Life

by Keith Richards; James Fox

  The first single came out rapidly after the signing of the contract—everything moving in days, not weeks. It was a very deliberately commercial pitch—“Come On,” by Chuck Berry. I didn’t think it was the best thing we could have done, but I did know it was something that would make a mark. As a recording it’s probably better than I thought it was at the time. But I have a feeling we thought that was the only shot we had in our locker then. It was not something that we’d ever played in the clubs. It was nothing to do with what we were doing. At the time there was a purist strain running through the band, which I obviously was not on top of. I loved my blues, but I saw the potential of other things. And also I loved pop music. I quite cold-bloodedly saw this song as just a way to get in. To get into the studio and to come up with something very commercial. It’s very different from Chuck Berry’s version; it’s very Beatle-ized, in fact. The way you could record in England, you couldn’t get fussy, you went in and did it. I think everybody thought it stood a good shot. The band itself were like “We’re making a record, can you believe this shit?” There was also a sense of doom. Oh my God, if the single makes it, we’ve got two years and that’s it. Then what are we going to do? Because nobody lasted. Your shelf life in those days, and a lot even now, was basically two and a half years. And apart from Elvis, nobody had proved that wrong.

  The weird thing is that when that first record came out, we were still basically a club band. I don’t think we had played anything bigger than the Marquee. The record wormed its way into the top twenty, and suddenly, in a matter of a week or so, we’d been transformed into pop stars. This is very difficult with a bunch of guys that are really like “get outta here,” you know, “fuck off.” And suddenly they’re dressing us up in dogtooth-check fucking suits and we’re rushed along on the tide. It was like a tsunami. One minute, hey, you wanted to make a record, you’ve made a record and it’s in the goddamn top twenty, and now you’ve got to do Thank Your Lucky Stars. TV you’d never thought about. We were propelled into show business. Because we were so anti-showbiz, it was the cold shoulder to us, enough already. But then we realized that we did have to make certain concessions.

  Now we had to figure out how to work it. The jackets didn’t last long. Maybe it was a good move for the first record, but by the second record, there was none of that. The crowds at the Crawdaddy Club had got so huge Gomelsky moved the club to the Athletic Ground, Richmond. July 1963, we actually moved out of London for a gig, for the first time ever—to Middlesbrough, Yorkshire, and a first taste of the bedlam. Between then and 1966—for three years—we played virtually every night, or every day, sometimes two gigs a day. We played well over a thousand gigs, almost back to back, with barely a break and perhaps ten days off in that whole period.

  Maybe if we’d been wearing our houndstooth jackets and looking like little dolls we wouldn’t have outraged the males in the audience at the Wisbech Corn Exchange in Cambridgeshire in July 1963. We were city boys, and this music is what’s happening in the city. But you try playing Wisbech, in 1963, with Mick Jagger. You got a totally different reaction. All of these hayseeds literally chewing on straw. The Wisbech Corn Exchange, out in the goddamn marshes. And a riot was started because the local yokels, the boys, couldn’t stand the fact that all of their chicks were gawping and blowing themselves out about this bunch of fags, as far as they were concerned, from London. “Eee by gum.” That was a very good riot, which we were lucky to escape from. By the greatest contrast known to rock-and-roll audiences, the previous night we’d played a debutante ball at Hastings caves, for someone called Lady Lampson, all via Andrew Oldham, an awfully super-duper, upper-crusty affair doing a lowlife bash in Hastings caves, which are quite big. And we were just part of the entertainment. We were told when we were not working to go into the catering area. That got our backs up, but we were playing it cool until one of them came up to Ian Stewart and said, “I say, piano chappie, can you play ‘Moon River’?” Bill decked him or took him out one way or another. Lord Lampson, or whoever it was at the time, said, “Who’s that horrid little man?” You can play at our parties, but we’ll treat you like a black man. It was all right for me, I felt very proud, I mean I love to be treated as black. But it was Stu that had to take the first remark. “I say, piano chappie…”

