suitable to Keith and Wood, who liked hanging out with the thirty-something ingenue, who idolized them. Unsubstantiated romantic rumors about Keith and Crow were allowed to filter out from the tour.

The fall months were unseasonably cold that year, and Mick Jagger, freezing, was working in a coat and hat. His hands were often too cold to play guitar on “Miss You,” now an obituary piece as the screen flashed images of revered dead musicians: Muddy, Duke, Brian. “I don't know how you do it,” he told the rest of the shivering band in a backstage huddle before the bridge came out in frigid Nashville.

In Oklahoma the next day, Sheryl told Keith and Ron that she'd been cold onstage too. “I bet your nipples were fucking
huge,
” Wood deadpanned. “They were as hard as—” Crow started, but Wood interrupted her. “I bet you could get
Radio Luxemburg
on them!” They were in the Baboon Cage, Keith's hotel suite (so-called after a reviewer described him as “an ageless, grinning baboon”), doing an interview for an English rock mag. Keith was rolling joints while Wood poured and planted smooches on good-natured Sheryl's cheek. Wood sent a minder up to his suite for a harmonica and then tried to teach Sheryl “Ain't Got You.” Keith got annoyed, snatched the harp, and tried to throw it out the window.

Ronnie, loaded on vodka and cranberry juice, tried to tell the interviewer that he was working all the time when Keith erupted. “You do shit-all! Working all the time?
I'm
working all the time. You do fucking nil, asshole.”

Wood: “Keith, man, I'm working with
you.
C'mon . . . just 'cause you covered my ass in Nashville . . .”

Keith: “
I'm
the fucking sucker who covers
your
fucking arse all the time, shithead.” Dead quiet in the room.

Wood: “Well, just for the last couple of weeks.”

They looked over at a dumbstruck Sheryl Crow amid shocked silence and started to laugh. Keith: “Sorry about that.”

                

Keith's Jamaican album
was released that autumn on his own new label, Mindless Records.
Wingless Angels
was an hour of Rastafarian passion and tree toads, a documentary of spirit, smoke and laughter. Keith took the Jamaican heartbeat rhythms and decorated them with airs from the Irish and English sea chanties and quadrilles that informed traditional Jamaican melody. He got the idea of adding a bass after hearing the old Wailers song “This Train.” This soulful synthesis even impressed Justin Hinds, who loved the album—much to Keith's relief.
Wingless Angels
was the work of a scholar and a true connoisseur. Critics called it Keith Richards's Jajouka. Keith insisted that listening to the Wingless Angels was good for you. “These people understand the necessity for trance in one's life,” he advised.

                

By the end
of the year, with the tour settling in for a long haul, Mick introduced Ron Wood as “stark raving bonkers.” (Other nights he called him “barking mad.”) The heart of the show was “Out of Control.” On the instrumental break the Stones cut loose and turned into a harp-driven, fire-breathing blues dragon presenting a tense, tightly organized blues movie, as cogent and vital as any in their career. Despite all the jokes about the Stones as leathery relics, the Rolling Stones were the kings of showbiz, the biggest act in the world. They had already grossed 90 million dollars.
Bridges To Babylon
sold about 4 million copies in its first year of release. They had nowhere to go but onward.

On December 12, Jerry Hall gave birth to Mick's second son, Gabriel Jagger. Soon Mick's romantic life would spin out of control, and change everything for the true king of rock and roll.

Cynical Nostalgia Merchants

January 1998.
The Rolling Stones moved their Babylonian circus indoors in New York and ratcheted up their price: $300 got you a seat around the B-stage for one of three nights at sold-out Madison Square Garden. Indoors, the Stones and their video screen were a lurid, vivid visitation. “When the Whip Comes Down” and “Rip This Joint” were revived. A diaphanous cloud of expensive, freshly shed lingerie enveloped the band during the miniset of “Little Queenie,” “Let It Bleed,” and “Like A Rolling Stone.” Mick hung the biggest bras and sexiest knickers as trophies on his mike stand. The Stones grossed $6.5 million from the shows. In February in Las Vegas, they charged $500 a night at the Hard Rock Hotel with Sheryl Crow opening. “It's only money,” Mick shrugged to
Rolling Stone.
Then Pepsi-Cola paid the band $3 million for a private concert for its employees at a beach resort in Hawaii after they'd spent a million to use “Brown Sugar” in a commercial. No one except the Stones seemed to recall that the song was named for potent Chinese heroin and a black dancer.

Meanwhile, Bill Wyman was touring Europe with a new R&B band, the Rhythm Kings, playing clubs and dumping on the Stones. He told interviewers that he left the Stones because their music annoyed him. Georgie Fame was in his band, and Eric Clapton sat in on some dates as well. “My life is more exciting now that I'm not a Rolling Stone,” the luckiest man in the world said, at the age of sixty-one.