50 Licks Page 22

  The funny thing is that “Start Me Up” is a song that had been lying around for a long while before it ever made it out into the world on the Tattoo You album. Keith explains:

  This photo was taken in 1980. Ronnie, Mick, and Keith had an interesting year ahead of them in 1981

  KEITH RICHARDS: That was in the can for ages, and mostly we’d forgotten about it. We had about thirty takes of it reggae and there was just one or two other takes where we did it with a backbeat, just straight rock ’n’ roll. So to us it was that interminable reggae track we did way back then. And then—right at the end of the reel—was this rock ’n’ roll version, you know.

  While the song seemed like a sure thing to be the Stones’ ninth number one single, it never quite made it. It was stalled at number two for a couple of weeks by the likes of (get this!) “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)” by Christopher Cross, “Private Eyes” by Daryl Hall and John Oates, and worst of all, “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John, which stayed at the top of the American charts for a “physically” sickening ten weeks! Though denied number one status during its initial run, “Start Me Up” has more than earned its weight in gold in a number of high-profile ways in the years since. It was the show opener at many future Stones concerts; Microsoft paid millions for it to use for their Windows 95 advertising campaign; it has become a staple at sporting events of every conceivable kind; and it was one of the three songs that the Stones performed at halftime during the 2006 Super Bowl (chapter 48).

  And if all of this wasn’t enough, “Start Me Up” served the very important purpose of introducing or reintroducing the Rolling Stones to generations of fans in America and globally as well. On August 1, 1981, MTV made its debut on cable television systems all across the United States. Stephen Davis explained the new wrinkle this way:

  STEPHEN DAVIS: Traditionally musicians had always traveled to their audiences to sell their music. Now, with a video in heavy rotation to a select audience, a band could appear before several million fans several times per day. For rich bands like the Stones, video obviated the ancient need to keep moving or die. MTV also became a major launching pad for solo stars: Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, and—in epic fashion—Michael Jackson, whose Thriller album became the biggest seller in recording history on the strength of short- and long-form videos. Among the video audience, bands became almost passé. The video revolution’s cameras loved a face more than a band, a fact not lost on ever-ambitious Mick Jagger . . .

  Longtime collaborator Michael Lindsay-Hogg was given the assignment to shoot the video for “Start Me Up.” He recalled:

  MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: In ’81 we talk about doing “Start Me Up” and “Waiting on a Friend” and “Neighbors.” This was the beginning of MTV. Mick and Charlie and I went out for lunch one day and Mick said, “Have you seen anything from MTV yet? Because that’s the future.” So we did “Start Me Up” very down and dirty. I’ve always thought with the Rolling Stones, to do their performance is a gift to the director—you don’t want to get in their way too much.

  Screen capture from 1981’s ubiquitous Start Me Up video

  In the early days of MTV, “Start Me Up” was one of the most programmed videos on the upstart channel. And, true to Stephen Davis’s observation, the TV screen just loved Mick Jagger’s face. Yes, the rest of the band was there, but when you look at that video over thirty years later, you can’t help but notice that it’s mostly Mick, Mick, and Mick! His well-toned body; his bare arms flailing about; his face; but, more than any of those features, it’s his lips! As true as it was in the ’60s when we first noticed them, it’s those lips that hypnotize and mesmerize. Here’s what noted author Tom Wolfe had to say about them back in the day:

  TOM WOLFE: In the center of the stage a short thin boy with a sweatshirt on, the neck of the sweatshirt almost falling off his shoulders, they are so narrow, all surmounted by this enormous head . . . with the hair puffing down over the forehead and ears, this boy has exceptional lips. He has two peculiarly gross and extraordinary red lips. They hang off his face like giblets. Slowly his eyes pour over the flaming bud horde (see chapter 11!), soft as Karo syrup, and close, and then the lips start spreading into the most languid, most confidential, the wettest, most labial, most concupiscent grin imaginable. Nirvana! The buds start shrieking, pawing toward the stage.

