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  Scott Muni took to the air outside the hotel and sputtered (from an actual air check of the event):

  SCOTT MUNI: Dave Herman is here . . . and here comes the truck now into view . . . and they’re going to be . . . Yep, they are! There’s Mick Jagger . . . and the Stones . . . They’re all here! Now YOU hear the sound! Let’s pick it up!

  Photographer Bob Gruen ran alongside the flatbed truck on Fifth Avenue as the Stones played “Brown Sugar”

  The music had already started in the background, but now it was coming through loud and clear. The Rolling Stones were playing live on a flatbed truck rolling slowly south on Fifth Avenue in New York City! They performed an elongated version of “Brown Sugar” with Billy Preston on electric piano and a new face (no pun intended) playing guitar. As the song ended, Muni returned to the air.

  SCOTT MUNI: Alright, the truck is pulling away. And we’re being crushed! Literally crushed! Mick Jagger has just thrown out the announcement of the tour . . .

  DAVE HERMAN: The New York dates will be on . . . Five days in New York . . .

  SCOTT MUNI: We’re out on the street now, and it is raining, and has been . . .

  DAVE HERMAN: [incredulous] The Rolling Stones playing on Fifth Avenue . . . on Fifth Avenue!

  SCOTT MUNI: The Rolling Stones playing on Fifth Avenue . . . and did you notice who the new member was? I think that’s most significant. Ron Wood was on guitar . . . Now let’s go back to Pete in the studio.

  I was flabbergasted. I’m sure people actually there couldn’t believe their eyes, and I know people listening to the radio couldn’t believe their ears—because I was one of them! They say radio is theater of the mind—what could be a better example? I could “see” and hear Mick Jagger and the Stones in my imagination, and it was all quite special and wonderful.

  Promotional display for It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll

  But here’s another perspective from the eye of the hurricane:

  BILL WYMAN: The truck, yeah (laughs). I don’t know whose idea it was. Probably Mick’s—he always comes up with these bad ideas that work. But it was quite fun to do. The sad thing was, when it came on TV they said we obviously weren’t playing live—we were miming to a record. Now that was very annoying because we were playing live! It was raining and we were taking the risk of being electrocuted to death!

  After all was said and done, Mick gave full credit for the stunt to Charlie Watts.

  MICK JAGGER: I think it was actually Charlie’s idea. Jazz in the old days in Harlem . . . they used to do promotions for their gigs on flatbed trucks.

  PERSONAL ESSAY: ROCK N ROLL HIGH SCHOOL

  While I was on the radio on May 1, 1975, my coauthor Bernie Corbett was stuck at Stoneham Junior High School outside Boston. Here’s his story from that day:

  A life worth living has a soundtrack. And from the moment I opened my ears, the Rolling Stones have provided the background to my mortal journey. Nineteen seventy-five was to be my year to roll with the Stones in concert. The rumor mill was rife with Stones tour speculation. And then, it happened. The same day the Stones took their trip on a flatbed truck down Fifth Avenue in New York, an article appeared in the Boston Globe.

  I grabbed the paper and learned the Stones would be at the Garden on June 11 and 12. The last line of the story proclaimed, “Tickets go on sale today.” That line encored in my head: TODAY!?!? There was no way I could get tickets. All was lost. I ran to the pay phone and I called my father’s law office. My late father, God bless him, sensed the extreme urgency of the situation. I nervously repeated the Ticketron on-sale locations. Soon after, he immediately dropped the Foley divorce or whatever mundane case he was supposed to be working on and proceeded to address my case. Off he went to a couple of Sears stores. No luck. I got the news that evening. My teenage life was ruined.

  Later that evening, he vowed he would find tickets. A friend at a local ad agency owed him a favor. Weeks passed with no resolution. And then one day after school, while I was occupying the third base coach’s box during a Stoneham-Melrose freshman baseball game, I heard a voice. I looked over my shoulder and saw my dad. “We got two for the Stones!” By the end of the inning, my score—not the game score—was the talk of the dugout.

  On June 11 my father and I witnessed the spectacle of the Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band in the World in all their glory from Loge II, up close and personal. I can still close my eyes and hear the strains of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” giving way to the signature opening chords of “Honky Tonk Women.” At the end of the two-and-a-half-hour performance, I was exhilarated. In my state of rock ’n’ roll ecstasy I turned to my father and asked him what he thought. “It was underpriced,” he observed, clearly pleased. It would not be the last time we got to experience the pure adrenaline of the Stones in concert together.

  To my father, attorney Mitchell B. Corbett, may you rest in peace. You delivered and shared the greatest night of your eldest son’s young life.

  CHAPTER 36

  AROUND AND AROUND

  Most of the Stones’ Love You Live album was recorded during the 1975 Tour of the Americas and the 1976 tour of Europe. But what really makes the record interesting is the side recorded at a small club in Toronto, the El Mocambo.

  BILL WYMAN: We wanted to do some live music of a really different nature, in a club where we could get a really good atmosphere and a bit of audience reaction, just basic blues stuff like we did in the early days, on our live album.

  How would it be to play a club after fifteen years away?

