Life (59 page)
One of those fabulous ironies now took place—and the joke was on me. I’d wanted Charlie to play the drums. Steve Jordan had wanted to do it, but I thought he wouldn’t know the music well enough—and I was wrong there, but then I still didn’t know him that well. So I told Steve, thanks, mate, but Charlie’s up for it. Then on another visit, Chuck wanted to play me something quite urgently. He put on a video of the jam at the end of Chuck’s induction into the Hall of Fame—and there was Steve, whacking away on the drums, though the camera angle cut his head off. But it’s rocking, and Chuck says, man, I like that drummer. Who’s that drummer? I want that drummer on the film. So I had to call up Steve and say, um, ah, there may be an opening. No doubt Steve enjoyed that. But there was a kicker. He’d better tell it.
Steve Jordan:
Chuck flies down to meet us in Jamaica and stay at the house in Ocho Rios, and we go to pick Chuck up at the airport. It’s a hot day, it’s like ninety plus, very hot. And everybody’s coming off the plane in shorts or bikinis, because they know they’re coming into sweltering weather. Chuck gets off the plane with a blazer, polyester flares and a briefcase. It was hysterical. Then we’re sitting around in the living room, and the drums are set up, and we’re supposed to play together. We have just a couple of little Champ amps and a couple of guitars so we can start banging out some stuff, and Chuck says, so where’s the drummer? And I had dreadlocks, I’m looking like Sly Dunbar. And Keith says, this is the drummer, it’s Steve, he’s the drummer. And Chuck goes, he’s my drummer? He looked at my dreadlocks and goes, he ain’t my drummer! Because there was no shot of my head [in the video he’d seen], and he didn’t know I had dreadlocks at the time. He was thinking I was some reggae drummer and he didn’t want to play with me. Then we started playing and he was fine.
I asked Johnnie Johnson, how did “Sweet Little Sixteen” and “Little Queenie” get written? And he said, well, Chuck would have all these words, and we’d sort of play a blues format and I would lay out the sequence. I said, Johnnie, that’s called songwriting. And you should have had at least fifty percent. I mean, you could have cut a deal and taken forty, but you wrote those songs with him. He said, I never thought about it that way; I just sort of did what I knew. Steve and I did the forensics on it, and we realized that everything Chuck wrote was in E-flat or C-sharp—piano keys! Not guitar keys. That was a dead giveaway. These are not great keys for guitar. Obviously most of these songs started off on piano and Chuck joined in, playing on the barre with his huge hands stretching across the strings. I got the sense that he followed Johnnie Johnson’s left hand!
Chuck’s hands are big enough; he’s got the stretch for all that barre chord playing. Very long, slender hands. It took me a couple of years to figure out how it was possible to sound like that with smaller hands. It was by going to see
Jazz on a Summer’s Day,
where Chuck plays “Sweet Little Sixteen.” I watched his hands, where they were moving and where the fingers were going, and discovered that if I transposed this into guitar keys, something with a root note, I could get my own swing on it. Just the way Chuck did. And the beautiful thing about Chuck Berry’s playing was it had such an effortless swing. None of this sweating and grinding away and grimacing, just pure, effortless swing, like a lion.
It was fantastic, to say the least, to put Chuck and Johnnie together. What was interesting was the way they reacted off each other. They hadn’t done it together for so long. Just by being there, Johnnie reminded Chuck of how it really went, and Chuck had to come up to Johnnie’s mark. He’d been playing with slouches for years, with the cheapest band in town, just going in and out with a briefcase. To a musician, playing below your mark is soul destroying, and he had been doing that for ages, to the point where he was completely cynical about the music. When Johnnie was rocking, Chuck would say, hey, remember this one? and switch to something really out of left field. It was weird and funny to watch Chuck catching up to Johnnie, and also with the band, because now he’s got Steve Jordan on drums, and he ain’t played with a drummer like that since goddamn ’58. I put a band together that came to find Chuck Berry, as much as that was possible. To present him with a band that was as good as his original. And I think we did it, in our own way, although he’s an elusive motherfucker. But I’m used to working with elusive motherfuckers.
