Life (47 page)

After lunch I headed for the Londonderry Hotel to celebrate. There, unfortunately, the bedroom caught fire. The corridor filled with smoke and my little family were ushered out, and indeed banned forever from our favorite hotel. The fire broke out in my room, and Marlon was asleep in my bed, and I leaped through the flames, plucked the boy out and then waited for the ruckus. It wasn’t dangerous and reckless behavior—as would be assumed by the tabloids—it was faulty wiring in the room. But who would believe that?

*   *   *

R
onnie
W
ood came into
the picture in late 1973. We’d bumped into each other but we weren’t particularly mates. I knew him as a good guitar player with the Faces. I was at Tramps, one of those ongoing clubs at the time, and this blonde came over to me and said, hey, I’m Krissie Wood, Ronnie Wood’s old lady. I said, oh, nice to meet you. How you doing, girl? How’s Ronnie? And she said, he’s down in Richmond at the house and he’s recording there. Do you want to come along? I said, I’d like to see Ronnie, so let’s go. So I went down with Krissie to Richmond, to their house, called the Wick, and I stayed for weeks. At the time, the Stones had some time off, Mick was mixing vocals on “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll,” I kind of felt like playing anyway. When I got there I saw these top men, Willie Weeks on bass, Andy Newmark on drums and Ian McLagan, Ronnie’s buddy from the Faces, on keyboards. I just started to play along. Ronnie was making his first solo album,
I’ve Got My Own Album to Do
—a
great title,
Ronnie—and I walked in on that session and they gave me a guitar. So that first meeting with Ronnie started over a couple of hot guitars. The next day Ronnie says, let’s finish that off, and I say yes but I’ve got to get home, back to Cheyne Walk. No, just bring some clothes down. Ronnie had bought the Wick from the actor John Mills and he had a studio put downstairs in the basement. It was the first time I’d seen a studio deliberately constructed in somebody’s house (and I do advise against living on top of a factory—I know; I did it for
Exile
). But the house was beautiful, the garden sloping down to the river. I had John Mills’s almost equally famous actress daughter Hayley’s bedroom, not that I used it much, but when I did I found myself reading a lot of Edgar Allan Poe. Staying down there got me away from the Chelsea surveillance, although they cottoned on eventually. Anita didn’t mind. She came down too.

T
here was an extraordinary
flow of players and talent concentrated in that time and place, gathered around Woody’s record. George Harrison walked in one night. Rod Stewart would pop in occasionally. Mick came and sang on the record, and Mick Taylor played. After not hanging about much on the London rock-and-roll scene for a couple of years, it was nice to see everybody and not have to move. They’d come to you. There was always jamming. Ronnie and I hit it off straightaway, day in, day out, we had a load of good laughs. He said, I’m running short of songs, so I knocked up a couple of songs for him, “Sure the One You Need” and “We Got to Get Our Shit Together.”

That’s where I first heard “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll,” in Ronnie’s studio. It’s Mick’s song and he’d cut it with Bowie as a dub. Mick had gotten this idea and they started to rock on it. It was damn good. Shit, Mick, what are you doing it with Bowie for? Come on, we’ve got to steal that motherfucker back. And we did, without too much difficulty. Just the title by itself was so beautifully simple, even if it hadn’t been a great song in its own right. I mean, come on. “It’s only rock and roll but I like it.”

Overlapping with Ronnie’s record, in December 1974, we went to Munich to record
Black and Blue,
to lay the basic tracks of songs like “Fool to Cry” and “Cherry Oh Baby.” That was when Mick Taylor dropped his bombshell on us, telling us he was leaving the band and that he had other furrows to plow, which none of us could believe. We were just then planning our US tour of 1975, and he kind of left us in the lurch. Mick could never explain why he left. He doesn’t know why. I always asked him, why did you leave? He said, I don’t know. He knew how I felt. I always want to keep a band together. You can leave in a coffin or with dispensations for long service, but otherwise you can’t. I can’t second-guess the man. It might have had something to do with Rose, his wife. But the proof that he didn’t really fit in is that he left. He didn’t want to fit in, I don’t think. I guess he felt that with his credentials from being with the Stones, he’d be able to write songs, produce. But he didn’t do anything.

