Life

by Keith Richards

  We went on tour. Suddenly I was the front man. OK, we’re going to do this. It made me far more sympathetic to some of Mick’s more loony things. When you have to sing every goddamn song, you have to develop your lungs. You’re doing an hour-odd show every day, not only singing but prancing around and playing guitar, and that brought my voice on. Some people hate it, some people love it. It’s a voice with character. Pavarotti it ain’t, but then I don’t like Pavarotti’s voice. When you sing lead in a band, it’s an exhausting business. Just the breathing involved. Singing song after song is enough to knock most people on their ass. It’s an incredible amount of oxygen you’re going through. So we would do shows and we’d come off stage and I’d go to bed! Sometimes, of course, we’d be up till the next show, but a lot of times it would be forget it! We had the time of our lives touring with the Winos. We had standing ovations at almost every show, we did small theaters, sellouts, we broke even. The caliber of musicianship across the stage was astonishing. Fabulous playing every night, the music flowing like crazy. We were flying. It was really magic.

  In the end neither Mick nor I sold a lot of records from our solo albums because they want the Rolling bleeding Stones, right? At least I got two great rock-and-roll records out of it, and credibility. But Mick went out there trying to be a pop star on his own. He got out there and hung his flag and had to pull it down. I’m not gloating about what happened, but it didn’t surprise me. In the long run he had to come back to the Stones to reidentify himself—for redemption.

  So here come the Millstones, brother, to save you from drowning. I was not going to put the first feeler out. I was over it. I was not interested in being with the Stones under these conditions. By then I had a very good record under my belt and I was enjoying myself. I would have done another Winos record right then. There was a phone call; there was some shuttle diplomacy. The meeting that followed wasn’t easy to organize. Blood had been spilt. Neutral territory had to be found. Mick wouldn’t come to Jamaica, where I was—this is now early January in 1989. I wouldn’t go to Mustique. Barbados was the choice. Eddy Grant’s Blue Wave studios were down the road.

  The first thing we did was to say this has got to stop. I’m not using the Daily Mirror as my mouthpiece. They’re loving this; they’re eating us alive. There was a little sparring, but then we started laughing about the things we’d called each other in the press. That was probably the healing moment. I called you a what? We hit it off.

  Mick and I may not be friends—too much wear and tear for that—but we’re the closest of brothers, and that can’t be severed. How can you describe a relationship that goes that far back? Best friends are best friends. But brothers fight. I felt a real sense of betrayal. Mick knows how I feel, although he may not have realized my feelings went so deep. But it’s the past I’m writing about; this stuff happened a long time ago. I can say these things; they come from the heart. At the same time, nobody else can say anything against Mick that I can hear. I’ll slit their throat.

  Whatever has happened, Mick and I have a relationship that still works. How else, after almost fifty years, could we be contemplating —at the time of writing this—going out on the road again together? (Even if our dressing rooms do have to be a mile distant for practical reasons—he can’t stand my sounds, and I can’t listen to him practicing scales for an hour.) We love what we do. When we meet up again, whatever antagonisms have been whipped up in the meantime, we drop them and start talking about the future. We always come up with something when we’re alone together. There’s an electromagnetic spark between us. There always has been. That’s what we look forward to and that’s what helps turn folks on.

  That’s what happened at that meeting in Barbados. It was the beginning of the détente of the ’80s. I let water go under the bridge. I may be unforgiving, but I can’t work a grudge that long. As long as we’ve got something going, everything else becomes peripheral. We’re a band, we know each other, we’d better refigure this, refigure our relationship with each other, because the Stones are bigger than any of us when it comes down to the nitty-gritty. Can you and I get together and make some good music? That’s our thing. The key, as ever, was to have no one else there. There is a marked difference between Mick and me alone and Mick and me when there’s somebody else—anybody else—in the room. It could just be the housemaid, the chef, anybody. It becomes totally different. When we’re alone we talk about what’s happening, “Oh, the old lady’s kicked me out of the house,” a phrase will come up and we start working on that phrase. It very quickly falls into piano, guitar, songs. And the magic returns. I pull things out of him; he pulls things out of me. He can do things in a way that you wouldn’t think of, you wouldn’t plan, they just happen.

