THE BACK LINE GETS OUT FRONT

In a smoky cutting-room on Sunset Boulevard, the entire history of rock ’n’ roll flashed before my eyes: Elvis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Haley, Vincent, Cochran; and the high school heroes, all the Bobbys, Spector’s girl groups and the beginnings of Motown; and the British Invasion, the Beatles and the Stones.

These last had long footage to themselves—Mick, Keith, Brian, Bill and Charlie—a reel of concerts, TV appearances, interviews, riots. I wasn’t counting, but I don’t recall more than a single shot of Bill Wyman, slow-faced, static, inscrutable, and Charlie Watts’ solitary offering to an interrogatory mike: “Dunno”.

And again, days but years apart, on a television show in London, a promo clip for a brand new album track, “Respectable”. It looked like LyndsayHogg. The group is playing in a bare white set; midway through the number Jagger goes for the wall with his guitar, the paper partition gives way and Mick, Woody and Keith wind up on the other side, falling about. Beyond the hole in the wall Charlie and Bill play on, and a look passes between them, a small glance, amused and almost paternally tolerant. Unspoken assent: there they go again!

Two images of the Rolling Stones, both real. The back line; undemonstrative, unnoticed, and a step away from the gallivanting Glimmer Twins. Coming on 16 years with the band and not a headline between them since Bill pissed on a filling station wall back in ’65, yet when the Stones’ story is finally written, the fact not the fiction, there’ll be no truer chronicler than Wyman, an obsessive collector with an attic full of tangible memories, or Watts, a sketch of every hotel room he’s stayed in tucked in his album.

They joined the band within a few weeks of each other, Bill in December 1962, Charlie in the new year, but their musical backgrounds were far apart. Charlie had been hanging around London’s jazz fringes. “I came out of the schoolthat never listened to rock ’n’ roll, or refused to until I was about twenty-one. I was never really that good to play what you might term ‘jazz’, particularly at that time, so 1 just used to play with anyone really, which was mostly jazz people, but not on a very high musical level, not the best, though some of them turned out to be the best as time passed.”

Watts

"I came out of the school that never listened to rock 'n' roll. .. Charlie Watts"

Then, through Alexis Korner, he drifted into the murky, uncharted waters of early British R&B. “When I first played with Cyril Davies in Alexis Korner’s band,” he recalled, “Ithought, ‘What the fuck is happening here?’ because I’d only ever heard harmonica played by Larry Adler, but Cyril was such a character, I loved him. But the rest of it! I didn’t know what the hell was going on. Although I knew about playing a heavy backbeat, it wasn’t like Chicago, which was what Cyril wanted. Now Alexis never really did front that band, so you had Dick HeckstallSmith, then Jack Bruce, Graham Bond, Ginger Baker, an amazing band, but a total cacophony of sound. On a good night it was amazing, but it was like a cross between R&B and Charlie Mingus, which was what Alexis wanted.

“By the time I joined the Stones, I was a bit used to rock ’n’ roll. 1 knew most of the rock ’n’ roll guys, people like Screaming Lord Sutch, through people who played in bands [like Sutch’s pianist, Nicky Hopkins], though I never had any desire to play it myself. But by the time I actually joined the Stones, I was quite used to Chuck Berry and that. But it was actually sitting up endlessly with Keith and Brian—I was out of work at the time I joined them and I just used to hang about with them, waiting for jobs to come up, daytime work—just listening to Little Walter and all that, that it got ground in.”

The southeastern suburb of London where Bill spent his teenage years remained unaffected by the strange new sounds that were reverberating through basement clubs less than a dozen miles away on the other side of town.

Wyman

"Brian and Keith never apoke to me until they found out I had some cigarettes.

-Bill Wyman"

NOVEMBER 1978—We've all heard of the Glimmer Twins, but here's the other set of twins that make the Stones roll. Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts have been giving the Stones the driving bottom that's become their trademark for almost 20 years. Here English writer John Pidgeon talks over the early days of the Stones—interesting facts, all—and Bill Wyman's frustrations at beingthe "second-best" songwriter in the Stones...

