Life (23 page)

“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.

I
n 1965,
O
ldham 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.

One of the first things Klein did was to renegotiate the contract between the Rolling Stones and Decca Records. And so one day we walked into the Decca office. A stage-managed piece of theater by Klein, the most obvious crass ploy. We got our instructions: “We’re going into Decca today and we’re going to work on these motherfuckers. We’re going to make a deal and we’re going to come out with the best record contract ever. Wear some shades and don’t say a thing,” said Klein. “Just troop in and stand at the back of the room and look at these old doddering farts. Don’t talk. I’ll do the talking.”

We were just there as intimidation, basically. And it worked. Sir Edward Lewis, the chairman of Decca, was behind the desk and Sir Edward was actually drooling! I mean not over us, he was just drooling. And then somebody would come along and pat him with a handkerchief. He was on his last legs, let’s face it. We just stood there with shades on. It was really the old guard and the new. They crumbled and we walked out of there with a deal bigger than the Beatles’. And this is where you’ve got to take your hat off to Allen. These five hoodlums then went back with Allen to the Hilton and glugged down the champagne and congratulated ourselves on our performance. And Sir Edward Lewis, he might have been drooling and everything, but he wasn’t stupid. He made a lot of money off of that deal himself. It was an incredibly successful deal for both parties. Which is what a deal is supposed to be. I’m still getting paid off of it; it’s called the Decca balloon.

With us, Klein was very much Colonel Tom Parker with Elvis. Hey, I’ll make the deals, anything you want, just ask me, you got it—patrician in his dealings with us and with money. You could always get some from him. If you wanted a gold-plated Cadillac, he’d give it to you. When I rang and asked him for £80,000 to buy a house on Chelsea Embankment near to Mick’s, so that we could wander back and forth and write songs, it came the next day. You just didn’t know the half of it. It was a paternalistic form of management that obviously doesn’t rub anymore these days, but it was still flying then. It was a different state of mind to now, where every fucking guitar pick is paid for and accounted for. It was rock and roll.

Klein was magnificent, at first, in the States. The next tour, under his management, was cranked up several gears. A private plane to get us about, huge billboards on Sunset Boulevard. Now we’re talking.

One hit requires another, very quickly, or you fast start to lose altitude. At that time you were expected to churn them out. “Satisfaction” is suddenly number one all over the world, and Mick and I are looking at each other, saying, “This is nice.” Then
bang bang bang
at the door, “Where’s the follow-up? We need it in four weeks.” And we were on the road doing two shows a day. You needed a new single every two months; you had to have another one all ready to shoot. And you needed a new sound. If we’d come along with another fuzz riff after “Satisfaction,” we’d have been dead in the water, repeating with the law of diminishing returns. Many a band has faltered and foundered on that rock. “Get Off of My Cloud” was a reaction to the record companies’ demands for more—leave me alone—and it was an attack from another direction. And it flew as well.

So we’re the song factory. We start to think like songwriters, and once you get that habit, it stays with you all your life. It motors along in your subconscious, in the way you listen. Our songs were taking on some kind of edge in the lyrics, or at least they were beginning to sound like the image projected onto us. Cynical, nasty, skeptical, rude. We seemed to be ahead in this respect at the time. There was trouble in America; all these young American kids, they were being drafted to Vietnam. Which is why you have “Satisfaction” in
Apocalypse Now
. Because the nutters took us with them. The lyrics and the mood of the songs fitted with the kids’ disenchantment with the grown-up world of America, and for a while we seemed to be the only provider, the soundtrack for the rumbling of rebellion, touching on those social nerves. I wouldn’t say we were the first, but a lot of that mood had an English idiom, through our songs, despite their being highly American influenced. We were taking the piss in the old English tradition.

This wave of recording and songwriting culminated in the album
Aftermath,
and many of the songs we wrote around this time had what you might call anti-girl lyrics—anti-girl titles too. “Stupid Girl,” “Under My Thumb,” “Out of Time,” “That Girl Belongs to Yesterday,” and “Yesterday’s Papers.”

Who wants yesterday’s girl?

Nobody in the world.

Maybe we were winding them up. And maybe some of the songs opened up their hearts a little, or their minds, to the idea of we’re women, we’re strong. But I think the Beatles and the Stones particularly did release chicks from the fact of “I’m just a little chick.” It was not intentional or anything. It just became obvious as you were playing to them. When you’ve got three thousand chicks in front of you that are ripping off their panties and throwing them at you, you realize what an awesome power you have unleashed. Everything they’d been brought up not to do, they could do at a rock-and-roll show.

The songs also came from a lot of frustration from our point of view. You go on the road for a month, you come back, and she’s with somebody else. Look at that stupid girl. It’s a two-way street. I know, too, that I was making unfavorable comparisons between the chicks at home who were driving us mad and the girls we fell in with on the tours who seemed so much less demanding. With English chicks it was you’re putting the make on her or she’s putting the make on you, yea or nay. I always found with black chicks that wasn’t the main issue. It was just comfortable, and if shit happened later, OK. It was just part of life. They were great because they were chicks, but they were much more like guys than English girls were. You didn’t mind them being around after the event. I remember being in the Ambassador Hotel with this black chick called Flo, who was my piece at the time. She’d take care of me. Love, no. Respect, yeah. I’d always remember because we’d laugh when we heard the Supremes singing, “Flo, she doesn’t know,” lying on the bed. And it always made us giggle. You take a little bit out of this one experience, and then a week later you’re down the road.

