Life

by Keith Richards; James Fox

  Sometimes I still visited Gus. By that time, because I’d been playing for two or three years, he said, “Come on, give me ‘Malagueña.’ ” I played it for him and he said, “You’ve got it.” And then I started to improvise, because it’s a guitar exercise. And he said, “That’s not how it goes!” And I said, “No, but Granddad, it’s how it could go.” “You’re getting the hang of it.”

  In fact, early on I was never really that interested in being a guitar player. It was just a means to an end to produce sound. As I went on I got more and more interested in the actual playing of guitar and the actual notes. I firmly believe if you want to be a guitar player, you better start on acoustic and then graduate to electric. Don’t think you’re going to be Townshend or Hendrix just because you can go wee wee wah wah, and all the electronic tricks of the trade. First you’ve got to know that fucker. And you go to bed with it. If there’s no babe around, you sleep with it. She’s just the right shape.

  I’ve learned everything I know off of records. Being able to replay something immediately without all that terrible stricture of written music, the prison of those bars, those five lines. Being able to hear recorded music freed up loads of musicians that couldn’t necessarily afford to learn to read or write music, like me. Before 1900, you’ve got Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, the cancan. With recording, it was emancipation for the people. As long as you or somebody around you could afford a machine, suddenly you could hear music made by people, not set-up rigs and symphony orchestras. You could actually listen to what people were saying, almost off the cuff. Some of it can be a load of rubbish, but some of it was really good. It was the emancipation of music. Otherwise you’d have had to go to a concert hall, and how many people could afford that? It surely can’t be any coincidence that jazz and blues started to take over the world the minute recording started, within a few years, just like that. The blues is universal, which is why it’s still around. Just the expression and the feel of it came in because of recording. It was like opening the audio curtains. And available, and cheap. It’s not just locked into one community here and one community there and the twain shall never meet. And of course that breeds another totally different kind of musician, in a generation. I don’t need this paper. I’m going to play it straight from the ear, straight from here, straight from the heart to the fingers. Nobody has to turn the pages.

  Everything was available in Sidcup—it reflected that incredible explosion of music, of music as style, of love of Americana. I would raid the public library for books about America. There were people who liked folk music, modern jazz, trad jazz, people who liked bluesy stuff, so you’re hearing prototype soul. All those influences were there. And there were the seminal sounds—the tablets of stone, heard for the first time. There was Muddy. There was Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightnin’,” Lightnin’ Hopkins. And there was a record called Rhythm & Blues Vol. 1. It had Buddy Guy on it doing “First Time I Met the Blues”; it had a Little Walter track. I didn’t know Chuck Berry was black for two years after I first heard his music, and this obviously long before I saw the film that drove a thousand musicians —Jazz on a Summer’s Day, in which he played “Sweet Little Sixteen.” And for ages I didn’t know Jerry Lee Lewis was white. You didn’t see their pictures if they had something in the top ten in America. The only faces I knew were Elvis, Buddy Holly and Fats Domino. It was hardly important. It was the sound that was important. And when I first heard “Heartbreak Hotel,” it wasn’t that I suddenly wanted to be Elvis Presley. I had no idea who he was at the time. It was just the sound, the use of a different way of recording. The recording, as I discovered, of that visionary Sam Phillips of Sun Records. The use of echo. No extraneous additions. You felt you were in the room with them, that you were just listening to exactly what went down in the studio, no frills, no nothing, no pastry. That was hugely influential for me.

  That Elvis LP had all the Sun stuff, with a couple of RCA jobs on it too. It was everything from “That’s All Right,” “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “Milk Cow Blues Boogie.” I mean, for a guitar player, or a budding guitar player, heaven. But on the other hand, what the hell’s going on there? I might not have wanted to be Elvis, but I wasn’t so sure about Scotty Moore. Scotty Moore was my icon. He was Elvis’s guitar player, on all the Sun Records stuff. He’s on “Mystery Train,” he’s on “Baby Let’s Play House.” Now I know the man, I’ve played with him. I know the band. But back then, just being able to get through “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone,” that was the epitome of guitar playing. And then “Mystery Train” and “Money Honey.” I’d have died and gone to heaven just to play like that. How the hell was that done? That’s the stuff I first brought to the john at Sidcup, playing a borrowed f-hole archtop Höfner. That was before the music led me back into the roots of Elvis and Buddy—back to the blues.

