Life

by Keith Richards

  Carter’s advantage at the immigration department was that he was one of the boys, he came from law enforcement, he had respect for having been with Kennedy. He did an “I know how you boys feel” and just said he wanted a hearing because he didn’t think we were being treated fairly. He worked his way in; many months of slogging. He paid attention particularly to the lower-level staff, who he knew could obstruct things on technicalities. I underwent medical tests to prove that I was drug free, from the same doctor in Paris who had given me many a clean bill of health. Then Nixon resigned. And then Carter asked the top official to meet Mick and judge for himself, and of course Mick puts on his suit and charms the pants off him. Mick is really the most versatile bloke. Why I love him. He can hold a philosophical discussion with Sartre in his native tongue. Mick’s very good with the locals. Carter told me he applied for the visas not in New York or Washington but in Memphis, where it was quieter. The result was an astonishing turnaround. Waivers and visas were suddenly issued on one condition: that Bill Carter toured with the Stones and would personally assure the government that riots would be prevented and that there would be no illegal activities on the tour. (They required a doctor to accompany us—an almost fictional character who appears later in the narrative, who became a tour victim, sampling the medication and running off with a groupie.)

  Carter had reassured them by offering to run the tour Secret Service–style, alongside the police. His other contacts also meant that he would get a tip-off if the police were planning a bust. And that’s what saved our asses on many occasions.

  Things had hardened up since the 1972 tour, with all the demonstrations and antiwar marches and the Nixon period. The first evidence of this was in San Antonio on June 3. This was the tour of the giant inflatable cock. It came rising up from the stage as Mick sang “Starfucker.” It was great was the cock, though we paid for it later in Mick’s wanting props at every tour after that, to cover his insecurities. There was a huge business of getting elephants on stage in Memphis until they ended up crashing through ramps and shitting all over the stage in rehearsals and were abandoned. We never had a problem with the cock in our opening shows at Baton Rouge. But the cock was a lure to the coppers who had given up trying to bust us in the hotel or while we were traveling or in the dressing room. The only place they could get us was on stage. They threatened to arrest Mick if the cock rose that night, and there was a mighty standoff. Carter warned them that the kids would burn down the arena. He’d taken the temperature and realized the kids weren’t going to stand for it. In the end Mick decided to defer to the sentiments of the authorities, and it didn’t erect itself in San Antonio. In Memphis when they threatened to arrest Mick for singing the lyrics “Starfucker, starfucker,” Carter stopped them in their tracks by producing a playlist from the local radio station that showed they’d been playing it on the air without any protest for two years. What Carter saw and was determined to fight every inch of the way was that every time the police moved, in every city, they violated the law, acted illegally, tried to bust in without warrants, made searches without probable cause.

  So there was some form on the books already by the time Carter finally got to Fordyce, with the judge under his arm. A great press corps was established in town; roadblocks had been erected to stop more people coming in. What the police wanted to do was to open the trunk, where they were sure they would find drugs. First they charged me with reckless driving because my tires had squealed and kicked up gravel as I left the restaurant car park. Twenty yards of reckless driving. Charge two: I had a “concealed weapon,” the hunting knife. But to open the trunk legally they needed to show “probable cause,” meaning there had to be some evidence or reasonable suspicion that a crime had been committed. Otherwise the search is illegal and even if they find the stuff the case will be thrown out. They could have opened the trunk if they’d seen contraband when they looked through the car window, but they hadn’t seen anything. This “probable cause” business was what generated the shouting matches that frequently erupted now between the various officials as the afternoon wore on. First off, Carter made it clear that he saw a trumped-up charge. To invent a probable cause, the cop who stopped me said that he smelled marijuana smoke coming through the windows as we left the car park and this was their cue to open the trunk. “They must think I fell off a watermelon truck,” Carter told us. The cops were trying to say that in the minute between leaving the restaurant and driving out of the car park there was time to light up a spliff and fill the car with enough smoke that it could be smelled many yards away. This was why they had arrested us, they said. That alone destroyed the credibility of the police evidence. Carter discussed all this with an already enraged chief of police, whose town was under siege, but who knew he could stop our sold-out concert the following night at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas by keeping us in Fordyce. In Chief Bill Gober, Carter saw and we saw the archetype redneck cop, the Bible Belt version of my friends from Chelsea police station, always prepared to bend the law and abuse their powers. Gober was a man personally enraged by the Rolling Stones—their dress, their hair, what they stood for, their music and above all their challenge to authority, as he saw it. Disobedience. Even Elvis said “Yes, sir.” Not these long-haired punks. So Gober went ahead and opened the trunk, warned by Carter that he would challenge him all the way to the Supreme Court. And when the trunk was opened that was the real creamer. It was legs-in-the-air laughter.

