Life

by Keith Richards

  It gave him a spongelike mentality when it came to music. He’d hear something in a club and a week later he’d think he wrote it. And I’d say, no, that’s actually a total lift. I’ve had to check him on that. I’ve played him songs that I’ve come up with, ideas… He says, that’s nice, and we fiddle about for a bit and leave it alone. A week later he’ll come back and say, look, I’ve just written this. And I know it’s totally innocent, because he wouldn’t be that dumb. The writers’ credits under “Anybody Seen My Baby?” include K.D. Lang and a cowriter. My daughter Angela and her friend were at Redlands and I was playing the record and they start singing this totally different song over it. They were hearing K.D. Lang’s “Constant Craving.” It was Angela and her friend that copped it. And the record was about to come out in a week. Oh shit, he’s lifted another one. I don’t think he’s ever done it deliberately; he’s just a sponge. So I had to call up Rupert and all of the heavy-duty lawyers, and I said, have this checked out right now, otherwise we’re going to be sued. And within twenty-four hours, I got a phone call: you’re right. We had to include K.D. Lang in the writing credits.

  I used to love to hang with Mick, but I haven’t gone to his dressing room in, I don’t think, twenty years. Sometimes I miss my friend. Where the hell did he go? I know when the shit hits the fan, I can guarantee he’ll be there for me, as I would be for him, because that’s beyond any contention. I think over the years Mick has become more and more isolated. I can understand it in a way. I try and avoid isolating myself, but even so, you often need to insulate yourself from what’s going on. In recent years, if I ever watch an interview with Mick, at the base of it he’s going, what do you want out of me? A defensive charm comes on. What do they want from you? They want some answers, obviously, to some questions. But what are you so scared of giving away? Or is it just the act of giving away something for free? And you can imagine how, if you were Mick at that time, in his high days, everybody wanted a piece, and how difficult it was. But his way of dealing with it was that he would start to slowly treat everybody that defensive way. Not just strangers, but his best friends. Until it came to the point where I would say something to him and I could tell from that look in his eyes that he was wondering, what’s Keith’s gain? And I didn’t have one! The siege mentality builds up. Now you’ve built the wall, but can you get out?

  I don’t know quite how to put the finger on where and when this all happened. He used to be a lot warmer. But not for many, many years. He put himself in the fridge, basically. First it was, what do other people want out of me? and then he closed the circle until I was on the outside too.

  For me it’s very painful, because he still is a friend of mine. Jesus Christ, he’s given me enough grief over my life. But he’s one of my mates, and to me it’s a personal failure not to have been able to turn him around to the joys of friendship and just bring him down to earth.

  We’ve been through so many different periods together. I love the man dearly. But it was a long time ago that we could be that close. We have a respect, I guess, for now, with a deeper, under-rooted friendship. Do you know Mick Jagger? Yeah, which one? He’s a nice bunch of guys. It’s up to him which one you meet. He chooses on the day whether he’s going to be distant or flippant or “my mate,” which doesn’t ever come off very well.

  And I think maybe in recent years he’s realized that he’s become isolated. He actually talks to the crew at times! In years past he wouldn’t even know their names or bother to learn them. When he got on the plane on tour, crew members would say, “How you doing, Mick?” and he just walked straight by. Me and Ronnie and Charlie too. He was famous for it. Yet these people were the ones that could make you sound and look great or like crap if they wanted to. In that sense he made things difficult, but if Mick wasn’t making things difficult you’d think he was ill.

  Just when he was at his most insufferable, a bombshell was dropped onto our assembled gathering. In 1983, we were a growing concern. There was a multi-record deal with CBS and its president, Walter Yetnikoff, for twenty-odd million dollars. What I didn’t know until a good while later was that on the back of that deal, Mick had made his own deal with CBS for three solo records for millions of dollars, without a word to anybody in the band.

  I don’t care who you are, you don’t piggyback on a Rolling Stones deal. Mick felt free to do that. It was total disregard for the band. And I’d rather have found out about it before it went down. I was incensed. We didn’t build this band up to stab each other in the back.

