Life

by Keith Richards; James Fox

  We first met Brian Jones at the Ealing Jazz Club. He was calling himself Elmo Lewis. He wanted to be Elmore James at the time. “You’ll have to get a tan and put on a few inches, boy.” But slide guitar was a real novelty in England, and Brian played it that night. He played “Dust My Broom,” and it was electrifying. He played it beautifully. We were very impressed with Brian. I think Mick was the first one to go up and talk to him, and discovered that he had his own band, most of whom deserted him in the next few weeks.

  Mick and I had come up together to the club and done Chuck Berry numbers, which annoyed Cyril Davies, who thought it was rock and roll and he couldn’t play it anyway. When you start to play in public and you’re playing with some guys that have done it before, you’re low in the hierarchy and you always feel you’re being tested. You’ve got to be there, on time, your equipment’s got to be working, which it rarely was in my case. You have to measure up. Suddenly you’re in with the big boys, you’re not just pissing around in school gyms. Shit, this is pro. At least semipro; pro with no money.

  I left art school around this time. At the end your teacher says, “Well, I think this is pretty good,” and they send you off to J. Walter Thompson and you have an appointment, and by then, in a way you know what’s coming—three or four real smarty-pants, with the usual bow ties. “Keith, is it? Nice to see you. Show us what you’ve got.” And you lay the old folder out. “Hmmmm. I say, we’ve had a good look at this, Keith, and it does show some promise. By the way, do you make a good cup of tea?” I said yes, but not for you. I walked off with my folio—it was green, I remember—and I dumped it in the garbage can when I got downstairs. That was my final attempt to join society on their terms. The second pink slip. I didn’t have the patience or the facility to be a hack in an advertising agency. I was going to end up the tea boy. I wasn’t very nice to them in the interview. Basically I wanted an excuse to be thrown out on my own and thrown back on music. I think, OK, I’ve got two free years, not in the army. I’m going to be a bluesman.

  I went to the Bricklayers Arms, a seedy pub in Soho, for the first time for the first rehearsal for what turned out to be the Stones. I think it was May of ’62, lovely summer evening. Just off Wardour Street. Strip Alley. I get there, I’ve got my guitar with me. And as I get there the pub’s just opened. Typical brassy blond old barmaid, not many customers, stale beer. She sees the guitar and says, “Upstairs.” And I can hear this boogie-woogie piano, this unbelievable Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons stuff. I’m suddenly transported in a way. I feel like a musician and I haven’t even got there! I could have been in the middle of Chicago, in the middle of Mississippi. I’ve got to go up there and meet this man who’s playing this, and I’ve got to play with him. And if I don’t measure up, it’s over. That was really my feeling as I walked up those stairs, creak creak creak. In a way I walk up those stairs and come down a different person.

  Ian Stewart was the only one in the room, with this horsehair sofa that was split, horsehairs hanging out. He’s got on a pair of Tyrolean leather shorts. He’s playing an upright piano and he’s got his back to me because he’s looking out of the window where he’s got his bike chained to a meter, making sure it’s not nicked. At the same time he’s watching all the strippers going from one club to another with their little round hatboxes and wigs on. “Phoar, look at that.” All the while this Leroy Carr stuff is rumbling off his fingers. And I walk in with this brown plastic guitar case. And just stand there. It was like meeting the headmaster. All I could hope for was that my amp would work.

