Authors: Philip Norman
“He’s not a happy person,” Sir Mick replied.
September 2002 found him back on the screen again, almost forty years after Performance. In The Man from Elysian Fields, he played Luther Fox, boss of the upmarket Elysian Fields escort agency—one service that, in real life, he’d never needed. Despite a strong cast including James Coburn, Anjelica Huston, and Andy Garcia, and being called “a work of elegance” by America’s hardest-to-please critic, Roger Ebert, the film did poorly in its home market and went straight to video in Britain. The suave Luther seemed an awkward fit for Sir Mick, though it did give him two lines with powerful personal resonance. One was “I’ve been blessed to live a life without boundaries”; the other, “You’re lucky to have a wife and children; don’t let their love slip through your fingers.”
On a fashion shoot the previous year, he had met the American fashion stylist and designer L’Wren Scott. At thirty-four, she was twenty-three years his junior, and at six foot three, the tallest woman ever to excite his ardor. Thanks to the internal punctuation mark that gave her first name the appearance of a French noun (suggesting the tiniest of birds), she was known among couture colleagues as the Apostrophe. Even though in her company Sir Mick was reduced to the size of a semicolon, they’d begun dating.
L’Wren had started life as Luann Bambrough, one of three adopted children of a Mormon insurance salesman living near Salt Lake City. In her teens (like Jerry Hall before her) she had escaped to Paris to become a model; her first name duly Frenchified, she then moved back to L.A. to work as a stylist for the fashion photographer Herb Ritts, superintending the wardrobe and hair of stars like Ellen Barkin, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Julianne Moore. A marriage to a London property developer had ended shortly before she met Sir Mick.
They began to be photographed everywhere together, L’Wren tactfully dipping at the knees to reduce the disparity in their height. The joke, in fact, became not how small he was but how unreasonably tall she was. And in a remarkably brief time, the girlfriends as young as daughters, or younger, faded from contention. It really seemed that the Apostrophe had brought his wandering spirit to a full stop. Speaking from near Salt Lake City, her adoptive mother, Lula (not L’Ula), commented: “L’Wren is very independent and would not take any nonsense from anyone, no matter how famous they were. It does not surprise me at all that she’s tamed Mick. She is very much her own woman and it would be my guess that that is why Mick likes her.”
In 2005, they were still together, like a high-fashion David and Goliath, at Hollywood’s Golden Globes. Sir Mick picked up the Best Original Song award for “Old Habits Die Hard,” written with Dave Stewart and featured in the remake of Alfie. In his acceptance speech, he thanked L’Wren for not wearing heels that night.
The past few years had brought a steep decline in record sales thanks to free music downloads on personal computers and the competitive allure of DVDs and video games. Where once rock tours were seen as promotional campaigns for new albums, they were now every major act’s main source of income. And such was the weight of baby-boomer nostalgia that legendary bands who’d split up in acrimony decades before now found themselves offered fortunes for reunion tours—an experience Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour likened to “sleeping with your ex-wife.”
But none of these reunited old stagers, from Floyd to the Monkees, could compete with the Stones on the road, any more than could contemporary superbands like the Kaiser Chiefs, Franz Ferdinand, the Backstreet Boys, or the Foo Fighters. The world tour around their album A Bigger Bang, between 2005 and 2007, broke their own record to become the world’s highest grossing yet at $558 million, with input from three different commercial sponsors, Tommy Hilfiger menswear, Sprint communications, and Castrol oil. Following the formula of the past three decades, mammoth shows alternated with more intimate ones in clubs or theaters, where the now-sixty-plus Sir Mick would still be bombarded with invitations from compliant young women in the form of notes, flowers, or the occasional flying bra.
On February 18, 2006, in a free concert on Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro, they played to a crowd three times as big as Woodstock’s, an estimated 1.5 million. When no deaths were reported, it could be said that the ghost of Altamont had been laid to rest. Two months later, they made their first-ever appearance in the People’s Republic of China (originally planned for the 2003 Licks tour but canceled because of the SARS outbreak). At the government’s request, “Brown Sugar,” “Honky Tonk Women,” and “Beast of Burden” were omitted from their show as too sexually suggestive, though the last named seemed more suggestive of their audience’s predicament under communism.
