When I went with Taylor Hackford to see Chuck at his home in Wentzville, just outside Saint Louis, I waited until the second day to slide the question. They’re all talking about lighting, and I just said to Chuck, I don’t know if this is a good question because I don’t know your relationship, but is Johnnie Johnson still about? And he said, I think he’s in town. But more importantly, said I, could you two play together? Yeah, he said. Shit, yeah. A tense moment. Suddenly I’ve put Johnnie Johnson back together with Chuck Berry. The possibilities are endless. Chuck rolled right in there, and it was a good decision, because he got a great movie out of it and a great band.
One of those fabulous ironies now took place—and the joke was on me. I’d wanted Charlie to play the drums. Steve Jordan had wanted to do it, but I thought he wouldn’t know the music well enough—and I was wrong there, but then I still didn’t know him that well. So I told Steve, thanks, mate, but Charlie’s up for it. Then on another visit, Chuck wanted to play me something quite urgently. He put on a video of the jam at the end of Chuck’s induction into the Hall of Fame—and there was Steve, whacking away on the drums, though the camera angle cut his head off. But it’s rocking, and Chuck says, man, I like that drummer. Who’s that drummer? I want that drummer on the film. So I had to call up Steve and say, um, ah, there may be an opening. No doubt Steve enjoyed that. But there was a kicker. He’d better tell it.
Steve Jordan: Chuck flies down to meet us in Jamaica and stay at the house in Ocho Rios, and we go to pick Chuck up at the airport. It’s a hot day, it’s like ninety plus, very hot. And everybody’s coming off the plane in shorts or bikinis, because they know they’re coming into sweltering weather. Chuck gets off the plane with a blazer, polyester flares and a briefcase. It was hysterical. Then we’re sitting around in the living room, and the drums are set up, and we’re supposed to play together. We have just a couple of little Champ amps and a couple of guitars so we can start banging out some stuff, and Chuck says, so where’s the drummer? And I had dreadlocks, I’m looking like Sly Dunbar. And Keith says, this is the drummer, it’s Steve, he’s the drummer. And Chuck goes, he’s my drummer? He looked at my dreadlocks and goes, he ain’t my drummer! Because there was no shot of my head [in the video he’d seen], and he didn’t know I had dreadlocks at the time. He was thinking I was some reggae drummer and he didn’t want to play with me. Then we started playing and he was fine.
I asked Johnnie Johnson, how did “Sweet Little Sixteen” and “Little Queenie” get written? And he said, well, Chuck would have all these words, and we’d sort of play a blues format and I would lay out the sequence. I said, Johnnie, that’s called songwriting. And you should have had at least fifty percent. I mean, you could have cut a deal and taken forty, but you wrote those songs with him. He said, I never thought about it that way; I just sort of did what I knew. Steve and I did the forensics on it, and we realized that everything Chuck wrote was in E-flat or C-sharp—piano keys! Not guitar keys. That was a dead giveaway. These are not great keys for guitar. Obviously most of these songs started off on piano and Chuck joined in, playing on the barre with his huge hands stretching across the strings. I got the sense that he followed Johnnie Johnson’s left hand!
Chuck’s hands are big enough; he’s got the stretch for all that barre chord playing. Very long, slender hands. It took me a couple of years to figure out how it was possible to sound like that with smaller hands. It was by going to see Jazz on a Summer’s Day, where Chuck plays “Sweet Little Sixteen.” I watched his hands, where they were moving and where the fingers were going, and discovered that if I transposed this into guitar keys, something with a root note, I could get my own swing on it. Just the way Chuck did. And the beautiful thing about Chuck Berry’s playing was it had such an effortless swing. None of this sweating and grinding away and grimacing, just pure, effortless swing, like a lion.
It was fantastic, to say the least, to put Chuck and Johnnie together. What was interesting was the way they reacted off each other. They hadn’t done it together for so long. Just by being there, Johnnie reminded Chuck of how it really went, and Chuck had to come up to Johnnie’s mark. He’d been playing with slouches for years, with the cheapest band in town, just going in and out with a briefcase. To a musician, playing below your mark is soul destroying, and he had been doing that for ages, to the point where he was completely cynical about the music. When Johnnie was rocking, Chuck would say, hey, remember this one? and switch to something really out of left field. It was weird and funny to watch Chuck catching up to Johnnie, and also with the band, because now he’s got Steve Jordan on drums, and he ain’t played with a drummer like that since goddamn ’58. I put a band together that came to find Chuck Berry, as much as that was possible. To present him with a band that was as good as his original. And I think we did it, in our own way, although he’s an elusive motherfucker. But I’m used to working with elusive motherfuckers.
