Life (12 page)

Alexis’s band was damn good. Cyril Davies was a hell of a harp player, one of the best harp players you’ve ever heard. Cyril was a panel beater from Wembley, and his manners and his way of coming on were exactly what you’d expect of a panel beater from Wembley, with a huge thirst for bourbon. He had this aura because he’d actually been to Chicago and he’d seen Muddy and Little Walter so he came back with a halo round him. Cyril didn’t like anybody. He didn’t like us because he felt the winds of change coming and he didn’t want it. He died very soon afterwards, in 1964, but he’d already broken away from Alexis’s band in
1963
to form the R&B All-Stars, with a weekly gig at the Marquee.

The Ealing Club was a trad jazz club that Blues Incorporated took over on Saturday nights. It was a funky room, sometimes ankle deep in condensation. It was under Ealing tube station, and the roof over the stage was one of those thick glass cobbled pavements, so there’s all these people walking over your head. And every now and again, Alexis would say, “You want to come up and play?” And you’re playing an electric guitar and you’re ankle deep in water, and you’re just hoping everything’s grounded right, otherwise sparks will fly. My equipment was always on a knife edge. When I got round to wire strings, they were expensive. If one broke, you’d keep another one and then loop them together and extend it and put it back on, and it would work! If the string could at least cover the fret board, you knotted it just above the nut and then extended it to cover the tuning pegs. It did affect tuning to a certain extent! Half a string here and half a string there. Thank God for scouting and knotting.

I had a thing called a DeArmond pickup. And it was unique. You could clamp it above the soundboard and it slid up and down on a spindle. You didn’t have a bass pickup or a treble pickup. If you wanted a softer sound, you slid the fucker up the spindle towards the neck and so you got a bassier sound up there. And if you wanted treble, you slid it down the pole again. And of course this played havoc with its wiring. I used to carry a soldering kit for emergencies, because you’d be sliding this thing up and down, and it was just so breakable. I was always soldering and rewiring behind the amp—a Little Giant amp the size of a radio. I was one of the first to get an amp. We were all using tape recorders before that. Dick Taylor used to plug into his sister’s Bush record player. My first amp was a radio; I just took that apart. My mother was pissed off. The radio’s not working because I’ve got it apart and I’m plugging,
zzzz,
just trying to get a sound. In that respect good training for later on—honing your sound, matching guitars to amps. We started from scratch, with the tubes and valves. Sometimes if you take one valve out, you can get this really raunchy, dirty sound because you’re pushing the machine and it’s got to work overtime. If you put the double-A valve back in, then you’ve got this sweeter sound. That’s how I got electrocuted so many times. I kept forgetting to unplug the fucker before I started poking around in the back.

W
e first met
Brian Jones at the Ealing Jazz Club. He was calling himself Elmo Lewis. He wanted to be Elmore James at the time. “You’ll have to get a tan and put on a few inches, boy.” But slide guitar was a real novelty in England, and Brian played it that night. He played “Dust My Broom,” and it was electrifying. He played it beautifully. We were very impressed with Brian. I think Mick was the first one to go up and talk to him, and discovered that he had his own band, most of whom deserted him in the next few weeks.

Mick and I had come up together to the club and done Chuck Berry numbers, which annoyed Cyril Davies, who thought it was rock and roll and he couldn’t play it anyway. When you start to play in public and you’re playing with some guys that have done it before, you’re low in the hierarchy and you always feel you’re being tested. You’ve got to be there, on time, your equipment’s got to be working, which it rarely was in my case. You have to measure up. Suddenly you’re in with the big boys, you’re not just pissing around in school gyms. Shit, this is pro. At least semipro; pro with no money.

I
left art school
around this time. At the end your teacher says, “Well, I think this is pretty good,” and they send you off to J. Walter Thompson and you have an appointment, and by then, in a way you know what’s coming—three or four real smarty-pants, with the usual bow ties. “Keith, is it? Nice to see you. Show us what you’ve got.” And you lay the old folder out. “Hmmmm. I say, we’ve had a good look at this, Keith, and it does show some promise. By the way, do you make a good cup of tea?” I said yes, but not for you. I walked off with my folio—it was green, I remember—and I dumped it in the garbage can when I got downstairs. That was my final attempt to join society on their terms. The second pink slip. I didn’t have the patience or the facility to be a hack in an advertising agency. I was going to end up the tea boy. I wasn’t very nice to them in the interview. Basically I wanted an excuse to be thrown out on my own and thrown back on music. I think, OK, I’ve got two free years, not in the army. I’m going to be a bluesman.

