Life

by Keith Richards; James Fox

  We’d sit around working out the music in the Wetherby Arms, in the King’s Road, Chelsea. Usually I’d go round the back and steal their empties and then sell them back to them. You got a couple of pence on a beer bottle. Which in those times was not a lot of money. We stole empties at the parties we went to as well. Get one of us in first, and then the rest would come in in gang formation.

  Edith Grove was a funny household. Three chicks underneath on the ground floor, student teachers from Sheffield; two poofters from Buxton above us. We had the middle floor. What the hell are we doing in Chelsea living between these northerners? It was a real slice of “Welcome to London,” since nobody came from there.

  The student teachers from Sheffield are probably headmistresses now. But at the time they were a randy bunch. Which we had very little time for. We were in and out like Flynn. Mick and Brian were down there, but I never got involved with them. I didn’t fancy ’em. But I found they came in handy. They would do a bit of laundry for you. Or my mum would send the washing via Bill from her washing-machine demonstrations. The two incipient poofters hung out in the pubs in Earls Court with the Australian poofters, of which there were many at that time. Earls Court was Australia, basically. And a lot of them were wang-danglers because they could be more poofter in London than they could in Melbourne or Sydney or Brisbane. The guys above us would be talking with an Australian accent when they came back from these Earls Court outings. They’re going, “Hello, cobber!” “I thought you were from Buxton.”

  Our flatmate was called James Phelge, the origin of half of the early pen name for our songwriting, Nanker Phelge. A “nanker” is a look—the face stretched to terrible contortions by the fingers inserted into all available orifices—a great Brian speciality. We advertised for a flatmate over the mike at the Ealing Club, someone to share the rent. Phelge must have sensed what he was getting into. He turned out to be perhaps the only person on the planet who could have lived in that terrible place with us—and even outflank us in gross and unacceptable behavior. He was in any case apparently the only one willing to live with this bunch pounding through the night, learning their crap, trying to find a gig. We were just idiotic together. We were still teenagers at the time, although at the top end of the scale. We dared each other: who could be more disgusting than anybody else. You think you can disgust me? I’ll show you. We’d get back from a gig and Phelge would be standing at the top of the stairs saying “Welcome home,” stark naked with his shitty underpants on his head, or pissing on you or flobbing at you. Phelge was a serious flobber. Mucus from every area he could summon up. He loved to walk into a room with a huge snot hanging out of his nose and dribbling down his chin, but otherwise be perfectly charming. “Hello, how are you? And this is Andrea, and this is Jennifer…” We had names for all different kinds of flob: Green Gilberts, Scarlet Jenkins. There was the Gabardine Helmsman, which is the one that people aren’t aware of; they snot it and it hangs on their lapel like a medal. That was the winner. Yellow Humphrey was another. The Flying V was the one that missed the handkerchief. People were always having colds in those days; things were always running out of their noses and they didn’t know what to do with them. And it can’t have been cocaine; it was a little too early. I think it was just bad English winters.

  Because we had nothing much to do, we had very few gigs, we ended up studying people. And we’d always be nicking things from the other flats. Go down and rifle the girls’ drawers while they were out, find a shilling or two. The bog was rigged up for recording. We’d just switch on if somebody went in there, especially if one of the chicks downstairs said, “Can I use your john?” because theirs was occupied. “Yes, sure.” “Quick! Turn it on.” And then, after every “performance,” when the chain was pulled it sounded like incredible applause. We’d play it back later. After every visit there it sounded like Sunday night at the London Palladium.

  The worst horror, certainly for any visitors to Edith Grove, was the pile of unwashed dishes in the “kitchen,” the substances growing out of the crockery, the greasy, cold pans piled in junked pyramids of foulness that no one could bear to touch. Yet it is true that one day we looked at this mess, Phelge and I, and thought that there was perhaps nothing else to do than to clean it. Given that Phelge was one of the filthiest people in the world, that was some historic decision. But that day we were overwhelmed by the amount of rubbish and so we went downstairs and stole a bottle of washing-up liquid.