  Fueled by MTV, Tattoo You would go on to become the Stones’ most successful selling album to date.

  BILLY ALTMAN: Tattoo You as an album sounds a bit disjointed. A lot of the songs sound better out of context as opposed to sitting down and listening to the whole thing as an entire album. “Start Me Up,” “Hang Fire,” “Waiting on a Friend” are all really good songs that I think sounded better on the radio than they did on the album when listened to as a whole. I think that’s probably a function of it getting recorded over an amount of time.

  Tattoo You itself was a patchwork quilt of outtakes and leftovers from Some Girls, Emotional Rescue, Black and Blue, even as far back as Goats Head Soup. But an album was needed to tour behind, and this is the one that came off the Stones’ assembly line. It put the group back on the radio and, even more important, back on the road to start the ’80s.

  CHAPTER 42

  BLACK LIMOUSINE

  REHEARSALS FOR THE Stones’ 1981 tour took place on Long View Farm in Massachusetts.

  STEVE MORSE: They rehearsed for that ’81 tour at Long View Farm. And that was in central Mass. in farm country. And they would be up all night, they had a soundstage, and they would perform, and they wouldn’t start until after midnight. So they were a bit of a nuisance to the farmers in the surrounding valleys out there.

  GREG PERLOFF: Bill Graham and I showed up at Long View Farm to meet with the band and no one was there. We found the caretaker and he told us that Mick went out for a ride. So we took a football out of the car and started throwing it around. For like an hour. We had nothing to do. No idea where we were staying or anything. And all of a sudden, galloping up on horseback, comes Mick Jagger. It was like a scene out of a movie.

  That was when Chuck Leavell first started playing with the Stones.

  CHUCK LEAVELL: My connection was through Bill Graham. One day I’m at home and I get a call from his office saying, “Would you be interested in auditioning for the Rolling Stones?” I was very interested because at the time, I didn’t have anything going on . . . Ian Stewart called me. We had a great talk; I was very surprised and very pleased, obviously. This was on a Thursday and I actually had a gig Friday and Saturday of that weekend and I asked him if it would be OK if I come up Sunday or Monday and his response was, “Well, we’d really like to have you there tomorrow.” So the next day I was on a plane to Long View Farm. Stu picked me up; we had a nice talk. We got there to the farm. I saw Mick jogging out with the security guys.

  One person was notably absent at Long View Farm, at least at first.

  Keith Richards rocks the stage once again at Madison Square Garden in 1981

  GREG PERLOFF: All of a sudden people start showing up. And there’s no Keith Richards. Later on we sit down for dinner at this long table, it’s the whole band and some crew guys, and Bill says, “Where’s Keith?” And they were all like, “Oh,” like no one had noticed he was missing. And then, about twenty feet away, you see this arm flop over the sofa, and someone says, “There’s Keith.” He had been out on the sofa for the entire time we had been there.

  We get to the next day and we’re really ready to get to work—still no Keith. You’ve got the barn, which is also a recording studio but from the outside it could be a horse barn. And then outside you’ve got this pond, and while we’re waiting for something to happen, Bill and I start throwing the football around again. And at that point, Keith Richards walks out, boots on, blue jeans on, no shirt, telecaster strapped over his shoulder, and he starts walking out of the barn and towards the lake. And there was a cord on the guitar, the longest cord you’ve ever seen in your life, like a two-hundred-foot cord. And
Keith stares at the lake and starts in on the opening riff to “Under My Thumb.” We stopped and went, “Yeah. That’s why we’re here.” It was magic. And that was the beginning of the ’81 tour.

  The tour grossed over thirty-six million dollars over fifty shows. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t tension between the two notoriously difficult personalities who were in charge, Bill Graham and Mick Jagger.

