A Prince Among Stones (27 page)

Then I had a major haemorrhage due to diverticulitis which occurred in Tokyo and then later again in Shanghai. Luckily Brad Connor, the excellent New York doctor we had on the tour, specialised in the problems of medicine in some of our more out of the way destinations; it was he who finally told us not to perform in 2003 because of the SARS outbreak. His contacts were first class and I received immediate treatment in the best hospitals in Tokyo and then Shanghai, where I had a blood transfusion, and so I now have quite a bit of Chinese blood circulating through my veins.

Keith had also had a medical trauma that year. Following one Australasian section of the tour – which, in the light of what happened, was prophetically called
A Bigger Bang
– he, with some friends, went to a very expensive holiday resort in Fiji where he was foolishly tempted to climb a palm tree. Although from my perspective Keith was still comparatively young, he was not quite able to stay in the tree and so fell off it – but felt all right afterwards. Two or three days later he went water-skiing and fell down, as a result of which he had a severe headache. It transpired that a blood clot had formed between his skull and brain which had to be operated on in Auckland: he needed a good month of monitoring and convalescence. This meant that the tour could only resume after the cancellation of a concert in St Petersburg, to which I had been looking forward, since I was sure that it would be most glamorous; how odd, I thought, that glamour has died out in the West but perhaps might arise in the East.

Not surprisingly in the light of these events, the question of the effect of the passing of the years was uppermost in my mind. Charlie Watts had been diagnosed with cancer of the throat. As well as his palm-tree accident and the damage to his plucking finger in 1990 (he nicked it on the end of a guitar string and it had turned septic), Keith had also fallen off a ladder in the library of his home in Connecticut a few years earlier. Mick lost his voice periodically: however, Peter Pan-like he might appear, the stresses and strains of singing on tour inevitably took their toll.

Bob Taylor, our insurance representative, said to me after one concert had to be cancelled, ‘Well, we may have to put Mick on the Pavarotti pile.' ‘What's the Pavarotti pile?' ‘With Pavarotti we only insure three performances at a go.' I said, ‘But you can't do that with the Stones, because they've had to spend millions just setting up the production. That has to be amortised by eight or ten shows.' Bob said, ‘I know, that's what I am telling you. It's very dangerous, because a man in his fifties is going to lose his voice at some point.'

I had been thinking about how to address the question of the band's future for some time. When I turned seventy, I had told them, ‘I shall have to start thinking about retiring, and I shall try to set up a system which is good enough to keep you with good advisers.' I could not see the Rolling Stones being able to manage more than one or two more tours of the magnitude of their previous global circumnavigations, which lasted a great deal of time and used up a huge amount of energy. I did not know whether they would be ready, willing and able to continue at that kind of level of work and interest.

The strain of the concerts was enormous: they could never do more than three a week. One side of the touring experience was that they had to give their all to different places, in different languages, on top of the demands of travel and the concern of the customs in so many different jurisdictions. I also felt that Mick would become increasingly anxious about whether he would be able to handle any diminution in his physical powers and therefore of his own performances, which had been superlative for so long: he can cope with what he is very good at, but not with anything he feels might be risky for his voice or his movements.

It was not only the levels of physical fitness, which could never be as high as they were when they were younger: touring is very hard physical work. The tours were also psychologically demanding because the performers were pushing themselves in front of hundreds of thousands of people and always dealing with criticism as well as adulation, including criticism of them continuing to perform as they got older: the ‘Strolling Bones' jibe. Time was not on anyone's side. In fact, it seemed to be going faster and faster. John Gielgud, towards the end of his life, remarked that breakfast seemed to be occurring every ten minutes.

It had already become apparent that record sales were going to represent a far less important source of money for a rock band because of piracy and the beginning of the age when the supply of music was moving to digital platforms, with the advent of iTunes, MP3s and downloads, all of which we had spotted a long time before.

The rock industry business model would have to be altered radically, and future earnings from recordings for any band more difficult to predict. It would be much harder for the average musical talent to make a lot of money unless they were interesting performers although they would have much more work to do with jingles in the commercial sphere and sponsorship and film music. The Rolling Stones were not average, but even with their exceptional musical talent they were going to be affected by the same problems, and more besides.

If touring would be the primary source of income, and if Rolling Stones tours were going to become less frequent and more difficult, if not peter out entirely, then there was considerable uncertainty ahead, and my aim had always been to minimise uncertainty.

This lay behind various previous attempts I had made to find a suitable and long-term business solution. As early as 1997, in a journal entry from the
Bridges to Babylon
tour, I noted in the course of one day a morning meeting in New York with Michael Stone, the founder of the brand licensing company Beanstalk, whose clients included Coca-Cola (‘very bright,' I wrote, ‘and probably the right man to help in my venture of launching an RS corporation'). This was followed by lunch with Tommy Hilfiger at his factory: ‘most able,
selon moi
, and very active: again perhaps the right man'.

I was examining potential purchases as well. One emerged from our previous work with IMAX. An opportunity arose for us – meaning Michael Cohl and myself, on our own behalf or in conjunction with the band – to buy IMAX for $25 million. We looked into this extremely carefully but in the end I, wearing an old-fashioned banking hat, said we couldn't afford it because the future earnings did not look certain enough.

By the early 2000s a position had been reached whereby an organisation within the peripheries of the entertainment industry was prepared to discuss a ‘takeover' of the Rolling Stones. The deal would have produced a substantial amount of money for the band, but importantly the creative originality of the Stones' activities would not have been hampered in any way, with no loss of creative freedom at all. In fact in my view they would have gained greater freedom to finance any sensible projects they wanted to undertake.