  At the time, the poverty seemed constant, unmovable. To go through that winter of ’62 was rough. It was a cold winter. But then Brian had this fantastic idea of bringing up his friend Dick, who had his Territorial Army bonus, and Brian was merciless towards Dick. We didn’t mind because we were getting the fallout. This is when nobody’s got two pennies to rub to-fucking-gether. Dick Hattrell was his name, and he was from Tewkesbury. And Brian almost killed the man. He would force him to walk behind him and pay for everything. Cruel, cruel, cruel. He would make him stand outside while we ate and he paid. Even Mick and I were shocked, and we were pretty cold-blooded. Sometimes he’d let him in for dessert. There was a streak of real cruelty in Brian. Dick Hattrel was Brian’s old school friend and he was panting like a little puppy after Brian. Once Brian left the poor sod outside with no clothes on, and it’s snowing and he’s begging and Brian’s laughing, and I’m not going to go to the window, I’m laughing too much. How could a guy let himself get into that position? Brian stole all his clothes and then sent him outside in his underpants. In a snowstorm. “What do you mean I owe you twenty-three pounds? Fuck off.” He’s just paid for us all evening; we’ve been feasting like kings. Terrible really, terrible. I said, “Brian, that’s just cold-blooded, man.” Brian, a cold-blooded, vicious motherfucker. Only short and blond with it. I wonder what happened to Hattrell. If he survived that, he could survive anything.

  We were cynical, sarcastic and rude where necessary. We used to go to the local caff, which we called the “Ernie” because everyone in there was named Ernie, or so it seemed. “Ernie” became everybody else. “What a fucking Ernie, Christ.” Anybody that insisted on doing his job without doing you a favor was a fuckin’ Ernie. Ernie was the working man. Only got one thing on his mind, making another extra shilling.

  If I’d had the choice of finding a diary of any three-month period of the Stones’ history, it would have been this one, the moment the band was hatching. And I did find one, covering January to March of 1963. The real surprise was that I kept any record of this period. It covers the crucial span when Bill Wyman arrived, or, more important, his Vox amplifier appeared and Bill came with it, and when we were trying to snare, to coin a phrase, Charlie Watts. I even kept accounts of the money we earned at gigs, the pounds, shillings and pence. Often it just said “0” when we played for beer at tiny end-of-term school dances. But entries also show January 21, Ealing Club: 0; January 22, Flamingo: 0; February 1, Red Lion: £1 10s. At least we’d got a gig. As long as you’ve got a gig, life is wonderful. Somebody called us up and booked us! I mean, wow. We must be doing something right. Otherwise shoplifting, picking up beer bottles and hunger was the order of the day. We used to pool our money for guitar strings, mending amplifiers and valves. Just to keep what we had going was an incredible expense.

  Inside the cover of the pocket diary are the heavily inked words “Chuck,” “Reed,” “Diddley.” There you have it. That was all we listened to at the time. Just American blues or rhythm and blues or country blues. Every waking hour of every day was just sitting in front of the speakers, trying to figure out how these blues were made. You collapsed on the floor with a guitar in your hands. That was it. You never stop learning an instrument, but at that time it was still very much searching about. You had to make sounds if you wanted to play a guitar. We went for a Chicago blues sound, as close as we could get it—two guitars, bass and drums and a piano—and sat around and listened to every Chess record ever made. Chicago blues hit us right between the eyes. We’d all gr
own up with everything else that everybody had grown up with, rock and roll, but we focused on that. And as long as we were all together, we could pretend to be black men. We soaked up the music, but it didn’t change the color of our skin. Some even went whiter. Brian Jones was a blond Elmore James from Cheltenham. And why not? You can come from anywhere and be any color. We found that out later. Cheltenham, admittedly, is a bit far-fetched. Blues players from Cheltenham, there ain’t a lot. And we didn’t want to make money. We despised money, we despised cleanliness, we just wanted to be black motherfuckers. Fortunately we got plucked out of that. But that was the school; that’s where the band was born.

  The early days of the magic art of guitar weaving started then. You realize what you can do playing guitar with another guy, and what the two of you can do is to the power of ten, and then you add other people. There’s something beautifully friendly and elevating about a bunch of guys playing music together. This wonderful little world that is unassailable. It’s really teamwork, one guy supporting the others, and it’s all for one purpose, and there’s no flies in the ointment, for a while. And nobody conducting, it’s all up to you. It’s really jazz—that’s the big secret. Rock and roll ain’t nothing but jazz with a hard backbeat.

  Jimmy Reed was a very big model for us. That was always two-guitar stuff. Almost a study in monotony in many ways, unless you got in there. But then Jimmy Reed had something like twenty hits in the charts with basically the same song. He had two tempos. But he understood the magic of repetition, of monotony, transforming itself to become this sort of hypnotic, trancelike thing. We were fascinated by it, Brian and I. We would spend every spare moment trying to get down Jimmy Reed’s guitar sounds.

