| 27th August 2006 10:25 AM |
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| Gazza |
The Sunday Times Magazine
The Sunday Times August 27, 2006
Feature
Band aid
They are the walking wounded of rock’n’roll. But the Rolling Stones nearly didn’t make it. Robert Sandall reports on the men who gave them the kiss of life
The Last Time, It’s All over Now, Paint it Black, Not Fade Away – few bands have given obituary writers as many headline opportunities as the Rolling Stones. Every time the Stones have turned up in the UK, prancing about on giant stages in a manner astonishing for men of their age, the question has hovered: how much longer can they keep doing this?
Nobody knows for sure – and the group, as always, refuses to comment – but the smart money now says until the summer of 2007, when the Stones finally get to play some of the European dates that were postponed in May and June this year. The reason for the hiatus – Keith Richards’s brain surgery, following his tumble from a coconut tree on the island of Fiji – primed the rumour mill. Richards is also said to be suffering from severe arthritis in his hands, which in a recent television interview did indeed appear to have grown all swollen and knobbly around the joints. Not great for a guitarist, even one whose fingers are more often slashing out chords than executing tricksy solos.
Then there’s the drummer, Charlie Watts, and his recent bout of cancer, which was treated by chemotherapy in 2004 but could recur. Keith’s guitar partner, Ronnie Wood, also has problems – most relating to a diet based for years on cocaine and Guinness. Wood went into rehab, again, this year, having broken a promise made to Mick Jagger during the band’s 2002 tour that he would refrain in future from staggering around the stage, flailing wildly, off his face.
But at 63, Sir Mick seems indestructible. He still has the stamina of a much younger man.
“I don’t know how I do it, I just do it,” he told an interviewer in a Tokyo baseball stadium, where he was about to hare back and forth across a stage 100 metres wide for most of the Stones’ two-hour live show. “It’s like breathing, to me.”
But mortality has clearly been on his mind recently. Earlier this month, while the group were preparing new wills, it emerged that the Stones have set up two foundations in the Netherlands. Dutch law relating to posthumous settlements required the disclosure of many aspects of the Stones’ business arrangements over the past 20 years, including the function of these foundations: to manage the rights to the Stones’ royalties and to arbitrate over questions of ownership among their heirs in the event of the death of any of the three principals – Jagger, Richards and Watts. (Wood is not a party to this arrangement; 31 years after joining, he remains the “new boy” and is still not a full partner.)
Add all the above together and it is at the very least plausible that the Stones’ current UK tour, which ends at the Millennium stadium in Cardiff on August 29, 2006, will be their last. If that’s the case, we will have witnessed the passing of a unique phenomenon: a public spectacle of flabbergasting scale. There will be no more sets to compare to the techno-baroque, eight-storey metallic structure that accompanied their Steel Wheels outing in 1989. A post-industrial fantasy inspired by the film Blade Runner, it was designed, in common with all their recent stages, by Mark Fisher, a part-time professor at the Architectural Association in London. He called it “guerrilla architecture”. Jagger called it “an urban mess, sort of glamourised”. It cost an estimated $18m. Nor will we see the Stones’ signature stage extras: the 60ft-high inflatable Honky Tonk Women that rear from the sides of the stage to tower and wobble in the sky. The motorised stages that surge above the crowd (a trick the Stones devised for their Bridges to Babylon tour in 1998) are, for most tour planners, too much hassle. Aside from what they cost to build and ship, such stunts impact severely on one of the largest expenses: insurance. But ever since Jagger emerged from a mechanical lotus flower in 1975, such audience-bewitching coups have been deemed essential to every Stones tour. They are known, in Stones patois, as the “f***-me factor”.
The hot bands of today, Coldplay being a good example, are too well-mannered for this kind of theatrical bombast, which is probably their loss. No other troupe of live entertainers comes close now to matching the Stones’ global appeal. Their current outing will take in around 125 venues and attract about 4.5m customers. Having begun in the States in July 2005, by the time of Keith’s accident this spring they had played to sold-out stadia all over North and South America and Asia, including Shanghai. In the States they played to the ageing baby boomers whose youths they once soundtracked. In their biggest South American date, at Copacabana beach in Rio, they were greeted by a crowd of around 1.5m – mostly under-25s – paying tribute to a band whose big hits happened years before they were born.
