Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!
 
Ronnie Lane's lonely battle
Former Face fights multiple sclerosis
By Kurt Loder
Rolling Stone Magazine
August 5, 1982
 
 
 
RONNIE LANE remembers rhe day, about five years ago. when doctors first told him he had multiple sclerosis. How could he ever forget ? "They just looked at me with an awful, pitiful, sort of helpless expression. It was scary-really scary. When they look at you like that, you know they can't bleedin' do anything, and oh, do you feel alone." Lane stares silently at the hands he can no longer control, the legs that hardly work, the once happy-go-lucky life that now lies in ruins, "I can be in a crowded football stadium," he says, "completely alone."
 
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is incurable. That's whar the English doctors rold Ronnie Lane. But rhen late last year, Fred Sessler rentered his life. A longtime business associate of the Rolling Stones, Sessler knew Lane from his glory day's with the Faces. Sessler had left the music business, taken his rock & roll money and invested it in a controversial MS therapy that involves daily injecrions of diluted poisonous snake venom. Basing himself in Florida, he opened rhe Miami Venom Institute. Keirh Richards' aunt, who has a severe case of MS, was a patient there, and by last November. so was Ronnie Lane,the former, now-penniless rock star. Sessler paid for everything, and Lane slowly started gett:ing better. The venom injections, combined with a rigorous program of therapy, can't cure MS, but Lane says thevydid arrest the physical deterioration associated with the disease. Suddenly, he had hope.

But'then earlier this year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration intervened. The FDA did not approve of Sessler's venom treatments and closed down the Miami Venom Institute, forcing him to move his operation to Jamaica and to put a heartbroken Ronnie Lane on a plane back to London.
 
Outside the small, tidy apartment in the London suburb of Kentish Town, a daylong drizzle drips through the trees. Inside, a small elecrtic heater struggles to take some of the chill off the afternoon, A battered Hammond organ, a souvenir of happier times, stands against a wall in the living room. Lane bought it years ago from Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan. His hands can't finger the keys anymore, but music still fills his head. and with the assistance of Boo Oldfield, he still composes songs. Boo is a dark, pretty, determined woman, and this is her flat. She took Lane in when his life was at a low ebb - a bottomed-out chronicle of two failed marriages, a pair of sons (now three and nine years old) he was rarely able to see and, finally and most devastaringly, this cruel, crippling disease.
 
"Do you know about MS?" Boo asks from the kitchen, where she's brewing a pot of tea. "It's where the outer layer of the nerves breaks down. It's like a short circuit." She brings the tea into the living room, and Lane, who's sitting quietly on a couch, asks her for a packet of Sweet 'n Low. He's confined to astringent diet-no sugar, no fat, no gluten. Bread's out," he explains. "Anything to do with wheat flour is out."
 
"Rice flour you can use to make lots of things," Boo cheerily interjects. It's not that bad."
 
"She's baked a few cakes with rice flour," says Ronnie, slowly stirring his tea, and I think I like it better." He's trying to be optimistic, but suddenly his smile tums into a bitter. twisted grin."That's just looking on the bright side of things," he says. "Let's look on the really dull side-it's awful!"
 
So are the snake-venom injections. (Before he left the States, Sessler provided Lane with a year's worth of the venom for home treatment.) "How can I describe it?" Ronnie says wearily. "Can you imagine the strands of your hair hurting? That's what happens.
And when you blink-like that-it's like your eyelids are made of sandpaper. I was quite prepared to feel bad, like with the flu or mumps.
But I've never had anything like this. This is like hell itself."
 
(According to a National Multiple Sclerosis Society spokeswoman, venom therapy is "an entirely unproven form of treatment." And while MS is not fatal itself; complications can lead to death.) To make matters worse, Lane is broke. What money he had from his days of fame went to doctors. Now he can't even afford a record player, and British tax collectors constantly hound him for thousands of pounds they claim he owes in back taxes. He agrees that it might be a wise idea to check on the royalties accrued by sales of the old Faces albums and Rough Mix, the lovely LP he recorded with Pete Townshend in 1977,: but he's unable to pay for an audit. Nor can he afford a security guard to watch over his last significant asset, a mobile studio, which he bought with his earnings from the Faces. The sixteen-track recording van is now parked in another part of London, where local punks-convinced that Lane was just another overprivileged rock star-stripped it of equipment. Ronnie was powerless to stop them.