  Jimmy Reed was always pissed out of his brain. There was one famous time, he was already like an hour and forty-five minutes late for a show, finally they get him onto the stage and he goes, “This one’s called ‘Baby What You Want Me to Do?’ ” And he threw up over the whole first two rows. Probably happened many times. He always had his wife with him, whispering the lyrics in his ear. You can even hear it on the records sometimes: “Going up… going down,” but it worked. He was a solid favorite to the black folks in the South, and occasionally in the whole world. It was a fascinating study in restraint.

  Minimalism has a certain charm. You say, that’s a bit monotonous, but by the time it’s finished, you’re wishing it hadn’t. There’s nothing bad about monotony; everyone’s got to live with it. Great titles—“Take Out Some Insurance.” This is not your everyday song title. And it would always come down to him and his old lady having a fight or something. “Bright Lights, Big City,” “Baby What You Want Me to Do?” “String to Your Heart,” wicked songs. One of Jimmy’s lines was “Don’t pull no subway, I rather see you pull a train.” Which actually means don’t go on the dope, don’t go underground, I’d rather see you either drunk or on cocaine. Took me years and years to decipher this.

  And I was heavily into Muddy Waters’s guitarist Jimmy Rogers, and the guys that played behind Little Walter, the Myers brothers. Talk about an ancient form of weaving, they were the masters. Half of the band was the Muddy Waters band, which included Little Walter as well. But while he was making these records, he had another little team, Louis Myers and his brother David, founders of the Aces. Two great guitar players. Pat Hare used to play with Muddy Waters and also did a few tracks with Chuck Berry. One of his unreleased numbers was called “I’m Gonna Murder My Baby,” dug up from the Sun vaults after he did just that, and then killed the policeman sent to investigate. He went in for life in the early ’60s and died in a Minnesota jail. There was Matt Murphy and Hubert Sumlin. They were all Chicago blues players, some more solo than others. But as teams, if we keep it down to that, the Myers brothers definitely go way up to the top of the list. Jimmy Rogers with Muddy Waters, an amazing pair of weavers. Chuck Berry is fantastic, but he would weave by himself, with himself. He did great overdubs with his own guitar because he was too cheap to hire another guy most of the time. But that’s just on records; you can’t re-create that live. But his “Memphis, Tennessee” is probably one of the most incredible little bits of overdubbing and tinkering that I’ve ever heard. Let alone a sweet song. I could never overstress how important he was in my development. It still fascinates me how this one guy could come up with so many songs and sling it so gracefully and elegantly.

  So we sat there in the cold, dissecting tracks for as long as the meter held out. A new Bo Diddley record goes under the surgical knife. Have you got that wah-wah? What were the drums playing, how hard were they playing… what were the maracas doing? You had to take it all apart and put it back together again, from your point of view. We need a reverb. Now we’re really in the shit. We need an amplifier. Bo Diddley was high tech. Jimmy Reed was easier. He was straightforward. But to dissect how he played, Jesus. It took me years to find out how he actually played the 5 chord, in the key of E—the B chord, the last of the three chords before you go home, the resolver in a twelve-bar blues—the dominant chord, as it’s called. When he gets to it, Jimmy Reed produces a haunting refrain, a melancholy dissonance. Even for non–guitar players, it’s worth trying to describe what he does. At the 5 chord, instead of making the conventional barre chord, the B7th, which requires a little effort with the left hand, he wouldn’t bother with the B at all. He’d leave the open A note ringing and just slide a finger up the D string to a 7th. And there’s the haunting note, resonating against the open A. So you’re not using root notes, but letting it fall against a 7th. Believe me, it’s (a) the laziest, sloppiest single thing you can do in that situation, and (b) one of the most brilliant musical inventions of all time. But that is how Jimmy Reed managed to play the same song for thirty years and get away with it. I learned how to do it from a white boy, Bobby Goldsboro, who had a couple of hits in the ’60s. He used to work with Jimmy Reed and he said he’d show me the tricks. I knew all the other moves, but I never knew that 5 chord move until he showed it to me, on a bus somewhere in Ohio, in the mid-’60s. He said, “I spent years on the road with Jimmy Reed. He does that 5 chord like this.” “Shit! That’s all it is?” “That’s it, motherfucker. You live and learn.” Suddenly, out of a bright sky, you get it! That haunting, droning note. Absolute disregard for any musical rules whatsoever. Also absolute disregard for the audience or anybody else. “It goes like this.” In a way, we admired Jimmy more for that than his playing. It was the attitude. And also very haunting songs. They might be based on a seemingly simplistic bedrock, but you try “Little Rain.”