*   *   *

S
o early in ’75
we were looking for guitar players and we were in Rotterdam laying more tracks for
Black and Blue
—the time of “Hey Negrita,” “Crazy Mama,” “Memory Motel” and of the embryonic “Start Me Up,” the reggae version that we couldn’t make work despite forty or fifty takes. We would be nagging at it again two years later, then four years after that —the slow birth of a song whose perfect non-reggae nature we had discovered in one passing take without realizing it, even forgetting we’d done it. But that’s for laters.

We’d been living with Ronnie at the Wick for quite a while, Anita and me and the kids, when I had to go to Rotterdam to record. By this time we’d discovered policemen in the trees with binoculars, in the style of the
Carry On
comedies. And I wasn’t hallucinating. Absurd though it was, it was equally serious. We were being watched now all the time. Surrounded. And I’m on my usual dose. So I told Anita, we’re going to have to slide out at night. But first I have to call Marshall Chess, who’s already in Rotterdam. Marshall was also hooked. We’re in this together. We would score together. I said to Marshall, make sure you’ve got the shit. I’m not moving until I know that you’ve got it, because what’s the point of Rotterdam and working and cold turkey? As I left he said, “Yeah, yeah, I’ve got it. It’s right here. I’ve got it in my hand.” OK. But when I get to Rotterdam, Marshall has this sad, sad look on his face. It’s cat litter. They sold him cat litter instead of smack. In those days you had brown, usually Mexican or South American, smack. Brown or beige crystals, which actually looked very much like some cat litter. I was livid. But what’s the point of killing the pilot? These fucking Surinamese had sold him cat litter. And we’d paid top price for it.

Instead of being able to zoom along to the studio and start work, we’re scrabbling for dope. It makes a man out of you, at least. We spent a nasty couple of days. When you’re cold turkey and trying to make a deal at the same time, you’re not in a very strong position. The fact that we actually went back to the Surinamese bar is proof of the point. We went down to the depths of the dock area, an almost Dickensian place—like an old illustration, shacks and brick buildings. We looked at the guy behind the bar Marshall thought had sold it to him, and he goes—that famous pose—“Gotcha. Sorry.” And they’re laughing. What you going to do about it?

Forget about it. It’s cold turkey, pal. But I didn’t say sorry to the Stones. Hey, just warm up, get a sound, give me another twenty-four hours. Everybody knows what’s what. Until I’m in the right condition, I won’t appear.

Ronnie wasn’t necessarily a shoo-in as our new guitarist, despite our closeness at the time. He was still, for one thing, a member of the Faces. We tried other players before him—Wayne Perkins, Harvey Mandel. Both great players, both of them are on
Black and Blue
. Ronnie turned up as the last one, and it was really a toss-up. We liked Perkins a lot. He was a lovely player, same style, which wouldn’t have ricocheted against what Mick Taylor was doing, very melodic, very well-played stuff. Then Ronnie said he had problems with the Faces. So it came down to Wayne and Ronnie. Ronnie’s an all-rounder. He can play loads of things and different styles, and I’d just been playing with him for some weeks, so the chips fell there. It wasn’t so much the playing, when it came down to it. It came down to the fact that Ronnie was English! Well, it is an English band, although you might not think that now. And we all felt we should retain the nationality of the band at the time. Because when you get on the road, and it’s “Have you heard this one?,” you’ve all got the same backgrounds. Because of being London-born, Ronnie and I already had a built-in closeness, a kind of code, and we could be cool together under stress, like two squaddies. Ronnie was damn good glue for the band. He was a breath of fresh air. We knew he’d got his chops, we knew he could play, but a big decider was his incredible enthusiasm and ability to get along with everybody. Mick Taylor was always a bit morose. You’ll not see Mick Taylor lying on the floor, holding his stomach, cracking up with laughter for anything. Whereas Ronnie would have his legs in the air.

If you sit Ronnie down, take his mind off everything else, just concentrate all the bits, he’s an incredibly sympathetic player. He can surprise you at times. I enjoy playing with him still, very, very much. We were doing “You Got the Silver,” and I said, well, I can sing it, but I can’t sing and play at the same time. You’ve got to do my bit. And he got it down so much, it was beautiful. He’s a lovely slide player. And he genuinely loves his music. It’s innocent, totally pure; there are no angles on it. He knows Beiderbecke, he knows his history, his Broonzy, he’s solidly grounded. And he was perfectly adapted to the ancient form of weaving, where you can’t tell rhythm from lead guitar, the style I’d developed with Brian, the old bedrock of the Rolling Stones sound. The division between guitar players, rhythm and lead, that we had with Mick Taylor melted away. You have to be intuitively locked to do that, and Ronnie and I are like that. “Beast of Burden” is a good example of the two of us twinkling felicitously together. So we said let’s get it on. It was going to be temporary and let’s see how it works. So Ronnie came on the 1975 tour of the USA, even though he wasn’t officially a member of the band.

