A stir down the players’ tunnel announces that the final two Stones have run out of excuses to postpone their arrival. Into the garden first comes a girl of about sixteen, wearing a long black ball gown and black crocheted shawl, carrying a half-empty bottle of Southern Comfort in the attitude of some ceremonial mace. After her comes Ronnie Wood, a creature hatched and bred in the rock-music swarm from his spiked black hair and cheese-pale, pointed face to his spindly legs, swaying and staggering on vermilion boot-heels with almost obligatory mirth. ‘Woody’, as lead guitarist Stone, survives in the niche where Brian Jones and Mick Taylor could not, chiefly through being this ideally complete and recognizable rock star parody, a cartoon trailer, as it were, to his friend and confederate, now known once more as Keith Richards.
Even in broad daylight, he manages to look fairly frightening. His skin is corpse-white as if, in his battles with heroin, all the blood truly had been pumped out of him. His eyes, under the draggled pompadour, are smudges of leering black. His mouth is a grimace of rotted teeth, held in suspense by lines nicked out of his face like duelling cuts. He is half naked in his bare-chested jerkin, cracked jeans tucked into ankle boots, a mangy white silk scarf wound many times around his neck. His gait is unsteady and sidelong as if he has only just now arisen from his vampire’s casket. And yet, for all the gipsy squalor and reek of suicidal decadence, there is something about Keith Richards strangely and resiliently alive. He seems, within his own ghastly parameters, a happy, even healthy man.
Staggering across the garden, he bites the cap from a beer bottle. He lurches up against a member of Bill Wyman’s party, throws his dead white arms around someone else and says, ‘Why is everyone making such a fuss about a bunch of middle-aged madmen on tour?’ The vampire speaks in the boozy, affectionate tones of some old-time actor-manager.
The Stones are ready at last. The stadium, by some vast animal instinct, has divined it even before the little group of blonde womenfolk, business aides and record company executives are shepherded out through the players’ tunnel, across a VIP enclosure swept clean of all press, and up the narrow staircase to their privileged places on the stage. The seven-foot TULSA POLICE giant stands respectfully aside. Now the roar changes to uproar. The Stones themselves are issuing from the tunnel-mouth.
The World’s Greatest Rock ’n’ roll Band, being all so small and thin, seem, rather, the last tiny herd of some nearly extinct gazelle. Jagger goes first as always, in his yellow jacket, pumping his knickerbockered knees in a final exercise. The figure of Keith staggering after him holding two guitars, smoking a long, droopy cigarette, brings from afar a cry filled with desperate would-be brotherhood:
‘He-e-e-e-ey … Keith!’
The five little beings flee up to the safety of their gigantic proscenium and the horizonless humanity beyond. Ninety thousand people are about to learn the secret of careless, unstoppable youth from men, in most cases, old enough to be their fathers.
It was Keith who almost put an end to the Stones in 1977. And it is Keith who has persuaded them to go back on the road yet again in 1981. Without him, the other four would still be comfortably enmired in their wealth, their millionaire hobbies and their illimitable freewill. Keith is the Stone who has most to fear when he has nothing in particular to do.
Becoming Keith Richards again symbolizes his wish to return to some kind of normal existence after his ten-year heroin odyssey with Anita Pallenberg. It also marks his reconciliation with the father he has not seen since he was a semi-delinquent eighteen-year-old. Bert Richards had subsequently parted from Doris and was living in retirement – with no thought of benefiting from his superstar son – when Keith discovered his address in 1976 and began writing to him. They finally met up again in London, Bert flinging his arms around his outlaw son and saying ‘Wotcher, mate.’
It was a new and single and apparently cleaned-up Keith who, during early 1981, visited Charlie Watts, the English landowner and antique silver expert, and Bill Wyman, the photographer, composer and friend of Marc Chagall, and proposed that they turn themselves back into teenage rock stars. Most assiduously did he visit the childhood friend who has, at times, seemed more like a lover, who can resemble a nagging wife and yet maintains an inimicably opposite existence within their indestructible partnership. All Keith’s persuasion was needed to entice Mick away from the life, floated on silk clouds between New York, the Caribbean and the Loire Valley, which he likes to characterize as that of ‘a dilettante Englishman’.
