Life

by Keith Richards; James Fox

  In any band, you’re learning how to play together all the time. You always feel that you’re getting tighter and better. It’s like a close family. If one person leaves, it’s a bereavement. When Bill Wyman left, in 1991, I got extremely stroppy. I really did have a go at him. I wasn’t very nice. He said he didn’t like to fly anymore. He had been driving to every gig because he’d developed a fear of flying. That’s not an excuse—get outta here! I couldn’t believe it. I’d been in some of the most ramshackle aircraft in the world with that guy and he’d never batted an eyelid. But I guess it’s something that one can develop. Or maybe he did a computer analysis. He was very into that. Bill had one of the first. It satisfied that meticulous mind of his, I suppose. He probably got something out of the computer, like the odds against you after flying so many miles. I don’t know why he’s so worried about dying. It’s not a matter of avoiding it. It’s where and how!

  But then what did he do? Having freed himself by luck and talent from the constraints of society, that one-in-ten-million chance, he goes back into it, into the retail trade, putting his energy into opening up a pub. Why would you leave the best band in the fucking world to open a fish-and-chip shop called Sticky Fingers? Taking one of our titles with him. It seems to be doing well.

  Not so Ronnie’s similarly inexplicable foray into the catering trade, always a nightmare of keeping people’s fingers out of the till. Josephine’s dream was to have a spa. They opened it, it was a disaster, it fell apart and went down in a blaze of insolvency proceedings.

  We didn’t tell the world that Bill had left until 1993, when we found a replacement, which took a while, and thank God we found a guy totally sympathetic. In the end we didn’t have to look far. Darryl Jones is very closely related to the Winos—great friends with Charley Drayton and Steve Jordan. So he was on the periphery. Darryl, in my estimation, is a giant, beautiful, an all-round man. And of course Darryl’s playing five years with Miles Davis certainly didn’t hurt Charlie Watts, who schooled himself on the great jazz drummers. And Darryl melted into the band real quick. I do enjoy playing with Darryl; he’s always provoking me. We have tremendous fun on stage. You want to go there? Fine, let’s go a little further. We know Charlie’s got it nailed. Let’s fuck around. Let’s sling some hash! And Darryl’s never let me down.

  Despite their dispersal, the X-Pensive Winos left trails of smoke in the popular culture with their hot licks, like their appearance on the Sopranos soundtrack with “Make No Mistake,” along with the Stones’ “Thru and Thru.” We were ready for a comeback, and we convened in New York to stage it—a slightly more ragged gang than the fresh-faced musicians who had first obeyed the call to arms five years earlier. Wine had long ago given way to Jack Daniel’s as the favored band beverage. When we went to Canada to make the first record, we were out in the country, in the woods, and we drank every bottle of Jack Daniel’s in a fifty-mile radius! This was towards the end of the first week. We’d cleaned out all the stores. We had to send out to Montreal to buy some more. Now when we gathered for our second act, the Jack flowed again and other stuff too, and it got a little disjointed and it began to take what seemed a long time. To the point where I, Keith Richards, ordered a ban on Jack Daniel’s at the sessions. That was my official moment of switchover from Jack to vodka, and the ban did lighten things up. Two, maybe three members of the band gave up drinking after that and haven’t taken a drop since.

  Before I put them on short rations, we had to listen to a sudden outburst of wrath from Doris at what she saw, through the studio glass, as our dilatory approach to our work. She was in New York visiting and came by the studio. Don Smith showed her in. Don died while I was writing this book and he’s much lamented. He had recalled Doris’s visit like this:

  Don Smith: Keith and the guys are out in the studio to record background vocals, and they are just blabbering away instead for about twenty minutes or so. Doris asks me what’s all this about and then asks how she could talk to them. I show her the talk-back button, and she presses it and starts screaming, “You boys stop messing around out there and get to work.… This studio is costing money, and you’re standing out there talking about nothing and nobody understands a thing you’re saying anyway, so get to bloody work. I’ve flown all the way from bloody England. I don’t have all night to sit around listening to you yapping about nothing.” In fact it was much longer and stronger. She actually scared them for a tiny minute and they all laughed, but they got to work fast.

