Life

by Keith Richards

  One of the first things Klein did was to renegotiate the contract between the Rolling Stones and Decca Records. And so one day we walked into the Decca office. A stage-managed piece of theater by Klein, the most obvious crass ploy. We got our instructions: “We’re going into Decca today and we’re going to work on these motherfuckers. We’re going to make a deal and we’re going to come out with the best record contract ever. Wear some shades and don’t say a thing,” said Klein. “Just troop in and stand at the back of the room and look at these old doddering farts. Don’t talk. I’ll do the talking.”

  We were just there as intimidation, basically. And it worked. Sir Edward Lewis, the chairman of Decca, was behind the desk and Sir Edward was actually drooling! I mean not over us, he was just drooling. And then somebody would come along and pat him with a handkerchief. He was on his last legs, let’s face it. We just stood there with shades on. It was really the old guard and the new. They crumbled and we walked out of there with a deal bigger than the Beatles’. And this is where you’ve got to take your hat off to Allen. These five hoodlums then went back with Allen to the Hilton and glugged down the champagne and congratulated ourselves on our performance. And Sir Edward Lewis, he might have been drooling and everything, but he wasn’t stupid. He made a lot of money off of that deal himself. It was an incredibly successful deal for both parties. Which is what a deal is supposed to be. I’m still getting paid off of it; it’s called the Decca balloon.

  With us, Klein was very much Colonel Tom Parker with Elvis. Hey, I’ll make the deals, anything you want, just ask me, you got it—patrician in his dealings with us and with money. You could always get some from him. If you wanted a gold-plated Cadillac, he’d give it to you. When I rang and asked him for £80,000 to buy a house on Chelsea Embankment near to Mick’s, so that we could wander back and forth and write songs, it came the next day. You just didn’t know the half of it. It was a paternalistic form of management that obviously doesn’t rub anymore these days, but it was still flying then. It was a different state of mind to now, where every fucking guitar pick is paid for and accounted for. It was rock and roll.

  Klein was magnificent, at first, in the States. The next tour, under his management, was cranked up several gears. A private plane to get us about, huge billboards on Sunset Boulevard. Now we’re talking.

  One hit requires another, very quickly, or you fast start to lose altitude. At that time you were expected to churn them out. “Satisfaction” is suddenly number one all over the world, and Mick and I are looking at each other, saying, “This is nice.” Then bang bang bang at the door, “Where’s the follow-up? We need it in four weeks.” And we were on the road doing two shows a day. You needed a new single every two months; you had to have another one all ready to shoot. And you needed a new sound. If we’d come along with another fuzz riff after “Satisfaction,” we’d have been dead in the water, repeating with the law of diminishing returns. Many a band has faltered and foundered on that rock. “Get Off of My Cloud” was a reaction to the record companies’ demands for more—leave me alone—and it was an attack from another direction. And it flew as well.

  So we’re the song factory. We start to think like songwriters, and once you get that habit, it stays with you all your life. It motors along in your subconscious, in the way you listen. Our songs were taking on some kind of edge in the lyrics, or at least they were beginning to sound like the image projected onto us. Cynical, nasty, skeptical, rude. We seemed to be ahead in this respect at the time. There was trouble in America; all these young American kids, they were being drafted to Vietnam. Which is why you have “Satisfaction” in Apocalypse Now. Because the nutters took us with them. The lyrics and the mood of the songs fitted with the kids’ disenchantment with the grown-up world of America, and for a while we seemed to be the only provider, the soundtrack for the rumbling of rebellion, touching on those social nerves. I wouldn’t say we were the first, but a lot of that mood had an English idiom, through our songs, despite their being highly American influenced. We were taking the piss in the old English tradition.

  This wave of recording and songwriting culminated in the album Aftermath, and many of the songs we wrote around this time had what you might call anti-girl lyrics—anti-girl titles too. “Stupid Girl,” “Under My Thumb,” “Out of Time,” “That Girl Belongs to Yesterday,” and “Yesterday’s Papers.”

  Who wants yesterday’s girl?

