Life (61 page)

All these guitars Pierre presides over have nicknames and personalities. He knows their different sounds and properties. Most of the people who made them in ’54, ’55, ’56 are dead and gone. If they were forty or fifty years old then, they would now be well over a hundred. But you can still read the names of the checkers, the ones who gave them the seal of approval, inside the guitars. So the guitars get their nicknames from their checkers. On “Satisfaction” I play a lot of Malcolm, a Telecaster, while on “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” I play Dwight, another Telecaster. Micawber is a real all-rounder. Micawber’s got a lot of highs; Malcolm’s got more bottom on it. And Dwight’s an in-betweener.

I take my hat off to Pierre and the rest of his backline crew. On stage, things go wrong suddenly. They have to be prepared for a guitar with a broken string to come back for a restring and have one ready that’s going to sound similar and fling it over the guy’s neck in ten seconds. In the old days, fuck it, if you broke your guitar, you just walked off and let everybody else carry on until you’d sorted it yourself. With all this film and video, everything is under scrutiny. Ronnie’s a string breaker. Mick is actually the worst. When he plays guitar, he thrashes the thing with his pick.

The second new arrival was Bernard Fowler, singer with the band ever since, along with Lisa Fischer and Blondie Chaplin, who came a few years later. Bernard too was working with Mick on his solo stuff. Bernard has since sung on my solo records and on every song I’ve written since he arrived on the scene. The first thing I said to Bernard when he was doing some backup vocals in the studio was “You know, I didn’t want to like you.” “Why not?” “You’re one of
his
guys.” Bernard cracked up, and the ice was broken. I felt I stole him, in a way, from Mick. But I wanted to get out of this embattled idea anyway, and we sing good together. So all that shit went out of the way.

I smuggled Bobby Keys back into the band in 1989 for the Steel Wheels tour, but it wasn’t easy. He’d been out for ten years or so, apart from some one-night gigs. It took me that long to get him back in. And when I did, I didn’t tell anyone at first. We were rehearsing for the new tour at the Nassau Coliseum. We were getting to the dress rehearsals, and I wasn’t too happy with the horns, so I rang Bobby and said, get on a plane and hide yourself when you get here. So we’re going to play “Brown Sugar,” and Bobby was in, but Mick didn’t know he was there. I just told Bobby, when we play “Brown Sugar,” come in on the solo. So it was solo time, and Mick looked round at me and said, “What the fuck…?” I just said, “See what I mean?” And when it was over, Mick looked at me like, well, you can’t argue with that. I mean, baby, that is rock and roll. But it took me years to grease Bobby back into the band. As I said, some of my friends can really fuck up, but so can I, and so can Mick, so can anybody. If you can’t fuck up, where’s your halo? My life is full of broken halos. Mick didn’t speak one word to Bobby for the whole tour. But he stayed.

I added one more member to the Richards gang in the person of Steve Crotty—one of those people who just find me, who become instant friends. Steve comes from Preston, Lancashire. His dad was a butcher and a rough man, which is why Steve left home at fifteen for a life of pretty rough adventure. I met Steve in Antigua, where he ran a famous restaurant, a big hangout for musicians and yachtsmen called Pizzas in Paradise. Anyone recording at George Martin’s AIR Studios in Montserrat would come back to Antigua, so Steve knew many people in the business. We used to stay at Nelson’s Dockyard, which was not far from his restaurant.

I struck up immediately with Steve, recognizing a kindred spirit. A jailbird, of course. My mates go to the most distinguished jails. In Steve’s case, he’d recently been released from the prison outside Sydney, Australia, in Botany Bay, where Captain Cook landed. He was there, sentenced to hard labor, for eight years, of which he did three and a half, locked up twenty-three hours a day. Part of the reason Steve survived its brutalities untouched was that it was known he had kept his mouth shut and taken the rap for two friends who got away. That’s the kind of bloke he is. For such a sweet-natured man, hard though he is, Steve’s taken a lot of beatings. One day Spanish sailors, cracked out of their heads, came into his bar at three a.m., and he told them he was closing. They nearly killed him. He was in a coma for some days, suffered aneurysms, lost nine teeth, couldn’t see for two weeks. Why had they beat him so badly? The last bit of dialogue exchanged was Steve saying, “Come back later today and I’ll buy you a drink.” He turns to the bar and hears, “I fuck your mother.” So Steve says, “Well, somebody did. What do you want me to do, call you Daddy?” He suffered for that.

