Life (22 page)

W
hen
I
was growing up,
the idea of leaving England was pretty much remote. My dad did it once, but that was in the army to go to Normandy and get his leg blown off. The idea was totally impossible. You just read about other countries and looked at them on TV, and in
National Geographic,
the black chicks with their tits hanging out and their long necks. But you never expected to see it. Scraping up the money to get out of England would have been way beyond my capabilities.

One of the first places I remember us going to, after the USA, was Belgium, and even that was an adventure. It was like going to Tibet. And the Olympia in Paris. And then suddenly you’re in Australia, and you’re actually seeing the world, and they’re paying you! But my God, there are some black holes.

Dunedin, for instance, almost the southernmost city in the world, in New Zealand. It looked like Tombstone and it felt like it. It still had hitching rails. It was a Sunday, a wet dark Sunday in Dunedin in 1965. I don’t think you could have found anything more depressing anywhere. The longest day of my life, it seemed to go on forever. We were usually pretty good at entertaining ourselves, but Dunedin made Aberdeen seem like Las Vegas. Very rarely did everybody get depressed at the same time; there was usually one to support the others. But in Dunedin everybody was totally depressed. No chance of any redemption or laughter. Even the drink didn’t get you pissed. On Sunday, there’d be little knocks on the door, “Er, church in ten minutes…” It was just one of those miserable gray days that took me back to my childhood, a day that will never end, the gloom, and not anything on the horizon. Boredom is an illness to me, and I don’t suffer from it, but that moment was the lowest ebb. “I think I’ll stand on my head, try and recycle the drugs.”

But Roy Orbison! It was only because we were with Roy Orbison that we were there at all. He was definitely top of the bill that night. What a beacon in the southernmost gloom. The amazing Roy Orbison. He was one of those Texan guys who could sail through anything, including his whole tragic life. His kids die in a fire, his wife dies in a car crash, nothing in his private life went right for the big O, but I can’t think of a gentler gentleman, or a more stoic personality. That incredible talent for blowing himself up from five foot six to six foot nine, which he seemed to be able to do on stage. It was amazing to witness. He’s been in the sun, looking like a lobster, pair of shorts on. And we’re just sitting around playing guitars, having a chat, smoke and a drink. “Well, I’m on in five minutes.” We watch the opening number. And out walks this totally transformed thing that seems to have grown at least a foot with presence and command over the crowd. He was in his shorts just now; how did he do that? It’s one of those astounding things about working in the theater. Backstage you can be a bunch of bums. And “Ladies and gentlemen” or “I present to you,” and you’re somebody else.

Mick and I spent months and months trying to write before we had anything we could record for the Stones. We wrote some terrible songs whose titles included “We Were Falling in Love” and “So Much in Love,” not to mention “(Walkin’ Thru the) Sleepy City” (a rip-off of “He’s a Rebel”). Some of them were actually medium-sized hits—Gene Pitney, for example, singing “That Girl Belongs to Yesterday,” although he improved on the words and on our original title, which was “My Only Girl.” I wrote a forgotten gem called “All I Want Is My Baby,” which was recorded by P.J. Proby’s valet Bobby Jameson; I wrote “Surprise, Surprise,” recorded by Lulu. We ended Cliff Richard’s run of hits when he recorded our “Blue Turns to Grey”—it was one of the rare times one of his records went into the top thirty instead of the top ten. And when the Searchers did “Take It Or Leave It,” it torpedoed them as well. Our songwriting had this other function of hobbling the opposition while we got paid for it. It had the opposite effect on Marianne Faithfull. It made her into a star with “As Tears Go By”—the title changed by Andrew Oldham from the
Casablanca
song “As Time Goes By”—written on a twelve-string guitar. We thought, what a terrible piece of tripe. We came out and played it to Andrew, and he said, “It’s a hit.” We actually sold this stuff, and it actually made money. Mick and I were thinking, this is money for old rope!

