Old Gods Almost Dead (49 page)

“Princess Radish,” as Keith called her (Capote was “that old queen”), ratcheted the tour up a notch in the publicity department. She and Capote gave the Stones an uneasy sheen of celebrity beyond the world of rock music, which annoyed other bands like Led Zeppelin, who were touring at the same time and found themselves ignored even though they were outselling the Stones in every city. It was the beginning of the nexus of the Rolling Stones and Big Gossip, items that got them mainstream daily publicity instead of mere ink in the rock press.

With this new celebrity entourage milling in the dressing room, the Stones played badly in Kansas City. It was the worst show of the tour, which the princess then left in a huff when told she couldn't fly with the Stones on their plane.

Only Stones Left Standing

Bianca rejoined
the tour as the Stones blasted through the southern states. Chic as ever, she wore a light pastel summer suit, with matching straw derby and a gold-topped ebony walking stick (Keith was incredulous). To get away from their onerous forty-man crew, the Stones drove across the South in a small convoy of station wagons, listening to the radio, passing joints, and stopping in drive-ins to eat. “The South is the only place in America where you can get decent food,” said Mick. “And it's fucking great to get away from all those people.” They were thrown out of a whites-only roadhouse in Louisiana because of their black bodyguards.

Truman Capote gave a small dinner for the band in New Orleans before quitting the tour. Ahmet Ertegun threw a large party for the Stones, with blues heroes Roosevelt Sykes and Professor Longhair for entertainment.

By early July, the Stones were burned out, with another three weeks still to go. On July 4, they played a sold-out RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., while a riot raged outside. Marshall Chess crashed and burned. Stash de Rola was caught shaking down dope dealers for drugs and money. The security posse decided to get rid of Stash, so in Indianapolis one of the bodyguards put a gun to his head, then beat him to a pulp and suggested he disappear. But their plans to lose de Rola were foiled by Keith; in an extremely tense meeting, he insisted that Stash had to stay.

In Montreal, Anglophobe Quebec separatists issued threats against the Stones and firebombed the Stones' equipment truck on July 17. Replacement gear had to be flown in from California. The next day, the Stones flew to Boston for two shows at Boston Garden. Fog forced a landing in Rhode Island, where a local photographer caught them at the airport and started snapping. Keith punched him, beginning an absurd fracas. The cops arrested Keith, and also Marshall Chess and Robert Frank for getting in their way. In Boston, Stevie Wonder played for two hours to an impatient crowd while the Stones were hauled off to jail. Meanwhile, a Latino race riot was raging in Boston, and part of the city was on fire. The mayor of Boston came to the hall and begged the Stones' crowd for patience and discipline so the large police concert detail could be diverted to the riot. He got a standing ovation, then called the governor of Rhode Island and managed to spring the Stones from jail. Gary Stromberg: “So we drive up to Boston, really worried because the Stones are five hours late, and as we get near the city we can see this fearsome red glow from the fires, and we figure that the Stones fans are sacking Boston! We got to the hall, the band tuned up in just a few minutes and played one of the greatest shows of the tour.”

                

The STP tour
wound down now and Robert Frank complained he wasn't shooting enough sleaze, so a mock orgy was staged for the film crew on the flight to Pittsburgh. The roadies stripped naked a couple of braless, bosomy young groupies and pretended to eat and screw them while Mick, Keith, and Mick Taylor gathered round, rattling shakers and tambourines. Bill Wyman stayed in the front of the plane with his son. Charlie thought the whole film was a mistake. Famous groupie Cynthia Plastercaster was filmed in a postcoital spread, and Frank shot as many blow jobs as he could. Another groupie, Cynthia Sagittarius (who said she'd been raped twice while hitching rides to follow the Stones), was filmed shooting up Keith and then herself. Mick was caught snorting white powder off the tip of a switchblade. Keith: “Since it was being filmed, a lot of it was performance, like the chicks on the plane. It was only done because the camera was turned on.” Keith was filmed nodding off into a heroin stupor in the locker room before the Pittsburgh show, while Mick talked business with smiling Ahmet.