With such a thick demographic blanket, it’s hardly surprising that the Stones are making more money than ever. For years they have prioritised live work over studio recordings, which is why, since Steel Wheels, they have waited until the staging of their tours has been finalised before naming their albums. This has turned out to be a prescient move. Over the past 10 years, CD prices have plummeted, and the price of concert tickets has risen dramatically: in 1989 it cost $30 to see the band in a US stadium; now it costs between $90 for the cheapest, so-called “nosebleed” areas at the back, and $400 for the VIP seats on the stage. Even with the 15 cancelled shows, their box-office takings for the first half of 2006 were £80m, almost twice those of their nearest rivals, U2. By the time the aptly named A Bigger Bang tour has wended its way around Europe, revisited America and stopped off in a few of the richer parts of the Third World, it will have grossed around £250m.
The Stones are not a cheap date. Tickets for their Twickenham shows start at £40 and rise to £340 for the “onstage experience” – seats in balconies built into the sides of their vast stage set. Such prices deter some, particularly younger fans, but they are in line with those charged here this summer by Madonna and the Eagles.
They still provoke howls of protest from those who believe Jagger to be a monster of greed; charges that date back to his offer of $100,000 to his first wife, Bianca, when they split in 1978. (She claimed $12.5m and settled for $1m in 1980.) Apart from the chorus of disapproval that regularly greets the private behaviour of “Tricky Mick”, many feel unease when rock stars seek to maximise their earnings the way other successful public figures, such as sportsmen and entrepreneurs, routinely do without criticism.
A more appropriate response would be to marvel at how on earth the Stones managed to achieve their present position. Before the Bigger Bang tour began, Billboard magazine calculated their total revenues from live work since 1989 at just over $1.1 billion, with 12m tickets sold in the 1990s. For much of the 20 years before their situation stabilised in 1989, however, the soi-disant “Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World” was a shambles. When Keith Richards tells the crowds now, as he often likes to do, “It’s good to be here tonight… It’s good to be anywhere tonight,” he isn’t joking, and he isn’t just talking about his own chequered past either.
The acclaim with which their biggest hit from the 1960s is greeted whenever they play it today is apt: in many ways the Stones really did get “no satisfaction” from that fabled decade. By the end of 1969 they were scarcely in better shape than their old rivals, the openly disintegrating Beatles.
Their original leader, Brian Jones, drowned in his swimming pool shortly after “leaving” a band that had run out of patience with him, ostensibly because of his drink and drug problems. In fact, relations within the band had become untenable after Keith Richards absconded with Jones’s girlfriend Anita Pallenberg in 1968.
Both of their biggest gigs backfired badly. The Hyde Park memorial for Brian Jones, held in front of 250,000 grieving fans in 1969, was remembered chiefly for Jagger’s baffling reading from Shelley’s Adonais, and the release of several hundred white butterflies, most of which dropped down dead, having suffocated in their boxes. The free show the band gave at Altamont later that year, which was intended to deflect criticism of the high ticket prices charged on a recent US tour, ended with the knifing of one of the 300,000 audience by one of the Hell’s Angels – installed by the Stones themselves as “security”.
Drugs had started to seriously erode band unity. After a much-publicised bust at Richards’s country residence, Redlands, near Chichester, in February 1967, Jagger and Richards had become heroes of the “permissive society”. William Rees-Mogg, then editor of The Times, wrote a supportive editorial, Who Breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel? Two years later, however, the butterflies had turned into less appealing creatures of the night. Once Keith and Anita had moved into Cheyne Walk in August 1969, they preferred to stay at home, shooting “speedball” cocktails of heroin and cocaine. Most threatening of all, though, to the group’s future as the 1970s dawned were its muddled finances. Having turned, in 1965, to an American accountant, Allen Klein, who had looked after the affairs of the late soul star Sam Cooke, four years later the Stones were individually broke. Despite having received about $15m on his clients’ behalf, Klein paid it out in meagre salaries; a sensible precaution, he argued, given the uncertain future of pop groups. But this meant the Stones’ office in London was endlessly telexing New York for cash to pay its bills.