The idea of this new, and to me eminently sensible, proposal was that the acquisition of the Rolling Stones by this interested party would have represented a huge plum in his corporate box, because the individual concerned was due to be taken over in turn by another company in a reverse takeover. Not only would there be a huge amount of cash down, particularly appealing in the period after the bursting of the dotcom bubble, but we would have additionally received the uplift that he would have received on his sale, should he sell the company for certain levels of money, which would have in part also been payable to us.

I thought the Stones could be taken over and each receive a significant tranche of money which was probably more than they would earn if they carried on, and they would still have other interests to keep them occupied, busy and amused.

This potential liberation represented the fruits of extensive conversations, negotiations and careful positioning, but I could not make any further progress without convincing all the band.

It was a frustratingly protracted discussion. I had innumerable conversations about the benefits of the deal through the whole of one tour and half of another. At one meeting everything was agreed, then at the next we were back at square one. Progress was painfully slow as we pirouetted through a series of seemingly never-ending volte-faces. I thought that one reason the band might be concerned about the deal was that they thought it would make them look as though they were selling out. The selling out one could have explained away by saying it was just a question of executives taking on a new partner, that no significant change had taken place.

I wrote to my close friend Lord Moyne, a former partner at Leopold Joseph, confiding my concerns: ‘I have been living through very difficult times in my business life since I have found a staggering proposal for my dear rock clients whereby they would have been paid at least double, if not treble, what they might be worth if there was no appropriate buyer. But the transaction may now not take place at all and a decades-old business relationship will be irreparably damaged. What a to-do! Of course it may all work out; I am sure Micawber would think so!'

Finally, I made it clear to the band that we had to complete it by the end of one particular September, because the takeover was due to be announced in the autumn and the mechanics of that required the deal with the Stones to have been initiated.

Michael Cohl and I had a talk with Keith, who seemed to understand everything perfectly, and the following day we convened a meeting of the clans in my hotel room, the clans in question being Mick, Keith, Charlie and Ronnie, with the lawyer I had found for Charlie (his lawyer had already told me, ‘Don't show me the documents, just show me the cheque', since it was so patently a good deal and a vast amount of money) as well as our own tax lawyer, who had drafted all the documents, and two other American lawyers.

Just as the meeting was about to start I took a telephone call from the person I had suggested to Mick as his private lawyer. He said, ‘The deal's off. Mick doesn't want to do it.' ‘Well, all I can say,' I replied, ‘is that that is total folly.' Although I was personally sad that they were turning down such a spectacular opportunity, we had to carry on with the meeting as planned.

During the meeting Keith suddenly started shouting at me. I said, ‘Keith, let's go next door and talk about what you want to say. There is no point in manifesting your bad temper in front of everybody else.'

Off we went, and I said, ‘This is most unfortunate. You agreed with everything yesterday. What's all this about?' Keith was most disturbed, almost on the verge of tears. ‘Don't you realise how terrible this is? It's our baby going away.' ‘It is not your baby going away,' I said sternly. ‘You are not losing control, as you fear, of your creativity. All you are ensuring is the safeguarding of a large sum of money which will in fact increase it.'

When we went back into the meeting Mick said, ‘Well, you know, I'm not saying I'm absolutely against it. I mean, perhaps we could talk it over.' I was firm with him. ‘No, Mick, the deal was that we had to come to the decision today. We have talked it over endlessly and spent months drafting and redrafting this document. Time has run out. We all knew that if we did not agree at this meeting, an additional, valuable sum would no longer be payable.' And in addition, I reminded him, we had asked a major Wall Street investment bank for their opinion and they had greatly endorsed the move.

Whereupon for the next six months Mick kept on trying to redo the deal. But it really was too late. That was one of the factors that precipitated my departure.

It made me realise that, from my point of view, after more than thirty-five years, things might nearly be over between me and the Rolling Stones. I was now old enough, in my seventies, not to be bothered with yet more toing and froing issues that, to me at least, seemed to be completely obvious decisions.

There had been many times when their behaviour in meetings amused rather than depressed me. Once, in the late 1980s, I had managed to get the band together for a meeting in a hotel in Washington, DC. This, of course, was an era when things were particularly fraught. I could see, as everybody else could, that Keith was getting increasingly fed up with the discussion, and clearly thought this interruption to his time quite unnecessary. He finally said, ‘I am going to take a leak.' The meeting continued but I saw his eyes light up when he saw a large window that happened to be open. He sauntered over, and before one could say ‘Jack Robinson' was peeing out of the window – luckily the canopy leading to the hotel lobby was directly underneath. I think I was the only person in the meeting whose eyeline he was in, since nobody else seemed to notice.

As far as the takeover deal was concerned, whatever the rights and wrongs on both sides – and naturally I believed that the route I had suggested was the right course of action – our views were too divergent. I was very frustrated because I felt that the Stones were coming home to harbour and that I had gone out of my way to organise a very agreeable homecoming, with double their net worth in cash in their pocket. They had decided not to take my advice and it seemed to me that we were now no longer thinking about business with like minds as we had done for so many years previously.

I made my mind up, set a date for my departure and announced it in March 2007. I would continue for a further twelve months, so that I had time to leave everything in as good an order as I could, and then gracefully withdraw. I felt some satisfaction that at least I had been able to help change the direction of the music business from its state in the first days of my involvement and to make it more organised and honest. Nowadays we see how important financial probity is in every sort of business and in a small way I had seen to it that that happened in rock'n'roll.