  One of the first lessons I learned with guitar playing was that none of these guys were actually playing straight chords. There’s a throw-in, a flick-back. Nothing’s ever a straight major. It’s an amalgamation, a mangling and a dangling and a tangling thing. There is no “properly.” There’s just how you feel about it. Feel your way around it. It’s a dirty world down here. Mostly I’ve found, playing instruments, that I actually want to be playing something that should be played by another instrument. I find myself trying to play horn lines all the time on the guitar. When I was learning how to do these songs, I learned there is often one note doing something that makes the whole thing work. It’s usually a suspended chord. It’s not a full chord, it’s a mixture of chords, which I love to use to this day. If you’re playing a straight chord, whatever comes next should have something else in it. If it’s an A chord, a hint of D. Or if it’s a song with a different feeling, if it’s an A chord, a hint of G should come in somewhere, which makes a 7th, which then can lead you on. Readers who wish to can skip Keef’s Guitar Workshop, but I’m passing on the simple secrets anyway, which led to the open chord riffs of later years—the “Jack Flash” and “Gimme Shelter” ones.

  There are some people looking to play guitar. There’s other people looking for a sound. I was looking for a sound when Brian and I were rehearsing in Edith Grove. Something easily done by three or four guys and you wouldn’t be missing any instruments or sound
on it. You had a wall of it, in your face. I just followed the bosses. A lot of those blues players of the mid-’50s, Albert King and B.B. King, were single-note players. T-Bone Walker was one of the first to use the double- string thing—to use two strings instead of one, and Chuck got a lot out of T-Bone. Musically impossible, but it works. The notes clash, they jangle. You’re pulling two strings at once and you’re putting them in a position where actually their knickers are pulled up. You’ve always got something ringing against the note or the harmony. Chuck Berry is all double-string stuff. He very rarely plays single notes. The reason that cats started to play like that, T-Bone and so on, was economics—to eliminate the need for a horn section. With an amplified electric guitar, you could play two harmony notes and you could basically save money on two saxophones and a trumpet. And my double-string playing was why, in the very first Sidcup days, I was looked on as a bit of a wild rock and roller, and not really a serious blues player. Everybody else was playing away on single strings. It worked for me because I was playing a lot by myself, so two strings were better than one. And it had the possibility of getting this dissonance and this rhythm thing going, which you can’t do picking away on one string. It’s finding the moves. Chords are something to look for. There’s always the Lost Chord. Nobody’s found it.

  Brian and I, we had the Jimmy Reed stuff down. When we were really hunkering down and working, working, Mick obviously felt a little bit out of it. Also he was away at the London School of Economics for much of the day to start with. He couldn’t play anything. That’s why he picked up on the harp and the maracas. Brian had picked up the harmonica very quickly at first, and I think Mick didn’t want to be left behind. I wouldn’t be surprised if from the beginning it wasn’t just from being in competition with Brian. He wanted to play in the band musically as well. And Mick turned out to be the most amazing harp player. I’d put him up there with the best in the world, on a good night. Everything else we know he can do—he’s a great showman —but to a musician, Mick Jagger is a great harp player. His phrasing is incredible. It’s very Louis Armstrong, Little Walter. And that’s saying something. Little Walter Jacobs was one of the best singers of the blues, and a blues harp player par excellence. I find it hard to listen to him without awe. His band the Jukes were so hip and sympathetic. His singing was overshadowed by the phenomenal harp, which was based on a lot of Louis Armstrong’s cornet licks. Little Walter would smile in his grave for the way Mick plays. Mick and Brian played totally different styles—Mick sucking, like Little Walter, Brian blowing, like Jimmy Reed, both bending notes. When you play like that, the Jimmy Reed style, it’s called “high and lonesome,” and when you hear it, it just touches the heart. Mick is one of the best natural blues harp players I’ve heard. His harp playing is the one place where you don’t hear any calculation. I say, “Why don’t you sing like that?” He says they’re totally different things. But they’re not—they’re both blowing air out of your gob.