One really brilliant thing that came out of that movie: I gave Johnnie Johnson a new life. He got a chance to play in front of people on a good piano. And for the rest of his life, he was playing all over the world and being liked. He had gigs; he was recognized. And more important than anything else, he had self-respect again, and he was seen for what he was, a brilliant player. He never thought anybody knew it was him on all those incredible records. His credits and royalties as a composer eluded him. Maybe it wasn’t Chuck’s fault; maybe it was Chess Records. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Johnnie never asked, so it was never given to him. Johnnie Johnson had another fifteen years of being heard, doing what he should have been doing and getting his kudos, not croaking behind a wheel.
I don’t knock people much (outside my intimate circle), but I’ve got to say Chuck Berry was a big disappointment. He was my numero uno hero. Shit, I thought, the cat’s got to be great to play like that, write like that, sing like that, sling the hash like that. He’s got to be a great cat. When we put his equipment together with ours for the film, I found out later that he charged the production company for the use of his amps. From the first bar of that first night of the show at the Fox Theatre in Saint Louis, Chuck threw all our carefully laid plans to the wind, playing totally different arrangements in different keys. It didn’t really matter. It was the best Chuck Berry live you’re ever going to get. As I said when I inducted him into the Hall of Fame, I’ve stolen every lick he ever played. So I owed it to Chuck to bite the bullet when he was at his most provocative, to play rope-a-dope to see it through. And he sure pushed me hard—you can see it in the film. It’s very difficult for me to allow myself to be bullied, and that is what Chuck was doing to me and to everybody else.
Yet what I think about Chuck deep down is what I wrote in a fax to him one day after hearing him on the radio for the millionth time:
T
he big betrayal by
M
ick,
which I find hard to forgive, a move that seemed almost deliberately designed to close down the Rolling Stones, was his announcement in March 1987 that he would go on a tour with his second solo album,
Primitive Cool
. I had been assuming we would tour in 1986 and was already frustrated by Mick’s delaying tactics. And now it all came clear. As Charlie put it, he’d folded up twenty-five years of the Rolling Stones. That’s what it looked like. The Stones didn’t tour at all from 1982 to 1989, and didn’t go into the studio together from ’85 to ’89.
Said Mick, “The Rolling Stones… cannot be, at my age and after spending all these years, the only thing in my life.… I certainly have earned the right to express myself in another way.” And he did. The way he expressed himself was to go on tour with another band singing Rolling Stones songs.
I really believed that Mick wouldn’t dare tour without the Stones. It was too hard a slap in the face to deliver to us. It was a death sentence, pending appeal. And for what? But I was wrong and I was outraged and hurt. Mick was touring.
So I let him have it, mostly in the press. An opening shot was, if he doesn’t want to go out with the Stones and then goes out with Schmuck and Ball’s band instead, I’ll slit his fuckin’ throat. And Mick responded loftily, “I love Keith, I admire him… but I don’t feel we can really work together anymore.” I can’t recall all the jibes and barbs I let loose—Disco Boy, Jagger’s Little Jerk Off Band, why doesn’t he join Aerosmith?—that’s the kind of stuff I fed the grateful tabloids. It got really bad. One day a reporter asked me, “When are you two going to stop bitching at each other?” “Ask the bitch,” I replied.
Then I thought, let the guy have his play. I took it like that. Let him go out there and fall flat on his face. He’d shown a total lack of friendship, of camaraderie, of everything that’s necessary to hold a band together. It was a dump. Charlie felt even worse about it than I did, I think.
