Life

by Keith Richards

  Five strings cleared out the clutter. It gave me the licks and laid on textures. You can almost play the melody through the chords, because of the notes you can throw in. And suddenly instead of it being two guitars playing, it sounds like a goddamn orchestra. Or you can no longer tell who is playing what, and hopefully if it’s really good, no one will care. It’s just fantastic. It was like scales falling from your eyes and from your ears at the same time. It broke open the dam.

  Ian Stewart used to refer to us affectionately as “my little three-chord wonders.” But it is an honorable title. OK, this song has got three chords, right? What can you do with those three chords? Tell it to John Lee Hooker; most of his songs are on one chord. Howlin’ Wolf stuff, one chord, and Bo Diddley. It was listening to them that made me realize that silence was the canvas. Filling it all in and speeding about all over the place was certainly not my game and it wasn’t what I enjoyed listening to. With five strings you can be sparse; that’s your frame, that’s what you work on. “Start Me Up,” “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” “Honky Tonk Women,” all leave those gaps between the chords. That’s what I think “Heartbreak Hotel” did to me. It was the first time I’d heard something so stark. I wasn’t thinking like that in those days, but that’s what hit me. It was the incredible depth, instead of everything being filled in with curlicues. To a kid of my age back then, it was startling. With the five-string it was just like turning a page; there’s another story. And I’m still exploring.

  My man Waddy Wachtel, guitar player extraordinaire, interpreter of my musical gropings, ace up the sleeve of the X-Pensive Winos, has something to say on this topic. Take the floor, Wads.

  Waddy Wachtel: Keith and I come to the guitar with a very similar approach. It’s funny. I sat with Don Everly one night, Don was a real drinker at that point, and I said, “Don, I’ve got to ask you something. I’ve known every song you guys have ever done”—that’s why I got the job in their band; I know every vocal part, I know every guitar part—“except,” I said, “there’s something I’ve never understood on your first single, ‘Bye Bye Love,’ and that is the intro. What the fuck is that sound? Who’s playing that guitar that starts that song?” And Don Everly goes, “Oh, that was just this G tuning that Bo Diddley showed me.” And I went, “Excuse me, I’m sorry, what did you say?” And he had a guitar, so he’s putting it in the open G tuning and he goes, “Yeah, it was me,” and he plays it and I go, “Oh, my fucking word, that’s it! It’s you! It was you!”

  I remember when I discovered this weird tuning—as it seemed to me then—Keith had adopted. In the early ’70s, I went to England with Linda Ronstadt. And we walked into Keith’s house in London and there’s this Strat sitting on a stand with five strings on it. And I’m like, “What happened to that thing? What’s wrong with that?” And he goes, “That’s my whole deal.” What is? He goes, “The five-string! The five-string open G tuning.” I went, “Open G tuning? Wait a minute, Don Everly told me about an open G tuning. You play open G tuning?” Because growing up and playing guitar, you’re learning Stones songs to play in bars, but you know something’s wrong, you’re not playing them right, there’s something missing. I’d never played any folk music. I didn’t have that blues knowledge. So when he said that to me, I said, “Is that why I can’t do it right? Let me see that thing.” And it makes so many things so easy. Like “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.” You can’t play that unless it’s in the tuning. It sounds absurd. And in the tuning, it’s so simple. If you lower the first string, the highest string, one step, then the fifth is always ringing through everything, and that’s creating that jangle. The inimitable sound, at least the way Keith plays it.

  Those two strings he travels up and down on, you can do a lot with them. We got on stage with the Winos one night and we’re about to do “Before They Make Me Run,” and he goes to do the intro and he starts to hit it and goes… “Argh, I don’t know which one it is!” Because he has so many introductions that are all based on the same form. The B string and the G string. Or the B string and the D string. He just went, “Which one are we doing, man? I’m lost in a sea of intros.” He’s got so many of them, a whirling dervish of riffs, open G intros.

