1991
My life flashes forward
1991
My life flashes forward
January 1, 1991: Mick Jagger and his family spend New Year's in Mustique.
January 6, 1991: Keith Richards leaves New York City for London, England.
Ron Wood returns to London from
Ireland.
January 7-18, 1991: In the midst
of mixing sessions for their next live album, the Rolling Stones gather
at Hit Factory
Studios in London, England, and record a new single based on pre-Gulf War
tensions,
Highwire,
and the extra song Sex Drive. These are Bill Wyman's last recordings
with the band.
January 12, 1991: Ron Wood leaves the Rolling Stones' recording sessions
early, to fly with his family to Kenya for
a safari holiday.
Mid-January 1991: At a Rolling
Stones business meeting, Bill Wyman announces his intention to leave
the group.
They decide not to announce the decision, given the absence of band projects
in the near
future.
| Keith Richards
(2003): Bill leaving
At the end of the Urban Jungle tour Bill said he was leaving the band. I got really pissed with him. I threatened to do everything in the world to him, including death at dawn - as I always say, Nobody leaves this band except in a coffin. But he made up his mind: he'd really started to hate flying, he developed a real fear of flying. Now, this was pretty strange after 25 years, but it happens to people. He was having to drive to every gig, which was knackering him, and sometimes people get to the end of their tether. |
January 24, 1991: Keith Richards returns to New York from England.
January 28, 1991: Ron Wood returns to England from Kenya.
January 29-30, 1991: Keith Richards produces two songs with pianist Johnnie
Johnson at Sorcerer Sound Studios in
New York, including a cover of Key to the Highway, which he sings.
February 1991: Keith Richards spends most of the month in Antigua.
February 2, 1991: Ron Wood and the Irish group the Wilfs perform a benefit
concert at Hackney Empire in London,
England.
February 14, 1991: Mick Jagger arrives in Atlanta, Georgia.
February 16, 1991: Ron Wood joins Bob Dylan onstage at the Hammersmith
Odeon in London, England.
February 18, 1991: Mick Jagger starts shooting for the movie Freejack
in Atlanta, Georgia.
February 26-27, 1991: Charlie Watts' new jazz group, the Charlie Watts
Quintet, receives its baptism as they record
their first album at Lansdowne Studio in London, England.
February 27, 1991: Ron Wood sees Eric Clapton perform at the Royal Albert
Hall in London, England.
February 28, 1991: Mick Jagger flies into New York from Atlanta for the
next day's video shoot. Charlie Watts and
Ron Wood arrive together on a plane from London.
February 28-March 1, 1991: Bill Wyman watches Eric Clapton perform at the
Royal Albert Hall in London, England.
March 1-2, 1991: The Rolling Stones,
without Bill Wyman, gather in Brooklyn, New York, to shoot a
videoclip
for Highwire near Brooklyn Bridge.
| Keith Richards
(March 1991): Is Bill still a Stone?
As far as the rest of us are concerned, he's still in the band. We'll know in a year, when we start getting back together. |
March 2, 1991: Mick Jagger returns to Atlanta to continue his film shoot.
March 3, 1991: Charlie Watts flies back to London from New York. Ron Wood
takes in the film Silence of the Lambs
in New York.
March
4, 1991: The Rolling Stones' single Highwire is released.
| Mick Jagger
(March 1991): "Highwire"
It's not about the war. It's about how it started. |
March 4, 1991: Ron and Jo Wood visit Keith and Patti Richards in New York.
March 5, 1991: Ron Wood returns to England.
March 7, 1991: Ron Wood leaves England for Ireland.
March 14, 1991: Ron Wood returns to England.
March 26, 1991: In Atlanta, Mick Jagger catches the Noel Coward play Fallen
Angels.
April
2, 1991: The Rolling Stones' 5th live album, Flashpoint, is released.
April 3, 1991: The Charlie Watts Quintet performs its first live concert
at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London,
England.
