Life

by Keith Richards

  Mick would come and visit me occasionally in Switzerland and talk about “economic restructuring.” We’re sitting around half the time talking about tax lawyers! The intricacies of Dutch tax laws vis-à-vis the English tax law and the French tax law. All of these tax thieves were snapping at our heels. I was trying to wish it away. Mick was a bit more practical on that point: “The decisions we make now will affect blah blah blah.” Mick picked up the slack; I picked up the smack. The cures didn’t always stick through the periods off the road, when I wasn’t working.

  Anita had cleaned up when she was pregnant, but the minute she had the baby, she was straight back on it, more, more, more. At least we could be on the road together, with the children, when we took off for Jamaica to cut Goats Head Soup in November 1972.

  I had first gone to Jamaica for a few days off at a place called Frenchman’s Cove in 1969. You could hear the rhythm going around. Free reggae, rock steady and ska. In that particular area you’re not very close to the population, you’re all white guys there, isolated from local culture unless you really want to go out and look for it. I met a few nice guys. I was listening to a lot of Otis Redding at the time and had guys coming up, saying, “That’s so fine.” I discovered that in Jamaica they were getting two radio stations from the US that could reach that far with a very clear signal. One was out of Nashville, which played country music, obviously. And the other one was from New Orleans, which also had an incredibly powerful beam. And when I came back to Jamaica at the end of 1972, I realized that what they’d been doing was listening to these two stations and stacking them together. Listen to “Send Me the Pillow That You Dream On,” the reggae version that came out then by the Bleechers. The rhythm section is New Orleans, the voice and song are Nashville. You had basically the rockabilly, the black and the white stuck together in an amazing fashion. The melodies of one with the beat of the other. It was that same mixture of white and black that brought you rock and roll. And I said, well, blimey, I’m halfway there!

  Jamaica in those days was not the Jamaica it is now. By 1972 the place was blooming. The Wailers were signed to Island Records. Marley was just sprouting his locks. Jimmy Cliff was in the cinemas with The Harder They Come. In Saint Ann’s Bay the audiences shot the screen as the titles rolled, in a familiar (to me) surge of rebellious glee. The screen was already perforated—perhaps from spaghetti westerns, which were the rage in those times. Plenty of gunmen in Kingston. The town was rife with an exotic form of energy, a very hot feeling, much of which was coming from the infamous Byron Lee’s Dynamic Sounds. It was built like a fortress, with a white picket fence outside, as it appears in the film. The track “The Harder They Come” was cut by Jimmy Cliff in the same room we used to record some of Goats Head Soup, with the same engineer, Mikey Chung. A great four-track studio. They knew where the drums were exactly right, and to prove it, bang bang, they nailed down the stool!

  We were all shacked up at the Terra Nova Hotel, which used to be Chris Blackwell’s family residence in Kingston. Neither Mick nor I could get visas to the United States at that moment, which partly explains why we were in Jamaica. We went to the American embassy in Kingston. The ambassador was one of Nixon’s boys and he obviously had his orders and also he hated our guts. And we were just trying to get a visa. The minute we walked in, we knew that we weren’t going to get it but, even so, we had to listen to this guy’s stream of venom. “People like you…” We got a lecture. Mick and I were looking at each other: have we not heard this before? We discovered later from the visa negotiations that Bill Carter conducted on our behalf that what they had in the files was very primitive—a few tabloid cuttings, a couple of screaming headlines, a story of us pissing against a wall. The ambassador pretended to go through the papers, talked of heroin, rubbed it all in.