  When I fell in with Gram Parsons in the summer of 1968, I struck a seam of music that I’m still developing, which widened the range of everything I was playing and writing. It also began an instant friendship that already seemed ancient the first time we sat down and talked. It was like a reunion with a long-lost brother for me, I suppose, never having had one. Gram was very, very special and I still miss him. Early that year he’d joined the Byrds, “Mr. Tambourine Man” and all that, but they’d just recorded their classic Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and it was Gram who had totally turned them around from a pop band into a country music band and expanded their whole being. That record, which bemused everybody at the time, turned out to be the incubator of country rock—a major influence. They were touring, on their way to South Africa, and I went to see them at Blaises Club. I expected to hear “Mr. Tambourine Man.” But this was so different, and I went back to see them and met Gram.

  “Got anything?” was probably the first question he asked me, or the more discreet “Erm, anywhere, erm…?” “Sure, come back to…” I think we went back to Robert Fraser’s to hang out, do some stuff. I was taking heroin by this time. He wasn’t unfamiliar with it. “Doodgy” was his word for it. It was a musical friendship, but also there was a similar love of a similar substance. Gram certainly liked to get out of it—which made two of us at the time. He also, like me, liked to go for the highest quality —he had better coke than the Mafia, did Gram. Southern boy, very warm, very steady under the drugs, calm. He had a troubled background, a lot of Spanish moss and Garden of Good and Evil.

  At Fraser’s that night we started to talk about South Africa, and Gram asked me, “What’s this drift I’m getting since I got to England? When I say I’m going to South Africa, I get this cold stare.” He was not aware of apartheid or anything. He’d never been out of the United States. So when I explained it to him, about apartheid and sanctions and nobody goes there, they’re not being kind to the brothers, he said, “Oh, just like Mississippi?” And immediately, “Well, fuck that.” He quit that night—he was supposed to leave the next day for South Africa. So I said, you can stay here, and we lived with Gram for months and months, certainly the rest of that summer of 1968, mostly at Redlands. Within a day or two I thought I’d known him all my life. There was an immediate recognition. What we could have done if we’d known each other earlier. We just sat around one night, and five nights later we were still sitting up talking and catching up on old times, which was five nights ago. And we played music without stopping. Sat around the piano or with guitars and just went through the country songbook. Plus some blues and a few ideas on top. Gram taught me country music—how it worked, the difference between the Bakersfield style and the Nashville style. He played it all on piano—Merle Haggard, “Sing Me Back Home,” George Jones, Hank Williams. I learned the piano from Gram and started writing songs on it. Some of the seeds he planted in the country music area are still with me, which is why I can record a duet with George Jones with no compunction at all. I know I’ve had a good teacher in that area. Gram was my mate, and I wish he’d remained my mate for a lot longer. It’s not often you can lie around on a bed with a guy having cold turkey in tandem and still get along. But that is a later story.

  Of the musicians I know personally (although Otis Redding, who I didn’t know, fits this too), the two who had an attitude towards music that was the same as mine were Gram Parsons and John Lennon. And that was: whatever bag the business wants to put you in is immaterial; that’s just a selling point, a tool that makes it easier. You’re going to get chowed into this pocket or that pocket because it makes it easier for them to make charts up and figure out who’s selling. But Gram and John were really pure musicians. All they liked was music, and then they got thrown into the game. And when that happens,
you either start to go for it or you fight it. Some people don’t even realize how the game works. And Gram was a bold man. This guy never had a hit record. Some good sellers, but nothing to point to, yet his influence is stronger now than ever. Basically, you wouldn’t have had Waylon Jennings, you wouldn’t have had all of that outlaw movement without Gram Parsons. He showed them a new approach, that country music isn’t just this narrow thing that appeals to rednecks. He did it single-handed. He wasn’t a crusader or anything like that. He loved country music, but he really didn’t like the country music business and didn’t think it should be angled just at Nashville. The music’s bigger than that. It should touch everybody.