  KEITH RICHARDS: That was what we were all wondering before we went on, “Gosh it’s been so long since we did this.” And the amazing thing was that two bars into the first number it just felt so natural, as if those years in between didn’t exist. It didn’t make any difference anymore. We could have been playing at the Crawdads next weekend. It just felt so natural that it just reinforced my belief that every band has got to make some sort of effort to break out of the circuit that we’re all put on and we just sort of accept. For instance, I hate to say it, an American tour. If they tell us that the Stones are doing an American tour, we can probably name you 97 percent of the cities that we’re going to hit. There just seems to be this circuit build up that gets more and more entrenched every time. There are theaters and auditoriums all over the place. They don’t hold fifteen thousand, twenty thousand people but I don’t see why you can’t do them both.

  Yet it’s very different playing small venues, as the Stones well knew.

  BILL WYMAN: First of all, you know that three-quarters of the kids are using binoculars in a big stadium, and you’re just dots on the horizon. So you have to wear clothes not because they look good but because they stand out—a brilliant red jacket—so they can make out you’re not an amplifier or something. When you’re in a club it’s smoky, and it’s intense, and very personal. Like, in the El Mocambo, the girls were grabbing our legs and crotches, while we’re playing, which adds a little bit to the show from our side (chuckles).

  This was among the challenges of being superstars—the more success the Stones had, the more pressure there was to focus on the business rather than the music.

  KEITH RICHARDS: I think it’s true, there is that conflict. Individually it depends upon the band and its members. But for instance, the business side of it is how come the Stones aren’t living in England together, which would be so much easier for us to organize things and get things together instead of everybody being three thousand miles apart. Half the time, Mick’s in New York and I’m in Switzerland. Or I’m here and he’s in New York and Bill’s in France. That’s the business side of it and that’s the effect it has and it slows us down so much and it just . . . To get everybody into one place to even decide what to do next is a major operation.

  The Stones at MSG in June of 1975

  Why had it been so long since the Stones played a club? The answer came down to dollars and sense.

  CHARLIE WATTS: If you’re going
to spend a quarter of a million dollars to build a stage for Madison Square Garden, how can you do a club the next day? You’ve got to earn back that money to make the whole trip worthwhile. We spend a million dollars, or a million and a half dollars, to set up a tour before we even come here. Just to organize a tour, from there to there, people going around checking out ceilings, how much weight the roof will stand, before you even sell one ticket. You’ve got to think financially, unfortunately, you can’t play little clubs.

  BILL WYMAN: It was an idea we’d had for some years, but we found it very uneconomical. In the old days, when you traveled in a van and you lived in tiny hotels, two in a room, you could afford to do small clubs. But touring America and staying in suites at the Plaza, and having the best food and good wine and restaurants means your expenses can reach five hundred thousand dollars—and you lose one hundred thousand dollars or two hundred thousand dollars each. But it’s the only place in the world where you can actually make some money from touring. Europe you can’t. England you can’t. Australia’s really hard, and . . . we have to make some money, especially Charlie and me, because we don’t write songs. So the only money we physically earn is from record royalties, which I can’t complain about, but if you only do one record every two years, that cuts it down. It sounds very mercenary, but it’s the facts of life.

  Fortunately for the Stones, they did eventually find a way to break out of the stadium touring rut, but amazingly, it wouldn’t happen for another quarter century! The Stones’ visit to Toronto wasn’t only known for those El Mocambo shows, it was also the site for one of the more infamous episodes in Rolling Stones history. And that’s the story you’ll read as soon as you turn the page.

  CHAPTER 37

  BEFORE THEY MAKE ME RUN

  ONE OF THE most significant Rolling Stones arrests happened in Toronto on February 27, 1977. It must be acknowledged that this incident really did represent the possibility of the end of the Stones. Keith was found with twenty-two grams of heroin, a large enough amount that he was initially charged with “possession of heroin for the purpose of trafficking.”

  The tabloid story got kicked to another level when the Canadian prime minister’s young wife, Margaret Trudeau, was seen both at a Stones show at the El Mocambo and also partying with the band after. The press assumed she was having an affair with Mick, though Ron Wood implies he was the man cuckolding the PM in his book. Of course, knowing the Stones, it could have been both.

  EDDIE KRAMER: There was a lot of political bullshit going on—as you can imagine—with Margaret Trudeau and Mick Jagger. Whether or not that actually happened I don’t know. Certainly she was there that night. She introduced herself to me in the club. “I’m Margaret Trudeau. Who are you?”

  KEITH RICHARDS: Maybe it’s not bad Margaret Trudeau was involved because it took it out to a completely different level. Instead of everything just being centered on me and the Stones, it involved the prime minister of the fucking country . . . (laughs). The things they were fishing for: Was Margaret Trudeau fed up? Was she going to leave her husband to run off with a rock ’n’ roll band? That’s what they were really trying to get around, but the way Pierre [Trudeau] handled it made more out of less, unfortunately. Obviously he didn’t know what was going on, because if he did he would have tried to cool things out.

