Chapter Three 10 страница

There was the stark thing you discovered about America--it was civilized round the edges, but fifty miles in land from any major American city, whether it was New York, Chicago, LA or Washington, you really did go into another world. In Nebraska and places like that we got used to them saying, "Hello, girls." We just ignored it. At the same time they felt threatened by us, because their wives were looking at us and going, "That's interesting." Not what they were used to every bloody day, not some beer-swilling redneck. Everything they said was offensive, but the actual drive behind it was very much defense. We just wanted to go in and have a pancake or a cup of coffee with some ham and eggs, but we had to be prepared to put up with some taunting. All we were doing was playing music, but what we realized was we were going through some very interesting social dilemmas and clashes. And whole loads of insecurities, it seemed to me. Americans were supposed to be brash and self-confident. Bullshit. That was just a front. Especially the men, especially in those days, they didn't know quite what was happening. Things did happen fast. I'm not surprised that a few guys just couldn't get the spin on it. The only hostility I can recall on a consistent basis was from white people. Black brothers and musicians at the very least thought we were interesting lyquirky. We could talk. It was far more difficult to break through to white people. You always got the impression that you were definitely a threat. And all you'd done was ask, "Can I use your bathroom?" "Are you a boy or a girl?" What are you gonna do? Pull your cock out? Back in England we had a number one album, but out in the middle of America nobody knew who we were. They were more aware of the Dave Clark Five and the Swinging Blue Jeans. In some towns we got some real hostility, real killer looks in our direction. Sometimes we got the sense that an exemplary lesson was about to be taught us, right then and there. We'd have to make a quick getaway in our faithful station wagon with Bob Bonis, our road manager, great guy. He'd been on the road with midgets, performing monkeys, with some of the best acts of all time. He eased us into America, driving five hundred miles a day. A lot of our gigs in '64, '65, were piggy backed onto these other tours that were already lined up. So for two weeks we'd be with Patti La Belle and the Bluebelles, the Vibrations and a contortionist called the Amazing Rubber Man. And then we'd switch onto another circuit. The first time I ever saw anybody lip-synch on stage was the Shangri-Las, "Remember (Walkin' in the Sand)." Three New York chicks and they're very handsome and everything like that, but you suddenly realize there's no band, they're actually singing to a tape machine. And there were the Green Men, also Ohio, I think. They actually painted themselves green to perform their duty. Whatever was the flavor of the week or the month. Some of them were damn good players, especially in the Midwest and the Southwest. Those little bands playing any given night in bars, never going to make it and they didn't even want to, that's the beauty of it. And some of them damn good pickers. Wealth of talent out there. Guys that could play much better than I could. Sometimes we were top of the bill, not always but usually. And with Patti La Belle and the Bluebelles there was young Sarah Dash, who had this woman chaperone, dressed in her Sunday church outfit. If you smiled you got a glare. They used to call her "Inch." She was sweet and short. Twenty years later she'll be back in my story. And of course, beginning in '65, I'm starting to get stoned--a lifelong habit now--which also intensified my impressions of what was going on. Just smoking the weed at the time. The guys I met on the road were, to me then, older men in their thirties, some in their forties, black bands that we were playing with. And we'd be up all night and we'd get to the gig and there would be these brothers in their sharkskin suits, the chain, the waistcoat, the hair gel, and they're all shaved and groomed, so fit and sweet, and we'd just drag our asses in. One day I was feeling so ragged getting to the gig, and these brothers were so together, and shit, they were working the same schedule we were. So I said to one of these guys, a horn player, "Jesus, how do you look so good every day?" And he pulled his coat back and reached into his waistcoat pocket and said, "You take one of these, you smoke one of those." Best bit of advice. He gave me a little white pill, a white cross, and a joint. This is how we do it: you take one of these and you smoke one of these. But keep it dark! That was the line I left the room with. Now we've told you, keep it dark. And I felt like I'd just been let into a secret society. Is it all right if I tell the other guys? Yeah, but keep it amongst yourselves. Backstage it had been going on from time immemorial. The joint really got my attention. The joint got my attention so much that I forgot to take the Benzedrine. They made good speed in those days. Oh yeah, it was pure. You could get hold of speed at any truck stop; truck drivers relied upon it. Stop over here, pull over to some truck stop and ask for Dave. Give me a Jack Daniel's on the rocks and a bag. Gimme a pig foot and a bottle of beer.