Jagger almost never wants to go on tour. The passing years have required more and more punishing effort to whip his body into the condition needed for a Mick Jagger performance. Mere mention of another tour would be enough to make his face go into the well-known Jagger put-down look: ‘Not that old thing again!’ Or he would produce one of the epigrams he polishes so carefully against his next press conference. ‘Performing’s like sex. You might like it but you don’t wanna do it all the time.’
What decided him in the end was not so much Keith’s enthusiasm as the figures prepared by the Austrian prince who supervises his and the Stone’s financial affairs. Jagger has a persuasive way of insisting that he cares nothing for money. His close friends – certainly his ex-wife – are equally convinced he cares for nothing else.
The band which had ruled pop music style in the Sixties and half the Seventies could not be sure, for all their heaped-up fame, that the Eighties would not laugh them into extinction. Their classic work aside, the fact was that they had not achieved a significant new success in almost a decade. They had remained on their treadmill of monster tours and monster money while punk rock was subjecting pop to its most radical change since its most radical change was themselves. Punk groups like the Sex Pistols – beer-swilling, swearing, spitting at their audience or even jumping offstage to attack them – made the Stones Sixties’ exploits look tame indeed. Punk was not so much music as satire: a giant collective jeer by young people in the depressed late Seventies at bands like the Stones who still appeared on stages as vast as ocean liners, and behaved as well as dressed like Bourbon monarchs, and played in too-fastidious tune, and were complacent, torpid, out of touch and most of all – God help them! – in their mid-thirties.
In the summer of 1981, a new Rolling Stones album on their eponymous label was released, as Stones albums had continued to be every year or so. Its title was Tattoo You – like that of its predecessor, Emotional Rescue, a vague, unrepentant swipe of male chauvinism. Tattoo You contained a track called Start Me Up, sung by a voice as snarlingly adolescent as if the past decade had never been, set about by plain guitar chords of dark, lazy malignity. Among the prevailing New Romantic high-tech, its effect was that of a cave painting, lit by primitive fire. All that was new and current could not suppress its Neolithic growl. For the first time since Angie in 1973, the Stones were top of the American singles charts.
A familiar seismic shudder, midway between joy and terror, spread across the United States in August when it was confirmed that the Stones would be giving concerts in twenty-six cities throughout October, November and December. Long years have not dimmed memories of outrage, real or imagined, which the wild young Stones visited on Middle America, and which to this day cause parents to blanch, hotel clerks to cower and sheriffs to reach for arrest warrants whenever their name is mentioned. Enormous stone structures and wide open spaces have likewise learned to be afraid of the Stones. In New York it is a tradition always to keep the name of their final and climactic tour venue a secret for as long as possible, lest its audience surround it prematurely and rend it brick from brick.
The response to that frisson down North America’s spine was bigger than in 1978, 1975 or even 1972. Within forty-eight hours of the tour’s announcement, almost three and a half million people had applied for tickets. The string of sports arenas and concert bowls long battered into accepting the Stones’ box-office percentage would, this time, yield some $15 million. Then there were the proceeds from ‘authorized’
merchandise, T-shirts, buttons, badges, posters. There were the proceeds from TV, video and film rights, to say nothing of record sales. There was the wholly unlooked for dividend arising from an agreement with Jovan Perfumes Inc. to allow its name – merely its name – to be printed above the Stones’ on concert admission tickets. With an expected total gross of $40 million, the ‘old men of rock’ were rolling the biggest moneymaking snowball the music industry had ever seen.
The build-up continued during the Stones’ seven weeks of rehearsal at a secluded farm-cum-studio in rural Massachusetts. It was announced that, as well as playing their high-gross stadium dates, they hoped to make spontaneous, unscheduled appearances at ‘small clubs’ along the tour route. Lords and superstars as they were, they wanted to re-establish contact with the kind of places and audiences which had given them their earliest foothold and fame. All across America for the next three months, groups of kids would gather, eyeing their local juke joint and wondering raptly if, some night soon, they would see the Rolling Stones there.
