Life

by Keith Richards; James Fox

  It took me a long time to figure out how to knock somebody else out instead of me getting it. I’d been an expert at taking beatings for quite a long time. Then I had a lucky break where I did a bully in by total sheer luck. It was one of those magical moments. I was twelve or thirteen. One minute I’m the mark, and with just one swift move, I put the big man in school down. Against the rockery and the little flower bed, he slipped and fell over and I was on him. When I fight, a red curtain comes down. I don’t see a thing, but I know where to go. It’s as if a red veil drops over my eyes. No mercy, mate, the boot went in! Pulled off by the prefects and all of that. How are the mighty fallen! I can still remember the astounding surprise when this guy went down. I can still see the little rockery and the pansies he fell over in, and after that I didn’t let him up.

  Once he was down, the whole atmosphere in the schoolyard changed. A huge cloud seemed to be lifted from me. My reputation after that suddenly released me from all that angst and stress. I’d never been aware the cloud was so large. It was the only time I started to feel good about school, mostly because I was able to repay a few favors some other guys had done for me. An ugly little sod called Stephen Yarde, “Boots” we used to call him, because of his huge feet, was the favorite to be picked on by the bully boys. He was being taunted all the time. And knowing what it was like to be waiting for a beating, I stood up for him. I became his minder. It was “Don’t fuck with Stephen Yarde.” I never wanted to get big enough to beat up other people; I just wanted to get big enough to stop it happening.

  With that weight off my mind, my work improved at Dartford Tech. I was even getting praise. Doris kept some of my reports: Geography 59%, a good exam result. History 63%, quite good work. But against the science subjects on the report sheet the form master put a single bracket that enclosed them all—there was no daylight between them for abjectness—and he wrote them all off with no improvement in mathematics, physics and chemistry. Engineering drawing was still rather beyond him. That report on science subjects contained the story of the big betrayal and of how I was turned from a reasonably compliant student into a school terrorist and a criminal, with a lively and lasting rage against authority.

  There is a photograph of our group of schoolboys standing in front of a bus, smiling for the camera, in the company of one schoolmaster. I am standing in the front row, wearing shorts, aged eleven. It was taken in 1955 in London, where we had gone to sing at a concert at St. Margaret’s Church in Westminster Abbey—a choir competition between schools, performed in front of the queen. Our school choir had come a long way, a bunch of Dartford yokels who were winning cups and prizes for choral work on a national level. The three sopranos were Terry and Spike and me—the stars, you might say, of the show. And our choirmaster, pictured by the bus, the genius who had forged this little flying unit out of such unpromising material, was called Jake Clare. He was a mystery man. I found out only many years later that he’d been an Oxford choirmaster, one of the best in the country, but he was exiled or degraded for boinky boink with little boys. Given another chance in the colonies. I don’t want to sully his name, and I have to say this is only what I heard. He’d certainly had better material to work with than us—what was he doing down here? Around us, anyway, he kept his hands clean, although he was famed for playing with himself through his trouser pocket. He hammered us into shape to the point where we were clearly one of the best choirs in the country. And he picked out the three best sopranos that he was given. We won quite a few trophies, which hung in the assembly hall. I’ve still never played a better gig prestige-wise than Westminster Abbey. You got the taunts: “Oh, choirboy, are we? Fantsy pantsy.” It didn’t bother me; the choir was wonderful. You got coach trips to London. You got out of physics and chemistry, and I would have done anything for that. That’s where I learned a lot about singing and music and working with musicians. I learned how to put a band together—it’s basically the same job—and how to keep it together. And then the shit hit the fan.

  Your voice breaks, aged thirteen, and Jake Clare gave the three of us sopranos the pink slip. But they also demoted us, kept us down one class. We had to stay down a year because we hadn’t got physics and chemistry and hadn’t done our maths. “Yeah, but you let us off that because of choir practice. We worked our butts off.” That was a rough thank-you. The great depression came right after that. Suddenly at thirteen I had to sit down and start again with the year under. Redo a whole school year. This was the kick in the guts, pure and unmixed. The moment that happened, Spike, Terry and I, we became terrorists. I was so mad, I had a burning desire for revenge. I had reason then to bring down this country and everything it stood for.