There was certainly that conscious element in those RCA days, from the end of ’65 to summer of ’66, of pushing the envelope in milder ways. There was “Paint It Black,” for example, recorded in March 1966, our sixth British number one. Brian Jones, now transformed into a multi-instrumentalist, having “given up playing the guitar,” played sitar. It was a different style to everything I’d done before. Maybe it was the Jew in me. It’s more to me like “Hava Nagila” or some Gypsy lick. Maybe I picked it up from my granddad. It’s definitely on a different curve to everything else. I’d moved around the world a bit. I was no longer strictly a Chicago blues man, had to spread the wings a bit, to come up with melodies and ideas, although I can’t say that we ever played Tel Aviv or Romania. But you start to latch on to different things. With songwriting, it’s a constant experiment. I’ve never done it consciously, like saying, I’ve got to explore such and such a thing. We were learning about making the album the center of attention—the form for the music instead of just singles. Making an LP usually consisted of having two or three single hits and their B-sides, and then filler. Everything was two minutes twenty-nine seconds for a single, otherwise you wouldn’t get played on the radio. I talked with Paul McCartney about this recently. We changed it: every track was a potential single; there was no filler. And if there was, it was an experiment. We’d use the extended time we had with an album just to make more of a statement.

If LPs hadn’t existed, probably the Beatles and ourselves wouldn’t have lasted more than two and a half years. You had to keep condensing, reducing what it was you wanted to say, to please the distributor. Otherwise radio stations wouldn’t play it. Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” was the breakthrough. “Goin’ Home” was eleven minutes long—“It ain’t gonna be a single. Can you extend and expand the product? Can it be done?” And that was really the main experiment. We said, you can’t edit this shit, it either goes out like it is or you’re done with it. I’ve no doubt Dylan felt the same about “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” or “Visions of Johanna.” The record got bigger—and could anybody listen to that much? It’s over three minutes. Can you keep their attention? Can you keep your audience? But it worked. The Beatles and ourselves probably made the album
the
vehicle for recording and hastened the demise of the single. It didn’t go away immediately; you always needed a hit single. It just extended you without your even really knowing it.

And because you’ve been playing every day, sometimes two or three shows a day, ideas are flowing. One thing feeds the other. You might be having a swim or screwing the old lady, but somewhere in the back of the mind, you’re thinking about this chord sequence or something related to a song. No matter what the hell’s going on. You might be getting shot at, and you’ll still be “Oh! That’s the bridge!” And there’s nothing you can do; you don’t realize it’s happening. It’s totally subconscious, unconscious or whatever. The radar is on whether you know it or not. You cannot switch it off. You hear this piece of conversation from across the room, “I just can’t stand you anymore”… That’s a song. It just flows in. And also the other thing about being a songwriter, when you realize you are one, is that to provide ammo, you start to become an observer, you start to distance yourself. You’re constantly on the alert. That faculty gets trained in you over the years, observing people, how they react to one another. Which, in a way, makes you weirdly distant. You shouldn’t really be doing it. It’s a little of Peeping Tom to be a songwriter. You start looking round, and everything’s a subject for a song. The banal phrase, which is the one that makes it. And you say, I can’t believe nobody hooked up on that one before! Luckily there are more phrases than songwriters,
just about
.

L
inda
K
eith was
the one that first broke my heart. It was my fault. I asked for it and I got it. The first look was the deepest, watching her, with all her tricks and movements, fearfully, from across the room and feeling that hit of longing, and thinking she was out of my league. I was sometimes in awe of the women I was with at the start, because they were the crème de la crème, and I’d come from the gutter as far as I was concerned. I didn’t believe these beautiful women wanted to say hello, let alone lie down with me! Linda and I met at a party given by Andrew Oldham, a party for some forgotten Jagger-Richards–written single. It was the party where Mick first met Marianne Faithfull. Linda was seventeen, strikingly beautiful, very dark hair, the perfect look for the ’60s: a blinder, very self-assured in her jeans and a white shirt. She was in the magazines, she was modeling, David Bailey was photographing her. Not that she was particularly interested. The girl just wanted something to do, to get out of the house.

When I first met Linda I was just astounded that she wanted to come along with me. Once again the girl puts the make on me. She bedded me, I didn’t bed her. She made a line straight for me. And I was totally, absolutely in love. We fell for each other. And the other surprise was that I was Linda’s first love, the first boy she ever fell for. She had been actively pursued by all kinds of people who she’d rejected. To this day I don’t understand it. Linda was the best friend of Andrew Oldham’s then almost-wife, Sheila Klein. These beautiful Jewish girls were a powerful cultural force in West Hampstead bohemia, which became my stomping ground, and Mick’s too for a couple of years. It centered around Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead, near where Decca Records was situated, and a few venues around there where we played. Linda’s father was Alan Keith, who for forty-four years presented a program on BBC radio called
Your Hundred Best Tunes.
Linda had been allowed to grow up fairly wild. She loved music, jazz, blues—a blues purist, in fact, who didn’t really approve of the Rolling Stones. She never did. She probably doesn’t now. She had been hanging out when she was very young at a place called the Roaring Twenties, a black club, when she was wandering around London in bare feet.