Life (18 page)

Sometimes chief constables would devise these ridiculous plans. I remember once in Chester, after a show that had ended in a riot, following the chief constable of Chester police over the rooftops of Chester city as in some weird Walt Disney film, with the rest of the band behind me, and him in full uniform, with a constable at his side. And then he loses his fucking way, and we’re perched on the top of Chester city, while his great “Escape from Colditz” plan disintegrates. Then it starts to rain. It was like something out of
Mary Poppins
. The uniform with the baton, the whole bit, and this was his great master plan. In those days at my age you thought the cops knew how to deal with everything; you were supposed to believe that. But you soon realized that these guys had never dealt with anything like this. It was as new to them as it was to us. We’re all babes in the wood here.

We used to play “Popeye the Sailor Man” some nights, and the audience didn’t know any different because they couldn’t hear us. So they weren’t reacting to the music. The beat maybe, because you’d always hear the drums, just the rhythm, but the rest of it, no, you couldn’t hear the voices, you couldn’t hear the guitars, totally out of the question. What they were reacting to was being in this enclosed space with us—this illusion, me, Mick and Brian. The music might be the trigger, but the bullet, nobody knows what that is. Usually it was harmless, for them, though not always for us. Amongst the many thousands a few did get hurt, and a few died. Some chick third balcony up flung herself off and severely hurt the person she landed on underneath, and she herself broke her neck and died. Now and again shit happened. But the limp and fainted bodies going by us after the first ten minutes of playing, that happened every night. Or sometimes they’d stack them up on the side of the stage because there were so many of them. It was like the western front. And it got nasty in the provinces—new territory for us. Hamilton in Scotland, just outside of Glasgow. They put a chicken wire fence in front of us because of the sharpened pennies and beer bottles they flung at us—the guys that didn’t like the chicks screaming at us. They had dogs parading inside the wire. The wire mesh was quite common in certain areas, especially around Glasgow at that time. But it was nothing new. You could see the same thing going on in clubs in the South, the Midwest. “Midnight Hour” Mr. Wilson Pickett, his stage set consisted of a rack of shotguns this side and a rack of shotguns that side. And the shotguns weren’t there as props. They were loaded, probably with rock salt, no heavy-duty stuff. But to look at it was enough to put anybody off throwing things at the stage or going berserk. It was just a measure of control.

One night somewhere up north, it could have been York, it could have been anywhere, our strategy was to stay behind in the theater for a couple of hours and have dinner there, just wait for everybody to go to bed and then leave. And I remember walking back out onto the stage after the show, and they’d cleaned up all of the underwear and everything, and there was one old janitor, night watchman, and he said, “Very good show. Not a dry seat in the house.”

Maybe it happened to Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley. I don’t think it had ever reached the extremes it got to around the Beatles and the Stones time, at least in England. It was like somebody had pulled a plug somewhere. The ’50s chicks being brought up all very jolly hockey sticks, and then somewhere there seemed to be a moment when they just decided they wanted to let themselves go. The opportunity arose for them to do that, and who’s going to stop them? It was all dripping with sexual lust, though they didn’t know what to do about it. But suddenly you’re on the end of it. It’s a frenzy. Once it’s let out, it’s an incredible force. You stood as much chance in a fucking river full of piranhas. They were beyond what they wanted to be. They’d lost themselves. These chicks were coming out there, bleeding, clothes torn off, pissed panties, and you took that for granted every night. That was the gig. It could have been anybody, quite honestly. They didn’t give a shit that I was trying to be a blues player.

For a guy like Bill Perks, when suddenly there it is in front of you, it’s unbelievable. We caught him in the coal pile with a chick, somewhere in Sheffield or Nottingham. They looked like something out of
Oliver Twist
. “Bill, we’ve got to go.” It was Stu that found him. What are you going to do at that age when most of the teenage population of everywhere has decided you’re it? The incoming was incredible. Six months ago I couldn’t get laid; I’d have had to pay for it.

*   *   *

O
ne minute no chick
in the world. No fucking way, and they’re going la la la la la. And the next they’re sniffing around. And you’re going wow, when I changed from Old Spice to Habit Rouge, things definitely got better. So what is it they want? Fame? The money? Or is it for real? And of course when you’ve not had much chance with beautiful women, you start to get suspicious.