  When you crossed the river from Tennessee, then mostly a dry state, into West Memphis, which is in Arkansas, there were liquor stores selling what was basically moonshine with brown paper labels. Ronnie and I had gone berserk in one of them, buying every bizarre bottle of bourbon with a great label, Flying Cock, Fighting Cock, the Grey Major, little hip flasks with all of these exotic handwritten labels on them. We had sixty-odd in the trunk. So now we were suddenly suspected of being bootleggers. “No, we bought them, we paid for them.” So I think all of that booze confused them. This is the ’70s and boozers are not dopeheads, in those days there was that separation. “At least they’re men and drink whiskey.” Then they found Freddie’s briefcase, which was locked, and he told them he’d forgotten the combination. So they smacked it open and there, sure enough, were two small containers of pharmaceutical cocaine. Gober thought he had us, or at least he had Freddie, cold.

  It took some time to find the judge, now late in the evening, and when he arrived he’d been out on the golf course all day, drinking, and by this time he was flying.

  Now we have total comedy, absurdity, Keystone Kops as the judge takes to his bench and the various lawyers and cops try to get him to follow their versions of the law. What Gober wanted to do was to get the judge to rule that the search and the finding of the coke were legal and that all of us would be detained on felony charges—i.e., put in the slammer. On this little point of law, arguably, hung the future of the Rolling Stones, in America at least.

  What then happened is pretty much as follows, from what I overheard and from Bill Carter’s later testimony. And this is the quickest way to tell it, with apologies to Perry Mason.

  The Cast:

  Bill Gober. Police Chief. Vindictive, enraged.

  Judge Wynne. Presiding judge in Fordyce. Very drunk.

  Frank Wynne. Prosecuting attorney. The judge’s brother.

  Bill Carter. Well-known, aggressive criminal lawyer, representing the Rolling Stones. Native of Arkansas, from Little Rock.

  Tommy Mays. Prosecuting attorney. Idealistic, fresh out of law school.

  Others present: Judge Fairley. Brought along by Carter to witness fair play and to keep him out of jail.

  Outside Courthouse: Two thousand Rolling Stones fans who are pressed against barricades outside the town hall, chanting “Free Keith. Free Keith.”

  Inside Courtroom:

  Judge: Now, I think what we are judging here is a felony. A felony, gennnmen. I will take summmissions. Mr. Attorney?

  Young Prosecuting Attorney: Y
our Honor, there is a problem here about evidence.

  Judge: Y’all have to excuse me a minute. I’ll recess.

  [Perplexity in court. Proceeding held up for ten minutes. Judge returns. His mission was to cross the road and buy a pint bottle of bourbon before the store closed at ten p.m. The bottle is now in his sock.]

  Carter [on telephone to Frank Wynne, the judge’s brother]: Frank, where are you? You’d better come up. Tom’s intoxicated. Yeah. OK. OK.

  Judge: Proceed, Mr.… ah… proceed.

  Young Prosecuting Attorney: I don’t think we can legally do this, Your Honor. We don’t have justification to hold them. I think we have to let them go.

  Police Chief [to judge, yelling]: Damn we do. You gonna let these bastards go? You know I’m gonna place you under arrest, Judge. You damn right I am. You are intoxicated. You are publicly drunk. You are not fit to sit on that bench. You are causing a disgrace to our community. [He tries to grab him.]

  Judge [yelling]: You sonofabitch. Gerraway from me. You threaten me, I’m gonna have your ass outta… [A scuffle.]