I went to the Bricklayers Arms, a seedy pub in Soho, for the first time for the first rehearsal for what turned out to be the Stones. I think it was May of ’62, lovely summer evening. Just off Wardour Street. Strip Alley. I get there, I’ve got my guitar with me. And as I get there the pub’s just opened. Typical brassy blond old barmaid, not many customers, stale beer. She sees the guitar and says, “Upstairs.” And I can hear this boogie-woogie piano, this unbelievable Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons stuff. I’m suddenly transported in a way. I feel like a musician and I haven’t even got there! I could have been in the middle of Chicago, in the middle of Mississippi. I’ve got to go up there and meet this man who’s playing this, and I’ve got to play with him. And if I don’t measure up, it’s over. That was really my feeling as I walked up those stairs,
creak creak creak.
In a way I walk up those stairs and come down a different person.

Ian Stewart was the only one in the room, with this horsehair sofa that was split, horsehairs hanging out. He’s got on a pair of Tyrolean leather shorts. He’s playing an upright piano and he’s got his back to me because he’s looking out of the window where he’s got his bike chained to a meter, making sure it’s not nicked. At the same time he’s watching all the strippers going from one club to another with their little round hatboxes and wigs on. “Phoar, look at that.” All the while this Leroy Carr stuff is rumbling off his fingers. And I walk in with this brown plastic guitar case. And just stand there. It was like meeting the headmaster. All I could hope for was that my amp would work.

Stu had gone down to the Ealing Club because he’d seen an ad Brian Jones had placed in
Jazz News
in the spring of ’62 for players wanting to start an R&B band. Brian and Stu started rehearsing with a bunch of different musicians; everybody would chip in two quid for an upstairs room in a pub. He’d seen Mick and me at the Ealing Club doing a couple of numbers and invited us along. In fact, to give Mick his due, Stu remembered that Mick had been coming already to his rehearsals, and Mick said, “I’m not doin’ it if Keith’s not doin’ it.” “Oh, you made it, did you?” And I started with him and he says, “You’re not gonna play that rock-and-roll shit, are ya?” Stu had massive reservations and he was suspicious of rock and roll. I’m “Yeah,” and then I start to play some Chuck Berry. And he’s “Oh, you know Johnnie Johnson?” who was Chuck’s piano player, and we started to sling the hash, boogie-woogie. That’s all we did. And then the other guys slowly started to turn up. It wasn’t just Mick and Brian. Geoff Bradford, a lovely slide blues guitar player who used to play with Cyril Davies. Brian Knight, a blues fan and his big number was “Walk On, Walk On.” He had that down and that was it. So Stu could have played with all these other cats, and actually we were third in line for this setup. Mick and I were brought in as maybes, tryouts. These cats were playing clubs with Alexis Korner; they knew shit. We were brand-new in town in those terms. And I realized that Stu had to make up his mind whether he was going to go for these real traditional folk blues players. Because by then I’d played some hot boogie-woogie and some Chuck Berry. My equipment had worked. And by the end of the evening I knew there was a band in the making. Nothing was said, but I knew that I’d got Stu’s attention. Geoff Bradford and Brian Knight were a very successful blues band after the Stones, Blues by Six. But they were basically traditional players who had no intention of playing anything else except what they knew: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy. Stu I think that day realized by the time I’d sung him “Sweet Little Sixteen” and “Little Queenie,” and he’d got behind me that somehow a deal had been made without anything being said. We just hit a chord together. “So I’ll be back then, right?” “See you next Thursday.”

Ian Stewart. I’m still working for him. To me the Rolling Stones is his band. Without his knowledge and organization, without the leap he made from where he was coming from, to take a chance on playing with this bunch of kids, we’d be nowhere. I don’t know what the attraction was with Stu and me. But he was absolutely the main impetus behind what happened next. Stu to me was a much older man—actually only by about three or four years, but at that time so it seemed. And he knew people. I knew nothing. I’d just come from the sticks.

