Life

by Keith Richards

  And with that, as it goes, they made their excuses and left. I didn’t even realize until I read his book that Andrew was still living with his mother while he was pulling off all this derring-do. Maybe that had something to do with it. He was smarter and sharper than the assholes that were running the media, or the people running the record companies, who were totally out of touch with what was happening. You could just run in and rob the whole bank. It was a bit Clockwork Orange. There was no great universal “We want to change society”; we just knew that things were changing and that they could be changed. They were just too comfortable. It was all too satisfied. And we thought, “How can we run rampant?”

  Of course all of us ran into the brick wall of the establishment. There was an impetus that couldn’t be stopped. It was like when somebody says something, and you’ve got the most fantastic reply. You know you really shouldn’t say it, but it has to be said, even though you know that it’s gonna get you in shit. It’s too good a line not to say. You’d feel that you’d chickened out on yourself if you didn’t say it.

  Oldham modeled himself to an extent on his idol Phil Spector as a producer as well as a manager, but unlike Spector, he wasn’t a natural in the studio. I doubt whether Andrew would call me a liar when I say he was not very musical. He knew what he liked and what other people liked, but if you said E7th to him, you might as well be saying, “What’s the meaning of life?” To me, a producer is somebody that at the end of the day comes out with everybody going, yeah, we got it. Andrew’s musical input was minimal, and it was usually saved for backup vocals. La la la here. OK, we’ll throw some on. He never got in the way of the way we did things, whether he agreed with it or not. But as a fully fledged producer, with knowledge of recording and a knowledge of music, he was on weaker ground. He had good taste for the market, especially once we went to America. The minute we got to America, it took the scales from his eyes as to what we were about, and more and more he let us get on with it. And basically that was the genius, I think, of Andrew’s method of producing, to let us make the records. And to provide a lot of energy and enthusiasm. When you’ve got to take thirty and you’re starting to flag a bit, you need that encouragement thing, “Just one more take, come on,” unflagging enthusiasm. “We’ve got it, we’re nearly there.…”

  When I was growing up, the idea of leaving England was pretty much remote. My dad did it once, but that was in the army to go to Normandy and get his leg blown off. The idea was totally impossible. You just read about other countries and looked at them on TV, and in National Geographic, the black chicks with their tits hanging out and their long necks. But you never expected to see it. Scraping up the money to get out of England would have been way beyond my capabilities.

  One of the first places I remember us going to, after the USA, was Belgium, and even that was an adventure. It was like going to Tibet. And the Olympia in Paris. And then suddenly you’re in Australia, and you’re actually seeing the world, and they’re paying you! But my God, there are some black holes.

  Dunedin, for instance, almost the southernmost city in the world, in New Zealand. It looked like Tombstone and it felt like it. It still had hitching rails. It was a Sunday, a wet dark Sunday in Dunedin in 1965. I don’t think you could have found anything more depressing anywhere. The longest day of my life, it seemed to go on forever. We were usually pretty good at entertaining ourselves, but Dunedin made Aberdeen seem like Las Vegas. Very rarely did everybody get depressed at the same time; there was usually one to support the others. But in Dunedin everybody was totally depressed. No chance of any redemption or laughter. Even the drink didn’t get you pissed. On Sunday, there’d be little knocks on the door, “Er, church in ten minutes…” It was just one of those miserable gray days that took me back to my childhood, a day that will never end, the gloom, and not anything on the horizon. Boredom is an illness to me, and I don’t suffer from it, but that moment was the lowest ebb. “I think I’ll stand on my head, try and recycle the drugs.”

  But Roy Orbison! It was only because we were with Roy Orbison that we were there at all. He was definitely top of the bill that night. What a beacon in the southernmost gloom. The amazing Roy Orbison. He was one of those Texan guys who could sail through anything, including his whole tragic life. His kids die in a fire, his wife dies in a car crash, nothing in his private life went right for the big O, but I can’t think of a gentler gentleman, or a more stoic personality. That incredible talent for blowing himself up from five foot six to six foot nine, which he seemed to be able to do on stage. It was amazing to witness. He’s been in the sun, looking like a lobster, pair of shorts on. And we’re just sitting around playing guitars, having a chat, smoke and a drink. “Well, I’m on in five minutes.” We watch the opening number. And out walks this totally transformed thing that seems to have grown at least a foot with presence and command over the crowd. He was in his shorts just now; how did he do that? It’s one of those astounding things about working in the theater. Backstage you can be a bunch of bums. And “Ladies and gentlemen” or “I present to you,” and you’re somebody else.