  Goats Head Soup meanwhile took some cranking up, despite Dynamic Sounds and the fervor of the moment. I think Mick and I were a little bit dried up after Exile. And we had just been on the road in the US and then here comes another album. After Exile, such a beautifully set up list of songs that all seemed to go together, it was difficult for us to get that tightness again. We hadn’t been in the studio for a year. But we had some good ideas. “Coming Down Again,” “Angie,” “Starfucker,” “Heartbreaker.” I enjoyed making it. Our way of doing things changed while we were recording it, and slowly I became more and more Jamaican, to the point where I didn’t leave. There were some downsides. By now Jimmy Miller’s on the stuff too, so is Andy Johns, and I’m watching this happen and I’m, oh fuck… You’re supposed to do as I say, not as I do. I was still on the dope myself, of course. Of “Coming Down Again,” I said not long ago that I wouldn’t have written it without heroin. I don’t know if it was about dope. It was just a mournful song—and you look for that melancholy in yourself. I’m obviously looking for great grooves, great riffs, rock and roll, but there’s the other side of the coin that still wants to go where “As Tears Go By” came from. And by then I’d worked a lot in the country field, especially with Gram Parsons, and that high-lonesome melancholy has a certain pull on the heartstrings. You want to see if you can tug ’em a little harder.

  Some people think “Coming Down Again” is about me stealing Anita, but by then that’s all water under the fucking bridge. You get highs and lows. I would have been most of the time very, very up, but when it got low, it got very, very low. I remember joy and happiness and a lot of hard work. But when shit did hit the fan, it always hit it very solidly. You get exhausted. You get busted. For a long stretch, I was either on trial or had a case pending, or we were going through visa problems. That was always the backdrop. It was sheer pleasure to get in the studio and lose yourself, forget about it for a few hours. You knew when it was over you were going to be facing some shit one way or another.

  Once the recording was over, having decided to stay in Jamaica, Anita, Marlon, Angie and I moved to the north coast, to Mammee Bay, between Ocho Rios and Saint Ann’s Bay. We ran out of dope. Cold turkey in paradise, par for the course. If you’re gonna clean up, there are worse places. (Still, it was only slightly warmer turkey.) Nevertheless, all things must pass, and before long we began to act as human beings again and then met some of the Rasta brethren of the coast. First one guy, Chobbs—Richard Williams on the birth certificate—he was one of those full-of-brass, full-on guys you met on the beach. He was selling coconuts, rum and anything else he could flog off. And he used to take the children out in his boat. As usual it was “Hey, man, any chance of some bush?” So it started from there. Then I met Derelin and Byron and Spokesy, who was later killed in a motorcycle accident. They worked the tourists in Mammee Bay and lived mostly in Steer Town. And slowly they all sort of gravitated around and we started to talk music. Warrin (Warrin Williamson), “Iron Lion” Jackie (Vincent Ellis), Neville (Milton Beckerd), a dreadlock man who still lives in my house in Jamaica. There was Tony (Winston “Blackskull” Thomas) and Locksley Whitlock, “Locksie,” who was the leader, so to speak, the Boss Man. They called him Locksie because he had a severe attack of dreadlocks. Locksley could have been a first-class cricketer. He was a wicked batsman. I had a picture of him somewhere, at the crease. He was invited to join the Jamaican top team, but he refused to cut his locks off. The only one who actually made a profession of music was Justin Hinds. The King of Ska. Late lamented. A beautiful singer—Sam Cooke reincarnated. One of his biggest records, called “Carry Go Bring Come,” Justin Hinds and the Dominoes, was a huge hit in Jamaica in 1963. In the few years before he died in 2005, he recorded albums with his band the Jamaica All Stars. And he was still very much one of the brethren of Steer Town, a fearsome place just inland into which I never would have ventured—let’s say I wouldn’t have been welcome there—before I knew them. I was eased in gently, via Chobbs, and eventually I was allowed to go up to the Covenant, which is what they used to call their moveable gathering .

  “Come to the Covenant, you’re welcome, brother.” I mean, Jesus Christ, I don’t kno
w how important this is in their terms, but if I’m asked to go, I’ll go. Quite honestly you couldn’t see a thing, the place would be covered in smoke. They used to smoke the chalice, a coconut with a huge earthenware jar on top and about half a pound of weed in it and a rubber pipe coming out the end. It was a question of who could smoke more than anybody else. The daring chaps would fill the coconut with white rum like a hubbly bubbly and smoke it through the rum. You set the earthenware container ablaze, bursting into flames with clouds of smoke. “Fire burn, Jah wonderful!” Who was I to defy local custom? OK, I’ll try and hang in here. This is powerful weed. Funnily enough, I never flaked out. That’s why I think I impressed them. I was a smoker for quite a few years before that, but never that amount. It was just like a dare, in a way. You know, watch whitey fall to the floor. And I was telling myself, not gonna go to the floor, not gonna go to the floor. I stood up and stayed with them. Mind you, I fell to the floor later, when I got out of there.

