I thought it was just a dumb move, basically. He didn’t realize that by doing something else he was breaking a certain image in the public mind that is very fragile. Mick was in a unique position as lead singer of the Stones, and he should have read a little more into what that actually meant. Anybody can get bigheaded once in a while and think, I can do this with any old band. But obviously he proved it’s not true. I can understand somebody wanting to kick the traces. I like to play with other people and do something else, but in his case he had nothing really in mind except being Mick Jagger without the Rolling Stones.
The way it was done was just so tacky. I could have maybe understood it if the Stones were flopping, like the rat leaving the sinking ship. But the fact is the Stones were doing very well and all we had to do was keep it together. Instead of losing four, five years in the wilderness and then having to pull it all together again. Everybody felt betrayed. What happened to the friendship? He couldn’t have told me from the beginning that he was thinking of doing something else?
What really pissed me off at the time was Mick’s compulsion to cultivate buddy relationships with CEOs, in this case Yetnikoff. Incessant telephone calls to impress them with his knowledge, letting them know that he was on top of it, when actually no one guy’s on top of it. And annoying everyone with his constant interference in places where people who are paid fortunes know how to do it better than he does.
Our only strength was in distance, in a united front. That’s how we did the Decca deal. We just stood there in shades and intimidated them into one of the best record deals of all time. My theory on working with record people is never to talk to them personally except on social occasions. You never get that close to them; you never get involved in the daily da da da —you pay somebody to do that. Asking about budgets for advertising and… “Hey, Walter, where’s the…?,” making yourself personally available to the guy you’re working with? You reduce yourself, diminish your power. You reduce the band. Because it’s “Jagger’s on the phone again.” “Oh, tell him to call me later.” That’s what happens. I like Walter very much; I think he’s great. But Mick actually pulled the rug from under us by getting too familiar with him.
There was a rare moment, in late 1984, of Charlie throwing his drummer’s punch—a punch I’ve seen a couple of times and it’s lethal; it carries a lot of balance and timing. He has to be badly provoked. He threw this one at Mick. We were in Amsterdam for a meeting. Mick and I weren’t on great terms at the time, but I said, c’mon, let’s go out. And I lent him the jacket I got married in. We got back to the hotel about five in the morning and Mick called up Charlie. I said, don’t call him, not at this hour. But he did, and said, “Where’s my drummer?” No answer. He puts the phone down. Mick and I were still sitting there, pretty pissed—give Mick a couple of glasses, he’s gone—when, about twenty minutes later, there was a knock at the door. There was Charlie Watts, Savile Row suit, perfectly dressed, tie, shaved, the whole fucking bit. I could smell the cologne! I opened the door and he didn’t even look at me, he walked straight past me, got hold of Mick and said, “Never call me your drummer again.” Then he hauled him up by the lapels of my jacket and gave him a right hook. Mick fell back onto a silver platter of smoked salmon on the table and began to slide towards the open window and the canal below it. And I was thinking, this is a good one, and then I realized it was my wedding jacket. And I grabbed hold of it and caught Mick just before he slid into the Amsterdam canal. It took me twenty-four hours after that to talk Charlie down. I thought I’d done it when I took him up to his room, but twelve hours later, he was saying, “Fuck it, I’m gonna go down and do it again.” It takes a lot to wind that man up. “Why did you stop him?” My jacket, Charlie, that’s why!
By the time we gathered in Paris to record
Dirty Work
in 1985, the atmosphere was bad. The sessions had been delayed because Mick was working on his solo album, and now he was busy promoting it. Mick had come with barely any songs for us to work on. He’d used them up on his own record. And he was often just not there at the studio.
So I began writing a lot more on my own for
Dirty Work
, different kinds of songs. The horrendous atmosphere in the studio affected everybody. Bill Wyman almost stopped turning up; Charlie flew back home. In retrospect I see that the tracks were full of violence and menace: “Had It with You,” “One Hit (to the Body),” “Fight.” We made a video of “One Hit (to the Body)” that more or less told the story—we nearly literally came to blows, over and above our acting duties. “Fight” gives some idea of brotherly love between the Glimmer Twins at this juncture.
