Mick Jagger (74 page)

The band reconvened to rehearse at a recording-studio-cum-farm in rural Massachusetts, at that time vivid with the glories of a New England autumn. Despite his recent strenuous months in Peru, Mick considered himself hopelessly out of condition and began an intensive program of weight training, karate, squash, and daily seven-mile runs, in addition to overseeing the tour’s security arrangements and Kabuki-esque stage design, and conferring with Prince Rupert Loewenstein. After a couple of weeks, he was down to just 125 pounds and a waist measurement of twenty-seven inches.

As an extra warm-up, the band gave a surprise performance at a small club called Sir Morgan’s Cave in the neighboring town of Worcester. Three hundred tickets for a one-night-only appearance by “Blue Sunday and the Cockroaches” had been issued to listeners of a local radio station in strict secrecy, but a rival station got wind of the plot and leaked that the Stones were coming. On the night, four thousand people besieged Sir Morgan’s Cave, which averted a riot only by throwing open all its doors. Next day, a string of other Massachusetts towns issued hasty ordinances to prevent any similar surprises being visited on them. The tour could thus begin with headlines juxtaposing “STONES,” as so many times before, with “RIOT” and “BAN”: not the fragrance of Jôvan perfume but a white lightning reek of their old danger and lawlessness.

The first show was on September 25, at Philadephia’s hundred-thousand-capacity John F. Kennedy Stadium. Clouds of party balloons nodding above the stage could not disguise the tension in the humid, hot-doggy air. It was only nine months since John Lennon had been gunned down by Mark David Chapman outside the Dakota building, virtually next door to Mick’s present New York address, 123 Central Park West. There was palpable, and by no means illogical, fear that yet again Jagger might follow in Lennon’s footsteps.

The murder had shaken Mick to the core, however hard the Tyranny of Cool might try to conceal it. Lennon had been one of his very few long-term friends and one of the still-fewer professional rivals he unreservedly admired. When Lennon first settled in America, they had often socialized, even made music together on occasion. But with the birth of his son Sean in 1975, Lennon had retreated inside the Dakota, devoting himself to child care, giving over his business affairs to Yoko Ono, and severing contact with even his oldest music cronies. Mick, as a result, had found himself in the—for him—highly unusual position of wanting to see someone but having his every friendly overture rebuffed.

From his sitting room window, he could see the Gothic rooftops of Lennon’s home, and would sometimes act out the part of a spurned girlfriend: “[John’s] right over there. Does he ever call me? Does he ever go out? No. Changes his phone number about every ten minutes. I’ve given up …” But there was no disguising how much this apparent indifference really hurt. Once or twice, he put aside the Tyranny of Cool sufficiently to leave Lennon a note with his own current phone number at the Dakota concierges’ desk, but no response ever came. He little suspected that, despite having ostensibly retired from music, Lennon still followed his every move almost as closely as Paul McCartney’s, and felt vaguely envious of his partying across town at Studio 54.

Mick’s life had been threatened many times over the years, of course, but always by those whom, consciously or unconsciously, he’d goaded to hatred: cuckolded boyfriends, disgruntled promoters, disrespected Hell’s Angels. The terrible difference was that Lennon had been murdered by someone professing to love him. Now, as millions across America screamed welcome back to the Stones, any one of them might be a potential assassin.

Consequently, the security—which in the modern world meant insecurity—was at a level never known in live rock before. Hundreds of police and highway patrol officers guarded the approaches to each venue and fussed to and fro overhead in helicopters. As well as the Stones’ regular, populous protection team, a force of local stewards was recruited at each stop, uniformed in yellow Tshirts and stationed along the stage front to glare ferociously at the paying customers and meet any breach of bounds, however accidental or innocent, with mass, unrestrained force.

The most conpicuous of these mercenaries was a genuine giant, seven feet tall at least, clad in jogging clothes and a baseball cap lettered TULSA POLICE, who guarded the VIP enclosure at JFK Stadium with an expression suggesting he would not merely deter unauthorized intruders but pop them into his mouth and crunch them up, chanting “Fee fi fo fum!” Among Mick’s personal Praetorian guard was a squat Chinese gentleman in a baby-blue tracksuit, identified as Dr. Daniel Pai, grand master, or White Dragon of the Pai-Lun martial-arts order. Dangling from one sleeve the doctor carried a small fan with a sharp metal edge. The implication was that it could simultaneously create a cooling breeze and take someone’s head off.