Bill Wyman, meanwhile, was living off a personal overdraft of £12,000. In order to secure the £20,000 he needed to complete on the house in Cheyne Walk, Richards had to fly a roadie to Klein’s office to collect bundles of banknotes. And to cap it all, the Inland Revenue was after them for “supertax” – the highest bracket of a confiscatory regime that claimed 90% of their earnings for the state. In 1970, each member of the band had an unpaid tax bill of over £100,000. When they toured Britain in early 1971, budgets were so tight that they took public transport.
Enter the band’s saviour, a supremely unlikely figure who rejoices in the name of Prince Rupprecht [Rupert] zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg. The middle-aged managing director of a London merchant bank, and a descendant of the Austrian royal family, Loewenstein had met Jagger at a very 1960s nobs-vs-rock stars party in Kensington. The fact that the prince was in a tailored suit while Jagger was wearing the same frilly white smock he appeared in at the Hyde Park concert did not hinder the start of a relationship that initially prevented the Stones from sinking into a swamp of debt, and later made them very, very rich.
An intensely private character, Loewenstein has never pretended to act as the band’s manager. He still works out of his own office in Mayfair rather than the Stones’ HQ in Wandsworth. But whenever any significant negotiations have been in play – from the point at which the Stones left the Decca label in 1971, through the subsequent $2m settlement with Klein, to the setting up of the new foundations in Holland – Loewenstein has taken part, and charged a fat fee as the group’s “adviser”. The first suggestion by “Ruppie the groupie”, as the band affectionately called him, was that they become tax exiles. So, in the summer of 1971, the Stones all migrated to France for a year. In many respects this proved an excellent move. It allowed them the breathing space to pay off their tax bills, and it was there they recorded what is generally regarded as their finest album, Exile on Main Street. But their “year out” also formalised the personal rifts and bad habits that, for most of the 1970s and ’80s, nearly destroyed them. While living in a rented villa, Nellcôte, on a hill above Villefranche-sur-Mer, near Nice, Keith and Anita’s drug consumption spiralled out of control. How the band managed to finish Exile in the fetid basement of a house overrun by junkies, dealers and hangers-on remains a mystery.
It certainly wasn’t down to a spirited team effort from the band. Once Richards had got involved in a fist fight with the harbour master in Marseille, the local police began to take an interest in his domestic arrangements. Apart from Brian Jones’s replacement, Mick Taylor, the rest of the Stones kept their visits to Nellcôte as brief as possible. Bill Wyman, who openly acknowledged that his “lack of interest in drugs had been a recurring problem with the Stones”, scarcely featured on the final cut of Exile, after it was discovered that his bass guitar had been out of tune for most of the sessions. “Immediately we entered France, I found Keith impossible to relate to,” he confessed in his autobiography. Jagger, recently married to the Nicaraguan beauty Bianca Moreno de Macias, in a St Tropez ceremony to which only one band member, Richards, got invited, spent most of his time partying in Paris with his new wife.
In everything except their business arrangements, it was downhill all the way. Richards passed the rest of the 1970s either stoned or getting busted, most famously in Toronto in 1977, where the quantity of hard drugs he was found to be carrying was so large that the police suspected he might be a trafficker rather than a user. He also had a narrow escape in 1973 in a London hotel fire, started after he “nodded out” on heroin while holding a lit cigarette. Stones shows in the 1970s would begin anything up to five hours late, thanks to Keith.
Relations between the band’s twin bosses deteriorated to the point where Jagger and Richards were barely speaking to each other when they recorded the Some Girls album in New York in 1978. When mixing the tracks, the album’s “producers” refused to sit together at the console, communicating by written notes instead.
In the 1980s, acrimony turned to something worse: sheer indifference. Solo projects started to take priority over group activities, notably when Jagger insisted on recording his first solo album, She’s the Boss, ahead of the Stones’ album Dirty Work. When it finally appeared, to dismal reviews, in 1985, Jagger declined to tour with his old band, instead planning another solo album and tours of Japan and Australia, during which, to the rest of the band’s horror, he played a number of Stones songs. At this, Richards began to plot a solo album of his own, Ronnie Wood resumed his career as a painter, and Bill Wyman decided to open a Stones-themed restaurant.