  Nobody in the world.

  Maybe we were winding them up. And maybe some of the songs opened up their hearts a little, or their minds, to the idea of we’re women, we’re strong. But I think the Beatles and the Stones particularly did release chicks from the fact of “I’m just a little chick.” It was not intentional or anything. It just became obvious as you were playing to them. When you’ve got three thousand chicks in front of you that are ripping off their panties and throwing them at you, you realize what an awesome power you have unleashed. Everything they’d been brought up not to do, they could do at a rock-and-roll show.

  The songs also came from a lot of frustration from our point of view. You go on the road for a month, you come back, and she’s with somebody else. Look at that stupid girl. It’s a two-way street. I know, too, that I was making unfavorable comparisons between the chicks at home who were driving us mad and the girls we fell in with on the tours who seemed so much less demanding. With English chicks it was you’re putting the make on her or she’s putting the make on you, yea or nay. I always found with black chicks that wasn’t the main issue. It was just comfortable, and if shit happened later, OK. It was just part of life. They were great because they were chicks, but they were much more like guys than English girls were. You didn’t mind them being around after the event. I remember being in the Ambassador Hotel with this black chick called Flo, who was my piece at the time. She’d take care of me. Love, no. Respect, yeah. I’d always remember because we’d laugh when we heard the Supremes singing, “Flo, she doesn’t know,” lying on the bed. And it always made us giggle. You take a little bit out of this one experience, and then a week later you’re down the road.

  There was certainly that conscious element in those RCA days, from the end of ’65 to summer of ’66, of pushing the envelope in milder ways. There was “Paint It Black,” for example, recorded in March 1966, our sixth British number one. Brian Jones, now transformed into a multi-instrumentalist, having “given up playing the guitar,” played sitar. It was a different style to everything I’d done before. Maybe it was the Jew in me. It’s more to me like “Hava Nagila” or some Gypsy lick. Maybe I picked it up from my granddad. It’s definitely on a different curve to everything else. I’d moved around the world a bit. I was no longer strictly a Chicago blues man, had to spread the wings a bit, to come up with melodies and ideas, although I can’t say that we ever played Tel Aviv or Romania. But you start to latch on to different things. With songwriting, it’s a constant experiment. I’ve never done it consciously, like saying, I’ve got to explore such and such a thing. We were learning about making the album the center of attention—the form for the music instead of just singles. Making an LP usually consisted of having two or three single hits and their B-sides, and then filler. Everything was two minutes twenty-nine seconds for a single, otherwise you wouldn’t get played on the radio. I talked with Paul McCartney about this recently. We changed it: every track was a potential single; there was no filler. And if there was, it was an experiment. We’d use the extended time we had with an album just to make more of a statement.

  If LPs hadn’t existed, probably the Beatles and ourselves wouldn’t have lasted more than two and a half years. You had to keep condensing, reducing what it was you wanted to say, to please the distributor. Otherwise radio stations wouldn’t play it. Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” was the breakthrough. “Goin’ Home” was eleven minutes long—“It ain’t gonna be a single. Can you extend and expand the product? Can it be done?” And that was really the main experiment. We said, you can’t e
dit this shit, it either goes out like it is or you’re done with it. I’ve no doubt Dylan felt the same about “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” or “Visions of Johanna.” The record got bigger—and could anybody listen to that much? It’s over three minutes. Can you keep their attention? Can you keep your audience? But it worked. The Beatles and ourselves probably made the album the vehicle for recording and hastened the demise of the single. It didn’t go away immediately; you always needed a hit single. It just extended you without your even really knowing it.