The last shows were in New York City. The Hell's Angels asked for a sit-down with Peter Rudge and demanded the Stones play a concert to help them recoup legal expenses from Altamont. Rudge told the Angels he would discuss it with the band, then changed hotels and hired extra security instead. The final Madison Square Garden show ended in a massive pie fight. Ahmet Ertegun threw a huge party for the band after the last show on July 26, Mick's twenty-ninth birthday. Muddy Waters, gracious blues Buddha still recovering from a near-fatal car wreck, played “Rollin' Stone Blues” for his erstwhile protégés. Count Basie's orchestra also entertained, with Charlie Watts impressed by Basie's ancient drummer, Papa Jo Jones. A stripper emerged from the cake. Bob Dylan came; so did Woody Allen, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Andy Warhol, and Truman Capote. Capote, consummate publicity hound, had disliked traveling with the Stones, where the only limelight was reflected. He slagged the Stones to his friends and didn't bother to write his article for
Rolling Stone.

Capote on the Stones: “They're complete idiots.” On Mick Jagger: “He's about as sexy as a pissing toad.” On Mick Taylor: “Pretty, dumb, uninteresting.” On Nicky Hopkins, chronically ill with a digestive disorder and painfully thin: “Has the mark of death on him.” On Bobby Keys: “Totally undisciplined and headed for disaster.” The novelist, himself addled on pills and drink, could have been talking about himself, because he never wrote anything of value again.

                

The Stones returned
to California after the tour. There was another birthday party in L.A. for Mick, at which Little Richard entertained. The band had survived two months on tour in America during the summer of 1972, unlike most of their entourage, who were never the same again. The casualty list was high. Marshall Chess was addicted to heroin. Jimmy Miller was a pale ghost of himself. Gram Parsons had lost it. Jo Bergman and Chris O'Dell left. Gary Stromberg was so wasted that friends kidnapped him after the New York shows and left him on a boat off Fire Island with no dingy so he could dry out. Robert Frank's film, a ropy,
cinéma-vérité
newsreel titled
Cocksucker Blues,
was never released because the Stones feared they wouldn't be allowed back into America. A concert album of the tour was killed when Decca refused permission to use live versions of songs recorded on their label. The concert film,
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones,
was mediocre and never went into general release.

Only the battle-hardened Stones were left standing. They'd made about $1.5 million on the tour: each took home perhaps $250,000. Mick was upset when he learned that Led Zeppelin, touring at the same time to larger crowds than the Stones, had demanded and got a 90/10 split with the local promoters.

Mick took his family and went back to England to watch cricket matches. Keith returned to his family in Switzerland. He rented a house near Montreux and resumed a relatively quiet life. His cars were brought over, dope deliveries arranged, and when it snowed, he took up skiiing. He immersed himself in the revolutionary new reggae music coming out of Jamaica, turned on by the Wailers' first album,
Catch a Fire,
and the brilliant songs on the sound track album from the film
The Harder They Come.
Still passionate about music, Keith knew reggae was the wave of the future, much as R&B had been ten years earlier. Keith would ride this cultural wave as adroitly as any white musician who ever tried to master reggae's steel pulse.

The rest of the band returned to France, where they were arrested, harassed, and investigated by the police for the rest of 1972, based on widening allegations of heroin trafficking and other crimes at Nellcote the year before.

The Third World Nashville

By late 1972,
the Stones had been rolling for a decade. The old band of ambitious kids and the bonds that had unified them were history. They were all turning thirty now, lived in different countries, were often out of touch. From then on, their music came much harder, and at a greater cost.
Exile on Main Street,
still selling well by year's end, was the last of their four midperiod, era-defining masterpieces. With Keith debilitated, barely capable of even living up to his cartoonlike “outlaw” persona as the Human Riff, Mick Jagger was forced to assume complete control.

Quite cleverly, he turned the Rolling Stones into a ballad group, which succeeded in keeping them on the radio through the seventies, when soft rock and disco made it hard to get a real rock and roll song played on the air in America. During the next four years, the Stones' mid-seventies albums were less like Bulletins from the Edge and more like formulaic “product”: a hit single, some ballads, two cool rock and funk numbers, and plenty of filler. Coasting on their mystique, the Rolling Stones rode out the seventies until they found their new muses later in the decade.