In May 1988 the band held a meeting in London to decide their future. Wyman said that he thought the Stones were “dead and buried”. As a social unit, they clearly were. But all around were strong indications that bands collectively commanded far more support than individual members ever could on their own. The most telling example to hand was Pink Floyd, who, despite the departure of their leader and chief songwriter, Roger Waters, and their unlikely re-formatting as a duo, had just completed the most successful and lucrative tour of their entire career. Waters, by contrast, was struggling.
The era of the band as brand had begun. More and more of the supergroups of the 1960s and ’70s were discovering that fans new and old were rallying to names they recognised. Lawsuits to establish ownership of these names were increasingly common. How many of the original members now assembled was of less interest to the public – hence the lack of concern when Bill Wyman left the Stones in 1992.
Although at their crisis summit four years earlier, Richards gave this an amusing spin, pointing out to Jagger, “Darling, this thing is bigger than both of us!”, it was becoming obvious where their future lay. A little over a year later, the Rolling Stones had embarked on a wildly acclaimed comeback tour that has continued, with breaks for rest, recreation and the recording of three more albums, ever since.
The man who guaranteed their continuation in the 1990s was not the same person who rescued them in the 1970s. By now, all of Prince Rupert’s arrangements were in place and doing a fine job at protecting the Stones’ income from predatory tax authorities. In 1972, he had set up a company based in Amsterdam, Promogroup, into which all their royalties from record sales, airplay and song publishing would from now on be paid.
Although Holland is hardly known as a tax haven, Loewenstein had discovered that it is unusually lenient on royalties. Accounts made public this month revealed that the Stones paid less than £4m on income of £240m received via Promogroup since 1986. The lion’s share went to Jagger and Richards, the men credited with writing all of the group’s songs and the only two who are actually contracted to the Stones’ record company, Virgin/EMI. Ronnie Wood is technically an employee, not a band member. Following years of lobbying by his mate Keith, Ronnie is now said to get the same whack from their concert revenues as the others.
That £240m royalty figure does not include the sums the Stones have received over the same period for their live performances – the area in which they rule supreme. Before they set foot on the first stadium stage of their tour of North America in 1989, they had already received $100m for an initial 40 dates from a Canadian promoter, Michael Cohl.
Sometimes referred to as “the most famous entertainment mogul you’ve never heard of”, Cohl is a bespectacled, middle-class beardie and Eric Clapton lookalike whose career began with the ownership of an Ottawa strip club. As well as getting in with the Stones, he has produced tours by a number of A-list rock acts, including Bowie, Pink Floyd and U2. Even more retiring than Prince Rupert, he has built a strong relationship with a group that prefers its key workers to keep a low profile. In a deal that broke the mould of concert promotion, Cohl bought the entire Steel Wheels tour upfront, including the sponsorship, merchandising, radio, film and TV rights. Much of the money he raised from the tour’s corporate sponsors, Labatt’s beer, who have an interest in his company, Ballard Cohl Labatt. This boxed out an entire tier of middlemen, agents and local promoters, who would previously have shared the risk – and the profits – between them.
One of the men he supplanted, the legendary promoter Bill Graham, who had been involved in every American tour they had done up to that point, said later that “losing the Stones was like watching my favourite lover become a whore”. What Graham’s sour grapes neglect to take into account is that it was Cohl’s provision of funds before the event that encouraged the band to mount the most ambitious production the rock world had ever seen.
In 1989, Cohl’s proposition seemed an audacious gamble. Seventeen years and five sold-out world tours later, he has almost replaced the increasingly frail Loewenstein as the Stones’ key money man, while his strategy has been adopted as a business model by Clear Channel, the entertainment consortium that is now the world’s largest concert promoter and the owner of hundreds of venues and media outlets.
“Corporate” is a term frequently applied, unflatteringly, to the Stones, and always as news of their latest sponsorship deal is made public. When in 1981 they first toured with the support of Jovan perfume, the rock press were outraged. This was the most blatant “sellout” ever. Twenty-five years later, such partnerships are commonplace, and have even been adopted by groups such as U2 who once denounced them.
