Life (66 page)

On the country end, Willie Nelson and I are close, and Merle Haggard too. I’ve done three or four TV shows with Merle and Willie. Willie’s fantastic. He has a guy with a turned-over Frisbee, rolling, rolling, rolling. A beautiful weedhead, is Willie. I mean straight out of bed. At least I
wait
ten minutes in the morning. What a songwriter. He’s one of the best. From Texas too. Willie and I just get along. I know that he’s very concerned about the agriculture of America and the small farmer. Most of the stuff that I’ve done with him has been in that cause. The conglomerates are taking over, that’s what he’s fighting and he’s putting up a damn good fight. Willie’s a true heart. Unfazed, unswerving and true to his cause, no matter what. I slowly realized I grew up listening to his music, because he was a songwriter way before he started performing—“Crazy” and “Funny How Time Slips Away.” I’ve always been slightly in awe, in a way, to be asked by people like that, that I’ve already been on my knees before, “Hey, you want to play with me?” Are you kidding?

A case in point was the great sessions at Levon Helm’s home in Woodstock, New York, in 1996 to play on
All the King’s Men,
with Scotty Moore, Elvis’s guitar player, and D. J. Fontana, his drummer on the early Sun recordings. This was serious stuff. The Rolling Stones are one thing, but to hold your own with guys that turned you on is another. These cats are not necessarily very forgiving of other musicians. They expect the best and they’re going to have to get it—you really can’t go in there and flake. Bands that work behind George Jones and Jerry Lee Lewis, these are top, top hands. You have to be on your mark. I love that. I don’t often work in the country area. But that’s been the other side of it to me; there’s been blues and there’s been country music. And let’s face it, those are the two vital ingredients of rock and roll.

Another great singer and a girl after my own heart—as well as my bride in a rock-and-roll “marriage”—is Etta James. She’d been making records from the early ’50s, when she was a doo-wop singer. She’s expanded into every range since then. She has one of those voices that when you heard it on the radio, or you saw an Etta James record in the store, you bought it. She’d sold you. And on June 14, 1978, we played together. She was on a bill with the Stones at the Capitol Theatre, Passaic, New Jersey. Now, Etta had been a junkie. So we found a certain reciprocation almost immediately. At the time she was clean, I think. But that doesn’t really matter. It takes one look in the eye for one to know another. Incredibly strong, Etta, with a voice that could take you to hell or take you to heaven. And we hung in a dressing room, and like all ex-junkies, we talked about the junk. And why did we do this, the usual soul-searching. This culminated in a backstage wedding, which in show business terms is like, you get married but you’re not really married. You exchange vows and stuff, on the top of the backstage stairs. And she gave me a ring, I gave her a ring and actually that’s where I decided her name’s Etta Richards. She’ll know what I mean.

W
hen
T
heodora and
A
lexandra
were born, Patti and I were living in an apartment on Fourth Street in New York City, and it seemed to us that Fourth Street was not the place to bring up children. So we headed for Connecticut and started building a house on land I’d bought. The geology is not unlike Central Park in New York—great flat slabs and boulders of gray slate and granite emerging from the earth, all enclosed by lush woodland. We had to blast tons of rock to build the foundation, hence my name for the house— Camelot Costalot. We didn’t move in until 1991. The house sits alongside a nature preserve that is an old Indian burial ground, a happy hunting ground of the Iroquois, and the woods have a primeval serenity about them that would suit the ancestral spirits. I have a key that unlocks a gate from my garden into the forest, and we go for walks there and roam about.

There’s a very deep lake in these woods with a waterfall coming down. I was there one day with George Recile when we were working together around 2001. And you’re not supposed to go fishing there, so we’re like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and we’re trying to catch these incredible fish, called oscars, big and very tasty. George is an expert fisherman and he said, they’re not supposed to be anywhere north of Georgia. So I said, let’s put in another hook! And suddenly I’m getting this incredible tug on the line. And this enormous snapping turtle, as big as an ox, green and slimy, comes lumbering out with my fish in its mouth! It was like confronting a dinosaur. The look of horror on my face and George’s, I wish I’d had a camera. This guy’s about ready to pop and snap—his neck can come out three or four feet—he’s enormous; he must be about three hundred years old. George and I reverted to cavemen. My God! This motherfucker’s serious. I dropped the rod, picked up this rock and cracked him on the shell with it. “Goddamn, it’s you or me, pal.” They’re vicious. They can bite your foot off. And he went back down. Creatures that lurk in the deep, immense and old, are truly frightening, to chill your bones. He’s probably been down there so long the last time he came up he was meeting Iroquois.