Mick and I knew by now that really our job was to write songs for the Stones. It took us eight, nine months before we came up with “The Last Time,” which is the first one that we felt we could give to the rest of the guys without being sent out the room. If I’d gone to the Rolling Stones with “As Tears Go By,” it would have been “Get out and don’t come back.” Mick and I were trying to hone it down. We kept coming up with these ballads, nothing to do with what we were doing. And then finally we came up with “The Last Time” and looked at each other and said, let’s try this with the boys. The song has the first recognizable Stones riff or guitar figure on it; the chorus is from the Staple Singers’ version, “This May Be the Last Time.” We could work this hook; now we had to find the verse. It had a Stones twist to it, one that maybe couldn’t have been written earlier— a song about going on the road and dumping some chick. “You don’t try very hard to please me.” Not the usual serenade to the unattainable object of desire. That was when it really clicked, with that song, when Mick and I felt confident enough to actually lay it in front of Brian and Charlie and Ian Stewart, especially, arbiter of events. With those earlier songs we would have been chased out the room. But that song defined us in a way, and it went to number one in the UK.

Andrew created an amazing thing in my life. I had never thought about songwriting. He made me learn the craft, and at the same time I realized, yes, I am good at it. And slowly this whole other world opens up, because now you’re not just a player, or trying to play like somebody else. It isn’t just other people’s expression. I can start to express myself, I can write my own music. It’s almost like a bolt of lightning.

“The Last Time” was recorded during a magical period at the RCA Studios in Hollywood. We recorded there intermittently across two years between June 1964 and August 1966, which culminated in the album
Aftermath,
all of whose songs were penned by Mick and me, the Glimmer Twins, as we later called ourselves. It was the period where everything —songwriting, recording, performing—stepped into a new league, and the time when Brian started going off the rails.

The work was always intensely hard. The gig never finished just because you got off stage. We had to go back to the hotel and start honing down these songs. We’d come off the road and we had four days to cut the tracks for an album, a week maximum. A track would get thirty to forty minutes to get down. It wasn’t that difficult, because we’re on the road, the band’s well oiled. And we’ve got ten, fifteen songs. But it was nonstop, high-pressure work, which was probably good for us. When we recorded “The Last Time,” in January 1965, we’d come back off the road and everyone was exhausted. We’d gone in to record the single only. After we finished “The Last Time,” the only Stones left standing were me and Mick. Phil Spector was there—Andrew had asked him to come down and listen to the track—and so was Jack Nitzsche. A janitor had come to clean up, this silent sweeping in the corner of this huge studio, while this remaining group picked up instruments. Spector picked up Bill Wyman’s bass, Nitzsche went to the harpsichord, and the B-side, “Play with Fire,” was cut with half the Rolling Stones and this unique lineup.

When we first arrived in Los Angeles on that second tour, it was Sonny Bono who was sent to meet us at the airport with a car, because he was the promotion man for Phil Spector then. A year later Sonny and Cher were being feted at the Dorchester, presented to the world by Ahmet Ertegun. But back then, when he knew we were looking for a studio, Sonny put us in touch with Jack Nitzsche, and RCA was the first place he suggested. We went more or less straight there, into the limo-and-pool world, from a three-day tour of Ireland—an almost surreal contrast in cultures. Jack was in and out of the studio, more to get relief from Phil Spector and the enormous amount of work required to make the “wall of sound” than anything else. Jack was the Genius, not Phil. Rather, Phil took on Jack’s eccentric persona and sucked his insides out. But Jack Nitzsche was an almost silent—and unpaid for reasons still not clear except he did it for fun—arranger, musician, gluer-together of the talent, a man of enormous importance for us in that period. He came to our sessions to relax and would throw in some ideas. He’d play when the mood took him. He’s on “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” when he took over my piano part while I took over bass. This is just one example of his input. I loved the man.

S
omehow we still had
no money even by late 1964. Our first album,
The Rolling Stones,
was top of the charts and sold 100,000 copies, which was more than the Beatles initially sold. So where was the money? In fact, we simply figured that if we broke even we were cool. But we also knew we weren’t tapping a huge market that we had opened. The system was that you didn’t get money from English sales until a year after the record came out, eighteen months later if it was foreign sales. There was no money in any of the American tours. Everyone was rooming with everybody. Oldham used to sleep on Phil Spector’s couch. We did the T.A.M.I. show in America late in 1964—the show where we came on after James Brown—to get us back home. We earned $25,000. So did Gerry & the Pacemakers, and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. That’s a bit much, isn’t it?