Mick and Keith, meanwhile, thumbed through the Jagger–Richard songbook, reminding themselves of the words and basic chords of its approximately one hundred titles. Between rehearsals, Mick exercised with weights and barbells, played squash and practised karate with his black bodyguard and ran seven miles daily through the autumnal woods. Far from provoking horror in the district, the visitation was accounted a positive blessing. A church in the neighbouring village of North Brookfield rearranged the letters on its announcement board to say GOD SPEED THE ROLLING STONES.
Most of the pre-tour publicity, as always, centred on Mick. There were stories about his new passion for physical fitness; his apparently happy life with Jerry Hall; the eternal possibility of his appearing in a film – would it be Werner Hertzog’s Fitzcarraldo, or Annie? Mick can keep such stories coming when he does nothing for eighteen months at a time. But there was a growing interest in Keith, as evidenced by a Rolling Stone cover story. The Human Riff is receiving his due, belatedly, as the true soul and mainspring of the Stones as well as the one incorrigibly bad boy among them. The difference in interviews with Keith is that – even when asked about heroin or his break up with Anita – he answers candidly.
One last little charge remained to set off the main explosion at its best. Early in September, in the small town of Worcester, Massachusetts, 300 people made their furtive way towards a club called Sir Morgan’s Cave to hear a band whose identity could be only half guessed from its obvious pseudonym, Little Boy Blue and the Cockroaches. The 300 had been selected by a local radio station under an oath of strict secrecy and all would have gone well had not a rival station got wind of the plot and begun announcing, at ten minute intervals, that the Rolling Stones were about to play in Worcester. Eleven thousand people instantly descended on Sir Morgan’s Cave. A riot was averted only by throwing open all the club doors. The Stones gave their first performance in the Eighties from a sort of sweating gazebo, with Mick Jagger stripped to the waist, lathered like a steeplechaser and grinning like an eight-year-old Kentish schoolboy.
Next day, half a dozen other small towns in North Massachusetts hastily issued pre-emptive orders, banning the Stones from all clubs, bar rooms and billiard halls within their precincts. Overnight, the dilettante Englishman, the connoisseur of silver, the friend of Chagall and the two ageing plutocrats were transformed back into outlaws, vagrants and fire hazards. Now they were ready to go on tour.
Out across the blue distances of JFK Stadium roll giant bass notes, circling downward in register and backwards fifteen years. The song is Under My Thumb, from the 1966 Aftermath album. The Stones have launched their assault on the Eighties by starting almost at the beginning.
The world since 1966 may have changed beyond recognition. But the voice, blown forth by giant speaker-mouths, has not changed or aged a day. It is the voice which, for all its owner’s vast sophistication, can still utter sentiments of child-chauvinist triumph over some luckless dolly bird: not a voice, indeed, so much as a scowl, or perhaps a pout made audible. The voice is so much the same, one forgets how surprising the song was originally – the muted undertow of melody Brian Jones gave to it with his African xylophone.
Behind the stage, reporters stand staring desperately upwards, trying to see the source of the thunder rolling back past Charlie Watts’s bald patch. Paul Wasserman the publicist beckons the first chosen photographers under the stage, to its frontal pit. Each has five minutes only, shooting upward at a fixed angle of seventy degrees. Should any photographer exceed his allotted time, or be otherwise recalcitrant, a man named Jerry Pompili will touch his camera with a long metal wand like a cattle-prod, instantly destroying the film inside.
Others, suspended above in helicopters and small aircraft, train telescopic lenses down on the figure, now shucked from its yellow jacket and prancing, over shallow pink steps, to the edge of a wild human sea. Tiny and contourless as that figure is, it has ignited its most distant watchers into the same self-contorting frenzy as those around its feet. Only Mick Jagger has ever projected sex so uneeringly over so huge an outdoor distance. That girlish toss of his head is a challenge issued impartially to all 90,000, female and male. That strutting elbow-pumping walk carries its innuendo over the whole expanse of heads and arms and waving banners. They can see the glare on his face, the very pout of his lips, from a quarter of a mile away.
