Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The
The future of the Rolling Stones hung in the balance during April and May, 1977, as Keith stayed marooned on bail in Toronto; Mick Jagger flitted in and out of gossip columns, giving fulsomely non-committal predictions of the outcome if Keith were jailed for life; and the world, with far more modern scandals to think about, wondered whether it really mattered anyway.
Keith spent his time in Toronto listening to the El Macombo playback, taping songs for the solo album he might one day make and gazing fondly on Marlon’s prodigious intake of junk food. Anita decorated their hotel suite with newspaper headlines chronicling the intertwined dramas of the smack and Margaret Trudeau: STONE ON HEROIN PUSHING CHARGE. COULD THIS BE THE LAST TIME? PREMIER’S WIFE IN STONES SCANDAL. THE MAGGIE MYSTERY TOUR. MAGGIE, MICK IN NEW YORK DENY HANKY-PANKY. BREAK UP FOR THE STONES ON CARDS SAYS JAGGER. HEY, MICK – WHAT’S HAPPENING?
In June, Keith’s lawyers succeeded in obtaining permission for him to leave Canada to ‘practise his profession’ during the months before his case came to trial. A special visa had been granted to admit him to America for heroin addiction treatment at the Stevens Psychiatric Centre in New York. There Anita and he received neuro-electric acupuncture, a new cure which cut the horrors of cold turkey by administering mild electric shocks. Since Keith’s visa forbade him to travel outside a thirty-mile radius of the clinic, tapes for the new album, Love You Live, had to be brought to him by Jagger. The rift between them repaired itself in a drinking bout that ended, most unusually, with Jagger passing out. The crisis was past. The subordinate Stones received word to meet in Paris, to record the album that would become Some Girls.
Keith’s case did not come to trial until October, 1978. In return for a guilty plea, the trafficking charge had been reduced to one of mere possession. Though the prosecution asked for a jail sentence, Judge Lloyd Graburn was impressed by Keith’s apparently determined efforts to cure himself for good. He was put on probation for a year and ordered to continue his drug rehabilitation programme. An extra proviso was that the Stones should compensate Toronto for the trouble they had caused there by giving a charity concern in aid of the blind.
The Canadian government appealed against the lightness of the judgement but it was upheld. Keith Richard, as he told his mother Doris in a misspelt note, was no longer ‘the fugative’.
Although Jagger might have tired of Bianca, his pride was cut to the quick when she was the one to begin proceedings for divorce. He was also mortified by the prospect of parting from Jade – who clearly would have to remain with her mother – and how the break up would affect her. For there was little hope of its being amicable or civilized.
Having taken the giant step, Bianca instantly found herself cast into outer darkness, with all the luxuries and amenities of a rock legend’s wife instantly cut off. As well as cancelling her charge accounts in New York, Jagger had all the furniture at 48 Cheyne Walk removed and put into storage. His explanation to Jade was that it had gone away to be ‘repaired’. Jade couldn’t understand why the antique tapestries in the dining room needed repair, and innocently asked whether people had been walking on them.
Bianca’s one hope was that the case would be heard in California, where a divorced wife automatically receives half of her ex-husband’s property. To this end, she retained Marvin Michelson, a Hollywood lawyer famed for the ground-breaking palimony settlement he had wrung from Lee Marvin on behalf of the actor’s former mistress. Bianca later said she had wanted to keep the case low profile, and naively assumed that Michelson would not talk about it to the media. As it was, banner headlines across the world screamed that the outgoing Mrs Jagger sought $12.5 million – half of Jagger’s estimated earnings during their marriage – with $13,400 per month in interim expenses and a $50,000 advance against her lawyer’s fee. For those days, the claim was a massively ambitious one, even had the defendant not been Mick Jagger. But Bianca was determined to do better than the $100,000 Jagger had offered to her privately.
After several months’ legal manoeuvring, Jagger’s lawyers managed to get the action heard in Britain’s High Court, where matrimonial financial settlements are less munificent than in America. There at last, in late 1980, the marriage ended with Bianca being awarded around £500,000.
