Life (21 page)

By the end of that first American tour, we thought we’d blown it in America. We’d been consigned to the status of medicine shows and circus freaks with long hair. When we got to Carnegie Hall in New York, we were suddenly back in England with screaming teenyboppers. America was coming around. We realized that it was just starting.

Mick and I hadn’t come all the way to New York in ’64 not to go to the Apollo. So I hooked up again with Ronnie Bennett. We went to Jones Beach with all the Ronettes in a red Cadillac. The desk rang up, “There’s a lady downstairs.” “Come on, let’s go.” And it was James Brown’s week at the Apollo. Maybe Ronnie should describe what nice English boys we were—contrary to popular belief:

Ronnie Spector:
The first time Keith and Mick came to America, they weren’t successful, they slept on my mother’s living room floor up in Spanish Harlem. They had no money, and my mom would get up in the morning and make them bacon and eggs, and Keith would always say, “Thank you, Mrs. Bennett.” And then I took them to see James Brown at the Apollo, and that’s what made them so determined. Those guys went home and came back superstars. Because I showed them what I did, how I grew up, and how I went to the Apollo Theater when I was eleven years old. I took them backstage and they met all these rhythm and blues stars. I remember Mick standing there shaking when we passed James Brown’s room.

The first time I went to heaven was when I awoke with Ronnie (later Spector!) Bennett asleep with a smile on her face. We were kids. It doesn’t get any better than that. Just more refined. What can I say? She took me to her parents’ house, took me to her bedroom. Several times, but that was the first time. And I’m just a guitar player. You know what I mean?

James Brown had the whole week there at the Apollo. Go to the Apollo and see James Brown, damn fucking right. I mean, who would turn that down? He was a piece of work. So on the button. We thought
we
were a tight band! The discipline in the band impressed me more than anything else. On stage, James would snap his fingers if he thought somebody had missed a beat or hit a wrong note, and you could see the player’s face fall. He would signal the fine he had imposed with his fingers. These guys would be watching his hands. I even saw Maceo Parker, the sax player who was the architect of James Brown’s band—who I finally got to work with in the Winos—get fined about fifty bucks that night. It was a fantastic show. Mick’s looking at his foot moves. Mick took more notice than I did that day—lead singer, dancing, he calls the shots.

Backstage that night, James wanted to show off to these English folk. He’s got the Famous Flames, and he’s sending one out for a hamburger, he’s ordering another to polish his shoes and he’s humiliating his own band. To me, it was the Famous Flames, and James Brown happened to be the lead singer. But the way he lorded it over his minions, his minders and the actual band, to Mick was fascinating.

*   *   *

W
hen we got back
to England, the big difference was seeing old friends, mostly musicians, who were already amazed that we were the Rolling Stones, but now “You’ve been to the States, man.” You were suddenly aware that you had been distanced just by the fact that you’d been to America. It really pissed off the English fans. It happened with the Beatles’ fans too. You were no longer “theirs.” There was a sense of resentment. Never more so than in Blackpool. There, at the Empress Ballroom, a few weeks after our return, we faced the mob again, though this time a rabble army of Scotch drunks baying for blood. They used to have what they called Scotch week. All of the factories in Glasgow shut down and nearly everybody from there went to Blackpool, the seaside resort. We start the gig, and it’s jam-packed, a lot of guys, a lot of them very, very pissed, all dressed up in their Sunday best. And suddenly while I’m playing, this little redheaded fucker flobs on me. So I move aside, and he follows me and flobs on me again and hits me in the face. So I stand in front of him again and he spits at me again and, with the stage, his head was just about near my shoe, like a penalty shot in football. I just went
bang
and knocked his fucking head off, with the grace of Beckham. He’s never walked the same since. And after that, the riot broke out. They smashed everything, including the piano. We didn’t see a piece of equipment that came back any bigger than three inches square with wires hanging out. We got out of there by the skin of our teeth.

