Life (14 page)

So we sat there in the cold, dissecting tracks for as long as the meter held out. A new Bo Diddley record goes under the surgical knife. Have you got that wah-wah? What were the drums playing, how hard were they playing… what were the maracas doing? You had to take it all apart and put it back together again, from your point of view. We need a reverb. Now we’re really in the shit. We need an amplifier. Bo Diddley was high tech. Jimmy Reed was easier. He was straightforward. But to dissect how he played, Jesus. It took me years to find out how he actually played the 5 chord, in the key of E—the B chord, the last of the three chords before you go home, the resolver in a twelve-bar blues—the dominant chord, as it’s called. When he gets to it, Jimmy Reed produces a haunting refrain, a melancholy dissonance. Even for non–guitar players, it’s worth trying to describe what he does. At the 5 chord, instead of making the conventional barre chord, the B7th, which requires a little effort with the left hand, he wouldn’t bother with the B at all. He’d leave the open A note ringing and just slide a finger up the D string to a 7th. And there’s the haunting note, resonating against the open A. So you’re not using root notes, but letting it fall against a 7th. Believe me, it’s (a) the laziest, sloppiest single thing you can do in that situation, and (b) one of the most brilliant musical inventions of all time. But that is how Jimmy Reed managed to play the same song for thirty years and get away with it. I learned how to do it from a white boy, Bobby Goldsboro, who had a couple of hits in the ’60s. He used to work with Jimmy Reed and he said he’d show me the tricks. I knew all the other moves, but I never knew that 5 chord move until he showed it to me, on a bus somewhere in Ohio, in the mid-’60s. He said, “I spent years on the road with Jimmy Reed. He does that 5 chord like this.” “Shit! That’s all it is?” “That’s it, motherfucker. You live and learn.” Suddenly, out of a bright sky, you get it! That haunting, droning note. Absolute disregard for any musical rules whatsoever. Also absolute disregard for the audience or anybody else. “It goes like this.” In a way, we admired Jimmy more for that than his playing. It was the attitude. And also very haunting songs. They might be based on a seemingly simplistic bedrock, but you try “Little Rain.”

One of the first lessons I learned with guitar playing was that none of these guys were actually playing straight chords. There’s a throw-in, a flick-back. Nothing’s ever a straight major. It’s an amalgamation, a mangling and a dangling and a tangling thing. There is no “properly.” There’s just how you feel about it. Feel your way around it. It’s a dirty world down here. Mostly I’ve found, playing instruments, that I actually want to be playing something that should be played by another instrument. I find myself trying to play horn lines all the time on the guitar. When I was learning how to do these songs, I learned there is often one note doing something that makes the whole thing work. It’s usually a suspended chord. It’s not a full chord, it’s a mixture of chords, which I love to use to this day. If you’re playing a straight chord, whatever comes next should have something else in it. If it’s an A chord, a hint of D. Or if it’s a song with a different feeling, if it’s an A chord, a hint of G should come in somewhere, which makes a 7th, which then can lead you on. Readers who wish to can skip Keef’s Guitar Workshop, but I’m passing on the simple secrets anyway, which led to the open chord riffs of later years—the “Jack Flash” and “Gimme Shelter” ones.

There are some people looking to play guitar. There’s other people looking for a sound. I was looking for a sound when Brian and I were rehearsing in Edith Grove. Something easily done by three or four guys and you wouldn’t be missing any instruments or sound on it. You had a wall of it, in your face. I just followed the bosses. A lot of those blues players of the mid-’50s, Albert King and B.B. King, were single-note players. T-Bone Walker was one of the first to use the double- string thing—to use two strings instead of one, and Chuck got a lot out of T-Bone. Musically impossible, but it works. The notes clash, they jangle. You’re pulling two strings at once and you’re putting them in a position where actually their knickers are pulled up. You’ve always got something ringing against the note or the harmony. Chuck Berry is all double-string stuff. He very rarely plays single notes. The reason that cats started to play like that, T-Bone and so on, was economics—to eliminate the need for a horn section. With an amplified electric guitar, you could play two harmony notes and you could basically save money on two saxophones and a trumpet. And my double-string playing was why, in the very first Sidcup days, I was looked on as a bit of a wild rock and roller, and not really a serious blues player. Everybody else was playing away on single strings. It worked for me because I was playing a lot by myself, so two strings were better than one. And it had the possibility of getting this dissonance and this rhythm thing going, which you can’t do picking away on one string. It’s finding the moves. Chords are something to look for. There’s always the Lost Chord. Nobody’s found it.