  Pretty soon everything was forgotten. Less than two weeks after that first meeting we were recording our first new album in five years, Steel Wheels, at AIR Studios in Montserrat, with Chris Kimsey back as coproducer. And the Steel Wheels tour, the biggest circus yet, was planned to start in August 1989. Having nearly dissolved the Stones forever, Mick and I were now faced with a further twenty years on the road.

  I knew that this was about starting over again. Either this thing was going to break and all the wheels would fall off, or we’d survive. Everybody else had swallowed the pill and got over it. We wouldn’t have been able to start it up otherwise. So it was kind of amnesia of the immediate past, although the bruises still showed.

  We prepared with care. We rehearsed for two solid months. It was a massive new operation. The set, designed by Mark Fisher, was the biggest stage ever constructed. Two stages would leapfrog each other along the route, the trucks carrying a moveable village with spaces for everything from rehearsal rooms to the pool table where Ronnie and I warmed up before shows. No longer a pirate nation on the road. This was the changeover in both personality and style from Bill Graham to Michael Cohl, who’d been a promoter for us in Canada. This time I realized how big a spectacle I was involved in—huge, enormous—a new kind of deal.

  The Stones only started to make money through touring in the ’80s—the tour of ’81–’82 was the start of the big stadium venues and broke box office records for rock shows. Bill Graham was the promoter. He was the king of rock concerts at the time, a big backer of the counterculture, of unknown artists and good causes, as well as bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. But that last tour was a rather dodgy period—a lot of bits were going missing. The mathematics weren’t adding up. To put it more simply, we needed to get control of our shows again. Rupert Loewenstein had reordered the finances so that, basically, we didn’t get cheated out of eighty percent of the takings, which was nice. On a fifty-dollar ticket, up till then, we’d get three dollars. He set up sponsorship and clawed back merchandising deals. He cleaned out the scams and fiddles, or most of them. He made us viable. I loved Bill dearly, he was a wonderful guy, but his head was beginning to turn. He was getting too big for his boots, as they all do when they’ve been doing it for too long. Separate from Bill, his business partners were stealing money from us and openly bragging about it—one of them telling how he bought a house with it. The inside machinations are nothing to do with me. Eventually I’m going to end up on stage playing. That’s why I pay other people. The whole point is that I can only do what I do if I have the space to do it in. That’s why you work with people like Bill Graham or Michael Cohl or whoever. They take this weight off your shoulders, but you’re going to get a good cut of it. All I’ve got to do is have somebody on my staff like Rupert or Jane who makes sure at the end of the day that the right shekels end up in the right pot. There was a big meeting on one of the islands when we threw in our lot with Michael Cohl, and he then did all our tours up to A Bigger Bang in 2006.

  Mick does have a talent for discovering good people, but they can get discarded or left lying about. Mick finds them, Keith keeps them, is the motto in our troupe, and it’s borne out by the facts. There were two people particularly that Mick had picked up
for his solo stuff, and without knowing it, he actually put me in contact with some of the best—guys I wouldn’t let go of again or ever. Pierre de Beauport, who came to Barbados as Mick’s sole assistant when Mick and I met up again, was one. He had taken a summer job out of college to learn to make records in New York, and Mick brought him along on his solo tour. Pierre can not only mend anything from tennis rackets to fishing nets, he’s a genius at guitars and amplifiers. When I came to Barbados, all I’d brought with me was one old Fender tweed amp, which was barely working and sounded terrible. Pierre of course, as a rookie working for Mick, had been warned never to cross the cold war battle lines, as if it was North and South Korea, when all it was was East and West Berlin. One day Pierre, cutting through all that, got hold of the Tweedie, stripped it, reassembled it and made it work perfectly. He got a hug from me. It wasn’t very long before I knew that he’s the man. Because also—and he hid it for a long time—he can play guitar like a motherfucker. He can play this shit better than I can. We fell in through our total infatuation with and obsessive love of the guitar. After that, he was backstage for me, handing me the guitars. He’s the guitar curator and trainer. But we’re a team music-wise too, to the point where now, if I think I’ve got a good song, I’ll play it to Pierre before I’ll play it to anybody else.