  It became clear how much earlier the plans had been laid. Mick was the big star, and Yetnikoff and others were fully behind the idea of him taking off on a solo career—all of which flattered Mick and encouraged his takeover plans. In fact, Yetnikoff let it be known later that everyone at CBS was thinking that Mick could be as big as Michael Jackson and they were actively promoting it, and Mick was going along with it. So the real purpose of the Rolling Stones deal was for Mick to ride in on top of it.

  I thought it was just a dumb move, basically. He didn’t realize that by doing something else he was breaking a certain image in the public mind that is very fragile. Mick was in a unique position as lead singer of the Stones, and he should have read a little more into what that actually meant. Anybody can get bigheaded once in a while and think, I can do this with any old band. But obviously he proved it’s not true. I can understand somebody wanting to kick the traces. I like to play with other people and do something else, but in his case he had nothing really in mind except being Mick Jagger without the Rolling Stones.

  The way it was done was just so tacky. I could have maybe understood it if the Stones were flopping, like the rat leaving the sinking ship. But the fact is the Stones were doing very well and all we had to do was keep it together. Instead of losing four, five years in the wilderness and then having to pull it all together again. Everybody felt betrayed. What happened to the friendship? He couldn’t have told me from the beginning that he was thinking of doing something else?

  What really pissed me off at the time was Mick’s compulsion to cultivate buddy relationships with CEOs, in this case Yetnikoff. Incessant telephone calls to impress them with his knowledge, letting them know that he was on top of it, when actually no one guy’s on top of it. And annoying everyone with his constant interference in places where people who are paid fortunes know how to do it better than he does.

  Our only strength was in distance, in a united front. That’s how we did the Decca deal. We just stood there in shades and intimidated them into one of the best record deals of all time. My theory on working with record people is never to talk to them personally except on social occasions. You never get that close to them; you never get involved in the daily da da da —you pay somebody to do that. Asking about budgets for advertising and… “Hey, Walter, where’s the…?,” making yourself personally available to the guy you’re working with? You reduce yourself, diminish your power. You reduce the band. Because it’s “Jagger’s on the phone again.” “Oh, tell him to call me later.” That’s what happens. I like Walter very much; I think he’s great. But Mick actually pulled the rug from under us by getting too familiar with him.

  There was a rare moment, in late 1984, of Charlie throwing his drummer’s punch—a punch I’ve seen a couple of times and it’s lethal; it carries a lot of balance and timing. He has to be badly provoked. He threw this one at Mick. We were in Amsterdam for a meeting. Mick and I weren’t on great terms at the time, but I said, c’mon, let’s go out. And I lent him the jacket I got married in. We got back to the hotel about five in the morning and Mick called up Charlie. I said, don’t call him, not at this hour. But he did, and said, “Where’s my drummer?” No answer. He puts the phone down. Mick and I were still sitting there, pretty pissed—give Mick a couple of glasses, he’s gone—when, about twenty minutes later, there was a knock at the door. There was Charlie Watts, Savile Row suit, perfectly dressed, tie, shaved, the whole fucking bit. I could smell the cologne! I
opened the door and he didn’t even look at me, he walked straight past me, got hold of Mick and said, “Never call me your drummer again.” Then he hauled him up by the lapels of my jacket and gave him a right hook. Mick fell back onto a silver platter of smoked salmon on the table and began to slide towards the open window and the canal below it. And I was thinking, this is a good one, and then I realized it was my wedding jacket. And I grabbed hold of it and caught Mick just before he slid into the Amsterdam canal. It took me twenty-four hours after that to talk Charlie down. I thought I’d done it when I took him up to his room, but twelve hours later, he was saying, “Fuck it, I’m gonna go down and do it again.” It takes a lot to wind that man up. “Why did you stop him?” My jacket, Charlie, that’s why!

  By the time we gathered in Paris to record Dirty Work in 1985, the atmosphere was bad. The sessions had been delayed because Mick was working on his solo album, and now he was busy promoting it. Mick had come with barely any songs for us to work on. He’d used them up on his own record. And he was often just not there at the studio.

