Life (62 page)

Our biggest problem with the huge stadiums and sets, the open-air venues, was the sound. How do you convert a stadium into a club? A perfect rock-and-roll theater would be a really large garage, made of brick, with a bar at the end. There is no such thing as a rock-and-roll venue; there’s not one in the world that’s made to play this kind of music as an ideal form. You work and wedge yourself into spots that are made to do other things. What we love is a controlled environment. There are some theaters like the Astoria, really good ballrooms like Roseland in New York, the Paradiso in Amsterdam. There’s a good Chicago joint called the Checkerboard. There’s an optimum size and space. But when you’re playing outdoors on those big stages, you never quite know what’s in store for you.

There’s another guy that joins the band on outdoor stages—God. Either he’s benign or he can come at you with wind from the wrong direction and the sound is swept out of the park, and somebody is getting the best Stones sound in the world, but they’re two miles away and they don’t want it. Luckily, I have the magic stick. Before the shows start, we come and do a sound check and I traditionally have one of my rods in my hand and make some cabalistic signs in the sky and on the floor of the stage. OK, the weather’s gonna be cool. It’s a fetish, but if I come to an open-air gig without a stick, they think I’m ill. The weather usually comes around by showtime.

Some of our best gigs have been in the worst conditions that you’d want to play in. In Bangalore, our first gig in India, their monsoon actually came down in the middle of the opening song and pissed down throughout the show. You couldn’t see the fret board for rain splashing and squirting all over the place. Monsoon in Bangalore, that’s what we still call it, it was a famous show. But it was a great show. Sleet, snow, rain or anything, the audience always stays there. If you stay there with them, under the worst conditions in the world, they’ll stay there and rock and forget about the weather. The worst ones are when there’s a cold snap. That’s really hard to work, when the fingers are freezing. There are very few of them—we try and avoid them—and Pierre will have guys backstage to give us little heat bags to put on for a few minutes until the next song starts, just trying to keep our fingers from freezing.

There’s a scar I have from burning my finger to the bone while playing the very first number one night. It was my fault. I told everybody, stand back, there’s a big pyro to start with, and then I forgot. I went out there, the fireworks were going off, and a lump of white phosphorus settled on my finger. And it’s steaming and burning. And I know I can’t touch it—if I touch it, I’m going to spread it. I’m playing “Start Me Up” and I’ve just got to let my finger burn through to the bone. I’m watching my white bone for the next two hours.

I remember a show in Italy where I really knew that I was losing it. It was in Milan, in the ’70s, and I could barely stand; I couldn’t breathe. The air was totally dead, it was hot and I started to feel myself going. Mick was just about holding himself up. Charlie always has some shade, but I was out in the pollution of Milan, the heat and the chemicals there in the brutal sun. There have been a couple of shows like that. Sometimes I’ve woken up with a temperature of one hundred and three, but I’m going to go on. I can handle it; I’ll probably sweat it out on stage. And most times I do. I’ve had terrible fevers going on and I’m totally cured at the end of the show, just because of the nature of the job. Sometimes I should have canceled the show and stayed in bed. But if I think I can totter up there, I will. And with a bit of sweating, I’ll pull through. There are occasions when I’ve actually been sick on stage. How many times I’ve turned round behind the amplifiers and chucked up, you wouldn’t believe! Mick pukes behind the stage. Ronnie pukes behind the stage too. Sometimes it’s the conditions: not enough air, too much heat. Throwing up is not such a big deal. It’s in order to make you better. “Where’s Mick gone?” “He’s chucking up backstage.” “Well, me next!”

When you play these big stadiums, you’re hoping that when you first hit it, it fills the room and doesn’t come out like a bat whisper. Something that you played yesterday in a little rehearsal room sounded fantastic, and you take it out on the big stage and it sounds like three mice caught in a trap. In the Bigger Bang tour we had Dave Natale, the best live-sound man I’ve ever worked with. But even with skill like that, in a big stadium you can never test the sound until it’s filled up with bodies, so you never know what it will be like on the first night. And when Mick gets away from the band, walking down some ramp, you can never trust that what he’s hearing out there is the same as what we’re hearing. It might be off just a fraction of a second, but the beat’s gone. And now he’s singing the song Japanese-style unless we put a brake on it for a second. And that is a real art. You need cats that are so together they know how to turn the whole beat around so that he’ll end up on the right place. The band has changed from off beat to on beat and back twice in order to do that, but the audience wouldn’t know it. I’ll wait for Charlie to look at Mick to readjust to his body talk, not to the sound, because that’s echoing and you can’t trust it. Charlie will just do a little stutter and watch where Mick’s gonna come down, and bang and I’m in.