  Stu had gone down to the Ealing Club because he’d seen an ad Brian Jones had placed in Jazz News in the spring of ’62 for players wanting to start an R&B band. Brian and Stu started rehearsing with a bunch of different musicians; everybody would chip in two quid for an upstairs room in a pub. He’d seen Mick and me at the Ealing Club doing a couple of numbers and invited us along. In fact, to give Mick his due, Stu remembered that Mick had been coming already to his rehearsals, and Mick said, “I’m not doin’ it if Keith’s not doin’ it.” “Oh, you made it, did you?” And I started with him and he says, “You’re not gonna play that rock-and-roll shit, are ya?” Stu had massive reservations and he was suspicious of rock and roll. I’m “Yeah,” and then I start to play some Chuck Berry. And he’s “Oh, you know Johnnie Johnson?” who was Chuck’s piano player, and we started to sling the hash, boogie-woogie. That’s all we did. And then the other guys slowly started to turn up. It wasn’t just Mick and Brian. Geoff Bradford, a lovely slide blues guitar player who used to play with Cyril Davies. Brian Knight, a blues fan and his big number was “Walk On, Walk On.” He had that down and that was it. So Stu could have played with all these other cats, and actually we were third in line for this setup. Mick and I were brought in as maybes, tryouts. These cats were playing clubs with Alexis Korner; they knew shit. We were brand-new in town in those terms. And I realized that Stu had to make up his mind whether he was going to go for these real traditional folk blues players. Because by then I’d played some hot boogie-woogie and some Chuck Berry. My equipment had worked. And by the end of the evening I knew there was a band in the making. Nothing was said, but I knew that I’d got Stu’s attention. Geoff Bradford and Brian Knight were a very successful blues band after the Stones, Blues by Six. But they were basically traditional players who had no intention of playing anything else except what they knew: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy. Stu I think that day realized by the time I’d sung him “Sweet Little Sixteen” and “Little Queenie,” and he’d got behind me that somehow a deal had been made without anything being said. We just hit a chord together. “So I’ll be back then, right?” “See you next Thursday.”

  Ian Stewart. I’m still working for him. To me the Rolling Stones is his band. Without his knowledge and organization, without the leap he made from where he was coming from, to take a chance on playing with this bunch of kids, we’d be nowhere. I don’t know what the attraction was with Stu and me. But he was absolutely the main impetus behind what happened next. Stu to me was a much older man—actually only by about three or four years, but at that time so it seemed. And he knew people. I knew nothing. I’d just come from the sticks.

  I think he’d started to enjoy hanging around with us. He just felt there was some energy there. So somehow these blues players fell away and it was Brian, Mick, Stu and me, and Dick Taylor on bass. At first, that was the skeleton and we were looking for a drummer. We said, “God, we’d love that Charlie Watts if we could afford him”—because we all thought Charlie Watts was a God-given drummer—and Stu put the feelers out. And Charlie said I’d love any gigs I can get, but I need money to hump these drums on the tube. He said if you can come back to me and say you’ve got a couple of solid gigs a week, I’m in.

  Stu was solid, formidable looking, with a huge protruding jaw, though he was a good-looking guy. I’m sure much of his character was influenced by his looks, and people’s reactions to them, from when he was a kid. He was detached, very dry, down-to-earth and full of incongruous phrases. Driving at speed, for example, would be “going at a vast rate of knots.” His natural authority over us, which never changed, was expressed as “Come on, angel drawers,” “my little three-chord wonders” or “my little shower of shit.” He hated some of the rock-and-roll stuff I played. He hated Jerry Lee Lewis for years—“Oh, it’s all just histrionics.” Eventually he softened on Jerry, he had to crumble and admit that Jerry Lee had one of the best left hands he’d ever heard. Flamboyance and showmanship were not in Stu’s bag. You played in clubs, it had nothing to do with showing off.

  By day Ian worked in a suit and tie at Imperial Chemical Industries near Victoria Embankment, and this is what helped to fund our rehearsal room fees later on. He put his money where his mouth was, at least where his heart was, because he didn’t talk a lot about it. The only fantasy Stu ever had was his insistence that he was the rightful heir to Pittenweem, which is a fishing village across fro
m St. Andrews golf course. He always felt cheated, usurped through some weird Scottish lineage. You can’t argue with a guy like that. Why wasn’t the piano loud enough? Look, you’re talking to the laird of Pittenweem. In other words, this is not worth discussing, you know? I once said, “What’s the tartan, then, of the Stewart clan?” He said, “Ooh, black-and-white check with various colors.” Stu was very dry. He saw the funny side of things. And it was Stu who had to pick up all the crap after the mayhem. There were loads of guys that were technically ten times better, but with his feel on the left hand, they could never get to where he was. He might have been the laird of Pittenweem, but his left hand came out of the Congo.