  I spent the next three years trying to fuck them up. If you want to breed a rebel, that’s the way to do it. No more haircuts. Two pairs of trousers, the skin-tight ones under the regulation flannels, which came off the minute I was out the gate. Anything to annoy them. It didn’t get me anywhere; it got me a lot of black looks from my dad, but even that didn’t stop me. I really didn’t like to disappoint my dad, but… sorry, Dad.

  It still rankles, that humiliation. It still hasn’t gone out, the fire. That’s when I started to look at the world in a different way, not their way anymore. That’s when I realized that there’s bigger bullies than just bullies. There’s them, the authorities. And a slow-burning fuse was lit. I could have got expelled easily after that, in any different way, but then I’d have had to face my dad. And he would have spotted that immediately—that I’d manipulated it. So it had to be a slow-moving campaign. I just lost total interest in authority or trying to make good under their terms. School reports? Give me a bad one, I’ll forge it. I got very good at forgery. He could do better. Somehow I managed to find the same ink, make it He could not do better. My dad would look at it. “He could not do better. Why does he give you a B-minus?” Pushing my luck a bit there. But they never detected the forgeries. I was actually hoping they would, because then I could be done, expelled for forgery. But apparently it was too good, or they decided that that one is not going to work, boy.

  I lost total interest in school after choir went down the tube. Technical drawing, physics, mathematics, a yawn, because it doesn’t matter how much they try to teach me algebra, I just don’t get it, and I don’t see why I should. I’ll understand at gunpoint, on bread and water and a whip. I would learn it, I could learn it, but there’s something inside of me saying this is going to be no help to you, and if you do want to learn it, you’ll learn it by yourself. At first, after the voice broke and we were given that boot down, I stuck very close together with the guys I used to sing with, because we all felt the same burning resentment for winning them all the medals and shields that they were always so proud of in their assembly hall. Meanwhile, we’re cleaning their bloody shoes round the back, and that’s the thanks you get.

  You cut some rebel style. In the High Street there was Leonards, where they sold very cheap jeans, just as jeans were becoming jeans. And they would sell fluorescent socks around ’56, ’57—rock-and-roll socks that glow in the dark so she always knows where I am, with black musical notes on them, pink and green. Used to have a pair of each. More daring still, I’d have pink on one foot and green on the other. That was really, like, wow.

  Dimashio’s was the ice cream parlor–coffee shop. Old Dimashio’s son went to school with us, big fat Italian boy. But he could always make plenty of friends by bringing them down to his dad’s joint. There was a jukebox there, so it was a hang. Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, apart from a load of schlock. It was the one little bit of Americana in Dartford. Just a little store, counter down the left side, jukebox, some seats and tables, the ice cream machine. At least once a week, I went to the cinema and usually to the Saturday morning pictures, either at the Gem or the Granada. Like Captain Marvel. SHAZAM! If you said it right, it might actually happen. Me and my mates in the middle of the field, going, “SHAZAM! We’re not saying it right!” Other blokes laug
hing behind our heads. “Yeah, you’re not going to laugh when I get it right. SHAZAM!” Flash Gordon, those little puffs of smoke. He had bleached-blond hair. Captain Marvel. You could never remember what it was about, it was more about the transformation, about just a regular guy who says one word and suddenly he’s gone. “I want to get that down,” you’d think. “I want to get out of this place.”

  And as we got bigger and a little brawnier, we started to swing our weight about a bit. The ludicrous side to Dartford Tech was its pretensions to being a public school (that’s what they call private schools in England). The prefects had little gold tassels on their caps; there was East House and West House. It was trying to recapture a lost world, as if the war hadn’t happened, of cricket, cups and prizes, schoolboy glory. All of the masters were totally substandard, but they were still aiming for this ideal as if it were Eton or Winchester, as if it were the ’20s or the ’30s or even the 1890s. In the midst of this there was, in my middle years there, soon after the catastrophe, a period of anarchy that seemed to go on for a very long time—a prolonged period of chaos. Maybe it was just one term in which, for whatever reason, these mad mass bundles would go on in the playing fields. There were about three hundred of us, everybody leaping around. It is strange, thinking back, that nobody stopped us. There were probably just too many of us running about. And nobody got hurt. But it allowed a certain degree of anarchy to the point that when the head prefect did come along and try to stop us one day, he was set upon and lynched. He was one of those perennial martinets, captain of sport, head of school, the most brilliant at all things. He swung his weight around, he would be really officious to the younger kids, and we decided to give him a taste. His name was Swanton —I remember him well. And it was raining, very nasty weather, and we stripped him and then chased him until he climbed a tree. We left him with his hat with the little gold tassels, that’s all he had left on. Swanton came down from the tree and rose to become a professor of medieval studies at the University of Exeter and wrote a key work called English Poetry Before Chaucer.

