The Winos were put together very slyly. Almost everybody in that band can play anything. They can switch instruments; they can virtually all sing. Steve can sing. Ivan’s a fantastic singer. This core band, from the first few bars we ever played, took off like a rocket. I’ve always been incredibly lucky with the guys I’ve played with. And there’s no way you can stand in front of the Winos without getting off. It’s a surefire high. It was so hot you could hardly believe it. It brought me back to life. I felt as if I’d just gotten out of jail. As engineer we had Don Smith, who Steve had picked out. He had cut his teeth at Stax in Memphis and worked with Don Nix, who wrote “Going Down.” He also worked with Johnnie Taylor, one of my earliest heroes. He’d hung out in the juke joints of Memphis with Furry Lewis. He loved his music.
Waddy describes our journey, and bears flattering witness to my improvement as a singer from the early thwarted promise of the Dartford boy soprano.
Waddy Wachtel:
We went up to Canada and did the whole of the first record,
Talk Is Cheap,
there. I think the second track we cut was “Take It So Hard,” which is a magnificent composition. And I just thought, I get to play on this? Let’s go. And we played it a few times. I guess you could call it rehearsing. And there’s one take that is just a great pass. It’s just ridiculously good. It was the second tune of the night, and it was this killer fucking take of our strongest tune. I went back to the house going, we’ve conquered Everest already? These other mountains we can climb easily if we’ve got the big one down. And Keith didn’t want to believe it; he was going, I don’t want these guys thinking they’re that good. He made us do a retake. I don’t know why. The take was shouting, hey, dude, I’m the take. I think Keith just did it to make sure people stayed in focus. But it never sounded as good as that first take. When you’ve got it, you’ve got it. When we were putting the sequence of the album together, I insisted “Big Enough” should be the first song. Because the first time you hear Keith sing on that, that first line is amazing, his voice sounds so beautiful. He delivers it effortlessly. I said, people when they hear this, they’re not going to believe it’s fucking Keith Richards singing. And then we’ll hit ’em with “Take It So Hard.”
In fact, on
Talk Is Cheap
it’s not just our band. We looked high and low. We went down to Memphis and recruited Willie Mitchell and put the Memphis Horns on “Make No Mistake.” Willie Mitchell! He engineered, arranged, produced and wrote all the Al Green stuff, either with Al Green or with Al Jackson or both. So we went down to the studio where he did all Al Green’s records and we had him do a horn arrangement. We tried for everybody we wanted, and we got most of them: we had Maceo Parker playing, we had Mick Taylor, William “Bootsy” Collins, Joey Spampinato, Chuck Leavell, Johnnie Johnson, Bernie Worrell, Stanley “Buckwheat” Dural, Bobby Keys, Sarah Dash. And we had Babi Floyd singing with us on tour. Great singer, great voice, one of the best. Babi Floyd used to do “Pain in My Heart” on our tour and do the whole Otis bit, getting down on his knees. On the last night of the Winos tour, we shackled him by his ankle to the microphone stand, because we thought he was a little overdoing it. How do you shackle him without him knowing it? It’s done very carefully.
I’d never really written with anybody on a long-term basis except Mick, and I wasn’t really writing much with Mick anymore. We were writing our own songs. And I didn’t realize until I worked with Steve Jordan how much I’d missed that. And how important it was to collaborate. When the band was assembled in the studio, I often composed the songs there, just standing up and voweling, hollering, whatever it took, a process that was unfamiliar to Waddy at first.
Waddy Wachtel:
It was very funny. Keith’s concept of writing was this. “Set up some mikes.” “Huh? OK.” He goes, “OK, let’s go sing it.” “Go sing what?” And he goes, “Go sing it!” “What are you talking about? Go sing what? We don’t have anything.” And he goes, “Yeah, right, let’s go make something up.” And this is it. This is the routine. So Steve and I are standing up there with him and every so often he’d go, “What the fuck… that feels good,” trying to come up with lines. Throw everything at the wall, see if it sticks. And that was basically the routine. It was amazing. And we got some lines out of it too.