Aside from poaching, which I haven’t done since then, I lead a gentleman’s life. Listen to Mozart, read many, many books. I’m a voracious reader. I’ll read anything. And if I don’t like it, I’ll toss it. When it comes to fiction, it’s George MacDonald Fraser, the Flashmans, and Patrick O’Brian. I fell in love with his writing straightaway, at first with
Master and Commander.
It wasn’t primarily the Nelson and Napoleonic period, more the human relationships. He just happened to have that backdrop. And of course having characters isolated in the middle of the goddamn sea gives more scope. Just great characterizations, which I still cherish. It’s about friendship, camaraderie. Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin always remind me a bit of Mick and me. History, in particular the British Navy during that period, is my subject. The army wasn’t up to much then. It was the navy and the guys that got roped into it against their will, the press-gang. And to make this machine work, you had to weld this bunch of unwilling people into a functioning team, which reminds me of the Rolling Stones. I’ve always got some historical work on the go. The Nelson era and World War II are near the top of my list, but I do the ancient Romans too, and a certain amount of British colonial stuff, the Great Game and all that. I have a fine library furnished with these works, with dark wooden shelves reaching to the ceiling. This is where I hole up and where one day I came to grief.

Nobody believes that I was looking for a book on anatomy by Leonardo da Vinci. It’s a big book, and the big books are way up on the top shelf. I got a ladder and went up there. There are little pins that hold these shelves up, and heavy, heavy volumes up there. And as I touched the shelf, a pin fell out and every fucking volume came down on my face.
Boom.
I hit the desk with my head and I went out. Woke up I don’t know how much time later, maybe half an hour, and it’s hurting. It’s an ouch. I’m surrounded by huge tomes. I would have laughed at the irony, except I couldn’t because it was hurting too much. Talk about “you wanted to find out about anatomy…” I crawled up the stairs, gasping for air. I just thought, I’ll get up to the old lady and see what’s what in the morning. The morning was even worse. Patti asked, “What’s the matter?” “Oh, I just fell over. I’m OK.” I was still gasping. It took me three days to say to Patti, “Darling, I’ve got to have this checked out.” And I wasn’t OK—I’d punctured a lung. Our European tour, set to open in Berlin in May 1998, was delayed a month— one of the only times I’ve held up a tour.

A year later, I did the same to the other side. We’d just arrived in Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands and I’d put on some sun oil. Gaily I leapt up on some earthenware pot to look over the fence, and the oil did me in. I slipped—
crack, bang.
The wife had some Percodan, so I just took a load of painkillers. And I didn’t know that I’d fractured three ribs on one side and perforated the other lung until a month later, when I had to do a medical for a tour. You’ve got to be checked out, do all the tests on the treadmill and all that crap. And then they X-ray you—“Oh, by the way, you fractured three ribs and perforated a lung on the right side. But it’s all healed now, so it doesn’t matter.”

W
hen
I
’m at home
I cook for myself, usually bangers and mash (recipe to follow), with some variation on the mash but not much. Or some other basic of English nosh. I have quite solitary eating habits at odd hours, born out of mealtimes on the road being the opposite of everyone else’s. I only eat when I feel like it, which is almost unheard-of in our culture. You don’t want to eat before you go on stage, and then when you get off, you’ve got to give it an hour or two before the adrenaline subsides, which is usually around three in the morning.

You’ve got to hit it when you’re hungry. We’ve been trained from babyhood to have three square meals a day, the full factory–industrial revolution idea of how you’re supposed to eat. Before then it was never like that. You’d have a little bit often, every hour. But when they had to regulate us all, “OK, mealtime!” That’s what school’s about. Forget the geography and history and mathematics, they’re teaching you how to work in a factory. When the hooter goes, you eat. For office work or even if you’re being trained to be a prime minister, it’s the same thing. It’s very bad for you to stuff all that crap in at once. Better to have a bit here, a mouthful there, every few hours a bite or two. The human body can deal with it better than shoving a whole load of crap down your gob in an hour.