  Carter [moving to separate them]: Whoa. Now, boys, boys. Let’s stop squabbling. Let’s keep talking. This is no time to get the liver out and put the knives in ha ha… We got TV, the world’s press outside. Won’t look good. You know what the governor’s going to say about this. Let’s proceed with the business. I think we can reach some agreement here.

  Courtroom Official: Excuse me, Judge. We have the BBC on live news from London. They want you now.

  Judge: Oh yeah. ’Scuse me a minute, boys. Be right back. [He takes a nip from the bottle in his sock.]

  Police Chief [still yelling]: Goddamn circus. Damn you, Carter, these boys have committed a felony. We found cocaine in that damn car. What more do you want? I’m gonna bust their asses. They gonna play by our rules down here and I’m gonna hit ’em where it hurts. How much they payin’ you, Hoover boy? Unless I get a ruling that the search was legal, I’m gonna arrest the judge for public drunk.

  Judge [v/o to BBC]: Oh yeah, I was over there in England in World War Two. Bomber pilot, 385th Bomb Group. Station Great Ashfield. I had a helluva time over there.… Oh, I love England. Played golf. Some of the great courses I played on. You got some great ones there.… Wennnworth? Yeah. Now to inform y’all, we’re gonna hold a press conference with the boys and explain some of the proceedings here, how the Rolling Stones came to be in our town here an’ all.

  Police Chief: I got ’em here and I’m holding ’em. I want these limeys, these little fairies. Who do they think they are?

  Carter: You want to start a riot? You seen outside? You wave one pair of handcuffs and you will lose control of this crowd. This is the Rolling Stones, for Christ sakes.

  Police Chief: And your little boys will go behind bars.

  Judge [returned from interview]: What’s that?

  Judge’s Brother [taking him aside]: Tom, we need to confer. There is no legal cause to hold them. We will have all hell to pay if we don’t follow the law here.

  Judge: I know it. Sure thing. Yes. Yes. Mr. Carrrer. You will all approach the bench.

  The fire had gone out of all except Chief Gober. The search had revealed nothing that they could legally use. There was nothing to charge us with. The cocaine belonged to Freddie the hitchhiker and it had been illegally discovered. The state police were mostly now on Carter’s side. With much conferring and words in the ear, Carter and the other lawyers made a deal with the judge. Very simple. The judge would like to keep the hunting knife and drop the charge on that—it hangs in the courtroom to this day. He would reduce the reckless driving to a misdemeanor, nothing more than a parking ticket for which I would pay $162.50. With the $50,000 in cash that Carter had brought down with him, he paid a bond of $5,000 for Freddie and the cocaine, and it was agreed that Carter would file to have it dismissed on legal grounds later—so Freddie was free to go too. But there was one last condition. We had to give a press conference before we went and be photographed with our arms around the judge. Ronnie and I conducted our press conference from the bench. I was wearing a fireman’s hat by this time and I was filmed pounding the gavel and announcing to the press, “Case closed.” Phew!

  It was a classic outcome for the Stones. The choice always was a tricky one for the authorities who arrested us. Do you want to lock them up, or have your photograph taken with them and give them a motorcade to see them on their way? There’s votes either way. In Fordyce, by the skin of our teeth, we got the motorcade. The state police had to escort us through the crowds to the airport at around two in the morning, where our plane, well stocked with Jack Daniel’s, was revved up and waiting.

  In 2006, the political ambitions of Governor Huckabee of Arkansas, who was going to stand in the primaries as a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, extended to granting me a pardon for my misdemeanor of thirty years previous. Governor Huckabee also thinks of himself as a guitar player. I think he even has a band. In fact there was nothing to pardon. There was no crime on the slate in Fordyce, but that didn’t matter, I got pardoned anyway. But what the hell happened to that car? We left it in this garage loaded with dope. I’d like to know what happened to that stuff. Maybe they never took the panels off. Maybe someone’s still driving it around, still filled with shit.

