Life (44 page)

I also learned some useful Jamaican skills with the ratchet, the working knife used for paring and cutting but also for fighting or protecting yourself, “with a ratchet in your waist,” as Derrick Crooks of the Slickers sang it in “Johnny Too Bad.” I’ve almost always carried a knife, and this one requires a special technique. I’ve used it to make a point—or to get myself heard. The ratchet has a ring to lock the blade; just a little pressure and you can flick it out. You’ve got to be quick in this game. The way it was explained to me, if you’re going to use a blade, the winner is the one who can make a quick horizontal cut across the other’s forehead. The blood will fall like a curtain, but you don’t really hurt the cat that much, you just put an end to the fight because he can’t see. The blade’s back in your pocket before anybody knows about it. The big rules of knife fighting are (a) do not try it at home, and (b) the whole point is
never, ever
use the blade. It is there to distract your opponent. While he stares at the gleaming steel, you kick his balls to kingdom come—he’s all yours. Just a tip!

Eventually they brought the drums down to the house, which was a major break with the sacred conventions, though I didn’t realize it at the time. And we began to record there, just on cassettes, and play all night. Naturally I’d pick up the guitar and stroke away, find out what chords might fit, and they, they kind of broke their own rules and turned round and said, “Hey, man, that’s nice.” So I wormed my way in. I suggested maybe a harmony here could help, and I crept in with a guitar. They could have told me to fuck off or not. So I left it to them, basically. But when they heard what they were sounding like coming back on a cassette recorder, they loved it—loved to hear themselves played back. Damn right, you’re good. You’re fucking unique, motherfuckers!

I went down there for years and years after that. We would just record in the room. If I had some tape and we had a machine, we’d put it down, but if not, it didn’t matter. If it ran out of tape, it didn’t matter. We weren’t there to record, we were there to play. I felt like a choirboy. I would just stroke a little bit behind them and hope that I didn’t annoy them. One frown, I’d shut up. But I kind of got accepted. And then they told me that I was not actually white. To the Jamaicans, the ones that I know, I’m black but I’ve turned white to be their spy, “our man up north” sort of thing. I take it as a compliment. I’m as white as a lily with a black heart exulting in its secret. My gradual transition from white man to black was not unique. Look at Mezz Mezzrow, a jazzman from the ’20s and ’30s who made himself a naturalized black man. He wrote
Really the Blues,
the best book on the subject. It was my mission in a way to get these guys recorded. Finally, when we were together around 1975, we schlepped everybody down to Dynamic Sounds, but they couldn’t handle the studio situation. It wasn’t their milieu. “You move over there, you go there…” The idea of being told what to do, for them, was incomprehensible. And it was a dismal failure, really. Even though it was a good studio. That’s when I realized, if you want to record these guys, it’s got to be in the front room. It’s got to be up at the house, where they’re all feeling comfortable and they’re not thinking about being recorded. We had to wait twenty years for that to happen, to get the take we wanted, which is when they became known as the Wingless Angels.

I
cleaned up for tours,
but in the middle of a long tour, somebody would give me some shit and then I’d want some more. And I’d say, well, I’ve got to get some more now, because I need to wait until I have some time off to clean up. I’ve had some lovely junkie babes on the road, ones that saved my life, got me off the hook here and there. And most of them not lowlife bitches. A lot of them very sophisticated, very smart women who were into it themselves. It wasn’t like you had to go to the gutters or the whorehouses to find it. You could be at some backstage party or go and visit these society people, and a lot of the shit I’ve scored is because they offered it, these debutante junkies, bless their hearts.

Even then I could never get being with a woman I didn’t genuinely like, even if it was just for a night or two, or just a port in the storm. Sometimes they were taking care of me, sometimes I was taking care of them, and a lot of it had nothing to do with lust. A lot of times I’ve ended up in bed with a woman and never done anything, just cuddled and slept. And I’ve loved loads of them. I’ve always been so impressed that they actually loved me in return. I remember a chick in Houston, my junkie friend, I think on the ’72 tour. I’m out, fucked up, and I’m cold turkey. Bumped into her in a bar. She gave me some stuff. For a week I loved her and she loved me and she saw me through a hard time. I’d broken my own rule and gotten strung out. And this sweet girl came to my rescue, moved in with me. I don’t know how I found her. Where do angels come from? They know what’s what and they can see through you, cut through the bullshit look in your eyes and say, “You’ve got to do this.” From you, I’ll take it. Thank you, sister.