  Gram wrote great songs. “A Song for You,” “Hickory Wind,” “Thousand Dollar Wedding,” great ideas. He could write you a song that came right round the corner and straight in the front, up the back, with a little curve on it. “I’ve been writing about a guy that builds cars.” And then you listen to it and it’s a story—“The New Soft Shoe.” Written about Mr. Cord, innovative creator of the beautiful Cord automobile, built on his own dime and deliberately crushed out by the triumvirate of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors. Gram was a storyteller, but he also had this unique thing that I’ve never seen any other guy do: he could make bitches cry. Even hardened waitresses in the Palomino bar who’d heard it all. He could bring tears to their eyes and he could bring that melancholy yearning. Guys he could rub pretty hard too, but his effect on women was phenomenal. It wasn’t boo-hoo, it was heartstrings. He had a unique hold on that particular string, the female heart. My feet were soaking from walking through tears.

  I remember well the trip with Mick and Marianne and Gram to Stonehenge under Chrissie Gibbs’s leadership early one morning, a jaunt photographed by Michael Cooper. The pictures are also a record of the early days of my friendship with Gram. Gibby recalls it thus:

  Christopher Gibbs: We started off very early from some club in South Kensington; set off about two or three in the morning in Keith’s Bentley. And we walked from where Stephen Tennant lived, from Wilsford, across a sort of track to Stonehenge in order to approach it in a properly reverent manner, and watched the dawn come up there. And we were all gibbering with acid. We had breakfast in one of the Salisbury pubs, lots of acid freaks trying to dismember kippers, get the spine out. Imagine that if you can. And like all these things one does on acid, it seemed to take a very long time but actually it took about thirty seconds. No one’s ever got a kipper cleaner or more swiftly.

  It’s difficult to put those middle and late ’60s together, because nobody quite knew what was happening. A different kind of fog descended and much energy was around and nobody quite knew what to do with it. Of course, being so stoned all the time and experimenting, everybody, including me, had these vague, half-baked ideas. You know, “Things are changing.” “Yeah, but for what, for where?” It was getting political in 1968, no way to avoid that. It was getting nasty too. Heads were getting beaten. The Vietnam War had a lot to do with turning it around, because when I first went to America, they started drafting the kids. Between ’64 and ’66 and then ’67, the attitude of American youth was taking drastic turns. And then when you got the killings at Kent State in May of 1970, it turned really sour. The side effects hit everybody, including us. You wouldn’t have had “Street Fighting Man” without the Vietnam War. There was a certain reality slowly penetrating.

  Then it became a “them against us” sort of thing. I could never believe that the British Empire would want to pick on a few musicians. Where’s the threat? You’ve got navies and armies, and you’re unleashing your evil little troops on a few troubadours? To me it was the first demonstration of how insecure establishments and governments really are. And how sensitive they can get to something that is trivial, really. But once they perceive a threat, they keep looking for the enemy within, without realizing that half the time, they’re it! It was an assault upon society. We had to assault the entertainment business, and then later the government took us seriously, after “Street Fighting Man.”

  A flavor of the period is contained in The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, by our friend Stanley Booth—our writer in residence on the early tours. He picked up a flyer in Oakland, back in the late ’60s or early ’70s, that proclaimed: “The Bastards hear us playing you on our little transistor radios and know that they will not escape the blood and fire of the Anarchist revolution. We will play your music, dear Rolling Stones, in rock and roll marching bands as we tear down the jails and free the prisoners and arm the poor. Tattoo Burn, Baby, Burn on the asses of the wardens and generals.”

  Taking “Street Fighting Man” to the extremes, or “Gimme Shelter.” But without a doubt it was a strange generation. The weird thing is that I grew up with it, but suddenly I’m an observer instead of a participant. I watched all these guys grow up; I watched a lot of them die. When I first got to the States, I met a lot of great guys, young guys, and I had their phone numbers, and then when I got back two or three years later, I’d call them up, and he’s in a body bag from Nam. A whole lot of them got feathered out, we all know. That’s when that shit hit home with me. Hey, that great little blondie, great guitar player, real fun, we had a real good time, and the next time, gone.

