And more on LIFE
Apr. 6th, 2012 06:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cryowizardThe awesome thing about the Kindle is that your highlights are accessible from your Amazon account.
I'm posting my clippings from Life, by Keith Richards -- random passages that hit the eye for some reason, usually because they are funny or explain a historically important musical event or item.
Note to the publisher -- let's consider this promotional material :)
She must have been around for our first gig as “the Rollin’ Stones,” a band name Stu highly disapproved of. Brian, after figuring how much it would cost, called up Jazz News, which was a kind of “who’s playing where” rag, and said, “We’ve got a gig at…” “What do you call yourselves?” We stared at one another. “It?” Then “Thing?” This call is costing. Muddy Waters to the rescue! First track on The Best of Muddy Waters is “Rollin’ Stone.” The cover is on the floor. Desperate, Brian, Mick and I take the dive. “The Rolling Stones.” Phew!! That saved sixpence.
***
A Vox AC30 amplifier, which was beyond our means to possess. Built by Jennings in Dartford. We used to worship it. We used to look at it and get on our knees.
***
July 1963, we actually moved out of London for a gig, for the first time ever—to Middlesbrough, Yorkshire, and a first taste of the bedlam. Between then and 1966—for three years—we played virtually every night, or every day, sometimes two gigs a day. We played well over a thousand gigs, almost back to back, with barely a break and perhaps ten days off in that whole period.
***
The actual gig you didn’t even get to know much about. It was just mayhem. We came there to listen to the audience! Nothing like a good ten, fifteen minutes of pubescent female shrieking to cover up all your mistakes. Or three thousand teenage chicks throwing themselves at you. Or being carried out on stretchers. All the bouffants awry, skirts up to their waists, sweating, red, eyes rolling. That’s the spirit, girl. That’s the way we like ’em.
***
And I remember walking back out onto the stage after the show, and they’d cleaned up all of the underwear and everything, and there was one old janitor, night watchman, and he said, “Very good show. Not a dry seat in the house.”
***
It was like somebody had pulled a plug somewhere. The ’50s chicks being brought up all very jolly hockey sticks, and then somewhere there seemed to be a moment when they just decided they wanted to let themselves go. The opportunity arose for them to do that, and who’s going to stop them? It was all dripping with sexual lust, though they didn’t know what to do about it. But suddenly you’re on the end of it. It’s a frenzy. Once it’s let out, it’s an incredible force. You stood as much chance in a fucking river full of piranhas. They were beyond what they wanted to be. They’d lost themselves. These chicks were coming out there, bleeding, clothes torn off, pissed panties, and you took that for granted every night. That was the gig. It could have been anybody, quite honestly. They didn’t give a shit that I was trying to be a blues player.
***
I discovered that Keith and I had the same birthday, both born 12/18/43. He told me, “Bobby, you know what that means? We’re half man and half horse, and we got a license to shit in the streets.” Well, that’s just one of the greatest pieces of information I’d ever received in my life!
***
Then she met Jimi Hendrix, saw him play and adopted his career as her mission, tried to get him a recording contract with Andrew Oldham. In her enthusiasm, during a long evening with Jimi, as she tells it, she gave him a Fender Stratocaster of mine that was in my hotel room. And then, so Linda says, she also picked up a copy of a demo I had of Tim Rose singing a song called “Hey Joe.” And took that round to Roberta Goldstein’s, where Jimi was, and played it to him. This is rock-and-roll history. So he got the song from me, apparently.
***
Schneiderman, who also went by the moniker of Acid King, was the source of that very high-quality acid of the time, such brands as Strawberry Fields, Sunshine and Purple Haze—where do you think Jimi got that from?
***
Morris (The Prosecutor): There was, as we know, a young woman sitting on a settee wearing only a rug. Would you agree, in the ordinary course of events, you would expect a young woman to be embarrassed if she had nothing on but a rug in the presence of eight men, two of whom were hangers-on and the third a Moroccan servant? Keith: Not at all. Morris: You regard that, do you, as quite normal? Keith: We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals.
***
But I know where the lyrics came from. They came from a gray dawn at Redlands. Mick and I had been up all night, it was raining outside and there was the sound of these heavy stomping rubber boots near the window, belonging to my gardener, Jack Dyer, a real country man from Sussex. It woke Mick up. He said, “What’s that?” I said, “Oh, that’s Jack. That’s jumping Jack.”