  So I began writing a lot more on my own for Dirty Work, different kinds of songs. The horrendous atmosphere in the studio affected everybody. Bill Wyman almost stopped turning up; Charlie flew back home. In retrospect I see that the tracks were full of violence and menace: “Had It with You,” “One Hit (to the Body),” “Fight.” We made a video of “One Hit (to the Body)” that more or less told the story—we nearly literally came to blows, over and above our acting duties. “Fight” gives some idea of brotherly love between the Glimmer Twins at this juncture.

  Gonna pulp you to a mess of bruises

  ’Cos that’s what you’re looking for

  There’s a hole where your nose used to be

  Gonna kick you out of my door.

  Gotta get into a fight

  Can’t get out of it

  Gotta get into a fight.

  And there was “Had It with You”:

  I love you, dirty fucker

  Sister and a brother

  Moaning in the moonlight

  Singing for your supper

  ’Cos I had it I had it I had it with you

  I had it I had it I had it with you.…

  It is such a sad thing

  To watch a good love die

  I’ve had it up to here, babe

  I’ve got to say goodbye

  ’Cos I had it I had it I had it with you

  And I had it I had it I had it with you.

  That was the kind of mood I was in. I wrote “Had It with You” in Ronnie’s front room in Chiswick, right on the banks of the Thames. We were waiting to go back to Paris, but the weather was so dodgy that we were stranded until the Dover ferry started rolling again. Peter Cook and Bert were hanging about. There was no heating, and the only way to keep warm was to turn on the amps. I don’t think I’d ever written a song before, apart maybe from “All About You,” in which I realized I was actually singing about Mick.

  Mick’s album was called She’s the Boss, which said it all. I’ve never listened to the entire thing all the way through. Who has? It’s like Mein Kampf. Everybody had a copy, but nobody listened to it. As to his subsequent titles, carefully worded, Primitive Cool, Goddess in the Doorway, which it was irresistible not to rechristen “Dogshit in the Doorway,” I rest my case. He says I have no manners and a bad mouth. He’s even written a song on the subject. But this record deal of Mick’s was bad manners beyond any verbal jibes.

  Just by the choice of material, it seemed to me he had really gone off the tracks. It was very sad. He wasn’t prepared not to make an impact. And he was upset. But I can’t imagine why he thought it would fly. This is where I felt Mick had lost touch with reality.

  No matter what Mick’s doing or what his intentions are, I’m not sitting around festering, nurturing venom. My attention, anyway, was turned suddenly and forcibly, in December 1985, to the shattering news that Ian Stewart had died.

  He died of a heart attack, aged forty-seven. I was waiting for him that afternoon in Blakes Hotel off the Fulham Road. He was going to meet me after he’d seen his doctor. Around three in the morning, I got a call from Charlie. “Are you still waiting for Stu?” I said yes. “Well, he’s not coming” was Charlie’s way of breaking the news. The wake was held at his golf course at Leatherhead, Surrey. He’d have appreciated the joke that this was the only way he’d ever get us there. We played a tribute gig to Stu at the 100 Club—the first time we’d been on stage together in four years. Stu was the hardest hit I had ever had, apart from my son dying. At first you’re anesthetized, you go on as if he’s still there. And he did remain there, turning up one way or another for a very long time. He still does. The things that go through your mind are the things that make you laugh, that keep you close, like his jutting-jawed way of speaking.

  He looms still, as when I remember how he cracked over Jerry Lee Lewis. At the beginning my love for “the Killer’s” playing diminished me in Stu’s soul. “Bloody fairy pounding away” comes to mind as a typical Stu response. Then, about ten years later, Stu came to me one night and said, “I must admit some redeeming factors in Jerry Lee Lewis.” Out of the blue! And this between takes. Now that’s looming.

  He never broached the subject of life and death except if somebody else croaked. “The silly sod. Asking for it.” When we went up to Scotland for the first time, Stu pulled over and asked someone, “Can you nae tell me the way to the Odeon?”—Stu being a very proud Scotsman, from Kent. Stu was a law unto himself, in his cardigans and polo shirts. When we had expanded into the mega stadiums and satellite television, thousands in the audience, he’d come on stage in his Hush Puppies, with his cup of coffee and his cheese sandwich, which he put on the piano while he played.

