Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The Read online

  To Angela Miller

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  PART ONE

  1 ‘I was schooled with a strap right across my back’

  2 ‘Well, the joint was rockin’ …’

  3 ‘I belong to you and you belong to me, so come on’

  4 ‘Beatle your Rolling Stone hair’

  PART TWO

  5 ‘My client has no fleas’

  6 ‘Everybody’s got something to hide’

  7 ‘It’s down to me; the change has come …’

  8 ‘The Oscar Wilde mistake’

  9 ‘A Mars bar fills that gap’

  PART THREE

  10 ‘Sing this all together – see what happens’

  11 ‘There’s just no room for a street-fighting man …’

  12 ‘He hath awakened from the dream of life’

  13 ‘We’re gonna kiss you goodbye’

  14 ‘The Stones like France tremendously’

  15 ‘Black and Blue’

  16 ‘God Speed the Rolling Stones’

  17 ‘Then there were four’

  18 ‘Some girls give me children …’

  Plate Section

  Afterword

  Author’s Note

  Index

  Also by Philip Norman

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  FOREWORD

  I began researching The Stones in 1981, just after publication of my Beatles biography, Shout! I’d never been a particular admirer of the Rolling Stones, quite the opposite in fact, but chronicling the Beatles had shown me how closely the two bands’ histories were intertwined; so, having ‘done’ the Liverpudlians it seemed logical to move on to the Londoners.

  As a journalist I’d interviewed the Stones only once, in 1965 when I was on a small evening paper in north-east England and they appeared at the ABC cinema in Stockton-on-Tees. It was the zenith of their British notoriety, just post-‘Satisfaction’; I expected surly Neanderthals but, even to a provincial nobody like me, they were perfectly nice. I talked to Mick Jagger sitting on a cold backstage staircase (he wore a white fisherman’s-knit sweater and swigged from a Pepsi-Cola bottle; such different days!), then to all five in their dressing-room.

  Brian Jones was the friendliest, telling me in his quiet, educated voice about the constant hassles they faced between gigs in hotels and restaurants, not for any real bad behaviour – that didn’t come until later – but ‘just because we’re us’. When I requested an autograph for my sister, they all obliged, then former graphic designer Charlie Watts drew a decorative border around their signatures, adding ‘the Rolling Stones’ in case there should be any confusion.

  In later years, as a roving correspondent for the Sunday Times Magazine, I’d written about rock, soul and blues legends from Johnny Cash, Bill Haley, the Everly Brothers, the Beach Boys and Fleetwood Mac to James Brown, Little Richard, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Wilson Pickett, B. B. King and Sleepy John Estes – but never a word about the Stones. There seemed far too many experts on the subject already, turning out miles of copy about them, not least for the magazine named Rolling Stone in their honour.

  However, just as I’d previously found with the Beatles, what at first looked like formidable competition soon melted away. The vast slush-pile of articles on the Stones had, by and large, swallowed their mythology whole. The books published about them to date were either partial, highly suspect memoirs by former friends (such as the drug-dealer ‘Spanish Tony’ Sanchez) or glossy pulp for the fans. There had never been a real biography of a band that shaped the Sixties as much as the Beatles did, perhaps even more, and who, to general amazement, were soon to celebrate 20 years together.

  Fortuitously, just as I committed to the project, the Stones announced a 20th anniversary world tour, to kick off at the John F. Kennedy Stadium, Philadelphia, on September 25, 1981. With the Sunday Times (and now also Shout!) behind me, I was given accreditation to cover its American leg.

  When one says one has been on tour with the Rolling Stones, people’s eyes tend to light up with visions of Bacchanalian orgies. Actually, it was one of the most arduous, frustrating and, often, humiliating experiences of my career. Unlike previous chroniclers such as Truman Capote and Terry Southern, I was not embedded with the tour: I had to make my own way to each venue, then apply for show-tickets and backstage access to the Stones’ American publicist, Paul Wasserman.

