Life (24 page)

The Stones played every night, we were on the road all the time, but still somehow, for a while Linda and I managed to have a love affair. We lived first in Mapesbury Road, then in Holly Hill with Mick and his girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton, and finally just the two of us in Carlton Hill, the flat I had in St. John’s Wood. The rooms there never got decorated: everything piled up around the walls, mattress on the floor, many guitars, an upright piano. We lived, despite all this, almost like a married couple. We used to take the tube before I bought Linda a Mark 2 Jaguar, which had a letterbox 45 player on which she wouldn’t play the Stones. We’d hang out in Chelsea at the Casserole, the Meridiana, the Baghdad House. The restaurant we went to in Hampstead is still there—Le Cellier du Midi—and probably still has the same menu after forty years. It certainly looks identical from the outside.

It was bound to unravel with the long absences—through confusion more than anything, the confusion of suddenly living this life that nobody, or certainly nobody that I knew, had a road map for. All of us were pretty young and we were trying to make this thing up as we went along. “I’m going to America for three months. I love you, darling.” And meanwhile we’re all changing. For one thing, I’d met Ronnie Bennett, and I spent more time on the road with her than I did with Linda. We grew apart slowly. It took a couple of years. We would still hook up, but in those years the band had a total of ten days off for the entire three-year period. Linda and I did manage to have one brief holiday in the South of France, though Linda remembers this as a flight she took away from London, an escape, a job as a waitress in Saint-Tropez, and me following her and installing her in a hotel, giving her a hot bath. Linda also began taking a lot of drugs. For me to disapprove is an irony, but I did disapprove then.

I’ve seen Linda a couple of times since those days. She’s happily married to a very well-known record producer, John Porter. She remembers my disapproval. I was taking little more than weed in those days, but Linda was getting into the heavy stuff, and it was having a dangerous effect on her. That was clear to see. She came with me to New York when we were touring the USA in the summer of 1966, our fifth tour there. I’d put her up at the Americana Hotel, though she spent much of her time with her girlfriend Roberta Goldstein. When I turned up, they’d put all the gear away, the downers, the Tuinals, which I wouldn’t have touched—imagine!—and strew wine bottles around to give probable cause if they staggered a bit.

Then she met Jimi Hendrix, saw him play and adopted his career as her mission, tried to get him a recording contract with Andrew Oldham. In her enthusiasm, during a long evening with Jimi, as she tells it, she gave him a Fender Stratocaster of mine that was in my hotel room. And then, so Linda says, she also picked up a copy of a demo I had of Tim Rose singing a song called “Hey Joe.” And took that round to Roberta Goldstein’s, where Jimi was, and played it to him. This is rock-and-roll history. So he got the song from me, apparently.

We went off on tour, and when I came back, London was suddenly hippie-ville. I was already into that in America, but I wasn’t expecting it when I came home to London. The scene had changed totally in a matter of weeks. Linda was on acid and I’d been jilted. You shouldn’t expect somebody of that age to hang around for four months with all this stuff going on. I knew it was on the break. It was my presumptuousness to think she was going to sit like a little old lady at home at eighteen or nineteen years old, while I gallivanted around the world doing what I wanted. I found out that Linda had taken up with some poet, which I went bananas about. I went running through the whole of London, asking people, anybody seen Linda? Crying my eyes out from St. John’s Wood to Chelsea, screaming, “Bitch! Get out of my fucking way.” Fuck the traffic lights. I only remember some very close accidents, nearly getting run over on the way through London to Chelsea. After I’d found out, I wanted to be sure, I wanted to see. I checked with my friends, where does this motherfucker live? I even remember his name, Bill Chenail. Some poet so-called. He was a hip little bugger at the time because he came on with the Dylanesque bit. Couldn’t play anything. Ersatz hip, as it’s called. I stalked her a couple of times, but I remember thinking, what would I say? I hadn’t got that act down yet, how to confront my rival. In the middle of a Wimpy bar? Or some bistro? I even walked to where she was living with him in Chelsea, almost into Fulham, and stood outside. (This is a love story.) And I could see her in there with him, “silhouettes on the shade.” And that was it. “Like a thief in the night.”

