Life

by Keith Richards; James Fox

  Fraboni had a microphone in the garden, and at the beginning of the recording you hear the crickets and frogs, the ocean beyond the veranda. There are no windows in the house, just wooden shutters. You can hear people playing dominoes in the back. It has a very powerful feel, and feel is everything. We took the tapes back to the US and began to figure how to keep the intrinsic core. That’s when I met Blondie Chaplin, who came along to the sessions with George Recile, who became Bob Dylan’s drummer. George is from New Orleans, and there are many different races in there—he’s Italian, black, Creole, the whole lot. What’s startling is the blue eyes. Because with those blue eyes, he can get away with anything, including crossing the tracks.

  I wanted to bring the Angels into a more global mood, and guys from everywhere began to show up at the Connecticut overdubbing sessions. The incredible fiddler Frankie Gavin, who founded De Dannan, the Irish folk group, came in with his great Irish humor, and a certain feel began to emerge. This was obviously not a record of great commercial appeal, but it had to be done, and I’m still very proud of it. So much so that there was another on the way as I was writing this.

  Very soon after Exile, so much technology came in that even the smartest engineer in the world didn’t know what was really going on. How come I could get a great drum sound back in Denmark Street with one microphone, and now with fifteen microphones I get a drum sound that’s like someone shitting on a tin roof? Everybody got carried away with technology and slowly they’re swimming back. In classical music, they’re rerecording everything they rerecorded digitally in the ’80s and ’90s because it just doesn’t come up to scratch. I always felt that I was actually fighting technology, that it was no help at all. And that’s why it would take so long to do things. Fraboni has been through all of that, that notion that if you didn’t have fifteen microphones on a drum kit, you didn’t know what you were doing. Then the bass player would be battened off, so they were all in their little pigeonholes and cubicles. And you’re playing this enormous room and not using any of it. This idea of separation is the total antithesis of rock and roll, which is a bunch of guys in a room making a sound and just capturing it. It’s the sound they make together, not separated. This mythical bullshit about stereo and high tech and Dolby, it’s just totally against the whole grain of what music should be.

  Nobody had the balls to dismantle it. And I started to think, what was it that turned me on to doing this? It was these guys that made records in one room with three microphones. They weren’t recording every little snitch of the drums or the bass. They were recording the room. You can’t get these indefinable things by stripping it apart. The enthusiasm, the spirit, the soul, whatever you want to call it, where’s the microphone for that? The records could have been a lot better in the ’80s if we’d cottoned on to that earlier and not been led by the nose by technology.

  In Connecticut, Rob Fraboni created a studio, my “Room Called L”—because it was L-shaped—in the basement of my house. I had a year off during 2000 and 2001, and I worked with Fraboni to build it up. We put a microphone facing the wall, not pointed at an instrument or an amplifier. We tried to record what was coming off of the ceiling and off of the walls rather than dissecting every instrument. You don’t, in fact, need a studio, you need a room. It’s just where to put the microphones. We got a great eight-track recorder made by Stephens, which is one of the smoothest, most incredible recording machines in the world, and it looks like the monolith in Kubrick’s 2001.

  The only track I’ve put out from “L” so far is “You Win Again,” on the Hank Williams tribute album Timeless, which got a Grammy. Lou Pallo, who was Les Paul’s second guitar player for years, maybe centuries, played guitar on it. Lou was known as “the man of a million chords.” Incredible guitar player. He lives in New Jersey. “What’s your address, Lou?” “Moneymaker Road,” he says. “It doesn’t live up to its name.” George Recile played drums. We had the makings of a house band, and anyone that was around could come and play. Hubert Sumlin would come by, Howlin’ Wolf’s guitar player, of whose music Fraboni later made a very good record called About Them Shoes. Great title. On September 11, 2001, we were cut short in the middle of recording with my old flame Ronnie Spector, a song called “Love Affair.”

  You can get into a bubble if you just work with the Stones. Even with the Winos it can happen. I find it very important to work outside of those areas. It was inspiring to work with Norah Jones, with Jack White, with Toots Hibbert—he and I have done two or three versions of “Pressure Drop” together. If you don’t play with other people, you can get trapped in your own cage. And then, if you’re sitting still on the perch, you might get blown away.

