34

ON AND OFF THE ROAD

Some Girls was the bestselling album in the United States. It went platinum six times and spawned several hit singles, including “Miss You,” the band’s last American number one. Looking back, it’s the obvious capper, the final marker before the wilderness begins. From there, it’s nothing but dead letters and short days. As in a film, the ensuing decades slip by in montage, each band member going from early middle age to late middle age to frankly old.

Mick Jagger has devoted much of his time in recent years to the business of making movies, a second career that grew from his collaborations with filmmakers and photographers. Scorsese told me about the first time he met Jagger: Scorsese wanted to use “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” in a crucial scene in Mean Streets. Jagger insisted on seeing the entire film first—he’s become somewhat less cautious, as can be seen in dozens of flicks with directors who, at a crucial moment, turn the hard work of mood and tempo over to the Stones. Jagger has been interested in film since at least as far back as his work with Tony Richardson and Donald Cammell. Though he’s been involved as a producer on several features—the James Brown biopic Get On Up, most recently—big success has eluded him. Mick Jagger in Hollywood is like a late-career story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s all about the near miss and the almost and the key lesson that remains the same: to Louis B. Mayer, even Satan is just another schmuck on the line. The script I wrote with Jagger and Scorsese was a work of love. It kicked around for years, but remained stubbornly alive. In February 2016, after many iterations, it made its debut on HBO as a series called Vinyl.

Jagger’s persistence in Hollywood strikes me as just another escape attempt, another run at adulthood, another search for a life free of Keith Richards—a quest that culminated in 2003, when Mick was knighted by Prince Charles. Asked what he felt when he heard about it, Richards said, “Cold, cold rage at his blind stupidity….I threatened to pull out of the tour, went berserk, bananas! But, quite honestly, Mick’s fucked up so many times, what’s another fuckup?” By accepting the knighthood, Keith believed, Mick had sold out to the very forces of reaction that busted them at Redlands. Richards is the friend who won’t let you forget the promise you made under the bridge.

Jagger’s longest romantic relationship was with Jerry Hall, a leggy blond model from Texas. They started dating in 1977, before Mick’s divorce from Bianca. Jagger and Hall were wed in a Balinese ceremony that the pop star later claimed wasn’t really official and didn’t really count. They split in 1999 after having four children, Elizabeth, James, Georgia, and Gabriel. That same year, Jagger had a son with the Brazilian fashion model Luciana Gimenez Morad. His name is Lucas. Jagger has seven children and five grandchildren. He recently became a great-grandfather. In 2001 he started dating L’Wren Scott, a fashion designer even taller than Jerry Hall. Scott was born in 1964, the year the Stones charted with “Not Fade Away.” In 2014, while the Stones were touring in Australia, she hanged herself with a scarf.

The Stones canceled several concert dates. Mick flew back to America. The pictures of him taken in these hours—on a tarmac, on a hotel balcony—were shocking. His face looked gutted, his body fragile and small. Grief had emptied him, weakened him like a disease. He was suddenly so much older. The famous features—lips and hair—had rearranged themselves into the countenance of an elderly man. I’ve always admired Mick; for the first time, I sympathized with him. He’s always been defined by sex and satisfaction—youth. He’s now reached the far shore of that country. An old man defined by sex is a strange thing.

—

If Mick Jagger teaches you how to stay young, Charlie Watts teaches you how to be old, how to remain elegant while being completely still. He was ancient when he was twenty, which has made his passage to actual dotage as smooth as the transition from evening to night. He is the still point at the center of the storm, calmly pursuing his interests, which include the U.S. Civil War, the Stones, and jazz. When not playing with Mick and Keith, he has toured with his own band, the Charlie Watts Quintet, a jazz combo in the Chris Barber style. But Charlie did suffer a single season of dangerous curiosity. He remained sober in the drug years. He drank, but that’s it. He was a metronome, smiling as he kept the beat. Then, in his middle age, at a time many others were switching to cornbread and iced tea, Charlie flirted with heroin, as if he suddenly decided, Since I’m gonna die anyway, I might as well know what they knew—“they” being the black jazz musicians who remain his heroes. “I don’t know what made me do it that late in life, although in retrospect, I think I must have been going through some kind of a midlife crisis,” Watts said. “I had never done any serious drugs when I was younger, but at this point in my life, I went, ‘Sod it. I’ll do it now.’ ”