  And because you’ve been playing every day, sometimes two or three shows a day, ideas are flowing. One thing feeds the other. You might be having a swim or screwing the old lady, but somewhere in the back of the mind, you’re thinking about this chord sequence or something related to a song. No matter what the hell’s going on. You might be getting shot at, and you’ll still be “Oh! That’s the bridge!” And there’s nothing you can do; you don’t realize it’s happening. It’s totally subconscious, unconscious or whatever. The radar is on whether you know it or not. You cannot switch it off. You hear this piece of conversation from across the room, “I just can’t stand you anymore”… That’s a song. It just flows in. And also the other thing about being a songwriter, when you realize you are one, is that to provide ammo, you start to become an observer, you start to distance yourself. You’re constantly on the alert. That faculty gets trained in you over the years, observing people, how they react to one another. Which, in a way, makes you weirdly distant. You shouldn’t really be doing it. It’s a little of Peeping Tom to be a songwriter. You start looking round, and everything’s a subject for a song. The banal phrase, which is the one that makes it. And you say, I can’t believe nobody hooked up on that one before! Luckily there are more phrases than songwriters, just about.

  Linda Keith was the one that first broke my heart. It was my fault. I asked for it and I got it. The first look was the deepest, watching her, with all her tricks and movements, fearfully, from across the room and feeling that hit of longing, and thinking she was out of my league. I was sometimes in awe of the women I was with at the start, because they were the crème de la crème, and I’d come from the gutter as far as I was concerned. I didn’t believe these beautiful women wanted to say hello, let alone lie down with me! Linda and I met at a party given by Andrew Oldham, a party for some forgotten Jagger-Richards–written single. It was the party where Mick first met Marianne Faithfull. Linda was seventeen, strikingly beautiful, very dark hair, the perfect look for the ’60s: a blinder, very self-assured in her jeans and a white shirt. She was in the magazines, she was modeling, David Bailey was photographing her. Not that she was particularly interested. The girl just wanted something to do, to get out of the house.

  When I first met Linda I was just astounded that she wanted to come along with me. Once again the girl puts the make on me. She bedded me, I didn’t bed her. She made a line straight for me. And I was totally, absolutely in love. We fell for each other. And the other surprise was that I was Linda’s first love, the first boy she ever fell for. She had been actively pursued by all kinds of people who she’d rejected. To this day I don’t understand it. Linda was the best friend of Andrew Oldham’s then almost-wife, Sheila Klein. These beautiful Jewish girls were a powerful cultural force in West Hampstead bohemia, which became my stomping ground, and Mick’s too for a couple of years. It centered around Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead, near where Decca Records was situated, and a few venues around there where we played. Linda’s father was Alan Keith, who for forty-four years presented a program on BBC radio called Your Hundred Best Tunes. Linda had been allowed to grow up fairly wild. She loved music, jazz, blues—a blues purist, in fact, who didn’t really approve of the Rolling Stones. She never did. She probably doesn’t now. She had been hanging out when she was very young at a place called the Roaring Twenties, a black club, when she was wandering around London in bare feet.

  The Stones played every night, we were on the road all the time, but still somehow, for a while Linda and I managed to have a love affair. We lived first in Mapesbury Road, then in Holly Hill with Mick and his girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton, and finally just the two of us in Carlton Hill, the flat I had in St. John’s Wood. The rooms there never got decorated: everything piled up around the walls, mattress on the floor, many guitars, an upright piano. We lived, despite all this, almost like a married couple. We used to take the tube before I bought Linda a Mark 2 Jaguar, which had a letterbox 45 player on which she wouldn’t play the Stones. We’d hang out in Chelsea at the Casserole, the Meridiana, the Baghdad House. The restaurant we went to in Hampstead is still there—Le Cellier du Midi—and probably still has the same menu after forty years. It certainly looks identical from the outside.

  It was bound to unravel with the long absences—through confusion more than anything, the confusion of suddenly living this life that nobody, or certainly nobody that I knew, had a road map for. All of us were pretty young and we were trying to make this thing up as we went along. “I’m going to America for three months. I love you, darling.” And meanwhile we’re all changing. For one thing, I’d met Ronnie Bennett, and I spent more time on the road with her than I did with Linda. We grew apart slowly. It took a couple of years. We would still hook up, but in those years the band had a total of ten days off for the entire three-year period. Linda and I did manage to have one brief holiday in the South of France, though Linda remembers this as a flight she took away from London, an escape, a job as a waitress in Saint-Tropez, and me following her and installing her in a hotel, giving her a hot bath. Linda also began taking a lot of drugs. For me to disapprove is an irony, but I did disapprove then.