  So thanks to Doris we renewed our labors. And it became a punishing regimen, which Waddy must describe.

  Waddy Wachtel: We started first at seven at night and we’d go for twelve hours at least. Then, as it went on, we’d go, oh, let’s go in at eight, let’s go in at nine, let’s go in at eleven. So all of a sudden, and I swear to God this is how it wound up, finally we’d go in to work at one in the morning, three in the morning. We’re in the car one morning and Keith’s sitting there with his drink and his shades on, it’s bright sun, and he goes, hey, wait a minute! What time is it? And we said, it’s eight in the morning. And he said, turn around! I’m not going to work at eight in the morning! He’d completely turned his day around.

  We were there for weeks trying to finish this record. We were in New York, it was during the summer, I never saw the sun once. We’d come out in the morning, it would be gray. I’d get back to my room, sleep all day, get up at night and go back to the studio. To give an idea of how long it took us: I was a total chain-smoker and I had this little mini Bic lighter. Jane Rose had said we had a month and a half until we were supposed to be finished. And I said to Keith, “Well”—and I was lighting a cigarette—“you know, these lighters, they last about a month and a half. So when this pink lighter is empty, we should be done.” He goes, “All right, man, cool, we’ll watch the lighter.” So a month and a half is gone. I buy another pink lighter and I don’t say anything. And now it’s almost two months. Every time he has a cigarette, I’m making sure I’m lighting it with a pink lighter. And he’s looking. We still have time, you know? So three lighters later, my wife, Annie, comes to New York to visit. I say, honey, I’ve got an assignment for you. I want you to go out and find every little pink Bic lighter you can. Because we’re heading into mix mode. Finally we’re mixing the last song, “Demon,” and it came out really nice. And for the last three or four days, I went with a pocketful of pink lighters, at least a dozen of them stuffed in my pocket. We finally finished “Demon,” and Keith comes in the room and he’s really happy and he goes, ahhh, I’ll have a cigarette. And I go, oh, let me light that for you, and I reached in and brought all these lighters out. And he’s, “You motherfucker! I knew something was going on!”

  Even just getting to those sessions could be an ordeal. There was a little misunderstanding in a bar in New York when I was having a drink with Don on the way to the studio. It’s happened to me so often that some fucker tries to wind me up because of who I am—and this time it was the sheer dumb stupidity that pissed me off. Don was a witness.

  Don Smith: I used to meet Keith down at the apartment and we’d walk to work and we’d stop at this bar and have a drink. And this DJ who was in the bar, as soon as we came in, a few minutes later he started playing Stones songs. And after the second one, Keith walked up and politely said, could you not do that? We’re just having a drink on the way to work. So the guy puts on another one and another one. Keith walks up, jumps across, grabs the guy and already has him on the ground with his knee on him. And we’re like, hey, Keith, we should go? Yeah, OK.

  We did another riotous Winos tour, including to Argentina, where we were greeted with a pandemonium not seen since the early ’60s. The Stones had never been there, so we walked into full-scale Beatlemania, frozen in time and released for our arrival. We played the first gig in a stadium with forty thousand people, and the noise, the energy, was unbelievable. I convinced the Stones that this was definitely a market where there were lots of people who really liked
us. I took Bert and we lived in Buenos Aires, in this great hotel, one of my favorites in the world, the Mansion, in a fine suite of rooms with lovely proportions. Bert would wake up and chuckle every morning, he’d be hearing “Olé, olé, olé, Richards, Richards…” This was the first time his family name had been beaten out on a drum to wake him up for breakfast. He said, “I thought they were chanting for me.”

  Mick and I had mostly learned to live with our disagreements, but diplomacy was still required to drag us together in 1994. Barbados was again the place to see whether we could get on well enough to make another album. It went well as it usually did when we were alone. I only brought Pierre, now working with me. We lived in a compound on a lemongrass plantation and I acquired a companion who gave his name to the album and to the tour that followed—Voodoo Lounge.