  Mick and I spent months and months trying to write before we had anything we could record for the Stones. We wrote some terrible songs whose titles included “We Were Falling in Love” and “So Much in Love,” not to mention “(Walkin’ Thru the) Sleepy City” (a rip-off of “He’s a Rebel”). Some of them were actually medium-sized hits—Gene Pitney, for example, singing “That Girl Belongs to Yesterday,” although he improved on the words and on our original title, which was “My Only Girl.” I wrote a forgotten gem called “All I Want Is My Baby,” which was recorded by P.J. Proby’s valet Bobby Jameson; I wrote “Surprise, Surprise,” recorded by Lulu. We ended Cliff Richard’s run of hits when he recorded our “Blue Turns to Grey”—it was one of the rare times one of his records went into the top thirty instead of the top ten. And when the Searchers did “Take It Or Leave It,” it torpedoed them as well. Our songwriting had this other function of hobbling the opposition while we got paid for it. It had the opposite effect on Marianne Faithfull. It made her into a star with “As Tears Go By”—the title changed by Andrew Oldham from the Casablanca song “As Time Goes By”—written on a twelve-string guitar. We thought, what a terrible piece of tripe. We came out and played it to Andrew, and he said, “It’s a hit.” We actually sold this stuff, and it actually made money. Mick and I were thinking, this is money for old rope!

  Mick and I knew by now that really our job was to write songs for the Stones. It took us eight, nine months before we came up with “The Last Time,” which is the first one that we felt we could give to the rest of the guys without being sent out the room. If I’d gone to the Rolling Stones with “As Tears Go By,” it would have been “Get out and don’t come back.” Mick and I were trying to hone it down. We kept coming up with these ballads, nothing to do with what we were doing. And then finally we came up with “The Last Time” and looked at each other and said, let’s try this with the boys. The song has the first recognizable Stones riff or guitar figure on it; the chorus is from the Staple Singers’ version, “This May Be the Last Time.” We could work this hook; now we had to find the verse. It had a Stones twist to it, one that maybe couldn’t have been written earlier— a song about going on the road and dumping some chick. “You don’t try very hard to please me.” Not the usual serenade to the unattainable object of desire. That was when it really clicked, with that song, when Mick and I felt confident enough to actually lay it in front of Brian and Charlie and Ian Stewart, especially, arbiter of events. With those earlier songs we would have been chased out the room. But that song defined us in a way, and it went to number one in the UK.

  Andrew created an amazing thing in my life. I had never thought about songwriting. He made me learn the craft, and at the same time I realized, yes, I am good at it. And slowly this whole other world opens up, because now you’re not just a player, or trying to play like somebody else. It isn’t just other people’s ex
pression. I can start to express myself, I can write my own music. It’s almost like a bolt of lightning.

  “The Last Time” was recorded during a magical period at the RCA Studios in Hollywood. We recorded there intermittently across two years between June 1964 and August 1966, which culminated in the album Aftermath, all of whose songs were penned by Mick and me, the Glimmer Twins, as we later called ourselves. It was the period where everything —songwriting, recording, performing—stepped into a new league, and the time when Brian started going off the rails.

  The work was always intensely hard. The gig never finished just because you got off stage. We had to go back to the hotel and start honing down these songs. We’d come off the road and we had four days to cut the tracks for an album, a week maximum. A track would get thirty to forty minutes to get down. It wasn’t that difficult, because we’re on the road, the band’s well oiled. And we’ve got ten, fifteen songs. But it was nonstop, high-pressure work, which was probably good for us. When we recorded “The Last Time,” in January 1965, we’d come back off the road and everyone was exhausted. We’d gone in to record the single only. After we finished “The Last Time,” the only Stones left standing were me and Mick. Phil Spector was there—Andrew had asked him to come down and listen to the track—and so was Jack Nitzsche. A janitor had come to clean up, this silent sweeping in the corner of this huge studio, while this remaining group picked up instruments. Spector picked up Bill Wyman’s bass, Nitzsche went to the harpsichord, and the B-side, “Play with Fire,” was cut with half the Rolling Stones and this unique lineup.