***
And then I found out all this stuff about banjos. A lot of five-string playing came from when Sears, Roebuck offered the Gibson guitar in the very early ’20s, really cheap. Before that, banjos were the biggest-selling instrument. Gibson put out this cheap, really good guitar, and cats would tune it, since they were nearly all banjo players, to a five-string banjo tuning. Also, you didn’t have to pay for the other string, the big string. Or you could save it for hanging the old lady or something. Most of rural America bought their stuff from the Sears catalogue. Rural America was where it was really important. In the cities, you could shop around. In the Bible Belt, rural America, the South, Texas, the Midwest, you got your Sears, Roebuck catalogue and you sent away. That’s how Oswald got his shooter.
***
At the same time, Anita and I had drifted into heroin. We just snorted it for a year or two, along with pure cocaine. Speedballs. A beautifully bizarre law of that time, when the National Health started, was that if you were a junkie, you registered with your doctor, and that would register you with the government as being a heroin addict, and then you would get pure little heroin pills, with a little phial of distilled water to shoot it up with. And of course any junkie is going to double how much he says he needs. Now, at the same time, whether you wanted it or not, you got the equivalent in cocaine. The theory being that the coke would counteract the junk and maybe make the junkies useful members of society, on the grounds that if they take just the junk, they’ll lie down and meditate and read things and then shit and stink. And the junkies of course would sell off their cocaine. They doubled their actual need for heroin, so they’ve got half their heroin stash to sell off, plus all of the cocaine. A beautiful scam! And it was only when the program stopped that you really began to have a drug problem in the UK.
***
That’s when I first got in touch with cocaine, pure May & Baker, right out of the bottle. It used to say on it “pure fluffy crystals.” On the label! And then a skull and crossbones saying “poison.” It was a beautifully ambiguous label.
***
It was a convertible, and it was three tons rolling on the windscreen and on the struts that hold up the canvas. The miracle was that the windscreen held up. I only found out later it was because the car was built in 1947 out of panzer parts and armored steel, immediately postwar, German scrap lying around the battlefield—whatever they could get their hands on. This shit was heavy-duty steel. Basically I was riding a tank with a canvas roof. No wonder they swept through France in six weeks. No wonder they almost took Russia. The panzers saved my life.
***
It was one of those magical moments when things come together. It’s like “Satisfaction.” You just dream it, and suddenly it’s all in your hands. Once you’ve got the vision in your mind of wild horses, I mean, what’s the next phrase you’re going to use? It’s got to be “couldn’t drag me away.” That’s one of the great things about songwriting; it’s not an intellectual experience. One might have to apply the brain here and there, but basically it’s capturing moments.
***
The tax rate in the early ’70s on the highest earners was 83 percent, and that went up to 98 percent for investments and so-called unearned income. So that’s the same as being told to leave the country.
***
When the fleet was in, all of these damn dark streets in Villefranche would suddenly burst with lighting as if it were Las Vegas. It’s the “Café Dakota” or the “Nevada Bar”—they’d put anything that sounded American on it: the “Texan Hang.” The streets of Villefranche would come alive with neon and fairy lights. All the bitches from Nice would come in, and Monte Carlo, all the whores from Cannes. The crew of an aircraft carrier is two thousand–odd men, randy and ready to serve. It was enough to attract the whole south coast. Otherwise, when they weren’t in town, Villefranche was dead as a doornail.
***
The guy that opened for us, in almost every city, was Stevie Wonder, and he was barely twenty-two.
***
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.
***
Said Mick, “The Rolling Stones… cannot be, at my age and after spending all these years, the only thing in my life.… I certainly have earned the right to express myself in another way.” And he did. The way he expressed himself was to go on tour with another band singing Rolling Stones songs.
***
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.
***
You’ve got to hit it when you’re hungry. We’ve been trained from babyhood to have three square meals a day, the full factory–industrial revolution idea of how you’re supposed to eat. Before then it was never like that. You’d have a little bit often, every hour. But when they had to regulate us all, “OK, mealtime!” That’s what school’s about. Forget the geography and history and mathematics, they’re teaching you how to work in a factory.
***
It’s now famous, my rule on the road. Nobody touches the shepherd’s pie until I’ve been in there. Don’t bust my crust, baby. It’s written into the contract. If you come into Keith Richards’s room and he’s got a shepherd’s pie on the warmer, bubbling away, if it’s still pristine, the only one that can bust the crust is me. Greedy motherfuckers, they’ll come in and just scoop up anything.
***
Instead of the queen, there was a muddle about the dates and Mick got Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, to tap him on the shoulders, which I think makes him a cur instead of a sir. At least, unlike some others newly knighted, he doesn’t insist on being called Sir Mick. But we do chuckle about it behind his back. As for me, I won’t be Lord Richards, I’ll be fucking King Richard IV, with that IV pronounced eye-vee.