April 8, 1991: The Charlie Watts Quintet's first album, From One Charlie,
is released in tandem with a re-release of
Charlie Watts' 1964 book Ode to a High Flying Bird.
April 10-19, 1991: Keith Richards is in San Francisco, California, where
he records a remake of Crawling King Snake
with John Lee Hooker. He also records the song That Feel with Tom
Waits.
| John Lee
Hooker: Keith the superman
Keith Richards has a love for me, and he does everything for the love of music. He's a lovely, lovely person. He's a superman. I love him. Oh yeah, he knows what the blues is. He came up to the house, we had a good time together, and played some good things. |
Mid-April 1991: Ron Wood is back on safari in Kenya.
April 16, 1991: Still in Atlanta for his film shoot, Mick Jagger, with
Elton John, catches Bob Dylan at the Fox Theatre.
April 19, 1991: Keith Richards flies from San Francisco to Los Angeles
for family outings.
April 22, 1991: Keith Richards returns to New York from California.
April 30, 1991: Mick Jagger ends shooting for the movie Freejack
in Atlanta. It marks his first completed film since
Ned Kelly filmed in 1969.
| Mick Jagger
(December 1991): Making films and producing things
I'd like to do one movie every year. I'm quite serious about acting... I'd also like to start writing pictures, and I'd like to start producing. I should really initiate projects rather than just accept them... I like producing things. It's not that I just like being in them. I like staging things. |
May 1, 1991: Mick Jagger returns to New York City.
May 1991: Mick Jagger and Jimmy Rip audition musicians in New York for
Mick's next solo album.
| Jimmy Rip
(December 1991): Cross-cultural Mick
We were auditioning band members in New York six months ago, and Mick was trying to get furniture and stuff for his new house. And in the middle of the rehearsal hall, we were jamming loud rock & roll, and in come these three people with about 15 paintings from Christie's or Sotheby's. And they're leaning the paintings up against the wall, and Mick starts singing Sex Machine, by James Brown, and dancing around and pointing at the ones he wants. I guess you could call him cross-cultural. |
May 2, 1991: Bill Wyman and Ron Wood receive a career award on behalf of
the Rolling Stones in London,
England, at the Ivor Novello Awards. Bill Wyman is dating 27-year-old Charlotte
Walden.
May 4, 1991: Mick Jagger and his daughter Karis catch the play I Hate
Hamlet in New York City.
May 9, 1991: Mick Jagger flies in to London, England, from France, and
soon after flies to France for the Cannes film
festival.
| Mick Jagger
(December 1991): Restless and always working
I'm not that domesticated. After life on the road, I'm not very good at being in the house and doing things. I'm extremely restless - I'm extremely restless and I never really stop working. I'm always writing, and if I'm not working with the Rolling Stones or something, I can do this solo album, or I can do some movie, or I'll make some deal, or I'll just go off somewhere and have a good time. I love all my children - I'm not saying that I don't - and we all get on very well. But I think it's a mistake to paint a picture of me as a sort of domesticated, ordinary kind of homebody, because I don't think it's really true. Probably I don't like the image of it very much. I think people find it very hard to accept multifaceted people. That you can be a person who has children but yet you can go out and get wild and crazy and mad and drunk, and then you can go out on the road and be completely sober because that's what you have to be. And so on and so on. I don't find life quite so simple, that everyone's just got these tiny personalities and that they can only behave in one kind of way. |
| Mick Jagger
(December 1991): The high-society thing
I don't think you should make too much of all that high-society thing. England's a very small place. I don't think you could avoid seeing different kinds of people. Keith and Bill and Charlie and Ronnie all know people in every class; they all know all the same people I know, or the same kinds of people. It's just that you never hear about it. |
May 19, 1991: Keith Richards flies to London, England, from New York.
May 21-22, 1991: The Rolling Stones,
including Bill Wyman, shoot a videoclip at Twickenham Studio in
London, England,
for the song Sex Drive. It is Bill Wyman's last ever task as a Rolling
Stone.
