Life

by Keith Richards; James Fox

  But I had other preoccupations. One of the best things that happened to me at that time, believe it or not, was joining the Boy Scouts. Its leader, Baden-Powell, a genuinely nice man who was well tuned in to what small boys liked doing, did believe that without the scouts the empire would collapse. This is where I came in, as a member of the Seventh Dartford Scouts, Beaver Patrol, although the empire was showing signs of collapsing anyway for reasons that had nothing to do with character and tying knots. I think my foray into scouting must have happened just before the guitar really set in—or maybe before I owned one —because when I really started playing the guitar, that was my other world.

  Scouting was a separate thing from music. I wanted to know how to survive, and I’d read all of Baden-Powell’s books. And now I’ve got to learn all these tricks. I want to know how to find out where I am; I want to know how to cook something underground. For some reason I needed survival skills and I thought it was important to learn. I already had a tent in the back garden, where I would sit for hours, eating raw potatoes and such. How to pluck a fowl. How to gut things. What bits to leave in and what bits to leave off. And whether to keep the skin or not. Is it any use? Nice pair of gloves? It was kind of miniature SAS training. It was mainly a chance to swagger around with a knife on your belt. That was the attraction for a lot of us. You didn’t get the knife until you got a few badges.

  Beaver Patrol had its own shed—one of the other dads’ unused garden shed, which we took over and where we had planning meetings about what the patrol was going to do. You’re good at that, you’re good at that. We’d sit around and talk and have a smoke, and we went on field trips to Bexleyheath or Sevenoaks. Scout Leader Bass was the scoutmaster, who seemed ancient at the time but was probably only about twenty. He was a very encouraging guy. He’d say, “All right, tonight is knotting. The sheepshank, the bowline, the running bowline.” I had to practice at home. How to start a fire without matches. How to make an oven, how to make a fire without smoke. I’d practice in the garden all week. Rubbing two sticks together—forget about it. Not in that climate. It might work in Africa or some other un-humid area. So it was basically the magnifying glass and dry twigs. Then suddenly, after only three or four months, I’ve got four or five badges and I’m promoted to patrol leader. I had badges all over the place, unbelievable! I don’t know where my scout shirt is now, but it’s adorned, stripes and strings and badges all over the place. Looked like I was into bondage.

  All that boosted my confidence at a crucial moment, after my ejection from the choir, especially the fact that I was promoted so fast. I think it was more important, that whole scouting period, than I’ve ever realized. I had a good team. I knew my guys and we were pretty solid. Discipline was a little lax, I must admit, but when it came to “This is the task for today,” we did it. There was the big summer camp at Crowborough. We’d just won the bridge-building competition. That night we drank whiskey and had a fight in the bell tent. It’s pitch-black, there’s no light, everybody’s just swinging, breaking things, especially themselves—first bone I ever broke was hitting the tent pole in the middle of the night.

  The only time I pulled rank was when my scouting career came to an end. I had a new recruit, and he was such a prick, he couldn’t get along with anybody. And it was like “I’ve got an elite patrol here and I’ve got to take this bum in? I’m not here to wipe snot. Why’d you dump him on me?” He did something, and I just gave him a whack. Bang, you cunt. Next thing I know I’m up before the disciplinary board. On the carpet. “Officers do not slap” and all that bullshit.

  I was in my hotel room in Saint Petersburg, on tour with the Stones, when I found myself watching the ceremony commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Boy Scouts. It was at Brownsea Island, where Baden-Powell started his first camp. All alone in my room, I stood up, made the three-fingered salute and said, “Patrol leader, Beaver Patrol, Seventh Dartford Scouts, sir.” I felt I had to report.

  I had summer jobs to while away the time, usually working behind the counter in various stores, or loading sugar. I don’t recommend that. In the back of a supermarket. It comes in great big bags, and sugar cuts you up like a motherfucker and it’s sticky. You do a day’s loading of sugar and you’re humping it on your shoulder and you’re bleeding. And then you package it. It should have been enough to put me off the stuff, but it never did. Before sugar, I did butter. Today you go in the shop and look at that nice little square, but the butter used to come in huge blocks. We used to chop it up and wrap it up there in the back of the shop. You were taught how to do the double fold, and the correct weight, and to put it on the shelf and go, “Doesn’t it look nice?” Meanwhile there are rats running around the back, and all kinds of shit.

  I had another job around that time, early teens. I did the bakery, the bread round at weekends, which was really an eye-opener at that age, thirteen, fourteen. We collected the money. There were two guys and a little electric car, and on Saturday and Sunday it’s me with them trying to screw the money out. And I realized I was there as an extra, a lookout, while they say, “Mrs. X… it’s been two weeks now.” Sometimes I’d sit in the truck, freezing cold and waiting, and then after twenty minutes the baker would come out red faced and doing his flies up. I started slowly to realize how things were paid for. And then there were certain old ladies who were obviously so bored, the highlight of their week was being visited by the bread men. And they’d serve the cakes they’d bought from us, have a nice cup of tea, sit around and chat, and you realize you’ve been there a bloody hour and it’s going to be dark before you finish the round. In the winter I looked forward to them, because it was kind of like Arsenic and Old Lace, these old ladies living in a totally different world.

