True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (13 page)

Bill used part of the money to buy the equipment that the Stones
admired. “They didn't like me, they liked my amplifier,” Bill said. “The two they had were broken and torn up inside—sounded great, really, but we didn't know that then. But I didn't like their music very much. I had been playing hard rock—Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis—and the slow blues things seemed very boring to me.”

But Stu “got on all right with Bill, really, and as I was the guy that was taking him home each night, I managed to sort of talk him into staying.”

“It also turns out,” Keith said, “that he can really play. At first it's very untogether, but slowly he starts to play very natural, very swinging bass lines. But it's not a permanent thing, he does play with us and he's coming to rehearsals, but then he can't make the gigs sometimes, because he's married and's got a kid, and he has to work. So it's very touchy one way and the other.

“Stu gets us a regular gig down where he lives, at this pub, the Red Lion, in Sutton. We're playing around west London, Eel Pie Island. Nearly all the same people would follow us wherever we went, the first Stones fans, all doing the new dances. The clubs held a couple of hundred. Things were beginning to look up, we were making like fifty quid a week, playing about five nights a week, every week the same places, and it's getting good. Brian's trying to find out about recordings. We know that because of the Beatles thing that's happening, there's no time to lose if we want to get on records, which is what we really want to do. Every musician wants to make records, I don't know why. It's got nothing to do with the bread, they just want to see what they can lay down for posterity, I guess.

“We've got a steady scene going in London, and we get hooked up with our first manager. Nothing was signed, but he was Giorgio Gomelsky, who owned the Piccadilly jazz club, a terrible place, nobody much used to go there, but we played there a couple of times. At one of these gigs we decided to get rid of our drummer and steal Charlie from this other band he was working with, because we were now in a position to offer Charlie twenty quid a week.”

Charlie Watts, the son of a lorry driver for British Rail, was born in London on June 2, 1941. “My grandparents moved from London before I was born, when my father first got married. And they lived not in Wembley but near there. We moved to Wembley when I was about seven,” Charlie said. “It was like there was nobody there. There were greens and things, which twenty years before were farmland. I remember as a kid there was a farm in Wembley that's not there any more. It's an estate. That was the last farm in that area producing milk and having pigs and a farmhouse, with barns. It's all gone now, and that's in my lifetime. I mean how far can you go? The world's going like that.

“I went to infants school in Wembley. Junior school's where you
start to play football. You go to a secondary modern school for an ordinary education, which is what I had. We used to have forty in a class. I specialized in art. If I hadn't, I'd have just played football all day long. That's all I would have been living for—and cricket.

“I started playing when I was fourteen or fifteen. We had a choir, which nobody liked singing in much, didn't have a band. Music was a guy lecturing, and nobody understood what he was saying. Fortunately my parents were perceptive enough to buy me a drum kit. I'd bought a banjo myself and taken the neck off and started playing it as a drum. I don't know how it came about, I started learning the banjo, and I just got pissed off with it, I didn't like it. There was a little period of four weeks and by the end of it I'd already taken the neck off. Played newspaper with wire brushes. My parents bought me one of those first drum kits which every drummer knows only too well. But you have to have them, or you'd never get any appreciation of the other ones. I used to sell records to buy bigger cymbals and what-ever was in vogue at the time. I used to waste money like mad buying equipment. I practiced at home to jazz records all the time. The only rock and roll I ever listened to was after the Rolling Stones turned me on to it. I used to like Jimmy Reed and Bo Diddley and from there I went on to, who's that guy, ‘Ooh Poo Pah Doo,' and slowly I got on to hearing how good the early Elvis records were.

“When I was older I used to play at weddings, but then I was working in the day. I used to be a designer. Well, I don't know what I used to be, I used to do lettering, that's what I used to do all day. For three years, sit down and practice that. For a little guy who made his living at it, and I was his apprentice. And then from there—I'd done three years apprenticeship and wanted more money, being Jewish, so I moved to a bigger firm, which sent me to Sweden, ah, Denmark. Actually it was a big con because I went over there and got paid and did no work because nobody knew what I was supposed to be doing, as usual. I should have gone to New York. That was my big ambition in those days. But instead of that I went to Denmark. I'm glad I did—I got straight in with a band there—but I had no drum kit, had to borrow one all the time.

