| 10th August 2006 05:18 AM |
|
|
| Gazza |
Stones by the Stones
Paul Sexton
What Mick thinks about Keef’s accident . . . Charlie on Jagger the ‘huge worrier’ . . . Keef on Ronnie’s rehab . . . our correspondent reveals what the Rolling Stones really think about each other
Being a music journalist is much less glamorous than some imagine. But occasionally it does stage a comically improbable playlet, and I was in one last week. I was sitting in a nondescript backstage meeting room at the Amsterdam Arena and every half an hour, with military accuracy, a Rolling Stone was brought to my door.
I first had this experience more than a decade ago, so any nervousness about being fast-tracked into the inner sanctum of such rock deities is at bay. I don’t profess to know them well, only to have cleared the first rounds of security protecting the team of 300-plus people that is the Stones’ touring family. Peeping behind the legend can be a dispiriting experience, but not with this lot.
Certain characteristics are consistent across the decade: Jagger, briskly efficient but intensely astute; Wood, gregarious and always ready with a hug; Watts, absent-minded but avuncular and perceptive; and Richards, the incorrigible, incongruously learned pirate.
If “Keef” was temporarily floored by the bizarre accident on holiday in Fiji in May, which led to emergency brain surgery, you’d never know it now. He has the humility to look somewhat bashful about the incident: “If you saw the tree, you’d laugh your head off. It was a little gnarled shrub.”
But with his self-described “constitution of an ox”, he was restored to health much more quickly than the press reports would have you believe. “The minute I got out of the hospital, I already felt OK, and then it’s been convincing everybody else,” he says. “They expected some loony to walk in the room.”
The delay of six weeks in starting their 2006 European tour provided a silver lining, in that the Stones were no longer competing with the World Cup. Better still, they were able to open at the San Siro Stadium in Milan on July 11, with the Italian team newly crowned as homecoming heroes.
“Trust me to break the momentum, but we’d been working pretty hard and I think everybody, including the crew, didn’t really mind the extra few weeks off, as long as we can pick up the slack as we go along,” Richards says. “I spoke to Mick and he said ‘Blessing in disguise’. I said ‘It was a bit painful. We won’t try that again’. There’s no big deal about it. I’m just sorry to have caused a lot of people a lot of inconvenience. But hey, you know . . . it’s Keith Richards, right?”
I was in Holland to talk to the Stones for two new Radio 2 programmes, the first of which will be broadcast on Saturday. They’ve been endlessly profiled by the great, the good and lots of other hangers-on for decades, but in 4x4 I’ve attempted to get them to profile each other.
Such a task presents unspoken challenges, because of the varying, invisible PH factor in the relationships between four men of such global repute. Keith loves Charlie, Ronnie loves Keith, Keith increasingly respects Mick, Mick chooses not to say anything gushingly admiring about Keith, and so it goes on.
“It’s different every time you see them,” Ronnie Wood says. “I think that’s why we’ve been going so long.” Wood is perhaps best placed to make the most measured judgment, as he was a fan of the Stones for more than a decade before he became one. “No one is predictable, especially when we have a few months off, or a few years,” he says. “We all get together and it’s like meeting a whole different bunch of people.”
The phrase has an echo of one that Watts is reported to have used about Jagger, that he was “a nice bunch of guys”.
Wood, who became a full-time Stone in 1975, still gets called the new boy, partly because he’s the youngest at 59, and partly because no one’s bothered to figure out that he’s now been in the group longer than Bill Wyman was. “He was always ‘Ronnie’ to me, but he was always ‘the new one’ [to the media],” Watts says. “But it’s threequarters of our life he’s been with us, isn’t it? He lives under that ‘cloud’. If it is one, it’s a very rosy cloud.”
The real cloud that Wood has attempted to evade on several occasions in recent years is an alcoholic one. In 2002, just before the Licks tour kicked off, he told me proudly that his detox programme was working wonders, and that he was seeing and hearing things more clearly on stage than for years. This summer, during the lay-off, he checked back into rehab and, on the evidence of the Amsterdam gig, is the better for it. The continent-straddling, box-office-busting A Bigger Bang tour arrives home in ten days, 24 hours before the first anniversary of its opening night in Boston. As profiled in the second Radio 2 show, it has not lacked adventure, notably with a beach concert in Rio for an audience of approximately one million. “You could not see the whole audience,” Richards recalls. “They went round the bay and up the hill. Some of them were in boats.”