You feel this need to run down these ramps, and it’s not doing anything for the music, because you can’t play very well on the run. And then you get there and you’ve got to run back. And you think, why am I doing this? What we’ve learned is that it doesn’t matter how big the stadium is, if you focus the band all around one spot, you can pretend it’s small. With the TV screens now, the audience can see four or five guys really tight together. That’s a far more powerful image than us dispersed all over the place, running around. The more we do it, the more we realize it’s the screen they’re watching. I’m like a matchstick; I’m only five-foot-ten and I can’t get any bigger any way you look at it.

When you go on the road on these grueling tours you become a machine; your whole routine is geared to the gig. From the moment you wake up, you’re preparing for the show; your whole mind’s on it all day, even if you think you know what you’re going to do. Afterwards you have a few hours free if you want, if you’re not knackered. Once I start a tour it takes me two or three shows to find my line, to get to the groove I’m in, then I can work it forever. Mick and I have different ways of approaching it. Mick has a lot more physically to do than I do, except that I am carrying five or six pounds of guitar. So it’s a different concentration of energy. He does lot of training. All I do to train and preserve energy is keep breathing. The grind is the traveling, the hotel food, whatever. It’s a hard drill sometimes. But once I hit the stage, all of that miraculously goes away. The grind is never the stage performance. I can play the same song again and again, year after year. When “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” comes up again it’s never a repetition, always a variation. Always. I would never play a song again once I thought it was dead. We couldn’t just churn it out. The real release is getting on stage. Once we’re up there doing it, it’s sheer fun and joy. Some long-distance stamina, of course, is needed. And the only way I can sustain the impetus over the long tours we do is by feeding off the energy that we get back from an audience. That’s my fuel. All I’ve got is this burning energy, especially when I’ve got a guitar in my hands. I get an incredible raging glee when they get out of their seats. Yeah, come on, let it go. Give me some energy and I’ll give you back double. It’s almost like some enormous dynamo or generator. It’s indescribable. I start to rely on it; I use their energy to keep myself going. If the place was empty, I wouldn’t be able to do it. Mick does about ten miles, I do about five miles with a guitar around my neck, every show. We couldn’t do that without their energy, we just wouldn’t even dream of it. And they make us want to give our best. We’ll go for things that we don’t have to. It happens every night we go on. One minute we’re just hanging with the guys and oh, what’s the first song? and oh, let’s have another joint, and suddenly we’re up there. It’s not that it’s a surprise, because that’s the whole reason to be there. But my whole physical being goes up a couple of notches. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Rolling Stones.” I’ve heard that for forty-odd years, but the minute I’m out there and hit that first note, whatever it is, it’s like I was driving a Datsun and suddenly it’s a Ferrari. At that first chord I play, I can hear the way Charlie’s going to hit into it and the way Darryl’s going to play into that. It’s like sitting on top of a rocket.

F
our years went by
between Steel Wheels and Voodoo Lounge, which kicked off in 1994. It gave me and everyone else time for other music, for solo records and guest spots, tribute albums and idol worship of various kinds. Eventually I played with almost all the survivors among my childhood heroes, like James Burton, the Everlys, the Crickets, Merle Haggard, John Lee Hooker and George Jones, with whom I recorded “Say It’s Not You.” The award I was proudest of was when Mick and I were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1993, because it was signed by Sammy Cahn on his deathbed. It took me years to appreciate just how great was the art of Tin Pan Alley writing—I used to dismiss it or it went straight through me. But when I became a songwriter I could appreciate the construction and the skill of those guys. I held Hoagy Carmichael in the same high esteem, and I will never forget him calling me six months before he died.

