Old Gods Almost Dead (44 page)

An Angel grabbed the mike, an ugly brute, and addressed the night: “Hey! You don't cool it, you ain't gonna hear no more music! You wanna all go home, or what?!” After a woman on the stage, a member of the local band Ace of Cups, was cut by a thrown beer bottle, the Stones' cops suggested to Jo Bergman and the women in the Stones' entourage that they leave. The Hell's Angels had assumed control, and the cops could smell what was coming.

Stu took the mike: “We need doctors down here now, please. Can we have a doctor down now to the front?” Mick gazed at the Hieronymous Bosch tableau in front of him and said, “Keith, man . . . these scenes!” Nearby sat Timothy Leary, apostle of LSD, looking scared and pale, aghast.

Keith called for some “cool-out music” and the Stones launched into “The Sun Is Shining,” a Jimmy Reed blues, trying to calm things down. Then Keith called “Stray Cat” as small pockets of mayhem continued to erupt in front of them. Then “Love in Vain,” with Mick Taylor's inspired guitar solo soaring into the blackness. Bill Wyman hit the bass line of “Under My Thumb,” and things actually began to cool out a little.

A flurry on the left side of the stage. All night a tall black kid in a lime-green suit and a black pimp's hat had been grooving away, irritating the Angels near him. His name was Meredith Hunter, known as Murdock on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. He was eighteen. Halfway through “Thumb,” he pulled a gun out of his pants and pointed it at an Angel who was grabbing at his throat. There was a scuffle, and the kid pointed the gun briefly at the stage. An Angel stabbed him in the head, pushed him out of sight of the stage, and stabbed him twice more in the back. When he was down, a dozen more Angels stomped him to death. Then they stood on his head. Witnesses reported his last words: “I wasn't going to shoot you.”

The band quit and Keith started yelling again, but stopped when the Angels told him they'd taken a gun off a guy who was shooting at the stage. They finished “Under My Thumb,” and Mick Taylor, who'd come to play, suggested the brand-new “Brown Sugar.” No one knew they'd just seen someone killed.

“ 'Brown Sugar'?” Keith asked, incredulous.

“Wot?” Charlie said.

Jagger: “He wants to do 'Brown Sugar.' ”

Keith switched guitars, and the Stones' new rocker was given its premiere performance under the hot movie lights as the Maysles brothers' cameras rolled. The Stones played the rest of their usual show, with a truncated “Rambler” and the band bearing down as it blasted its way through. At the end of “Street Fighting Man,” two Hell's Angels threw baskets of roses into the writhing crowd, and the Stones left fast.

The Stones' whole entourage piled into one waiting helicopter, desperate not to be left behind. The pilot was afraid to take off, but Cutler was screaming at him to fly as an unruly crowd surged under the whirling rotor blades. The pilot got his overloaded ship off the ground, and the Rolling Stones lurched into the night, leaving the damned and blasted heath of Altamont behind them, along with any lingering illusions of Woodstockian groovyness and a significant piece of their reputation.

Pearl Harbor for Woodstock Nation

The Stones gathered
in Keith's hotel suite in the early morning of December 7—Pearl Harbor Day. A tape of moaning old blues songs was playing. Keith was furious at the Hell's Angels for wrecking the day. Emeretta was doing her best to console him, and Mick was trying to get Miss Pamela and Michelle Phillips down to his room for a threesome. Gram Parsons was nodding against the wall in black leather and eye makeup, while Keith was wearing flash cowboy duds; Miss Pamela had the impression Keith and Gram were turning into each other. Gram was bummed because he thought Michelle, radiant ex-Mama, was with him. Keith cheered him up by giving him a demo tape of “Wild Horses,” only days old.