  GREG PERLOFF: There were interesting ego things. Bill was a very famous promoter and producer at that time. And early in the tour there was this wonderful article about Bill. And Mick asked to see Bill and Bill went to his suite and Mick had the newspaper laid out and said, “Bill, what’s the name of this tour?” The answer being the Rolling Stones. It was one of the few times I ever saw Bill shook up. The message was, there is one star on this tour, and it’s not Bill Graham.

  Greg didn’t let his ability to book the Stones go to his head.

  GREG PERLOFF: I was doing all the deals for the tour as Bill was actually out on the tour. I was twenty-nine years old and feeling a bit full of myself. And an agent friend said, “You know, Greg, anybody can book the Rolling Stones. Let’s see you book Dr. Hook on a rainy Tuesday in Des Moines.” There’s no band in the business even close to how big the Rolling Stones are. If you want to understand the power of the Rolling Stones from a different perspective, for six months of my life, everybody took my phone call.

  The Stones made an unusual gesture at the end of their time at Long View Farm, a special thank you to any of their neighbors they might have bothered.

  STEVE MORSE: I saw the sneak concert at Sir Morgan’s Cove in Worcester. But the Stones made sure that they gave free tickets to the Sir Morgan’s Cove show to the farmers. The Stones took care of their neighbors.

  Bill Graham was the tour manager at the time. And I recall how he kicked all the media out, away from the door. As the day evolved, there were about fifteen hundred to two thousand kids trying to get in unsuccessfully. And the tickets had been given away on WAAF, the Worcester rock station. Literally handed out on the streets. If you were wearing an AAF shirt, you’d get a ticket. It became a great promotion for the radio station.

  Bill Graham would get in shouting matches with the media. There was a photographer I brought with me named Stan Grossfeld. And Stan later won two Pulitzer Prizes. At the time, he was making a name for himself and he and Bill got in an unbelievable shouting match because Bill would not let Stan in. So Stan somehow got in and he ends up coming out on a balcony overlooking the front door, getting these incredible photos of the crowd. And here’s Bill Graham down on the sidewalk waving his fist, “You get down off of there!” And Stan happily took his picture.

  It was just an eleven-song set. Just a tune-up for the tour. They arrived and left in a thirty-five-foot-long Winnebago. And as they were leaving, Jagger opened the blinds and started mugging for the cameras.

  A still from Hal Ashby’s Let’s Spend the Night Together, a concert film about the 1981 tour

  One of the notable aspects of the Stones’ 1981 tour is that it was the first time a rock band had a corporate sponsor. In the Stones’ case: Jōvan Musk men’s cologne.

  STEVE MORSE: The American rockers at the time wouldn’t have considered corporate sponsorship. They thought it was cheesy to get involved with it. The British acts were out in front with that. A lot of the American bands and music critics didn’t like it at all. But as time went on and people saw how expensive it was to tour and how the tickets would have to be raised astronomically to compensate, then all of a sudden it became OK to do.

  GREG PERLOFF: At that point we were totally against corporate sponsorship. Bands didn’t charge as much as they could for tickets because it was unseemly. The Stones actually came to us with Jōvan. It was groundbreaking at the time.

  Graham wasn’t assured of getting the ’81 tour but in the end, he won out.

  GREG PERLOFF: There were a number of companies competing for the ’81 tour and we were fortunate enough to get it. When we did the Stones in ’78, we did some special effects. We had some helicopters flying overhead dropping plastic blow-up girls down and Ping-Pong balls, and at the same time we had helium balloons coming up from the front of the stage. This was for Some Girls. In those days, the local promoter could actually do some of these special promotion items and this was the first tour that they really went out and did some really good business. That had a lot to do with getting the ’81 tour.

  SUMMIT AT BUDDY’S PLACE

  One of the most memorable nights on the ’81 tour was on November 22, when the Stones played Buddy Guy’s club in Chicago, the Checkerboard Lounge. Muddy Waters joined them on the bill.

  Buddy guy: First of all, they had promised to do that seven times before they finally did it. They wanted it to be a surprise. They shocked everybody, including me. They came up in one of the raggediest vans that ever rode. I think the door was cracked; the windshield was cracked. And they was all disguised.