Twenty years later, as the aggrieved ex-wife of a rock icon, her financial future would have been assured by kiss-and-tell memoirs, TV chat show appearances and lavish confessional spreads in Hello! magazine. But in 1980 that world was still largely unborn, even if Bianca had been the type to profit from it. Instead, she would go on to reveal herself as a person very different from the spoiled, vapid character of Stones inner-circle gossip. Settling in New York, she became immersed in charity work on behalf of her native Nicaragua and other troubled Central American countries. Her activities included public fundraising, conferences on relief and welfare and visits to highly dangerous battle zones. As the original ‘supermodel’, she would occasionally be lured back to do a modelling job, and reveal that her old grandeur had not completely deserted her. At one such session in London, the photographer suggested breaking so that everyone involved could have a quick snack. Bianca’s idea of a quick snack was ‘a little sea trout with fennel’.
The other women of the Stones’ first division did not fare so well. After finally parting from Keith in the early Eighties, Anita Pallenberg put on weight massively, suffered illness and a broken hip and in general became the saddest casualty left in the band’s wake. Lonely as her life was, it still contained almost involuntary drama and scandal. In 1980, at her house in Long Island, a teenage boy killed himself with a shotgun in her bed. In 1983, she was raided for drugs at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel. A year later, her name would crop up again in the case of Stephen Waldorf, an innocent man shot and seriously wounded in Central London by armed police who had mistaken him for an escaped convict. After Keith began seeing a breezy young American actress named Pattie Hansen, Anita took to speaking of him almost maternally, playing his tapes as a proud parent might and warning him to ‘watch out for those American girls’. In her handbag she carried a photograph of their daughter, Dandelion, whom Keith’s mother had by now taken over and renamed Angela.
‘Isn’t she like Keith,’ Anita would say fondly, staring at the little girl’s photograph. ‘Keith and I still love and respect each other. The trouble is, we can’t live together. The people who really love Keith are waiting for him to grow out of the kind of life he leads and the creeps he surrounds himself with … I’ve always been his greatest fan.’
Marianne Faithfull came back from the wall in Windmill Street to build a career as the serious musician she had always hoped to be. The voice that had been so virginally shy was now raw and nicotine-stained, distilling the lessons of her many lifetimes with bitter world-weariness. She made three highly regarded albums (Broken English, Dangerous Acquaintances and A Child’s Fantasy), had a number one hit single in Ireland and gained a cult following in West Germany. In 1977, she married a young punk guitarist named Ben Brierley who worked under the name ‘Ben E. Ficial’. They set up home together in Chelsea, just a few streets away from Cheyne Walk, where they suffered continual harassment both from journalists and drug-seeking police. At one point they were so poor that Marianne had to start selling off pictures painted of herself long ago, when she seemed to live in a Renoir cornfield. ‘I’m always skint,’ she admitted. ‘Always have been, always will be. But one thing I can say – my credit is good.’
In Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, two eighteenth-century houses, deserted by their tax-exile owners, joined the company of London’s lesser shrines. Number 48 was irreproachably shuttered and still. At number 3, the windows were often illuminated. A series of subtenants lived there, on condition they did not disturb the petrified debris of Keith Richard’s last hasty exit. In every room lay half-packed cartons, expensive children’s toys, old Sixties finery and single ski boots. A double aircraft seat, showing signs of having been physically torn from its moorings, lay on the floor of the
elegant downstairs drawing room with its view over Albert Bridge.
Up the twisting stair, dimly lit by jewel-studded Moroccan lamps, Keith’s purple music room and psychedelic piano were just as he had left them. So was the oddly bare ‘tripping’ room, with its medieval candlesticks and the shrine to Jimi Hendrix. The glass mirror ball could still be turned on, sending flecks of light dancing into wood-panelled corners where so many cushions and insensible beings used to lie.
For some months in 1981, Anita’s friend Molly Parkin borrowed the house. Sleeping in Keith and Anita’s top floor room – in the carved wooden bed that had been used in Performance – Molly became convinced the place was haunted. Alone there at night, she would hear scufflings on the stairs, voices and movements in the rooms below her, as if the house were helplessly re-enacting its unwanted and unbelievable past.