  This Wasserman was an overweight, bearded man with a bald head oddly like a tortoise’s, who constantly shed paper napkins from the ice-cream parlours to which he was addicted. Wherever he appeared, so did a crowd of journalists from newspapers, magazines and broadcasting organizations from all over the world, myself among them, pleading, expostulating, at times raging, at the inadequate media facilities he had provided. Nothing, however, moved Wasserman, whose fear of his clients overrode all normal PR instincts, to keep the press sweet. Under our onslaught his tortoise head would retract defensively into its shell and another paper napkin or two would float free: the Porter’s words in Shakespeare’s Macbeth – ‘Have napkins enough about you, here you’ll sweat for ’t’ – might have been written for him.

  At the tour’s opening venue, Philadelphia’s vast, cheerless JFK Stadium, only photographers were allowed front-of-stage, for a few minutes each at a pre-ordained and immovable camera angle. The writing contingent were imprisoned in the bleachers, the block of empty seats behind the stage, under the hostile glare of innumerable thuggish-looking security guards, unable to see a thing or even hear very well. For my first unrestricted view of the Stones in performance, I had to travel to the tour’s third stop, Rockford, Illinois. There, and again in Boulder, Colorado, and again in Buffalo, New York, I asked Paul Wasserman if I could interview Mick and Keith; each time, the only response was a blank stare and more falling triangles of porous paper.

  In despair, I filed a perfunctory story to the Sunday Times and flew back to London to try another tack (journalism was different then). I approached the Stones’ UK publicist, Keith Altham, himself a former music journalist, and said that the Times had guaranteed me the front of its prestigious Weekly Review section if he could deliver me Mick and the other Keith. A few weeks later (this is how different journalism was then) I returned to America with Altham to pick up the tour again in Orlando, Florida.

  So, backstage at Orlando’s Tangerine Bowl, I was finally ushered through concentric rings of security into the enclosure where the Stones foregathered with a few selected VIPs before each show. In one corner, away from the social chit-chat, Mick was limbering up for his two hours onstage, wearing a bright yellow puffer jacket and American football-player’s knickerbockers. When Altham took me over for an introduction, I thought I’d better make it brief; a rock megastar about to face an 80,000-strong audience would hardly be in the mood for small talk.

  How wrong I was. Even when psyching himself up to a feat of endurance that seemed remarkable enough for a 38-year-old, the sharp Jagger brain remained ever alert. He told me he’d read Shout!, then, while never slackening his workout, proceeded to correct a minor point of fact about Allen Klein, the manager whom the Beatles and Stones had once shared.

  I interviewed him next afternoon beside the pool at his hotel, getting the quiet, thoughtful Mick he puts on for the broadsheet press – and hearing the bizarre claim, to be repeated many times later, that he recalled almost nothing of his career as a performer. That evening, I visited Bill Wyman in his room with the computer – still a great novelty then – on which he claimed to have stored the names and addresses of a thousand different women he’d slept with. Neit
her Ronnie Wood nor Charlie Watts was difficult to reach: Woody could usually be found propping up some bar or other, while Charlie, who’d always hated touring, was often around in the early morning, wearing what I can only describe as grey flannel culottes and watching rather enviously as British film-crews packed up to go home.

  I even joined a trip to nearby Disney World with Keith Altham’s family and Ian Stewart, one of the original members of the band, who later became their roadie and back-up pianist. So I could legitimately say I’d been on Space Mountain with a Rolling Stone.

  Confident I finally had my ‘in’, I followed on to the next gig, the giant Astrodome in Houston, Texas, where I saw Mick doing his pre-show recce of the arena, unrecognizable in combat trousers and a camouflage hat pulled down over his eyes. But at the entrance to the VIP enclosure, I was stopped by Jim Callaghan, the hulking Cockney security chief in a crumpled green caftan who’d waved me through so genially a few days before. ‘Where’s yore press-card?’ he snarled. VIP that I now thought myself, I’d left it at the hotel. ‘No press-card, no entry!’ I remember walking away from the Astrodome’s sparkly red lights, thinking, ‘Even when I went to Libya to interview Gaddafi, I wasn’t treated like that.’

  Getting to Keith, as might be expected, was an odyssey in itself – one delayed until the following spring, when the 20th anniversary tour reached Europe. First, I was called to see him in Glasgow, where I hung about outside the Apollo Theatre for a whole afternoon and evening under the supervision of police as thuggish as any Stones minders. As I watched one officer roughly disperse a knot of inoffensive girls, he fixed me with a Jim Callaghan glare and demanded, ‘Are you lookin’ at me?’ Only by swiftly moving away did I avoid being put into the back of a van. Eventually, I received word that Keith would be very busy in both Scotland and England, so preferred to see me when the tour moved on to Paris.