I did start writing as well as singing songs differently. For one thing, I wasn’t writing for Mick—songs that he’d have to deliver on stage. But mostly I was learning to sing. First off I put the songs in a lower key, which allowed me to get my voice down from high-pitched songs like “Happy.” The melodies, too, were different from the Stones melodies. And I was learning to sing into the microphone rather than waving in and out while I played air guitar, which I used to do while I sang on stage. Don Smith rigged the mikes and compressors so that I heard it very loud in the headphones, which meant I couldn’t sing loud and scream, which used to be the way I’d do it. I got writing quieter songs, ballads, love songs. Songs from the heart.
We went on tour. Suddenly I was the front man.
OK, we’re going to do this
. It made me far more sympathetic to some of Mick’s more loony things. When you have to sing every goddamn song, you have to develop your lungs. You’re doing an hour-odd show every day, not only singing but prancing around and playing guitar, and that brought my voice on. Some people hate it, some people love it. It’s a voice with character. Pavarotti it ain’t, but then I don’t like Pavarotti’s voice. When you sing lead in a band, it’s an exhausting business. Just the breathing involved. Singing song after song is enough to knock most people on their ass. It’s an incredible amount of oxygen you’re going through. So we would do shows and we’d come off stage and I’d go to bed! Sometimes, of course, we’d be up till the next show, but a lot of times it would be forget it! We had the time of our lives touring with the Winos. We had standing ovations at almost every show, we did small theaters, sellouts, we broke even. The caliber of musicianship across the stage was astonishing. Fabulous playing every night, the music flowing like crazy. We were flying. It was really magic.
In the end neither Mick nor I sold a lot of records from our solo albums because they want the Rolling bleeding Stones, right? At least I got two great rock-and-roll records out of it, and credibility. But Mick went out there trying to be a pop star on his own. He got out there and hung his flag and had to pull it down. I’m not gloating about what happened, but it didn’t surprise me. In the long run he had to come back to the Stones to reidentify himself—for redemption.
S
o here come
the Millstones, brother, to save you from drowning. I was not going to put the first feeler out. I was over it. I was not interested in being with the Stones under these conditions. By then I had a very good record under my belt and I was enjoying myself. I would have done another Winos record right then. There was a phone call; there was some shuttle diplomacy. The meeting that followed wasn’t easy to organize. Blood had been spilt. Neutral territory had to be found. Mick wouldn’t come to Jamaica, where I was—this is now early January in 1989. I wouldn’t go to Mustique. Barbados was the choice. Eddy Grant’s Blue Wave studios were down the road.
The first thing we did was to say this has got to stop. I’m not using the
Daily Mirror
as my mouthpiece. They’re loving this; they’re eating us alive. There was a little sparring, but then we started laughing about the things we’d called each other in the press. That was probably the healing moment. I called you a
what?
We hit it off.
Mick and I may not be friends—too much wear and tear for that—but we’re the closest of brothers, and that can’t be severed. How can you describe a relationship that goes that far back? Best friends are best friends. But brothers fight. I felt a real sense of betrayal. Mick knows how I feel, although he may not have realized my feelings went so deep. But it’s the past I’m writing about; this stuff happened a long time ago. I can say these things; they come from the heart. At the same time, nobody else can say anything against Mick that I can hear. I’ll slit their throat.
Whatever has happened, Mick and I have a relationship that still works. How else, after almost fifty years, could we be contemplating —at the time of writing this—going out on the road again together? (Even if our dressing rooms do have to be a mile distant for practical reasons—he can’t stand my sounds, and I can’t listen to him practicing scales for an hour.) We love what we do. When we meet up again, whatever antagonisms have been whipped up in the meantime, we drop them and start talking about the future. We always come up with something when we’re alone together. There’s an electromagnetic spark between us. There always has been. That’s what we look forward to and that’s what helps turn folks on.
That’s what happened at that meeting in Barbados. It was the beginning of the détente of the ’80s. I let water go under the bridge. I may be unforgiving, but I can’t work a grudge that long. As long as we’ve got something going, everything else becomes peripheral. We’re a band, we know each other, we’d better refigure this, refigure our relationship with each other, because the Stones are bigger than any of us when it comes down to the nitty-gritty. Can you and I get together and make some good music? That’s our thing. The key, as ever, was to have no one else there. There is a marked difference between Mick and me alone and Mick and me when there’s somebody else—anybody else—in the room. It could just be the housemaid, the chef, anybody. It becomes totally different. When we’re alone we talk about what’s happening, “Oh, the old lady’s kicked me out of the house,” a phrase will come up and we start working on that phrase. It very quickly falls into piano, guitar, songs. And the magic returns. I pull things out of him; he pulls things out of me. He can do things in a way that you wouldn’t think of, you wouldn’t plan, they just happen.