One really brilliant thing that came out of that movie: I gave Johnnie Johnson a new life. He got a chance to play in front of people on a good piano. And for the rest of his life, he was playing all over the world and being liked. He had gigs; he was recognized. And more important than anything else, he had self-respect again, and he was seen for what he was, a brilliant player. He never thought anybody knew it was him on all those incredible records. His credits and royalties as a composer eluded him. Maybe it wasn’t Chuck’s fault; maybe it was Chess Records. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Johnnie never asked, so it was never given to him. Johnnie Johnson had another fifteen years of being heard, doing what he should have been doing and getting his kudos, not croaking behind a wheel.
I don’t knock people much (outside my intimate circle), but I’ve got to say Chuck Berry was a big disappointment. He was my numero uno hero. Shit, I thought, the cat’s got to be great to play like that, write like that, sing like that, sling the hash like that. He’s got to be a great cat. When we put his equipment together with ours for the film, I found out later that he charged the production company for the use of his amps. From the first bar of that first night of the show at the Fox Theatre in Saint Louis, Chuck threw all our carefully laid plans to the wind, playing totally different arrangements in different keys. It didn’t really matter. It was the best Chuck Berry live you’re ever going to get. As I said when I inducted him into the Hall of Fame, I’ve stolen every lick he ever played. So I owed it to Chuck to bite the bullet when he was at his most provocative, to play rope-a-dope to see it through. And he sure pushed me hard—you can see it in the film. It’s very difficult for me to allow myself to be bullied, and that is what Chuck was doing to me and to everybody else.
Yet what I think about Chuck deep down is what I wrote in a fax to him one day after hearing him on the radio for the millionth time:
The big betrayal by Mick, which I find hard to forgive, a move that seemed almost deliberately designed to close down the Rolling Stones, was his announcement in March 1987 that he would go on a tour with his second solo album, Primitive Cool. I had been assuming we would tour in 1986 and was already frustrated by Mick’s delaying tactics. And now it all came clear. As Charlie put it, he’d folded up twenty-five years of the Rolling Stones. That’s what it looked like. The Stones didn’t tour at all from 1982 to 1989, and didn’t go into the studio together from ’85 to ’89.
Said Mick, “The Rolling Stones… cannot be, at my age and after spending all these years, the only thing in my life.… I certainly have earned the right to express myself in another way.” And he did. The way he expressed himself was to go on tour with another band singing Rolling Stones songs.
I really believed that Mick wouldn’t dare tour without the Stones. It was too hard a slap in the face to deliver to us. It was a death sentence, pending appeal. And for what? But I was wrong and I was outraged and hurt. Mick was touring.
So I let him have it, mostly in the press. An opening shot was, if he doesn’t want to go out with the Stones and then goes out with Schmuck and
Ball’s band instead, I’ll slit his fuckin’ throat. And Mick responded loftily, “I love Keith, I admire him… but I don’t feel we can really work together anymore.” I can’t recall all the jibes and barbs I let loose—Disco Boy, Jagger’s Little Jerk Off Band, why doesn’t he join Aerosmith?—that’s the kind of stuff I fed the grateful tabloids. It got really bad. One day a reporter asked me, “When are you two going to stop bitching at each other?” “Ask the bitch,” I replied.
Then I thought, let the guy have his play. I took it like that. Let him go out there and fall flat on his face. He’d shown a total lack of friendship, of camaraderie, of everything that’s necessary to hold a band together. It was a dump. Charlie felt even worse about it than I did, I think.
I saw a clip of Mick’s show, and he had Keef look-alike guitar players stepping in tandem, doing guitar hero moves. When it was on the road, I was asked what I thought, and I said it was sad that a high percentage of his show was Rolling Stones songs. I said, if you’re going to do something on your own, do stuff off the two albums you did. Don’t pretend you’re a solo artist and have two chicks prancing around doing “Tumbling Dice.” The Rolling Stones spent a lot of time building up integrity, as much as you can get in the music industry. And the way Mick handled his solo career jeopardized all that, and it severely pissed me off.