  All these guitars Pierre presides over have nicknames and personalities. He knows their different sounds and properties. Most of the people who made them in ’54, ’55, ’56 are dead and gone. If they were forty or fifty years old then, they would now be well over a hundred. But you can still read the names of the checkers, the ones who gave them the seal of approval, inside the guitars. So the guitars get their nicknames from their checkers. On “Satisfaction” I play a lot of Malcolm, a Telecaster, while on “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” I play Dwight, another Telecaster. Micawber is a real all-rounder. Micawber’s got a lot of highs; Malcolm’s got more bottom on it. And Dwight’s an in-betweener.

  I take my hat off to Pierre and the rest of his backline crew. On stage, things go wrong suddenly. They have to be prepared for a guitar with a broken string to come back for a restring and have one ready that’s going to sound similar and fling it over the guy’s neck in ten seconds. In the old days, fuck it, if you broke your guitar, you just walked off and let everybody else carry on until you’d sorted it yourself. With all this film and video, everything is under scrutiny. Ronnie’s a string breaker. Mick is actually the worst. When he plays guitar, he thrashes the thing with his pick.

  The second new arrival was Bernard Fowler, singer with the band ever since, along with Lisa Fischer and Blondie Chaplin, who came a few years later. Bernard too was working with Mick on his solo stuff. Bernard has since sung on my solo records and on every song I’ve written since he arrived on the scene. The first thing I said to Bernard when he was doing some backup vocals in the studio was “You know, I didn’t want to like you.” “Why not?” “You’re one of his guys.” Bernard cracked up, and the ice was broken. I felt I stole him, in a way, from Mick. But I wanted to get out of this embattled idea anyway, and we sing good together. So all that shit went out of the way.

  I smuggled Bobby Keys back into the band in 1989 for the Steel Wheels tour, but it wasn’t easy. He’d been out for ten years or so, apart from some one-night gigs. It took me that long to get him back in. And when I did, I didn’t tell anyone at first. We were rehearsing for the new tour at the Nassau Coliseum. We were getting to the dress rehearsals, and I wasn’t too happy with the horns, so I rang Bobby and said, get on a plane and hide yourself when you get here. So we’re going to play “Brown Sugar,” and Bobby was in, but Mick didn’t know he was there. I just told Bobby, when we play “Brown Sugar,” come in on the solo. So it was solo time, and Mick looked round at me and said, “What the fuck…?” I just said, “See what I mean?” And when it was over, Mick looked at me like, well, you can’t argue with that. I mean, baby, that is rock and roll. But it took me years to grease Bobby back into the band. As I said, some of my friends can really fuck up, but so can I, and so can Mick, so can anybody. If you can’t fuck up, where’s your halo? My life is full of broken halos. Mick didn’t speak one word to Bobby for the whole tour. But he stayed.

  I added one more member to the Richards gang in the person of Steve Crotty—one of those people who just find me, who become instant friends. Steve comes from Preston, Lancashire. His dad was a butcher and a rough man, which is why Steve left home at fifteen for a life of pretty rough adventure. I met Steve in Antigua, where he ran a famous restaurant, a big hangout for musicians and yachtsmen called Pizzas in Paradise. Anyone recording at George Martin’s AIR Studios in Montserrat would come back to Antigua, so Steve knew many people in the business. We used to stay at Nelson’s Dockyard, which was not far from his restaurant.

  I struck up immediately with Steve, recognizing a kindred spirit. A jailbird, of course. My mates go to the most distinguished jails. In Steve’s case, he’d recently been released from the prison outside Sydney, Australia, in Botany Bay, where Captain Cook landed. He was there, sentenced to hard labor, for eight years, of which he did three and a half, locked up twenty-three hours a day. Part of the reason Steve survived its brutalities untouched was that it was known he had kept his mouth shut and taken the rap for two friends who got away. That’s the kind of bloke he is. For such a sweet-natured man, hard though he is, Steve’s taken a lot of beatings. One day Spanish sailors, cracked out of their heads, came into his bar at three a.m., and he told them he was closing. They nearly killed him. He was in a coma for some days, suffered aneurysms, lost nine teeth, couldn’t see for two weeks. Why had they beat him so badly? The last bit of dialogue exchanged was Steve saying, “Come back later today and I’ll buy you a drink.” He turns to the bar and hears, “I fuck your mother.” So Steve says, “Well, somebody did. What do you want me to do, call you Daddy?” He suffered for that.