There was powder going up noses, serious gloom and doom. Mick thought he'd been shot at, and talked about quitting while he was alive. He told them he blamed himself, that it shouldn't have happened. “I'd rather have had the cops,” he sulked. Miss Pam noticed Mick was a nervous wreck. “I thought the scene here was supposed to be so groovy,” he said. “If Jesus Christ had been there, he would've been fucking
crucified.
” No one could believe what had gone down. For years, the Rolling Stones had seen weird scenes in front of them while they played, but this was the first time one of their concerts had featured human sacrifice. They tried to follow the radio reports of multiple deaths, beatings, overdoses, and other casualties. Bitter callers were blaming the Stones and the Angels equally, and it was clear that an almost infinite bummer and hassle was coming. Time to get out of town. Sam Cutler was delegated to stay behind and try to patch things up with the locals. He met with the Hell's Angels after his personal safety was guaranteed. The Angels demanded the incriminating films made at Altamont, meaning the Maysles's footage, and weren't thrilled when Cutler explained the film was back in New York already, and the Stones were gone too. Real gone, as Sam Cutler soon found out. From then on, his phone calls to the Stones or their office in London were never returned.

                

Later on December 7,
Mick and Jo Bergman flew to Switzerland to deposit the Stones' tour money, almost a million dollars, in a Geneva bank recommended by Rupert Lowenstein. When they arrived, they were escorted by Swiss police to the rubber glove room, where their body cavities were searched. From Switzerland, they went to the south of France to look for a house for Mick to rent. Marsha Hunt was waiting for them. Facing ruinous taxes, drug charges, and total lack of privacy, Mick had decided to leave England and live, at least for a while, the life of an exile.

When Keith arrived at Heathrow airport, he was greeted by Anita and baby Marlon. “Keith!” she cried when she saw him. “They're throwing me out of the country!” Her Majesty's government had indeed seized Anita's passport and threatened to deport her unless Keith married her immediately. So Keith made plans to get out too.

When Mick arrived in London a few days later, Marianne and Nicholas met him at the airport. “Hullo, girl,” Mick said to her when he got off the plane. “Wop in yer bed, eh?”

                

Four people died
at Altamont. One executed, two run over by a Plymouth, one drowned in a drainage ditch. About a hundred victims were treated for stabbings and beatings by the Angels. Seven hundred bad trips. An awful day for everyone, including the Hell's Angels.

The national media ignored Altamont.
Time
and
Life,
still rhapsodizing about Woodstock, didn't mention it. The
New York Times
ran a small story in a late Sunday edition.
Newsweek
ran a piece three weeks later. San Francisco, however, was trauma city.
PEARL HARBOR TO THE WOODSTOCK NATION,
read a headline. The
Berkeley Tribe
:
STONES CONCERT ENDS: AMERIKA UP FOR GRABS.
The Airplane and CS&N said they wouldn't play any more outdoor festivals. The Grateful Dead went into hiding. When the Stones appeared to criticize the Hell's Angels for the disaster at Altamont, the Angels went public, with Sonny Barger furiously claiming that his bikers just did what they were asked to do, and that the dead guy was pointing a gun at the stage. “We
told
'em,” Barger rasped, “we told 'em we weren't gonna play cops for the Rolling Stones.” Barger later claimed he stuck a gun in Mick's ribs to make him finish the show at Altamont. According to court testimony years later, unknown members of the Hell's Angels put a murder contract out on Mick Jagger as a result of the confused events
after
Altamont.

In its exhaustive, embittered coverage of Altamont,
Rolling Stone,
never shy about its total adulation of its main inspirers, called it “perhaps rock and roll's all-time worst day.”

Let It Bleed
took on new resonance. Right after Altamont, it broke into the Top Ten.

Much was made of the absurd notion that the Altamont disaster was the end of Innocence, Community, the Movement, the Sixties, the Stones. It was an easy tag for the media, and the Stones suffered for years. Mick Jagger had little time for it. “Of course some people wanted to say Altamont was the end of an era,” he said later. “People like that are like fashion writers. Perhaps it was the end of
their
era, the end of their . . . naiveté.”