Patti and I were in Barbados, hiding away for a couple of weeks, and one evening the housekeeper comes in, “Mr. Keith! There’s Mr. Michael on the phone.” So immediately I think it’s Mick. Then she said, I think it was Carmichael. I said, Carmichael? I don’t know any Carmichael. And then this sort of frisson went through me. I said, ask him his first name. And she comes back and says Hoagy. And I’m looking at Patti. It’s like being summoned by the gods. Such a weird feeling. Hoagy Carmichael’s calling me? Somebody’s putting me on. So I get to the phone and there it is, it’s Hoagy Carmichael. He’d heard a version I’d done of the song “The Nearness of You,” which I’d given to our lawyer Peter Parcher. Peter liked my record and the piano playing and he’d sent it to Hoagy. My treatment of it is barrelhouse; it really flips the song on its back, deliberately so. I can’t play piano well and I was improvising to say the least, just sort of making do. And here’s Carmichael on the phone, and he says, “Hey, man, when I heard that version, shit, that’s the way I was hearing it when I was writing it.” I had always thought Carmichael was so right-wing, I doubted whether he’d ever approve of me or of me doing his song. So I couldn’t believe it when he rang and said he liked the way I’d done it. And to hear this from… Whoa! I’ve died and gone to heaven, right? In one sweet slice. He said, “You in Barbados? You oughtta go to the bar and get some corn ’n’ oil.” That is a drink made of dark blackstrap rum and falernum, the sweet syrup made of sugarcane. I drank nothing else for two weeks—corn ’n’ oil.

A
t the tail end
of the Steel Wheels tour we liberated Prague, or so it felt. One in Stalin’s eye. We played a concert there soon after the revolution that ended the communist regime. “Tanks Roll Out, Stones Roll In” was the headline. It was a great coup by Václav Havel, the politician who had taken Czechoslovakia through a bloodless coup only months earlier, a brilliant move. Tanks were going out, and now we’re going to have the Stones. We were glad to be a part of it. Havel is perhaps the only head of state who has made, or would imagine making, a speech about the role that rock music played in political events leading to a revolution in the Eastern Bloc of Europe. He is the one politician I’m proud to have met. Lovely guy. He had a huge brass telescope in the palace, once he was president, and it was focused on the prison cell where he did six years. “And every day I look through there to try and figure things out.” We lit the state palace for him. They couldn’t afford to do it, so we asked Patrick Woodroffe, our lighting guru, to relight the huge castle. Patrick set him up, Taj Mahal’d him. We gave Václav this little white remote control with a tongue on it. He walked around lighting up the palace, and suddenly statues came alive. He was like a kid, pushing buttons and going, whoa! It’s not often you get to hang with presidents like that and say, Jesus, I like the cat.

In any band, you’re learning how to play together all the time. You always feel that you’re getting tighter and better. It’s like a close family. If one person leaves, it’s a bereavement. When Bill Wyman left, in 1991, I got extremely stroppy. I really did have a go at him. I wasn’t very nice. He said he didn’t like to fly anymore. He had been driving to every gig because he’d developed a fear of flying. That’s not an excuse—get outta here! I couldn’t believe it. I’d been in some of the most ramshackle aircraft in the world with that guy and he’d never batted an eyelid. But I guess it’s something that one can develop. Or maybe he did a computer analysis. He was very into that. Bill had one of the first. It satisfied that meticulous mind of his, I suppose. He probably got something out of the computer, like the odds against you after flying so many miles. I don’t know why he’s so worried about dying. It’s not a matter of avoiding it. It’s where and how!

But then what did he do? Having freed himself by luck and talent from the constraints of society, that one-in-ten-million chance, he goes back into it, into the retail trade, putting his energy into opening up a pub. Why would you leave the best band in the fucking world to open a fish-and-chip shop called Sticky Fingers? Taking one of our titles with him. It seems to be doing well.

Not so Ronnie’s similarly inexplicable foray into the catering trade, always a nightmare of keeping people’s fingers out of the till. Josephine’s dream was to have a spa. They opened it, it was a disaster, it fell apart and went down in a blaze of insolvency proceedings.

We didn’t tell the world that Bill had left until 1993, when we found a replacement, which took a while, and thank God we found a guy totally sympathetic. In the end we didn’t have to look far. Darryl Jones is very closely related to the Winos—great friends with Charley Drayton and Steve Jordan. So he was on the periphery. Darryl, in my estimation, is a giant, beautiful, an all-round man. And of course Darryl’s playing five years with Miles Davis certainly didn’t hurt Charlie Watts, who schooled himself on the great jazz drummers. And Darryl melted into the band real quick. I do enjoy playing with Darryl; he’s always provoking me. We have tremendous fun on stage. You want to go there? Fine, let’s go a little further. We know Charlie’s got it nailed. Let’s fuck around. Let’s sling some hash! And Darryl’s never let me down.