  While I was practicing my knots I wasn’t noticing—in fact I didn’t piece it together until years later—some swift moves Doris was making. Around 1957, Doris took up with Bill, now Richards, my stepfather. He married Doris in 1998, after living with her since 1963. He was in his twenties and she was in her forties. I just remember that Bill was always there. He was a taxi driver, and he was always driving us about, always willing to take on anything that involved driving. He even drove us on holiday, me, Mum and Dad. I was too young to know what the relationship was. Bill to me was just like Uncle Bill. I didn’t know what Bert thought and I still don’t know. I thought Bill was Bert’s friend, a friend of the family.

  He just turned up and he had a car. That’s partly what did it for Doris, back in 1957. Bill had first met her and me in 1947, when he lived opposite us in Chastilian Road, working in the Co-op. Then he joined a firm of taxi drivers and didn’t reappear until Doris came out of Dartford station one day and saw him. Or, as Doris told it, “I only knew him from living opposite him, and he was at the cab one day, and I came off the station and I went, ‘Hello.’ And he came running after me and said, ‘I’ll take you home.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t mind,’ because I would have had to wait for a bus otherwise, and he took me home. And then it started and I can’t believe it. I was so brazen.”

  Bill and Doris had to get up to some deception, and I feel for Bert if he knew. One of their opportunities was Bert’s passion for tennis. It left Doris and Bill free to have a date out together. Then, according to Bill, they’d somehow get in a position to see Bert leaving the tennis club on his bike and race back in Bill’s taxi to get Doris home before him. Doris reminisced, “When Keith started with the Stones, Bill used to take him here and everywhere. If it wasn’t for Bill, he couldn’t have gone anywhere. Because Keith used to say, ‘Mick says I’ve got to get to so-and-so.’ And I’d say, ‘How are you going to get there, then?’ And Bill would say, ‘I’ll take him.’ ” That’s Bill’s so far unheralded role in the birth of the Rolling Stones.

  Still, my dad was my dad, and I was scared shitless of facing him come the day I got expelled, which is why it had to be a long-term campaign—it couldn’t be done in one swift blow. I would just slowly have to build up
the bad marks until they realized that the moment had come. I was scared not from any physical threat, just of his disapproval, because he’d send you to Coventry. And suddenly you’re on your own. Not talking to me or even recognizing I was around was his form of discipline. There was nothing to follow it up; he wasn’t going to whip my arse or anything like that; it never came into the equation. The thought of upsetting my dad still makes me cry now. Not living up to his expectations would devastate me.

  Once you’d been shunned like that you didn’t want it to happen again. You felt like you were nothing, you didn’t exist. He’d say, “Well, we ain’t going up the heath tomorrow”—on the weekend we used to go up there and kick a football about. When I found out how Bert’s dad treated him, I thought I was very lucky, because Bert never used physical punishment on me at all. He was not one to express his emotions. Which I’m thankful for in a way. Some of the times I pissed him off, if he had been that kind of guy, I’d have been getting beatings, like most of the other kids around me at that time. My mum was the only one that laid a hand on me now and again, round the back of the legs, and I deserved it. But I never lived in fear of corporal punishment. It was psychological. Even after a twenty-year gap, when I hadn’t seen Bert for all that time and when I was preparing for our historic reunion, I was still scared of that. He had a lot to disapprove of in the intervening twenty years. But that’s a later story.

  The final action that got me expelled was when Terry and I decided not to go to assembly on the last day of the school year. We’d been to so many and we wanted to have a smoke, so we just didn’t go. And that I believe was the actual final nail in the coffin of getting me expelled. At which of course my dad nearly blew up. But by then, I think he’d written me off as any use to society. Because by then I was playing guitar, and Bert wasn’t artistically minded and the only thing I’m good at is music and art.

  The person I have to thank at this point—who saved me from the dung heap, from serial relegation—is the fabulous art instructor Mrs. Mountjoy. She put in a good word for me to the headmaster. They were going to dump me onto the labor exchange, and the headmaster asked, “What’s he good at?” “Well, he can draw.” And so I went to Sidcup Art College, class of 1959—the musical intake.

  Bert didn’t take it well. “Get a solid job.” “What, like making lightbulbs, Dad?” And I started to get sarcastic with him. I wish I hadn’t. “Making valves and lightbulbs?”

  By then I had big ideas, even though I had no idea how to put them into operation. That required meeting a few other people later on. I just felt that I was smart enough, one way or another, to wriggle out of this social net and playing the game. My parents were brought up in the Depression, when if you got something, you just kept it and you held it and that was it. Bert was the most unambitious man in the world. Meanwhile, I was a kid and I didn’t even know what ambition meant. I just felt the constraints. The society and everything I was growing up in was just too small for me. Maybe it was just teenage testosterone and angst, but I knew I had to look for a way out.