  A storm had come in, one of those tropical downpours, and I was doing a quick rush to get some cigarettes. Suddenly I heard a sound and thought it was one of those huge toads that inhabit Barbados, which make catlike sounds. I looked and at the other end of this sewer pipe on the walkway was a sodden little kitten. Bit my hand. I knew there were loads of cats down there. Oh, you come from down the pipe, where your mother lives? So I shoved him back in, and I turned around and he shot back up. He was not welcome, in other words. I tried it again. I said, come on, you know your own kid, and he shot back out again. And he was looking at me, this little runt. And I said, fuck it, all right, come on. Put him in my pocket and I rushed home, by now I’m drowning like a rat. I appear at the door in this sodden floor-length leopard bathrobe, an obeah man under a fire hose, holding a small cat. Pierre, we’ve got a slight side trip. It was pretty clear that if we didn’t take care of him, he’d be dead by morning. So Pierre and I tried the basic thing, got a saucer of milk, shoved his head in it, and he went for it. So we have a strong one here, all we’ve got to do is keep him going. All we’ve got to do is grow him up. We called him Voodoo because we were in Barbados and his survival was against the odds—Voodoo luck and charm. And always this little cat followed me everywhere. So the cat became Voodoo and the terrace became Voodoo’s Lounge—I put up signs around the perimeter. And the cat was always on my shoulder or nearby. I had to protect him from all the tomcats round there for weeks. The tomcats, they wanted his ass, they didn’t want another tom on the scene. I’m throwing rocks at these toms, and they’re all gathered like some lynch mob. “Give me that little fucker!” Voodoo ended up at my house in Connecticut. We weren’t going to be parted after that. He disappeared only in 2007. He was a wild cat.

  We all decamped to Ronnie’s house in Ireland, in County Kildare, to start work on Voodoo Lounge, and all went well and then one day we found out that Jerry Lee Lewis was down the road, hiding from the IRS or something. It’s only an hour or two away, so we asked him, do you want to come up and play? But apparently from Jerry’s point of view at the time, or the way it got to him, he was going to make a Jerry Lee Lewis album with the Stones backing him. But we were just saying come up and play, it was just like a jam: we’re pretty loose, we’ve got the studio set up, let’s rock and roll. So we did a lot of stuff, a lot of great stuff too, and it’s all there on tape somewhere. Then we were listening to playbacks later on, and Jerry’s going, hey, the drummer’s a bit slow there. He’s starting to pick the band apart. Hey, that guitar is… And I looked at him and I said, Jerry, we just did a playback, you know what I mean, we ain’t cutting. We were just playing. A red mist was falling, and I said if you want to tear my band apart, your name’s Lewis, right? You’re from Wales. I said, my name’s Richards; we’re both Welsh. So I’ll look into your little baby blue eyes and you look into these two black motherfuckers, and if you want to take it outside, let’s deal with it. Don’t fucking chop my band up. And I left, I just stormed off and actually wrote “Sparks Will Fly” out of it, watching the bonfire outside. Our longtime crew chief Chuch Magee said Jerry just turned around and said, “Well, it usually works.” But the stuff we did with him that night was amazing. And it was a real honor for me to play in that sort of situation, where we’d say, Jerry, what you got? OK, let’s do “House of Blue Lights.” Brilliant. That’s where Jerry and I met on the level that guys like us have to meet, and since then he’s been a brother.

  The new meat in the sandwich, between Mick and me, was Don Was, who became our producer. He was too clever to get eaten. Don possessed a mix of finely honed diplomatic skills and musical insight. Not swayable, certainly not by fashion. And if something ain’t happening, he’ll say, I don’t think this is happening, which very few people do. They just sort of let us carry on not happening. Or in a polite way, they say, let’s leave this one alone for now; let’s go on to something else and come back. With all these skills, Don brilliantly survived the next four albums, including this one, Voodoo Lounge. He’s held high in the business as a gifted producer; he’s worked with a long list of the best musicians, but mainly he’s a musician, which makes it a lot easier. On top of that he was personally hardened in psychological band warfare, of which Mick and I are some of the oldest practitioners. Don had a band called Was (Not Was) and he started with a guy he’d grown up with; they’d never had an argument until they became successful, and they went for six years without speaking to each other until it collapsed in a storm of acrimony. Sound familiar? With Don, too, the band and the friendship survived. His understanding of the DNA code in all bands is that sooner or later the two principals will turn on each other because one of them will be driven crazy by the knowledge that to be at their best they need to perform with the other person and therefore they need that other person to be successful, or even to be heard. It makes you hate that person. Well, it didn’t in my case, because I wanted us to depend on each other and carry on.