  Tom Waits was an early collaborator back in the mid-’80s. I didn’t realize until later that he’d never written with anyone else before except his wife, Kathleen. He’s a one-off lovely guy and one of the most original writers. In the back of my mind I always thought it would be really interesting to work with him. Let’s start with a bit of flattery from Tom Waits. It’s a beautiful review.

  Tom Waits: We were doing Rain Dogs. I was living in New York at the time, and someone asked if there was anybody I wanted to play on the record. And I said, how about Keith Richards? I was just kidding around. It was like saying Count Basie or Duke Ellington, you know? I was on Island Records at the time, and Chris Blackwell knew Keith from Jamaica. So somebody got on the phone, and I said no, no, no! But it was too late. Sure enough, we got a message: “The wait is over. Let’s do it.” So he came to RCA, a huge studio with high ceilings, with Alan Rogan, who was his guitar valet, and about 150 guitars.

  Everybody loves music. What you really want is for music to love you. And that’s the way I saw it was with Keith. It takes a certain amount of respect for the process. You’re not writing it, it’s writing you. You’re its flute or its trumpet; you’re its strings. That’s real obvious around Keith. He’s like a frying pan made from one piece of metal. He can heat it up really high and it won’t crack, it just changes color.

  You have your own preconceived ideas about people that you already know from their records, but the real experience, ideally, hopefully, is better. That certainly was the case with Keith. We kind of circled each other like a couple of hyenas, looked at the ground, laughed and then we just put something on, put some water in the swimming pool. He has impeccable instincts, like a predator. He played on three songs on that record: “Union Square,” we sang on “Blind Love” together, and on “Big Black Mariah” he played a great rhythm part. It really lifted the record up for me. I didn’t care how it sold at all. As far as I was concerned it had already sold.

  Then a few years later we hooked up in California. We got together every day at this little place called Brown Sound, one of those funky old rehearsal places with no windows and carpet on the wall, smells like diesel. We started writing. You have to get relaxed enough around someone to be able to throw out any kind of twisted idea that might test your mind, that comfort zone. I remember on my way to the studio, I taped a Sunday gospel brunch Baptist preacher coming right out of the radio. And the title of the sermon was “The Carpenter’s Tools”! It was all about the carpenter’s tools, how he went into his bag and pulled out all these tools.… We laughed about that for a long time. And then Keith played me a copy he had of “Jesus Loves Me,” sung by Aaron Neville, something he’d sung in a rehearsal, just a cappella. So he likes diamonds in the rough, he likes Zulu music, Pygmy music, the arcane, obscure and impossible to categorize music. We wrote a whole bunch of songs, one was called “Motel Girl” and another was “Good Dogwood.” And that’s where we wrote “That Feel”—I put that on Bone Machine.

  One of my favorite things that he did is Wingless Angels. That completely slayed me. Because the first thing you hear is the crickets, and you realize you’re outside. And his contribution to capturing the sounds on that record just feels a lot like Keith. Maybe more like Keith than I had contact with when we got together. He’s
like a common laborer in a lot of ways. He’s like a swabby. Like a sailor. I found some things they say about music that seemed to apply to Keith. You know, in the old days they said that the sound of the guitar could cure gout and epilepsy, sciatica and migraines. I think that nowadays there seems to be a deficit of wonder. And Keith seems to still wonder about this stuff. He will stop and hold his guitar up and just stare at it for a while. Just be rather mystified by it. Like all the great things in the world, women and religion and the sky… you wonder about it, and you don’t stop wondering about it.

  In 1980, Bobby Keys, Patti, Jane and I paid a visit to the remaining Crickets in Nashville. Must have been something special, because we hired a Learjet to get there. We went to see Jerry Allison, alias Jivin’ Ivan, the Crickets’ drummer, the one who actually married Peggy Sue (though it didn’t last long), at his place he calls White Trash Ranch just outside of Nashville in Dickson, Tennessee. There was Joe B. Mauldin, bass player with Buddy. Don Everly was around on that trip, and to play with him, sitting around… these were the cats I was listening to on the goddamn radio twenty years ago. Their work had always fascinated me, and just to be in their house was an honor.