Ronnie is the most malleable character I’ve ever met and a real chameleon. He doesn’t really know who he is. It’s not insincere. He’s just looking for a home. He has a sort of desperation for brotherly love. He needs to belong. He needs a band. Ronnie’s a very tight family man. He’s had a bit of a rough time—his mum and dad and both of his brothers have died in the past few years. It’s tough. You say, hey, Ron, sorry about that. He says, well, what do you expect? Everyone has their time. But Ronnie sometimes doesn’t let it out. He holds it in for a long time. Without his mum, Ronnie is sort of lost. Being the youngest in the family, he was Mum’s boy. And I know I’m the same way. Ronnie holds it in a lot. He’s a tough little sod, fucking Gyppo. The last family of water Gypsies to come onto dry land, some fantastic moment of evolution, though sometimes I don’t think Ronnie’s shed his fins. Perhaps that’s why he’s always falling off the wagon. He doesn’t like being dry; he wants to get back into the wet.

One difference between Ronnie and me is he was an over-the-top man. He had no control whatsoever. I’m a bit of a drinker, let’s say, but Ronnie was everything to the max. I can get up and take a drink, but Ronnie’s breakfast used to be a White Cloud tequila and water. If you gave him real cocaine he didn’t like it, because what he’d been taking was speed. Except he paid cocaine prices for it. And you’d try and drill it into his head: you’re not taking coke, you’re taking speed. You’ve just been sold speed at cocaine prices. At the same time, it’s not as if he was discouraged from these habits in his new job.

There was one memorable initiation of Ronnie just before the USA tour at the end of March 1975. We were rehearsing the band in Montauk, Long Island, and we decided to pay a visit to Freddie Sessler, who was living then in Dobbs Ferry, just up the Hudson River from Manhattan. Freddie dared us to consume an ounce of pharmaceutical there and then. It was basically like ripping three pages out of your diary. Freddie’s notes enlighten us about this, because I remember very little:

Freddie Sessler:
I was deeply asleep about five a.m. when I heard an enormous knock at the front door of my house. With my eyes closed I managed to open the door. I was immediately greeted and awakened to Keith’s sense of humor. “What the fuck are you doing sleeping while we are working our asses off and just drove one hundred miles to visit you?” “OK,” I said, “I’m up. Just let me wash my face,” and I grabbed an orange juice for myself and handed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to Keith. At once he inserted a cassette in the deck of the stereo of some reggae music, at full blast of course, and it was party time. Within a few moments I asked Keith and Ronnie if they would care to join in a wake-up toast. I was holding in my hand a one-ounce bottle of Merck, went into the bedroom, reached for a painting framed in glass and decided to play a game of my own devising. One of my biggest pleasures has always been the ritual of opening a sealed bottle of cocaine. Just looking, staring at it, breaking the seal, I would get an instant rush, euphoria. It was a bigger pleasure than actually consuming the cocaine itself. As I broke the seal I emptied on the glass two-thirds of the bottle. Then I prepared two equal piles of about eight grams each for Keith and myself and about four grams for Ronnie.

When completed, I said the following to Keith:

“Keith, I would like to test you. What kind of man you are,” knowing very well he would stand up to any challenge. I made two lines, grabbed a straw and with swift action snorted my share of eight grams. “Now, let me see if you can do that.” In my entire adult life I had never, ever seen anyone indulging in a quantity of this magnitude. Keith looked, stared, grabbed the straw and duplicated my effort with no difficulties. I passed the four grams to Ronnie, saying, “You are a junior. That’s all you get. Do it.” He did it.

Pharmaceutical cocaine cannot be compared in any way to cocaine produced in Central or South America. It is pure, does not bring on depression or lethargy. A totally different type of euphoria, one of creativity, exists immediately when it is absorbed by the central nervous system. There are absolutely no withdrawal symptoms.