Mick had misjudged something by a hundred miles. He took it for granted that any bunch of good musicians would be as compatible with him as the Rolling Stones. But he didn’t sound like himself. He had great players, but it’s kind of like the World Cup. England’s not Chelsea or Arsenal. It’s a different game, and you’ve got to work with a different team. Now you’ve hired the best hands around and you’ve got to form a relationship with them. Which is not Mick’s forte. He could certainly strut around and have the star on his dressing room door and treat the band like hirelings. But you can’t get good music that way.
After that I decided, fuck it, I want a band. I was determined to make music in Mick’s absence. I wrote a lot of songs. I began to sing in a new way on songs like “Sleep Tonight.” It was a deeper sound, one I’d never had before, and it worked well for the kind of ballads I had started writing. So I called in guys I’d always wanted to work with, and I knew the man to start with. You could almost say a collaboration had begun between me and Steve Jordan even back in Paris during the making of Dirty Work. Steve encouraged me; he heard something in my voice that he thought could make records. If I had a melody I was working on, I’d get him to sing it. And I thrive on collaboration—I need a reaction to think anything I’ve done is any good. So back in New York we started to hang, and we wrote a lot of songs together. Then, with his buddy and collaborator Charley Drayton, mainly a bass player but also another superbly gifted drummer, we started to jam at Woody’s house. Then Steve and I hung in Jamaica for a while, and he became my buddy. And Steve and I found, hey, we can write too! He’s the only one. It’s either going to be Jagger/Richards or Jordan/Richards.
Steve will tell how we came together.
Steve Jordan: Keith and I were very close during those times when we were writing, before we put together a band, when there was just the two of us. We went into a studio called Studio 900, which was right around the corner from where I lived and up the street from where he lived in New York. And we would go in there and hunker down. The first time we went in there, we played twelve hours straight. Keith didn’t even go out and take a piss! It was unbelievable. It was just sheer love of music that bound us. But it was clearly liberating for him. He had so many ideas he wanted to get out. And certainly he was upset, or, at least when it came to writing, wearing his heart on his sleeve. Much of the music was very specific. It was about his old partner. “You Don’t Move Me” was a classic of its kind, which ended up on the first solo album, Talk Is Cheap.
All I had was the title, “You don’t move me anymore.” And I had no idea which way to shift it; I could be a guy talking to a chick or a chick talking to a guy. But then, when I got to the first verse, I realized where my mind was going. I suddenly had a focus, and it was Mick. Trying to be gracious at the same time. But my version of graciousness.
What makes you so greedy
Makes you so seedy.
Steve and I thought we ought to make a record and started to put together the core of the X-Pensive Winos—so named later on when I noticed a bottle of Château Lafite introduced as light refreshment in the studio. Well, nothing was too good for this amazing band of brothers. Steve asked me who I wanted to play with, and first up, on guitar I said Waddy Wachtel. And Steve said, you took the words, brother. I had known Waddy since the ’70s and I’d always wanted to play with him, one of the most tasteful, simpatico players I know. And he’s completely musical. Understanding of it, empathetic, nothing ever needing to be explained. He’s also got the most uncanny ultrasonic ear, still tuned high after years of bandstands. He was playing with Linda Ronstadt and he was playing with Stevie Nicks— chick bands—but I knew my man wanted to rock. So I called him and said simply, “I’m putting a band together, and you’re in it.” Steve agreed that Charley Drayton should be the bass player, and I think it was just a general consensus that Ivan Neville, from Aaron Neville’s family from New Orleans, should be the piano player. There was no audition process whatsoever.
The Winos were put together very slyly. Almost everybody in that band can play anything. They can switch instruments; they can virtually all sing. Steve can sing. Ivan’s a fantastic singer. This core band, from the first few bars we ever played, took off like a rocket. I’ve always been incredibly lucky with the guys I’ve played with. And there’s no way you can stand in front of the Winos without getting off. It’s a surefire high. It was so hot you could hardly believe it. It brought me back to life. I felt as if I’d just gotten out of jail. As engineer we had Don Smith, who Steve had picked out. He had cut his teeth at Stax in Memphis and worked with Don Nix, who wrote “Going Down.” He also worked with Johnnie Taylor, one of my earliest heroes. He’d hung out in the juke joints of Memphis with Furry Lewis. He loved his music.