2120 South Michigan Avenue was hallowed ground--the headquarters of Chess Records in Chicago. We got there on a last-minute arrangement made by Andrew Oldham, at a moment when the first half of our first US tour seemed like a semidisaster. There in the perfect sound studio, in the room where everything we'd listened to was made, perhaps out of relief or just the fact that people like Buddy Guy, Chuck Berry and Willie Dixon were wandering in and out, we recorded fourteen tracks in two days. One of them was Bobby Womack's "It's All Over Now," our first number one hit. Some people, Marshall Chess included, swear that I made this up, but Bill Wyman can back me up. We walked into Chess studios, and there's this guy in black overalls painting the ceiling. And it's Muddy Waters, and he's got whitewash streaming down his face and he's on top of a ladder. Marshall Chess says, "Oh, we never had him painting." But Marshall was a boy then; he was working in the basement. And also Bill Wyman told me he actually remembers Muddy Waters taking our amplifiers from the car into the studio. Whether he was being a nice guy or he wasn't selling records then, I know what the Chessbrothers were bloody well like--if you want to stay on the payroll, get to work. Actually meeting your heroes, your idols, the weirdest thing is that most of them are so humble, and very encouraging. "Play that lick again," and you realize you're sitting with Muddy Waters. And of course later I got to know him. Over many years I frequently stayed at his house. In those early trips I think it was Howlin' Wolf's house I stayed at one night, but Muddy was there. Sitting in the South Side of Chicago with these two greats. And the family life, loads of kids and relatives walking in and out. Willie Dixon's there....In America people like Bobby Womack used to say, "The first time we heard you guys we thought you were black guys. Where did these motherfuckers come from?" I can't figure that out myself, why Mick and I in that damn town should come up with such a sound--except that if you soak it up in a damp tenement in London all day with the intensity that we did, it ain't that different from soaking it up in Chicago. That's all we played, until we actually became it. We didn't sound English. And I think it surprised us too. Each time we played--and I still do this at certain times--I'd just turn round and say, "Is that noise just coming from him there, and me?" It's almost as if you're riding a wild horse. In that respect we're damn lucky we got to work with Charlie Watts. He was playing very much like black drummers playing with Sam and Dave and the Motown stuff, or the soul drummers. He has that touch. A lot of the time very correct, with the sticks through the fingers, which is how most drummers now play. If you try to get savage you're off. It's a bit like surfing; it's OK while you're up there. And because of that style of Charlie's, I could play the same way. One thing drives another in a band; it all has to melt together. Basically it's all liquid. The most bizarre part of the whole story is that having done what we intended to do in our narrow, purist teenage brains at the time, which was to turn people on to the blues, what actually happened was we turned American people back on to their own music. And that's probably our greatest contribution to music. We turned white America's brain and ears around. And I wouldn't say we were the only ones--without the Beatles probably nobody would have broken the door down. And they certainly weren't bluesmen. American black music was going along like an express train. But white cats, after Buddy Holly died and Eddie Cochran died, and Elvis was in the army gone wonky, white American music when I arrived was the Beach Boys and Bobby Vee. They were still stuck in the past. The past was six months ago; it wasn’t a long time. But shit changed. The Beatles were the milestone. And then they got stuck inside their own cage. "The Fab Four." Hence, eventually, you got the Monkees, all this ersatz shit. But I think there was a vacuum somewhere in white American music at the time. When we first got to America and to LA, there was a lot of Beach Boys on the radio, which was pretty funny to us--it was before

Pet Sounds -- it was hotrod songs and surfing songs, pretty lousily played, familiar Chuck Berry licks going on. "Round, round get around / I get around," I thought that was brilliant. It was later on, listening to Pet Sounds, well, it's all a little bit overproduced for me, but Brian Wilson had something. "In My Room," "Don't Worry Baby." I was more interested in their B-sides, the ones he slipped in. There was no particular correlation with what we were doing so I could just listen to it on another level. I thought these are very well-constructed songs. I took easily to the pop song idiom. I'd always listened to everything, and America opened it all out--we were hearing records there that were regional hits. We'd get to know local labels and local acts, which is how we came across "Time Is on My Side," in LA, sung by Irma Thomas. It was a B-side of a record on Imperial Records, a label we'd have been aware of because it was independent and successful and based on Sunset Strip. I’ve talked to guys since like Joe Walsh of the Eagles and many other white musicians about what they listened to when they were growing up, and it was all very provincial and narrow and depended on the local, usually white, FM radio station. Bobby Keys reckons he can tell where someone came from by their musical tastes. Joe Walsh heard us play when he was at high school, and he's told me that it had a huge effect on him simply because nobody he knew had ever heard anything like that because there wasn't anything. He was listening to doo-wop and that was about it. He had never heard Muddy Waters. Amazingly, he was first exposed to the blues, he said, by hearing us. He also decided there and then that the minstrel's life was for him, and now you can't go into any diner without hearing him weaving that guitar of his on "Hotel California." Jim Dickinson, the southern boy who played piano on "Wild Horses," was exposed to black music through the powerful and only black radio station, WDIA, when he was growing up in Memphis, so when he went to college in Texas he had a musical education that exceeded that of anybody he met there. But he never saw any black musicians, even though he lived in Memphis, except once he saw the Memphis Jug Band with Will Shade and Good Kid on the washboard, when they were playing in the street when he was nine. But the racial barriers were so severe that those kinds of players were inaccessible to him. Then Furry Lewis --at whose funeral he played--and Bukka White and others were being brought out to play via the folk revival. I do think maybe the Stones had a lot to do with making people twiddle their knobs a little more. When we put out "Little Red Rooster," a raw Willie Dixon blues with slide guitar and all, it was a daring move at the time, November 1964. We were getting no-no's from the record company, management, everyone else. But we felt we were on the crest of a wave and we could push it. It was almost in defiance of pop. In our arrogance at the time, we wanted to make a statement. "I am the little red rooster / Too lazy to crow for day." See if you can get that to the top of the charts, motherfucker. Song about a chicken. Mick and I stood up and said, come on, let's push it. This is what we're fucking about. And the floodgates burst after that, suddenly Muddy and Howlin' Wolf and Buddy Guy are getting gigs and working. It was a breakthrough. And the record got to number one. And I'm absolutely sure what we were doing made Berry Gordy at Motown capable of pushing his stuff elsewhere, and it certainly rejuvenated Chicago blues as well. I keep a notebook where I write down sketches and song ideas, and it contains this:

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