  It seemed the whole population of Steer Town was musicians whose music consisted of beautifully reworked hymns chanted by voices and drums. I was in heaven. They used to sing in unison, there was no concept of singing harmonies, and they played no instruments except these drums—a very powerful sound. Just drums and voices. The words and the chants were already a century old or more, old hymns and psalms that they would rewrite to suit their tastes. But the actual melodies were straight out of the church, and many churches in Jamaica used drums as well. They’d go all night for it. Hypnotic. Trance. Relentless beat. And they’d keep coming out with more and more songs. Some of them cutting-edge songs too. The drums belonged to Locksley, with a bass drum that could be so loud it was believed it could kill you, like a massive stun grenade. In fact there were many witnesses to the story of a cop who unwisely ventured into a house in Steer Town, and Locksley looked at him—they were in a small room—and said, “Fire burn,” meaning hit the drum, giving others warning to protect their ears. Then he hit the bass drum, and the cop fell unconscious, was stripped of his uniform and ordered never to return.

  Steer Town was a Rasta town at that time. Now it’s a much bigger junction, but then to go up there you had to have a pass, in a way. It was on a main road from Kingston; it had the crossroads and many shacks and a couple of taverns. But you didn’t poke your nose in. Because even if you said, “Oh, I know him and I know him,” other cats might not know who you were and just slash you up. It was their bastion and they had no shame with that machete. And they had reason to be fearful. So fearful that they had to make themselves fearsome so that no cops were ever gonna walk into Steer Town. It wasn’t long ago that the cops would ride down the street and if they saw two Rastas, they’d shoot one and leave the other to drag the body away. These guys stood up in front of fire. I’ve always admired them for that.

  Rastafarianism was a religion, but it was a smokers’ religion. Their principle was “ignore their world,” live without society. Of course they didn’t or couldn’t—Rastafarianism is a forlorn hope. But at the same time, it’s such a beautiful forlorn hope. When the grid and the iron and the bars closed in on societies everywhere, and they got tighter and tighter, the Rastafarians loosened themselves from it. These guys just figured out their little way of being spiritual about it and at the same time not joining in. They would not accept intimidation. Even if they had to die. And some of them did. They refused to work within the economic system. They’re not going to work for Babylon; they’re not going to work for the government. For them that was being taken into slavery. They just wanted to have their space. If you get into the theology, you can get a little lost. “We’re the lost tribe of Judah.” OK, anything you say. But why this bunch of black Jamaicans consider themselves to be Jewish is a question. There was a spare tribe that had to be filled and that one would do. I have the feeling it was like that. And then they found a spare deity in the unreal medieval figure of Haile Selassie, with all his biblical titles. The Lion of Judah. Selassie, I. If there was a clap of thunder and lightning, “Jah!” everybody got up, “Give thanks and praises.” It was a sign that God was working. They knew their Bible back to front—they could quote phrase after phrase of the Old Testament. I loved their fire about it, because whatever the religious ins and outs, they were living on the edge. All they had was their pride. And what they were engaged in was not, in the end, religion. It was one last stand against Babylon. Not all of them hung to the tenets of the Rastafarian law. They were very flexible. They had all these rules that they would gladly break. It was amazing to watch them when they got into arguments amongst themselves over a point of doctrine. There was no parliament or senate or tribunal of elders. Rasta politics—“fundamental reasoning” —was very like the bar at the House of Commons, in this case with a lot of stoned people and huge amounts of smoke.

  What really turned me on is there’s no you and me, there’s just I and I. So you’ve broken down the difference between who you are and who I am. We could never talk, but I and I can talk. We are one. Beautiful.

