True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (8 page)

(Ten years later, Keith would make his father part of the family again, but with no false feeling on either side. When, in 1983, Bert Richards answered the phone at Keith's house in Jamaica, the friend calling said, “You must be so proud of him.” “Well . . .” Keith's father said, refusing to commit himself.)

“How did you feel about school?”

“I wanted to get the fuck out of there. The older I got, the more I wanted to get out. I just knew I wasn't gonna make it. In primary
school you didn't do that much, but later, when I went to that fucking technical school in Dartford, the indoctrination was blatantly apparent. I went to primary school, which in England is called, or was then, infant school, from five to seven. When I started going to school, just after the war, they taught you the basics, but mainly it was indoctrination in the way schools were run, who's to say yes to who and how to find your place in class. It's what you've let yourself in for for the next ten years.

“When you're seven you go to junior school. They had just started building a few new schools by the time we'd finished the first one, so we went to a new one nearer where we lived. That's where I met Mick, 'cause that's where he went too, Wentworth County Primary School. He happened to live near by me, I used to see him around . . . on our tricycles.

“In junior school they start grading you each school year, each section of kids into three sections, fast, average, and slow. When you're eleven you take an examination called the eleven plus, which is the big trauma, because this virtually dictates the rest of your life as far as the system goes. It probably includes more psychology now, but then they were just trying to see how much you knew and how quick you learned it and whether you could write it down. That decided whether you went to grammar school, which is where you receive a sort of semiclassical education for the masses, or to what they call a technical school, which I ended up in, which is actually for kids that are usually pretty bright but that just won't accept discipline very well. The school for kids that don't stand much of a chance of doing anything except unskilled or semiskilled labor is called secondary modern. For those who had the bread there were plenty of public schools, but this was the system for state education.

“After eleven I lost touch with Mick because he went to a grammar school and I went to this technical school. I lost touch with Mick for—it seemed a long time, actually it was about six years.”

Keith Richards, the youngest of the original Rolling Stones, was born on December 18, 1943. Michael Philip Jagger was born in the same year and the same town, Dartford, on July 26. When she was four years old, Mick's mother had come to Dartford from Australia, where six generations of her family had lived. “The women in my family went to Australia to get away from the men,” she said. She married Joseph Jagger, a physical education teacher who came to Dartford from a family of strict nondrinking Baptists in the north of England. Their son Michael was from an early age interested in athletics and in earning money.

“When I was twelve years old,” Mick said, “I worked on an American
army base near Dartford, giving other kids physical instruction—because I was good at it. I had to learn their games, so I learned football and baseball, all the American games. There was a black cat there named José, a cook, who played R&B records for me. That was the first time I heard black music. In fact that was my first encounter with American thought. They buried a flag, a piece of cloth, with full military honors. I thought it was ridiculous, and said so. They said, ‘How would you feel if we said something about the Queen?' I said, ‘I wouldn't mind, you wouldn't be talking about me. She might mind, but I wouldn't.' ”

We talked in many places—movie sets, motel rooms, airplanes, at Mick's house on Cheyne Walk, with Marsha Hunt, the Afro-American actress, pregnant with Mick's first child, wearing her bosom Scotch-taped into a hippie-Indian dress.

One night at Keith's London house, a few doors up from Mick's, Keith, Mick, Anita, and I were talking, and Anita mentioned that Mrs. Jagger often speaks of how Mick used to enjoy camping and the outdoor life. In a high-pitched, proper voice, imitating Mrs. Jagger, I said, “As a child, Mick was very butch.”

“Yeah, I was butch,” Mick said. “But she was always butcher.”

“Technical school was completely the wrong thing for me,” Keith said. “Working with the hands, metalwork. I can't even measure an inch properly, so they're forcing me to make a set of drills or something, to a thousandth-of-an-inch accuracy. I did my best to get thrown out of that place. Took me four years, but I made it.”

“You tried to get yourself thrown out how? By not showing up?”