  There was another wonderful expedition to record a duet with George Jones at the Bradley Barn sessions, “Say It’s Not You,” a song that Gram Parsons had turned me on to. George was a great guy to work with, especially when he had the hairdo going. Incredible singer. There’s a quote from Frank Sinatra, who says, “Second-best singer in this country is George Jones.” Who’s the first, Frank? We were waiting and waiting for George, for a couple of hours, I think. By then I’m behind the bar making drinks, not remembering that George is supposed to be on the wagon and not knowing why he was so late. I’ve been late many times and so no big deal. And when he turns up, the pompadour hairdo is perfect. It’s such a fascinating thing. You can’t take your eyes off it. And in a fifty-mile-an-hour wind it would still have been perfect. I found out later that he’d been driving around because he was a bit nervous about working with me. He’d been doing some reading up and was uncertain of meeting me.

  On the country end, Willie Nelson and I are close, and Merle Haggard too. I’ve done three or four TV shows with Merle and Willie. Willie’s fantastic. He has a guy with a turned-over Frisbee, rolling, rolling, rolling. A beautiful weedhead, is Willie. I mean straight out of bed. At least I wait ten minutes in the morning. What a songwriter. He’s one of the best. From Texas too. Willie and I just get along. I know that he’s very concerned about the agriculture of America and the small farmer. Most of the stuff that I’ve done with him has been in that cause. The conglomerates are taking over, that’s what he’s fighting and he’s putting up a damn good fight. Willie’s a true heart. Unfazed, unswerving and true to his cause, no matter what. I slowly realized I grew up listening to his music, because he was a songwriter way before he started performing—“Crazy” and “Funny How Time Slips Away.” I’ve always been slightly in awe, in a way, to be asked by people like that, that I’ve already been on my knees before, “Hey, you want to play with me?” Are you kidding?

  A case in point was the great sessions at Levon Helm’s home in Woodstock, New York, in 1996 to play on All the King’s Men, with Scotty Moore, Elvis’s guitar player, and D. J. Fontana, his drummer on the early Sun recordings. This was serious stuff. The Rolling Stones are one thing, but to hold your own with guys that turned you on is another. These cats are not necessarily very forgiving of other musicians. They expect the best and they’re going to have to get it—you really can’t go in there and flake. Bands that work behind George Jones and Jerry Lee Lewis, these are top, top hands. You have to be on your mark. I love that. I don’t often work in the country area. But that’s been the other side of it to me; there’s been blues and there’s been country music. And let’s face it, those are the two vital ingredients of rock and roll.

  Another great singer and a girl after my own heart—as well as my bride in a rock-and-roll “marriage”—is Etta James. She’d been making records from the early ’50s, when she was a doo-wop singer. She’s expanded into every range since then. She has one of those voices that when you heard it on the radio, or you saw an Etta James record in the store, you bought it. She’d sold you. And on June 14, 1978, we played together. She was on a bill with the Stones at the Capitol Theatre, Passaic, New Jersey. Now, Etta had been a junkie. So we found a certain reciprocation almost immediately. At the time she was clean, I think. But that doesn’t really matter. It takes one look in the eye for one to know another. Incredibly strong, Etta, with a voice that could take you to hell or take you to heaven. And we hung in a dressing room, and like all ex-junkies, we talked about the junk. And why did we do this, the usual soul-searching. This culminated in a backstage wedding, which in show business terms is like, you get married but you’re not really married. You exchange vows and stuff, on the top of the backstage stairs. And she gave me a ring, I gave her a ring and actually that’s where I decided her name’s Etta Richards. She’ll know what I mean.

  When Theodora and Alexandra were born, Patti and I were living in an apartment on Fourth Street in New York City, and it seemed to us that Fourth Street was not the place to bring up children. So we headed for Connecticut and started building a house on land I’d bought. The geology is not unlike Central Park in New York—great flat slabs and boulders of gray slate and granite emerging from the earth, all enclosed by lush woodland. We had to blast tons of rock to build the foundation, hence my name for the house— Camelot Costalot. We didn’t move in until 1991. The house sits alongside a nature preserve that is an old Indian burial ground, a happy hunting ground of the Iroquois, and the woods have a primeval serenity about them that would suit the ancestral spirits. I have a key that unlocks a gate from my garden into the forest, and we go for walks there and roam about.