I saw a clip of Mick’s show, and he had Keef look-alike guitar players stepping in tandem, doing guitar hero moves. When it was on the road, I was asked what I thought, and I said it was sad that a high percentage of his show was Rolling Stones songs. I said, if you’re going to do something on your own, do stuff off the two albums you did. Don’t pretend you’re a solo artist and have two chicks prancing around doing “Tumbling Dice.” The Rolling Stones spent a lot of time building up integrity, as much as you can get in the music industry. And the way Mick handled his solo career jeopardized all that, and it severely pissed me off.
Mick had misjudged something by a hundred miles. He took it for granted that any bunch of good musicians would be as compatible with him as the Rolling Stones. But he didn’t sound like himself. He had great players, but it’s kind of like the World Cup. England’s not Chelsea or Arsenal. It’s a different game, and you’ve got to work with a different team. Now you’ve hired the best hands around and you’ve got to form a relationship with them. Which is not Mick’s forte. He could certainly strut around and have the star on his dressing room door and treat the band like hirelings. But you can’t get good music that way.
A
fter that
I
decided,
fuck it, I want a band. I was determined to make music in Mick’s absence. I wrote a lot of songs. I began to sing in a new way on songs like “Sleep Tonight.” It was a deeper sound, one I’d never had before, and it worked well for the kind of ballads I had started writing. So I called in guys I’d always wanted to work with, and I knew the man to start with. You could almost say a collaboration had begun between me and Steve Jordan even back in Paris during the making of
Dirty Work
. Steve encouraged me; he heard something in my voice that he thought could make records. If I had a melody I was working on, I’d get him to sing it. And I thrive on collaboration—I need a reaction to think anything I’ve done is any good. So back in New York we started to hang, and we wrote a lot of songs together. Then, with his buddy and collaborator Charley Drayton, mainly a bass player but also another superbly gifted drummer, we started to jam at Woody’s house. Then Steve and I hung in Jamaica for a while, and he became my buddy. And Steve and I found, hey, we can write too! He’s the only one. It’s either going to be Jagger/Richards or Jordan/Richards.
Steve will tell how we came together.
Steve Jordan:
Keith and I were very close during those times when we were writing, before we put together a band, when there was just the two of us. We went into a studio called Studio 900, which was right around the corner from where I lived and up the street from where he lived in New York. And we would go in there and hunker down. The first time we went in there, we played twelve hours straight. Keith didn’t even go out and take a piss! It was unbelievable. It was just sheer love of music that bound us. But it was clearly liberating for him. He had so many ideas he wanted to get out. And certainly he was upset, or, at least when it came to writing, wearing his heart on his sleeve. Much of the music was very specific. It was about his old partner. “You Don’t Move Me” was a classic of its kind, which ended up on the first solo album,
Talk Is Cheap
.
All I had was the title, “You don’t move me anymore.” And I had no idea which way to shift it; I could be a guy talking to a chick or a chick talking to a guy. But then, when I got to the first verse, I realized where my mind was going. I suddenly had a focus, and it was Mick. Trying to be gracious at the same time. But
my
version of graciousness.
What makes you so greedy
Makes you so seedy.
Steve and I thought we ought to make a record and started to put together the core of the X-Pensive Winos—so named later on when I noticed a bottle of Château Lafite introduced as light refreshment in the studio. Well, nothing was too good for this amazing band of brothers. Steve asked me who I wanted to play with, and first up, on guitar I said Waddy Wachtel. And Steve said, you took the words, brother. I had known Waddy since the ’70s and I’d always wanted to play with him, one of the most tasteful, simpatico players I know. And he’s completely musical. Understanding of it, empathetic, nothing ever needing to be explained. He’s also got the most uncanny ultrasonic ear, still tuned high after years of bandstands. He was playing with Linda Ronstadt and he was playing with Stevie Nicks— chick bands—but I knew my man wanted to rock. So I called him and said simply, “I’m putting a band together, and you’re in it.” Steve agreed that Charley Drayton should be the bass player, and I think it was just a general consensus that Ivan Neville, from Aaron Neville’s family from New Orleans, should be the piano player. There was no audition process whatsoever.