                

In November 1972,
Mick went to Montreux to work on new songs with Keith. But there was contempt between them, and their old collaborative flame was just a glimmer. Keith mostly ignored Mick, or kept him waiting, or thrust half a riff at him. “This one goes, 'Angieeeee,' ” he'd say, and expect Mick to make a song out of it.

“Up to then Mick and I were inseparable,” Keith said later. “We made every decision for the group. We loved to get together and kick things around. But after we split up, I started going my way—downhill to Dopesville—and Mick ascended to Jet Land . . . Mick and I have different attitudes, and during the seventies I was living in a different world from him. I don't blame him; he's earned the right to do what he wanted. And even if I could've related to it, I was too busy being busted, which is equally dumb. But it got up my nose, his jet set shit, and the flaunting of it. But then he's a lonely guy too. He's got his own problems.”

The Stones had to go somewhere to record the new album, but where? France was out because the cops were after them. Their American work visas had run out. They were in tax exile from an England preoccupied with David Bowie and glam rock, which Keith despised. There was no creative vibe in Switzerland. Almost stateless, Keith came up with the idea of recording in Jamaica while listening to the Slickers sing “Sweet and Dandy” on a throbbing reggae album in the Richards chalet in the cold mountains above Montreux, as the Swiss winter began to close in.

Kingston, Jamaica, was the new third world Nashville. The funky port city's recording studios were churning out an incredible stew of innovative music that would propel reggae's new stars—Bob Marley and the Wailers, Burning Spear, the deejay Big Youth, Toots and the Maytals—into planetary sainthood within just a few years. Jamaica also had tropical beaches and an experimental socialist government, and the whole island was a garden of the best marijuana in the world. Kingston's studios were known to be primitive, but singer Paul Simon had recently recorded at bandleader Byron Lee's Dynamic Sound Studio (where Jamaican star Jimmy Cliff had cut his hit single “Wonderful World, Beautiful People”), so the Stones decided to try Jamaica themselves.

On November 23, 1972, they moved into small rooms at the Terra Nova Hotel in uptown Kingston, once the family home of Chris Blackwell, the owner of Island Records and the man behind Bob Marley's rise. Kingston was a violent town, locked down at night by factional fighting in the ghettos, and there were huge bullet holes in the heavily guarded studio's control room walls. Bill Wyman's girlfriend Astrid was reportedly raped in their hotel room while Bill was forced to wait under the bed until her attacker had left.

The Stones plunged into new music with Nicky Hopkins and let fly. Byron Lee had upgraded the studio for them, adding previously unknown amenities like headphones, vocal mikes, a grand piano, and a Hammond B3 organ. The Stones worked from sundown to dawn, seven days a week.

Keith: “The backing tracks [for
Goat's Head Soup
] were all done in Jamaica. We started off with 'Winter,' which was just Mick strumming guitar in the studio. 'Angie' and 'Dancing with Mr. D' came in the middle of the sessions. 'Starfucker' was about last.” Mick resurrected “A Hundred Years Ago,” an elegiac song about his days with Marianne, written three years earlier. Keith wrote and sang the stark sexual infidelity confession “Coming Down Again,” while “Starfucker” was all Mick's. The voodoo stew of “Dancing with Mr. D” was Keith's riff and Mick's lyric. Outtakes included “You Should've Seen Her Ass,” “Four and In,” and early versions of “Waiting on a Friend” and “Tops.” The sessions were productive because the Stones had nothing else to do. There wasn't much of a scene because reggae was then mostly recorded music, not a live one, so there weren't any bands to go see. They would leave the studio and return to the hotel, where they had trouble finding things to eat once their taste for curried goat and boiled akee began to wane.

                

In late November,
the Stones flew to Los Angeles to plan a Stones tour of the Far East that would take them back to Australia, and then to Japan for the first time. While in L.A., they jammed at Elektra Studio, producing high-grade experimental tracks starring Mick Taylor and Nicky Hopkins. These included rambling jams like “Travellin' Man,” “Leather Jacket,” “Potted Shrimp,” and a later version of “Blood Red Wine” that was close in spirit to “Winter.” Never officially released, these Elektra jams would take on lives of their own in the bootlegged netherworld of fascinating but unfinished songs.