In the days after our return from the US we appeared on
Juke Box Jury,
a long-established format presided over by a TV pro called David Jacobs, in which the celebs on the “jury” discussed the records Jacobs played and then voted them hits or misses. This was one of those landmark moments that completely escaped us while it was happening. But in the media later it was seen as a declaration of generational war, the cause of outrage, fear and loathing. On the same day we’d taped a show called
Top of the Pops
to promote our Bobby Womack single “It’s All Over Now.” I’d gotten used to lip-synching without blushing; that’s the way it was done. Very few shows were live. We were getting a little bit cynical about the tripe market. You realized that you were really in one of the sleaziest businesses there is, without actually being a gangster. It was a business where the only time people laughed was when they’d screwed someone else over. I have a feeling that by then we kind of realized the role that we were being cast in, and that there was no fighting it and anyway, nobody had really played it before, and this would be kind of fun. And we didn’t give a shit. Andrew Oldham describes our
Juke Box Jury
appearance in his book
Stoned
.

Andrew Oldham:
With no prompting from me, they proceeded to behave as complete and utter yobos and in twenty-five minutes managed to confirm the nation’s worst opinion of them for once and all. They grunted, they laughed among themselves, were merciless towards the drivel that was played and hostile towards the unflappable Mr. Jacobs. This was no planned press move. Brian and Bill made some effort to be polite, but Mick and Keith and Charlie would have none of it.

Nobody was particularly witty or anything. We just trashed every record they played. While the record was playing, we were going, “I’m not fit to comment on this,” “You can’t listen to this stuff. Be serious.” And there’s David Jacobs trying to cover up the dirt. Jacobs was smarmy, but he was actually quite a nice guy. It had been so easy up until then: Helen Shapiro and Alma Cogan, reliable Variety Club sorts of people, all of those showbiz comfy societies that everybody was roped into, and then we come out of nowhere. I’ve no doubt that David was thinking, “Thanks a lot, BBC, and I want a raise after working with this lot.” It won’t get any better. Wait for the Sex Pistols, mate.

The Variety Club was like the inner circle, at the time, in showbiz. You didn’t know if it was Freemasons or a charity; it was a clique that basically ran show business. Weirdly archaic, English showbiz mafia. We were thrown into all this in order to tear it apart. They were still playing their game. Billy Cotton. Alma Cogan. But you realized that all these celebs, and really very few of them were talented, had an incredible swing on things. Who got to play where, who would close doors on you and who would open them. And luckily, the Beatles had already shown them all what was what. The writing was on the wall already, so when they had to deal with us, they didn’t know quite which way to pussyfoot.

The only reason we got a record deal with Decca was because Dick Rowe turned down the Beatles. EMI got them, and he could not afford to make the same mistake twice. Decca was desperate—I’m amazed the guy still had the job. At the time, just like anything else in “popular entertainment,” they thought, it’s just a fad, it’s a matter of a few haircuts and we’ll tame them anyway. But basically we only got a record deal because they could just not afford to fuck up twice. Otherwise they wouldn’t have touched us with a barge pole. Just out of prejudice. That whole structure was Variety Club, a nod and a wink here and there. It served its purpose at the time, no doubt, but suddenly they realized, bang, welcome to the twentieth century, and it’s 1964 already.

Things happened incredibly fast from the moment Andrew turned up. To me at least, there was a certain feeling that things were running away from us. But you also realize you’ve just been noosed, honey, and you’re going to have to go with it. I was a little bit hesitant to run with it to start with, but Andrew knows it didn’t take me long. We were of a very similar mind—let’s figure out how to use Fleet Street. This was partly provoked by an incident at a photo session we did, when one of the photographers said to Andrew, “They’re so dirty.” Andrew’s flash point was low, and he decided then that from now on he’d give them what they described. He suddenly saw the beauty of opposites. He’d already done the Beatles stuff with Epstein, so he was a street ahead of me. But he did find a willing partner in me, I must say. Even at that age there was a chemistry between us. Later we became firmer friends, but at the time, I looked at him just as Andrew looked at us—“I can use these bastards.”