The first real cash I ever saw came from selling “As Tears Go By.” I certainly remember the first time I got it. I looked at it! And then I counted it and then I looked at it again. And then I felt it and touched it. I did
nothing
with it. I just kept it in my bin, saying, I’ve got such a lot of money! Shit! I didn’t particularly want to buy anything, or blow it. For the first time in my life, I’d got money.… Maybe I’ll buy a new shirt, spring for some guitar strings. But basically it was “I don’t believe this shit!” There’s the queen’s face all over it and it’s signed by the right man, and you’ve got more than you’ve ever had in your hand ever, and more than your dad makes in a year, schlepping and working his fucking arse off. I mean, what to do with it is another thing, because I’ve got another gig to do, and I’m working. But I must say, the first taste of a few hundred crisp new bills was not unsatisfying. What to do with it took some time. But it was the first feeling of being ahead of the game. And all I did was write a couple songs and they gave it to me.

One big setback we had was not being paid by Robert Stigwood for a tour we did with one of his acts. If the homework had been done, we would have known that this was his modus operandi—late paying turned into not paying at all, and we had to go all the way to the High Court. But before that, alas for him, one night at a club called the Scotch of St James, he made the terrible mistake of coming down the stairs as Andrew and I were going up. We blocked off the staircase so I could extract payment. You can’t use a boot on a winding staircase, so he got the knee, one for every grand he owed us—sixteen of them. Even then he never apologized. Maybe I didn’t kick him hard enough.

And when I got some more money, I took care of Mum. They’d split up, Doris and Bert, a year after I left home. Dad’s Dad, but I bought Mum a house. I was always in touch with Doris. But that implied I couldn’t be in touch with Bert, because they’d split up. It was like I couldn’t take sides. And also I didn’t have much time for that because life was getting really exciting. I’m zooming all over the place; I’ve got other things to do. What Mum and Dad were doing was not at the forefront of my mind.

T
hen came “
S
atisfaction,”
the track that launched us into global fame. I was between girlfriends at the time, in my flat in Carlton Hill, St. John’s Wood. Hence maybe the mood of the song. I wrote “Satisfaction” in my sleep. I had no idea I’d written it, it’s only thank God for the little Philips cassette player. The miracle being that I looked at the cassette player that morning and I knew I’d put a brand-new tape in the previous night, and I saw it was at the end. Then I pushed rewind and there was “Satisfaction.” It was just a rough idea. There was just the bare bones of the song, and it didn’t have that noise, of course, because I was on acoustic. And forty minutes of me snoring. But the bare bones is all you need. I had that cassette for a while and I wish I’d kept it.

Mick wrote the lyrics by the pool in Clearwater, Florida, four days before we went into the studio and recorded it—first at Chess in Chicago, an acoustic version, and later with the fuzz tone at RCA in Hollywood. I wasn’t exaggerating when I wrote a postcard home from Clearwater that said, “Hi Mum. Working like a dog, same as ever. Love, Keith.”

It was down to one little foot pedal, the Gibson fuzz tone, a little box they put out at that time. I’ve only ever used foot pedals twice—the other time was for
Some Girls
in the late ’70s, when I used an XR box with a nice hillbilly Sun Records slap-echo on it. But effects are not my thing. I just go for quality of sound. Do I want this sharp and hard and cutting, or do I want warm, smooth “Beast of Burden” stuff? Basically you go: Fender or Gibson?

In “Satisfaction” I was imagining horns, trying to imitate their sound to put on the track later when we recorded. I’d already heard the riff in my head the way Otis Redding did it later, thinking, this is gonna be the horn line. But we didn’t have any horns, and I was only going to lay down a dub. The fuzz tone came in handy so I could give a shape to what the horns were supposed to do. But the fuzz tone had never been heard before anywhere, and that’s the sound that caught everybody’s imagination. Next thing I know, we’re listening to ourselves in Minnesota somewhere on the radio, “Hit of the Week,” and we didn’t even know Andrew had put the fucking thing out! At first I was mortified. As far as I was concerned that was just the dub. Ten days on the road and it’s number one nationally! The record of the summer of ’65. So I’m not arguing. And I learned that lesson —sometimes you can overwork things. Not everything’s designed for your taste and your taste alone.