We’re bloody lucky, man. —Charlie Watte

“I’d been playing for just about two years and I had a couple of bands in that time, formed from local kids, people I was working with or lived ’round the corner. None of us could play very well. All the local bands were playing Shadows stuff, Ventures stuff, ail those semi-instrumental groups, because there were never really any good singers about. So most of the bands had an echo chamber and a good lead guitarist who could play ‘FBI’ and all that shit, and experiment and try and play some American music, but it was always the wrong stuff—it was ‘Poetry In Motion’ and ‘Personality’ and all those things—whereas the band I was trying to get together, we were trying to play the R&B kind of American music that was coming over, more like Little Richard, the Coasters, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, black artists, not the Pat Boones and the Bobby Vees.

“We weren’t doing very well, playing youth clubs, doing three or four gigs a week for almost nothing, and my drummer, Tony Chapman, answered an ad from Mick, Keith and Brian in one of the music papers, and he came back the next day and said, ‘It’s not bad actually, it’s very different kind of music. I’ve made a tape copy and I thought you’d like to hear it, because they haven’t got a bass player either’— it must’ve been just after Dick Taylor split. So I listened to this stuff, and there were about four or five Jimmy Reed tracks, and I thought it was very interesting and unusual, and it gave me a weird feeling to listen to it, but an excited feeling. But I thought, ‘It’s so slow,’ because we were playing all the uptempo semi-white semi-black stuff. So I said, ‘All right. I’ll go up.’

“So we went up there, and it was snowing and cold, to this horrible pub where there was a rehearsal hall, and nobody spoke to me for two hours. Mick said hullo to me when I arrived and Stu, who was playing piano, was nice, but Brian and Keith never spoke to me until thsy found out I had some cigarettes, because they never had any money, so I bought them each a drink and we were all mates .They asked us to join, and our band wasn’t doing so well, so we did, but after about three weeks they asked Tony Chapman, who wasn’t a very good drummer, if he would leave, and asked Charlie if he would join permanently.

“I wasn’t involved at all with the jazz thing that was going on in London, or even the R&B thing. I was more into rock ’n’ roll, rather than the Korner thing, so the whole thing was very, very strange to me, and it was only Chuck Berry that held me in with the band for the first few weeks, because I knew all those Chuck Berry songs, and I knew Bo Diddley vaguely. I didn’t know any of the blues people, but at least when they said, let’s do ‘Reeling And Rocking’, I knew it backwards, and doing a blues on the bass was fairly simple anyway. It was just popular music that was being played by black artists instead of white, really, that was the difference, and we suddenly realized it was better.”

Charlie already knew Mick, Keith and Brian from Korner’s club in Ealing, West London, and had even caught their first gig as the Rollin’Stones at the Marquee on Oxford Street. “There were a lot of people dancing,” he recalled, “but all the usual crowd was saying ‘Terrible!’ But really they were very popular even then. The thing was—me included—the bands on the stage that were doing that stuff, like Alexis, were really eccentric old men. Now the Stones, the front line at any rate, were young, so there was obvious appeal for the kids who wanted to dance. Alexis’ band was a joke to look at, but this lot sort of crossed the barrier. They actually were like rock stars, I suppose, but they could play.”

Not, when he joined the band, that he could see any future in it; nor could Bill who, married and a father, didn’t dare give up his day job. It was their ambitious young manager Andrew Oldham who granted them a degree of longevity, relegating the sixth Stone, Ian “Stu” Stewart, to roadie, bleaching the black out of their act for the studio, and molding an image that made them whipping boys for the silent majority and hence heroes for a rebellious generation.

“He saw it as a bigger thing than I personally ever saw it as,” Charlie admitted. “He saw it as a product which he could promote. And I’m sure Brian and Keith at the time would sooner have played all Chuck Berry songs or Elmore James.”

