Life (51 page)

Kimsey spotted immediately that this studio had truly great sound properties. Because it was a rehearsal room, we’d rented it cheap, which was lucky because we spent a long time on this record and never moved into the proper studio next door. The primitive mixing desk turned out to be the same kind of soundboard designed by EMI for Abbey Road Studios—very humble and simple, with barely more than a treble and bass button but with a phenomenal sound, which Kimsey fell in love with. Uprooted relics of these desks are apparently muso collectors’ items. The sound it got had clarity but dirtiness, a real funky, club feel to it that suited what we were doing.

It was a great room to play in. So, despite Mick doing his usual “Let’s move to a proper studio,” that’s where we stayed, because in a recording session, especially with this kind of music, everything has to feel good. There’s no swimming upstream; you’re not salmon. We’re looking to glide, and if you’ve got problems with the room, you start to lose confidence in what’s going to be captured by the microphones and you start shifting things about. You know it’s a good room when a band is smiling. What a lot of
Some Girls
was down to was this little green box I used, this MXR pedal, a reverb-echo. For most of the songs on there I’m using that, and it elevated the band and it gave it a different sound. In a way, it came down to a little bit of technology. It was kind of like “Satisfaction,” a little box. On
Some Girls
I just found a way of making that thing work, at least through all of the fast songs. And Charlie was on with it, and Bill Wyman too, I’ve got to say. There was a certain sense of renewal. A lot of it was, we’ve got to out-punk the punks. Because they can’t play, and we can. All they can do is be punks. Yes, that might have been a certain thorn in the side. The Johnny Rottens, “these fucking kids.” I love every band that comes along. That’s why I’m here, to encourage guys to play and get bands together. But when they’re not playing anything, they’re just spitting on people, now come on, we can do better than that. There was also an extra urgency because of this grim prospect of the trial and also because after all the palaver, the bust, the noise, the cleaning up, I needed to prove that there was something behind all this—some purpose to this kind of suffering. And it came together very nicely.

Because we hadn’t been together for a while, we needed to get back our old form of writing and collaborating—doing it all on the day, there and then, composing from scratch or semi-scratch. We jumped straight in, back to our old ways with remarkable results. “Before They Make Me Run” and “Beast of Burden” were basically collaborations. “When the Whip Comes Down” I did the riff. Mick wrote it and I looked around and said, shit, he’s finally written a rock-and-roll song. By himself! “Some Girls” was Mick. “Lies” too. Basically he’d say, I’ve got a song, and then I’d say, what if we do it this way or that way?

We didn’t think much of “Miss You” when we were doing it. It was “Aah, Mick’s been to the disco and has come out humming some other song.” It’s a result of all the nights Mick spent at Studio 54 and coming up with that beat, that four on the floor. And he said, add the melody to the beat. We just thought we’d put our oar in on Mick wanting to do some disco shit, keep the man happy. But as we got into it, it became quite an interesting beat. And we realized, maybe we’ve got a quintessential disco thing here. And out of it we got a huge hit. The rest of the album doesn’t sound anything like “Miss You.”

Then we had trouble with the cover, from Lucille Ball, of all people, who didn’t want to be included, and there were loads of lawsuits going on. On the original cover you could pull out and change the faces with one of those cards. There was every famous woman in the world in there, everybody we fancied. Lucille Ball? You don’t like it? Fine! The feminists didn’t like it either. We always like to piss them off. Where would you be without us? And there is the offending line “Black girls just wanna get fucked all night” from “Some Girls.” Well, we’ve been on the road with a lot of black chicks for many years, and there’s quite a few that do. It could have been yellow girls or white girls.