  There’s a very deep lake in these woods with a waterfall coming down. I was there one day with George Recile when we were working together around 2001. And you’re not supposed to go fishing there, so we’re like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and we’re trying to catch these incredible fish, called oscars, big and very tasty. George is an expert fisherman and he said, they’re not supposed to be anywhere north of Georgia. So I said, let’s put in another hook! And suddenly I’m getting this incredible tug on the line. And this enormous snapping turtle, as big as an ox, green and slimy, comes lumbering out with my fish in its mouth! It was like confronting a dinosaur. The look of horror on my face and George’s, I wish I’d had a camera. This guy’s about ready to pop and snap—his neck can come out three or four feet—he’s enormous; he must be about three hundred years old. George and I reverted to cavemen. My God! This motherfucker’s serious. I dropped the rod, picked up this rock and cracked him on the shell with it. “Goddamn, it’s you or me, pal.” They’re vicious. They can bite your foot off. And he went back down. Creatures that lurk in the deep, immense and old, are truly frightening, to chill your bones. He’s probably been down there so long the last time he came up he was meeting Iroquois.

  Aside from poaching, which I haven’t done since then, I lead a gentleman’s life. Listen to Mozart, read many, many books. I’m a voracious reader. I’ll read anything. And if I don’t like it, I’ll toss it. When it comes to fiction, it’s George MacDonald Fraser, the Flashmans, and Patrick O’Brian. I fell in love with his writing straightaway, at first with Master and Commander. It wasn’t primarily the Nelson and Napoleonic period, more the human relationships. He just happened to have that backdrop. And of course having characters isolated in the middle of the goddamn sea gives more scope. Just great characterizations, which I still cherish. It’s about friendship, camaraderie. Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin always remind me a bit of Mick and me. History, in particular the British Navy during that period, is my subject. The army wasn’t up to much then. It was the navy and the guys that got roped into it against their will, the press-gang. And to make this machine work, you had to weld this bunch of
unwilling people into a functioning team, which reminds me of the Rolling Stones. I’ve always got some historical work on the go. The Nelson era and World War II are near the top of my list, but I do the ancient Romans too, and a certain amount of British colonial stuff, the Great Game and all that. I have a fine library furnished with these works, with dark wooden shelves reaching to the ceiling. This is where I hole up and where one day I came to grief.

  Nobody believes that I was looking for a book on anatomy by Leonardo da Vinci. It’s a big book, and the big books are way up on the top shelf. I got a ladder and went up there. There are little pins that hold these shelves up, and heavy, heavy volumes up there. And as I touched the shelf, a pin fell out and every fucking volume came down on my face. Boom. I hit the desk with my head and I went out. Woke up I don’t know how much time later, maybe half an hour, and it’s hurting. It’s an ouch. I’m surrounded by huge tomes. I would have laughed at the irony, except I couldn’t because it was hurting too much. Talk about “you wanted to find out about anatomy…” I crawled up the stairs, gasping for air. I just thought, I’ll get up to the old lady and see what’s what in the morning. The morning was even worse. Patti asked, “What’s the matter?” “Oh, I just fell over. I’m OK.” I was still gasping. It took me three days to say to Patti, “Darling, I’ve got to have this checked out.” And I wasn’t OK—I’d punctured a lung. Our European tour, set to open in Berlin in May 1998, was delayed a month— one of the only times I’ve held up a tour.

  A year later, I did the same to the other side. We’d just arrived in Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands and I’d put on some sun oil. Gaily I leapt up on some earthenware pot to look over the fence, and the oil did me in. I slipped—crack, bang. The wife had some Percodan, so I just took a load of painkillers. And I didn’t know that I’d fractured three ribs on one side and perforated the other lung until a month later, when I had to do a medical for a tour. You’ve got to be checked out, do all the tests on the treadmill and all that crap. And then they X-ray you—“Oh, by the way, you fractured three ribs and perforated a lung on the right side. But it’s all healed now, so it doesn’t matter.”