Waddy describes our journey, and bears flattering witness to my improvement as a singer from the early thwarted promise of the Dartford boy soprano.
Waddy Wachtel: We went up to Canada and did the whole of the first record, Talk Is Cheap, there. I think the second track we cut was “Take It So Hard,” which is a magnificent composition. And I just thought, I get to play on this? Let’s go. And we played it a few times. I guess you could call it rehearsing. And there’s one take that is just a great pass. It’s just ridiculously good. It was the second tune of the night, and it was this killer fucking take of our strongest tune. I went back to the house going, we’ve conquered Everest already? These other mountains we can climb easily if we’ve got the big one down. And Keith didn’t want to believe it; he was going, I don’t want these guys thinking they’re that good. He made us do a retake. I don’t know why. The take was shouting, hey, dude, I’m the take. I think Keith just did it to make sure people stayed in focus. But it never sounded as good as that first take. When you’ve got it, you’ve got it. When we were putting the sequence of the album together, I insisted “Big Enough” should be the first song. Because the first time you hear Keith sing on that, that first line is amazing, his voice sounds so beautiful. He delivers it effortlessly. I said, people when they hear this, they’re not going to believe it’s fucking Keith Richards singing. And then we’ll hit ’em with “Take It So Hard.”
In fact, on Talk Is Cheap it’s not just our band. We looked high and low. We went down to Memphis and recruited Willie Mitchell and put the Memphis Horns on “Make No Mistake.” Willie Mitchell! He engineered, arranged, produced and wrote all the Al Green stuff, either with Al Green or with Al Jackson or both. So we went down to the studio where he did all Al Green’s records and we had him do a horn arrangement. We tried for everybody we wanted, and we got most of them: we had Maceo Parker playing, we had Mick Taylor, William “Boo
tsy” Collins, Joey Spampinato, Chuck Leavell, Johnnie Johnson, Bernie Worrell, Stanley “Buckwheat” Dural, Bobby Keys, Sarah Dash. And we had Babi Floyd singing with us on tour. Great singer, great voice, one of the best. Babi Floyd used to do “Pain in My Heart” on our tour and do the whole Otis bit, getting down on his knees. On the last night of the Winos tour, we shackled him by his ankle to the microphone stand, because we thought he was a little overdoing it. How do you shackle him without him knowing it? It’s done very carefully.
I’d never really written with anybody on a long-term basis except Mick, and I wasn’t really writing much with Mick anymore. We were writing our own songs. And I didn’t realize until I worked with Steve Jordan how much I’d missed that. And how important it was to collaborate. When the band was assembled in the studio, I often composed the songs there, just standing up and voweling, hollering, whatever it took, a process that was unfamiliar to Waddy at first.
Waddy Wachtel: It was very funny. Keith’s concept of writing was this. “Set up some mikes.” “Huh? OK.” He goes, “OK, let’s go sing it.” “Go sing what?” And he goes, “Go sing it!” “What are you talking about? Go sing what? We don’t have anything.” And he goes, “Yeah, right, let’s go make something up.” And this is it. This is the routine. So Steve and I are standing up there with him and every so often he’d go, “What the fuck… that feels good,” trying to come up with lines. Throw everything at the wall, see if it sticks. And that was basically the routine. It was amazing. And we got some lines out of it too.
I did start writing as well as singing songs differently. For one thing, I wasn’t writing for Mick—songs that he’d have to deliver on stage. But mostly I was learning to sing. First off I put the songs in a lower key, which allowed me to get my voice down from high-pitched songs like “Happy.” The melodies, too, were different from the Stones melodies. And I was learning to sing into the microphone rather than waving in and out while I played air guitar, which I used to do while I sang on stage. Don Smith rigged the mikes and compressors so that I heard it very loud in the headphones, which meant I couldn’t sing loud and scream, which used to be the way I’d do it. I got writing quieter songs, ballads, love songs. Songs from the heart.
Life Page 49