The media were so easy to manipulate, we could do anything we wanted. We’d get thrown out of hotels, piss on a garage forecourt. Actually that was a total accident. Once Bill wants to take a pee, it doesn’t stop for about half an hour. Jesus Christ, where does the little bloke put all that? We went to the Grand Hotel in Bristol deliberately to get thrown out. Andrew called Fleet Street to say if you want to watch the Stones get thrown out of the Grand Hotel, be there at such and such a time—because we were dressed incorrectly. The way Andrew could set them up, we’d have them panting for nothing. And of course it provoked things like “Would you let your daughter marry one?” I don’t know whether Andrew planted that idea on somebody or whether it was just one of those Lunchtime O’Booze ideas.

We were obnoxious. But these people were so complacent. They didn’t know what hit them. It was blitzkrieg, really, an assault on the whole PR setup. And suddenly you realize there’s this landscape out there, these people that need to be told what to do.

While we were pulling all these stunts, Andrew was going around in a Chevrolet Impala driven by Reg, his butch gay chauffeur from Stepney. Reg was a very nasty piece of work. In those days it was a miracle to get four lines from a rock journalist in
New Musical Express,
but it was important because there was very little radio and not much TV. There was a writer at the
Record Mirror
called Richard Green who had used that precious space to write about my complexion. I didn’t even suffer from the blemishes he described. But this was the last straw for Andrew. He took Reg and barged into the writer’s office. And with Reg holding his hands under the open window, he said to Richard—I quote again from Andrew’s memoir:

Andrew Oldham:
Richard, I got a call this morning from a very hurt and upset Mrs. Richards. You don’t know her, but she’s Keith Richards’ mum. She said, “Mr. Oldham, can you do anything to stop what this man keeps saying about my boy’s acne? I know you can’t stop that rubbish about how they don’t wash. But Keith is a sensitive boy, even if he doesn’t say so. Please, Mr. Oldham, can you do anything?” So, Richard, this is the story. If you ever again write something about Keith that is out of line, that is hurtful to his mum, because I’m responsible to Keith’s mum, your hands will be where they are now, but with one big difference. Reg here will bring that fuckin’ window crashing down on your ugly hands, and you will not be writing, you malicious fat turd, for a long fucking time, and you won’t be dictating either, ’cause your jaw will be sewn up from where Reg fucking broke it.

And with that, as it goes, they made their excuses and left. I didn’t even realize until I read his book that Andrew was still living with his mother while he was pulling off all this derring-do. Maybe that had something to do with it. He was smarter and sharper than the assholes that were running the media, or the people running the record companies, who were totally out of touch with what was happening. You could just run in and rob the whole bank. It was a bit
Clockwork Orange.
There was no great universal “We want to change society”; we just knew that things were changing and that they could be changed. They were just too comfortable. It was all too satisfied. And we thought, “How can we run rampant?”

Of course all of us ran into the brick wall of the establishment. There was an impetus that couldn’t be stopped. It was like when somebody says something, and you’ve got the most fantastic reply. You know you really shouldn’t say it, but it has to be said, even though you know that it’s gonna get you in shit. It’s too good a line not to say. You’d feel that you’d chickened out on yourself if you didn’t say it.

Oldham modeled himself to an extent on his idol Phil Spector as a producer as well as a manager, but unlike Spector, he wasn’t a natural in the studio. I doubt whether Andrew would call me a liar when I say he was not very musical. He knew what he liked and what other people liked, but if you said E7th to him, you might as well be saying, “What’s the meaning of life?” To me, a producer is somebody that at the end of the day comes out with everybody going, yeah, we got it. Andrew’s musical input was minimal, and it was usually saved for backup vocals. La la la here. OK, we’ll throw some on. He never got in the way of the way we did things, whether he agreed with it or not. But as a fully fledged producer, with knowledge of recording and a knowledge of music, he was on weaker ground. He had good taste for the market, especially once we went to America. The minute we got to America, it took the scales from his eyes as to what we were about, and more and more he let us get on with it. And basically that was the genius, I think, of Andrew’s method of producing, to let us make the records. And to provide a lot of energy and enthusiasm. When you’ve got to take thirty and you’re starting to flag a bit, you need that encouragement thing, “Just one more take, come on,” unflagging enthusiasm. “We’ve got it, we’re nearly there.…”