  By this time Brian’s got three babies with three different women and he’s living in London with the latest, Pat, and the kid, having finally left Cheltenham with shotguns firing at his heels. They were living in this damp basement in Powis Square with fungus growing up the wall. And that’s where I first heard Robert Johnson, and came under Brian’s tutorship and delved back into the blues with him. I was astounded at what I heard. It took guitar playing, songwriting, delivery, to a totally different height. And at the same time it confused us, because it wasn’t band music, it was one guy. So how can we do this? And we realized that the guys we were playing, like Muddy Waters, had also grown up with Robert Johnson and had translated it into a band format. In other words, it was just a progression. Robert Johnson was like an orchestra all by himself. Some of his best stuff is almost Bach-like in construction. Unfortunately, he screwed up with the chicks and had a short life. But a brilliant burst of inspiration. He gave you a platform to work on, no doubt as he did to Muddy and the other guys we were listening to. What I found about the blues and music, tracing things back, was that nothing came from itself. As great as it is, this is not one stroke of genius. This cat was listening to somebody and it’s his variation on the theme. And so you suddenly realize that everybody’s connected here. This is not just that he’s fantastic and the rest are crap; they’re all interconnected. And the further you went back into music and time, and with the blues you go back to the ’20s, because you’re basically going through recorded music, you think thank God for recording. It’s the best thing that’s happened to us since writing.

  But real life sometimes entered our domain, and in this case Mick had come back drunk one night to visit Brian, found he wasn’t there and screwed his old lady. This caused a seismic tremble, upset Brian very badly and resulted in Pat leaving him. Brian also got thrown out of his flat. Mick felt a little responsible, so he found a flat in a dismal bungalow in Beckenham, in a suburban street, and we all went to live there. It was there I went in 1962 when I left home. It was a gradual departure. A night here and there, then a week, then forever. There was no final moment of parting, of shutting the wicker gate behind me.

  Doris had this to say on the subject:

  Doris: From eighteen till he left home at twenty, Keith was in between jobs, nothing, that’s why his dad got on at him. Get your hair cut and get yourself a job. I waited till Keith left before I moved out. I wouldn’t go while he was at home. I couldn’t leave him, could I? Break his heart. Then on the day I moved out, Bert went to work; Keith wasn’t with me. I had an electric light bill in my hand, and I went out and I posted the electric light bill back in! So Bert could pay it. Nice gesture, wasn’t it? Bill bought a ground-floor flat, because I told him I had to get out. They were just finishing these new flats, and he went up, done a deal with the builders and we moved in. Bill had some money. Bought it straight out. First telephone I had was when Bill bought that flat. I phoned Keith up one night. He said, “Yes?” I said, “Keith, we’ve moved into this flat.” I said, “I’ve got a phone, isn’t it lovely?” He wasn’t that pleased.

  It was here, in Beckenham, that we began mysteriously to collect this little core collection of early fans, including Haleema Mohamed, my first love. Recently someone sold back to me a diary I kept in 1963—I think the only diary I ever wrote, more like a logbook of the Stones’ progress in those dire days. I must have left it in one of the flats we were always vacating, and whoever it was held on to it for all that time. In its back pocket was a tiny picture of Lee, as I called her. She was a beauty, with a slightly Indian look about her. It was the eyes that always got me and her smile and they’re both in the picture, as I remember her. She was at least two or three years younger than me, fifteen or at the most sixteen, and she had an English mother. I never saw her father, but I remember meeting the rest of her family. I remember going to pick her up and just saying hello to them in Holborn.

  I was in love with Lee. Our relationship was touchingly innocent—maybe partly because if we ever got close we’d have to bunk up in a room full of other people, like Mick or Brian. And she was very young and lived with her parents in Holborn, an only child, like me. She must have put up with a lot, however fond she was of me. And it’s clear that we had one breakup and then got together again. “Second time around” says the diary, bitterly.

