50 Licks Page 23

Mick and I are incredibly diverse people. We’ve known each other forty years—ever since we were three or four years old. But while a certain part of our personalities is incredibly close, there’s an awful lot which is very, very different. And so, yeah, it kind of got up my nose a bit, that jet-set shit and, like, the flaunting of it.

  Put it down to the law of unintended consequences. One unpredictable effect of Keith Richards getting straight was that there was suddenly a lot more tension between him and Mick. When Keith was in a fog, Mick got his way all the time in terms of music and business decisions. Sober Keith—well, sober compared to himself—understandably wanted to be more involved.

  KEITH RICHARDS: This situation was a culmination of things that had been going on for several years. The immediate problem was that Mick had developed an overriding desire to control everything. As far as he was concerned, it was Mick Jagger and them.

  Conflict defined Mick and Keith’s relationship through most of the 1980s

  To make matters worse, both Ron Wood and even Charlie Watts developed drug problems of their own. Put all this in the hopper and you have another crisis that threatened the band’s very existence.

  Musically speaking, after Some Girls the band quickly resorted to rehashing. Mick described 1980’s Emotional Rescue as “a lot of leftovers.” As enjoyable as Tattoo You was, it wasn’t new material. Undercover represented more of an effort from the band—it was composed of all new material but can’t be called one of the Stones’ better albums. Undercover was the Stones’ last record for Atlantic in the USA and they needed a new deal. Unbeknownst to the rest of the band, Mick also piggybacked a solo deal on the Stones’ new agreement with CBS and their president, Walter Yetnikoff. Things were getting ugly.

  KEITH RICHARDS: It was total disregard for the band. We didn’t build this band up to stab each other in the back.

  Of course, from Mick’s perspective, it’s understandable that Keith’s sudden interest in the band after years of being out of it must have seemed a little odd. Another incident from around this time involved Charlie throwing a punch at Mick.

  BRENDA JAGGER

  In addition to writing songs about Mick, Keith had a code name for him during the World War III period.

  BILL GERMAN: It was during the sessions in Paris when Keith went into a bookstore and saw a book by Brenda Jagger. At the time, he wanted to stab Mick in the eyeballs, so referring to his prima donna lead singer as Brenda was a much healthier way to vent. Mick didn’t know about the nickname, it was all behind his back. But Keith told me to stop by the studio anytime—as long as Brenda wasn’t there.

  KEITH RICHARDS: Charlie biffed Mick once in Holland. Mick had a couple of drinks and he can get a bit silly. So, about five in the morning, he calls up Charlie and says, “Is my drummer there?” There was this ominous silence at the other end of the phone and I’m like, “Mick, I don’t think that was a very clever thing to say.” Twenty minutes later, Charlie knocks on my door—Savile Row suit, tie, polished brogues—and says to Mick, “Don’t ever call me your drummer.” Smack! And there’s this long table with a platter of smoked salmon on it and the window’s open and there’s a canal outside and Mick falls on the platter and starts sliding down the table towards the open window.

  For the next album, Dirty Work, Mick and Keith were at each other’s throats.

  BILL GERMAN: The Stones were obligated to deliver an album, but Mick’s head was already inside his solo-album stuff. Mick didn’t really contribute that much to Dirty Work. So they start recording Dirty Work in Paris at Pathé Marconi, and Mick was busy doing interviews with MTV. And Keith was not pleased with that. So a lot of the work fell on Keith’s shoulders. Keith and Woody were the ones that wound up writing a lot of the Stones’ songs on the fly. They would come up with stuff they were feeling at the moment. Woody told me, “It was a good thing we were able to play guitar or otherwise we would have killed people.” It was a great outlet for them.

  Keith wrote barely disguised songs about Mick with titles like “Fight,” and “Had It with You.” Mick didn’t have many songs of his own to contribute, and delayed the sessions themselves, busy simultaneously working on his solo album, the forgettable She’s the Boss, a title which Richards has said “says it all.”