Bill agreed: “That was proven by the fifth single, [Willie Dixon’s] ‘Little Red Rooster’. We were still trying to play blues and get it across to the kids as an interesting music, but it was very hard. ‘Little Red Rooster’ worked, fortunately, but it could’ve been a disaster. Andrew didn’t want us to do it. He wanted us to do some much more poporiented song. Every album we tried to put a few blues things on—‘Honest I Do’ by Jimmy Reed, ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’ by Muddy Waters—we kept trying to get them in there, but Andrew was trying to get us to do Motown things like ‘Can I Get A Witness’. And he was right as well; he was more right than we were. But, of course, when Mick and Keith got into writing, the songs came out more like he was looking for. Andrew practically forced them into writing.”

And it was the writing that clinched it, that enviable and prolific partnership of Jagger and Richard which has given the Stones immortality in a world of still births and infanticide.

“That," Bill insisted, “and Keith’s determination that the band will work and continue being a rock ’n’ roll band and a studio band. Because it could very easily have become just a studio band at the time of ’67-’68, when the drug busts happened and when we basically stopped going on the road, because there were so many problems doing a tour in England at that time. Every day we did a gig there was a riot. There were policemen injured, police dogs shot that went crazy, three hundred girls carried off—1 mean every day. It just became impossible: police escorts, doors torn off police cars and ambulances, going down laundry chutes into hotels. It got mad, so we stopped touring because it was impossible to do shows. Gigs we were turning up to we couldn’t get in, let alone play. And if we had’ve got in, we’d never’ve got out, so we gave up. And we could very easily have become a studio band, couldn’t we, Charlie?”

“Yeah. Remember the one-and-ahalf number gigs?”

“Or the three bars at Birkenhead?”

“Walk on ... da da da .. . off. We rarely finished a set.”

“And it was only 25 minutes long anyway. Only seven or eight numbers, but we never got to the end of it. Never did a whole set for about two years.”

“That’s when I started practicing again,” Charlie said, stretching a memory of cramp from his fingers. “Because we never played anything except in the studio. We never had time to play anything really.”

“And the proof of that,” Bill added, “is if you look at the records we recorded, for instance, at RCA in America and in Chicago between about ’65 through to ’68, hardly any of those numbers have ever been recorded live, because we hardly ever did any of them live. Between The Buttons and Flowers and Satanic Majesties, all those records right up until Beggar’s Banquet, we never performed them on stage really, because we weren’t on the road that much. We did whole albums that we never played any of the numbers on stage to this day, except maybe for the singles, like ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’ or ‘Under My Thumb’ or something like that.”

The kind of chemistry that creates more than a dozen years of classic rock ’n’ roll hits, such as fuses the Twins, can be hard to live with. Not for Charlie, though. He’s happy just to keep the beat. A taciturn prototype among rock drummers, the corners of his zip-lipped mouth plunge at the suggestion he’s also the best. As proof he quotes praise of his playing on “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll” or “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. He didn’t play on them.

“That’s why it’s all bullshit when everyone says you’re the best. If someone else can do the record and it’s supposed to be you, how are you the best? If it was Max Roach it would be fucking true, but when it’s me it isn’t. Absolutely not true. That’s why I don’t believe all that crap. If people tell you how great you are, which in this business they always tend to overdo, and someone else did it, like on those things, it makes a joke of it.”

What makes it for Charlie is not just good playing, but playing good songs. “If you haven’t got a song to play, you can be just a good player, and you know how many good players there are—there’s thousands of them, and some of them are great players—but if you’ve got a good song to play, if you’ve got a hit record, it’s all part of one thing, it makes it seem ten times better than it actually is. To play ‘Miss You’ is really very easy, it’s just four in a bar, it’s even easier to play than a triplet. But it’s a good song, so it works.” Right. The way a heartbeat does.

