Bill Wyman is talking about mythology, though the term
he prefers is "selective memory". Most books about the Rolling Stones, he says,
repeat the same stories. "The scandals. Marianne Faithfull, the Mars Bar. Anita
Pallenberg, switching from Brian to Keith.
Altamont."
With each telling, detail is eroded. Mistakes become
truth. For instance, Wyman is supposed to own a house in Venice. He does have a
house in Vence, in France. "And someone popped an ‘i’ in there. Since then it’s
been in every book. So, I’ve got a house in Venice. I wish someone’d show me
it."He permits himself a
smile."There’s tons of mistakes.
Andy Warhol designed the tongue logo. Not true. Marianne Faithfull: Mars Bar in
the drug bust - not true. Muddy Waters painting the ceiling at Chess studios -
not true."It’s in my diary. Muddy
Waters walked up the street and helped us carry the gear. He wasn’t painting
that ceiling. "You know," he says, "in
1964, you could say to Keith, what did you think of the Chess studio sessions?
‘Oh, it was really good, Ron Malo was a really good engineer. And we cut some
really nice tracks.
We got the sound we wanted.’ If you ask Keith
Richards this week, he’d say: ‘Well, us cats, we went into Chess studios in ’64
and there was Muddy painting the ceiling, with the white paint dripping down his
nose on to his broad black face ...’ I mean, it’s a completely different story.
It’s very interesting, but it’s not true."Wyman has kept diaries since he was nine. He lived with
his grandmother in London throughout the war, while his brother, two sisters and
mother were evacuated to Nottingham. His father, a bricklayer, was in the army.
His grandmother, "a well-read lady", taught him "about collecting things,
postage stamps, cigarette cards". He started a diary and kept scrapbooks; a
habit he maintains. Though he left the Stones in 1991, he still collects
memorabilia about the group. From this compulsion has come Rolling With The
Stones, a lavish distillation of pop history. Wyman’s earliest musical memories are of the times his
mother took him to jitterbug dances. His musical education began during National
Service, hearing rock’n’roll on the American Forces Network.His telling of the Stones’ story exposes the
malleability of social mores, but what emerges from the early years is how hard
the band worked. "We worked 360 days of the year. You’d get to the office at
9am. You’d go to Mirabelle magazine and do an interview. You’d go to Decca and
do a photo session. You’d come back and do an interview with the New Musical
Express and Melody Maker. You’d grab a sandwich. Then you’d be off to the studio
in Soho, cut two tracks, then grab another sandwich in some coffee shop. Then
you’d be in the van, with Stu [road manager Ian Stewart], with no windows, to
Sheffield, do two shows. You’d get back from Sheffield at three in the morning.
You’d have to be up at seven to go to the Hague in Holland. "When I hear about bands like Oasis going to America
for an eight-show tour, when we were doing a 60-show tour, and after the third
show they come home because they’re exhausted ..." He sighs dramatically and I
fear for a moment that he is going to tell me he lived in a shoebox. "It just
shows you what’s gone wrong. These kids have no concept ..."
The Stones and the Beatles were
flipsides of the myth of the 1960s: the Beatles were light, the Stones were
dark. But what did it feel like inside? "While it was going on, you weren’t
really aware. You had vague ideas. You were mixing with David Bailey and [Jean]
Shrimpton, and Twiggy. Wossername - Mary Quant - with the miniskirts. [Terence]
Donovan, Terry O’Neill. And the art people. But you weren’t aware that it was
like a hurricane going through the Sixties that was changing everything."
As evidence of this social change,
Wyman’s diaries famously helped him compile a record of his promiscuity. Asking
about this, I accidentally exaggerate his batting average, telling him that he
slept with 278 women in a year. "Two
years," he says, quickly. "If it had been one year the old man would have just
ceased functioning. That’s the healthy part of it. If you’ve had enough, it
don’t work. No more. The lead’s all gone and me pencil don’t write no more. Bo
Carter, 1930s." He goes into a
little reverie of risqu챕 song lyrics, from a blues album he has just compiled.
"Warm my wiener. Man in the boat - something smells like fish."
What did this do to his sense of
morality? "That groupie thing
didn’t exist in ’62, ’63. It started to happen in ’64-5, mostly ’65-6, in many
countries at the same time. I think it was the Pill. When we went to America for
the first time, from the first of June 1964 to the 20th, the girls all wore
passion killers. They flirted with you, the way they did in college in America
at the time, but they didn’t get together with you on any level because it was
not the done thing. "We were
probably one of the first bands that it happened to, because we were touring all
the time. This was the most hard-working band of the Sixties. That’s probably
why the band’s still together, because everything we tried to do was opposed; by
the media, promoters, airport officials, police. Everyone you came in contact
with, you had a battle against. And you always came out as the loser, because
you were always written up as bad guys. If you went into a shop to buy some
cigarettes, the guy would refuse to serve you. Get out of my shop. We don’t
serve the likes of you. You went in a pub, the place was buzzing. Everyone was
drinking, playing darts, all that. ‘Three pints of bitter.’ ‘Sorry, we’re
closed.’ ‘Course you’re not closed.’ ‘Get out, or I’ll call the cops.’ And if
they call the cops, you’re going to get the blame. You’re going to be told that
you had a fight in there …" He
flashes back to March 1965, when the Stones were fined for urinating on a garage
forecourt in Stratford, East London. "It was me, meekly asking: ‘Can I please
use your toilet, I’m desperate?’ I’d run off the stage, without going. Into the
car, voom voom. And he said ‘get off my forecourt, you’re a monster’."