  When Steve had recovered, I asked him to come and look after my place in Jamaica, where he is today as sheriff of the Caribbean conference. While this book was being written, a guy came armed with a pistol to rob my house there. Steve floored him with an electric guitar. The guy’s elbow hit the floor and his gun went off. The bullet went in an inch from Steve’s willy, missed all the major arteries and went out. What you call a clean shot. The guy that broke in was shot dead by the police.

  There was one time the blade was called for while we were rehearsing in Montserrat. We were recording a song called “Mixed Emotions.” One of our engineers was there and witnessed it, and he had better tell it. I don’t include it just to brag about how accurate I am with a throwing knife (although it’s lucky I made my mark on this occasion), but to show the kind of thing that triggers the red mist—in this case someone coming into the studio who didn’t play an instrument, who knew fuck all about what I was doing and tried to tell me how to improve the track. Yap, yap, yap. As this eyewitness remembered:

  Some bigwig figure in the music business, invited by Mick, came to Montserrat to discuss some contract to do with touring. He obviously fancied himself for his producing abilities, because we’re standing in the studio area, playing back “Mixed Emotions,” which was going to be the first single. And Keith is standing there with his guitar on and Mick’s standing there and we’re listening to it. The song finishes, and the guy says, Keith, great song, man, but I tell you, I think if you arranged it a little bit differently it would be so much better. So Keith went to his doctor’s bag and pulled out a knife and threw it, and it landed right between the bloke’s legs, boinggg. It was really like William Tell; it was great. Keith says, listen, sonny, I was writing songs before you were a glint on your father’s dick. Don’t you tell me how to write songs. And he walked out. And then Mick had to smooth it over, but it was fantastic. I’ll never forget.

  The great Steel Wheels tour was all set to go when I got a visit from Rupert Loewenstein—not from Mick, who should have come himself—to say that Mick would not do the tour if Jane Rose was on
it. Jane Rose was, and still is, as I write, my manager, last heard of in these pages heroically sticking by me during my last cleanup in the days after the Toronto bust in 1977, and all through the months, years, of the court cases in Canada that followed. She is an unseen presence on the page in much of the narrative since then. We were in the summer of 1989, ten years after those events, and Jane had certainly become a thorn in Mick’s side—though he put the thorn there himself. Jane had worked jointly for Mick and me for what now seems like an impossibly long time, from that Toronto period up to 1983, though for a while her working for me was unofficial—she was delegated by Mick to stick by me and help me out. In 1983, Mick decided he wanted to get rid of her and dismissed her from the Rolling Stones. He didn’t tell me. And when I found out, I wouldn’t have it. Not me, pal. I’m not going to throw off Jane Rose. I believed in her; she stayed with me in Toronto, she went through all this stuff with me and also she’d been acting as my manager. I rehired her that same day.

  Jane immediately became a force to be reckoned with. When Mick had refused to tour in 1986, Jane started setting up projects for me—first an ABC television special with Jerry Lee Lewis, then Jumpin’ Jack Flash with Aretha Franklin, then a record deal with Virgin, which had newly arrived in the United States, to make the Winos record. It was me and Jane, and Jane was driven. So now Mick wanted to insist that she couldn’t come on the tour. It was the same old problem—someone getting too close to me, making it difficult to control me, and now someone who kept thwarting Mick’s plans for controlling the whole shebang. Jane is tenacious; she’s my bulldog. She just will not let go. And she usually wins it. In this case she was fighting simply to have me consulted on important stuff, which Mick was always avoiding. So she flew directly in the face of Mick’s desire to command. Worse for her in this situation, and she’s had a doubly hard task because of it, she’s a chick.