Another was in Melbourne, Australia. She had a baby. Sweet, shy, unassuming, she was on the scuppers; the old man had left her with the kid. She could get me pure cocaine, pharmaceutical. And she kept coming to the hotel to deliver, so I went, hey, why don’t I just move in? Living in the suburbs of Melbourne for a week with a mother and child was kind of weird. Within four or five days I was like a right Australian old man. Sheila, where’s my fucking breakfast? Here’s your breakfast, darling. It was like I’d been there forever. And it felt great, man. I can do this, just a little semidetached. I’d take care of the baby; she went to work. I was husband for the week. Changed the baby’s diapers. There’s somebody in a suburb in Melbourne who doesn’t even know I wiped his ass.

Then there was the stopover Bobby and I made with two girls we picked up in Adelaide. Lovely girls who took care of us very well. These chicks had some acid, and I’m not a big acid head, but we had a couple of days off in Adelaide, and they were fine-looking babes and they had a little hippie bungalow up in the hills, drapes and candles and incense and sooty oil lamps. So OK, take me away. We’d been living in hotels, we’d been on the road forever, and just to be taken out of our context was a huge relief. When we had to leave, because we had to go from Adelaide to Perth, which is the other end of the fucking continent, we said, why don’t you come with us? So they did, but we were still all fucking high as kites. We got on the plane, and somewhere halfway to Perth, Bobby and I were in the front seat, both girls burst out of the john seminaked. They’d been having it off together and they came tumbling out, giggling. They were outrageous Australian Sheilas. We were laughing. “Go on, get ’em out,” and we heard this collective gasp from the rest of the tube behind us. We figured we were on our own plane; we’d forgotten about the other passengers. And we turned around and there were two hundred shocked faces behind us, Australian businessmen and matrons. Their gasps took the air out of the whole cabin. Some of them started laughing and some went to see the captain and demanded immediate reprisals. So we were threatened with arrest at Perth airport. We were all corralled for a bit when we landed. It was a close call, but somehow we talked our way out of it. Bobby and I were saying, what have we got to do with it? We were just sitting in our seats. The two girls explained they were “exchanging frocks.” I don’t know how they got away with it.

They came with us to Perth, we did the gig, and then we left on our own plane, a cargo plane, a Super Constellation. Leaking oil, no soundproofing, and all your own kit, bring a mattress or two to lie on. We spent fifteen hours from Perth to Sydney. You could raise your voice; it wouldn’t matter. It was like being in a World War II bomber, without the Benzedrine. And we obviously made the most of it. We knew these chicks a week. This happens on the road a lot. Very fierce relationships form and then they’re gone; it’s almost a flash. “I was really close to her, I really liked her, I almost remember her name.”

It’s not like I was collecting—I’m not Bill Wyman or Mick Jagger, noting down how many I’ve had. I’m not talking about shagging here. I’ve never been able to go to bed with a woman just for sex. I’ve no interest in that. I want to hug you and kiss you and make you feel good and protect you. And get a nice note the next day, stay in touch. I’d rather jerk off than just have a piece of pussy. I’ve never paid for it in my life. I’ve
been
paid for it, though. Sometimes there’s a backhander—“I love you too,
and here’s some smack!
” Sometimes I’d get into it just for fun. Can you pull her? Let’s see if you can. Try your best line. Usually I was more interested in chicks who weren’t slavering and falling all over me. I’d be hanging out and go, let’s try the wife of the banker.…

I remember once in Australia, I had a room opposite Bill Wyman’s. And I found out he had a deal with the doorman, because there were something like two thousand chicks outside the hotel. “That one in the pink. No, not
that
one in the pink,
that
one in the pink.” He had loads of chicks up there that day, and none of them stayed more than ten minutes. I don’t think any of them got much more than the insipid cup of tea that Bill likes—some hot water with a little milk in it and a dip of a tea bag. It was just too short for anything to happen and get dressed again. None of them emerged disheveled, so to speak. But then it would go down in the book: had that one! I counted nine in four hours. He wasn’t shagging them, so I presume he was auditioning them. “You from around here?” Bill was just blatantly like that. The weird thing is that, as different as they seem, Bill Wyman and Mick Jagger were actually very similar. That would rankle Mick like a motherfucker, me saying that. But if you saw them together on the road or read their diaries, they were basically the same. Except Mick’s got a bit of class, standing at the front, being the lead singer and la la la. But if you saw them off stage and what they were doing, “How many did you have tonight?” they were the same.