  When we first arrived in Los Angeles on that second tour, it was Sonny Bono who was sent to meet us at the airport with a car, because he was the promotion man for Phil Spector then. A year later Sonny and Cher were being feted at the Dorchester, presented to the world by Ahmet Ertegun. But back then, when he knew we were looking for a studio, Sonny put us in touch with Jack Nitzsche, and RCA was the first place he suggested. We went more or less straight there, into the limo-and-pool world, from a three-day tour of Ireland—an almost surreal contrast in cultures. Jack was in and out of the studio, more to get relief from Phil Spector and the enormous amount of work required to make the “wall of sound” than anything else. Jack was the Genius, not Phil. Rather, Phil took on Jack’s eccentric persona and sucked his insides out. But Jack Nitzsche was an almost silent—and unpaid for reasons still not clear except he did it for fun—arranger, musician, gluer-together of the talent, a man of enormous importance for us in that period. He came to our sessions to relax and would throw in some ideas. He’d play when the mood took him. He’s on “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” when he took over my piano part while I took over bass. This is just one example of his input. I loved the man.

  Somehow we still had no money even by late 1964. Our first album, The Rolling Stones, was top of the charts and sold 100,000 copies, which was more than the Beatles initially sold. So where was the money? In fact, we simply figured that if we broke even we were cool. But we also knew we weren’t tapping a huge market that we had opened. The system was that you didn’t get money from English sales until a year after the record came out, eighteen months later if it was foreign sales. There was no money in any of the American tours. Everyone was rooming with everybody. Oldham used to sleep on Phil Spector’s couch. We did the T.A.M.I. show in America late in 1964—the show where we came on after James Brown—to get us back home. We earned $25,000. So did Gerry & the Pacemakers, and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. That’s a bit much, isn’t it?

  The first real cash I ever saw came from selling “As Tears Go By.” I certainly remember the first time I got it. I looked at it! And then I counted it and then I looked at it again. And then I felt it and touched it. I did nothing with it. I just kept it in my bin, saying, I’ve got such a lot of money! Shit! I didn’t particularly want to buy anything, or blow it. For the first time in my life, I’d got money.… Maybe I’ll buy a new shirt, spring for some guitar strings. But basically it was “I don’t believe this shit!” There’s the queen’s face all over it and it’s signed by the right man, and you’ve got more than you’ve ever had in your hand ever, and more than your dad makes in a year, schlepping and working his fucking arse off. I mean, what to do with it is another thing, because I’ve got another gig to do, and I’m working. But I must say, the first taste of a few hundred crisp new bills was not unsatisfying. What to do with it took some time. But it was the first feeling of being ahead of the game. And all I did was write a couple songs and they gave it to me.

  One big setback we had was not being paid by Robert Stigwood for a tour we did with one of his acts. If the homework had been done, we would have known that this was his modus operandi—late paying turned into not paying at all, and we had to go all the way to the High Court. But before that, alas for him, one night at a club called the Scotch of St James, he made the terrible mistake of coming down the stairs as Andrew and I were going up. We blocked off the staircase so I could extract payment. You can’t use a boot on a winding staircase, so he got the knee, one for every grand he owed us—sixteen of them. Even then he never apologized. Maybe I didn’t kick him hard enough.

  And when I got some more money, I took care of Mum. They’d split up, Doris and Bert, a year after I left home. Dad’s Dad, but I bought Mum a house. I was always in touch with Doris. But that implied I couldn’t be in touch with Bert, because they’d split up. It was like I couldn’t take sides. And also I didn’t have much time for that because life was getting really exciting. I’m zooming all over the place; I’ve got other things to do. What Mum and Dad were doing was not at the forefront of my mind.

