Life (20 page)

A lot of our gigs in ’64, ’65, were piggybacked onto these other tours that were already lined up. So for two weeks we’d be with Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles, the Vibrations and a contortionist called the Amazing Rubber Man. And then we’d switch onto another circuit. The first time I ever saw anybody lip-synch on stage was the Shangri-Las, “Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand).” Three New York chicks and they’re very handsome and everything like that, but you suddenly realize there’s no band, they’re actually singing to a tape machine. And there were the Green Men, also Ohio, I think. They actually painted themselves green to perform their duty. Whatever was the flavor of the week or the month. Some of them were damn good players, especially in the Midwest and the Southwest. Those little bands playing any given night in bars, never going to make it and they didn’t even want to, that’s the beauty of it. And some of them damn good pickers. Wealth of talent out there. Guys that could play much better than I could. Sometimes we were top of the bill, not always but usually. And with Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles there was young Sarah Dash, who had this woman chaperone, dressed in her Sunday church outfit. If you smiled you got a glare. They used to call her “Inch.” She was sweet and short. Twenty years later she’ll be back in my story.

And of course, beginning in ’65, I’m starting to get stoned—a lifelong habit now—which also intensified my impressions of what was going on. Just smoking the weed at the time. The guys I met on the road were, to me then, older men in their thirties, some in their forties, black bands that we were playing with. And we’d be up all night and we’d get to the gig and there would be these brothers in their sharkskin suits, the chain, the waistcoat, the hair gel, and they’re all shaved and groomed, so fit and sweet, and we’d just drag our asses in. One day I was feeling so ragged getting to the gig, and these brothers were so together, and shit, they were working the same schedule we were. So I said to one of these guys, a horn player, “Jesus, how do you look so good every day?” And he pulled his coat back and reached into his waistcoat pocket and said, “You take one of these, you smoke one of those.” Best bit of advice. He gave me a little white pill, a white cross, and a joint. This is how we do it: you take one of these and you smoke one of these.

But keep it dark! That was the line I left the room with. Now we’ve told you, keep it dark. And I felt like I’d just been let into a secret society. Is it all right if I tell the other guys? Yeah, but keep it amongst yourselves. Backstage it had been going on from time immemorial. The joint really got my attention. The joint got my attention so much that I forgot to take the Benzedrine. They made good speed in those days. Oh yeah, it was pure. You could get hold of speed at any truck stop; truck drivers relied upon it. Stop over here, pull over to some truck stop and ask for Dave. Give me a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks and a bag. Gimme a pigfoot and a bottle of beer.

2120
S
outh
M
ichigan
A
venue
was hallowed ground—the headquarters of Chess Records in Chicago. We got there on a last-minute arrangement made by Andrew Oldham, at a moment when the first half of our first US tour seemed like a semidisaster. There in the perfect sound studio, in the room where everything we’d listened to was made, perhaps out of relief or just the fact that people like Buddy Guy, Chuck Berry and Willie Dixon were wandering in and out, we recorded fourteen tracks in two days. One of them was Bobby Womack’s “It’s All Over Now,” our first number one hit. Some people, Marshall Chess included, swear that I made this up, but Bill Wyman can back me up. We walked into Chess studios, and there’s this guy in black overalls painting the ceiling. And it’s Muddy Waters, and he’s got whitewash streaming down his face and he’s on top of a ladder. Marshall Chess says, “Oh, we never had him painting.” But Marshall was a boy then; he was working in the basement. And also Bill Wyman told me he actually remembers Muddy Waters taking our amplifiers from the car into the studio. Whether he was being a nice guy or he wasn’t selling records then, I know what the Chess brothers were bloody well like—if you want to stay on the payroll, get to work. Actually meeting your heroes, your idols, the weirdest thing is that most of them are so humble, and very encouraging. “Play that lick again,” and you realize you’re sitting with Muddy Waters. And of course later I got to know him. Over many years I frequently stayed at his house. In those early trips I think it was Howlin’ Wolf’s house I stayed at one night, but Muddy was there. Sitting in the South Side of Chicago with these two greats. And the family life, loads of kids and relatives walking in and out. Willie Dixon’s there.…

In America people like Bobby Womack used to say, “The first time we heard you guys we thought you were black guys. Where did these motherfuckers come from?” I can’t figure that out myself, why Mick and I in that damn town should come up with such a sound—except that if you soak it up in a damp tenement in London all day with the intensity that we did, it ain’t that different from soaking it up in Chicago. That’s all we played, until we actually became it. We didn’t sound English. And I think it surprised us too.