  At the Hotel Warwick just off the Champs Elysées I waited in the lobby, then in my room, for a total of fourteen hours. The summons into Keith’s presence did not come until past 3 a.m. We had been talking for only about five minutes when Paul Wasserman’s assistant, Alvinia Bridges, marched in and told me I’d have to stop there as it was ‘time for Keith to have some fun’. I’ve never wanted to strangle someone so much as at that moment.

  Back in London, it was some consolation to talk again to Bill Wyman, the Stones’ unofficial archivist, over lunch at an old-fashioned French restaurant named Boulestin, which served Bill’s favourite Provençal rosé, Domaine Ott.

  Afterwards, he and his then girlfriend Astrid Lundstrom were due to be photographed by David Bailey, and they invited me to go along. We’d talked so much that we arrived more than an hour late; the great photographer was fuming, but I just shut my eyes and told myself it wasn’t my fault. I expected Bailey to pose his subjects with a lot of Sixties schmoozing and cries of ‘Super!’. His only instruction to Bill, however, was ‘Stand over here, you cunt.’

  I didn’t get the Keith interview until two months later, in his suite at the top of London’s Carlton Tower Hotel. I came away charmed by his articulacy and humour, and the honesty and directness that were such a contrast with Mick. Thanks to years insulated from reality by thick-eared bodyguards (quite as harmful to the brain-cells as drugs) he was also a bit of a malapropist. When I think of excitement pumping at a Stones concert, I remember Keith’s word for it: ‘andrenaline’.

  Elsewhere I had a somewhat easier time. In 1982, most of the principal supporting characters in the story were still alive – miraculously so in some cases – and all of them agreed to talk to me.

  My very first interviewee, in fact, was Andrew Loog Oldham, the inspired young PR man who moulded the Stones into British pop’s first anti-heroes, who almost singlehandedly created the Mick Jagger we know today, and remains unequalled in the music business (save, perhaps, by Malcolm McLaren) for vision, nerve and outrageousness.

  By then minus the ‘Loog’ and living in New York, Oldham talked to me in his office in Broadway’s Brill Building, amid the shades of great songwriters like Leiber and Stoller, Goffin and King, and Neil Sedaka. We continued the conversation in downtown Chinese restaurants and then intermittently in London, long after my biography was completed and published. People do not always like what I write about them, but Oldham relished my description of him – prompted by the way he ultimately let the Stones slip through his fingers – as having ‘style to the point of self-destruction’.

  Marianne Faithfull in 1982 was just coming out of the long cycle of addiction and self-degradation that had followed her break-up with Mick. I sent a message via her agent asking if she’d see me, and received a polite refusal; then the agent telephoned to say that she’d changed her mind as a result of reading Shout!

  We talked in the Chelsea basement flat where Marianne was living with a punk musician, some years her junior, named Ben E. Ficial. Half-way through the evening, having discovered that I’d never taken cocaine, she insisted I must have a line and sent Ben out to get it. She’d already impressed on me (in the granddame manner that once so fascinated Mick) how ill-mannered it was to refuse drugs other people had paid for and taken trouble to obtain. So I inhaled the stuff while she stood over me, going, ‘Come on … you’ve left a bit!’ like a gym-teacher urging some sluggish pupil up the parallel bars. It did nothing for me but make my senses momentarily feel as if they were toppling sideways, and left a scab inside my nose that stayed for weeks.

  Two of my most crucial informants were living essentially the same lives in the early Eighties as when they’d hung out with the Stones in the mid-Sixties. Christopher Gibbs, Mick’s one-time aesthetic counsellor, still had an antique shop on Chelsea’s King’s Road, where he gave me an eye-witness account of the legendary 1967 Redlands drug-bust. Robert Fraser, tried and imprisoned along with Mick and Keith – but not released quite so speedily – was still London’s most eclectic art-dealer. Sitting in his Mayfair flat, surrounded by original Jim Dines and John Lennons, he supplied an even more chilling description than Keith had done of heroin’s deadly seductive power.