That’s the first time I felt the deep cut. The thing about being a songwriter is, even if you’ve been fucked over, you can find consolation in writing about it, and pour it out. Everything has something to do with something; nothing is divorced. It becomes an experience, a feeling, or a conglomeration of experiences. Basically, Linda is “Ruby Tuesday.”

But our story wasn’t quite over. After she left me, Linda was in a really bad way, Tuinals had given way to harder stuff. She went back to New York and took up further with Jimi Hendrix, who may have broken her heart, as she broke mine. Certainly, her friends say, she was very much in love with him. But I knew she needed medical help—she was getting very close to the danger line, as she herself acknowledged later, and I couldn’t deal with it because I’d burned my boats. I went to see her parents and gave them all the telephone numbers and places where they’d find her. “Hey, your daughter is in distress. She won’t admit it, but you’ve got to do something. I can’t. I’m already persona non grata anyway. And this is going to be the final nail in my coffin with Linda, but you’ve got to do something about her because I’m on the road tomorrow.” Linda’s father went to New York and found her in a nightclub, brought her back to England, where her passport was removed and she was made a ward of court. She felt that this was a great betrayal on my part, and we didn’t speak or see each other again until many years later. She had some close shaves with drugs after that, but she survived and recovered and brought up a family. She now lives in New Orleans.

On a rare day off between tours I did manage to buy Redlands, the house I still own in West Sussex, near Chichester Harbour; the house where we were busted, which burned down twice, the house I still love. We just spoke to each other the minute we saw each other. A thatched house, quite small, surrounded by a moat. I drove up there by mistake. I had a brochure with a couple of houses marked and I’m poncing around in my Bentley, “Oh, I’m going to buy a house.” I took a wrong turn and turned into Redlands. This guy walked out, very nice guy, and said, yeah? And I said, oh sorry, we’ve come to the wrong turning. He said, yes, you want to go Fishbourne way, and he said, are you looking for a house to buy? He was very pukka, an ex-commodore of the Royal Navy. And I said yes. And he said, well, there’s no sign up, but this house is for sale. And I looked at him and said, how much? Because I fell in love with Redlands the minute I saw it. Nobody’s going to let this thing go, it’s too picturesque, ideal. He said twenty grand. This is about one o’clock in the afternoon and the banks are open till three. I said, are you going to be here this evening? He said, yes, of course. I said, if I bring you down twenty grand, can we do the deal? So I zoomed up to London, just got to the bank in time, got the bread—twenty grand in a brown paper bag—and by evening I was back down at Redlands, in front of the fireplace, and we signed the deal. And he turned over the deeds to me. It was like cash on the barrelhead, done in really an old-fashioned way.

By the end of 1966, we were all exhausted. We’d been on the road without a break for almost four years. The crack-ups were coming. We’d already had a wobbler with the formidable but brittle Andrew Oldham in Chicago in 1965, when we were recording at Chess. Andrew was a lover of speed, but this time he was drunk too and very distressed about his relationship with Sheila, his old lady at the time. He started waving a shooter around in my hotel room. This we didn’t need. I hadn’t come all the way to Chicago to get shot by some wonky public schoolboy whose gun barrel I was staring down. Which looks very ominous at the time, that little black hole. Mick and I got the gun away from him, slapped him around a bit, put him to bed and forgot about it. I don’t even know what happened to the shooter, an automatic. Tossed it out the window, probably. We’re just getting going. Let’s make this a forget-it.

But Brian was a different story. What was comic about Brian was his illusions of grandeur, even before he got famous. He thought it was his band for some weird reason. The first demonstration of Brian’s aspirations was the discovery on our first tour that he was getting five pounds more a week than the rest of us because he’d persuaded Eric Easton that he was our “leader.” The whole deal with the band was we split everything like pirates. You put the booty on the table and split it, pieces of eight. “Jesus Christ, who do you think you are? I’m writing the songs round here, and you’re getting five pounds extra a week? Get outta here!” It started with little things like that, which then exacerbated the friction between us as it went on and he became more and more outrageous. In the early negotiations, it was always Brian who would go to the meetings as our leader. We were not permitted —by Brian. I remember Mick and me once waiting for the results around the block, sitting in Lyons Corner House.