“Not so much that, because they do too many things to you for doing that. It makes life difficult for you. I was trying to make it easier for me.

“At this time rock and roll had just hit the scene. That also played a very heavy part in my decision. The first record that really turned me on out of the rock and roll thing was ‘Heartbreak Hotel.' ”

“Did you see
Blackboard Jungle
over here?”

“Yeah, that was the first ripping-the-seats-up, Teddy Boys type of scene here. I was very young at that time. I did the first school year, I did the second year, I did the third year, and at the end of the third year I'd fucked up so much that they made me do the third-year course again, which was really to humiliate me. It meant you had to stay down with the younger kids and couldn't take the G.C.E. examinations, which in this country are very important in getting a job. I didn't take the fucking things at all. I did the third year again, and I did the fourth year, and at the end of the fourth year—remember, everybody else was at the end of the fifth year—I made things so bad—culminating in a spate of truancy which they wouldn't take from me—they kicked me out.

“The particular thing was splitting constantly very early in the day, and just generally turning out contrary to their demands, and millions of things, like I used to wear two pairs of pants to school, a very tight pair and a very baggy pair which I would put on as soon as I got near the school, because they would just send you home if you had tight pants on. That's another thing about English schools, you had to wear the school uniform . . . the cap, very strange contraption, like a skullcap with a peak on it, school badge on the front. And a dark blazer with a badge on the breast pocket, a tie, and gray flannel trousers. I refused to go to and from school with those fucking clothes on.

“But in kicking me out, they as a final show of benevolence fixed up this place for me in art school. Actually that was the best thing they could have done for me, because the art schools in England are very freaky. Half the staff anyway are in advertising agencies, and to keep up the art bit and make a bit of extra bread they teach school like one day a week. Freaks, drunks, potheads. Also there's a lot of kids. I was fifteen and there are kids there nineteen, in their last year. A lot of music goes on at art schools. That's where I got hung up on guitar, because there were a lot of guitar players around then, playing anything from Big Bill Broonzy to Woody Guthrie. I also got hung up on Chuck Berry, though what I was playing was the art school stuff, the Guthrie sound and blues. Not really blues, mostly ballads and Jesse Fuller stuff. In art school I met Dick Taylor, a guitar player. He was the first cat I played with. We were playing a bit of blues, Chuck Berry stuff on acoustic guitars, and I think I'd just about now got an amplifier like a little beat-up radio. There was another cat at art school called Michael Ross. He decided to form a country and western band—this is
real
amateur—Sanford Clark songs and a few Johnny Cash songs, ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky.' The first time I got onstage and played was with this C&W band. One gig I remember was a sports dance at Eltham, which is near Sidcup, where the art school I went to was.

“I left technical school when I was fifteen. I did three years of art school. I was just starting the last year when Mick and I happened to meet up on the train at Dartford Station. Between the ages of eleven and seventeen you go through a lot of changes. So I didn't know what he was like. It was like seeing an old friend, but it was also like meeting a new person. He'd left grammar school and he was going to the London School of Economics, very heavily into a university student number. He had some records with him, and I said Wotcha got? Turned out to be Chuck Berry,
Rocking at the Hop.

“He was into singin' in the bath sort of stuff, he had been singin' with a rock group a few years previous, couple of years. Buddy Holly stuff and ‘Sweet Little Sixteen,' Eddie Cochran stuff, at youth clubs and things in Dartford, but he hadn't done that for a while when I met him.
I told him I was messin' around with Dick Taylor. It turned out that Mick knew Dick Taylor because they'd been to grammar school together, so, fine, why don't we all get together? I think one night we all went round to Dick's place and had a rehearsal, just a jam. That was the first time we got into playing. Just back-room stuff, just for ourselves. So we started gettin' it together in front rooms and back rooms, at Dick Taylor's home particularly. We started doing things like Billy Boy Arnold stuff, ‘Ride an Eldorado Cadillac,' Eddie Taylor, Jimmy Reed, didn't attempt any Muddy Waters yet, or Bo Diddley, I don't think, in that period. Mick laid a lot of sounds on me that I hadn't heard. He'd imported records from Ernie's Record Mart.