  Mick didn’t want to tour Dirty Work. Keith thinks this was because he wanted to tour solo but it certainly also seems plausible that Mick thought going out on the road with Charlie and Ron Wood abusing drugs, and he and Keith hating each other, was just a bad idea.

  Mick didn’t choose the best way of telling his bandmates he didn’t want to go on the road.

  BILL GERMAN: He sent them all the same telegram. Something to the effect that he was going to pursue other interests in 1986. And that’s how they learned about it.

  Then the tabloid battle between Mick and Keith began. Mick got things off to a rollicking start when he said in an interview that the Rolling Stones were a millstone around his neck. Keith says in Life that this was the moment that World War III was officially declared. Keith had a lot of great nasty lines about Mick from that period but this one representative sample will suffice for our purposes. A reporter asked him when he and Mick were going to stop bitching about each other in the tabloids.

  KEITH RICHARDS: I don’t know. Ask the bitch.

  Keith got involved in other projects, including the film Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll and starting his own band, the X-Pensive Winos.

  BILL GERMAN: The first Winos album, Talk Is Cheap, is a masterpiece. One critic called it the best Stones album in years. And it taught Keith something about himself, that he could be a leader and a lead singer.

  By the start of 1989, Mick and Keith were starting to mend fences. In January, they met in Barbados to see if they could work together “without killing each other.” In Life, Keith sums up their relationship:

  KEITH RICHARDS: Mick and I may not be friends—too much wear and tear for that—but we’re the closest of brothers and that cannot be severed.

  Indeed, big things lay ahead for the Stones in ’89, starting with their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on January 18.

  HAIL! HAIL! ROCK N ROLL

  One of Keith’s main projects during the mid-’80s was a movie called Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll, which reunited Chuck Berry with his old piano player/collaborator Johnnie Johnson (who had given up music and was driving a bus at the time). Berry was a very up-and-down performer as Bill Wyman explained to me in 1977.

  Bill Wyman: I haven’t really bought his records in the last ten years, because they always seemed like lazy attempts to rehash, unfortunately. But he’s still great on stage. And I do hear he uses good musicians these days to back him sometimes. That was always the failing with him; he was always so fantastic, and yet he wouldn’t pay that extra little bit of cash to get some good musicians behind him so that he could have a great show. He’d just grab somebody for ten bucks a night. It focused everybody’s attention on him, because the rest of the band was no good. I’ve always found that top people have always wanted to produce the best show that they could and not just knock it off like that.

  Berry, like many rock legends, had his own set of personality issues.

  Bill Wyman: He’s very hard to talk to. One day he’ll be very nice; the next day he won’t even speak to you. We must have earned him a few dollars . . . as he probably earned us a few, I’m sure (laughs). I mean, he’s always been an idol and a god of ours, and sometimes he’s not polite enough even to say hello. And when Keith wanted to play with him—when he went on stage with Ian Stewart and a few people in California to back him—Chuck Berry threw ’em all off . . . because they were playing better than he was, probably. Physically, he told them to leave the stage. What a downer that must have been. I think he was a bit resentful of the applause that Keith was getting.

  Being booted off stage wasn’t the only incident Keith had with Berry.

  BILL GERMAN: I got a phone call from a friend of mine who told me,
“You won’t believe this, but Chuck Berry punched Keith last night in the eye at the Ritz.” They were backstage after Chuck played and Keith tapped Chuck on the shoulder. You don’t touch Chuck Berry; he doesn’t like being touched. Then Chuck, claiming that he didn’t know it was Keith, just turned around and just punched Keith. Keith said to a few people that were in the room, “Chuck Berry is the only person in the room who could get away with that without being killed.”