Gonna pulp you to a mess of bruises
’Cos that’s what you’re looking for
There’s a hole where your nose used to be
Gonna kick you out of my door.
Gotta get into a fight
Can’t get out of it
Gotta get into a fight.
And there was “Had It with You”:
I love you, dirty fucker
Sister and a brother
Moaning in the moonlight
Singing for your supper
’Cos I had it I had it I had it with you
I had it I had it I had it with you.…
It is such a sad thing
To watch a good love die
I’ve had it up to here, babe
I’ve got to say goodbye
’Cos I had it I had it I had it with you
And I had it I had it I had it with you.
That was the kind of mood I was in. I wrote “Had It with You” in Ronnie’s front room in Chiswick, right on the banks of the Thames. We were waiting to go back to Paris, but the weather was so dodgy that we were stranded until the Dover ferry started rolling again. Peter Cook and Bert were hanging about. There was no heating, and the only way to keep warm was to turn on the amps. I don’t think I’d ever written a song before, apart maybe from “All About You,” in which I realized I was actually singing about Mick.
Mick’s album was called
She’s the Boss,
which said it all. I’ve never listened to the entire thing all the way through. Who has? It’s like
Mein Kampf
. Everybody had a copy, but nobody listened to it. As to his subsequent titles, carefully worded,
Primitive Cool,
Goddess in the Doorway,
which it was irresistible not to rechristen “Dogshit in the Doorway,” I rest my case. He says I have no manners and a bad mouth. He’s even written a song on the subject. But this record deal of Mick’s was bad manners beyond any verbal jibes.
Just by the choice of material, it seemed to me he had really gone off the tracks. It was very sad. He wasn’t prepared not to make an impact. And he was upset. But I can’t imagine why he thought it would fly. This is where I felt Mick had lost touch with reality.
No matter what Mick’s doing or what his intentions are, I’m not sitting around festering, nurturing venom. My attention, anyway, was turned suddenly and forcibly, in December 1985, to the shattering news that Ian Stewart had died.
He died of a heart attack, aged forty-seven. I was waiting for him that afternoon in Blakes Hotel off the Fulham Road. He was going to meet me after he’d seen his doctor. Around three in the morning, I got a call from Charlie. “Are you still waiting for Stu?” I said yes. “Well, he’s not coming” was Charlie’s way of breaking the news. The wake was held at his golf course at Leatherhead, Surrey. He’d have appreciated the joke that this was the only way he’d ever get us there. We played a tribute gig to Stu at the 100 Club—the first time we’d been on stage together in four years. Stu was the hardest hit I had ever had, apart from my son dying. At first you’re anesthetized, you go on as if he’s still there. And he did remain there, turning up one way or another for a very long time. He still does. The things that go through your mind are the things that make you laugh, that keep you close, like his jutting-jawed way of speaking.
He looms still, as when I remember how he cracked over Jerry Lee Lewis. At the beginning my love for “the Killer’s” playing diminished me in Stu’s soul. “Bloody fairy pounding away” comes to mind as a typical Stu response. Then, about ten years later, Stu came to me one night and said, “I must admit some redeeming factors in Jerry Lee Lewis.” Out of the blue! And this between takes. Now that’s
looming
.
He never broached the subject of life and death except if somebody else croaked. “The silly sod. Asking for it.” When we went up to Scotland for the first time, Stu pulled over and asked someone, “Can you nae tell me the way to the Odeon?”—Stu being a very proud Scotsman, from Kent. Stu was a law unto himself, in his cardigans and polo shirts. When we had expanded into the mega stadiums and satellite television, thousands in the audience, he’d come on stage in his Hush Puppies, with his cup of coffee and his cheese sandwich, which he put on the piano while he played.
I got really mad at him for leaving me, which is my normal reaction when a friend or somebody I love croaks when they’re not supposed to. He left many legacies. Chuck Leavell, from Dry Branch, Georgia, who had been in the Allman Brothers, was a Stu protégé and appointee. He first played keyboards on tour with us in 1982 and became a permanent fixture on all subsequent tours. By the time Stu died, Chuck had been working with the Stones for several years. If I croak, God forbid, said Stu, Leavell’s the man. Maybe when he said that, he knew he was ill. He also said, “Don’t forget that Johnnie Johnson is alive and well and still playing in Saint Louis.” And it was all in the same year. Maybe a doctor had told him, you’ve got so long to go.