All he has left, really, are his memories. They stretch back thirty-six years to the East End of London, where he was born. His father was a truck driver-"a saint," Ronnie says- who'd work all day and then spend his nights caring for his two sons and their mother, who also suffered from MS. (As a child, Lane was assured that the disease was not hereditary; when he later contracted it, doctors allowed as how it did tend to "cluster in families.") It was Ronnie's father who urged him to take up the guitar as a child.

"In his own kind of truck-driver way, he was very wise," Lane says. "He said, 'If you learn to play an instrument, son, learn to play a guitar. You'll alwavs have a friend.' It's a great way of puttin' it."
 
His first band was called the Outcasts. Ronnie was the guitarist and lead singer, and a little kid named Kenny Jones played drums. When they couldn't find a steady bass player, Ronnie decided to switch instruments and got his father to "accompany him to a music store to pick out a bass.

"I'd seen the bass I wanted, a Harmony, and it was only fortyfive pounds [about $100 ]. We went
to the shop, and this little fellow came up and said, 'Oh, yeah, that's a great bass, , and he showed it to us. I liked this little fellow a lot, and I ended up goin' home with him. He had a stack of records as high as that table over there-really early Sun records and Ray Charles. I'd never come across that kind of music before, but he had it all."
 
The little fellow," whose name was Steve Marriott, was also a musician, so Lane invited him down to a local pub one night to sit in with the Outcasts. Unfortunately, Marriott destroyed the house piano, the band got fired, and Ronnie was chucked out of the group. Kenny Jones loyally followed him, and together with the incorrigible Marriott they started a new group. Since they were all rather diminurive, they called themselves the Small Faces.

With Ian McLagan on organ, the band acquired a following, a manager and a recording deal. They charted in 1965 with their first single, "Whatcha Gonna Do about It?" and had hits the following year with "Sha La La La Lee", "Hey Girl" and "All or Nothing" ( which went to Number One). They smoked a lot of dope, dropped acid and generally lived it up. They were in it for love and fun, and they never knew where the money went. At one point, with three singles in the charts, they were sleeping on top of cars parked in the street.

Even though the hits kept coming- "Itchycoo Park" in 1967, "Lazy. Sunday" in 1968-the group stayed poor. In 1969, Marriott left to form Humble Pie, and the remaining Small Faces looked for a replacement. Eventually, they found two: singer Rod Stewart and bassist-turned-guitarist Ron Wood, late of the Jeff Beck Group. This new combination was a hit, and life soon got better. The Faces liked only the best hotels, the biggest limousines. There was lots of drinking, and, of course, drugs. Lane happily consumed everything available, and when he'd occasionally notice a numbness in his fingers or a certain lack of coordinarion, he put it down to simple excess. After a few years, though, the extravagant lifestyle started getting to him.
 
 
"The thing that upset me was, like, to get a bloody private jet just to fly thirty-five miles. I thought, "Come on, who are you tryin' to impress?" And then Rod Stewart got so big-headed I couldn't take it anymore. I don't know what he wanted. I don't think he knew what he wanted, either. He was just bein' stupid."
 
Lane left the Faces in 1973 and started a traveling rock circus complete with jugglers and fire-eaters - called the Passing Show. He also put together a band, Slim Chance, and recorded four low-key; folksy albums. His physical coordination continued worsening, and after cutting Rough Mix with Townshend (with whom he shared a longstanding interest in the Sufibased teachings of Meher Baba), he sought medical help. It was then that the doctors told him there was none.

Lane puts part of the blame for his condition on drugs and alcohol and the rock & roll lifestyle he knew with the Faces. "I did a lot of really unreasonable things in those days," he says softly. "I'm ashamed of myself for the way I've gone on, very ashamed."
 
"He finds solace in the Bible and in Boo and, of course, in music. Last year, he even reunited with Steve Marriott, and they recorded a low-budget album called The Midgets Strike Back. No record company has yet expressed interest in releasing the record, however, and Lane is not in any position to promote it.
 
Outside, the rain has ceased and the sun is shining. A visiting journalist, taking his leave. asks Lane if there's any way in which people might help him-thinking he might appreciate charitable contributions from old Faces fans or some-thing.

"How could they help out?" he says. "I'!l tell you how your readers could help me out, if they want to: don't take dope. If you listen to me.
that'll help me out." Then he cites the Book of Proverbs, chapter seven, verse seven: "And . . . I discerned among the youths, a young man void of understanding."
 
"I've been there and back," says Ronnie Lane, and I know how far it is."
 
 
Back to Articles
Back to Odds & Ends
Back to Main