  At first, our audiences were female driven, until towards the end of the ’60s, when it evened out. These armies of feral, body-snatching girls began to emerge in big numbers about halfway through our first UK tour, in the fall of 1963. That was an incredible lineup: the Everly Brothers, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Mickie Most. We felt like we were in Disneyland, or the best theme park we could imagine. And at the same time we had this unique opportunity to check out the top cats. We used to hang from the rafters in the Gaumonts and the Odeons to watch Little Richard, Bo Diddley and the Everlys at work. It was a five-week tour. We went everywhere, Bradford, Cleethorpes, Albert Hall, Finsbury Park. Big gigs, small gigs. There was that amazing feeling of, wow, I’m actually in a dressing room with Little Richard. One part of you is the fan, “Oh, my God,” and the other part of you is “You’re here with the man and now you better be a man.” The first time we went up on that first stage, at the New Victoria Theatre in London, it went to the horizon. The sense of space, the size of the audience, the whole scale, was breathtaking. We just felt so puny up there. Obviously we weren’t that bad. But we all looked at one another with shock. And the curtains opened and aaaaghh. Working the Coliseum. You get used to it pretty quick, you learn. But that first night I felt so miniature. And of course we’re not sounding like we usually are in a small room. Suddenly we’re sounding like little tin soldiers. There were so many things to learn, real quick. That was the biggest deep end, really. We were probably disastrously horrible in some of those shows, but by then there was a buzz going on. The audience was louder than we were, which certainly helped. Great backup vocals of chicks screaming. So in a way, we learned through this barrage of shrieking.

  Little Richard’s stage presentation was outrageous, and brilliant. You never knew which way he was going to arrive. He had the band thumping out “Lucille” for almost ten minutes, which is a long time to keep that riff going. The whole place blacked out, nothing to see but the exit signs. And then he’d come out of the back of the theater. Other times he’d run on stage and then disappear again and come back. He had a different intro almost every time. What you realized was that Richard had checked the theater, talked to the lighting people—Where can I come from? Is there a doorway up there?—and figured out how he could get the most effective intro possible. Whether it’s bang, straight in, or whether to let the riff roll for five minutes and then turn up from the loft. Suddenly you’re not just playing a club, where presentation means nothing, where there’s no room to move, no way of doing anything. Suddenly to see stage work going on, with Bo Diddley too, it was mind-blowing, like you’d been elevated, somehow, by a miracle and allowed to talk to the gods. On and on went “Lucille,” thumping away, until you wondered if he’d ever show up. And suddenly there’s a spotlight on the balcony, and the Reverend is alive! Reverend Penniman. And the riff is on. So we learned their showmanship. And after all, Little Richard was one of the best masters we could have learned from.

  I used this trick a lot with the X-Pensive Winos, where we’d black out the stage and the whole band would sit in a circle, smoking a joint and having a drink. And people didn’t know we were there. And then the lights go up and we break. That came from Little Richard.

  The Everly Brothers come out and there’s a soft light, the band plays very quietly, and their voices, that beautiful, beautiful refrain—almost mystical. “Dream, dream, dream… ,” slipping in and out of unison and harmony. Load of bluegrass in those boys. The best rhythm guitar playing I ever heard was from Don Everly. Nobody ever thinks about that, but their rhythm guitar playing is perfect. And beautifully placed and set up with the voices. They were always very polite, very distant. I knew their band be
tter—Joey Page, he was the bass player; Don Peake on guitar; and on drums was Jimmy Gordon, who was out of high school doing that. He was also Delaney & Bonnie’s drummer and Derek and the Dominos’ drummer. Eventually he hacked his mother to death in a schizophrenic rage and was sentenced to life in California. But that’s another story. Later on I knew the Everlys were having problems, that they always did. There was something a little analogous to Mick and me in that brotherhood. You’ve been through thick and thin, and then it gets really big and you have the time and space to figure out what it is you don’t like about each other. Yeah, more of that later on.