Draconian restrictions were also placed on the press and broadcast media, who for the most part found themselves penned in the bleachers far behind the stage and unable to see the performance at all. Photographers and camera crews were allowed to shoot Mick in action only for a couple of minutes each, all under strict supervision and from the same fixed seventy-degree upward angle. If any attempted to depart from this or loiter when ordered to vacate their position, a man named Jerry Pompili would touch their camera with a long metal instrument like a cattle prod, instantly destroying the film inside.

The tour’s second most important figure was the Stones’ director of security, Jim Callaghan, a man in every way unlike his British prime ministerial namesake, from his pugilist’s face to his crumpled, pale green dragon-embroidered caftan. But even Callaghan’s power was limited to saying no. In that whole giant, paranoid traveling circus, only one person had absolute power to say yes.

That person was to be seen during the ritual couple of hours’ delay before each show jogging up and down the special warm-up area set aside for him backstage, seemingly oblivious to the ebb and flow of VIP guests and Keith and Woody’s relentless merrymaking. In his stage wardrobe, butterfly-wing feyness had been replaced by the severely practical and uncompromisingly masculine—American football player’s breeches, bulk-purchased on New York’s Canal Street at fifteen dollars per pair, together with protective knee pads, a low-key colored T-shirt, and shoes suitable for extended roadwork. Limbering and psyching himself up to face yet another eighty or a hundred thousand people did not prevent his being approached by a constant stream of subordinates, from Jim Callaghan downward, all seeking that unique, definitive “yes.” Sometimes he would accompany Callaghan on a quick inspection of the stage and the area immediately in front of it, where another Mark David Chapman might conceivably lurk. No one in the expectant multitude even noticed, let alone recognized, the diminutive figure with a camouflage hat pulled down low over its eyes.

On this tour, his stage act was no longer notable for its outrageousness but for its athleticism. For more than two hours, he was all over the giant stage, slaloming in and out among his static bandmates, prancing along each of the forty-yard aprons in turn, climbing the scaffolding and hanging off by an arm and leg, or skidding onto his padded knees like a football player scoring a touchdown. There were no brief retirements into the wings for a restorative drag of something or other, no quieter interludes seated on a stool that a man pushing forty might be expected to need—no pauses at all except to introduce the other four, toss out a deeper-than-Dixie “A-aw-right!,” or swig from a plastic bottle of Evian water. The onetime epitome of decadence and self-indulgence now looked all about simplicity and clean living.

Starting with “Under My Thumb,” he delivered most of the Stones’ golden oldies, a man pushing forty using the same voice, acting out the same charade he had as an eighteen-year-old. And even on humid, balloon-filled, onion-smelly afternoons in Philadelphia or Orlando, those oldies still stirred up all the wickedness of their innocent heyday—the “nana-nana-nana-nana-na” prelude to “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” for instance, getting much more reaction than “Start Me Up”’s “you make a dead man come.” Only toward the end did he look more like the old over-the-top Jagger, using a cherry picker to be swung out above his audience and sing “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” while pelting them with long-stemmed red carnations.

With memories of Altamont never far away, the after-show escape was a military exercise, set in motion while the Stones still had an hour of playing time left. After the final encore, they boarded four identical yellow vans and were removed while any tardy assassin was distracted by a $12,000 fireworks display. Thanks to radio microphones, Mick could continue goading the crowds with cries of “A-a-awright!” while already halfway back to his hotel.

At press conferences he was his usual regally bland self, tossing out the occasional well-honed epigram (“Touring’s like sex. You may enjoy it but you don’t wanna do it all the time”), studiously avoiding all political controversy, like Britain’s war with Argentina in the Falkland Islands (“None of my business”), and, in a literal sound bite, talking about “the diamond.” This was no thumping rock for Jerry Hall such as Richard Burton might have given Elizabeth Taylor, but a tiny chip set into his upper right incisor tooth. The story went that he’d first tried a tiny emerald in the tooth, but people had mistaken it for a speck of spinach. Journalist after journalist requested to view the minuscule sparkler up close and were willingly indulged; at last, he’d found a way of opening his mouth and literally not saying anything.