  To this day there’s a Scotty Moore lick I still can’t get down and he won’t tell me. Forty-nine years it’s eluded me. He claims he can’t remember the one I’m talking about. It’s not that he won’t show me; he says, “I don’t know which one you mean.” It’s on “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone.” I think it’s in E major. He has a rundown when it hits the 5 chord, the B down to the A down to the E, which is like a yodeling sort of thing, which I’ve never been quite able to figure. It’s also on “Baby Let’s Play House.” When you get to “But don’t you be nobody’s fool / Now baby, come back, baby…” and right at that last line, the lick is in there. It’s probably some simple trick. But it goes too fast, and also there’s a bunch of notes involved: which finger moves and which one doesn’t? I’ve never heard anybody else pull it off. Creedence Clearwater got a version of that song down, but when it comes to that move, no. And Scotty’s a sly dog. He’s very dry. “Hey, youngster, you’ve got time to figure it out.” Every time I see him, it’s “Learnt that lick yet?”

  The hippest guy at Sidcup Art College was Dave Chaston, a famous man of that time and place. Even Charlie Watts knew Dave, in some other jazz connection. He was the arbiter of hip, hip beyond bohemian, so cool he could run the record player. You’d get a 45 and play it and play it, again and again, almost like looping it. He had the first Ray Charles before anybody else—he’d even seen him play—and I first heard him during one of those lunchtime record breaks.

  Everybody then was going for looks. You can’t tell that yet from the photograph of the class of ’59, my induction year; things were only just beginning. The guys look conventionally dressed in V-neck pullovers, and the teenage girls are dressed to look like women of fifty, indistinguishable from the few women teachers. In fact, everyone, of both sexes, was wearing black sweaters far too long for them, except for Brian Boyle, who was the archetypal mod, who would be changing his clothes every week. We wondered where he got the money. The half belt’s back, the Prince of Wales check and the bouffant hair, and then he got a Lambretta with a little fucking furry squirrel tail on the end. Brian may have single-handedly started the mod movement, which was art college and south London in origin. He was one of the first to go to the Lyceum and to get the mod gear. He was in a frenzied fashion race at the time—the first to ditch the drape jacket and put on the short boxy one. He was definitely ahead on footwear, with pointy shoes instead of round ones, winkle pickers with Cuban heels—a big revolution. Rockers didn’t get to the points until later. He went to the shoemaker and got the points extended four inches, which made it very difficult to walk. It was intense, kind of desperate, this never-ending fashion flash, but funny to watch, and he was a funny bloke too.

  I couldn’t afford squirrel tails. I was lucky to have a pair of trousers. The opposite of that fashionista stuff was your rockers and your motorbike racers. Nobody could quite put their finger on me. Somehow I managed to have a foot in both camps without having to split my balls. I had my own uniform, winter or summer: Wrangler jacket, purple shirt and black drainpipes. I got a reputation for being impervious to the cold, because I didn’t vary my
wardrobe much. As for drugs, it was before my time, except for the occasional use of Doris’s period pills. The thing people had started taking was ephedrine, which was horrible, so that didn’t last long. And then there were nasal inhalers, which were full of Dexedrine and smelled of lavender. You took the top off it and rolled up the cotton wool stuff and made little pills. Dexedrine for colds!

  *

  The figure I’m standing next to in the school picture is Michael Ross. I can no longer listen to certain records without Michael Ross coming to mind. My first public performance was with Michael; we did a couple of school gigs together. He was a special guy, extrovert, talented, up for all risk and adventure. He was a really gifted illustrator, taught me many tricks of how to work pen and ink. And he was into music big-time. Michael and I liked the same kind of music, something that was available for us to play. That’s why we gravitated to country music and blues, because we could play it with just ourselves. One’s enough, so much better with two. He introduced me to Sanford Clark, a heavy-duty country singer, very like Johnny Cash, came out of the cotton fields and the air force with a US hit called “The Fool.” We played his “Son of a Gun,” partly because it was the only thing the instruments would bear, but a great song. We did a school party, somewhere round Bexley, in the gymnasium, sang a lot of country stuff as best as we could at the time, with only two guitars and nothing else. What I remember most about our first gig was that we pulled a couple of birds and spent the whole night in a park somewhere, in one of those shelters with a bench and a little roof over it. We didn’t really do anything. I touched her breast or something. We were just snogging all night, all those tongues going like eels. And then we just slept there till morning, and I thought, “My first gig and I end up with a chick. Shit! Maybe I’ve got a future here.”

