Mick congratulated Robert Frank on a brilliant piece of work, but said that if it were released, he’d never be able to show his face in America again. So Cocksucker Blues was put on the shelf alongside The Rolling Stones’ Rock ’n’ Roll Circus. Instead, a crew from John Lennon’s Butterfly film company cobbled together a straightforward record of the ’72 tour, using stage footage from the Fort Worth and Houston concerts and blamelessly entitled Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones.
Those who spent lengthy periods with the Stones tended never to be quite the same afterward, and Robert Frank was no exception. Having months of arduous work thrown away was just the start of the bad luck that Cocksucker Blues brought Frank. His daughter, Andrea, and his young assistant, Danny Seymour (who appeared in the credits as “Junkie Soundman”), were both to die suddenly soon afterward.
IN THE JANUARY 1974 issue of American Viva magazine, Bianca dropped the first public hint that she and Mick had begun seriously to drift apart. She was being interviewed for a cover story on Rock Royalty (a status conferred not only on her and Mick but also on Carly Simon and James Taylor). “Perhaps Mick isn’t attracted to me anymore,” Viva quoted her as saying, “When I first met him, I knew who he was. But not now . . . All I need is to find a human being who is truthful. It’s so sad when I discover that someone I care for isn’t truthful . . . I can’t forgive lies. Lies are offensive to the intelligence.”
Here was a very different Bianca from that frowning, uncommunicative clotheshorse; here was an uncertain, vulnerable young woman who admitted the situation frightened her, especially “when I look at Jade. My parents were divorced and I remember how painful it was to be a child divided between two loves.” Interviewed in the same magazine, Mick played down any idea of a serious rift, merely saying he was “not in the least domesticated” and, more revealingly, “I try not to hang around my family any more than I have to.”
Under Prince Rupert Loewenstein’s strategy, 1974 was a year empty of Stones tours. Keith spent much of it in Switzerland, attempting yet another cure (the one in which, according to folklore, all his drug-infused blood was pumped away and a fresh supply substituted). As a result, Switzerland once more became the band’s command center. There were frequent business meetings—attended, one participant recalls, by “about twenty lawyers”—when Prince Rupert and Mick hammered out plans for touring America, Latin America, and the Far East in ’75 and ’76, this time definitely without any fly-on-the-wall filmmakers tagging along.
Rather than hang around his family, Mick also was often in Los Angeles, hanging out with the only fellow musician to whom he ever deferred. A few months earlier, John Lennon had split from Yoko in New York and moved to the West Coast for the riotous interlude he later called his Lost Weekend. High on the agenda was sex, which Lennon felt had come his way in insufficient quantity while he was a Beatle and which had latterly begun to pall with Yoko. As he often said, he aspired to be like Mick, sitting in the bar at New York’s Plaza Hotel, waiting to be picked up by some stunning woman, then retiring with her to one of the hotel’s suites.
Lennon desperately wanted the green card that would allow him permanent residency in America, but was continually threatened with deportation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service because of his history with drugs and radical politics. Mick, by now thoroughly persona grata in Washington, could easily have obtained a green card, but never would because it would make him liable to U.S. income tax.
Hard though Lennon tried to be dissolute, he spent much of his Lost Weekend in the recording studio with trusted British cronies like Ringo Starr, Elton John—and Mick. In one session at the Record Plant West, he produced Mick singing Willie Dixon’s “Too Many Cooks (Spoil the Soup)” with Al Kooper on keyboards, Jesse Ed Davis—who’d appeared in the Stones’ Rock ’n’ Roll Circus—on guitar, and Jack Bruce from Cream, and the Ealing Blues Club, on bass. When Lennon returned to New York (though not yet to Yoko), Mick joined him at the Record Plant East to work on the Dixon track some more and also visited him and his girlfriend, May Pang, at their apartment on East Fifty-Second Street.