Debate continued for years. Keith tried to be philosophical about it when interviewed two years later. He said Rock Scully and the Dead should have known what would happen, but that it all had fallen apart too fast. All the planning occurred while they were making a record in Alabama. They didn't know. The Dead told them that Ken Kesey had cooled the Angels out.

Keith thought the gang-stompings were cowardly. “If someone tries to do [me], it's between him and me. I don't call in Bill Wyman to come in and do him
for
me, with one of his ankle-twisters or vicious Chinese burns.”

Still, “Who do you want to lay it on? Do you want to blame somebody, or do you want to learn from it? I don't really think anyone is to blame.

“Altamont, it could only happen to the Stones, man. Let's face it. It wouldn't happen to the Bee Gees.”

                

On Sunday night,
December 21, in London, the Stones played at the Lyceum Theater, the last Rolling Stones concert of the sixties. Two shows, at five and eight, tickets sold out for weeks, thousands of fans in the streets and enough cops to stop a riot. It had been seven years since they started. Brian Jones was dead, and the new guy would never become one of them. Some think their best work was already behind the Rolling Stones, and that they would spend the next three decades and the rest of their career defending, often successfully, their self-bestowed heavyweight title as the greatest rock and roll band in the world.

Music's meaning to people is one of the great mysteries.

Keith Richards

Blame It on the Stones

In early 1970,
the Rolling Stones were still in England, but their Blue Period was over and their lives would now evolve and change. The Beatles disbanded that year, and Bob Dylan retreated into near seclusion. This left the Stones standing alone in the arena, soon to be outdone in heavyosity by the younger, louder, more intense Led Zeppelin.

The Stones adapted to the 1970s by mutating into a gypsy band, always on the move, adding and dropping musicians for a tour here, an album there. Moving beyond its roots in blues, R&B, soul, rock and roll, and rock, the Stones added horns to become a Memphis-style roadhouse band, used Mick Taylor to explore jazz-style textures, delved into the seventies pop discoveries—funk, reggae, disco, power pop—in order to stay alive. The Greatest R&R Etc. would become a ballad band, at least on the radio (“Wild Horses,” “Angie,” “Fool to Cry”), until forced to deploy a stripped-down response to the punk bands later in the decade.

The Stones remained stoic about Altamont. To Keith, “It was just another gig where I had to leave fast.” The Stones' more pretentious critics postulated that the contemptuous politics of
Beggar's Banquet
and
Let It Bleed
had come to life in the bleak California hills. Incredible blather was written about the death of the sixties and the loss of innocence by the Stones and their generation, but in the end no one really cared except the lawyers who worked the lawsuits that began to fly around California like bats at sunset. A young Hell's Angel, already doing time in Soledad prison on a parole violation, was charged with murdering Meredith Hunter at Altamont after six crews documented the knifing on film. He was acquitted by a jury in 1971.

“After Altamont,” wrote Stanley Booth, who'd been on the '69 tour with the band, “the Stones would for reasons of self-preservation turn toward comedy.” Songwriter Kris Kristofferson composed a funny ditty called “Blame It on the Stones.”

                

In January 1970,
the Stones remixed and overdubbed their New York concert tapes at Olympic and Trident studios in London. Mick tried to sell Decca a double live album, with B. B. King and Ike and Tina on the second disc. “Decca wasn't interested,” Mick said later. “ 'Who is B. B. King? Who are these people?' So in the end I gave it all up. I've still got that part of the album and it's good.”

David and Albert Maysles came to London and filmed the Stones watching their grisly Altamont snuff footage. Mick walked out without saying a word, followed by the rest of the band. The Maysles couldn't find a distributor for the film and wondered if it could even be released.

Blasted by postpartum depression and loneliness, Anita Pallenberg had become a heroin addict while Keith was on tour. When Keith returned, he joined her in the arms of Morpheus, an addiction that would last for seven years and cede near-total control of the Rolling Stones to Mick Jagger. Keith and Anita holed up in their house in Cheyne Walk, employing Spanish Tony Sanchez, who talked like Peter Lorre on pills, to buy their drugs. Keith avoided marrying Anita after Les Perrin's press campaign got the government off their backs.