He relates this in a voice of
great pathos, omitting the fact that the Stones guitarist, Brian Jones, replied:
"Get off my foreskin!" "You went
to America - same problems. Insults in the street, people yellin’ at you, ‘get
your hair cut’ . The abuse on radio and television. It was absurd. If we stayed
in hotels we couldn’t walk through the foyer. We had to go in the bloody staff
exit, because we weren’t wearing a suit and tie. We couldn’t eat in the
restaurant, because we weren’t appropriately dressed. "You formed this communal spirit. It was like being a
bloody tribe in the jungle, against wild elephants." Wyman’s book also restores Brian Jones to a position of
prominence in the band. Wyman roomed with Jones on tours from 1963-65 and he
considers him to be "the genius of the band", while lamenting his
drug-influenced decline. In Keith Richards - who is described as "elegantly
wasted" less often these days - the Stones had perhaps the most famous chemist
in rock. Wyman’s view of drugs is
simple. "They didn’t improve things. People see that Eric Clapton, Pete
Townshend, Keith Richards took drugs and then they think, well, they’re such
good musicians, maybe I’ll take drugs and it’ll create that musical genius. It
isn’t that way at all. Those people took drugs and they were worse. It was just
the people around them helped to bolster it a bit and achieve things.
"Me and Charlie were as straight
as anything. With that you had a rhythm section that was reliable, with Ian
Stewart on piano as well, on the ball, tight. So, if someone was out to lunch,
Keith, or Woody, or Mick Taylor, the band still functioned. "That was probably because Charlie and me were the
first ones to be married. The first ones to have kids. You finished the gig, you
went home to your family. You didn’t hang out in the clubs in London and
misbehave." I invite Wyman to be
immodest: asking whether his contribution to the group was undervalued. "If
you’re talking about financially, yes." He exercises a long-held complaint about
Jagger and Richards’ monopoly over writing credits. "It was a closed shop. You accepted it or you left. I
realised that if I wanted to do things creatively I had to do them outside the
band, so I did movie scores, blues bands, played in other people’s bands. That’s
the way it was. I didn’t want it to grow inside me and turn into a cancer, or
something that’s pessimistic. I just let it go. "We did that with managers. They screwed us. They owed
us millions. Bye bye. Forget that. Don’t let it bug you. Don’t let it turn you
into some sort of lunatic. Bypass it. Move on. The people that don’t, always get
sick. Mick Taylor gets so upset about not getting his credit that he ends up
being a junkie for 25 years. It achieved nothing, did it?" I ask Wyman what he thinks of Jagger. He issues a long,
diplomatic answer which grows progressively less warm. It starts with friendship
and is then scaled down. "He’s a very clever guy. He’s learned how to drain
information from other people’s brains. He’s brilliant at it. If he doesn’t know
something, he just has meetings with people and gets information from them. And
then he uses it very cleverly. He’s a very clever businessman. And he’s
obviously one of the best live performers, visually, there’s ever been.
"He’s someone I associate with and
am friendly with, but he’s not one of my best mates. I can’t get close to a
person like that. He’s not a friend like Charlie’s a friend. A month ago, in the
office, I got a package, a big cardboard box full of T-shirts, programmes,
posters, badges. There’s a little letter in there. ‘Dear Bill, I thought you’d
like this to add to your collection. Love, Charlie.’ In brackets: ‘Drummer of
the Rolling Stones’." Wyman
ponders Jagger again, remembering that when his father died, on the third day of
the Stones’ first visit to Japan. Charlie was first to offer his condolences,
Mick was second. "He’s always there where you need ’im. And that applies to
Keith as well. I’ve been at dinner and someone’s slagged off Charlie, saying
‘that f***in’ drummer of yours is a bit out of it’, and Keith’s jumped the table
and punched ’em in the face. This band defends each other. They’re all very
honourable, and loyal and faithful. That’s what I like about ’em.
"I went and scored drugs for Keith
in Toronto because he was dying on the floor. He was coughing up green phlegm.
And rolling in pain on the floor. Mick and Charlie had gone back to New York,
scared ’cause of all the cops around us - and me and Woody went out and scored
heroin for him. Now, I had never taken heroin in my life but there was a time
when it was necessary to get that guy out of that agony. So, you do it, don’t
you?"
Rolling With The
Stones is published by Dorling Kindersley
This article:
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/s2.cfm?id=1298272002
Last updated: 22-Nov-02 01:00 BST