  Chapter Two

  Growing up an only child on the Dartford marshes. Camping holidays in Dorset with my parents, Bert and Doris. Adventures with my grandfather Gus and Mr. Thompson Wooft. Gus teaches me my first guitar lick. I learn to take beatings at school and later vanquish the Dartford Tech bully. Doris trains my ears with Django Reinhardt and I discover Elvis via Radio Luxembourg. I morph from choirboy to school rebel and get expelled.

  For many years I slept, on average, twice a week. This means that I have been conscious for at least three lifetimes. And before those lifetimes there was my childhood, which I ground out east of London in Dartford, along the Thames, where I was born. December 18, 1943. According to my mother, Doris, that happened during an air raid. I can’t argue. All four lips are sealed. But the first flash of memory I have is of lying on the grass in our backyard, pointing at the droning airplane in the blue sky above our heads, and Doris saying, “Spitfire.” The war was over by then, but where I grew up you’d turn a corner and see horizon, wasteland, weeds, maybe one or two of those odd Hitchcock-looking houses that somehow miraculously survived. Our street took a near hit from a doodlebug, but we weren’t there. Doris said it bounced along the curbstones and killed everyone on either side of our house. A brick or two landed in my cot. That was evidence that Hitler was on my trail. Then he went to plan B. After that, my mum thought Dartford was a bit dangerous, bless her.

  Doris and my father, Bert, had moved to Morland Avenue in Dartford from Walthamstow to be near my aunt Lil, Bert’s sister, while Bert was called up. Lil’s husband was a milkman, who’d been moved there on his new round. Then, when the bomb hit that end of Morland Avenue, our house wasn’t considered safe and we moved in with Lil. When we came out of the shelter after a raid one day, Lil’s roof was on fire, Doris told me. But that’s where our families were all stuck together, after the war, in Morland Avenue. The house that we used to live in was still there when I first remember the street, but about a third of the street was just a crater, grass and flowers. That was our playground. I was born in the Livingstone Hospital, to the sound of the “all clear”—another of Doris’s versions. I’ll have to believe Doris on that one. I wasn’t really counting from day one.

  My mother had thought she was going somewhere safe, moving to Dartford from Walthamstow. So she had moved us to the Darent Valley. Bomb Alley! It contained the biggest arm of Vickers-Armstrongs, which was pretty much a bull’s-eye, and the Burroughs Wellcome chemical firm. And on top of that it was around Dartford where German bombers would get cold feet and just drop their bombs and turn around. “Too heavy round here.” BOOM. It’s a miracle we didn’t get it. The sound of a siren still makes the hair on th
e back of my neck curl, and that must be from being put in the shelter with Mum and the family. When the sound of that siren goes off, it’s automatic, an instinctive reaction. I watch many war movies and documentaries, so I hear it all the time, but it always does the trick.

  My earliest memories are the standard postwar memories in London. Landscapes of rubble, half a street’s disappeared. Some of it stayed like that for ten years. The main effect of the war on me was just that phrase, “Before the War.” Because you’d hear grown-ups talking about it. “Oh, it wasn’t like this before the war.” Otherwise I wasn’t particularly affected. I suppose no sugar, no sweets and candies, was a good thing, but I wasn’t happy about it. I’ve always had trouble scoring. Lower East Side or the sweet shop in East Wittering, near my home in West Sussex. That’s the closest I get nowadays to visiting the dealer—the old Candies sweet shop. I drove over there at 8:30 one morning not long ago with my mate Alan Clayton, singer of the Dirty Strangers. We’d been up all night and we’d got the sugar craving. We had to wait outside for half an hour until it opened. We bought Candy Twirls and Bull’s-Eyes and Licorice & Blackcurrant. We weren’t going to lower ourselves and score at the supermarket, were we?

  The fact that I couldn’t buy a bag of sweets until 1954 says a lot about the upheavals and changes that last for so many years after a war. The war had been over for nine years before I could actually, if I had the money, go and say, “I’ll have a bag of them”—toffees and Aniseed Twists. Otherwise it was “You got your ration stamp book?” The sound of those stamps stamping. Your ration was your ration. One little brown paper bag—a tiny one—a week.