Bill Wyman had his own midlife crisis—a spectacular one. It was signaled by an interview he gave to The Sun of London. “Two weeks ago I went to bed with nine different girls in a week but nobody knows about that,” he told a reporter, “newspapers don’t follow me around. No one worries about what Bill Wyman is up to, and that’s fine by me. Just three or four months ago I went to bed with four different girls in one day. I promise you that’s the truth, but everything is done very discreetly. I find it interesting to go with different girls. They say variety is the spice of life—and it certainly is for me….I don’t know if I’m good in bed or not, but I’ve never had any complaints. And I’ve had more girls than any of the other Stones—more than all of them put together, probably. It’s not something I ever talk about because I hate men who brag like that, but I remember sitting down with the band once when we were touring America years and years ago. We were in a hotel room and we spent four hours working out how many girls we’d been to bed with in the previous couple of years. I was running at just under three hundred at that time. Brian Jones was about one thirty-five. Mick Jagger was about thirty-two. Keith Richards was six. And Charlie Watts was zero.”

Oh, Bill Perks, you poor, downtrodden man, lost in the back row with your bass guitar, small hands, high heels, and fear of oblivion!

Bill Wyman took up with a thirteen-year-old girl, a predilection as old as rock ’n’ roll. Jerry Lee Lewis and his child bride. Chuck Berry and Sweet Little Sixteen. It’s in the DNA: fast cars and nymphets. “I love young ladies of eighteen…or twenty-two…or twenty-three,” Wyman told The Sun, “and they seem to enjoy me. I think sex is the healthiest thing of all. After I’ve been to bed with some twenty-two-year-old chick, I get up after a three-hour session with so much energy I feel I can do anything.”

Wyman first spotted Mandy Smith at an awards banquet in 1984. “I saw two stunning girls leaving the dance floor and my heart just jumped,” he writes. “She took my breath away. I felt like I’d been whacked over the head with a hammer.”

Wyman talked to the older sister first, Nicola Smith.

“Well, you must be twenty,” he told her.

“No,” she said, “I’m fifteen. And Mandy’s thirteen.”

Mandy Smith wanted to be a model. Wyman got her a meeting with an agency—they told her to come back in a year—then asked to meet her mom. He went to the house with flowers and chocolate. He kissed Mandy in the hallway, then asked the mom if he could take the daughter out. Bill and Mandy began dating on the sly, though word eventually got out.

Teenage girl plus fifty-year-old man equals tabloid sensation. There was talk of statutory rape charges. “It was a nightmare,” Wyman writes. “I didn’t think I’d done her any harm, whatever her age. Quite the reverse. I was deeply upset at being in the limelight like this, because I’d looked after Mandy and treated her honorably: I’d tried to encourage her to continue her education when she’d flunked out; I’d tried to help her career; I hadn’t introduced her to alcohol or drugs. I simply wanted to be with her.”

The scandal might or might not have contributed to Wyman’s decision to quit the Stones before the Voodoo Lounge tour. He told Ron Wood he’d simply grown tired of the slog, especially the air travel. “Bill hated to fly, and said he’d never get on another plane,” Wood told me. When I asked Richards about it, he said, “When I first got word he was leaving, I wanted to cut Bill’s throat. Nobody quits the Stones—nobody!”

Wyman was replaced by Darryl Jones, a Chicago bassist who’d played with Miles Davis. Wyman has spent the subsequent years working with his own band, the Rhythm Kings. He’s the only living member of the Stones I’ve never interviewed. I tried to talk to him in London. At first he agreed, then said maybe, then said he had the flu. Which is fine. Bill Wyman’s always been like a head on Easter Island, silently towering. Plus there are his books. Wyman has appointed himself the official Stones historian. A selection of his mementos—Bill Wyman’s Scrapbook—was published in a limited edition. Leafing through the pages is dizzying. He’s seemingly hung on to every stage bill, flyer, and receipt. You can piece together the entire age from his artifacts.

—

Anita Pallenberg had the bleakest second and third acts of any member of the Stones circle. In 1976, she was living in Switzerland with Keith, Marlon, Dandelion, and their newborn baby boy, Tara, named for the Guinness heir Tara Browne. One morning, when Keith and Marlon were in Paris with the Stones, Anita found Tara dead in his crib. He was two months old.