  Let Don describe what things had come to when we were mixing in LA.

  Don Was: When we did Voodoo Lounge, Keith and Mick would exchange pleasantries about a football match for maybe thirty seconds and then go to opposite corners of the room. And then they’d play, but the degree of interaction with each other was part of a group thing. Throughout the making of that whole record, I assumed that they were calling each other at five in the morning to talk about what was going to happen the next day and all of that. And it was only when we got to the end that I found out they never talked to each other. The only time either of them called the other guy was, Mick told me, when Keith hit a speed dial wrong at the Sunset Marquis and Mick was staying at a rented house in the hills and he called Mick and asked for more ice. He thought it was room service.

  Nevertheless, Don was rocked off balance very early on by a sudden and apparently terminal row that erupted in the studio, Windmill Lane in Dublin, between Mick and me, out of the blue, despite our apparent peace terms. It came from sheer nonexistent communication, the building up of festering rages. It was the culmination of a lot of things, but mostly, I think, the control freak business that I found so wearing to digest and deal with. Ronnie and I had come back into the studio, and Mick was playing some imitation riffs on a brand-new Telecaster. It was one of his songs, called “I Go Wild,” and he was strumming, sitting down. I’m told I said, “There’s only two guitar players in this band and you’re not one of them.” I probably threw it out as a joke, but it didn’t connect to the funny bone for Mick—he took it the wrong way, and then it got deeper. I just laid into him, and once again, according to eyewitness accounts, we hammered each other about everything from Anita to contracts to betrayals. It was pretty wild, hurling one-liners at each other. “What about this?” “Well, what about that?” And everyone else ran, the assistants and Ronnie and Darryl and Charlie and everyone, all scuttled into the control room. I don’t know if they were listening on a microphone or not, but several people heard the slanging match. Don Was, electing himself arbitrator, tried to do a shuttle diplomacy act, because we’d both gone to other ends of the building. “But you’re both saying the same thing,” one of those. Old trick. Don told me he genuinel
y believed that if one more word was uttered, everybody was going to get on planes and the show would be over forever. What he underestimated was that we’d been conducting this slanging match for thirty years. In the end, after maybe an hour and a half, we hugged and carried on.

  It was Mick who had originally got hold of Don Was. Mick had always wanted to work with Don because Don is a groove producer. It’s groove, dance hall music. And when we’d finished with Voodoo Lounge, Mick said he wouldn’t work with Don again because he’d hired him to be a groove producer and Don wanted to make Exile on Main St. And Mick wanted to make Prince, The Black Album or something. Mick, again, wanted what he heard in the club last night.

  Mick’s biggest fear at the time, as he kept on telling the press, was to be pigeonholed, as he put it, to Exile on Main St. But Don was more interested in protecting the legacy of what was good about the Stones; he didn’t want to do anything that was below the standard of that stuff from the late ’60s and early ’70s era. Why did Mick fear Exile? It was too good! That’s why. Whenever I heard “Oh, we don’t want to go back and re-create Exile on Main St.,” I thought, I wish you fucking could, pal!

  So when it came to Bridges to Babylon, a tour and a record later in 1997, Mick wanted to make sure we made cutting-edge music of the moment. Don Was was still on board as producer despite Mick’s frustrations, because he was so good and worked so well with both of us, but this time Mick had what seemed at first like not a bad idea to get different producers to work under Don on different tracks. But when I got to LA to go to work, I found that he’d just hired who he wanted without asking. He’d hired a team of all these people who had won Grammys and were all cutting-edge. The only problem was none of it worked. I did try to accommodate one of these arrivals. If they asked for a retake, I did one, however good the take was, and another, until I realized they weren’t getting it. They didn’t know what they wanted. And that was it. Then Mick realized his mistake and said get me out of here. It wasn’t promising to discover that one of these producers had looped Charlie Watts—just put him on a drum machine on a loop. Well, that didn’t sound like the Stones. Ronnie Wood, lying on the couch, was heard to moan, “All that’s left is the ghost of Charlie’s left foot.”