  I’ve seen Linda a couple of times since those days. She’s happily married to a very well-known record producer, John Porter. She remembers my disapproval. I was taking little more than weed in those days, but Linda was getting into the heavy stuff, and it was having a dangerous effect on her. That was clear to see. She came with me to New York when we were touring the USA in the summer of 1966, our fifth tour there. I’d put her up at the Americana Hotel, though she spent much of her time with her girlfriend Roberta Goldstein. When I turned up, they’d put all the gear away, the downers, the Tuinals, which I wouldn’t have touched—imagine!—and strew wine bottles around to give probable cause if they staggered a bit.

  Then she met Jimi Hendrix, saw him play and adopted his career as her mission, tried to get him a recording contract with Andrew Oldham. In her enthusiasm, during a long evening with Jimi, as she tells it, she gave him a Fender Stratocaster of mine that was in my hotel room. And then, so Linda says, she also picked up a copy of a demo I had of Tim Rose singing a song called “Hey Joe.” And took that round to Roberta Goldstein’s, where Jimi was, and played it to him. This is rock-and-roll history. So he got the song from me, apparently.

  We went off on tour, and when I came back, London was suddenly hippie-ville. I was already into that in America, but I wasn’t expecting it when I came home to London. The scene had changed totally in a matter of weeks. Linda was on acid and I’d been jilted. You shouldn’t expect somebody of that age to hang around for four months with all this stuff going on. I knew it was on the break. It was my presumptuousness to think she was going to sit like a little old lady at home at eighteen or nineteen years old, while I gallivanted around the world doing what I wanted. I found out that Linda had taken up with some poet, which I went bananas about. I went running through the whole of London, asking people, anybody seen Linda? Crying my eyes out from St. John’s Wood to Chelsea, screaming, “Bitch! Get out of my fucking way.” Fuck the traffic lights. I only remember some very close accidents, nearly getting run over on the way through London to Chelsea. After I’d found out, I wanted to be sure, I wanted to see. I checked with my friends, where does this motherfucker live? I even remember his name, Bill Chenail. Some poet so-called. He was a hip little bugger at the time because he came on with the Dylanesque bit. Couldn’t play anything. Ersatz hi
p, as it’s called. I stalked her a couple of times, but I remember thinking, what would I say? I hadn’t got that act down yet, how to confront my rival. In the middle of a Wimpy bar? Or some bistro? I even walked to where she was living with him in Chelsea, almost into Fulham, and stood outside. (This is a love story.) And I could see her in there with him, “silhouettes on the shade.” And that was it. “Like a thief in the night.”

  That’s the first time I felt the deep cut. The thing about being a songwriter is, even if you’ve been fucked over, you can find consolation in writing about it, and pour it out. Everything has something to do with something; nothing is divorced. It becomes an experience, a feeling, or a conglomeration of experiences. Basically, Linda is “Ruby Tuesday.”

  But our story wasn’t quite over. After she left me, Linda was in a really bad way, Tuinals had given way to harder stuff. She went back to New York and took up further with Jimi Hendrix, who may have broken her heart, as she broke mine. Certainly, her friends say, she was very much in love with him. But I knew she needed medical help—she was getting very close to the danger line, as she herself acknowledged later, and I couldn’t deal with it because I’d burned my boats. I went to see her parents and gave them all the telephone numbers and places where they’d find her. “Hey, your daughter is in distress. She won’t admit it, but you’ve got to do something. I can’t. I’m already persona non grata anyway. And this is going to be the final nail in my coffin with Linda, but you’ve got to do something about her because I’m on the road tomorrow.” Linda’s father went to New York and found her in a nightclub, brought her back to England, where her passport was removed and she was made a ward of court. She felt that this was a great betrayal on my part, and we didn’t speak or see each other again until many years later. She had some close shaves with drugs after that, but she survived and recovered and brought up a family. She now lives in New Orleans.