  There was an unforgettable dressing-room scene during that tour. I like Tom Jones. I first met him on that tour with Little Richard. I’d been on the road with Little Richard for three or four weeks, and Richard was not hard to get along with and still isn’t, and we’d have a laugh together. But in Cardiff, guys like Tom Jones and his band the Squires were still living five years behind. They all walk into Little Richard’s dressing room, and they’ve still got the leopard-skin coats with the black velvet collars, and the drapes—a procession of teddy boys all bowing and scraping. And Tom Jones actually kneels in front of Little Richard as if he’s the pope. And of course Richard rises right to the occasion: “My boys!” They don’t realize that Richard is a screaming fag. So they don’t know how to take this. “Well, baybee, you’re a Georgia peach.” This total culture clash, but they were so in awe of Richard that they would take anything he would say. And he’s giving me a nod and a wink. “I love my fans! I love my fans! Ohh, baby!” The Reverend Richard Penniman. Never forget he comes from the gospel church, like most of them do. We all sang Hallelujah at one time or another. Al Green, Little Richard, Solomon Burke, they all got ordained. Preaching is tax free. Very little to do with God, a lot to do with money.

  Jerome Green was Bo Diddley’s maracas shaker. He’d been with him on all the records and he was sloppy drunk, one of the sweetest motherfuckers you could ever meet. He would just fall into your arms. He was almost Bo’s partner; they’d been together through everything. There was a lot of call-and-response going on, “Hey, man, your old lady’s so ugly, I had to chase her away with an ugly stick.” Jerome must have been an important part of Bo’s life for Bo to keep him on. But the maracas were amazing. He used to play four in each hand, eight maracas, very African. And the sound was incredible, pissed or not. That would be his thing: “I can’t go on, I’m not drunk.”

  I took over the job of being Jerome’s roadie for some reason. We liked each other a lot, and he was great fun. He was a big guy, looked a little like Chuck Berry. Suddenly there’d be this cry backstage, anybody seen Jerome? And I’d say, I bet I know where he is. He’ll be in the nearest pub from backstage. In those days, I wasn’t that famous; people wouldn’t recognize me. I’d zip round to the pub closest to the backstage and there’d be Jerome and he’d be talking to the locals and they’d all be buying him drinks because they didn’t often meet a six-foot black man from Chicago. I was his minder: “Jerome, you’re on. Bo’s looking for you.” “Oh Christ, I’ll be right back.”

  By the end of the tour he fell pretty ill. That’s when I learned to call up doctors and get organized. I had him living at my apartment. “I’ve given up on this English food, man. Where can I get some goddamn American food round here? I wanna hamburger.” So I’d go round Wimpy’s to get him one. “Call this a hamburger?” “Sorry, Jerome.” In a way I did it just because he was always such a laugh, and also he really was such a charming guy. Didn’t mind taking you for a few bucks either. But you felt if you weren’t there, he’d fall under a bus or flush himself down the toilet if possible. He left Bo’s band not long after this.

  That first tour was bizarre. I was never that confident about my own playing, but I knew that between us we could do things and that there was something happening. We started off opening the show, and then we got to ending the intermission, and then we got to opening up the second half, and within six weeks, the Everly Brothers were virtually saying, hey, you guys better top the bill. Within six weeks. Something happened as we were going round England. The chicks started screaming. It was teenyboppers! And to us, being “bluesmen,” this was, well, we’re really going downhill here. We don’t want to be some fucking ersatz Beatles. Shit, we’ve worked this hard to be a very, very good blues band. But the money’s better, and suddenly with the size of the audience, like it or not, you’re no longer just a blues band, you’re now what they’re going to call a pop band, which we despised.

  In a matter of weeks, we went from nowhere to London’s crowning triumph. The Beatles couldn’t fill in all of the spots on the charts. We filled in the gaps for the first year or so. You can put it down to Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” You knew it, you sniffed it in the air. And it was happening fast. The Everly Brothers, I mean, I loved them dearly, but they smelled it too, they knew something was happening, and as great as they were, what are the Everly Brothers gonna do when there’s suddenly three thousand people chanting, “We want the Stones. We want the Stones”? It was so quick. And Andrew Loog Oldham was the one that grabbed the moment; he was right on top of it. We knew that we’d set something on fire that I still can’t control, quite honestly.