  She was one of a gang of girls who used to come around in 1962. Where they came from we never figured out, though my diary shows that we met at least once at the Ken Colyer Club. There wasn’t a fan club in those days. This was the pre–fan club period. I don’t even know if we’d had any gigs. We just used to sit around and practice and learn. And somehow we got invaded by a bunch of five or six cockney girls from Holborn and Bermondsey. They used to speak great cockney back slang; they were really young, but they took it on themselves to take care of us. They used to come around and do our washing and cooking and then stay overnight and do the rest. It was really no big deal. Sex then was mostly just like, it’s a bit chilly, let’s cuddle, the gas has gone out and no shillings left. I was in love with Lee for a long time. She was just incredibly nice to me. It wasn’t a big sexual thing, we just sort of grew into each other. Maybe we were a little pissed one night, and also that shit builds up. Whenever we saw each other, we kept looking at each other and you know there’s something between you, it’s whether… can you get across the gap? And eventually, it usually happens. And, according to the diary, she came back a second time.

  She must have been around for our first gig as “the Rollin’ Stones,” a band name Stu highly disapproved of. Brian, after figuring how much it would cost, called up Jazz News, which was a kind of “who’s playing where” rag, and said, “We’ve got a gig at…” “What do you call yourselves?” We stared at one another. “It?” Then “Thing?” This call is costing. Muddy Waters to the rescue! First track on The Best of Muddy Waters is “Rollin’ Stone.” The cover is on the floor. Desperate, Brian, Mick and I take the dive. “The Rolling Stones.” Phew!! That saved sixpence.

  A gig! Alexis Korner’s band was booked to do a BBC live broadcast on July 12, 1962, and he’d asked us if we’d fill in for him at the Marquee. The drummer that night was Mick Avory—not Tony Chapman, as history has mysteriously handed it down— and Dick Taylor on the bass. The core Stones, Mick, Brian and I, played our set list: “Dust My Broom,” “Baby What’s Wrong?” “Doing the Crawdaddy,” “Confessin’ the Blues,” “Got My Mojo Working.” You’re sitting with some guys, and you’re playing and you go, “Ooh, yeah!” That feeling is worth more than anything. There’s a certain moment when you realize that you’ve actually just left the planet for a bit and that nobody can touch you. You’re elevated because you’re with a bunch of guys that want to do the same thing as you. And when it works, baby, you’ve got wings. You know you’ve been somewhere most people will never get; you’ve been to a special place. And then you want to keep going back and keep landing again, and when you land you get busted. But you always want to go back there. It’s flying without a license.

  Dezo Hoffmann / Rex USA

  Chapter Four

  Mick, Brian and me in Edith Grove, summer of ’62. Learning Chicago blues. Marquee, Ealing Club, Crawdaddy Club. Turf fights with the trad jazzers. Bill Wyman comes with his Vox. Wongin’ the pog at the Stati
on Hotel. We get Charlie on board. Andrew Loog Oldham signs us with Decca. First UK tour with the Everly Brothers, Bo Diddley and Little Richard; our music drowned in riots. The Beatles give us a song. Andrew locks Mick and me in a kitchen and we write our first one.

  The Rolling Stones spent the first year of their life hanging places, stealing food and rehearsing. We were paying to be the Rolling Stones. The place where we lived—Mick, Brian and I—at 102 Edith Grove, in Fulham, was truly disgusting. We almost made it our professional business for it to be so, since we had little means to make it otherwise. We moved in in the summer of 1962 and lived there for a year through the coldest winter since 1740, as records attested, and the shillings we fed into the meter for warmth, for electricity and gas, were not that easy to come by. It was mattresses and no furniture to speak of, only a threadbare carpet. There was no fixed rotation between the two beds and a couple of mattresses. And it didn’t really matter much; usually all three of us would wake up on that floor, where we had the enormous radiogram that Brian had brought with him, a great ’50s warm-up number.