I'm posting my clippings from Life, by Keith Richards -- random passages that hit the eye for some reason, usually because they are funny or explain a historically important musical event or item.
Note to the publisher -- let's consider this promotional material :)
She must have been around for our first gig as “the Rollin’ Stones,” a band name Stu highly disapproved of. Brian, after figuring how much it would cost, called up Jazz News, which was a kind of “who’s playing where” rag, and said, “We’ve got a gig at…” “What do you call yourselves?” We stared at one another. “It?” Then “Thing?” This call is costing. Muddy Waters to the rescue! First track on The Best of Muddy Waters is “Rollin’ Stone.” The cover is on the floor. Desperate, Brian, Mick and I take the dive. “The Rolling Stones.” Phew!! That saved sixpence.
***
A Vox AC30 amplifier, which was beyond our means to possess. Built by Jennings in Dartford. We used to worship it. We used to look at it and get on our knees.
***
July 1963, we actually moved out of London for a gig, for the first time ever—to Middlesbrough, Yorkshire, and a first taste of the bedlam. Between then and 1966—for three years—we played virtually every night, or every day, sometimes two gigs a day. We played well over a thousand gigs, almost back to back, with barely a break and perhaps ten days off in that whole period.
***
The actual gig you didn’t even get to know much about. It was just mayhem. We came there to listen to the audience! Nothing like a good ten, fifteen minutes of pubescent female shrieking to cover up all your mistakes. Or three thousand teenage chicks throwing themselves at you. Or being carried out on stretchers. All the bouffants awry, skirts up to their waists, sweating, red, eyes rolling. That’s the spirit, girl. That’s the way we like ’em.
***
And I remember walking back out onto the stage after the show, and they’d cleaned up all of the underwear and everything, and there was one old janitor, night watchman, and he said, “Very good show. Not a dry seat in the house.”
***
It was like somebody had pulled a plug somewhere. The ’50s chicks being brought up all very jolly hockey sticks, and then somewhere there seemed to be a moment when they just decided they wanted to let themselves go. The opportunity arose for them to do that, and who’s going to stop them? It was all dripping with sexual lust, though they didn’t know what to do about it. But suddenly you’re on the end of it. It’s a frenzy. Once it’s let out, it’s an incredible force. You stood as much chance in a fucking river full of piranhas. They were beyond what they wanted to be. They’d lost themselves. These chicks were coming out there, bleeding, clothes torn off, pissed panties, and you took that for granted every night. That was the gig. It could have been anybody, quite honestly. They didn’t give a shit that I was trying to be a blues player.
***
I discovered that Keith and I had the same birthday, both born 12/18/43. He told me, “Bobby, you know what that means? We’re half man and half horse, and we got a license to shit in the streets.” Well, that’s just one of the greatest pieces of information I’d ever received in my life!
***
Then she met Jimi Hendrix, saw him play and adopted his career as her mission, tried to get him a recording contract with Andrew Oldham. In her enthusiasm, during a long evening with Jimi, as she tells it, she gave him a Fender Stratocaster of mine that was in my hotel room. And then, so Linda says, she also picked up a copy of a demo I had of Tim Rose singing a song called “Hey Joe.” And took that round to Roberta Goldstein’s, where Jimi was, and played it to him. This is rock-and-roll history. So he got the song from me, apparently.
***
Schneiderman, who also went by the moniker of Acid King, was the source of that very high-quality acid of the time, such brands as Strawberry Fields, Sunshine and Purple Haze—where do you think Jimi got that from?
***
Morris (The Prosecutor): There was, as we know, a young woman sitting on a settee wearing only a rug. Would you agree, in the ordinary course of events, you would expect a young woman to be embarrassed if she had nothing on but a rug in the presence of eight men, two of whom were hangers-on and the third a Moroccan servant? Keith: Not at all. Morris: You regard that, do you, as quite normal? Keith: We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals.
***
But I know where the lyrics came from. They came from a gray dawn at Redlands. Mick and I had been up all night, it was raining outside and there was the sound of these heavy stomping rubber boots near the window, belonging to my gardener, Jack Dyer, a real country man from Sussex. It woke Mick up. He said, “What’s that?” I said, “Oh, that’s Jack. That’s jumping Jack.”