  Some sources had been tapped many times before, like Dick Taylor, Keith’s fellow student at Sidcup Art College, who was in the original Stones line-up, then went on to join an even hairier band, the Pretty Things. ‘I wondered what the spiel would be this time,’ he said after I’d explained at length how different and serious my book would be. Others came my way through the sheer luck every biographer needs. For example, there was Shirley Arnold, the Stones’ fan-club secretary and long-time assistant, who recalled a somewhat different Brian Jones from the amoral, devious, larcenous screw-up of legend. As also did Helen Spittal, a young fan who visited Brian a few days before he mysteriously drowned in his swimming-pool, leaving behind the fog of Kennedyesque conspiracy theory that lingers to this day.

  Tracking down elusive interviewees sometimes became an obsession or, rather, a sickness from which one awoke cured the morning after finally reaching them. I spent months on the trail of Anita Pallenberg, by then separated from Keith. I got a phone-number for her that worked and persuaded her to see me in her suite at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel. But when I rang at the door, a croaky voice through the woodwork informed me she wasn’t well and I’d have to come back another time. Interviewing rock people hardens you to this feeling of so near, yet so far. Several more weeks passed before I was finally cured of Anita-itis. (For others, Keith included, it took longer.)

  In the most bizarre instance of biographer’s luck, I also got to spend a Christmas Day at 3 Cheyne Walk, the Chelsea house Keith had abandoned when the Stones went into tax-exile in France a decade earlier. The wood-panelled eighteenth-century interior retained all its original rock ’n’ roll features, like the shrine to Jimi Hendrix in the first-floor drawing room and an en suite toilet with a bead curtain instead of a door. A few of Keith’s personal possessions were still scattered around the basement, including a right ski-boot and a block of three aircraft seats, torn from their
mooring during some long-ago in-flight vandalism. The house’s temporary tenant, writer and painter Molly Parkin, was convinced the house was haunted. Might the restless spirits, I wondered, include a left ski-boot, seeking its lost brother, and a jumbo jet, seeking a lost segment of its first-class cabin?

  Halfway through the project I relocated to New York, where I spent time with, among others, Allen Klein’s nephew Ron Schneider, who ran the Stones’ ‘renaissance’ American tour of 1969, and David Maysles, who filmed the free concert at Altamont, California, that was its bloody aftermath. I spent a further evening with Marianne, this time tête-à-tête, on nothing stronger than Stolichnaya vodka. And, in my greatest-ever stroke of biographer’s luck, I had an hour on the telephone with Mick’s first, most beautiful and most ill-used wife, Bianca.

  I wrote the second half of the book in an artist’s loft in TriBeCa during New York’s hottest summer for decades. There was no air-conditioning, and roaches as big as fat, glossy dates galloped over the bare floorboards. The ‘loft’ (first floor actually) belonged to a sculptress who seemed to have only one subject: the naked human posterior. Sets of buttocks were everywhere, in stone or plaster, some mounted on the wall, some free-standing. In the centre of the main room, impossible to move, stood a tableau of two giant naked wrestlers, fashioned from khaki-coloured clay, balsawood and wire, and locked together in a pose showing off both their buttocks to the optimum.

  I worked at a ratty silver card table, so close to the wrestlers that I could have used the anus of one as a pen-holder. I had no word processor – few writers then did – just a small portable typewriter and a pile of those peculiarly American yellow writing-pads. The cobbled street outside was a rat-run for heavy trucks en route to the Holland Tunnel; every few minutes, the building would shake as another consignment of McDonald’s or Tropicana orange juice thundered by.

  For me, as for most authors, the final job in the writing of every book is polishing up its opening paragraphs. This I did in the old Long Island whaling town of Sag Harbor in midwinter, when the snow turned every street of wooden houses and picket fences into a Norman Rockwell nocturne. I worked in a bedroom decorated in nineteenth-century pioneer style, including a spiky four-poster, and ate each evening in a deserted bar whose owner greeted me with as much ceremony as if I were a party led by King Edward VII. It couldn’t have been a pleasanter contrast with buttocks and trucks in TriBeCa – or, for that matter, going on tour with the Stones.