Old Gods Almost Dead (48 page)

Keith was doing so much dope he was unable to complete some of the final overdubs on
Exile on Main Street.
Studio guitarist Al Perkins played slide guitar on “Torn and Frayed” while Keith returned to Switzerland for a three-day heroin detox. (For years, Richards maintained that the Stones' best album was created during his heaviest period of addiction, a tribute to both his drug of choice and his physical stamina.) The rest of the Stones arrived in Montreux on May 17 for several weeks of secret tour rehearsals in a movie theater with Nicky Hopkins, Bobby Keys, and Jim Price.

They were all around thirty now, with separate lives and interests. Mick and Keith were no longer as close as they had been, and the rehearsals were a way to bring the Stones together as friends as well as musicians. The show, Mick Jagger insisted, must go on.

                

Exile on Main Street
came out in May 1972, while the first single, “Tumbling Dice,” was climbing into the Top Ten. This epochal eighteen-song double album still stands as the best Rolling Stones album for many fans. A damp, drunken-sounding collection of riffs, incomprehensible lyrics, and jam-type songs,
Exile
also marked the end of the Rolling Stones' protean midperiod, the last of four albums in the band's glory days, the foundation on which their career still rests.

The album cover was a montage of black-and-white photos by Robert Frank, the Swiss-born filmmaker whose classic photo book,
The Americans,
had a foreword by Jack Kerouac. Frank's 1959 beatnik film
Pull My Daisy,
with Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso, was considered the first underground movie, and Frank had been hired to film the upcoming tour in cutup underground style.

The album was sequenced as four discrete sets, one on each side of the two records. Mick said the record shouldn't be played all at once, that it was designed as twenty-minute bursts. The first side of
Exile
was a missile launch of energy with “Rocks Off.” “Rip This Joint” was a lightning tour of southern cities, the fastest song the Stones ever recorded until “Flip the Switch” outran it twenty-five years later. “Hip Shake” was a fast boogie homage to Slim Harpo, with Mick on harp and Ian Stewart on piano. “Casino Boogie” was a Nellcote basement jam with Bobby Keys that led into “Tumbling Dice,” a homage to good-time women that had only come to life when it got its chorus of black singers in Los Angeles.

“Acoustic” side two delved into country matters. “Sweet Virginia” was a mock country tune about hiding pills and speed in somebody's shoe. “Torn and Frayed” introduced Joe the Guitar Player, a take on wild Keith Richards and his accelerated lifestyle. “Sweet Black Angel” was a lilting calypso about Angela Davis, the fire-breathing Black Panther activist who had just faced down murder charges in California. The marimba on this track and others, credited to “Amyl Nitrate,” was actually played by Didimus (aka Richard Washington), one of Dr. John's Cajun conjurers. The set ended with “Loving Cup,” an acoustic song that built over four minutes into a funky grandeur that typified the louche ambience of the album.

Side three. “Happy” with Keith on vocal, his trenchant, anthemic, open G autobiography and hard rock manifesto for two guitars and horns. “Turd on the Run” was a country shuffle in overdrive that described the pain of giving diamonds and getting disease in return. “Ventilator Blues” transported the Stones fan into Keith's humid Gestapo basement. The darkly shimmering “Just Wanna See His Face,” with Keith on electric piano, had been given a Delta gospel treatment in L.A. and emerged as a hoodoo, churchy reverie of atmosphere and fervor, the most overtly spiritual of all Stones songs, ever. This song bled into “Let It Loose,” with Dr. John and the moaning girls, which ended the side.

Exile on Main Street
concluded with four upbeat soul numbers. “All Down the Line” was an old
Bleed-
era Stones jam goosed by Jimmy Miller's percussion and the L.A. studio singer Kathi McDonald. “Stop Breaking Down” was Robert Johnson on the Riviera, mostly Stu and Mick on harmonica (the track was miscredited as “Trad.” on the album). “Shine a Light” was a West Coast gospel treatment of a 1968 Stones demo: terror in Room Ten Oh Nine on a Sunday morning, and it introduced Billy Preston as a sometimes-sanctified Stones sideman who would continue in concert and on record for five more years. (“Shine a Light” has been called Mick's love song to Keith.) The album's finale, “Soul Survivor,” really just a verse and a lick, anticipated the stripped-down, semidesperate Stones of
Black and Blue.