I’ve been saved by chicks more times than by guys. Sometimes just that little hug and kiss and nothing else happens. Just keep me warm for the night, just hold on to each other when times are hard, times are rough. And I’d say, “Fuck, why are you bothering with me when you know I’m an asshole and I’ll be gone tomorrow?” “I don’t know. I guess you’re worth it.” “Well, I’m not going to argue.” The first time I encountered that was with these little English chicks up in the north, on that first tour. You end up, after the show, at a pub or the bar of the hotel, and suddenly you’re in the room with some very sweet chick who’s going to Sheffield University and studying sociology who decides to be really nice to you. “I thought you were a smart chick. I’m a guitar player. I’m just going through town.” “Yeah, but I like you.” Liking is sometimes better than loving.

B
y the late ’50s,
teenagers were a targeted new market, an advertising windup. “Teenager” comes from advertising; it’s quite cold-blooded. Calling them teenagers created a whole thing amongst teenagers themselves, a self-consciousness. It created a market not just for clothes and cosmetics, but also for music and literature and everything else; it put that age group in a separate bag. And there was an explosion, a big hatch of pubescents around that time. Beatlemania and Stone mania. These were chicks that were just dying for something else. Four or five skinny blokes provided the outlet, but they would have found it somewhere else.

The power of the teenage females of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, when they’re in a gang, has never left me. They nearly killed me. I was never more in fear for my life than I was from teenage girls. The ones that choked me, tore me to shreds, if you got caught in a frenzied crowd of them—it’s hard to express how frightening they could be. You’d rather be in a trench fighting the enemy than to be faced with this unstoppable, killer wave of lust and desire, or whatever it is—it’s unknown even to them. The cops are running away, and you’re faced with this savagery of unleashed emotions.

I think it was Middlesbrough. And I couldn’t get in the car. It was an Austin Princess, and I’m trying to get in the car and these bitches are ripping me apart. The problem is if they get their hands on you, they don’t know what to do with you. They nearly strangled me with a necklace, one grabbed one side of it, the other grabbed the other, and they’re going, “Keith, Keith,” and meanwhile they’re choking me. I get hold of the handle and it comes off in my hand, and the car goes zooming off, and I’m left with this goddamn handle in my hand. I got left in the lurch that day. The driver panicked. The rest of the guys had gotten in the car, and he just wasn’t going to stick around any longer. So I was left in this pack of female hyenas. Next thing, I woke up in this back alley stage door entrance, because the cops had obviously moved everyone on. I’d passed out, I’d suffocated, they were all over me. What are you going to do with me now you’ve got me?

I remember one scene of real contact with these girls—a completely unexpected moment, a vignette.

The sky is sullen. It’s a day OFF! Suddenly the storm breaks viciously! Outside I see three die-hard fans. Their bouffants are succumbing to nature’s forces. But they stay! What can a poor boy do? “Get in here, dopes.” My tiny cubicle is filled with three drowned brats. They steam, trembling. They drench my room. The hairdos are done. They are trembling from the storm and from suddenly being in their (or one of their) idol’s room. Confusion reigns. They don’t know whether to squat or go blind. I’m equally confused. It’s one thing to play on stage to them, it’s another to be face-to-face. Towels become an important issue, as does the john. They make a poor attempt to resurrect themselves. It’s all nerves and tension. I get them some coffee laced with a little bourbon, but sex is not even in the air. We sit and talk and laugh until the sky clears. I get them a cab. We part as friends.

S
eptember 1963.
No songs, at least none that we thought would make the charts. Nothing in the ever-depleting R&B barrel looked likely. We were rehearsing at Studio 51 near Soho. Andrew had disappeared to walk about and absent himself from this gloom and he’d walked into John and Paul, getting out of a taxi in the Charing Cross Road. They had a drink and they detected Andrew’s distress. He told them: no songs. They came back to the studio with him and gave us a song that was on their next album but wasn’t coming out as a single, “I Wanna Be Your Man.” They played it through with us. Brian put on some nice slide guitar; we turned it into an unmistakably Stones rather than Beatles song. It was clear that we had a hit almost before they’d left the studio.