Brian and I, we had the Jimmy Reed stuff down. When we were really hunkering down and working, working, Mick obviously felt a little bit out of it. Also he was away at the London School of Economics for much of the day to start with. He couldn’t play anything. That’s why he picked up on the harp and the maracas. Brian had picked up the harmonica very quickly at first, and I think Mick didn’t want to be left behind. I wouldn’t be surprised if from the beginning it wasn’t just from being in competition with Brian. He wanted to play in the band musically as well. And Mick turned out to be the most amazing harp player. I’d put him up there with the best in the world, on a good night. Everything else we know he can do—he’s a great showman —but to a musician, Mick Jagger is a great harp player. His phrasing is incredible. It’s very Louis Armstrong, Little Walter. And that’s saying something. Little Walter Jacobs was one of the best singers of the blues, and a blues harp player par excellence. I find it hard to listen to him without awe. His band the Jukes were so hip and sympathetic. His singing was overshadowed by the phenomenal harp, which was based on a lot of Louis Armstrong’s cornet licks. Little Walter would smile in his grave for the way Mick plays. Mick and Brian played totally different styles—Mick sucking, like Little Walter, Brian blowing, like Jimmy Reed, both bending notes. When you play like that, the Jimmy Reed style, it’s called “high and lonesome,” and when you hear it, it just touches the heart. Mick is one of the best natural blues harp players I’ve heard. His harp playing is the one place where you don’t hear any calculation. I say, “Why don’t you sing like that?” He says they’re totally different things. But they’re not—they’re both blowing air out of your gob.

T
his band was very fragile
; no one was looking for this thing to fly. I mean, we’re anti-pop, we’re anti-ballroom, all we want to do is be the best blues band in London and show the fuckers what’s what because we know we can do it. And these weird little bunches of people would come in and support us. We didn’t even know where they came from or why, or how they found out where we were. We didn’t think we were ever going to do anything much except turn other people on to Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley and Jimmy Reed. We had no intention of being anything ourselves. The idea of making a record seemed to be totally out of the picture. Our job at that time was idealistic. We were unpaid promoters for Chicago blues. It was terribly shining shields and everything like that. And monastic, intense study, for me at least. Everything from when you woke up to when you went to sleep was dedicated to learning, listening and trying to find some money—a division of labor. The ideal thing was, right, we’ve got enough to live on, a few bob in case of emergencies, and on top of that, beautiful, these girls come round, three or four of them, Lee Mohamed and her mates, and clear up for us, cook for us and just hang about. What the hell they saw in us at that time, I don’t know.

We didn’t have any other interests in the world except how to keep the electricity going and how to nick a few things out of the supermarket for food. Women were really third on that list. Electricity, food and then, hey, you got lucky. We needed to work together, we needed to rehearse, we needed to listen to music, we needed to do what we wanted to do. It was a mania. Benedictines had nothing on us. Anybody that strayed from the nest to get laid, or try to get laid, was a traitor. You were supposed to spend all your waking hours studying Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson. That was your gig. Every other moment taken away from it was a sin. It was that kind of atmosphere, that kind of attitude that we lived with. The women around were really quite peripheral. The drive in the band was amazing among Mick, Brian and myself. It was incessant study. Not really in the academic sense of it, it was to get the feel of it. And then I think we realized, like any young guys, that blues are not learned in a monastery. You’ve got to go out there and get your heart broke and then come back and then you can sing the blues. Preferably several times. At that time, we were taking it on a purely musical level, forgetting that these guys were singing
about
shit. First you’ve got to get in the shit. And then you can maybe come back and sing it. I thought I loved my mother and I left her. She still did my laundry. And I got my heart broken, but not right away. My sights were still set on Lee Mohamed.