  That time was when the Rastas were almost at their most serious. Just when I thought I was shacking up with this really weird, unknown sect, Bob Marley and the Wailers happened and Rastas suddenly became fashionable all over the world. They went global just within that year. Before Bob Marley became a Rastafarian, he was trying to be one of the Temptations. Like anybody else in the music business, he’d had a long career already, in rock steady, ska, etc. But others said, “Hey, Marley didn’t have no fucking locks, you know? He weren’t a Rasta until it became cute.” The first time the Wailers went to England, soon after this, I caught them by chance up in Tottenham Court Road. I thought they were pretty feeble compared to what I’d been hearing in Steer Town. But they certainly got their act together real quick. Family Man joined in on the bass, and Bob obviously had all of the stuff required.

  I respond instinctively to kindness with no side attached. In those days when I hung in Steer Town, I could walk in any door and my every need would be satisfied. I was treated as family and I acted like family. Not acted! I behaved like family, became family. Me sweep the yard, me mash up coconuts, me make chalice for the sacramental smoking. Man, I was more Rasta than they. I’d fallen in with just the right bunch of guys, and their old ladies. It was another one of those across-the-tracks things —just being accepted and welcomed into something I didn’t even know existed.

  I also learned some useful Jamaican skills with the ratchet, the working knife used for paring and cutting but also for fighting or protecting yourself, “with a ratchet in your waist,” as Derrick Crooks of the Slickers sang it in “Johnny Too Bad.” I’ve almost always carried a knife, and this one requires a special technique. I’ve used it to make a point—or to get myself heard. The ratchet has a ring to lock the blade; just a little pressure and you can flick it out. You’ve got to be quick in this game. The way it was explained to me, if you’re going to use a blade, the winner is the one who can make a quick horizontal cut across the other’s forehead. The blood will fall like a curtain, but you don’t really hurt the cat that much, you just put an end to the fight because he can’t see. The blade’s back in your pocket before anybody knows about it. The big rules of knife fighting are (a) do not try it at home, and (b) the whole point is never, ever use the blade. It is there to distract your opponent. While he stares at the gleaming steel, you kick his balls to kingdom come—he’s all yours. Just a tip!

  Eventually they brought the drums down to the house, which was a major break with the sacred conventions, though I didn’t realize it at the time. And we began to record there, just on cassettes, and play all night. Naturally I’d pick up the guitar and stroke away, find out what chords might fit, and they, they kind of broke their own rules and turned round and said, “Hey, man, that’s nice.” So I wormed my way in. I suggested maybe a harmony here could help, and I crept in with a guitar. They could have told me to fuck off or not. So I left it to them, basically. But when they heard what they were sounding like
coming back on a cassette recorder, they loved it—loved to hear themselves played back. Damn right, you’re good. You’re fucking unique, motherfuckers!

  I went down there for years and years after that. We would just record in the room. If I had some tape and we had a machine, we’d put it down, but if not, it didn’t matter. If it ran out of tape, it didn’t matter. We weren’t there to record, we were there to play. I felt like a choirboy. I would just stroke a little bit behind them and hope that I didn’t annoy them. One frown, I’d shut up. But I kind of got accepted. And then they told me that I was not actually white. To the Jamaicans, the ones that I know, I’m black but I’ve turned white to be their spy, “our man up north” sort of thing. I take it as a compliment. I’m as white as a lily with a black heart exulting in its secret. My gradual transition from white man to black was not unique. Look at Mezz Mezzrow, a jazzman from the ’20s and ’30s who made himself a naturalized black man. He wrote Really the Blues, the best book on the subject. It was my mission in a way to get these guys recorded. Finally, when we were together around 1975, we schlepped everybody down to Dynamic Sounds, but they couldn’t handle the studio situation. It wasn’t their milieu. “You move over there, you go there…” The idea of being told what to do, for them, was incomprehensible. And it was a dismal failure, really. Even though it was a good studio. That’s when I realized, if you want to record these guys, it’s got to be in the front room. It’s got to be up at the house, where they’re all feeling comfortable and they’re not thinking about being recorded. We had to wait twenty years for that to happen, to get the take we wanted, which is when they became known as the Wingless Angels.