  I got really mad at him for leaving me, which is my normal reaction when a friend or somebody I love croaks when they’re not supposed to. He left many legacies. Chuck Leavell, from Dry Branch, Georgia, who had been in the Allman Brothers, was a Stu protégé and appointee. He first played keyboards on tour with us in 1982 and became a permanent fixture on all subsequent tours. By the time Stu died, Chuck had been working with the Stones for several years. If I croak, God forbid, said Stu, Leavell’s the man. Maybe when he said that, he knew he was ill. He also said, “Don’t forget that Johnnie Johnson is alive and well and still playing in Saint Louis.” And it was all in the same year. Maybe a doctor had told him, you’ve got so long to go.

  Dirty Work came out in early 1986, and I badly wanted to tour with it. So, of course, did the other band members, who wanted to work. But Mick sent us a letter saying he wouldn’t tour. He wanted to get on with his solo career. Soon after the letter came, I read in one of the English tabloids of Mick saying the Rolling Stones are a millstone around my neck. He actually said it. Swallow that one, fucker. I had no doubt that some part of his mind was thinking that, but saying it is another thing. That’s when World War III was declared.

  Unable to tour, I thought on Stu’s remark about Johnnie Johnson. Johnson was Chuck Berry’s original piano player and, if Chuck was honest, the cowriter of many Chuck Berry hits. But Johnson wasn’t playing much in Saint Louis. Ever since Chuck had told him to hasten down the wind, more than a decade before this, he’d been a bus driver, ferrying old folks around, almost entirely forgotten. It wasn’t just his partnership with Berry that distinguished Johnnie Johnson. He was one of the best-ever players of blues piano.

  When we were cutting Dirty Work in Paris, the drummer Steve Jordan came to hang out in the studio, and then played on the album, filling in for Charlie, who was having a wobble of his own, carried away for a time on various stupéfiants, as the French have it. Steve was around thirty then, and a very gifted all-round musician and singer. He had come to Paris to record, getting some leave from his job playing in the David Letterman show band. Before that he had played with the Saturday Night Live band and toured with Belushi and Aykroyd in their Blues Brothers band. Charlie had picked him out as a drum
mer back in 1978 when he was playing on Saturday Night Live, and remembered him.

  Aretha Franklin called up because she was making a movie called Jumpin’ Jack Flash, with Whoopi Goldberg, and she wanted me to produce her title track for it. I remembered Charlie Watts saying, if you ever work outside of this frame, Steve Jordan’s your man. And I thought, well, if I’m going to do Jumpin’ Jack Flash with Aretha, I’ve got to put a band together. I’ve got to start again. I knew Steve anyway, so that’s how we forged ourselves —on Aretha’s soundtrack. Which was a great session. And in my mind it was lodged that if I’m going to do anything else, it’s with Steve.

  I inducted Chuck Berry as one of the first musicians in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 1986, and it happened that the band that played behind Chuck and all the other musicians jamming with him that night was the David Letterman band, with Steve Jordan on drums. Next thing I knew, Taylor Hackford asked me to be musical director for a feature film he was making for Chuck Berry’s sixtieth birthday, and suddenly Stu’s words were echoing: Johnnie Johnson is alive. The first problem, I realized the minute I thought about it, was that Chuck Berry had been playing with pickup bands for so long, he’d forgotten what it was like to play with top hands. And especially with Johnnie Johnson, who he’d not played with since they broke up in the early 1970s. When Chuck turned around and said, in his inimitable fashion, Johnnie, fuck off, he cut off a hand and a half.

  He thought he’d have hits forever. Was he too suffering from LVS, even though he played guitar? In fact he never had a hit record after he split that band up, apart from his biggest record ever, “My Ding-a-Ling.” Go, Chuck! With Johnnie Johnson he had had the perfect unit. It was made in heaven, for Christ’s sake. Oh no, says Chuck, it’s only me that counts. I can find another pianist, and anyway, I can get them cheaper too. It’s basically the cheapness he was concerned about.