May 23, 1991: Mick Jagger returns to France.
| Bassist
Doug Wimbish: Mick in France
(His château) is a really wicked fuckin' place. I mean, it's so big, they have POSTCARDS, you know? (Behind a stream in the garden) are some bushes and then there are the gypsies who are camped off. Every now and then one of the geese would go missing, and Mick was like, The fuckin' gypsies got my geese. I know they're eatin' 'em. Mick keeps himself together. He'll be up in the mornings, he works out - he looks great. Just one thing: Don't let the motherfucker have a beer. God forbid. One or two beers and he's sloshed. I've never seen anything like it. |
May 30, 1991: Mick Jagger joins Lenny Kravitz onstage at Le Zenith in Paris,
France, to duet on No Expectations.
June 1, 1991: Ron Wood celebrates his birthday in Ireland.
June 2, 1991: Charlie Watts flies from London to New York City on his 50th
birthday.
June 3, 1991: The Charlie Watts Quintet performs athe Blue Note jazz club
in New York City. Keith Richards attends.
June 6, 1991: Charlie Watts appears and performs on U.S. TV's Good Morning
America.
June 7, 1991: Charlie Watts visits Keith Richards in New York.
June 8, 1991: Charlie Watts returns to England from New York.
June 13, 1991: Ron Wood celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Hard Rock
Café in London, England.
June 18, 1991: Ron Wood oversees an exhibition of cancer patients' artwork
at a hospital in London.
June 19-20, 1991: Charlie and Shirley Watts visit Germany.
June 23, 1991: Bill Wyman and Ron Wood perform with other musicians for
a charity show at a cricket ground in
London, England.
June 25, 1991: In London, England, Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall catch the
opera Tosca at Earl's Court.
July 26, 1991: Mick Jagger spends his birthday at his castle in France.
August 1991: Keith Richards starts recording demos for his second solo
album in New York City, and mixing tapes
for a live album from his 1988 tour. Mick Jagger spends time in Los Angeles
making plans/writing demos for his
next solo album.
August 4, 1991: Ron Wood is back at his home in St. Kildare, Ireland, working
on his art for an exhibition and
starting work for a new solo album.
September 1991: Ron Wood records the bulk of his next solo album at his
home studio in St. Kildare, Ireland. Keith
Richards continues demo work on his own album in New York.
September 15-17, 1991: The Charlie Watts Quintet performs concerts
at Spiral Hall in Tokyo, Japan.
September 18, 1991: Mick Jagger attends a book party at The Spencer House
in London, England.
September 20, 1991: Charlie Watts signs copies of his CD/book at a record
store in Tokyo, Japan.
September 21, 1991: Charlie Watts returns to England from Japan.
September 26, 1991: Mick Jagger attends a party for Dave Stewart in London.
Ron Wood arrives in Tokyo, Japan,
for an art exhibition.
September 30, 1991: Ron Wood travels from Tokyo to Kobe, Japan.
October 1991: Mick Jagger starts recording sessions for his third solo
album in Paris, France.
October 2, 1991: Ron Wood arrives in Kyoto, then Osaka, Japan, to continue
his art exhibition.
October 4, 1991: Ron Wood arrives in Fukuoka, Japan, to finish his Japanese
art exhibition tour.
October 8, 1991: Ron Wood returns to England from Japan.
October 13, 1991: Keith Richards flies in to Spain from New York.
October 17, 1991: Keith Richards performs at a Guitar Legends festival
in Seville, Spain, along with Bob Dylan and
others.
October 18, 1991: Keith Richards leaves Spain for London, England.
October 19, 1991: Keith Richards hangs out with Ron Wood in London.
Late October 1991: Keith Richards resumes writing songs and working on
demos for his next album in New York.
October 25, 1991: The Rolling
Stones' IMAX-format concert film, At The Max, filmed during the
1990
Urban Jungle
European Tour, is released at various IMAX theaters around the world.