Each time we played—and I still do this at certain times—I’d just turn round and say, “Is that noise just coming from him there, and me?” It’s almost as if you’re riding a wild horse. In that respect we’re damn lucky we got to work with Charlie Watts. He was playing very much like black drummers playing with Sam and Dave and the Motown stuff, or the soul drummers. He has that touch. A lot of the time very correct, with the sticks through the fingers, which is how most drummers now play. If you try to get savage you’re off. It’s a bit like surfing; it’s OK while you’re up there. And because of that style of Charlie’s, I could play the same way. One thing drives another in a band; it all has to melt together. Basically it’s all liquid.

The most bizarre part of the whole story is that having done what we intended to do in our narrow, purist teenage brains at the time, which was to turn people on to the blues, what actually happened was we turned American people back on to their own music. And that’s probably our greatest contribution to music. We turned white America’s brain and ears around. And I wouldn’t say we were the only ones—without the Beatles probably nobody would have broken the door down. And they certainly weren’t bluesmen.

American black music was going along like an express train. But white cats, after Buddy Holly died and Eddie Cochran died, and Elvis was in the army gone wonky, white American music when I arrived was the Beach Boys and Bobby Vee. They were still stuck in the past. The past was six months ago; it wasn’t a long time. But shit changed. The Beatles were the milestone. And then they got stuck inside their own cage. “The Fab Four.” Hence, eventually, you got the Monkees, all this ersatz shit. But I think there was a vacuum somewhere in white American music at the time.

When we first got to America and to LA, there was a lot of Beach Boys on the radio, which was pretty funny to us—it was before
Pet Sounds
—it was hot rod songs and surfing songs, pretty lousily played, familiar Chuck Berry licks going on. “Round, round get around / I get around,” I thought that was brilliant. It was later on, listening to
Pet Sounds,
well, it’s all a little bit overproduced for me, but Brian Wilson had something. “In My Room,” “Don’t Worry Baby.” I was more interested in their B-sides, the ones he slipped in. There was no particular correlation with what we were doing so I could just listen to it on another level. I thought these are very well-constructed songs. I took easily to the pop song idiom. I’d always listened to everything, and America opened it all out—we were hearing records there that were regional hits. We’d get to know local labels and local acts, which is how we came across “Time Is on My Side,” in LA, sung by Irma Thomas. It was a B-side of a record on Imperial Records, a label we’d have been aware of because it was independent and successful and based on Sunset Strip.

I’ve talked to guys since like Joe Walsh of the Eagles and many other white musicians about what they listened to when they were growing up, and it was all very provincial and narrow and depended on the local, usually white, FM radio station. Bobby Keys reckons he can tell where someone came from by their musical tastes. Joe Walsh heard us play when he was at high school, and he’s told me that it had a huge effect on him simply because nobody he knew had ever heard anything like that because there wasn’t anything. He was listening to doo-wop and that was about it. He had never heard Muddy Waters. Amazingly, he was first exposed to the blues, he said, by hearing us. He also decided there and then that the minstrel’s life was for him, and now you can’t go into any diner without hearing him weaving that guitar of his on “Hotel California.”

Jim Dickinson, the southern boy who played piano on “Wild Horses,” was exposed to black music through the powerful and only black radio station, WDIA, when he was growing up in Memphis, so when he went to college in Texas he had a musical education that exceeded that of anybody he met there. But he never saw any black musicians, even though he lived in Memphis, except once he saw the Memphis Jug Band with Will Shade and Good Kid on the washboard, when they were playing in the street when he was nine. But the racial barriers were so severe that those kinds of players were inaccessible to him. Then Furry Lewis —at whose funeral he played—and Bukka White and others were being brought out to play via the folk revival. I do think maybe the Stones had a lot to do with making people twiddle their knobs a little more.