Exile
had a mismatched, random, brain-fevered quality, like a Jackson Pollock splatter. It was all over the place, random, hard to handle. “It ran the gamut of the Rolling Stones' interests at that point,” Mick said later. “It was recorded in a very amateurish fashion.”
Exile
was an instant no. 1 album, a huge success for the Stones, and, promoted by a publicity-rich tour that summer, stayed high in the charts for the rest of the year.

STP

June 1972.
Mick wanted a state-of-the-art professional tour this time. They had their own plane, a Lockheed Electra turboprop with the Stones' red lapping tongue logo painted on the fuselage and tail. They had a real tour manager, Peter Rudge, a large, efficient English public school type with long hair and acceptable manners. They had a film crew, headed by Robert Frank, on hand to film a documentary. They had a forty-man crew and a phalanx of security, especially after the segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace was gunned down in May. Both Mick and Keith carried loaded .38s, and they hid behind LeRoy and Stan, their famous linebacker-size black bodyguards. The Stones were scared. The Hell's Angels supposedly had a murder contract out on Mick, left over from Altamont, and were trying to extort money from the Stones. After the tour, Mick told Robert Greenfield, “Don't say I wasn't scared, man. I was scared
shitless.
”

Technical director Chip Monck rigged a huge mirror over the stage and bounced the lights off it from the sides and behind, instead of lighting the stage from in front and above. This bathed the musicians in reflected beams of pale light, frontlit and backlit, that gave the frenetic Stones experience a weird, dreamlike aura. (Monck's innovation was supposed to be the wave of the future, but the system was so awkward it was barely used again.)

Robert Frank's film crew joined the band in L.A. during rehearsals on a soundstage at Warner Bros. and pre-tour interviews in a house above Sunset Boulevard rented from aviation heir Michael Butler. Guaranteed “access all areas” and adept at getting through closed doors, Frank was shooting in Super 8, and he gave one of his Eclair cameras to Mick for some rock star vérité. Marshall Chess was the producer of Frank's doomed-from-the-start documentary, and Keith's pal Stash de Rola was put to work holding the microphones.

Ticket prices were held to $6.50. The laminated backstage passes had the letters STP printed on them for “Stones Touring Party,” alternately “Stop Tripping Please.” Fred Sessler was on the case as pharmacist to the band. “He was incredibly important to the Stones,” Gary Stromberg says. “Everyone deferred to him. Fred was the only one on that tour, other than the band, who could write his own ticket.” No one really knew where Fred got his amazing stash; word was he had a license to import cocaine manufactured by Merck Pharmaceutical in Switzerland. Everyone marveled. What a guy!

                

First show,
Vancouver, June 3. On the plane, drinks were served, and the tequila sunrise, a vitamin-rich cocktail of O.J., grenadine, and cactus liquor, became the official drink of STP. Motown hero Stevie Wonder and his tight soul band Wonderlove opened the show with rippling, intensely musical versions of his great soul hits. The blind master musician blasted out “Uptight” and shook every arena on the tour. The Stones then opened their shows with a roaring “Brown Sugar.” Mick had two main costumes: a jumpsuit in ivory-colored silk with a red sash by Michael Fish, and Ossie Clark's blue silk and velvet number with plastic and metal studs, both set off by thick golden chains around his neck and Balinese bracelets around his wrists and arms. He wore white dance shoes with little bells and never stopped bopping, exhibiting all his trademark struts, feints, and jabs.

The Stones' ninety-minute show mixed recent hits with new
Exile
tracks like “Tumbling Dice,” “All Down the Line,” and “Happy.” Mick's pre-break line—“Keith's gonna sing 'Happy' for ya now”—often drew the biggest cheers of the show as Keith, cruising on smack and wrapped in a yellow scarf covered in red Tibetan mantras, took over the mike and bawled out his life story as the horns, stage left, blared joyously behind him. Nicky Hopkins played keyboards on the melodic stuff. Stu took over when it was Chuck Berry time.

Keith told friends he hated the big arenas the Stones were playing, hated Peter Rudge, hated the tour. He carried his drugs in a small black doctor's bag. The Stones also had their own staff physician in tow, Dr. Larry, who was equipped to treat any malady from depression to gunshots. Dr. Larry also had a taste for the youngest of the young girls who flocked to the hotels to meet the Stones. “People on the tour started trading him girls for drugs,” Gary Stromberg recalled, “and we later learned he almost lost his license for writing too many prescriptions.”