“Prior to that I used to play at the Troubadour with this band, and that's where I met Alexis Korner. Then I went away and came back and he's starting a band. He said he wanted me to play, so I said okay. Three of us lasted through the first rehearsals. Well, the first six months. They all became friends of mine. 'Cause it wasn't for bread. You never made bread, none of us did. We went all the way to Birmingham once and got five shillings. Time went on and I left that band and I'd left my firm, I was out of work, playing sometimes with another band, Blues by Five, just a mixture of stray people, and I joined the Stones.”

• • •

“We'd come to a club,” said Bill Wyman, who changed from Perks, taking the name of an air force friend, when the Stones began announcing their names onstage, “when we could get one to take us, and set up our amps. The others were dressed in sweaters, leather jackets, blue jeans, and I'd be in the clothes I'd worn to work. The manager would tell us, ‘Look sharp now, only ten minutes before you go on, better go and change.' We'd tell him that we were going on as we were, and he'd say, ‘Very funny, now go and get dressed.'

“We carried three stolen metal stools with us, and with Mick out front and Charlie in back we'd just sit down, Brian, Keith, and me, and start playing, just as if we were rehearsing. Each of us would have a beer by his stool, and when we finished a number we'd all drink a bit and light up a fag. Customers couldn't believe it. They'd stop dancing, come stand around the stage and stare at us. Didn't know what to think. The managers would say, ‘Right, pack up your gear and get out in five minutes or I'll set my boys on you.'

“We'd finish playing after two
A.M.,
and I'd have to be up at six to go to my job. I averaged three hours' sleep, and didn't know where I was a good part of the time. But I had to go on, because I had Stephen. Finally, though, I had to choose—the people at work told me to cut my hair or pack up. I had had long hair before going with the Stones, but now it was longer than ever. It seemed such a silly thing. Everybody—the people at work, my friends, my parents, my wife—said I should keep my job and not go with the Stones. Later, when we were a success, they said, ‘See, I knew you could make it.'”

“The first time I saw them,” Glyn Johns said, “I'd never seen any-thing like it, ever.” The chief engineer at I.B.C. recording studios in London in January 1963, Johns helped the Stones to get a recording session. “I can remember taking them to I.B.C. for the first session and being frightened of introducing them to George Clouston, the guy who owned the studio. I see photographs of them then and they look so tame and harmless, I can't associate it with the effect they had on people. It was just their appearance, their clothes, their hair, their whole attitude was immediately obvious to you as soon as you saw them playing. It was just a complete
pppprt
to society and everybody and anything.”

“At the start of the Stones it was Brian who was the monster head,” Alexis Korner said. “Brian was incredibly aggressive in performance. By then his hair was pretty long, and he had what was almost a permanent pout, crossed with a leer, and he used to look incredibly randy most of the time. He used to jump forward with the tambourine and smash it in your face and sneer at you at the same time. The aggression had a tremendous impact. Also, he was a very sensitive player, Brian, at his best, and could play slow blues exceptionally well.
But I remember him most for his ‘I'm gonna put the boot in' attitude. Brian achieved what he wanted to achieve by his extreme aggression, and it was extreme, it was incitement, when Brian was onstage playing he was inciting every male in the room to hit him. Really and truly that was the feeling one got. At the start Brian was the image of aggression in the Stones much more than Mick.”

“But it was always Mick who would take people on,” Stu said. “When we used to get fucked up every week by
Jazz News”
which seemed purposely to misprint the Stones' ads, “it would be Mick who'd go up to their office and have it out.”

“But onstage,” Alexis said, “it was Brian who made blokes want to thump him. He would deliberately play at someone's chick, and when the bloke got stroppy, he'd slap a tambourine in his face.”