Different from teenyboppers or the queues of chicks waiting for tea with Bill Wyman were the groupies. I’d like to vindicate them as the fine young ladies they were, who knew what they wanted and knew what to provide. There were a few blatant opportunists, like the plaster casters who went around trying to get an impression of every rock-and-roll player’s cock. They didn’t get mine. I won’t go through that. Or the butter queens, rivals to the plaster casters. I’ve got to admire their moxie. But I don’t like professionals who go around predatorily, had him, had him… like a Bill Wyman in reverse. I was never interested in that lot. I would deliberately not fuck ’em. I’d tell them to get undressed and go, OK, you can leave now. Because you knew you were gonna be chalked up on scoreboards.

But there were loads of groupies out there that were just good old girls who liked to take care of guys. Very mothering in a way. And if things got down to that, OK, maybe go to bed, have a fuck. But it wasn’t the main thing with groupies. Groupies were friends and most of them were not particularly attractive. They were providing a service. You got into town, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and there would be one or two chicks who you knew would come by and make sure that you were OK, take care of you, make sure you ate properly. They banged on the door, and you’d look through the little hole and say, oh, it’s Shirley.

The groupies were just extended family. A loosely framed network. And what I really liked was there was no jealousy or possession involved in any of it. In those days there was a kind of circuit. Play Cincinnati, next you’re going to be playing Brownsville, then you’re going down to Oklahoma; there was a sort of route. And they’d just pass you on to their next friend down the road. You go in there and ask for help. Baby, I’m dying out here! I’ve done four shows, I’m croaking. And they were nurses, basically. You could look upon them more like the Red Cross. They’d wash your clothes, they’d bathe you and stuff. And you’re going, why are you doing this for a guitar player? There’s a million of us out there.

Flo, who I’ve already mentioned, was one of my favorites, lived in LA, one of a band of black chicks. Flo had another three or four groupies around her. If I was a bit short of weed or whatever, she would send her crew out. We slept together many times, never fucked, or very rarely. We just crashed out or stayed up and listened to music. A lot of it was to do with music. I had the best sounds, and they would bring me their local sounds that had just come out. Whether you ended up in bed together was immaterial, really.

B
obby
K
eys and
I
got
into further trouble at the end of the Far East tour in early 1973. In fact, Bobby got into such bad trouble he might still be doing time now but for a deus ex machina of intervention. It was pineapples this time that came to his rescue.

We had played Honolulu as the first gig of the tour. Honolulu was the point of exit and reentry into the United States for this tour, which had taken us to New Zealand and Australia. You had to register musical instruments on the way out of Hawaii and have the list checked on the way back to prove you weren’t importing goods.

Bobby should tell the story, since he is the main protagonist.

Bobby Keys:
Keith and I and the Rolling Stones tour Australia and the Far East, early in 1973. That’s back when Dr. Bill used to travel with us, and there were concessions of self-medication for Keith and me to relieve the stress of the road. We’re on our way back and we go through customs in Hawaii. I’ve got all my saxophones with me, and they want to check the serial numbers to make sure they’re the same horns I took out. So the guy’s got to turn the horn upside down because the serial numbers are printed upside down. Well, the minute this guy turns the saxophone around, I hear this rattling sound. Oh God, I know what that is!
BOINNNGGG,
right on the desk out comes a syringe. And sticks in the desk in front of the customs guy. So one thing naturally leads to another. Keith is there with me; we’re in the same line. They separate us immediately, take me away and give me the whole rubdown and find these large capsules full of smack and what have you. They’re just soaking it up. The booking guy has made his fucking year’s quota now! He’s just rattling that typewriter. “Oh boy, we nailed a Kingfish and his sidekick now, buddy! This is it, yeah, we got the menu on these boys!” And they do. They’ve just taken our pictures and we’ve given them our prints, and they’re just having so much fun out there—hee hee, ten years! Ten years! Being the very end of the tour, there wasn’t really an entourage at all, everybody had split. I was allowed one phone call.