It’s Only Rock & Roll, released in October 1974, was the first Stones album produced by Mick and Keith under their Glimmer Twins pseudonym. The initial plan had been a mixture of live performance extracts from the ’73 European tour and soul standards like the Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.” But the ever-fecund Twins soon switched to doing their own new material, albeit working separately more often than together. The album cover was by the Belgian painter Guy Peellaert, whose lushly airbrushed portraits of record idols from Hank Williams to Eddie Cochran had made him the Rubens of glam rock. Peellaert depicted the Stones walking through what seemed to be a Parliament chamber full of Pre-Raphaelite young women and little girls, seemingly immune to their outstretched bare arms.
The title track, released as “It’s Only Rock & Roll (But I Like It),” felt exactly right for glam rock’s prevailing mood of pastiche and faux naïveté. Nonetheless, it failed to make the American Top 10 and only just scraped it in Britain. Its sound was not in the least glam but the rough-edged mixture as usual, with Mick mouthing some sarcastic calligrapher-hara-kiri guff about sticking a pen in his heart and bleeding all over the stage. What perplexed the punters was a color video of the band who had once abhorred matching uniforms, now all dressed in white Victorian sailor suits and playing in a tent that gradually filled with foam. The foam proved only too plentiful, rising relentlessly to above head height, so that by the time the five rockin’ sailor boys finished their performance, they appeared to be trapped inside a washing machine midcycle. It seemed the very last message Mick’s fans wanted to hear from him at this point was “Hello, sailor!”
Mick Taylor looked least comfortable in his prissy white suit with soap bubbles brushing his nose, and in December he handed in his resignation. In five years, he had contributed enormously to the Stones while stoically accepting his paradoxical role as soloist overshadowed by chord player, resigned to being the Mick people thought of a long way second, following the others into exile despite having no tax problems and uncomplainingly sharing the fallout from Keith’s drug problems. Yet he still remained just a salaried employee, confined to the same NCOs barracks as Bill and Charlie.
Taylor had ambitions as a songwriter, but all his attempts to realize them had been crushed by the Glimmer Twins juggernaut. During the making of It’s Only Rock & Roll, so he complained, he’d made major contributions to several songs, but received no credit. At heart, he was a live-action bluesman who preferred blasting out a riff in seconds to working on it for weeks in the studio. And to the bluesman who thought he’d joined a blues band, Mick’s latter foray into glam rock was the final straw.
On a personal level, too, five years had taken their toll. Taylor had arrived in 1969 as a nonsmoking vegetarian; now he was a heroin user on a scale not far behind Keith. A wake-up call (as no one yet said) had come in September 1973, when Keith’s acolyte, the beautiful Gram Parsons, died of a smack overdose. Always in Taylor’s mind, too, was the fate of his predecessor in the lead-guitar spot, Brian Jones. He would later call himself “the only lead guitarist to have left the Stones and lived.”
The story to the media was that he wanted a change of scene. From Keith he received a warmly appreciative telegram but from Mick merely a catty epigram when asked about the problem of replacing him: “No doubt we can find a brilliant six-foot-three blond guitarist who can do his own makeup.” That was just the Tyranny of Cool speaking; actually Mick thought Taylor’s delicate single-string playing the perfect counterpoint to Keith’s rhythm lead, and tried hard to persuade him not to leave. The final attempt was at a party given by impresario Robert Stigwood. “Mick talked to Taylor a long while that night, with Eric Clapton reeling around dead drunk in the background,” Marshall Chess recalls. “But it was no use.”
With hindsight it seemed that Taylor’s good friend twenty-seven-year-old Ronnie Wood, affectionately know
n throughout the business as Woody, was (as no one yet said) a shoo-in to take his place. Woody had known the Stones since the Ealing Club days, when his older brother, Art, used to sing with Blues Incorporated. He was now lead guitarist with Rod Stewart’s band the Faces, who, despite being glam-rock idols, were just as macho as the Stones and their main rivals both in the UK and the United States. Prior to Woody’s arrival, the Faces had been the Small Faces, the act on which Andrew Oldham had mainly focused after parting from the Stones in 1967.