Coaxing Charlie from behind his kit on stage is as likely as getting him out of his front door when he’s off the road, and he’s thankful for the front man who holds the eyes of the crowd. “I’d hate to be Mick,” he admits cheerfully. “I’m glad to say he’s promoted himself in that direction—always in the magazines—because it helps us. It’s great for me because I’d never do that. I hate that sort of thing. I’d hate to go on stage and walk about in front of everyone.” A relationship Jack Spratt and his wife would envy.

But if it all ended tomorrow? Poker face. “I’d just do something else.”

And Bill? Well, Bill’s happier now than he has been since 1966, but he’s had his ups and downs in the meantime, even felt like quitting. Whereas Charlie has always been happy to leave the material to Mick and Keith, Bill’s had ideas of his own from time to time, and you must have noticed how often B. Wyman has cropped up in the composer credits on Rolling Stones Records.

“If I write a song and I think it could be good for the band, there’s no way the band’s going to do-it, because firstly I can’t sing the bloody thing to the rest of them or play the guitar as Keith might, to show them what it could sound like if it was done that way. I’ve got to pick up a bass to try to get a song across, or an acoustic guitar, which I can’t play either—I can’t play chords. I can’t convey it to them, and Mick won’t really try hard to help you sing it, because he doesn’t know it either, so it’s pretty impossible unless I made demos or something at home and said, ‘What do you think of this?’ They’d probably say, ‘Yeah, that’s quite nice,’ but they wouldn’t think of recording it.

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“That was one of the things that disillusioned Mick Taylor, that he couldn’t get involved with the writing of songs and be part of it. You are part of it in fact if you look at it that way: your name isn’t on it, you don’t get paid for the song, but you are part of the song because anybody can come up with a certain little thing that will make that songjusta bitspecial.

“It’s a very lucrative side of the business, and you can make an awful lot of money with songwriting and publishing, which goes two ways— record royalties, which we’ve all got an equal share of, go five ways, of course—so there is a vast difference in what Keith gets and what I get. Probably he gets five times more than me. 1 don't feel bad about that because he writes the songs, but what does get me sometimes is if 1 had an idea for a song, I would like to be heard a little stronger than I’ve ever been. I’d like to be equally considered. Because I’ve worked on songs of Keith’s in the studio—as the whole band haveseven nights, eight or twelve hours a night, to get a riff into a great song, and if 1 had an idea for a song, and it has happened on occasion, I’d’ve been given probably 20 minutes to experiment with it.”

Thus the solo albums?

“Yeah, that and 1 was getting very frustrated in the band just before being a bass player. Because before, in the early days, the first three, four, five years, when Brian was in the band, he and I in particular, more. than anybody else, would experiment with other instruments for overdub and things. We would try to find glockenspiels and harps and marimbas and all that stuff, and we would use them. It was very much more interesting being able to experiment, like on ‘PaintltBlack,’ using organ pedals as well as bass And it just ended up, after Brian left and Mick Taylor joined, and Nicky Hopkins came along, and then Billy Preston, and a horn section, there was nothing else to do but play bass on each number. And I wasn’t interested in singing, because Mick and Keith were doing it all right, and they were also using back-up singers sometimes, and I found I was just playing bass on some numbers, that was all I was doing. And I got very bored.

“Before I did my solo albums 1 was getting to the point of thinking, ‘Gosh, 1 haven’t got to go to a session again?’ because they were so boring and such a downer. And you can’t make good music like that. I was getting depressed and thinking about leaving the band, because it was fun no more. It was becoming too strict, too bizarre, and incredibly heavy atmospheres and moodies, although the band has never really had a fight.”

If his solo work purged him of these malignant frustrations, it was the recruiting of-Ron Wood that patched whatever holes gaped in his friendship with Mick and Keith. If I was picking sides, me this is, I’d choose Woody for my team every time, because his ability to bring people together and keep them togetherfand happy) is rarer than fun at the dentist. Bill knows all about that.