  Chuck Berry duckwalks across the stage in St. Louis during the filming of Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll

  Keith told me another story: He was in LA having just finished taping a TV show for Dick Clark. He’s waiting at LAX to fly back to New York and he bumps into Chuck at the airport and Chuck is sitting on his guitar case. Keith goes up to him and they start exchanging phone numbers and as they’re doing it Chuck accidentally drops a cigarette down Keith’s shirt. The way Keith put it to me was, “Every time I see Chuck Berry I end up wounded.”

  Keith didn’t hold a grudge, but the filming of Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll didn’t end up being much easier. There’s a great scene in the movie of Chuck arguing with Keith about how to play the bends in “Carol.”

  KEITH RICHARDS: The rest of the band behind me, the guys that are with me, if you look at their faces, are going, “He ain’t gonna take much more of this, watch out or you’re going to get stabbed or that guitar’s gonna go round your chops.” I was willing to take all of that. I ate the bullets and chewed lead. If I could show the rest of the guys that I’m willing to take any amount of crap to do this gig, then I’ve got that much of a better band. Also, it’s gonna fox Chuck. He’s trying to provoke me, and I ain’t gonna go for it.

  TAYLOR HACKFORD: When you’re making a documentary, if everything is sweetness and light and everyone is patting each other on the back, you’re kind of doomed to having an uninteresting film. I knew going into this project that it was going to be difficult. There were going to be fireworks. And if I made the film and rode that bucking bronco, there’d be conflict. There’d have to be with Chuck Berry.

  Part of the issue was that Chuck didn’t like to practice.

  KEITH RICHARDS: He’s never rehearsed in his life. He thought the rehearsals were for the band. He didn’t realize they were for him. He needed rehearsing. The band knew their shit. There were some bits a week earlier where Joey Spampinato [of NRBQ] is showing Chuck how to play, and what really happens, in “Around and Around.” Chuck would go back and listen and—to give him his due—would come back and say, “You’re right.” After playing for twenty-odd years with pickup bands, he didn’t know how to play live anymore. It was bugging him that this band was really kicking him up the butt and suddenly he realizes he’s not really cutting the mustard.

  I interviewed Johnnie Johnson and asked him about the film.

  JOHNNIE JOHNSON: Yeah, I look back at that and I hear a lot of mistakes I made while I was playing, but who noticed the mistakes then? You know, I’m just making this movie. I was just so excited about it, and I was making a nice piece of change out of it also. What else could you ask for? Plus getting the recognition that I had been denied before then. And people see you on the street and know who you are. I was in San Francisco after the movie was made, and my wife and I were walking down the street and a fellow—you know the streets are very wide in San Francisco—and this fellow comes running across the street and I didn’t know if he was coming to stick me up or whatever—but he runs across the street and he says, “You’re Johnnie Johnson! Johnnie Johnson! Can I have your autograph?” I didn’t know what he was up to, but I mean after that people began to recognize me, and would probably never have recognized me before that because they had never seen me.

  I asked him to tell me about his relationship with Keith.

  JOHNNIE JOHNSON: Well, the first time I ever met him was during the making of the picture, but naturally everybody knew of the Rolling Stones. And when I first met him, I mean, we just hit it off as very good friends. Matter of fact, his secretary had me come to New York to play by myself at one of his parties. And I’m sitting up there as nervous as I could be ’cause I never played no big party for a star like Keith Richards before, and I’m playing for him at this party, and Keith is sitting on this side, and Eric Clapton on this side, and I’m trembling like I’m frozen.

  In the end, though, Keith made the right decision to work with Berry.

  KEITH RICHARDS: If I’d turned the gig down, somebody else would have done it and I would have been kicking myself. It would have been a sore point with me for the rest of my life.

  The experience was also a real turning point for Keith.

  Keith went formal as the musical director for Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll

  TAYLOR HACKFORD: Keith knew he wouldn’t be there if not for Chuck Berry. Up to that point, Keith was a dark figure in the Rolling Stones. Mick was the brilliant front man. Keith was in the back. It was his junkie days, he was very clearly self-destructive and everybody knew it.

  Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll was Keith’s coming out party. He loved the Rolling Stones. He wanted the Rolling Stones to go on forever. Mick decided to leave and do a solo project which was an insult. I think Keith for the first time stood up and defined himself outside of the Rolling Stones. It was the first major project he did outside the Rolling Stones.

  CHAPTER 44

  NOT FADE AWAY

  IT WAS INEVITABLE that there would one day be a Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Surely this uniquely American art form deserved to stand shoulder to shoulder with all of the other major cultural and financial “leisure-time-activity” institutions in the country. It happened in the mid-’80s. By virtue of my associations with WNEW-FM and K-ROCK, I was pleased and honored to attend the first six Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies, which were all held in New York City. Every one of them had touching and memorable moments and that certainly includes the January 1989 event in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Why?

  Here are nine good reasons: Dion, the Ink Spots, Otis Redding, the Rolling Stones, Bessie Smith, the Soul Stirrers, Phil Spector, the Temptations, and Stevie Wonder.

  Those were the newest additions to the Hall, and I was thrilled to be there to watch the spectacle unfold. I took great personal pride in Dion’s selection because we were both Italian-Americans from the same Bronx neighborhood and had become quite friendly over the course of my years on the radio. He was always an inspiration to me and certainly deserved this recognition as one of the finest male vocalists that rock ’n’ roll has ever produced.

  Then there were the Rolling Stones—as close to a sure thing for this honor as you could imagine. Right up there with Elvis and Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys and the Beatles. The only question left to be answered was how would these titans of irreverence handle this potentially solemn elevation to sainthood?

  Not to worry. Another rock legend set the proper tone in his induction speech.

  PETE TOWNSHEND: Rock ’n’ roll has quite obviously been around for a lot longer than I thought . . . Keith Richards once told me that I think too much. The truth is that I think, generally, that I talk too much. But I don’t think first. And faced with injecting the Rolling Stones this evening, I realized that thinking isn’t going to help me very much . . . I can’t analyze what I feel about the Stones, because I’m really an absolute stone fan of the Stones, and always have been. Their early shows were just shocking, and absolutely riveting and stunning and moving, and they changed my life completely. The Beatles were fun . . . I’m not demeaning them in any way. But the Stones were really what made me wake up. At the Beatles’ shows, there were lots of screaming girls, and at the Stones’—I think the Stones were the first to have a screaming boy. And the sheer force of the Stones on stage, and that perfectly balanced audience—a thousand girls, and me—it kind of singled them out. They’re the only group I’ve ever really been unashamed about idolizing . . . and each of them in their own way has given me something as
an artist, as a person, and as a fan. And it would be crazy to suggest that any of the things they gave me were wholesome, practical, or useful.

  Then Pete went into full-on roast mode:

  PETE TOWNSHEND: Even Bill Wyman hurt me—and not really because I’m jealous of the female company he keeps, no. He got such a big advance for this book he’s doing about the Stones’ life that the book is obviously expected to sell more copies than the last couple of Stones albums. You’ve heard how much he got? You’ve heard how much they sold. It’s a wonder Ahmet even bothered, really. Charlie wounded me in the last year by having a much more dramatic drug problem than mine. Keith had a much more dramatic cure.

  Then he went back to serious mode . . . briefly.

  PETE TOWNSHEND: And Brian Jones hurt me by not bothering to take a cure. Because I loved him a lot. He was very, very important to me. He was the first real star who befriended me in a real way . . . I’ve missed him terribly, and I always felt that when he finally did collapse, that the Stones were a very different group. Mick gave me something too. A bad case of VD. Sorry, that’s wrong. Mick’s mix CD had a bad case . . . And Ronnie Wood of course is now a Rolling Stone; I can’t help but think of him as the new boy. And it’s wonderful to note that, due to his tender age, he still has his own teeth. But I did notice that tonight, they’ve been set into what looks like someone else’s face.