In October, two nights at one of their smaller venues, New York’s Beacon Theater, became a cinema documentary, Shine a Light, named after a song from Exile on Main St. and directed by Martin Scorsese. Since releasing Mean Streets with its Stones-heavy soundtrack in 1973, Scorsese genuinely had made cinema “the new rock ’n’ roll”; his keenness now to capture them in the flesh conferred huge prestige, as even Sir Mick and the Tyranny of Cool freely acknowledged. More pertinently, The Last Waltz, Scorsese’s documentary about the Band’s farewell concert in 1976, still stood as the best live-performance film ever.
The Beacon Theater shows were a benefit for former president Bill Clinton’s foundation and were introduced by the man whose saxophone playing and sexual antics in the White House had given even the U.S. presidency a claim on being “the new rock ’n’ roll.” Among the first-night audience were his wife, Hillary, now a member of the Senate, and the former president of Poland, Aleksander Kwas´niewski. Beforehand, all the Stones, Keith included, lined up for a simpering meet-and-greet that would have sickened their young outlaw selves to the soul.
Sixty-three-year-old Sir Mick’s performance was unchanged from when he was twenty-three—same tossing hair, staring eyes, and letter-box lips; same jacket shrugged halfway down his arms like a rebellious schoolboy; same stripperish bottom wiggling with fingers locked behind head; same flashes of girlish bare midriff. Donning a guitar, he duetted with Jack White, from Stones sound-alike band the White Stripes, on “Loving Cup,” making White’s enunciation seem almost BBC-perfect by comparison (“Goo me a liddle dranke … and Ah fawl down drernke”); then came a predictably sexy shimmy with Christina Aguilera on “Live with Me,” then a version of “Champagne & Reefer” with Buddy Guy, showing the many who did not realize that no white man (except Brian Jones) ever played blues harmonica better.
In common with Scorsese’s classic 1976 rockumentary, Shine a Light featured the director as a character, Sir Mick’s new best friend “Marty,” alternately charming and irascible (as when, with only hours to showtime, he still hadn’t been told which songs the Stones would be playing). The resulting film had characteristic Scorsese energy and drama, yet came nowhere near The Last Waltz. That had been about a still-young band breaking up at the peak of their form; this was about one just a few steps ahead of the taxidermist.
For all its cash and kudos, the Bigger Bang tour proved to be jinxed like none since 1969. In April 2006, during a break in Fiji, Keith decided to climb a coconut tree and fell off it onto the beach, landing on his head and knocking himself unconscious. He was rushed to New Zealand for medical treatment, reported as a brain scan; in fact, he had sustained serious head injuries and a team of top surgeons only just managed to save his life.
A tragic reprise of the incident took place on October 29, during the filming of Shine a Light, when Ahmet Ertegun, the Stones’ old label boss at Atlantic and still Sir Mick’s good friend, fell and knocked himself out in a backstage hospitality area. He never regained consciousness and died a few weeks later, aged eighty-three.
Then, on November 11, Joe Jagger died of pneumonia, aged ninety-three. He had been hospitalized since suffering a fall a few weeks earlier, and his son had only just returned to America after a flying visit back to Surrey to see him. The news of his death came as the Stones were about to play a sold-out show at the MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas. The performance went ahead as scheduled, and Sir Mick made no reference to his loss from the stage.
The slight, quiet, sinewy man with hardly a hair on his head had shaped the shaggy superstar more lastingly than the world ever knew. If Sir Mick felt respect for precious little else, he always had huge respect for Joe, the richer-than-Croesus rock god admiring as well as wondering at his father’s steadfast altruism. In 1981, when the Stones were on their first mega-money U.S. tour, Joe had been in the country at the same time, giving a series of lectures in his tireless crusade to persuade young people to lead clean lives. “Physical training from the Renaissance to the present day,” his son was fond of quoting with almost paternal pride. There was real affection between them, too, in an understated British way: whatever the pressures of being Mick, the superstar could always make time to tramp the wet Welsh Marches on one of the hiking tours Joe so much enjoyed. His funeral took place at St. Mary’s College Chapel, Twickenham, on November 28, in the presence of three Sir Mick exes who had all adored him: Marsha, Bianca, and Jerry.