  Then came “Satisfaction,” the track that launched us into global fame. I was between girlfriends at the time, in my flat in Carlton Hill, St. John’s Wood. Hence maybe the mood of the song. I wrote “Satisfaction” in my sleep. I had no idea I’d written it, it’s only thank God for the little Philips cassette player. The miracle being that I looked at the cassette player that morning and I knew I’d put a brand-new tape in the previous night, and I saw it was at the end. Then I pushed rewind and there was “Satisfaction.” It was just a rough idea. There was just the bare bones of the song, and it didn’t have that noise, of course, because I was on acoustic. And forty minutes of me snoring. But the bare bones is all you need. I had that cassette for a while and I wish I’d kept it.

  Mick wrote the lyrics by the pool in Clearwater, Florida, four days before we went into the studio and recorded it—first at Chess in Chicago, an acoustic version, and later with the fuzz tone at RCA in Hollywood. I wasn’t exaggerating when I wrote a postcard home from Clearwater that said, “Hi Mum. Working like a dog, same as ever. Love, Keith.”

  It was down to one little foot pedal, the Gibson fuzz tone, a little box they put out at that time. I’ve only ever used foot pedals twice—the other time was for Some Girls in the late ’70s, when I used an XR box with a nice hillbilly Sun Records slap-echo on it. But effects are not my thing. I just go for quality of sound. Do I want this sharp and hard and cutting, or do I want warm, smooth “Beast of Burden” stuff? Basically you go: Fender or Gibson?

  In “Satisfaction” I was imagining horns, trying to imitate their sound to put on the track later when we recorded. I’d already heard the riff in my head the way Otis Redding did it later, thinking, this is gonna be the horn line. But we didn’t have any horns, and I was only going to lay down a dub. The fuzz tone came in handy so I could give a shape to what the horns were supposed to do. But the fuzz tone had never been heard before anywhere, and that’s the sound that caught everybody’s imagination. Next thing I know, we’re listening to ourselves in Minnesota somewhere on the radio, “Hit of the Week,” and we didn’t even know Andrew had put the fucking thing out! At first I was mortified. As far as I was concerned that was just the dub. Ten days on the road and it’s number one nationally! The record of the summer of ’65. So I’m not arguing. And I learned that lesson —sometimes you can overw
ork things. Not everything’s designed for your taste and your taste alone.

  “Satisfaction” was a typical collaboration between Mick and me at the time. I would say on a general scale, I would come up with the song and the basic idea, and Mick would do all the hard work of filling it in and making it interesting. I would come up with “I can’t get no satisfaction.… I can’t get no satisfaction.… I tried and I tried and I tried and I tried, but I can’t get no satisfaction,” and then we’d put ourselves together and Mick would come back and say, “Hey, when I’m riding in my car… same cigarettes as me,” and then we’d tinker about with that. In those years that was basically the setup. “Hey you, get off of my cloud, hey you…” would be my contribution. “Paint It Black”—I wrote the melody, he wrote the lyrics. It’s not that you can say in one phrase he wrote that and he did that. But the musical riff is mostly coming from me. I’m the riff master. The only one I missed and that Mick Jagger got was “Brown Sugar,” and I’ll tip my hat there. There he got me. I mean, I did tidy it up a bit, but that was his, words and music.

  A peculiarity of “Satisfaction” is that it’s a hell of a song to play on stage. For years and years we never played it, or very rarely, until maybe the past ten or fifteen years. Couldn’t get the sound right, it didn’t feel right, it just sounded weedy. It took the band a long time to figure out how to play “Satisfaction” on stage. What made us like it was when Otis Redding covered it. With that and Aretha Franklin’s version, which Jerry Wexler produced, we heard what we’d tried to write in the first place. We liked it and started playing it because the very best of soul music was singing our song.

  In 1965, Oldham bumped into Allen Klein, the pipe-smoking, smooth-talking manager. And I still think it was the best move Oldham made to put us together with him. Andrew loved the idea that Klein had put to him, that no contract is worth the paper it’s written on, which we later found out to be painfully true in our relations with Allen Klein himself. My attitude at the time was that Eric Easton, Andrew’s partner and our agent, was just too tired. In fact he was ill. Onward. Whatever happened later with Allen Klein, he was brilliant at generating cash. And he was also spectacular at first in blasting through the record companies and tour managers who had been overpaying themselves and being inattentive to business.