Anita met Keith in Paris that night. She stood backstage as he performed. Parts of the show are included on Love You Live. Knowing the background changes the record. Listening to Keith sing “Happy”—“I never kept a dollar past sunset / it always burned a hole in my pants”—is electrifyingly sad when you know what was really on his mind. Anita and Keith left as soon as the concert was over. “Anita was crying and seemed to be having difficulty moving,” Nick Kent writes in The Dark Stuff. “Keith was shepherding her along but he was crying too and looked all of a sudden to be impossibly fragile, like a stiff breeze could send him spinning to the ground. No longer the Scott and Zelda of the rock ’n’ roll age, they looked like some tragic shell-shocked couple leading each other out of a concentration camp. I honestly never thought I’d see them alive again.”

Pallenberg never fully recovered, nor did her relationship with Richards. Her daughter, Dandelion, was sent to live with Keith’s mother in England soon after the baby died. In the summer of 1979, Anita was living with Marlon in South Salem, New York, a few miles from where I write these sentences. The house was a pit and she was a ruin, a weird hippie lady that locals regarded as a witch. Neighbors reported night chanting. Dead cats turned up in the yard. “She’s a sick person,” a local kid named Steve Levoie reportedly said. “She should be put away. The house was filthy, really dirty, and Anita was dirty herself. She even asked my sister if she wanted some coke….She had a lot of young boys who would come to the house all the time. She would ask for sex and talk of sex quite often. She never asked me, but who’d want a dirty old woman like that?”

Anita, then in her midthirties, took up with a seventeen-year-old named Scott Cantrell. He’d come to do errands, then stayed. His mother had killed herself and he’d dropped out of school—just another wayward soul who fell into the diorama. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. None of it was very glamorous. On July 20, 1979, Cantrell shot himself in Anita’s bed with Anita’s gun—possibly playing Russian roulette.

While examining the crime scene, Detective Douglas Lamanna of the South Salem police noticed a newspaper with Anita’s picture beneath the headline WHAT ANITA DID TO BIANCA.

“Is that you?”

“Yes.”

“What’d you do to Bianca?”

Pallenberg was charged with possession of stolen property and illegal possession of weapons and ultimately paid a fine. Asked how she felt when the boy died, she told The Sunday Correspondent: “I didn’t feel anything. That’s one of the wonders of drugs and drink. You don’t feel anything.”

Anita returned to England, went back to school, and got a degree. She has since appeared in movies and TV shows. She rides her bike near Redlands. She’s had a hip replaced and walks with a limp. She’s old but looks even older. She’s consumed more than her share of life, misery, heroin, and cocaine. Asked about Keith, she told a reporter, “He’s aged the best—he was always the best.”

—

Keith’s life turned in 1977, while the Stones rehearsed for an upcoming tour. It started with Anita, who, because of either her flamboyant manner or her flamboyant appearance, attracted an unhealthy amount of attention on a flight from London to Toronto. Her luggage—twenty-eight pieces, according to Chet Flippo—was searched at customs. Hashish was found, along with a spoon and a needle with traces of heroin, giving Canadian police cause to search her local residence—three adjoining suites shared at the Harbour Castle hotel with Keith. Five Mounties went through drawers and shelves, the pockets of spangled coats, the toes of Western boots, the bodies of acoustic guitars. They found heroin, a razor blade, a knife, a brass lighter, a silver bowl, a teaspoon, foil, three red pills, and a hypodermic needle—all the fixin’s.

Keith slept through the whole thing, which seems impossible until you consider the chemical nature of his slumber. He had to be slapped back to consciousness before he could be arrested. Bail was set and paid. He was back at the hotel that night, but in big trouble. Enough product had been recovered to charge him with not merely possession but trafficking. If convicted, he could spend decades in prison, just the way Captain Kidd went out: a cell in the colonies, a green island floating in the cold water beyond barred windows. What’s more, he was sick. The cops had taken all his shit and he was going into withdrawal, swarmed by meanies, seeing the rat.

“I’ll never forget going to [Keith’s] room with Woody to find him writhing on the floor, vomiting,” Bill Wyman writes. “We tried to give him pills but he threw them up. Woody said to me: ‘What can we do?’ I said, ‘Well, we’ve obviously got to get him some heroin, haven’t we?’ I feared he would otherwise have died. Nobody seemed to be looking after him. And so Woody and I went out of the hotel, which was riddled with plain-clothes detectives, and scored some heroin to get him by. I’ve never done that for anybody before or since, but he simply had to have it at that point.”