D
irty
W
ork
came out
in early 1986, and I badly wanted to tour with it. So, of course, did the other band members, who wanted to work. But Mick sent us a letter saying he wouldn’t tour. He wanted to get on with his solo career. Soon after the letter came, I read in one of the English tabloids of Mick saying the Rolling Stones are a millstone around my neck. He actually said it. Swallow that one, fucker. I had no doubt that some part of his mind was thinking that, but saying it is another thing. That’s when World War III was declared.
Unable to tour, I thought on Stu’s remark about Johnnie Johnson. Johnson was Chuck Berry’s original piano player and, if Chuck was honest, the cowriter of many Chuck Berry hits. But Johnson wasn’t playing much in Saint Louis. Ever since Chuck had told him to hasten down the wind, more than a decade before this, he’d been a bus driver, ferrying old folks around, almost entirely forgotten. It wasn’t just his partnership with Berry that distinguished Johnnie Johnson. He was one of the best-ever players of blues piano.
When we were cutting
Dirty Work
in Paris, the drummer Steve Jordan came to hang out in the studio, and then played on the album, filling in for Charlie, who was having a wobble of his own, carried away for a time on various
stupéfiants,
as the French have it. Steve was around thirty then, and a very gifted all-round musician and singer. He had come to Paris to record, getting some leave from his job playing in the David Letterman show band. Before that he had played with the
Saturday Night Live
band and toured with Belushi and Aykroyd in their Blues Brothers band. Charlie had picked him out as a drummer back in 1978 when he was playing on
Saturday Night Live,
and remembered him.
Aretha Franklin called up because she was making a movie called
Jumpin’ Jack Flash,
with Whoopi Goldberg, and she wanted me to produce her title track for it. I remembered Charlie Watts saying, if you ever work outside of this frame, Steve Jordan’s your man. And I thought, well, if I’m going to do
Jumpin’ Jack Flash
with Aretha, I’ve got to put a band together. I’ve got to start again. I knew Steve anyway, so that’s how we forged ourselves —on Aretha’s soundtrack. Which was a great session. And in my mind it was lodged that if I’m going to do anything else, it’s with Steve.
I inducted Chuck Berry as one of the first musicians in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 1986, and it happened that the band that played behind Chuck and all the other musicians jamming with him that night was the David Letterman band, with Steve Jordan on drums. Next thing I knew, Taylor Hackford asked me to be musical director for a feature film he was making for Chuck Berry’s sixtieth birthday, and suddenly Stu’s words were echoing: Johnnie Johnson is alive. The first problem, I realized the minute I thought about it, was that Chuck Berry had been playing with pickup bands for so long, he’d forgotten what it was like to play with top hands. And especially with Johnnie Johnson, who he’d not played with since they broke up in the early 1970s. When Chuck turned around and said, in his inimitable fashion, Johnnie, fuck off, he cut off a hand and a half.
He thought he’d have hits forever. Was he too suffering from LVS, even though he played guitar? In fact he never had a hit record after he split that band up, apart from his biggest record ever, “My Ding-a-Ling.” Go, Chuck! With Johnnie Johnson he had had the perfect unit. It was made in heaven, for Christ’s sake. Oh no, says Chuck, it’s only me that counts. I can find another pianist, and anyway, I can get them cheaper too. It’s basically the cheapness he was concerned about.
When I went with Taylor Hackford to see Chuck at his home in Wentzville, just outside Saint Louis, I waited until the second day to slide the question. They’re all talking about lighting, and I just said to Chuck, I don’t know if this is a good question because I don’t know your relationship, but is Johnnie Johnson still about? And he said, I think he’s in town. But more importantly, said I, could you two play together? Yeah, he said. Shit, yeah. A tense moment. Suddenly I’ve put Johnnie Johnson back together with Chuck Berry. The possibilities are endless. Chuck rolled right in there, and it was a good decision, because he got a great movie out of it and a great band.