SIXTEEN
‘GOD SPEED THE ROLLING STONES’
The John F. Kennedy Stadium, Philadelphia, is built of reddish stone embellished with turrets, loophole windows and irregular battlements reminiscent of a British fort in nineteenth-century India. Today, September 25, 1981, it has the appearance of such a fort long breached and overrun by mutineers. On the outside, all is eerily quiet. A pallid sun beats down on the steel mesh fences, the raw concrete approaches and a mass of parked cars extending over some five square miles. Decrepit gas-guzzlers, garish Dodge pickups, old Volkswagen buses with ‘Philly or bust’ scratched among mouldering graffiti, stand row on row, block after block, slow-broiling in the sticky heat.
Close to, JFK Stadium emits a steady roar, as if huge amounts of wet shingle are seething under a tide which its red battlements can barely keep in check. This afternoon, the Rolling Stones give the first concert in their twentieth-anniversary tour of America and Europe. Ninety thousand people are waiting to welcome back the World’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band.
The stadium doors lead to long sub-Gothic cloisters, lined with stalls purveying the T-shirts, sweatshirts and other merchandise which the Rolling Stones have authorized to be sold at venues along the route of their twentieth-anniversary tour. T-shirts, hung up like Neapolitan laundry lines, bear the Stones’ name in gold, red and black mid-Seventies script. On the reverse, a cartoon dragon rears over North America, its thick red lips parted to hang out a sagging and lascivious tongue. The sweatshirts cost $12.50 each, the T-shirts $10.50. Almost every boy and girl in the lower concourse wears a T-shirt or sweatshirt, carries a poster or sports a badge or button or pocket patch imprinted with that same unmistakable mouth and lolling tongue. Here and there among the pillars are roped-off enclosures with rows of stretchers, ready for the casualties which will occur when the owner of the mouth eventually shows himself.
Dirty stairs, through unfinished concrete crossbeams, lead to the terraces where people have paid fifteen dollars to see the Rolling Stones from no more than a quarter of a mile away. It is like emerging suddenly in the midst of downtown Calcutta. Boys and girls, crushed together on shallow stone ledges, extend upwards and downwards, in a great, seething human tenement of blue denim and brown skin, as far as the eye can see. Many are already drunk, many more semi-comatose with the marijuana that can be smoked almost openly in America nowadays. The attention of all is fixed on that far curve of the stadium where a pink, purple and faint yellow stage stands between two scaffolding towers, moored in place by bunches of multi-coloured balloons. The sky is full of small aircraft, towing indecipherable messages or relaying reports to local radio stations. From time to time, a police helicopter swoops down low, casting a shadow like a giant bee over the shirtless multitude furthest out in the sun.
Habits peculiar to the Stones fifteen years ago have evolved, through their countless imitators, into time-honoured rock concert tradition. It has long been acknowledged that no band which aspires to greatness ever begins playing on time. With the World’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band, lateness is naturally expected on an heroic scale. The crowd in JFK Stadium has waited two hours already with no entertainment save an obscure ‘support band’ and occasional records booming over the PA. It bears its vigil, not merely with patience, but with an enjoyment divorced from anything seen or heard so far today. This is the first young generation for whom nostalgia is more powerful than hope. Nostalgia for a past never experienced, and a youth never savoured, keeps them almost happy. This, surely, must be how it felt at Woodstock or in Hyde Park, back when young people ruled the world and gathered so often in exaltation under the brilliant, strange-scented Sixties sun.
The stage that will accompany the Stones across America – and, later, Europe – squats on its end curve of the stadium, straining gently under its rainbow clouds of balloons. Each seventy-foot-high side panel is a swirl of dim blue and yellow Japanese shapes, incorporating Mick Jagger’s mouth and an American flag, zigzagged instead of striped. The performing area is a pink and purple apron, stretched into a pair of purple catwalks extending almost to the nearest spectator blocks. Above the left-hand catwalk, a cherry-picker crane waits on its thirty-foot stem, close to the well-guarded scaffolding.