  Sunset Strip in the ’60s, ’64, ’65—there was no traffic allowed through it. The whole strip was filled with people, and nobody’s going to move for a car. It was almost off-limits. You hung out in the street, you just joined the mob. I remember once Tommy James, from the Shondells—six gold records and blew it all. I was trying to get up to the Whisky a Go Go in a car, and Tommy James came by. “Hey, man.” “And who are you?” “Tommy James, man.” “Crimson and Clover” still hits me. He was trying to hand out things about the draft that day. Because obviously he thought he was about to be fucking drafted. This was Vietnam War time. A lot of the kids that came to see us the first time never got back. Still, they heard the Stones up the Mekong Delta.

  Politics came for us whether we liked it or not, once in the odd personage of Jean-Luc Godard, the great French cinematic innovator. He somehow got fascinated with what was happening in London in that year, and he wanted to do something wildly different from what he had done before. He probably took a few things he shouldn’t have, not being used to it, just to get himself in the mood. Nobody, I think, has ever quite honestly been able to figure out what the hell he was aiming at. The film Sympathy for the Devil is by chance a record of the song by us of that name being born in the studio. The song turned after many takes from a Dylanesque, rather turgid folk song into a rocking samba—from a turkey into a hit—by a shift of rhythm, all recorded in stages by Jean-Luc. The voice of Jimmy Miller can be heard on the film, complaining, “Where’s the groove?” on the earlier takes. There wasn’t one. There are some rare instrumental switches. I play bass, Bill Wyman plays maracas, Charlie Watts actually sings in the wooo-woooo chorus. As did Anita and maybe Marianne too. So far so good. I’m glad he filmed that, but Godard! I couldn’t believe it; he looked like a French bank clerk. Where the hell did he think he was going? He had no coherent plan at all except to get out of France and score a bit of the London scene. The film was a total load of crap—the maidens on the Thames barge, the blood, the feeble scene of some brothers, aka Black Panthers, awkwardly handing weapons to one another in a Battersea scrap yard. Jean-Luc Godard up until then made very well-crafted, almost Hitchcockian work. Mind you, it was one of those years when anything was flyable. Whether it would actually take off was another thing. I mean, why, of all people, would Jean-Luc Godard be interested in a minor hippie revolution in England and try to translate it into something else? I think somebody slipped him some acid and he went into that phony year of ideological overdrive.

  Godard at least managed to set Olympic Studios on fire. Studio one, where we were playing, used to be a cinema. To diffuse the light, he had tissue paper taped up under these very hot lights on the ceiling. And halfway through—I think there are some outtakes w
here you can actually see this—all of this tissue paper and the whole ceiling caught alight at ferocious speed. It was like being inside the Hindenburg. All of the heavy light rigging started to crash to the floor because it had burned through the cables; lights going out, sparks. Talk about sympathy for the fucking devil. Let’s get the fuck out of here. It was the last days of Berlin, down to the bunker. The end. Fin.

  I wrote “Gimme Shelter” on a stormy day, sitting in Robert Fraser’s apartment in Mount Street. Anita was shooting Performance at the time, not far away, but I ain’t going down to the set. God knows what’s happening. As a minor part of the plot, Spanish Tony was trying to steal the Beretta they were using as a prop off the set. But I didn’t go down there, because I really didn’t like Donald Cammell, the director, a twister and a manipulator whose only real love in life was fucking other people up. I wanted to distance myself from the relationship between Anita and Donald. Donald was a decadent dependent of the Cammell shipyard family, very good-looking, a razor-sharp mind poisoned with vitriol. He’d been a painter in New York, but something drove him mad about other clever and talented people—he wanted to destroy them. He was the most destructive little turd I’ve ever met. Also a Svengali, utterly predatory, a very successful manipulator of women, and he must have fascinated many of them. He would sometimes take the piss out of Mick for his Kentish accent and sometimes me, Dartford yokel. I don’t mind a good put-down now and again; I come up with a few. But putting people down was almost an addiction for him. Everybody had to be put in their place. Anything you did in front of Cammell was up for his ridicule. He had a fairly developed sense of inferiority in there somewhere.