The tour ended with a gig perhaps not as lucrative as others but one triumphantly demonstrating the Stones’ continued power over the young of their homeland. On June 10, 2007, they headlined at the Isle of Wight Festival, their first appearance on the island since they’d played at a repertory theater there in 1964 with Brian and Bill, with the scenery from the current production (including French windows) as a backcloth. Forty-three years on, they proved as big a draw as any of the hot young twenty-first-century bands on offer, from Snow Patrol to Muse. Their set included an appearance by Amy Winehouse, the eeriest sixties throwback yet, with her black-caked eyes and outsize beehive hairdo, though her self-destructive drinking and drugging were pure mid-seventies Keith Richards. The honor of singing with Sir Mick seemingly helped her hold it together for once; their duet on the Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” was the festival’s acknowledged highlight.
In January 2008, Carla Bruni, that explosive figure from Sir Mick’s past, secretly married another diminutive, powerful individual, France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy; so, rather than the man from Elysian Fields, she ended up with the one from the Élysée Palace. One commentator of an anagramatic turn of mind wondered if from now on “Élysée” should be pronounced “Easy lay.”
OVER THE PAST twenty years, Keith Richards’s appearance has become increasingly bizarre. Whereas advancing age has etched Sir Mick’s face into Mount Rushmore stone, it has given Keith’s the horrific fluidity of a gurner, those competitive grimace makers peculiar to England’s north country. When he smiles, and his features seem to dissolve like some old-fashioned movie special effect of Dr. Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde, one feels a genuine need to cover small children’s eyes. He has also taken to doing strange things with his hair, twisting it into dreadlocks tipped with metal objects resembling clothes pegs or tying it up in none-too-hygienic-looking bandannas.
Yet all those decades of suicidal drug abuse have left him essentially unscathed, a tribute to a constitution rivaled only by Winston Churchill. (Sad that so many who tried to emulate him, from Gram Parsons to Amy Winehouse, were not similarly armored.) He claims to be still off heroin and not to have used cocaine since nose-diving from that coconut tree in Fiji, though his voice, and in particular his thoroughly scary laugh, still sounds like a thousand unemptied ashtrays made audible. “Nice to be here,” he tells the audience in his solo spot in every Stones show. “Hey, it’s nice to be anywhere, y’know.” Or sometimes: “Nice to see you. Hey, it’s nice to see anyone, y’know.”
That special timbre—less rock guitar hero than boozy, sentimental old repertory actor—has now also endeared him at second hand to a worldwide cinema audience. In the first Pirates of the Caribbean film in 2003, Johnny Depp borrowed it—adding a touch of cartoon skunk Pepé Le Pew—for his character, Captain Jack Sparrow. Knowing Keith’s reputation, Depp wondered if he might find himself slammed up against a wall with a sword stick at his throat. But Keith was hugely amused, and in the third film of the series played a cameo role as Sparrow’s father, Captain Edward Teague (his beaten-up pirate hat, thick black beard, and dangling crucifix earrings striking a relatively normal note for him).
As Captain Teague prepared to go before the camera for the first time, a journalist asked if any advice had come from that seasoned film actor Sir Mick. “He’s the last person I’d ask in the world,” Keith replied. Since the Pirates franchise shows no sign of ending, Sir Mick will have to keep watching his Glimmer Twin make the splash on-screen that has eluded him for more than forty years.
May 2010 brought a reissue of the Stones’ 1972 album, Exile on Main St., with ten previously unreleased tracks. Critically panned on its original appearance, it was now hailed as one of the all-time great rock albums and in its new form became the band’s first UK/U.S. No. 1 since Voodoo Lounge. With it came a documentary, Stones in Exile, recounting the escape from the British tax man to France and the album’s evolution in Keith’s basement at Villa Nellcôte. When it was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, a line began to form two hours before the screening. Sir Mick was there to introduce it, supported by L’Wren (once again tactfully sans heels). His self-deprecating humor about old times with the Stones, in both English and fluent French, delighted his audience. “[In] the early seventies,” he said, “we were young, good-looking, and stupid. Now we’re just stupid.”
The problem with recapturing the revelry at Nellcôte was that almost none of it had been filmed. Stones in Exile therefore consisted mainly of black-and-white still photographs, almost all by the young Frenchman Dominique Tarle. As a further oddity, several of those interviewed about their part in making Exile on Main St. appeared only as voice-overs, as if they were ashamed to show the physical ravages of their decadent youth. Its British transmission on BBC2 included a brief sofa chat between Sir Mick and the BBC’s arts supremo Alan Yentob. Sir Mick yielded to a little sentiment, saying it was “kinda nice” when people came up and told him which Stones concerts had been milestones in their lives. Unfortunately, after half a century molded by the Tyranny of Cool, his face just didn’t have an expression to go with “kinda nice.”