  They was trying to do it and keep the media away. But you couldn’t keep the media away from there. This particular night, Junior Wells and I was coming out of Vancouver through Seattle and we almost missed the plane. When I got almost to the Checkerboard—and I owned the Checkerboard at that time—they had the road blocked off. One of the policemen said, “You can’t go up there because the Rolling Stones is there.” Thank God there was a sergeant recognized me and said, “Well, you can’t stop him, because he’s the one that owns the club.”

  When I got to the front door there was people on top of the building, and I thought it was going to crash in because it wasn’t real good construction. They was hanging off the roof . . . and some of them recognized me and one guy screamed, “Buddy, I’ll give a thousand dollars to get in there.” The place didn’t hold but sixty-four people. And the Stones had fifty-four. I started crying out of one eye. That night I didn’t make anything off the bar; nobody was drinking. I had the Rolling Stones in my place and I didn’t make a nickel.

  In the end I was so happy because it put the club on the map . . . I saw Charlie Watts a year, two years later and he said, “I got to apologize Buddy, ’cause I don’t even remember being in your club.” When I walked in the door he was laying out on the bar . . . There was so many people out of it that night, so I say, “Everybody’s high but me. Give me a shot of Jack Daniel’s.”

  Muddy started singing his song about champagne and reefer. And there was at least twenty policemen in there when Muddy started singing and Mick Jagger threw a bag of weed up there. I said, “Oh shit, they’re going to get arrested.” The police didn’t do nothing but laugh. They didn’t give a damn what they did.

  Back then, I didn’t have any kind of awards or anything. And every time I got to play with Muddy and the Rolling Stones on the stage that was up there with my Grammy and my induction into the Hall of Fame. I was sitting on top of the world. How high can you go?

  The shows featured a mix of indoor and outdoor venues.

  GREG PERLOFF: The outdoor tour had these beautiful scrims in front of the stage, and the indoor shows had a stage that was in the shape of a flower that opened up and it was a spectacular stage. The Stones have gone on to become one of the real leaders in concert production. There was resistance at the time, Keith saying, “I want to play on a stage, I don’t want to play on a fucking toy.” Bill and Mick convinced him. At that point he said, “Well, I’ll do it. But if this stage doesn’t hold up, you’re fucking paying for it.”

  Were there any incidents?

  GREG PERLOFF: And we get through the entire tour and we’re in Hampton, Virginia, filming the last two shows of the tour and we do the second-to-last show and everything’s great and someone on the crew decides we need a photograph of the entire crew. So we all go on the stage to take this picture and the stage collapses. Thank God no one was injured but there went a lot of the profits from the tour. We had to rebuild the stage for the show and the filming the next night.

  From a business point of view, the
Stones debuted a couple of other advanced concepts in ’81.

  GREG PERLOFF: The idea of not paying to sell our merchandise. The other thing on the US tour is we only advertised in one market. We started out with a press conference to introduce the shows. And every show just blew out. This was the beginning of the Stones really becoming a professional organization.

  Part of the way the Stones compensated for a lack of traditional promotion was radio (see chapter 39).

  GREG PERLOFF: In those days, FM radio ruled. We did a lot of press conferences. Radio had to cover the tour. They had to be the first to announce it, all of the information. There were no presales back then. The tickets went on sale and if you were first in line, you got the front row. We realized that radio was going to sell it for us. All we had to do was whisper, “The Rolling Stones are coming.”

  CHAPTER 43

  HAD IT WITH YOU

  KEITH RICHARDS: I would say that (in the early ’70s) you’ve got the seeds of why we’re not together right now. I mean, Mick and I have different attitudes, and throughout most of the ’70s, I was living in another world from him. I didn’t blame him—he’d earned the right to do what he wanted. It was just that I couldn’t RELATE to [his lifestyle]. And even if I could’ve related to it, I was too busy being busted—which, I mean, is equally as dumb, you know?