  Ross and I played more. It drifted on without any sort of concentrated thought, but you go back again next weekend and there’s a bigger crowd.… And there’s nothing like an audience doing that to encourage you. I guess somewhere in there was the glimmer.

  I had spent my entire school life expecting to do National Service. It was in my brain—I was going to art school and then into the army. And suddenly, just before my seventeenth birthday, in November 1960, it was announced that it was over, ended forever. (The Rolling Stones would soon be cited as the single reason why it should be brought back.) But that innocent day I remember, at art school, you could almost hear a massive exhale, a huge sense of relief that went through the school. There was no more work that day. I remember all of us guys at that age looking at one another, realizing we’re not being sent to a drafty destroyer somewhere, or marching about at Aldershot. Bill Wyman did National Service, in the RAF in Germany, and he quite enjoyed it. But he’s older than I am.

  At the same time it was “Motherfuckers!” We’d spent all of these years with that cloud over us. Some guys round school would start to deliberately develop a twitch, working their way up to a dangerous personality disorder, so they could be let off. It was a whole built-in system, everyone comparing notes about how you could get out of it. “I’ve got corns, I can’t march.”

  It changes guys. I saw my older cousins, older friends who’d been through it. They’d come out different men, basically. Left right left right. That drill. It’s brainwashing. You can do it in your goddamn sleep. Sometimes these guys did. Their whole mind changed, and their sense of who they were, what level they inhabited. “I’ve been put in my place and I know where it is.” “You’re a corporal and don’t think you’re gonna get any higher in life.” I was very aware of it with guys I knew that had done it. A lot of steam seemed to have been taken out of them. They took two years off in the National Service and came back and they’re still schoolboys, but by then they’re twenty.

  Suddenly you felt like you had two free years, but it was a complete illusion, of course. You didn’t know what to do with it. Even your parents didn’t know what to do with those years, because they were expecting you to disappear at eighteen. It all happened so fast. My life had been plodding along nicely until I found out there was no National Service. There was no way I was going to get out of this goddamn morass, the council estate, the very small horizons. Of course if I’d done it, I’d probably be a general by now. There’s no way to stop a primate. If I’m in, I’m in. When they got me in the scouts, I was a patrol leader in three months. I clearly like to run guys about. Give me a platoon, I’ll do a good job. Give me a company, I’ll do even better. Give me a division, and I’ll do wonders. I like to motivate guys, and that’s what came in handy with the Stones. I’m really good at pulling a bunch of guys together. If I can pull a bunch of useless Rastas into a viable band and also the Winos, a decidedly unruly band of men, I’ve got something there. It’s not a matter of cracking the whip, it’s a matter of just sticking around, doing it, so they know you’re in there, leading from the front and not from behind.

  And to me, it’s not a matter of who’s number one, it’s what works.

  Not long before this book went to press, a letter of mine came to light, which had been in the possession of my aunt Patty for almost fifty years and had never been seen outside my family. She was still alive when she gave it to me, in 2009. In it I describe, among other things, the moment I met Mick Jagger on the train station at Dartford in 1961. The letter was written in April 1962, only four months later, when we were already hanging out and trying to learn how to do it.

  6 Spielman Rd

  Dartford

  Kent

  Dear Pat,

  So sorry not to have written before (I plead insane) in bluebottle voice. Exit right amid deafening applause.

  I do hope you’re very well.

  We have survived yet another glorious English Winter. I wonder which day Summer falls on this year?