It happened so fast. After we did a couple of TV shows, Brian turned into this sort of freak, devouring celebs and fame and attention. Mick and Charlie and I were looking at it all a bit skeptically. This is shit you’ve got to do to make records. But Brian—and he was not a stupid guy—fell right into it. He loved the adulation. The rest of us didn’t think it was bad, but you don’t fall for it all the way. I felt the energy, I knew that there was something big happening. But some guys get stroked and they just can’t get over it. Stroke me some more, stroke me some more, and suddenly “I’m a star.”

I never saw a guy so much affected by fame. The minute we’d had a couple of successful records, zoom, he was Venus and Jupiter rolled into one. Huge inferiority complex that you hadn’t noticed. The minute the chicks started screaming, he seemed to go through a whole change, just when we didn’t need it, when we needed to keep the whole thing tight and together. I’ve known a few that were really carried away by fame. But I never saw one that changed so dramatically overnight. “No, we’re just getting lucky, pal. This is not fame.” It went to his head, and over the next few years of very difficult road work, in the mid-’60s, we could not count on Brian at all. He was getting really stoned, out of it. Thought he was an intellectual, a mystic philosopher. He was very impressed by other stars, but only because they were stars, not because of what they were good at. And he became a pain in the neck, a kind of rotting attachment. When you’re schlepping 350 days a year on the road and you’ve got to drag a dead weight, it becomes pretty vicious.

We were on a swing through the Midwest, and Brian’s asthma had got him and he was in hospital in Chicago. And, hey, when a guy’s sick, you double for him. But then we saw pictures of him zooming around Chicago, hanging at a party with so-and-so, fawning over stars with a silly little bow around his neck. We’d done three, four gigs without him. That’s double duty for me, pal. There’s only five of us, and the whole point of the band is that it’s a two-guitar band. And suddenly there’s only one guitar. I’ve got to figure out whole new ways to play all of these songs. I’ve got to perform Brian’s part as well. I learned a lot about how to do two parts at once, or how to distill the essence of what his part was and still play what I had to play, and throw in a few licks, but it was damn hard work. And I never got a thank-you from him, ever, for covering his arse. He didn’t give a shit. “I was out of it.” That’s all I would get. All right, are you gonna give me your pay? That’s when I had it in for Brian.

One can get very sarcastic on the road and quite vicious. “Just shut up, you little creep. Preferred it when you weren’t here.” He had this way of ranting on, saying things that would just grate. “When I played with so-and-so…” He was totally starstruck. “I saw Bob Dylan yesterday. He doesn’t like you.” But he had no idea how obnoxious he was being. So it would start off, “Oh, shut up, Brian.” Or we’d imitate the way he cringed his head into his nonexistent neck. And then it went to baiting him in a way. He had this huge Humber Super Snipe car, but he was a pretty short guy and he had to have a cushion to see over the steering wheel. Mick and I would steal the cushion for a laugh. Wicked, schoolboy sort of stuff. Sitting at the back of the bus, we just let him have it, pretending he wasn’t there. “Where’s Brian? Shit, did you see what he was wearing yesterday?” It was the pressure of work, and the other side of it was that you hoped that kind of shock treatment would snap him out of it. There’s no time to take time off and say let’s sort this out. But it was a love-hate relationship with Brian. He could be really funny. I used to enjoy hanging with him, figuring out how Jimmy Reed or Muddy Waters did this or T-Bone Walker did that.

What probably really stuck in Brian’s craw was when Mick and I started writing the songs. He lost his status and then lost interest. Having to come to the studio and learn to play a song Mick and I had written would bring him down. It was like Brian’s open wound. Brian’s only solution became clinging to either Mick or me, which created a triangle of sorts. He had it in for Andrew Oldham, Mick and me, thought there was a conspiracy to roll him out. Which wasn’t true at all, but somebody’s got to write the songs. You’re quite welcome; I’ll sit around and write a song with you. What have you come up with? But no sparks flew when I was sitting around with Brian. And then it was “I don’t like guitar anymore. I want to play marimbas.” Another time, pal. We’ve got a tour to do. So we got to rely on him
not
being there, and if he turned up, it was a miracle. When he was there and came to life, he was incredibly nimble. He could pick up any instruments that were lying around and come up with something. Sitar on “Paint It Black.” The marimbas on “Under My Thumb.” But for the next five days we won’t see the motherfucker, and we’ve still got a record to make. We’ve got sessions lined up and where’s Brian? Nobody can find him, and when they do, he’s in a terrible condition.