Pretty soon everything was forgotten. Less than two weeks after that first meeting we were recording our first new album in five years,
Steel Wheels,
at AIR Studios in Montserrat, with Chris Kimsey back as coproducer. And the Steel Wheels tour, the biggest circus yet, was planned to start in August 1989. Having nearly dissolved the Stones forever, Mick and I were now faced with a further twenty years on the road.
I knew that this was about starting over again. Either this thing was going to break and all the wheels would fall off, or we’d survive. Everybody else had swallowed the pill and got over it. We wouldn’t have been able to start it up otherwise. So it was kind of amnesia of the immediate past, although the bruises still showed.
We prepared with care. We rehearsed for two solid months. It was a massive new operation. The set, designed by Mark Fisher, was the biggest stage ever constructed. Two stages would leapfrog each other along the route, the trucks carrying a moveable village with spaces for everything from rehearsal rooms to the pool table where Ronnie and I warmed up before shows. No longer a pirate nation on the road. This was the changeover in both personality and style from Bill Graham to Michael Cohl, who’d been a promoter for us in Canada. This time I realized how big a spectacle I was involved in—huge, enormous—a new kind of deal.
The Stones only started to make money through touring in the ’80s—the tour of ’81–’82 was the start of the big stadium venues and broke box office records for rock shows. Bill Graham was the promoter. He was the king of rock concerts at the time, a big backer of the counterculture, of unknown artists and good causes, as well as bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. But that last tour was a rather dodgy period—a lot of bits were going missing. The mathematics weren’t adding up. To put it more simply, we needed to get control of our shows again. Rupert Loewenstein had reordered the finances so that, basically, we didn’t get cheated out of eighty percent of the takings, which was nice. On a fifty-dollar ticket, up till then, we’d get three dollars. He set up sponsorship and clawed back merchandising deals. He cleaned out the scams and fiddles, or most of them. He made us viable. I loved Bill dearly, he was a wonderful guy, but his head was beginning to turn. He was getting too big for his boots, as they all do when they’ve been doing it for too long. Separate from Bill, his business partners were stealing money from us and openly bragging about it—one of them telling how he bought a house with it. The inside machinations are nothing to do with me. Eventually I’m going to end up on stage playing. That’s why I pay other people. The whole point is that I can only do what I do if I have the space to do it in. That’s why you work with people like Bill Graham or Michael Cohl or whoever. They take this weight off your shoulders, but you’re going to get a good cut of it. All I’ve got to do is have somebody on my staff like Rupert or Jane who makes sure at the end of the day that the right shekels end up in the right pot. There was a big meeting on one of the islands when we threw in our lot with Michael Cohl, and he then did all our tours up to A Bigger Bang in 2006.
Mick does have a talent for discovering good people, but they can get discarded or left lying about. Mick finds them, Keith keeps them, is the motto in our troupe, and it’s borne out by the facts. There were two people particularly that Mick had picked up for his solo stuff, and without knowing it, he actually put me in contact with some of the best—guys I wouldn’t let go of again or ever. Pierre de Beauport, who came to Barbados as Mick’s sole assistant when Mick and I met up again, was one. He had taken a summer job out of college to learn to make records in New York, and Mick brought him along on his solo tour. Pierre can not only mend anything from tennis rackets to fishing nets, he’s a genius at guitars and amplifiers. When I came to Barbados, all I’d brought with me was one old Fender tweed amp, which was barely working and sounded terrible. Pierre of course, as a rookie working for Mick, had been warned never to cross the cold war battle lines, as if it was North and South Korea, when all it was was East and West Berlin. One day Pierre, cutting through all that, got hold of the Tweedie, stripped it, reassembled it and made it work perfectly. He got a hug from me. It wasn’t very long before I knew that he’s the man. Because also—and he hid it for a long time—he can play guitar like a motherfucker. He can play this shit better than I can. We fell in through our total infatuation with and obsessive love of the guitar. After that, he was backstage for me, handing me the guitars. He’s the guitar curator and trainer. But we’re a team music-wise too, to the point where now, if I think I’ve got a good song, I’ll play it to Pierre before I’ll play it to anybody else.