  Oh but my dear I have been soooo busy since Christmas beside working at school. You know I was keen on Chuck Berry and I thought I was the only fan for miles but one mornin’ on Dartford Stn. (that’s so I don’t have to write a long word like station) I was holding one of Chuck’s records when a guy I knew at primary school 7–11 yrs y’know came up to me. He’s got every record Chuck Berry ever made and all his mates have too, they are all rhythm and blues fans, real R&B I mean (not this Dinah Shore, Brook Benton crap) Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Chuck, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker all the Chicago bluesmen real lowdown stuff, marvelous. Bo Diddley he’s another great.

  Anyways the guy on the station, he is called Mick Jagger and all the chicks and the boys meet every Saturday morning in the ‘Carousel’ some juke-joint well one morning in Jan I was walking past and decided to look him up. Everybody’s all over me I get invited to about 10 parties. Beside that Mick is the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic and I don’t mean maybe. I play guitar (electric) Chuck style we got us a bass player and drummer and rhythm-guitar and we practice 2 or 3 nights a week. SWINGIN.’

  Of course they’re all rolling in money and in massive detached houses, crazy, one’s even got a butler. I went round there with Mick (in the car of course Mick’s not mine of course) OH BOY ENGLISH IS IMPOSSIBLE.

  “Can I get you anything, sir?”

  “Vodka and lime, please”

  “Certainly, sir”

  I really felt like a lord, nearly asked for my coronet when I left.

  Everything here is just fine.

  I just can’t lay off Chuck Berry though, I recently got an LP of his straight from Chess Records Chicago cost me less than an English record.

  Of course we’ve still got the old Lags here y’know Cliff Richard, Adam Faith and 2 new shockers Shane Fenton and John Leyton SUCH CRAP YOU HAVE NEVER HEARD. Except for that greaseball Sinatra ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

  Still I don’t get bored anymore. This Saturday I am going to an all night party.

  “I looked at my watch

  It was four-o-five

  Man I didn’t know

  If I was dead or alive�
�

  Quote Chuck Berry

  Reeling and a Rocking

  12 galls of Beer Barrel of Cyder, 3 bottle Whiskey Wine. Her ma and pa gone away for the weekend I’ll twist myself till I drop (I’m glad to say).

  The Saturday after Mick and I are taking 2 girls over to our favourite Rhythm & Blues club over in Ealing, Middlesex.

  They got a guy on electric harmonica Cyril Davies fabulous always half drunk unshaven plays like a mad man, marvelous.

  Well then I can’t think of anything else to bore you with, so I’ll sign off goodnight viewers

  BIG GRIN

  Luff

  Keith xxxxx

  Who else would write such bloody crap

  Did we hit it off? You get in a carriage with a guy that’s got Rockin’ at the Hops by Chuck Berry on Chess Records, and The Best of Muddy Waters also under his arm, you are gonna hit it off. He’s got Henry Morgan’s treasure. It’s the real shit. I had no idea how to get hold of that. I realize now I’d met him once before outside Dartford Town Hall when he was selling ice creams for a summer job. He must have been about fifteen, just before he left school, about three years before we actually started the Stones, because he just happened to mention that he occasionally did a dance around there doing Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran stuff. It just clicked in my mind that day. I bought a choc ice. I don’t know, it might have been a cornet. I plead the statute of limitations. And then I didn’t see him again until the fateful day on the train.

  And he was carrying this stuff. “Where the hell did you get this?” It was, always, all about records. From when I was eleven or twelve years old, it was who had the records who you hung with. They were precious things. I was lucky to get two or three singles every six months or something. And he said, “Well, I got this address.” He was already writing off to Chicago, and funnily enough to Marshall Chess, who had a summer job with his dad in the mail room there, and who later became the president of Rolling Stones Records. It was a mail-order thing, like Sears, Roebuck. He’d seen this catalogue, which I had never seen. And we just started talking. He was still singing in a little band, doing Buddy Holly stuff, apparently. I’d never heard about any of that. I said, “Well, I play a little.” I said, “Come on round, play some other stuff.” I almost forgot to get off at Sidcup because I was still copying down the matrix numbers of the Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records he happened to have with him. Rockin’ at the Hops: Chess Records CHD-9259.