The case was resolved in a manner too drawn-out and bureaucratic to go into, but suffice it to say that the Canadian raid, which seemed like the end of Keith, proved to be a good thing. In forcing Keith to finally get clean, it probably saved his life. Keith and Anita apparently broke up because she refused to get off junk. Given a choice—love or obliteration—she chose obliteration. Keith went on. At first, his treatment consisted of wires connecting him to a mechanical box. This sent a pulse into his brain, shocking him with electricity and blunting the symptoms of withdrawal. He was still using the device a short time later when the band was rehearsing in Woodstock, New York. When I spoke to Ian McLagan, who played keyboards on that tour, he remembered the box with a shiver and spoke of how, in the middle of a sentence, Keith would get hit by a jolt and stabs of pain would register on his face. “He carried it around like it was a guitar,” McLagan told me. “He hated it, but he was determined.”

Keith met Patti Hansen at the Roxy roller rink in Manhattan in December 1979. It was his thirty-sixth birthday, and he was celebrating. She was a twenty-three-year-old Vogue model from Staten Island. It was a match made in blue-collar heaven. The train from Dartford; the ferry from St. George Terminal. Keith is a serial monogamist. No matter what happened on the road, he’s been loyal to his partner. In every case I know, it was the woman who, in one way or another, left him. Linda Keith went off with Jimi Hendrix. Anita chose junk. And Keith is still with Patti Hansen. I remember flying beside him to New York after a show. When the plane banked over Long Island Sound, he looked out the window and smiled. “That’s my home down there,” he said. “When I see those lights, I know I’m close to everything I love.”

Keith lives in a big house that backs up to a nature preserve in Weston, Connecticut. He lingers on his estate in the way of an aristocrat lingering on ancestral grounds, a sage old man fading toward gossamer. He’s suffered various mishaps: stumbles, falls, fractures. Lord, your sea is so big and my ship is so small. In 2006, he fell out of a tree in Fiji, which, according to press reports, was a palm tree, but according to Keith was somewhat less picturesque. Two days later, while riding on a boat, he was knocked backward by a swell, banging his head a second time. That’s when the pain began. He had a clot in his brain. He was taken in for emergency surgery. I’ve been told by people close to the band that it was far more serious than fans realize. Keith recovered but has never been the same. It was a near-death experience, and he emerged weakened and somewhat frail. He has to be extremely careful. Even after quitting heroin, he still sought derangement. The doctors said that had to stop. Backstage one night, a musician handed Keith a pill, which he swallowed without consideration. He did not even know what it was. A few minutes into the show, he stumbled and fell. Jagger simply stepped over his friend and kept performing.

Yet Keith still carries on in the old spirit, with the old joy. Once, when I asked a rapper what Lyor Cohen, one of the first executives of Def Jam Records, was like, he said, “Lyor is old and white but he’s so fucking gangster—doing it like it needs doing, doing it like it’s got to be done.” To me, that’s Keith. No matter how old, beat up, or infirm, he’s still so fucking gangster, doing it like it needs doing, doing it like it’s got to be done.

Keith and Patti raised two daughters in Weston, not far from where I now live. I first heard of this bucolic pocket of rolling hills on the Stones’ plane as Keith mumbled his way home after a show. He blessed the place, and I’ve aged from early middle age to middle middle age myself here, raising my own children a bike ride from the Richards estate. Now and then, when I go to Luc’s, a bistro in Ridgefield, Keith is at the bar with a glass of vodka in front of him and a big hat on his head. On such occasions, the owner of the restaurant, who’s related to Keith, puts on a playlist consisting almost entirely of reggae. Keith drinks, listens, smiles, and laughs. He wears sunglasses and soft shoes with buckles. I nod to him and say hello and he acknowledges me and says hello back but it’s impossible to say whether he remembers or has gotten into the famous man’s habit of seeming to remember everyone.

On certain days, he lingers. When he lingers, I linger, soaking up the Zen-like rock ’n’ roll of his presence. It means being in the exact right place at the exact right time; it means that Keith’s road, which was Crawdaddy and Chess and Villefranche, and my road, which was SATs and college and rules, have led to the same place, emptied into the same song. It justifies every decision I’ve ever made.