When Steve had recovered, I asked him to come and look after my place in Jamaica, where he is today as sheriff of the Caribbean conference. While this book was being written, a guy came armed with a pistol to rob my house there. Steve floored him with an electric guitar. The guy’s elbow hit the floor and his gun went off. The bullet went in an inch from Steve’s willy, missed all the major arteries and went out. What you call a clean shot. The guy that broke in was shot dead by the police.

There was one time the blade was called for while we were rehearsing in Montserrat. We were recording a song called “Mixed Emotions.” One of our engineers was there and witnessed it, and he had better tell it. I don’t include it just to brag about how accurate I am with a throwing knife (although it’s lucky I made my mark on this occasion), but to show the kind of thing that triggers the red mist—in this case someone coming into the studio who didn’t play an instrument, who knew fuck all about what I was doing and tried to tell me how to improve the track. Yap, yap, yap. As this eyewitness remembered:

Some bigwig figure in the music business, invited by Mick, came to Montserrat to discuss some contract to do with touring. He obviously fancied himself for his producing abilities, because we’re standing in the studio area, playing back “Mixed Emotions,” which was going to be the first single. And Keith is standing there with his guitar on and Mick’s standing there and we’re listening to it. The song finishes, and the guy says, Keith, great song, man, but I tell you, I think if you arranged it a little bit differently it would be so much better. So Keith went to his doctor’s bag and pulled out a knife and threw it, and it landed right between the bloke’s legs,
boinggg.
It was really like William Tell; it was great. Keith says, listen, sonny, I was writing songs before you were a glint on your father’s dick. Don’t you tell me how to write songs. And he walked out. And then Mick had to smooth it over, but it was fantastic. I’ll never forget.

The great Steel Wheels tour was all set to go when I got a visit from Rupert Loewenstein—not from Mick, who should have come himself—to say that Mick would not do the tour if Jane Rose was on it. Jane Rose was, and still is, as I write, my manager, last heard of in these pages heroically sticking by me during my last cleanup in the days after the Toronto bust in 1977, and all through the months, years, of the court cases in Canada that followed. She is an unseen presence on the page in much of the narrative since then. We were in the summer of 1989, ten years after those events, and Jane had certainly become a thorn in Mick’s side—though he put the thorn there himself. Jane had worked jointly for Mick and me for what now seems like an impossibly long time, from that Toronto period up to 1983, though for a while her working for me was unofficial—she was delegated by Mick to stick by me and help me out. In 1983, Mick decided he wanted to get rid of her and dismissed her from the Rolling Stones. He didn’t tell me. And when I found out, I wouldn’t have it. Not me, pal. I’m not going to throw off Jane Rose. I believed in her; she stayed with me in Toronto, she went through all this stuff with me and also she’d been acting as my manager. I rehired her that same day.

Jane immediately became a force to be reckoned with. When Mick had refused to tour in 1986, Jane started setting up projects for me—first an ABC television special with Jerry Lee Lewis, then
Jumpin’ Jack Flash
with Aretha Franklin, then a record deal with Virgin, which had newly arrived in the United States, to make the Winos record. It was me and Jane, and Jane was driven. So now Mick wanted to insist that she couldn’t come on the tour. It was the same old problem—someone getting too close to me, making it difficult to control me, and now someone who kept thwarting Mick’s plans for controlling the whole shebang. Jane is tenacious; she’s my bulldog. She just will not let go. And she usually wins it. In this case she was fighting simply to have me consulted on important stuff, which Mick was always avoiding. So she flew directly in the face of Mick’s desire to command. Worse for her in this situation, and she’s had a doubly hard task because of it, she’s a chick.

But Jane did some major things for me, from the Winos deal to my appearance in
Pirates of the Caribbean,
which she pulled off by sheer tenacity. After she’d done the deal with Virgin for me, Rupert asked her if she thought the Stones might switch to the label, and in 1991 we signed an enormous deal with them. Jane can be annoying at times, bless her heart. And she’s inflicted bruises—often people bump into her expecting her to give way and find a rock in their path. I have a tiger in disguise here, and a devoted one. When Mick gave his ultimatum to ban her back in
1989
, he had been incensed by my slipping Bobby Keys back into the lineup, defying his ban on Bobby, used as he was to running everything. Maybe this was his way of getting back at me. But my response to his ultimatum was predictable: if you won’t tour with Jane Rose, no tour. So the tour went ahead with Jane on it, and in some ways I don’t think Mick got over it. But he chose his ground badly.

