Mick and Keef reveal all
The sad death of Charlie Watts leaves two original band members rocking. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards talk to Anthony Decurtis
When the nascent Rolling Stones began performing around London in 1962, the notion that a rock ’n’ roll band would last anything remotely like 50 years was not just absurd – it was inconceivable.
‘I didn’t expect to last until 50 myself, let alone with the Stones,’ Keith Richards said. ‘It’s incredible, really. In that sense, we’re still living on borrowed time.’
Mick Jagger takes a more expansive view of its ongoing evolution.
‘You have to put yourself back into that time,’ he says about those early days in London, when he, Richards and guitarist Brian Jones shared a legendarily squalid flat at 102 Edith Grove in Chelsea (Richards described the place as a ‘beautiful dump’) and hustled gigs wherever they could find one.
‘Popular music wasn’t talked about on any kind of intellectual level. There was no such term as “popular culture”. None of those things existed. But, suddenly, popular music became bigger than it had ever been before. It became an important – perhaps the most important – art form of the period, after not at all being regarded as an art form before.’
Of course the collaboration at the heart of the Stones’ success is the creative interplay between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
Jagger and Richards knew each other as young boys growing up in Dartford, Kent, close to south-east London. They lived not far from each other and attended the same junior school.
They drifted apart, but then famously ran into each other one day at Dartford railway station as Jagger was heading to classes at the London School of Economics and Richards was off to Sidcup Art College.
The spark of their connection was music. Jagger was carrying The Best of Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry’s Rockin’ at the Hops and One Dozen Berrys, albums by artists that, taken together, provide something like the genetic code of the early Rolling Stones.
Seeing the cache his friend had in his hands, Richards sensed the possibilities.
‘To me, that was Captain Morgan’s treasure,’ he said.
The two men began talking and discovered their shared love for American blues and R&B. Jagger had been doing some singing. Richards had been playing guitar. Their friendship was rekindled, now charged by passion and ambition. They began to meet regularly to play songs by their favourite blues artists, and became regulars on London’s burgeoning R&B scene.
‘Mick is the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic,’ Richards soon wrote to his Aunt Pat.
Over the decades, Jagger and Richards’s relationship has proven combustible. But on that day in Dartford, an unbreakable attachment was forged.
Richards said, ‘It was almost as if we made a deal without knowing it. Like Robert Johnson at the crossroads. I don’t know why it should have happened, but there was a bond made there that, despite everything else, goes on and on – like a solid deal.’
Dick Taylor, who played bass in an early configuration of the Stones, said of the Jagger-richards tie, ‘One day, Mick would become Keith. But then, on
‘Mick is the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic,’ Keith told his Aunt Pat
another day, Keith would go all like Mick. You never knew which way round it would be. But, from then on, Mick and Keith were together. Whoever else came into the band or left, there’d always be Mick and Keith.’
Brian Jones was the third key member of the original Stones triumvirate. He placed the ad inviting musicians to audition for a new R&B band that eventually led to his being joined by Jagger, Richards and Taylor.
Boogie-woogie pianist Ian Stewart was the first to be accepted into Jones’s combo, which took its initial name as the Rollin’ Stones when a club owner surprised Jones during a telephone conversation by asking what his band was called. Stuck for an answer, Jones offered ‘The Rollin’ Stones’, a plural rendering of the title of one of the rawest, most brooding blues numbers on The Best of Muddy Waters.
Drummer Tony Chapman joined for a time. Before long, Dick Taylor left (he would go on to help found the Pretty Things) and was replaced on bass by Bill Wyman. Stewart would eventually cease to be a full-time member in May of 1963, and instead became the group’s beloved road manager and taskmaster.
Always held in the deepest affection and highest regard by the band, Stewart would routinely summon them to the stage with such endearments as ‘You’re on, my three-chord wonders’ or passingly refer to them as ‘my little shower of shit’.
A masterfully rhythmic pianist who steadfastly refused to play minor – or ‘Chinese’, as he put it – chords, he often sat in with the Stones, both in the studio and on stage, until his death in 1985.
The late Charlie Watts (1941-2021) soon took over the drums spot. By the spring of 1963, the line-up of the Rolling Stones that the world would first come to know – Jagger, Richards, Jones, Wyman and Watts – was fixed.
‘Something was happening in the late winter of 1963 and afterwards,’ Richards said, ‘because suddenly hundreds and then thousands of people were queuing up to see us. And it doesn’t take a nail driven through your head to make you realise that something’s going on and you’re part of it. It was an amazing experience and it happened so fast, starting in London and then moving out from there. It was like hanging onto a tornado.’
The Stones proceeded to press every button in the psyche of post-war British authority figures, who were desperate to restore a pre-war status quo.
‘The English are very strange,’ Richards says. ‘As long as you don’t bother them, that’s cool. But we bothered them. We bothered ’em because of the way we looked; the way we’d act. Because we never showed any reverence for them whatsoever.’
Much has been made of how the Stones, in cahoots with their young manager and producer Andrew Oldham, consciously assumed a dark, rebellious stance in opposition to the Beatles’ sunniness. If the Beatles were wearing the white hat, Richards observed, the only option left was the black hat.
Jagger has compared his blues obsession to the fascination subsequent generations of white teenagers would have with hip-hop.
‘It’s the other; it’s the most different thing,’ Jagger said. ‘You’re leading a relatively comfortable life, but all the music’s about people who are ploughing fields, experiencing economic hardship and being racially abused. They’re singing about having woman problems and you didn’t even have a woman to have a problem with. You’re discovering the background of all these lives.
‘It was a socially aware music, as opposed to the other popular music at the time, which was pretty much candyfloss stuff. The blues was a much more directly spoken real experience – even if it wasn’t a real experience for us. It was a learned experience for us.’
Richards remains enthralled by the inexorable pull the blues exerted on him.
‘Why the keening sounds from Mississippi should strike notes of thrill and terror and wonder in hearts in the suburbs of London I don’t know,’ he said.
‘It can only be because it goes beyond colour, blood – it goes to the bone. Maybe that’s it. If you look closely at the marrow, there’s a bit of blue in there.’
The Rolling Stones: Unzipped, with an introduction by Anthony Decurtis, is published on 7th October (£35, Thames & Hudson)