“Woody’s come along and, especially in the last year—I noticed it more than anything when we started recording for the new album—he’s pulled both sides together, and 1 think he was the main reason for the band being so close and super friendly suddenly in, say, the last nine months than we’ve been since, I don’t know, maybe ’£>6 maybe. Really being able to talk to each other. I found great difficulty after a while in being able to communicate, basically with Mick and Keith. I never had a problem with Charlie, never had a problem with Mick Taylor or Brian, but Woody’s really pulled us all in, because...I don’t know, he talks to me the same as he talks to Mick and Keith and Charlie, and it’s all very amusing and joking—and he can make you laugh.

“And there’s such a great rapport going now between the band that people actually say to each other, ‘You played great tonight!’—which we’d never say. That’s never been said in twelve years. I’ve never been told, ever, ‘You did a great set tonight.’ I’ve only been told, ‘You were out of tune tonight.’ If I play great, it’s accepted, and it’s the same with Charlie. If you play badly or something goes wrong, you get put down, so you never get that uplift, but Woody started to get that happening, and now everybody congratulates everybody, and it’s‘Thanks for a great show!’ We were all bumping into each other after the last show of the tour and everybody was saying to everybody else individually, 'Thanks for a great tour, man, ’ thanking each other for how good the tour was, and we’d never do that before. And I really got off on that. Woody’s fabulous! He’s made this band come back to life again. ”

Nowhere is that new life more apparent than on stage. In contrast to their previous outing, they’ve largely abandoned artifice, and the greatest hits which dominated the last set now sandwich a fat filling of cuts from Some Girls, itself proof enough for all but a handful of tired reviewers of renewed vigor and inspiration.

“We were all having such a great time in the studio,” Bill explains, “so we never stopped really. We just worked and worked and worked. We were going to go there (Paris) for four or five weeks originally—middle of October ’til early December—six weeks with a break of a week in between, and we were still there in February, still havingfun.

“Basically it was because we were really enjoying ourselves and we were getting things done and getting off on new songs, so we’d try a new one and then another one. We’ve got lots of demos where we only did the song once, just to get it down on tape with some idea—a guuar lick or bass run or something Charlie did—so we wouldn’t forget it and we could refer back to it when we cut it properly. We probably finished twelve or thirteen songs and we picked those ten for the album, so there are two or three more that are finished now, about five or six that are near completion, and then there’s a whole mass of stuff that are demos, no vocals, rough ideas, jams, an awful lot of material. We finished up with 96 reels of tape, where a normal band might use six maybe for an album.”

■Bill and Charlie both benefited mightily from Mick’s choice of Chris Kimsey as engineer (because of the bass and drum sound he gave Bad Company and Frampton). According to Bill, he “got the best bass sound I’ve ever had apart from an occasional track here and there, so immediately when you’re listening back to something, a rough even, you get turned on because itsounds great anyway. You've only got to play it great then. Most of the time you can play what you consider one of your best songs, and it doesn’t sound good because the sound isn’t good and it gets mixed in to all the guitars and the bass drum. He did get beautiful sounds for me and Charlie, and that inspires ‘you and turns everybody on to your playing.”

‘1t’s easy,” says Charlie. “If you’ve got a good sound, it’s easy. There’s.no hassle. It wasn’t like sitting there for an hour testing drums. ”

“We’re bloody lucky, man,” he adds. “We’ve signed a record deal three or four times, and each time we’ve had a fucking good album. We did it with Atlantic with ‘Brown Sugar’ and Sticky Fingers, and we’ve done it again this time.”

It’ll surely be a while before those perennial harbingers of the Stones’ end will have an excuse to prophesy the band’s demise. As far as Bill, for one, is concerned, they’ll last as long as they have fun.

“As long as it’s worthwhile, as long as it doesn’t become a drag and a bore and an obligation, and, as I said earlier, it was getting to be for me three of four years ago. Now I’ve got a new lease on life, a second wind, and it doesn’t cross my mind to ever leave the band or the band’s going to break up. And touring, doing shows, getting on the road—Keith thinks that’s the most important thing, and he’s probably right. The most important thing for a band is to work on the road and the more you work on the road the better you play and the better the next session gets and the next tour.”

And the next. And the next. And the next and...