I made a damn good attempt at cleaning up in 1977 with my black box and Meg Patterson and the rest, but for a brief time it didn’t stick. While working on
Some Girls,
I’d go to the john from time to time and shoot up. But it had its method. I’d think about what I was gonna do in there. I would be in there meditating about this track that was really nice but only half finished, and where it could go and what was going wrong with it, and why we’d done twenty-five takes and were still stumbling on the same block every time. When I came out, it was, “Listen, it goes a little faster, and we cut out the keyboards in the middle.” And sometimes I was right, sometimes I was wrong, but it had only been, hey, forty-five minutes. Better than forty-five minutes when everybody is putting their oar in at once—“Yeah, but what about if we do
this?
” Which is, to me, murder. Very occasionally I would go on the nod while we were playing. Still upright, but removed from present concerns, only to pick it up a few bars on. This did waste time because the take, if there was one, would have to be scrapped.

For sheer longevity—for long distance—there is no track that I know of like “Before They Make Me Run.” That song, which I sang on that record, was a cry from the heart. But it burned up the personnel like no other. I was in the studio, without leaving, for five days.

Worked the bars and sideshows along the twilight zone

Only a crowd can make you feel so alone

And it really hit home

Booze and pills and powders, you can choose your medicine

Well here’s another goodbye to another good friend.

After all is said and done

Gotta move while it’s still fun

Let me walk before they make me run.

It came out of what I had been going through and was still going through with the Canadians. I was telling them what to do. Let me walk out of this goddamn case. When you get a lenient sentence, they say, oh, they let him walk.

“Why do you keep nagging that song? Nobody likes it.” “Wait till it’s finished!” Five days without a wink of sleep. I had an engineer called Dave Jordan and I had another engineer, and one of them would flop under the desk and have a few hours’ kip and I’d put the other one in and keep going. We all had black eyes by the time it was finished. I don’t know what was so difficult about it; it just wasn’t quite right. But then you get guys that’ll hang with you. You’ll be standing there with a guitar round your neck and everybody else is conked out on the floor. Oh no, not another take, Keith, please. People brought in food,
pain au chocolat
. Days turned into nights. But you just can’t leave it. It’s almost there, you’re tasting it, it’s just not in your mouth. It’s like fried bacon and onion, but you haven’t eaten it yet, it just smells good.

By the fourth day, Dave looked like he’d been punched in both eyes. And he had to be taken away. “We got it, Dave,” and somebody got him a taxi. He disappeared, and when we were finally finished, I fell asleep under the booth, under all the machinery. I woke up eventually, how many hours I never counted, and there’s the Paris police band. A bloody brass band. That’s what woke me up. They’re listening to a playback. And they don’t know I’m under there, and I’m looking at all these trousers with red stripes and “La Marseillaise” going on, and I’m wondering, when should I emerge? And I’m dying for a pee, and I’ve got my shit with me, needles and stuff, and I’m surrounded by cops that don’t know I’m there. So I waited a bit and thought, I’ll just be very English, and I sort of rolled out and said, “Oh, my God! I’m terribly sorry,” and before they knew it, I was out, and they were all
zut alors–
ing and there were about seventy-six of them. I thought, they’re just like us! They’re so intent on making a good record they didn’t bust me.

When you get into it that much, you can lose the drive of it, but if you know it’s there, it’s there. It’s manic, but it’s like the Holy Grail. Once you’re in, you’re going to go for it. Because there’s no turning back, really. You’ve got to come out with something. And eventually you get there. That’s probably the longest I’ve done. There have been others that were close—“Can’t Be Seen” was one—but “Before They Make Me Run” was the marathon.

There’s a postscript to these
Some Girls
sessions, which I should let Chris Kimsey tell.

Chris Kimsey:
“Miss You” and “Start Me Up” were actually recorded on the same day. When I say on the same day, “Miss You” took about ten days to get the final master, and then when it was done they went and did “Start Me Up.” “Start Me Up” had been a reggae song recorded in Rotterdam three years earlier. When they started playing it this time, it wasn’t a reggae song, it was what we know today as the great “Start Me Up.” It was Keith’s song; he just changed it. Maybe after the disco thing of “Miss You,” he went to it with a different approach. And it was the only occasion I’ve ever recorded two masters on the same session. It didn’t take long to get down. And when we got the take that everyone felt, oh, that was good, Keith came in and listened to it, and he said, it’s all right, it sounds like something I’ve heard on the radio, it should be a reggae song. Wipe it. He was still toying with it, but he didn’t like it. I remember Keith saying at one point that he would prefer to wipe all the masters after they’d been done and released. So no one could go back and fiddle with them. So of course I didn’t wipe it. And it became the big song on
Tattoo You
three years later.