In San Francisco, the Stones played the Winterland Ballroom for promoter Bill Graham. Mick diffused lingering tensions with Graham by being charming, and the poison left over from 1969 was forgotten. No longer were they the greatest R&R band in the world: understated Chip Monck now simply said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Rolling Stones.” Everyone except Stu was wrecked, and the Stones played so out of tune that Nicky Hopkins was disgusted by the people who came backstage to tell them how great they were. At the airport, a young woman tried to serve Altamont-connected subpoenas to Mick. Keith smacked her and threw the papers on the runway before they flew south.

Two shows at the Forum in L.A. inspired a media frenzy and an ungodly guest list. Bianca earned the loathing of the Stones' office ladies by commandeering precious tickets for her friends. Less than friendly when on tour, Bianca was much reviled by the STP crew for putting them uptight. They liked it better when Mick took up with photog Annie Leibovitz later on the tour when his wife wasn't around.

In Denver, Keith threw overweight, glamour-deprived Gram Parsons out of his hotel suite, which as usual was Party Central. A story went around that Gram had threatened Keith with a knife after having been denied all the cocaine in the room, and that he was told to stay away from the tour.

“Some nights,” wrote Robert Greenfield, “it was as though they brought Keith to the hall in a cage and his hour and a half onstage was the only freedom he was going to get. There was no way of telling when he'd crash into an amp or fall the last three steps off the back of the stage. He was dangerous and unpredictable, which made him exciting to watch.” Typical 1972 set, circa midtour: “Brown Sugar” with solos by Keys and Mick Taylor; “Bitch” with Charlie on the attack (some think this was, musically, Mr. Watts's greatest tour); “Rocks Off” with its lazy midsong bridge and busy horns; “Gimme Shelter”; “Happy” croaked and quacked by Keith, goosed by the brass; “Tumbling Dice” delivered in Mick's new “preaching” style, spoken more than sung; “Love in Vain,” mostly a showcase for Mick Taylor's spellbinding blues solo; “Sweet Virginia,” Keys taking the sax solo; “You Can't Always Get What You Want” with Jim Price playing the intro on trombone; “All Down the Line” as fast as Charlie could make it; “Midnight Rambler” full throttle too, the centerpiece of the show and another side of the Stones' incredible young virtuoso, Mick Taylor. Introducing him, Mick liked to say, “The lady with the lipstick—Mick Taylor on guitar!”

After the rock rape scene of “Rambler,” the shows geared up to the finale of “Bye Bye Johnny” with Keith playing blocks of Chuck chords as the solo; an even crazier “Rip This Joint”; “Jumpin' Jack Flash” with Keith's new stuttering guitar at the end; and a set-ending, erupting “Street Fighting Man”—blazing chords and supercharged drumming that built to a breathtaking peak. Then it was rose petals and good night.

                

June 19 and 20.
Three shows in Chicago International Amphitheater. The Stones were happily entertained with Bunnies and blow at Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion, where they stayed for three nights enjoying the underwater bar and the game room with rows of pinball machines. The Bunnies were highly buffed midwestern prom queens on Quaaludes, up for just about anything English in tight pants. Sad-eyed Charlie Watts played pinball. With the boys on coke and the girls on 'ludes, the Stones' visit turned into a seventy-two-hour orgy. Hugh Hefner wisely refused to let Robert Frank and his cameras into his house, and Frank was furious.

In Kansas City, Gary Stromberg began bringing in his star writers to hang out. Truman Capote had a
Rolling Stone
assignment and brought along celebrity photog Peter Beard and his girlfriend Princess Lee Radziwill, sister of Jackie Onassis. Capote appeared to be on tranquilizers and was bluntly ignored by Mick, despite Capote's extreme visibility quotient. Rumpled, bearded Terry Southern was covering the tour for
Saturday Review
and was as high as anyone in the band.

“Terry Southern was so stoned you had to look out for him,” recalls Gary Stromberg. “This was uncool, but Terry was close to Keith, so you couldn't say anything. One night in Mobile, Alabama, he was standing by Keith's amp during the show, with the uniformed Mobile police chief standing next to him. Terry was fumbling in his pockets and dropped all his drugs—pills, powders, Baggies, amyl nitrite poppers, hash pipe—on the floor in front of them. He fell on his knees to gather them up while Keith was laughing and kicking the pills and phials that had rolled onto the stage over to him, while still playing. The cop never said a thing.”