***
And then I found out all this stuff about banjos. A lot of five-string playing came from when Sears, Roebuck offered the Gibson guitar in the very early ’20s, really cheap. Before that, banjos were the biggest-selling instrument. Gibson put out this cheap, really good guitar, and cats would tune it, since they were nearly all banjo players, to a five-string banjo tuning. Also, you didn’t have to pay for the other string, the big string. Or you could save it for hanging the old lady or something. Most of rural America bought their stuff from the Sears catalogue. Rural America was where it was really important. In the cities, you could shop around. In the Bible Belt, rural America, the South, Texas, the Midwest, you got your Sears, Roebuck catalogue and you sent away. That’s how Oswald got his shooter.
***
At the same time, Anita and I had drifted into heroin. We just snorted it for a year or two, along with pure cocaine. Speedballs. A beautifully bizarre law of that time, when the National Health started, was that if you were a junkie, you registered with your doctor, and that would register you with the government as being a heroin addict, and then you would get pure little heroin pills, with a little phial of distilled water to shoot it up with. And of course any junkie is going to double how much he says he needs. Now, at the same time, whether you wanted it or not, you got the equivalent in cocaine. The theory being that the coke would counteract the junk and maybe make the junkies useful members of society, on the grounds that if they take just the junk, they’ll lie down and meditate and read things and then shit and stink. And the junkies of course would sell off their cocaine. They doubled their actual need for heroin, so they’ve got half their heroin stash to sell off, plus all of the cocaine. A beautiful scam! And it was only when the program stopped that you really began to have a drug problem in the UK.
***
That’s when I first got in touch with cocaine, pure May & Baker, right out of the bottle. It used to say on it “pure fluffy crystals.” On the label! And then a skull and crossbones saying “poison.” It was a beautifully ambiguous label.
***
It was a convertible, and it was three tons rolling on the windscreen and on the struts that hold up the canvas. The miracle was that the windscreen held up. I only found out later it was because the car was built in 1947 out of panzer parts and armored steel, immediately postwar, German scrap lying around the battlefield—whatever they could get their hands on. This shit was heavy-duty steel. Basically I was riding a tank with a canvas roof. No wonder they swept through France in six weeks. No wonder they almost took Russia. The panzers saved my life.
***
It was one of those magical moments when things come together. It’s like “Satisfaction.” You just dream it, and suddenly it’s all in your hands. Once you’ve got the vision in your mind of wild horses, I mean, what’s the next phrase you’re going to use? It’s got to be “couldn’t drag me away.” That’s one of the great things about songwriting; it’s not an intellectual experience. One might have to apply the brain here and there, but basically it’s capturing moments.
***
The tax rate in the early ’70s on the highest earners was 83 percent, and that went up to 98 percent for investments and so-called unearned income. So that’s the same as being told to leave the country.
***
When the fleet was in, all of these damn dark streets in Villefranche would suddenly burst with lighting as if it were Las Vegas. It’s the “Café Dakota” or the “Nevada Bar”—they’d put anything that sounded American on it: the “Texan Hang.” The streets of Villefranche would come alive with neon and fairy lights. All the bitches from Nice would come in, and Monte Carlo, all the whores from Cannes. The crew of an aircraft carrier is two thousand–odd men, randy and ready to serve. It was enough to attract the whole south coast. Otherwise, when they weren’t in town, Villefranche was dead as a doornail.
***
The guy that opened for us, in almost every city, was Stevie Wonder, and he was barely twenty-two.
***
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.
***
Said Mick, “The Rolling Stones… cannot be, at my age and after spending all these years, the only thing in my life.… I certainly have earned the right to express myself in another way.” And he did. The way he expressed himself was to go on tour with another band singing Rolling Stones songs.
***
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.
***
You’ve got to hit it when you’re hungry. We’ve been trained from babyhood to have three square meals a day, the full factory–industrial revolution idea of how you’re supposed to eat. Before then it was never like that. You’d have a little bit often, every hour. But when they had to regulate us all, “OK, mealtime!” That’s what school’s about. Forget the geography and history and mathematics, they’re teaching you how to work in a factory.
***
It’s now famous, my rule on the road. Nobody touches the shepherd’s pie until I’ve been in there. Don’t bust my crust, baby. It’s written into the contract. If you come into Keith Richards’s room and he’s got a shepherd’s pie on the warmer, bubbling away, if it’s still pristine, the only one that can bust the crust is me. Greedy motherfuckers, they’ll come in and just scoop up anything.
***
Instead of the queen, there was a muddle about the dates and Mick got Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, to tap him on the shoulders, which I think makes him a cur instead of a sir. At least, unlike some others newly knighted, he doesn’t insist on being called Sir Mick. But we do chuckle about it behind his back. As for me, I won’t be Lord Richards, I’ll be fucking King Richard IV, with that IV pronounced eye-vee.