I think he’d started to enjoy hanging around with us. He just felt there was some energy there. So somehow these blues players fell away and it was Brian, Mick, Stu and me, and Dick Taylor on bass. At first, that was the skeleton and we were looking for a drummer. We said, “God, we’d love that Charlie Watts if we could afford him”—because we all thought Charlie Watts was a God-given drummer—and Stu put the feelers out. And Charlie said I’d love any gigs I can get, but I need money to hump these drums on the tube. He said if you can come back to me and say you’ve got a couple of solid gigs a week, I’m in.

Stu was solid, formidable looking, with a huge protruding jaw, though he was a good-looking guy. I’m sure much of his character was influenced by his looks, and people’s reactions to them, from when he was a kid. He was detached, very dry, down-to-earth and full of incongruous phrases. Driving at speed, for example, would be “going at a vast rate of knots.” His natural authority over us, which never changed, was expressed as “Come on, angel drawers,” “my little three-chord wonders” or “my little shower of shit.” He hated some of the rock-and-roll stuff I played. He hated Jerry Lee Lewis for years—“Oh, it’s all just histrionics.” Eventually he softened on Jerry, he had to crumble and admit that Jerry Lee had one of the best left hands he’d ever heard. Flamboyance and showmanship were not in Stu’s bag. You played in clubs, it had nothing to do with showing off.

By day Ian worked in a suit and tie at Imperial Chemical Industries near Victoria Embankment, and this is what helped to fund our rehearsal room fees later on. He put his money where his mouth was, at least where his heart was, because he didn’t talk a lot about it. The only fantasy Stu ever had was his insistence that he was the rightful heir to Pittenweem, which is a fishing village across from St. Andrews golf course. He always felt cheated, usurped through some weird Scottish lineage. You can’t argue with a guy like that. Why wasn’t the piano loud enough? Look, you’re talking to the laird of Pittenweem. In other words, this is not worth discussing, you know? I once said, “What’s the tartan, then, of the Stewart clan?” He said, “Ooh, black-and-white check with various colors.” Stu was very dry. He saw the funny side of things. And it was Stu who had to pick up all the crap after the mayhem. There were loads of guys that were technically ten times better, but with his feel on the left hand, they could never get to where he was. He might have been the laird of Pittenweem, but his left hand came out of the Congo.

B
y this time
Brian’s got three babies with three different women and he’s living in London with the latest, Pat, and the kid, having finally left Cheltenham with shotguns firing at his heels. They were living in this damp basement in Powis Square with fungus growing up the wall. And that’s where I first heard Robert Johnson, and came under Brian’s tutorship and delved back into the blues with him. I was astounded at what I heard. It took guitar playing, songwriting, delivery, to a totally different height. And at the same time it confused us, because it wasn’t band music, it was one guy. So how can we do this? And we realized that the guys we were playing, like Muddy Waters, had also grown up with Robert Johnson and had translated it into a band format. In other words, it was just a progression. Robert Johnson was like an orchestra all by himself. Some of his best stuff is almost Bach-like in construction. Unfortunately, he screwed up with the chicks and had a short life. But a brilliant burst of inspiration. He gave you a platform to work on, no doubt as he did to Muddy and the other guys we were listening to. What I found about the blues and music, tracing things back, was that nothing came from itself. As great as it is, this is not one stroke of genius. This cat was listening to somebody and it’s his variation on the theme. And so you suddenly realize that everybody’s connected here. This is not just that he’s fantastic and the rest are crap; they’re all interconnected. And the further you went back into music and time, and with the blues you go back to the ’20s, because you’re basically going through recorded music, you think thank God for recording. It’s the best thing that’s happened to us since writing.

But real life sometimes entered our domain, and in this case Mick had come back drunk one night to visit Brian, found he wasn’t there and screwed his old lady. This caused a seismic tremble, upset Brian very badly and resulted in Pat leaving him. Brian also got thrown out of his flat. Mick felt a little responsible, so he found a flat in a dismal bungalow in Beckenham, in a suburban street, and we all went to live there. It was there I went in 1962 when I left home. It was a gradual departure. A night here and there, then a week, then forever. There was no final moment of parting, of shutting the wicker gate behind me.