October 28, 1991: Mick Jagger
holds a press conference to promote At The Max in Paris, France.
| Mick Jagger:
At The Max
(I)t turned out all right. I was very interested in experimenting with this format because I wanted to give people the sense of what it's like to be there. |
October 28-November 2, 1991: The Charlie Watts Quintet performs at a new
Ronnie Scott's jazz club in Birmingham,
England. Ron Wood attends on November 1.
November 19, 1991: The Rolling
Stones - minus Bill Wyman - agree to a new record deal with Virgin
Records in
London, England, for a record-breaking $40+ million.
| Mick Jagger
(December 1991): Is there pressure from Virgin?
Not at all. We don't have to even START an album for more than a year. It's all bullshit, all those numbers you read in the newspapers. They don't actually GIVE you that money when you sign a piece of paper. If only they did - life would be really nice, wouldn't it? You know, they GIVE it to you in dribs and drabs - and eventually you spend it all anyway. But we're dividing it up between a lot of peple. I'm not saying it's not a lot of money, but Virgin does hope to make a profit on this deal. They could probably be recouped with one new album and one boxed set of reissues. |
| Mick Jagger
(December 1991): Is Bill out of the Stones?
It's a terrible thing. God, I don't know how I'm going to live with it. I think Bill's kind of had enough of it all, really. I mean, I don't know, he seemed all right on the tour, but I guess he just doesn't want to do any more. He's got enough money, and I suppose he feels he's done it. We haven't really talked it through, but I don't think I'd be out of order by saying that I doubt we would actually get somone new in the band who would be a permanent Rolling Stone. We'll go out on the tour and make a record with a bass player and then we'll see how that works over a two-year period. |
| Mick Jagger
(December 1991): getting along with Keith
Keith and I seem to be getting on all right. The tour got all that out of our systems. We'd had enough (of fighting). So we had a good time. We never had any major problems on the road, considering that we're both pretty volatile. We didn't have any rows or everything. Which is why I can blithely talk about doing it all again. Because if it had been a nightmare, I wouldn't be sitting here talking about Virgin deals and Rolling Stones tours. I'd be saying, Well, it was very nice, and it was a great ending to a wonderful... |
November 19, 1991: Following the agreement, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards,
Ron Wood and wives dine with Virgin
Records CEO Richard Branson in London.
November 20, 1991: Keith Richards returns to New York from London and continues
pre-production work on his
next album.
November 21, 1991: Keith Richards
holds a press conference to promote the Rolling Stones' At The Max
at the Beacon
Theatre in New York City.
| Keith Richards
(November 1991): Is Bill still a Stone?
With Bill, you can't tell. I'm going to wait until I get in the studio and see if he's there or not. I hope he is. |
November 25, 1991: Keith Richards attends a memorial for concert promoter
Bill Graham in New York.
December 1991: Ron Wood is continuing work on his solo album at his home
in Ireland.
December 1991: Mick Jagger continues work on his next solo album at Olympic
Studios in London, England.
| Mick Jagger
(December 1991): Taking time off the Stones again
Doing a solo album, it's more relaxed than doing the Rolling Stones... It's just free and easy. And I don't REALLY want to DO a Rolling Stones record right now. I just spent two years with them on the Steel Wheels tour and it can get a bit incestuous if you just play everything with one band. |
December 5, 1991: Mick Jagger duets again with Lenny Kravitz onstage at
Wembley Arena in London, England.
December 9, 1991: Keith Richards is interviewed on cross-country American
radio from New York City to promote
his live album.
December 10, 1991: Keith Richards' live album Live At The Hollywood
Palladium, December 15, 1988 is released.
A video of the concert is also released.
December 20, 1991: Keith and Patti Richards host a party at their new home
in Connecticut.
December 21, 1991: Keith Richards shows up at a screening of At The
Max in Norwalk, Connecticut, USA.
Late December 1991: Mick Jagger spends the holidays in England, as Jerry
Hall is expecting their third child
together.