As the first great wave of clapping rolls round the stadium, mingled with cheers and whistles, Jagger bends double like an old-fashioned maestro at the podium, then flings his head back so that the cords stand taut in his neck. ‘Good aftahnoon, JFK,’ he says in that well-known public voice, part English lord, part Cockney errand-boy and part Southern black mammy. ‘Are you feelin’ awright? Yeah … it’s nice to be back ’ere in Philadelphia …’ And, apparently euphoric, he looks at Keith, then shuffles backward on his toes like a little boy unbearably excited. ‘Okay – we’re gonna ’ave a good time.’
The first half-dozen songs do not need to be announced. It has always seemed miraculous that the Stones, unlike the Beatles, never succumbed to amnesiac loathing of their early work, but were always prepared to do their oldies, affectionately unrevised. The cheer given to each is as much for the epoch it summons up. Under My Thumb awakens vague memories of Courrèges boots, op-art dresses, boutiques and bistros in candlelight. You Can’t Always Get What You Want reincarnates the Chelsea Drug Store, that neon-lit folly of tubular glass which perished almost as soon as Jagger left the neighbourhood. A song grown almost quaintly innocent by modern standards still brings a whiff of its old indolent wickedness. There is an excited murmur as Jagger bleats the ‘na-na-na-na’ phrase that unloosed so many bans and prohibitions. Is he really going to dare sing Let’s Spend the Night Together?
The energy taken for granted even three years ago, now seems nothing less than phenomenal. Energy has replaced outrage, just as peacock robes have yielded to practical athletics kit. There are moments when Jagger, in his white breeches and knee-guards, seems less like a rock star than a PT instructor, exhorting his huge class to follow his example. Each song is a piece of circuit-training, packed tight with every pose he has ever struck. In a single verse he can change from street-corner tough to primping aesthete, from bitchy old harridan to high-kicking, beaming Tiller Girl. In the space of a line, he will march, mince, strut, chassé, kneel, implore, roll over, and suddenly be airborne like the Nureyev he has sometimes wished he was. And all the time, the same rather unfriendly, callow voice is singing about chasing women, or being chased by them.
Behind the Jagger show, to left and right, the World’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band are meanwhile playing like so many learners on pneumatic drills. Seven weeks’ intensive rehearsal have left Keith and Woody still apparently only half familiar with the chosen programme; Woody is on impish form as usual, in his red leather blouson and streetwalker boot heels, gambolling back and forth with the freedom his cordless guitar allows; crossing behind Bill Wyman to
nudge the stoic bass player in the ribs, then skipping up to peer at Charlie Watts, at work like a blacksmith among his cymbals and drum silverware. Keith, meanwhile, has come to a halt on the left-hand promontory, against the declining sun. His draggled head peers down at his oscillating white arm, as if still unable to comprehend what it is doing. The intro to Miss You begins and expires on a five-string chord in which barely two fingers seem to have been awake.
The rock concert audience is almost infinitely forgiving. It requires to see and hear only the vaguest approximation of the dreams it has acquired through the engineered illusion of records. Just the same, after forty minutes or so of gigantically botched intros and hopelessly tangled-up solos, it is borne in upon JFK Stadium that – Mick Jagger aside – the Rolling Stones are not trying. The applause is still vast: it can be nothing else. But it is an ebbing vastness. Jagger shows uneasy awareness of the fact. ‘Aw-right!’ he shouts, the rock star’s wild response to a wild ovation, not yet detectable. ‘Aw-ri-ight!’ Several times he enquires anxiously, ‘Can you ’ear at the back awright?’ It is what the rawest teenage beginner might say to an audience at a church hall social. ‘Okay – Shadoobie!’ The intro begins at breakneck speed, then topples over in a great crash of mangled, molten uproar. Jagger looks back and, briefly, buries his face in his hands.
Black Cadillac goes better, being just a long, chromium-plated version of the blues which Keith and Mick used to drive around the Surrey back-streets twenty years ago. Twenty Flight Rock is bedlam – but interesting. For all their undisputed sobriquet, the World’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll band have rarely attempted genuine Fifties bass-slapping rock ’n’ roll. Jagger plays rhythm guitar, as he has done on studio sessions since the late Sixties. Some people around the Stones consider this deeply revealing. Despite his mastery of his own unique milieu, what Mick has always seemed to want most is to be a real musician, like Keith.