  Of all the schoolmasters, the one sympathetic one, who didn’t bark out orders, was the religious instruction teacher, Mr. Edgington. He used to wear a powder blue suit with cum stains down the leg. Mr. Edgington, the wanker. Religious instruction, forty-five minutes, “Let’s turn to Luke.” And we were saying, either he’s pissed himself or he’s just been round the back shagging Mrs. Mountjoy, who was the art mistress.

  I had adopted a criminal mind, anything to fuck them up. We won cross-country three times but we never ran it. We’d start off, go and have a smoke for an hour or so and then chip in towards the end. And the third or fourth time, they got wise and put monitors down the whole trail, and we weren’t spotted along the other seven miles. He has maintained a low standard was the six-word summary of my 1959 school report, suggesting, correctly, that I had put some effort into the enterprise.

  I was taking in a lot of music then, without really knowing it. England was often under fog, but there was a fog of words that settled between people too. One didn’t show emotions. One didn’t actually talk much at all. The talk was all around things, codes and euphemisms; some things couldn’t be said or even alluded to. It was a residue of the Victorians and all brilliantly portrayed in those black-and-white movies of the early ’60s—Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, This Sporting Life. And life was black-and-white; the Technicolor was just around the corner, but it wasn’t there yet in 1959. People really do want to touch each other, to the heart. That’s why you have music. If you can’t say it, sing it. Listen to the songs of the period. Heavily pointed and romantic, and trying to say things that they couldn’t say in prose or even on paper. Weather’s fine, 7:30 p.m., wind has died down, P.S. I love you.

  Doris was different—she was musical, like Gus. At three or four or five years old, at the end of the war, I was listening to Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Big Bill Broonzy, Louis Armstrong. It just spoke to me, it was what I listened to every day because my mum played it. My ears would have gone there anyway, but my mum trained them to go to the black side of town without her even knowing it. I didn’t know whether the singers were white, black or green at the time. But after a while, if you’ve got some musical ears, you pick up on the difference between Pat Boone’s “Ain’t That a Shame” and Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame.” Not that Pat Boone’s was particularly bad, he was a very good singer, but it was just so shallow and produced, and Fats’s was just so natural. Doris liked Gus’s music too. He used to tell her to listen to Stéphane Grappelli, Django Reinhardt’s Hot Club—that lovely swing guitar—and Bix Beiderbecke. She liked jazzy swing. Later on she loved going to hear Charlie Watts’s band at Ronnie Scott’s.

  We didn’t have a record player for a long time, and most of it, for us, was on the radio, mostly on the BBC, my mother being a master twiddler of the knobs. There were some great British players, some of the northern dance orchestras and all of those that were on the variety shows. Some great players. No slouches. If there was anything good she’d find it. So I grew up with this searching for music. She’d point out who was good or bad, even to me. She was musical, musical. There were voices she would hear and she’d say “screecher” when everyone else would think it was a great soprano. This was pre-TV. I grew up listening to really good music, including a little bit of Mozart and Bach in the background, which I found very over my head at the time, but I soaked it up. I was basically a musical sponge. And I was just fascinated by watching people play music. If they were in the street I’d gravitate towards it, a piano player in the pub, whatever it was. My ears were picking it up note for note. Didn’t matter if it was out of tune, there were notes happening, there were rhythms and harmonies, and they would start zooming around in my ears. It was very like a drug. In fact a far bigger drug than smack. I could kick smack; I couldn’t kick music. One note leads to another, and you never know quite what’s going to come next, and you don’t want to. It’s like walking on a beautiful tightrope.

  I think the first record I bought was Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.” Fantastic record, even to this day. Good records just get better with age. But the one that really turned me on, like an explosion one night, listening to Radio Luxembourg on my little radio when I was supposed to be in bed and asleep, was “Heartbreak Hotel.” That was the stunner. I’d never heard it before, or anything like it. I’d never heard of Elvis before. It was almost as if I’d been waiting for it to happen. When I woke up the next day I was a different guy. Suddenly I was getting overwhelmed: Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, Fats. Radio Luxembourg was notoriously difficult to keep on station. I had a little aerial and walked round the room, holding the radio up to my ear and twisting the aerial. Trying to keep it down because I’d wake Mum and Dad up. If I could get the signal right, I could take the radio under the blankets on the bed and keep the aerial outside and twist it there. I’m supposed to be asleep; I’m supposed to be going to school in the morning. Loads of ads for James Walker, the jewelers “in every high street,” and the Irish sweepstakes, with which Radio Lux had some deal. The signal was perfect for the ads, “and now we have Fats Domino, ‘Blueberry Hill,’ ” and shit, then it would fade.