Empty of music as the stage still is, it none the less exhibits multifarious life. On the broad ramp from the backstage VIP enclosure, figures toil ceaselessly up into the proscenium, carrying clean towels, drinking water, guitars, cartons of cigarettes and boxes of long-stemmed carnations. Launching the five Stones into performance is an operation that involves approximately a hundred people, onstage and in the area behind, hurrying to and fro with a sense of keen urgency that does not seem to bring the concert any nearer to beginning. The black towered amplifiers give off huge gusts of unused power as a technician rechecks the computer which regulates them. There is always the chance that a local taxi company using the same frequency might interpolate a radio call gigantically into the middle of Jumpin’ Jack Flash.
In the backstage enclosure, and a single block of empty seats behind it, some 200 journalists and photographers wait to file stories about the World’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band to newspapers, magazines, wire-services, radio and TV stations throughout America, Europe, Australasia and Japan. A band whose press coverage in the past has contributed to the imprisonment of its two leading members could not be expected to treat journalists with goodwill. Even so, the delay, frustration and downright humiliation inflicted on media people covering any Stones tour have been raised to something like an art. Every few minutes, in their long, uncomfortable, unrefreshed wait, some new manoeuvre is devised for herding them into a different place, even further from where they would like to be, and in general reducing their self-esteem to dust.
The Stones invented ‘security’, long before other rock stars had anything but hugs and kisses to fear from fans. Now the world has changed: it is barely ten months since Mick Jagger’s old friend and rival, John Lennon, was gunned down in New York by a boy with an LP record under one arm. Jagger, with his own vastly greater backwash of enemies, reportedly lives in constant terror of assassination. That is why, at JFK Stadium, yellow-shirted teenage thugs glower down in long lines at inoffensive paying customers; why huge black men block thoroughfares with their whole bodies; why huge white men in crumpled safari jackets whisper devoutly into walkie-talkies or dash to and fro on miniature motorcycles. That is why naked paranoia rages, under the balloon-skin veneer of one great, carefree garden party.
As well as the visible and the undercover security, there is a guard of a special sort, posted alone on the staircase by which the Rolling Stones will eventually make their way up to the stage. The guard is a bearded young man, upwards of seven feet tall. He is dressed as for college athletics in a navy blue sweatshirt, shorts and white jogging shoes. On his head he wears a blue baseball cap bearing the gold-wreathed inscription TULSA POLICE. His outfit suggests the cosy joviality of guys together in the locker-room. His face promises something very different to anyone without authority who should try to climb that staircase. You could not wish a more perfect evocation of the kill-or-be-killed indust
ry which – as Mick Jagger characteristically reminds us – is ‘only rock ’n’ roll’.
The real VIP enclosure, at the inner end of the players’ tunnel, is a little portable garden, surrounded by pink and purple Japanese screens, and containing all that, it is hoped, will keep the World’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band happy during their pre-concert rendezvous and conference. There are palm trees in pots and flower baskets and somnolent caged parrots and, for more advanced aesthetic stimulus, lines of kabuki masks mounted on poles around the perimeter. On either side of the garden, a pink and purple trailer houses the continuous bars and running banquets without which no Rolling Stone is expected to function for ten minutes at a time. About a dozen highly privileged, highly nervous people are seated at tables under sun umbrellas or standing on the artificial grass, glancing this way and that over their shoulders.
At the inner end of the garden, Mick Jagger, swathed in a bright yellow quilted ski jacket, trots briskly to and fro, lifting his knees in regular drill-instructor’s time. He stops, spreads his legs, flexes his torso, touches his toes and rotates each shoulder blade in turn. It is a warm-up period essential before two hours onstage calculated to be, at least, the equivalent of a twenty-mile run. Jagger goes through it with the half-closed eyes and muttered counting of a trained athlete whose life, these past weeks, has been virtually non-stop circuit exercise.
Two of the four remaining Stones, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, also wait in the garden, each at the centre of a small, tenaciously jovial group. Tour life for a Rolling Stone may once have been perpetual sex, drugs and madness. Now it seems little more than an unremitting cocktail party. Charlie looks at his watch and grimaces lugubriously. ‘’Alf past four,’ he says. ‘We should have been on at two-fifteen. I hate keeping people waiting.’