The tour’s British leg ended with a giant open-air show at Roundhay Park, Leeds, on July 25, 1982. It seemed the climax to a triumphant comeback, proof that the Stones could go rolling on through the eighties, still as free of moss as Mick’s upper incisor was of suspected spinach. In fact, having created this template for a mega-earning future, they were not to tour again until 1989, or record together between 1985 and the decade’s end.

At Roundhay Park, the backstage amenities that had to be laid out for them included a Japanese water garden with a stream, a bridge, a waterfall, and koi. The very sun umbrellas in this inner sanctum had to say “Welcome the Rolling Stones” in Japanese, even though no one present would be able to translate it. The show was emceed by Andy Kershaw, an outspoken BBC radio deejay who had little time for pointless superstar whims. Kershaw therefore recruited an expert in Japanese calligraphy from Leeds University to inscribe another message around the parasols. “Fuck the Rolling Stones,” it said.

Which, prophetically enough, their singer was almost to do with his long-delayed attempt to go solo.

JERRY DID NOT bring a breath of fresh air into Mick’s life so much as a gale. Visitors to his hotel room on the morning after a show usually found a twilit mess of rumpled sheets, strewn papers and books, and dirty breakfast dishes. These days, Jerry was often to be found there, exquisitely dressed, Dairy Queen–fresh, and, as like as not, chortling with laughter. One journalist arriving for an interview was surprised when she thrust a small whirring object into his hand: Mick’s electric shaver. “Neither of us can get it to switch off,” she explained. “Would you have a try?” What price now the Tyranny of Cool?

Jerry dealt with the Machiavellian politics around Mick by simply disregarding them. Texan down-home charm is always hard to resist, but especially so when accompanied by spectacular blond beauty, six feet high. One of her earliest triumphs was winning over Prince Rupert Loewenstein, whose view of Mick’s paramours tended to be governed by their potential impact on his finances. Jerry nicknamed the assiduous Loewenstein “Rupie the Groupie” and soon had him eating out of her hand.

Her exuberance and easygoingness, after Bianca’s reserve and supertouchiness, were only part of the tonic for Mick. There was also the fact—especially relevant in the aftermath of divorcing Bianca—that her supermodel career had made her independently wealthy; she couldn’t possibly just be after his money. Indeed, when he told her how he dreaded the effort of getting back into shape for the ’81 tour, she said he needn’t if he didn’t want to: she was rich enough to support them both.

He did want to, of course—couldn’t live without it—so Jerry uncomplainingly became part of a rock ’n’ roll lifestyle that made Bryan Ferry’s look pale indeed. Since the Toronto bust, every customs authority in the world had the Stones logged on computer, and the sight of any one of them automatically triggered maximum alert. One Christmas Eve, Mick and Jerry landed in Hong Kong for what was supposed to be a romantic break together in a luxury hotel. The immigration official took one look at their passports and pressed a button, and they were instantly surrounded by armed police with obviously itchy trigger fingers. Drug-free as Jerry had always been, she found herself receiving the same sort of treatment when traveling alone on her modeling assignments; for the computer, her affiliation with the Rolling Stones was enough.

The press had always liked her, and as Mick’s “lady,” it liked her even more—something that, one day, would stand her in good stead. She unfailingly provided wonderful copy with that extravagant yet entirely natural southern accent (so unlike the one Mick used) and her willingness to discuss their sex life, apparently without any repercussions from him. “Ah do all that stuff to liven up the bedroom,” she confided to one British magazine, making it sound like bucking broncos and lariats. “You know … suspenders and all that.”

Fortunately, the member of the Stones’ inner circle who might have dimmed even Jerry’s sunny smile was no longer a force to be reckoned with. Keith had finally split from Anita, realizing he had no hope of staying off heroin while she was around, and that her urge to self-destruct was beyond his power to check. The final breaking point came at a house they were renting in Salem, Massachusetts, when a seventeen-year-old gardener named Scott Cantrell, rumored to be Anita’s lover, shot himself dead on her bed with one of Keith’s guns, apparently as a result of playing Russian roulette. Adding to an already unsurpassed store of rock-kid experiences, little Marlon Richard was in the house when it happened. Salem’s connection with a notorious seventeenth-century witch hunt reawakened the old rumors about Anita being a witch and prompted tabloid stories that she and her hapless toy boy had been involved in a local coven. For Keith, the once-bewitching, brainy blonde had become “like Hitler … trying to take everything down with her.”