It is often noted that the Stone who has been behind all of the group’s sharpest business moves – from the hiring of Prince Rupert to the denial of the benefits of full-band membership to Ronnie Wood – once attended the London School of Economics. Those who work closely with, and for, Jagger, however, have nothing but praise for him and his attention to detail, his willingness to delegate, and the fact that because he functions as the group’s player-manager – and possibly chairman as well – the Stones are a remarkably uncomplicated organisation to deal with. They also insist that he is far from being the rock’n’roll scrooge of popular repute. They claim that the budgets he okays are significantly more generous than those offered by other stadium acts. It is axiomatic within the Stones’ camp that the reason the fans keep coming back is because the quality of the shows gets higher with every tour. The staging of A Bigger Bang is reportedly the biggest, heaviest and most expensive structure the group has ever performed on.
As it flows out in one direction, the money is pouring back in another. Cohl is nothing if not canny in gauging how much different audiences are prepared to pay. He introduced discounts for students on the Stones’ current tour in Canada, while setting up a Barbra Streisand concert series for this autumn in which tickets will average $750 a pop, with VIP packages into the thousands. Since he got involved, each of the Stones’ tours has generated more cash than the one before, with receipts now estimated at three times what they were in 1989.
Does this mean that the Rolling Stones are going out with a (bigger) bang? The care and cash lavished on their latest production suggests not: why invest in a show that’s finally reached the end of the road? On the other hand, no matter how much they still love what they do, and how much the world still loves watching the Stones do it, there’s one old favourite from the catalogue that Jagger hasn’t sung for years: Time Is on My Side…
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-2318644,00.html
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| 27th August 2006 10:41 AM |
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| sirmoonie |
Interesting historical read. Tx, Gazza. |
| 27th August 2006 11:55 AM |
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| lotsajizz |
the writer got it right!
for once
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| 27th August 2006 12:02 PM |
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| Taptrick |
Promogroup: From freerepublic.com:
Stones rolling in it, thanks to Dutch firm, tax havens -Paid 1.6 % tax on earnings of $152 million
theage ^ | August 2, 2006 | Allan Hall, Berlin
Posted on 08/11/2006 4:11:58 AM PDT by dennisw
The Rolling Stones paid just 1.6 per cent in tax on earnings of $US152 million ($A200 million) last year, thanks to slick management of their fortunes.
Details have leaked out because the Stones' finances are managed by a Dutch company; they are making their wills and Dutch law requires certain information to be made public.
Germany's Die Welt newspaper reported on the tax break that Mick Jagger, guitarist Keith Richards and drummer Charlie Watts enjoyed through the use of offshore trusts and companies.
According to the newspaper, the trio went to a Dutch finance house in 1972 to have their millions managed from Amsterdam because they didn't trust British finance houses. Now they are making wills to ensure that beneficiaries don't end up squabbling.
Details of the tax break were revealed in the country's trade registry, according to Die Welt.
A Dutch holding company called Promogroup is the umbrella organisation that has been managing the finances of the three original Stones for the past 35 years.
Ron Wood's assets are not managed by the Dutch group. With just £70 million ($A171 million) in the bank, he is the poor relation to the others in the band.
The Stones' Dutch advisers use branch offices in the Dutch Antilles in the Caribbean to reduce tax liabilities. The registry also pinpoints a European blueblood as the Stones' finance manager, a German-Austrian prince who the band reportedly refer to as Ruppie the Groupie.
Promogroup runs 10 subsidiary companies and has roots stretching back to the 17th century when rich merchants rather than rockers were its clients.
Sabine Schuttgens, a lawyer involved in setting up the Stones' trusts, said: "The foundations are to make sure that after the death of the rock stars there would be no arguments among their heirs."
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I found the comments section of this article interesting. This is a classic example of ATLAS SHRUGGING. I also like the comment that expressed irony at how Bono preaches where to spend tax dollars and then pays almost none himself.
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| 27th August 2006 12:31 PM |
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| GotToRollMe |
Great Sunday morning read. Thanks, Gazza!
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| 27th August 2006 10:12 PM |
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| Soldatti |
Good read. |
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