Jagger adds: “That was pretty amazing. You get out there, and you can see only 50,000 people, if that, because the 950,000 just disappear into the haze. When I bowed at the end, you think ‘That’s what it’s like bowing to a million people’. Well, it’s very much like bowing to a thousand people.”
At the culmination of the initial North American leg, in February, the Stones played a mini-set at half-time in the Super Bowl. “That was an exercise in ‘Can you whip up a stage in 5 min 30 seconds and transform a football field into a stage?’ ” Richards laughs. “And the guys did it. We’re stuck inside this hidden part of the stage, which was now being rolled across like some medieval siege machine or something. It was hats off to the crew. It was fun and everything, but it’s not a real gig.”
When the European leg ends next month that would normally be the cue for the band to retreat to their farms, châteaux, country houses and tax havens — and Richards, perhaps, to the beach hut that we are told he has just purchased in West Wittering, Sussex.
Instead, in late September, the gigantic operation involving 126 trucks and a 300-tonne stage will head back across the Atlantic for another 17 dates, running into mid-November. Some estimates in the US put potential ticket revenue for the entire tour at $400 million (£209 million), and there are murmurings of more shows next year.
But no matter how many millions are at stake, no one would put themselves through this kind of relentless rigour unless they were getting some physical and spiritual sustenance from it. “If I work 100 per cent,” says Watts, “they work 200 per cent, because there’s all the writing as well. Mick works very hard. The tour might be ‘only’ 18 months long, but it’s four years of his life, and it’s constant work. I have nothing but admiration for him, as I do for all of them.”
The mutual respect between Watts and Richards is also as evident as ever. “Charles . . . ” he says wistfully. “He’s an indescribable creature. People think I’m tough, but I take second place to him. He walks in (last year) and comes back even better. I said, ‘If that’s what chemo does for you, I’ll take some whether I need it or not’.”
The home-loving Watts, at 65 the senior Stone, never hides his dislike of being on the road for such extended spells. He once told me that his idea of hell was staring at his suitcase on the night before a tour begins. Indeed, he made the most of the recent unexpected break during Richards’s recuperation by going on an “18th-century grand tour” of Turin, Rome, Florence and Paris.
That’s the kind of European tour that he really wants to be on, but Watts says that Richards’s boundless enthusiasm for the road is hard to say no to. “He loves touring. Whenever I say I’m going to retire, he says, ‘What are you going to do?’ And I’m speechless, because I actually don’t do anything except play the bloody drums. So it’s a very difficult one to answer.”
Jagger, a “huge worrier” according to Watts, has the careworn air of the actor-manager. He worked with Michael Cohl, the tour’s promoter-producer, to reinstate as many of the European dates as possible, and speaks with business-like concern about the dozen shows that they’ve not yet been able to reschedule.
With such an assiduous nature, one imagined Jagger’s eyes rolling to the heavens when he heard about Richards’s accident. “I didn’t get any of that from him at all,” Richards says. “But at the same I was very aware, when I got back to Milan to start the tour, that I was under some very intense microscopes, including my own. I know that I’m under some scrutiny, but in fact I’m pulling off the shows a lot better than I did before.”
Jagger says: “It was quite a long lay-off from playing for him, which is quite difficult to come back to, and we only did a few days’ rehearsal. I think everyone, including myself, was very supportive, because he’d been through a lot. He’d had concussion, and he had to have this ’ole in ’is ’ead, as I call it. But we went out there, the Italians were all screaming about the World Cup and they were all very supportive as well.”
Wood recognises that a section (possibly the majority) of the Stones’ live audience is there to see a certain catalogue of hits, and will not respond to the newer material. “We get four generations in the crowd,” he says. “Hopefully we cater to all of them and the new fans get educated to the old songs and vice versa.”
Last year’s A Bigger Bang, the Stones’ first new studio record in eight years, drew generally enthusiastic notices. Is it possible to imagine another? “Absolutely,” Richards says, enthusing about the back-to-basics recordings made for that album in France. “I’ve been trying to get the band to record like that for many years. Exile On Main St was recorded very much like that. I’ve always felt the band is far less self-conscious when it’s not in those big studios with the glass window and technicians walking about adjusting things, where you feel like you’re in hospital.”