When we put out “Little Red Rooster,” a raw Willie Dixon blues with slide guitar and all, it was a daring move at the time, November 1964. We were getting no-no’s from the record company, management, everyone else. But we felt we were on the crest of a wave and we could push it. It was almost in defiance of pop. In our arrogance at the time, we wanted to make a statement. “I am the little red rooster / Too lazy to crow for day.” See if you can get that to the top of the charts, motherfucker. Song about a chicken. Mick and I stood up and said, come on, let’s push it. This is what we’re fucking about. And the floodgates burst after that, suddenly Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf and Buddy Guy are getting gigs and working. It was a breakthrough. And the record got to number one. And I’m absolutely sure what we were doing made Berry Gordy at Motown capable of pushing his stuff elsewhere, and it certainly rejuvenated Chicago blues as well.

I keep a notebook where I write down sketches and song ideas, and it contains this:

JUKE JOINT… ALABAMA? GEORGIA?

Finally I’m in my element! An incredible band is wailing on a stage decorated with phosphorescent paint, the dance floor is moving as one, so does the sweat and the ribs cooking out back. The only thing that makes me stand out is that I’m
white
!
Wonderfully, no one notices this aberration. I am accepted, I’m made to feel
so
warm. I am in heaven!

Most towns, like white Nashville, for example, by ten o’clock were ghost towns. We were working with black guys, the Vibrations, Don Bradley, I think his name was. The most amazing act, they could do everything. They were doing somersaults while they were playing. “What are you going to do after the show?” This is already an invitation. So, get in the cab and we go across the tracks and it’s just starting to happen. There’s food going, everybody’s rocking and rolling, everybody’s having a good time, and it was such a contrast from the white side of town, it always sticks in my memory. You could hang there with ribs, drink, smoke. And big mamas, for some reason they always looked upon us as thin and frail people. So they started to mama us, which was all right with me. Shoved into the middle of two enormous breasts… “You need a rubdown, boy?” “OK, anything you say, mama.” Just the free-and-easiness of it. You wake up in a house full of black people who are being so incredibly kind to you, you can’t believe it. I mean, shit, I wish this happened at home. And this happened in every town. You wake up, where am I? And there’s a big mama there, and you’re in bed with her daughter, but you get breakfast in bed.

The first time I stared into a gun barrel was in the men’s room of the Civic Auditorium (I believe) in Omaha, Nebraska. It was in the fist of a big grizzled cop. I was with Brian, backstage at a sound check. We used to drink Scotch and Coke at the time. Anyhow, we took our paper cups with us and answered the call of nature, cup in hand. Happily we splashed away. I heard the door open behind us. “OK, turn around slowly,” a voice wheezed. “Fuck off,” Brian said. “I mean now,” came the wheeze. Shaking off the drips, we looked around. A massive cop with a huge revolver in his huge fist fixed us with a menacing regard. Silence ruled as Brian and I stared at the black hole. “This is a public building. No alcoholic beverages allowed! You will tip the contents of your cups into the john. Now! No quick moves. Do it.” Brian and I cracked up but did as we were told. He did have the upper hand. Brian said something about heavy-handed overreaction, which only infuriated the old bugger to the point that the barrel began to tremble. So we blabbered about being unaware of the city ordinance, to which he barked out something about ignorance not being a defense in the eyes of the law. I was about to ask how he knew we were drinking booze but thought better of it. We had another bottle in the dressing room.

It was soon after that that I picked up a Smith & Wesson .38 special. It was the Wild West, and still is! I picked it up in a truck stop for twenty-five dollars, plus ammo. Thus began my illicit relationship with that venerable firm. I’m not on their books! Quite a few of the guys we were traveling with were carrying shooters. They were fucking hard cats who I worked with. I remember that other side of it. Pools of blood oozing out of dressing rooms and realizing there’s a beating going on and you don’t want to get involved. But the biggest horror of all was seeing the cops turn up. Especially backstage. You should have seen some of the bands run, baby. A lot of the cats on the road were on the run for one reason or another. Probably minor offenses, like not paying their alimony or auto theft. You were not working with saints here. They were good players and they could pick up a gig and disappear amongst the minstrels. They were streetwise like motherfuckers. Backstage, a squad of cops would arrive with a warrant for somebody that was playing guitar in some band. It was kind of like the press-gang had arrived. Oh, my God! The panic… You’d see Ike Turner’s piano player zooming down the stairs.