  Then, “Since my baby left me”—it was just the sound. It was the last trigger. That was the first rock and roll I heard. It was a totally different way of delivering a song, a totally different sound, stripped down, burnt, no bullshit, no violins and ladies’ choruses and schmaltz, totally different. It was bare, right to the roots that you had a feeling were there but hadn’t yet heard. I’ve got to take my hat off to Elvis for that. The silence is your canvas, that’s your frame, that’s what you work on; don’t try and deafen it out. That’s what “Heartbreak Hotel” did to me. It was the first time I’d heard something so stark. Then I had to go back to what this cat had done before. Luckily I caught his name. The Radio Luxembourg signal came back in. “That was Elvis Presley, with ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’
” Shit!

  Around 1959, when I was fifteen, Doris bought me my first guitar. I was already playing, when I could get one, but you can only tinker when you haven’t got one of your own. It was a Rosetti. And it was about ten quid. Doris didn’t have the credit to buy it on hire purchase, so she got someone else to do it, and he defaulted on the payment—big kerfuffle. It was a huge amount of money for her and Bert. But Gus must have had something to do with it too. It was a gut-string job. I started where every good guitar player should start—down there on acoustic, on gut strings. You can get to wire later on. Anyway, I couldn’t afford an electric. But I found just playing that Spanish, an old workman, and starting from there, it gave me something to build on. And then you got to steel strings and then finally, wow! Electricity! I mean, probably if I had been born a few years later, I would have leapt on the electric guitar. But if you want to get to the top, you’ve got to start at the bottom, same with anything. Same with running a whorehouse.

  I would just play every spare moment I got. People describe me then as being oblivious to my surroundings—I’d sit in a corner of a room when a party was going on or a family gathering, and be playing. Some indication of my love of my new instrument is Aunt Marje telling me that when Doris went to hospital and I stayed with Gus for a while, I was never parted from my guitar. I took it everywhere and I went to sleep with my arm laid across it.

  I have my sketchbook and notebook of that year. The date is more or less 1959, the crucial year when I was, mostly, fifteen years old. It’s a neat, obsessive piece of work in blue Biro. The pages are divided by columns and headings, and page two (after a crucial page about Boy Scouting, of which more later) is called “Record List. 45 rpm.” The first entry: “Title: Peggy Sue Got Married, Artiste(s): Buddy Holly.” Underneath that, in a less neat scrawl, are the encircled names of girls. Mary (crossed out), Jenny (ticked), Janet, Marilyn, Veronica. And so on. “Long Players” are The Buddy Holly Story, A Date with Elvis, Wilde about Marty (Marty Wilde, of course, for those who don’t know), The “Chirping” Crickets. The lists include the usuals—Ricky Nelson, Eddie Cochran, Everly Brothers, Cliff Richard (“Travellin’ Light”)—but also Johnny Restivo (“The Shape I’m In”), which was number three on one of my lists, “The Fickle Chicken” by the Atmospheres, “Always” by Sammy Turner—forgotten jewels. These were the record lists of the Awakening—the birth of rock and roll on UK shores. Elvis dominated the landscape at this point. He had a section in the notebook all to himself. The very first album I bought. “Mystery Train,” “Money Honey,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone.” The crème de la crème of his Sun stuff. I slowly acquired a few more, but that was my baby. As impressed as I was with Elvis, I was even more impressed by Scotty Moore and the band. It was the same with Ricky Nelson. I never bought a Ricky Nelson record, I bought a James Burton record. It was the bands behind them that impressed me just as much as the front men. Little Richard’s band, which was basically the same as Fats Domino’s band, was actually Dave Bartholomew’s band. I knew all this. I was just impressed by ensemble playing. It was how guys interacted with one another, natural exuberance and seemingly effortless delivery. There was a beautiful flippancy, it seemed to me. And of course that goes even more for Chuck Berry’s band. But from the start it wasn’t just the singer. What had to impress me behind the singer would be the band.