As the gig draws near, Richards, of all the Stones, is clearly the one with the greatest sense of excitement about putting all the paraphernalia on hold and going out to do his job. “Personally, I’ve never had a bad audience,” he says. “I’ve sometimes had a bad night, but you never blame it on the audience. If they’re there, I’m going to kick ass, that’s the way it is, and hopefully it all pans out. Most of the guys in this band are very fun-easy, it doesn’t take a lot to make it fun. It takes a disaster, in fact, to make it not fun.
“You’re up there, people want to see you, there’s thousands of them, they’re all ready for a good time. Only an asshole could turn it into a bad time.”
Paul Sexton presents The Rolling Stones: 4x4 on Saturday at 9pm on Radio 2, and on Saturday August 19. The band’s UK tour begins at Twickenham on August 20
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-2305533.html
|
| 10th August 2006 06:28 AM |
|
|
| charlotte |
Thanks Gazza! glad you and the boss are back safe and sound! |
| 10th August 2006 06:45 AM |
|
|
| Gazza |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
Looks like our timing was immaculate! Fuckin' hell. |
| 10th August 2006 08:11 AM |
|
|
| LadyJane |
Great read!!
My favorite Keith quote:
“They expected some loony to walk in the room.”
LMAO.
LJ. |
| 10th August 2006 08:19 AM |
|
|
| Gazza |
Hopefully Charlie's quote (which is basically a repeat of what hes been saying for decades) will shut up some people who are taking this unsubstantiated and never published previous 'quote' of his about 'retiring' at the end of 2006 a tad too literally
and I found this a bit more encouraging too :
"Jagger...,speaks with business-like concern about the dozen shows that they’ve not yet been able to reschedule
I guess we can interpret that when the interview gets broadcast. Everything I've read and heard in recent days suggests we WILL get something over here next year.
[Edited by Gazza] |
| 10th August 2006 08:25 AM |
|
|
| charlotte |
quote:
Gazza wrote:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
Looks like our timing was immaculate! Fuckin' hell.
No joke!!! Good job Scotland Yard!! |
| 10th August 2006 08:26 AM |
|
|
| PartyDoll MEG |
Thanks for the good read, Gazza!!
Better than the news headlines!!! DAMN!!!! |
| 10th August 2006 08:55 AM |
|
|
| Nellcote |
Thanks! |
| 10th August 2006 08:57 AM |
|
|
| corgi37 |
The Stones could very well outlive the Jihad. |
| 10th August 2006 08:57 AM |
|
|
| Bitch |
Great read, thanks for posting that Gazza! KEEF is enthusiastic about recording another album! How wonderful that after all he's been through, he won't stop making music. Keep on rockin me baby! |
| 10th August 2006 09:00 AM |
|
|
| not bound to please |
quote:
LadyJane wrote:
Great read!!
My favorite Keith quote:
“They expected some loony to walk in the room.”
LMAO.
LJ.
Ha! You beat me to it.... |
| 10th August 2006 11:03 AM |
|
|
| Steel Wheels |
So where's the usual posters posting their moans about a last tour and no more albums and Charlie retiring?
BRING ON THE STONES - 2006 AND BEYOND! |
| 10th August 2006 09:24 PM |
|
|
| Soldatti |
Another album would be great, they can't wait 7 years again. 2008 is a good year. |
| 10th August 2006 09:28 PM |
|
|
| Poplar |
quote:
Steel Wheels wrote:
BRING ON THE STONES - 2006 AND BEYOND!
$1000 tickets and beyond!!! |
| 10th August 2006 09:58 PM |
|
|
| Steel Wheels |
$60 seats my friend are everywhere! 60 bucks a ticket! |
| 10th August 2006 10:11 PM |
|
|
| pdog |
quote:
Gazza wrote:
I guess we can interpret that when the interview gets broadcast. Everything I've read and heard in recent days suggests we WILL get something over here next year.
[Edited by Gazza]
If it happens, I will come over there, bank on it. i know I'm going to start a small savings fund this week for it! |
|