“Brian could have been killed a few times,” Stu said.

She said, “Daddy, this old World Boogie
Gone take me to my grave
Gone take me to my grave.”

B
UKKA
W
HITE:
“World Boogie”

B
EFORE TEN O'CLOCK
in the morning I was sitting in the living room with my back to the sweep of Los Angeles, talking on a beige telephone to a travel agent, who said that Kerouac's funeral could be reached only by taxi or rental car from Boston. There wasn't time, but with the letter mailed and the Stones, Sandison said, planning to spend the next week in the studio finishing
Let It Bleed,
I could go home and try to prepare for the tour.

After a day of shopping—a leather jacket, an ounce of grass—I rode to the airport with Chip Monck and Ian Stewart, who were going to inspect the hall the Stones would play in Chicago. Stu's neat black hair with short back and sides, his khaki trousers, golf shirt, and Hush Puppies made him and Monck, in his California cowboy drag—red suede jeans—a curious pair. Monck had again fallen asleep sitting up. He was the only person I had ever seen who could make falling asleep pretentious.

I asked Stu, who was driving, whether the Stones would charter a plane for the tour. Nobody knew yet, but it might not be a bad idea, Stu said; Keith was banned from Alitalia “for stayin' in the restroom from Rome to London punchin' that crazy Anita.”

At eleven
P.M.
I flew to Memphis with a quiet planeload of tired old people returning from a synagogue-sponsored vacation in Singapore.
Christopher met me at the gate. “Are you a child or an adult?” people have asked her. Christopher is four feet eleven and a half inches tall, but like Hermia in
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
“though she be but little, she is fierce.”

Today Christopher worked for Omega Airlines from three o'clock till midnight, talking to machines and people, and her eyes, that change like the sea, looked tired and red.

When I met Christopher, the great-granddaughter of a Mississippi River steamboat captain, family fortune gone, she and her mother were living like ruined Russian royalty in a federal housing project in Memphis. Her mother and father separated before she was born, and she never knew her father. They had lived in the project since Christopher was a little girl. Her mother, having neither the breeding nor the inclinations of a servant, did not cook or clean. They ate at a place called Mae's Grill, or else ate tuna sandwiches and Vienna sausages at home. When she was very young, Christopher went to a private day school in much the same way that Fanny Price went to Mansfield Park. One day—she was about five years old—her father called the school and told Christopher that he was coming to get her. He never came, but she was terrified.

Christopher grew up in perfect ignorance of men. She saw photographs in books of Roman statues wearing fig leaves and thought men were made that way. She never had a date in high school, but she read Thackeray, Henry James, Jane Austen. She knew more about life then than I do now.

I was nineteen when we met, and a more arrogant young fool never drew breath. Without the handicap of learning or experience, I saw no reason not to become equal to Poe or Melville. (Not Mark Twain—I didn't foam at the mouth.) I was also a great and cynical lover. Christopher forgave me.

Nearly ten years had passed. Christopher had worked her way through college and freed her mother from the housing project. She had been a private tutor, ward clerk in a hospital, secretary at a savings and loan company. I had taught karate, been a state welfare worker, a Pinkerton operative, lived off my parents, and tried to learn to write. Now I was something called a journalist. Christopher had wanted to work for an airline so she could travel. We had travelled, but Omega changed Christopher's schedule every few weeks, giving her jet lag when she'd been nowhere. We both worked constantly, but the only money we had saved was $2000 from the
Saturday Evening Post,
hoarded against the Stones tour.

Christopher handled money strangely. Coins poured from her purse. I would find them in the car (we lived in a little white house, whose door would be kicked in by Detective J. J. Wells of the Metro Narcotics Squad, and drove a maroon Mustang) and ask, “What's this?”

“People throw money at me.”

Later I would come home from England to find Christopher gone and only a cold wind in her closet, and when I found her and asked where she had been, she would say, “The birds and the animals keep me warm.”