The venues in the diary are the Flamingo Club in Wardour Street, where Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated played; the Ealing Club, mentioned already; Richmond was the Crawdaddy Club in the Station Hotel, where we really took off; the Marquee was then in Oxford Street, where Cyril Davies’s R&B All-Stars performed after he’d broken away from Korner; the Red Lion was in Sutton, south London; and the Manor House was a pub in north London. The sums of money were the paltry earnings from playing our guts out, but they began to get better.

*   *   *

I
don’t think the
S
tones
would have actually
coagulated
without Ian Stewart pulling it together. He was the one that rented the first rehearsal rooms, told people to get there at a certain time; otherwise it was so nebulous. We didn’t know shit from Shinola. It was his vision, the band, and basically he picked who was going to be in it. Far more than anybody actually realizes, he was the spark and the energy and the organization that actually kept it together in its early days, because there wasn’t much money, but there was this idealistic hope that “we can bring the blues to England.” “We have been chosen!” All that dopey sort of stuff. And Stu had such incredible enthusiasm in that way. He’d stepped out—made a split with the people he’d played with. He took a leap in the dark there, really. It was against the grain. It alienated him from his cozy little club scene. Without Stu we’d have been lost. He’d been around the club scene a lot longer—we were just new kids on the block.

One of his first strategies was to wage guerrilla war against the trad jazzers. That was a big, bitter cultural shift. The traditional jazz bands, aka Dixieland bands, semi-beatniks, were doing very, very well. “Midnight in Moscow,” Acker Bilk, the whole goddamn lot of them. They flooded the market. Very good players, Chris Barber and all of those cats. They ran the scene. But they couldn’t understand that things were moving and that they should incorporate something else into their music. How could we dislodge the Dixieland mafia? There seemed to be no chinks in their armor. It was Stu’s idea that we play the interval at the Marquee, while Acker was having a beer. No money in it, but the interval was the thin end of the wedge. Stu figured out that strategy. He would just turn up and say, no money, but interval at the Marquee, or the Manor House. Suddenly the interval became more interesting than the main event. You put the interval band on, and they’re playing Jimmy Reed. Fifteen minutes. And it was really only a matter of months before that traditional-jazz monopoly faded away. There was bitter hatred of us. “I don’t like your music. Why don’t you play in ballrooms?” “You go! We’re staying.” But we had no idea that the ground was shifting at the time. We weren’t that arrogant. We were just happy to get a gig.

There is a parable on film of the changeover of power between jazz and rock and roll, in
Jazz on a Summer’s Day
—a hugely important film for aspiring rock musicians at the time, mostly because it featured Chuck Berry at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958, playing “Sweet Little Sixteen.” The film had Jimmy Giuffre, Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, but Mick and I went to see
the man
. That black coat. He was brought on stage—a very bold move by someone—with Jo Jones on drums, a jazz great. Jo Jones was, among others, Count Basie’s drummer. I think it was Chuck’s proudest moment, when he got up there. It’s not a particularly good version of “Sweet Little Sixteen,” but it was the attitude of the cats behind him, solid against the way he looked and the way he was moving. They were laughing at him. They were trying to fuck him up. Jo Jones was raising his drumstick after every few beats and grinning as if he were in play school. Chuck knew he was working against the odds. And he wasn’t really doing very well, when you listen to it, but he carried it. He had a band behind him that wanted to toss him, but he still carried the day. Jo Jones blew it, right there. Instead of a knife in the back, he could have given him the shit. But Chuck forced his way through.

A description of the early days of bookings and of my amazement and excitement that we were starting to be a working band comes in another letter to my aunt Patty, astonishing to find, which came to light while I was writing this book.

Dear Patty,

Thanks for birthday card. Arrived on the correct day 18th full marks.