They deliberately aimed it at us. They’re songwriters, they’re trying to flog their songs, it’s Tin Pan Alley, and they thought this song would suit us. And also we were a mutual-admiration society. Mick and I admired their harmonies and their songwriting capabilities; they envied us our freedom of movement and our image. And they wanted to join in with us. The thing is, with the Beatles and us, it was a very friendly relationship. It was also very cannily worked out, because in those days singles were coming out every six, eight weeks. And we’d try and time it so that we didn’t clash. I remember John Lennon calling me up and saying, “Well, we’ve not finished mixing yet.” “We’ve got one ready to go.” “OK, you go first.”

W
hen we first took off
we were too busy playing on the road to think about writing songs. Also we reckoned it wasn’t our job; it hadn’t occurred to us. Mick and I considered songwriting to be some foreign job that somebody else did. I rode the horse and somebody else put the shoes on. Our first records were all covers, “Come On,” “Poison Ivy,” “Not Fade Away.” We were just playing American music to English people, and we could play it damn good, and some American people even heard. We were already shocked and stunned to be where we were, and we were very happy as interpreters of the music that we loved. We thought we had no reason to step outside. But Andrew was persistent. Strictly pressure of business. You’ve got an incredible thing going here, but without more material, and preferably new material, it’s over. You’ve got to find out if you can do that, and if not, then we’ve got to find some writers. Because you can’t just live off cover versions. That quantum leap into making our own material, that took months, though I found it a lot easier than I expected.

T
he famous day
when Andrew locked us in a kitchen up in Willesden and said, “Come out with a song”—that did happen. Why Andrew put Mick and me together as songwriters and not Mick and Brian, or me and Brian, I don’t know. It turned out that Brian couldn’t write songs, but Andrew didn’t know that then. I guess it’s because Mick and I were hanging out together at the time. Andrew puts it this way: “I worked on the assumption that if Mick could write postcards to Chrissie Shrimpton, and Keith could play a guitar, then they could write songs.” We spent the whole night in that goddamn kitchen, and I mean, we’re the Rolling Stones, like the blues kings, and we’ve got some food, piss out the window or down the sink, it’s no big deal. And I said, “If we want to get out of here, Mick, we better come up with something.”

We sat there in the kitchen and I started to pick away at these chords.… “It is the evening of the day.” I might have written that. “I sit and watch the children play,” I certainly wouldn’t have come up with that. We had two lines and an interesting chord sequence, and then something else took over somewhere in this process. I don’t want to say mystical, but you can’t put your finger on it. Once you’ve got that idea, the rest of it will come. It’s like you’ve planted a seed, then you water it a bit and suddenly it sticks up out of the ground and goes, hey, look at me. The mood is made somewhere in the song. Regret, lost love. Maybe one of us had just busted up with a girlfriend. If you can find the trigger that kicks off the idea, the rest of it is easy. It’s just hitting the first spark. Where that comes from, God knows.

With “As Tears Go By,” we weren’t trying to write a commercial pop song. It was just what came out. I knew what Andrew wanted: don’t come out with a blues, don’t do some parody or copy, come out with something of your own. A good pop song is not really that easy to write. It was a shock, this fresh world of writing our own material, this discovery that I had a gift I had no idea existed. It was Blake-like, a revelation, an epiphany.

“As Tears Go By” was first recorded and made into a hit by Marianne Faithfull. That was only weeks away. After that we wrote loads of airy-fairy silly love songs for chicks and stuff that didn’t take off. We’d give them to Andrew and, amazing to us, he got most of them recorded by other artists. Mick and I refused to put this crap we were writing with the Stones. We’d have been laughed out of the goddamn room. Andrew was waiting for us to come up with “The Last Time.”

Songwriting had to be fitted in. After a show was sometimes the only time. It was impossible on the road. Stu would drive us, and he was merciless. We’d be stuck in the back of this Volkswagen, sealed in, one window at the back, and you sat on the engine. Most important was the gear, the amplifiers and the microphone stands and the guitars, and then, once that was loaded, “wedge yourselves in.” Find some room, and if you wanted to stop for a pee, forget about it. He’d pretend he couldn’t hear you. And he had a huge stereo, mobile sounds forty years ahead of what they’ve got now. Two huge JBLs next to his ears in his driving cabin. A traveling prison.