Woody’s own face, bony and long-nosed, somewhat like an amiable anteater, seemed a natural fit with Mick and Keith; indeed, he already had a strong working relationship with each of them. His Victorian mansion, The Wick, on Richmond Hill—where he lived with his wife, Krissie, a former groupie said to have slept with both John Lennon and George Harrison—was a popular party zone for musicians of every stripe. Keith was a frequent visitor and, during a period of turmoil with Anita, had spent some months as the Woods’ houseguest. As a result, intensive police surveillance had been placed on the house and one raid conducted, though its only find was Krissie Wood in bed with a female companion.
The Wick had a basement recording studio where Woody was sporadically at work on a solo album between gigging with Rod Stewart and the Faces. Mick liked to hang out there, and had been some assistance with the album, particularly a track called “I Can Feel the Fire.” On a later visit, Woody helped him tape the basis of “It’s Only Rock & Roll” with the two of them on guitar and David Bowie doing backup vocals (inaudible on the released version). Assistance of that scale would normally earn a cowriting credit, but Mick had a better idea: he would leave Woody’s name off “It’s Only Rock & Roll” and, in return, ask no credit for his help on “I Can Feel the Fire.” This doubtful bargain was a further foretaste of working with the Glimmer Twins.
But for now Woody was in a hugely successful band whose concert and recording commitments stretched years ahead; moreover, Rod Stewart was an old blues-club friend whom Mick and Keith hesitated to antagonize by stealing his key sideman. So when the Stones returned to Munich in December 1974 to start the album that would become Black and Blue, auditions for a new lead guitar were held at the same time. The chance of becoming a Stone brought most of the current guitar gods winging to Musicland Studios, as tremulous with nerves as any modern X Factor hopefuls, among them Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Muscle Shoals’ virtuoso Wayne Perkins, and former Canned Heat member Harvey “the Snake” Mandel. Each had to play a number with the band that was also put on tape: the best takes were then thriftily put aside to be slotted into the album in progress.
The two finalists were Clapton and Steve Marriott, the latter of whom had fronted the Small Faces when Andrew Oldham tried to turn them into the new Rolling Stones, then gone on to cofound Humble Pie. Recruiting Marriott would be fraught with potential embarrassment, since he had dated Chrissie Shrimpton immediately after Mick dumped her. Sooner or later it would be bound to come out how Chrissie could only endure a boyfriend even shorter than Mick by calling him Peter, after Peter Pan, and making him call her Wendy. As a powerful vocalist with a huge female following, he would also be a major threat to Mick’s limelight. Eric Clapton, on the other hand, was a sublime instrumentalist and a friend, but currently had drug and alcohol issues all too reminiscent of Brian Jones’s. So the Glimmer Twins turned back to Ronnie Wood.
To lessen the feeling of larceny from Rod and the Faces, the Stones were said only to be borrowing Woody for their next American tour, in the early summer of 1975. And, like Mick Taylor, he would be just a salaried employee. When Mick handed him his contract, the cheery soul signed it without reading it.
Woody was to make his half-debut in a show more extravagant than anything the Stones previously offered the American public. It would start with a giant metal flower whose (bulletproof) petals opened to reveal the band playing inside. Midway through, a forty-foot inflatable phallus would come thrusting from rear stage and Mick would sit astride it to sing “Star Star.” All this capital investment was suddenly put in jeopardy, however, when U.S. Immigration denied Keith a visa as a result of his recent drug headlines in Britain and France. Mick appealed for help to the American ambassador in London, Walter Annenberg, and thanks to their combined clout with Washington, the visa was granted.
As a rehearsal space for the Stones, and to “hang around his family” for a spell, Mick rented Andy Warhol’s summer home in Montauk on the eastern tip of Long Island. The oceanfront house had several Warhol-esque touches, like shelves full of books reversed to show only white pages. Though original Warhols crowded the walls and were stacked dozens deep in spare rooms and passages, the place had no special protection; indeed, its doors were usually left unlocked. Mick imported heavy security for the Stones’ warm-up sessions, which he doubled before the arrival of “my baby,” as he called three-year-old Jade. So that her education wouldn’t be too disrupted, he also enrolled her in the local hippie-progressive Little Red School House.