                

The Stones began
recording new tracks that winter, about the time Bill Wyman—who didn't use drugs—stopped talking to Keith, this silence that lasted until 1981. They set up in an empty parlor off a main hall at Stargroves, the mouldering country manor that Mick had bought years before. The room's old oak floor and plaster walls gave the music an intimate, woody flavor. The Stones' thirty-four-foot mobile studio (with a nervous Andy Johns, younger brother of Glyn, at the controls) was outfitted with sixteen-track tape machines, mixing board, microphones, and effects units. “Sway” was the first song cut, with Mick Taylor's amp placed in the big fireplace and the microphones in the chimney. Charlie's drums were in a big bay window. Nicky Hopkins was on piano, and Mick Taylor began to deliver the solo virtuosity that marked the first important directional change for the Stones since 1968. Mick Jagger's “Bitch” evolved from a jam between him, Charlie Watts, and Bobby Keys, a rhythm with a horn kick. Keith's demo melody called “Japanese Thing” later became “Moonlight Mile.” Other Stargroves tracks included the second version of “Cocksucker Blues,” Mick's low, moaning soliloquy about a teenage hustler; “Mean Woman Blues”; “Alladin Story”; “Good Time Woman,” an early version of “Tumblin' Dice” with Stu on piano and Mick Taylor on slide guitar; a track called “Green Bent Needles” that became “Sweet Black Angel”; and Robert Johnson's boasting blues “Stop Breakin' Down.” Keith also overdubbed his National steel guitar onto the Stones' 1969 version of “Sister Morphine.” Already in the can from the Muscle Shoals sessions: “Wild Horses,” “Brown Sugar,” and “You Gotta Move.” All the Stargroves tracks would be worked on over the next year, especially when Bobby Keys and Jim Price joined the band that fall.

                

It was a
turbulent time for Mick Jagger. Contemptuous of drug addiction, he got addicted to love instead. After their pot bust was resolved, he won Marianne back and they were living together again by March 1970. But she was miserable, using smack, and spoke openly of her desire to
really
get into it, to experience the doomed floating freedom of the junk world, while he worried that they could get busted for heroin at any moment. She despised her acting career and let it go. She called Mick at the studio, crying and complaining of loneliness, while he was trying to work, which led to big fights and more tears. Marianne's public behavior began to slip. Mick would take her for a country weekend at a duke's castle and she'd nod off into the soup. They'd have to carry her upstairs, and Mick would be embarrassed. He was spending more time with Marsha Hunt at her place in St. John's Wood.

One day that summer at Cheyne Walk, after Marianne overheard Ahmet Ertegun tell Mick she was a business liability, a possible obstacle to the Stones' signing with Atlantic Records, she packed up her little boy, slung a favorite Persian carpet under her arm, and walked out of Mick's house, never to return. Mick tried to get her back. He played “Wild Horses” and said he'd written it for her, but Marianne was already out the door. She let herself go and put on weight so Mick wouldn't want her anymore. Her husband divorced her and got custody of their son. True to the legend she'd decided to write for herself, Marianne Faithfull traded life with Mick Jagger for the existence of a registered heroin addict on the streets of Soho.

Mick rarely spoke about any of this. For a time, he took up with Patti D'Arbanville, a good-lookin' American girl of nineteen who was a friend of Miss Pamela's. Years later Mick remembered, “Marianne, y'know—she almost
killed
me. Forget it! I wasn't going to get out of there alive! Marianne and Anita, I mean
—help!
”

                

Rupert Lowenstein,
the Stones' new financial adviser, gave them the bad news that summer. They all had to get out of England. They were all broke and in debt. Their business manager hadn't paid their British taxes in years, and each of them had a six-figure tax bill. Allen Klein's contract with the band was about to expire, but he still controlled their publishing and catalog and would probably not let go without a fight. Lowenstein told them there was no chance of settling their debts and rebuilding their fortunes unless they made an immediate break with Klein and left England to avoid its ruinous taxation and possible bankruptcy proceedings. Keith didn't want to be forced out of England, but he was eventually convinced to join the Stones' exile by April 5, 1971, the start of the next British tax year.