  All we knew was that we were on the road every day of the week. Maybe a day off here and there to get somewhere else. But we could tell from on the street, all over England and Scotland, Wales. Six weeks ahead you could feel it in the air. We got bigger and bigger and more and more crazy, until basically all we thought about was how to get into a gig and how to get out. The actual playing time was probably five to ten minutes at max. In England for eighteen months, I’d say, we never finished a show. The only question was how it would end, with a riot, with the cops breaking it up, with too many medical cases, and how the hell to get out of there. The biggest part of the day was planning the in and the out. The actual gig you didn’t even get to know much about. It was just mayhem. We came there to listen to the audience! Nothing like a good ten, fifteen minutes of pubescent female shrieking to cover up all your mistakes. Or three thousand teenage chicks throwing themselves at you. Or being carried out on stretchers. All the bouffants awry, skirts up to their waists, sweating, red, eyes rolling. That’s the spirit, girl. That’s the way we like ’em. On the set list, for what it was worth, we had “Not Fade Away,” “Walking the Dog,” “Around and Around,” “I’m a King Bee.”

  Sometimes chief constables would devise these ridiculous plans. I remember once in Chester, after a show that had ended in a riot, following the chief constable of Chester police over the rooftops of Chester city as in some weird Walt Disney film, with the rest of the band behind me, and him in full uniform, with a constable at his side. And then he loses his fucking way, and we’re perched on the top of Chester city, while his great “Escape from Colditz” plan disintegrates. Then it starts to rain. It was like something out of Mary Poppins. The uniform with the baton, the whole bit, and this was his great master plan. In those days at my age you thought the cops knew how to deal with everything; you were supposed to believe that. But you soon realized that these guys had never dealt with anything like this. It was as new to them as it was to us. We’re all babes in the wood here.

  We used to play “Popeye the Sailor Man” some nights, and the audience didn’t know any different because they couldn’t hear us. So they weren’t reacting to the music. The beat maybe, because you’d always hear the drums, just the rhythm, but the rest of it, no, you couldn’t hear the voices, you couldn’t hear the guitars, totally out of the question. What they were reacting to was being in this enclosed space with us—this illusion, me, Mick and Brian. The music might be the trigger, but the bullet, nobody knows what that is. Usually it was harmless, for them, though not always for us. Amongst the many thousands a few did get hurt, and a few died. Some chick third balcony up flung herself off and severely hurt the person she landed on underneath, and she herself broke her neck a
nd died. Now and again shit happened. But the limp and fainted bodies going by us after the first ten minutes of playing, that happened every night. Or sometimes they’d stack them up on the side of the stage because there were so many of them. It was like the western front. And it got nasty in the provinces—new territory for us. Hamilton in Scotland, just outside of Glasgow. They put a chicken wire fence in front of us because of the sharpened pennies and beer bottles they flung at us—the guys that didn’t like the chicks screaming at us. They had dogs parading inside the wire. The wire mesh was quite common in certain areas, especially around Glasgow at that time. But it was nothing new. You could see the same thing going on in clubs in the South, the Midwest. “Midnight Hour” Mr. Wilson Pickett, his stage set consisted of a rack of shotguns this side and a rack of shotguns that side. And the shotguns weren’t there as props. They were loaded, probably with rock salt, no heavy-duty stuff. But to look at it was enough to put anybody off throwing things at the stage or going berserk. It was just a measure of control.

  One night somewhere up north, it could have been York, it could have been anywhere, our strategy was to stay behind in the theater for a couple of hours and have dinner there, just wait for everybody to go to bed and then leave. And I remember walking back out onto the stage after the show, and they’d cleaned up all of the underwear and everything, and there was one old janitor, night watchman, and he said, “Very good show. Not a dry seat in the house.”

  Maybe it happened to Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley. I don’t think it had ever reached the extremes it got to around the Beatles and the Stones time, at least in England. It was like somebody had pulled a plug somewhere. The ’50s chicks being brought up all very jolly hockey sticks, and then somewhere there seemed to be a moment when they just decided they wanted to let themselves go. The opportunity arose for them to do that, and who’s going to stop them? It was all dripping with sexual lust, though they didn’t know what to do about it. But suddenly you’re on the end of it. It’s a frenzy. Once it’s let out, it’s an incredible force. You stood as much chance in a fucking river full of piranhas. They were beyond what they wanted to be. They’d lost themselves. These chicks were coming out there, bleeding, clothes torn off, pissed panties, and you took that for granted every night. That was the gig. It could have been anybody, quite honestly. They didn’t give a shit that I was trying to be a blues player.