The band rehearsed in a cottage on the grounds, making a din that echoed across the peninsula. While Woody’s guitar meshed in with Keith’s—a virtually instantaneous process, as it proved—Warhol pottered around in his peroxide-blond toupee and took endless Polaroid pictures, blissfully unconscious that in Cocksucker Blues Mick referred to him as “a fuckin’ voyeur.” Warhol was a notoriously poor conversationalist (as a rule saying little beyond “Really? Oh!” and “Oh, really?”), but Jade, already a precocious charmer, roused him to eloquence that her father certainly never had. “I love Mick and Bianca, but Jade’s more my speed,” he was to recall. “I taught her how to color and she taught me how to play Monopoly . . . Mick got jealous. He said I was a bad influence because I gave her champagne.”
The next-door property belonged to ABC-TV talk-show host Dick Cavett, who had done a celebrated live transmission from the Stones’ Madison Square Garden concert in 1972. With a low hill screening him from the Warhol house, Cavett was not disturbed by the Stones’ rehearsals, and became aware of their presence only when young women began crossing his private beach in search of Mick. “Some I saw were naked, with their pubic hair dyed green,” he recalls. “And there were four with heads shaved as bald as eggs camping in my woods.”
Also at rehearsals was twenty-five-year-old Annie Leibovitz, a photographer with a remarkable knack for catching rock dignitaries in the most unguarded situations yet not damaging their amour propre. She had covered the ’72 tour for Rolling Stone in a junior capacity, but Mick had spotted her qualities and asked her to join this one in effect as his personal photographer. At first she tried to be as unintrusive as possible, but then realized that “what might have seemed like a nuisance to him became a source of comfort . . . to know I was somewhere nearby . . . I remember him saying I should tell him if I wanted him to be at a specific place on the stage at any point in the show, but . . . I couldn’t think of anything for him to do that he wasn’t doing already.”
One day, while leaving a restaurant in Montauk, he mistook a plate-glass window for a door and shattered the pane with his forearm, making a seven-inch gash that needed twenty-four stitches. As he showed off the gory wound later, Annie Leibovitz unslung her camera and began snapping it in black-and-white. Mick at first demurred but then changed his mind and told her to continue—this time in color.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Old Wild Men, Waiting for Miracles”
MICK’S FAILURE TO become the major screen actor Performance had promised was not for want of trying. And most of that trying was done by his longtime English film agent, Maggie Abbott.
Abbott had known him socially in London since the mid-sixties and worked for the Stones’ film agent, Creative Management Associates, with Sandy Lieberson, who went on to produce Performance. Mick’s screen debut as the teasing, reclusive Turner had profoundly impressed her, but she thought Ned Kelly an ill-advised follow-up and had vainly tried to talk him out of it. As a result, he trusted her judgment and s
howed her a professional loyalty he did to precious few others. During the 1970s, Maggie Abbott would bring him some twenty-five film projects, offering diverse acting challenges and the chance to work with directors of the caliber of John Boorman, Steven Spielberg, and Franco Zeffirelli; several more came from other quarters, including the Andy Warhol circle.
His interest was often aroused, sometimes turning into enthusiasm, occasionally into actual commitment. Yet thanks to indecision, conflicting obligations with the Stones, or—most frequently—last-minute attacks of cold feet, he ended up not doing a single one.
Predictably, a high proportion had a musical theme. In 1973, when plans were first mooted to film the Who’s rock opera Tommy, Mick was considered for the name role, then invited to play the Acid Queen. He decided he didn’t want to be “in the Who’s movie”—hadn’t they upstaged him in his movie, The Rolling Stones’ Rock ’n’ Roll Circus?—so Tina Turner got the part instead. Around the same time he was approached to star in a biopic of his blues hero Robert Johnson, who died aged only twenty-seven having reputedly made a pact with the devil, but that one never got as far as a pact with an agent either. There was more progress with Blame It on the Night, the story of a rock star getting to know his estranged son, which Maggie Abbott was to coproduce. Mick was initially interested, especially when producer Gene Taft offered him a co-credit for “original story” if he would provide material from his own direct experience of rock stardom. He changed his mind, however, on realizing that the estranged parent-child theme had uncomfortable parallels with himself and his daughter Karis. When the film finally came out in 1984, “Michael Philip Jagger” was still co-credited for the story.