  The threat of a seven-year prison term haunted Keith for more than a year. He was allowed to leave Canada to enter treatment at a clinic near Philadelphia, where he cleaned up—or at least tried to. According to his memoir Life, Keith was on heroin during the Some Girls sessions in France and even once shot up in the bathroom on a plane from New York to Toronto, with a Mountie’s spurs clinking outside the door!

  Keith was overwhelmed by the support he received from Stones fans throughout his troubles in Toronto.

  A court sketch from October 23, 1978, by Laurie McGaw that appeared in the Toronto Star

  KEITH RICHARDS: I know lots and lots of people dig the Stones but frankly, I was knocked out by the personal care and attention that people were paying just to me. I’d just like them to know that everything’s fine and don’t expect any major fractures in the future. I think we can keep it all together. And I hope we can get round their way soon. I like to be able to play everywhere once a year if it’s possible. Sometimes by the time we get back to America it’s three years. But this year, once we do this album and that’s in the can, then we’re on the road.

  After multiple delays, Keith’s trial was finally heard on October 23, 1978. Keith pleaded guilty to possession but not guilty to trafficking. The judge found him guilty but said, “I will not incarcerate him for addiction and wealth.”

  Keith was sentenced to just one-year probation. There were two conditions. One was that Keith was ordered to continue treatment for heroin addiction (which he clearly needed to do anyway). The other (of course!) was that he must perform a benefit performance for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.

  KEITH RICHARDS: This was to do with a blind girl who had followed the Stones everywhere on the road. Rita, my blind angel. Despite her blindness, she hitchhiked to our shows. The chick was absolutely fearless, I’d heard about her backstage, and the idea of her thumbing in the darkness was too much for me. I hooked her up with the truck drivers, made sure she got a safe lift, and made sure she got fed. And when I was busted, she actually found her way to the judge’s house and told him this story.

  WE PISS ANYWHERE, MAN

  Ironically, considering Keith’s reputation as an outlaw, Bill Wyman was the first Stone to be arrested, in 1963.

  BILL WYMAN: We were coming back from a gig and I wanted to have a wee-wee, so we stopped at a garage—and they refused to let me so I went back to the car and Mick said, “Come on, Bill, we’ll find one” and Brian Jones as well. So the three of us went over there and they still wouldn’t let us use it, so we just did it there and got arrested. And we had to pay about twenty pounds, which was about thirty dollars then. We got publicity for about a year on that one. It was then we realized what we had to do to get publicity, you see.

  Keith was free. And he finally beat his heroin addiction not long after that. Mick Jagger offers his perspective on the idea that the Stones became identified with drug use in the ’70s.

  MICK JAGGER: Yeah, I think it’s very bad. I don’t remember ever proselytizing for it myself. But I think it became a tremendous bore to everyone in the Rolling Stones who ever got either arrested or involved with drugs. So it was tremendously regrettable—especially the damage it did by persuading people how glamorous it all was. You might get different answers from different people in the band, but if I remember right, it was not the intention of the Rolling Stones to become drug-user outlaws. It was a real drawback as far as creativity went. And it went on until 1977, with Keith’s bust in Toronto. All those things affected the band and gave us this image of being like a real bunch of outlaw dope fiends—which was to a certain extent, I suppose, true. But it was also imposed, somewhat. Because I think the original intent was just to do what one did and not make an issue of it.

  CHAPTER 38

  SOME GIRLS

  KEITH RICHARDS: First of all those mid-’70s LPs remind me of being a junkie (laughs). What happened was I’d been through the bust in Canada, which was a real watershed—or WaterGATE—for me. I’d gone to jail, been cleaned up, done my cure, and I’d wanted to come back and prove there was some difference . . . some . . . some reason for this kind of suffering. So Some Girls was the first record I’d been able to get back into and view from a totally different state than I’d been in for most of the ’70s.

  The Rolling Stones haven’t lasted for fifty years by standing still or staying static. As the times have changed, the Stones have changed: from an R&B cover band to a rock ’n’ roll powerhouse; from playing small clubs to playing huge stadiums, then back to playing small clubs; from the music world’s most outrageous young punks to its esteemed elder statesmen.

  This ability to adapt
, reinvent, and transform was never more apparent than it was in 1978. First of all, there were a couple of lean years and misfires after Exile on Main St. Goats Head Soup, It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll, and Black and Blue weren’t bad albums—you could make a great compilation taking the best of those three—but none had the power of the Stones’ best work.

  Then too, the music business itself was in the midst of its greatest changes since . . . well, probably since the changes that the Beatles, Dylan, and the Stones themselves had wrought in the ’60s.

  Punk and new wave were beginning to rock rock ’n’ roll. Disco was inexplicably (to me anyway) pushing rock music out of the spotlight. There were even rumblings of a new kind of laser technology that could eventually supplant vinyl and long-playing records as the main delivery system for music. Against this backdrop, the Stones came roaring back with Some Girls.

  KEITH RICHARDS: I think a lot of [the reasons for the quality of Some Girls] was Chris Kimsey. We were at a point where we asked ourselves, “Are we just going to do another boring Stones-in-the-doldrums sort of album?”

  Kimsey had worked with the Stones as far back as Sticky Fingers, and while his credit on Some Girls is as an engineer, it certainly sounds like he functioned as a producer as well.