Once again, everything revolved around the stuff. Nothing could be done or organized without first organizing the next fix. It got more and more dire. Elaborate arrangements had to be made, some of them more comic than others. I had a man, James W, who I would call up when I was going from London to New York. I would stay at the Plaza Hotel. James, this sweet young Chinese man, would meet me in the suite, the big one preferably, and I’d hand him the cash, he’d give me the shit. And it was always very polite. Give my regards to your father. It was difficult in the ’70s to get hypodermics in America. So when I traveled I would wear a hat and use a needle to fix a little feather to the hatband, so it was just a hat pin. I would put the trilby with the red, green and gold feather in the hat bag. So the minute James turned up, I got the shit. OK, but now I need the syringe. My trick was, I’d order a cup of coffee, because I needed a spoon for cooking up. And then I’d go down to FAO Schwarz, the toy shop right across Fifth Avenue from the Plaza. And if you went to the third floor, you could buy a doctor and nurse play set, a little plastic box with a red cross on it. That had the barrel and the syringe that fitted the needle that I’d brought. I’d go round, “I’ll have three teddy bears, I’ll have that remote-control car, oh, and give me two doctor and nurse kits! My niece, you know, she’s really into that. Must encourage her.” FAO Schwarz was my connection. Rush back to the room, hook it up and fix it.

By then I’ve ordered up coffee, so I’ve got the teaspoon. You fill the spoon and hold a lighter to it, and you watch it and it should burn clear and turn to treacle. It shouldn’t go black; that means there’s too much cut in it. James never let me down on that; it was always high-quality stuff. I’m not looking for weight, I’m looking for sustenance. I’m strung out. I’ve got to have some dope. But never look for a huge amount. Quarter ounces. Because also, the quality could change over a week or so. You don’t want a whole bag of useless, rotten dope. You watch the market. James W was my man. “Look, this is the best we’ve got right now. I don’t suggest you buy any more of this. Next week, we’re getting some high quality.” Absolutely reliable was James. And a great sense of humor, very straight up, straight business, price on the button. The only thing we’d laugh about was “Have you been over to the toy store yet?”

O
nce you’re a junkie,
your smack’s your daily bread. You don’t really get off anymore that much. There’s junkies that keep upping their dosage, and that’s why you get ODs. To me, it just became maintenance. It was to set the trend for the day. Then came all those agonizing moments when there was a drought on, and the old lady’s going, I want some stuff! So do I, honey, but we’ve got to wait. Waiting for the man. When there was a heroin drought it was a bit rough. They really used to put the screws on. There’d be people in the room in dire straits, throwing up. You’d be treading over bodies. And there’s sometimes really no drought; it’s only to jack the price up. And it doesn’t really matter how much money you’ve got. I’m not going to say, “Do you know who I am?” I’m just another junkie.

When there’s no shit at all, then you’ve got to go down to the pits, and you know it’s going to be like a fucking pool of piranhas down there. It happened to me a couple of times on the East Side in New York and in LA. We knew the trick—you’d score upstairs, and on your way down the other bunch would take it back off you again. Most of the time you’d hear it going on while you were waiting for your turn. The thing was to leave quietly, and if you saw anybody outside—because you never knew if it was going to happen or not—usually you’d give them a kick in the balls. But a couple of times, fuck it, OK, let’s go for it. You cover me. You stay down there, and as I come down with the shit I’ll go bang, and they’ll go bang and then you go bang. Shoot out the lightbulbs and put a few bullets around and do the run, sparks flying. Then with a bit of luck we’re out of there. The statistics are well on your side against being hit when you’re a moving target. If you look at the odds, one thousand to one, you’re going to win. You have to be very close and you have to have good eyesight to shoot out a lightbulb. And it’s dark. Flash, bang, wallop and get out of there. I loved it. It was real OK Corral stuff. Only did it twice.