I’ve been cooking bangers all my life and I only just found out from this lady on TV that you have to put bangers in a cold pan. No preheating. Preheating agitates them, that’s why they’re called bangers. Very slowly, start them off cold. And then just be prepared to have a drink and wait. And it works. It doesn’t shrivel them up; they’re plump. It’s just a matter of patience. Cooking is a matter of patience. When I was cooking
Goats Head Soup,
I did it very slowly.

M
Y
R
ECIPE FOR
B
ANGERS AND
M
ASH

1. First off, find a butcher who makes his sausages
fresh.

2. Fry up a mixture of onions and bacon and seasoning.

3. Get the spuds on the boil with a dash of vinegar, some chopped onions and salt (seasoning to taste). Chuck in some peas with the spuds. (Throw in some chopped carrots too, if you like.) Now we’re talking.

4. Now, you have a choice of grilling or broiling your bangers or frying. Throw them on low heat with the simmering bacon and onions (or in the cold pan, as the TV lady said, and add the onions and bacon in a bit) and let the fuckers rock gently, turning every few minutes.

5. Mash yer spuds and whatever.

6. Bangers are now fat free (as possible!).

7. Gravy if desired.

8. HP sauce, every man to his own.

My granddad Gus made the best egg and chips you’d ever believe in the world. I’m still trying to get up to the mark on that, and shepherd’s pie, which is an ongoing art. Nobody’s actually made the quintessential, absolute shepherd’s pie; they all come out different. My way of doing it has evolved over the years. The basic thing is just great ground meat and throw in some peas, some carrots, but the trick I was taught by, bless his soul, he’s gone now, Big Joe Seabrook, who was my minder, is before you spread the spuds on the top, you chop up some more onions, because the onions you’ve used to cook with the meat have been reduced, and he was damn right—it just gives you that extra je ne sais quoi.… Just a tip, folks.

Tony King, who has worked with the Stones, and with Mick, and on and off as a publicist since we began in the ’60s, records the last occasion when somebody ate my shepherd’s pie without asking.

Tony King:
In Toronto, on the Steel Wheels tour, there was a shepherd’s pie delivered to the lounge and the security guys all tucked into it, and Keith arrived and he realized that someone had broken the crust ahead of him. He demanded to know the names of all the people who had eaten the shepherd’s pie. So Jo Wood’s running around going, “Did you eat the shepherd’s pie?” and everyone’s denying all knowledge, except the security people, of course, who’d had loads of it and couldn’t deny it. I denied all knowledge too, even though I’d had a piece. Keith said, “I’m not going on stage until another one is produced.” So they had to send out for another shepherd’s pie to be cooked and delivered. I had to say to Mick, “Your show is running late because Keith doesn’t want to go on stage until he gets a shepherd’s pie.” Mick said, “You can’t be serious.” And I said, “I think I can on this occasion.” There was this scene in the backstage area, where on the walkie-talkies somebody actually said, “The shepherd’s pie is in the building!” And it got carried through the lounge and dropped into Keith’s dressing room, with some HP sauce, naturally. And he just stuck a knife in it and didn’t bother eating any of it and went on stage. Just wanted to cut the crust. Ever since then he’s always had his own delivered to his dressing room so he doesn’t have to worry.

It’s now famous, my rule on the road. Nobody touches the shepherd’s pie until I’ve been in there. Don’t bust my crust, baby. It’s written into the contract. If you come into Keith Richards’s room and he’s got a shepherd’s pie on the warmer, bubbling away, if it’s still pristine, the only one that can bust the crust is me. Greedy motherfuckers, they’ll come in and just scoop up anything.

I put that sort of shit about just for fun, quite honestly. Because I very rarely eat before I go on stage. It’s the worst thing you can do, at least for me. Barely digested food in your stomach and you’ve got to head out there and do “Start Me Up” and another two hours to go. I just want it there in case I realize I haven’t eaten that day and I might need a bit of fuel. It’s just my particular metabolism; I’ve just got to have enough fuel.