There are comic sides to all this—one of which was Mick’s pathological inability to consult me before executing his Great Ideas. Mick always thought he needed more and more props and effects. Piling on the gimmicks. The inflatable cock was great. But because a couple of things worked, every tour we started, I’d have to send acts home. I think you’re better off without any props. Or the minimum. Many times I cut down the props projects on these tours. He wanted stilt walkers. Luckily, at dress rehearsals it was raining, and all the stilt walkers fell over. I had to fire thirty-five dancers who were going to appear for about thirty seconds on “Honky Tonk Women.” Sight unseen, I sent them all home. Sorry, girls, go hoof it somewhere else. That was a hundred thousand dollars down the sink. Mick had got used to the fait accompli in the ’70s, believing I wouldn’t notice his decisions. I almost always did, even then, especially when it came to music. My weary faxes would go like this:

Mick, how is it that the Stones tracks are being mixed and about to be issued without a by your leave? I find this odd to say the least. Terrible mixes anyway. If you don’t know that by now… this is thrown at me as a fait accompli. How could you be so clumsy? Who chose the tracks? Who chose the mixing? Why do you imagine that it is your decision? Will you never realize that you cannot piss around with me?

It wasn’t Mick any more than the rest of us who conceived these megatours: Steel Wheels, Voodoo Lounge, Bridges to Babylon, Forty Licks, A Bigger Bang—these great traveling shows that kept us on the road for many months at a time from 1989 to 2006. It was basically public demand that expanded them to this size. People say, why do you keep doing this? How much money do you need? Well, everyone likes making money, but we just wanted to do shows. And we’re working in an unknown medium. You felt drawn to it like a moth to a flame because it was there and they wanted it. And what can you say? That must be right. You’ve asked for it; you got it. I prefer theaters, but where are you going to put everybody? We never realized just what the scale of this thing would become. How did it get so big when we’re not doing anything much different than what we did in 1963 in the Crawdaddy Club? Our usual set list is two-thirds standard Stones numbers, the classics. The only thing that’s different is the audiences have grown and the show’s gotten longer. All any top act would do was twenty minutes when we started. The Everly Brothers did maybe half an hour. When you’re talking about a tour, you’re talking cold-blooded arithmetic: it’s how many bums on seats, how much does it cost to put the show on—it’s an equation. You could say that Michael Cohl was the one who expanded things to this scale, but he did it by judging the demand—after eight years without a tour—and taking a risk. We hadn’t known for sure whether the demand was still that high, though it was clear Cohl had got it right when tickets went on sale that first day in Philadelphia and could have sold out three times.

Touring was the only way to survive. Record royalties barely paid overheads; you couldn’t tour behind a record like the old days. Megatours were, in the end, the bread and butter of keeping this machinery running. We couldn’t have done it on a smaller scale and been sure to do more than break even. The Stones were a rarity in this market in that the show that filled the stadium was still based on the music—nothing else. You’re not going to see dance routines or get a tape playing. You’ll just hear the Stones, and see them.

There were aspects of these tours that would have been unthinkable in the ’70s. There were shocked murmurings that we’d become a corporate enterprise and an advertising medium through all the sponsorship deals. But this too was part of the bread and butter, the equation. How do you finance a tour? And as long as it’s a fair deal to the audience and to yourselves, that’s the way they figure it out. There were the corporate “meet and greet” sessions—where people come in and shake our hands and get their pictures taken—that were part of our contract. In actual fact, it’s fun. They’re just loads of pissed people lined up going, “Hey, how you doing, baby?” “Oh, I love you.” “Hey, brother.” It’s pressing the flesh. These people work for these companies that sponsor us. It’s also part of the buildup. Oh, we’re actually starting to do the work. Finished the snooker game, meet-and-greet time. And in a way, it’s reassuring. It means it’s two hours before we go on. So you know where you are. Everybody likes a bit of a routine, especially when you’re in a new city every day.