On July 30, 1970, the Rolling Stones announced that Allen Klein was no longer authorized to act on their behalf. Their Decca recording contract expired the same day. Owing one more new single to their despised label, they sent Decca a tape of “Cocksucker Blues,” the explicitly obscene demo whose lyrics asked, “Where do I get my ass fucked? Where do I get my cock sucked?” Decca declined to release the single. “I'd rather the Mafia than Decca,” Keith said later.

Performance
was released in America in August 1970, only weeks after the awful
Ned Kelly
had bombed. Heavily reedited and censored after Warner's executives objected to nude sequences of Mick and the explicit sadism of the violence,
Performance
still had a shocking impact that bore witness to its turbulent creation. Donald Cammell had fought the studio for two years while they shelved the project, then revived it after a management shake-up. Cammell reedited the film using cutup techniques that caused his codirector, Nicholas Roeg, to try to take his name off the film. Dialogue was redubbed when studio executives complained they couldn't understand the cockney accents of the gangsters. Repeatedly delayed and almost sabotaged by the studio,
Performance
delighted and mystified Stones fans but bored the mainstream critics, who didn't understand it. Stones fans flocked to see Mick, and the film did respectable business during its first run. Released in England the next year, it was recognized as a serious work of art, but ran for only two weeks before being pulled out of the theaters. Decca released the scorching song “Memo from Turner” as a Mick Jagger single in England, and it became for many the most thrilling rock moment of the year, quivering with devilish malice and bad attitude, a cynical, perverse rock masterpiece featuring Ry Cooder's menacing slide guitar. “Memo from Turner” kept the Stones' street cred alive until their next album came out months later.

Let It Rock

Summer 1970.
The Rolling Stones announced the formation of Rolling Stones Records right after their Decca contract expired. Marshall Chess became the new label's president. He was short, dark, bearded, funny, intense, full of entrepreneurial energy and ideas of how to sell the Stones. He made the effort to get to know the whole band, not just Mick and Keith, and succeeded in winning their trust. It didn't hurt that he'd filled Mick Jagger's mail orders for blues records in his role as stockroom boy at Chess ten years before. “He was a hustler, street,” Keith said of Marshall. “He was Chicago, the South Side, and the world of black records that none of us
really
knew.” Marshall Chess also became the band's de facto manager in the first part of the seventies. He lived on the top floor of Keith's house in Cheyne Walk for a year, and soon got in dope trouble too.

                

In August,
the Stones began rehearsing for a European tour scheduled for that fall. Bobby Keys and Jim Price were hired as the new horn section when their gig with Eric Clapton's band Derek and the Dominos fell through. One night Keys ran into Mick at a club in London. Mick: “We're out here in the country. Why don't you drop by and bring your horn?” Keys played sax on “Can't You Hear Me Knocking?” He also played a blistering solo on “Brown Sugar,” and he and Price overdubbed their horns on “Bitch.”

Bobby Keys: “After we played on
Sticky Fingers,
Jim Price and I weasled our way into a gig. We'd woven our way into the fabric, and we thought, 'Thank God.' These guys had some real rockin'
fans.
People were going to burn the place
down.”

Keith was thrilled to have Keys in the band. The twenty-six-year-old Keys, a big and beefy Texan with a helmet of brown hair and serious reedman jowls, had been on the road since he was thirteen, had played on Buddy Holly's first record date at KLLL radio in Texas, had played with Holly and the Crickets at Alan Freed's first rock and roll show at the Brooklyn Paramount in 1958. “It's a gas not to be so insulated and play with some more people like Bobby Keys,” Keith told Robert Greenfield in
Rolling Stone.
“Bobby's like one of those things that go all the way through. He was
there,
man.”