“At this time the big music among the kids was traditional jazz, some of it very funky, some of it very wet, most of it very,
very
wet. Rock and roll had already drifted into pop like it has already done again here because the mass media have to cater to everybody. They don't have it broken down into segments so that kids can listen to one station. It's all put together, so eventually it boils down to what the average person wants to hear, which is average rubbish. Anyway, that was the scene then, no good music coming out of the radio, no good music coming out of the so-called rock and roll stars. No good nothing.

“Just about the time Mick and I are getting the scene together with Dick Taylor, trying to find out what it's all about, who's playing what and how they're playing it, Alexis Korner starts a band at a club in the west of London, in Ealing, with a harmonica player called Cyril Davies, a car-panel beater at a junkyard and body shop. Cyril had been to Chicago and sat in with Muddy at Smitty's Corner and was therefore a very big deal. He was a good harp player and a good night man; he used to drink bourbon like a fucking fish. Alexis and Cyril got this band together and who happens to be on drums, none other than Charlie Watts. We went down about the second week it opened. It was the only club in England where they were playing anything funky, as far as anybody knew. The first person we see sitting in—Alexis gets up and says, ‘And now, folks, a very fine bottleneck guitar player who has come all the way from Cheltenham to play here tonight'—and suddenly there's fucking Elmore James up there, ‘Dust My Broom,' beautifully played, and it's Brian.”

If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.

—W
ILLIAM
B
LAKE:
Proverbs of Hell

I
T WAS AFTER ELEVEN
in the morning when I clawed my way down the hall toward the fresh fruit salad in the refrigerator, hoping it would cure the headache left me as a souvenir of last night's cocaine. David Sandison, coming out of the office, loomed before me, his face mournful as a basset hound's. He asked if I'd just got up and I said brusquely, “That's right,” wanting the thick apple juice, cold strawberries, pineapple and orange slices—they might try to steal from you, but they'd never starve you—and he said, “Then you haven't heard about Kerouac.”

“What about him?”

“He's dead.”

“Where'd you hear that?” I asked, because you never want to believe these things.

“It's been on the radio this morning. He died last night. He was living in Florida. Did you know that?”

I didn't answer because in my mind I was riding on a Trailways bus from Waycross to Macon, Georgia, Lumber City just ahead, reading a story in a book I had borrowed from the Okefenokee Regional Library, since Waycross did not have a bookstore, if you discounted a place where they sold Bibles. In the story a Mexican girl was singing to a young American man a Piano Red song we used to play on the jukebox
at the lake where my high school friends and I danced and drag-raced and made love in cars. I had never read a story like this one. The people in it drove fast and made love in cars, and that made my life seem more like something you might read about, or as the song said, “If you can't boogie, you know I'll show you how.” Then I remembered that the only work I had an actual contract to do was a story for
Esquire
about Kerouac. Waiting to hear from the Stones, I had postponed going to Florida for an interview. The thought jolted me back to the present, sitting on a couch in the living room, still hungry. My mood had changed, and I made a ham sandwich and drank a beer.

Mick, Mick, and Keith had arrived, Jagger in the office with the door closed, Keith playing tennis with Mick Taylor, then displaying in the pool what he called “the form perfected over six years lounging on the beaches of the world.” Only six years a Rolling Stone, and he looked a hundred. How old had Kerouac looked? Sandison grimly watched Keith swimming. Before going into the publicity racket Sandison was a reporter for a small-town English newspaper. Both his body and his prematurely balding head were pear-shaped; Kerouac had lived the vagabond life unknown to the pear-shaped. Sandison really felt as if something had been taken away from him. He told Keith about Kerouac, and though Keith had never read him, he sort of swam more seriously for a few strokes.