  Chapter Three

  In which I go to art college, which is my guitar school. I play in public for the first time and end up with a chick that same night. I meet Mick at Dartford Railway Station with his Chuck Berry records. We start playing—Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. We meet Brian Jones at the Ealing Club. I get Ian Stewart’s approval at the Bricklayers Arms, and the Stones form around him. We want Charlie Watts to join but can’t afford him.

  I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t been expelled from Dartford and sent to art college. There was a lot more music than art going on at Sidcup, or any of the other art colleges in south London that were turning out suburban beatniks—which is what I was learning to be. In fact there was almost no “art” to be had at Sidcup Art College. After a while you got the drift of what you were being trained for, and it wasn’t Leonardo da Vinci. Loads of flash little sons of bitches would come down in their bow ties from J. Walter Thompson or one of the other big advertisers for one day a week to take the piss out of the art school students and try and pick up the chicks. They’d lord it over us and you got taught how to advertise.

  There was a great feeling of freedom when I first went to Sidcup. “You mean you can actually smoke?” You’re with lots of different artists, even if they’re not really artists. Different attitudes, which was really important to me. Some are eccentrics, some are wannabes, but they’re an interesting bunch of people, and a very different breed, thank God, to what I was used to. We’d all got there out of boys’ schools and suddenly we’re in classes with chicks. Everybody’s hair was getting long, mainly because you could, you were that age and for some reason it felt good. And you could finally dress any way you wanted; everybody had come from uniforms. You actually looked forward to getting on the train to Sidcup in the morning. You actually looked forward to it. At Sidcup I was “Ricky.”

  I realize now that we were getting some dilapidated tail end of a noble art-teaching tradition from the prewar period—etching, stone lithographs, classes on the spectrum of light—all thrown away on advertising Gilbey’s gin. Very interesting, and since I liked drawing anyway, it was great. I was learning a few things. You didn’t realize you were actually being processed into some sort of so-called graphic designer, probably Letraset setter, but that came later. The art tradition staggered on under the guidance of burnt-out idealists like the life classes teacher, Mr. Stone, who had been trained at the Royal Academy. Every lunchtime he’d down several pints of Guinness at the Black Horse and come to class very late and very pissed, wearing sandals with no socks, winter and summer. Life class was often hilariously funny. Some lovely old fat Sidcup lady with her clothes off—oooh way hay tits!—and the air heavy with Guinness breath and a swaying teacher hanging on to your stool. In homage to high art and the avant-garde that the faculty aspired to, one of the school photographs designed by the principal had us arranged like figures in a geometric garden from the big scene in Last Year at Marienbad, the Alain Resnais film—the height of existentialist cool and pretentiousness.

  It was a pretty lax routine. You did your classes, finished your projects and went to the john, where there was this little hangout-cloakroom, where we sat around and played guitar. That was what really gave me the impetus to play, and at that age you pick up stuff at speed. There were loads of people playing guitar there. The art colleges produced some notable pickers in that period when rock and roll, UK-style, was getting under way. It was a kind of guitar workshop, basically all folk music, Jack Elliott stuff. Nobody noticed if you weren’t at the college, so the local musical fraternity used it as a meeting place. Wizz Jones used to drop in, with a Jesus haircut and a beard. Great folk picker, great guitar picker, who’s still playing—I see ads for his gigs and he looks similar, though the beard’s gone. We barely met, but Wizz Jones to me then was like… Wizzzz. I mean, this guy played in clubs, he was on the folk circuit. He got paid! He played pro and we were just playing in the toilet. I think I learned “Cocaine” from him—the song and that crucial fingerpicking lick of the period, not the dope. Nobody, but nobody played that South Carolina style. He got “Cocaine” from Jack Elliott, but a long time before anyone else, and Jack Elliott had got it from the Reverend Gary Davis in Harlem. Wizz Jones was a watched man, watched by Clapton and Jimmy Page at the time too, so they say.

  I was known in the john for my rendition of “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone.” They sometimes got at me because I still liked Elvis at the time, and Buddy Holly, and they didn’t understand how I could possibly be an art student and be into blues and jazz and have anything to do with that. There was this certain “Don’t go there” with rock and roll, glossy photographs and silly suits. But it was just music to me. It was very hierarchical. It was mods and rockers time. There were clear-drawn lines between the “beats,” who were addicted to the English version of Dixieland jazz (known as traditional), and those into R&B. I did cr
oss the line for Linda Poitier, an outstanding beauty who wore a long black sweater, black stockings and heavy eyeliner à la Juliette Gréco. I put up with a lot of Acker Bilk—the trad jazzers’ pinup—just to watch her dance. There was another Linda, specs, skinny but beauty in the eyes, who I clumsily courted. A sweet kiss. Strange. Sometimes a kiss is burned into you far more than whatever comes later. Celia I met at a Ken Colyer Club all-nighter. She was from Isleworth. We hung all night, we did nothing, but for that brief moment it was love. Pure and simple. She lived in a detached house, outta my league.