I’m amazed at how much Keith Richards and I are alike. The similarities are amazing. We’re just about the same age. We were both born in England, in December. We both love rock and roll. We both love The Rolling Stones. When we were kids we both spent time in the summer on beaches in Devonshire. We both used to smoke. Well, he still does. We were both boy scouts.
I’ve just finished reading Keith’s autobiography, “Life,” and the thing that sticks with me is just how similar we are. Oh, of course, there are differences. I don’t play guitar. I’m not rich and famous. When I talk I don’t sound like I’ve smoked fifty million cigarettes. I don’t own houses in England, Connecticut, Jamaica and the Turks and Caicos. I don’t get cards from Bill Clinton when I’m not well. I’ve never broken the base off a wineglass and held the jagged end of the stem to some guy’s throat. I’ve never been addicted to heroin. I didn’t hang out with John Lennon. I don’t know Paul McCartney. Or Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Everly Brothers, Scotty Moore, Eric Clapton, Willie Nelson, The Crickets, George Jones, Aretha Franklin, Merle Haggard, Tom Waits or Mick Jagger. I never spent some time together with Ronnie Bennett of the Ronnettes. Etta James was never my bride in a rock and roll “marriage.” I never met Terry Southern,Truman Capote, Andy Warhol or William S. Burroughs. Never played a show with Muddy Waters.
Keith has written or co-written some of the greatest rock and roll songs in the history of the genre, and I haven’t. He’s played a concert before an audience of a million people, and I haven’t. He, along with the other members of The Rolling Stones, has produced dozens of albums, four of which are considered by many, including me, to be masterpieces. I haven’t. And I think maybe he’s taller. But, apart from those differences, the similarities are amazing.
I’ve been a Stones fan for a long, long time. Here’s a recollection I wrote a while ago of the first time I heard The Rolling Stones:
In the early fall of 1964. I was nineteen years old and six months out of basic training. I sat in a bar called the Cafe Engel in Bamberg, Germany with a few of my buddies. We drank beer out of fliptops, those brown bottles with a wire bail and a ceramic cap with a rubber seal around it. Beer that was brewed and bottled right nearby and Sergeant Kennedy said you could taste the cow piss in it. I never thought I could taste that in it, but the beer was dark and malty and if you reached across the table and brought your bottle down on somebody else’s when he wasn’t looking and gave it a quick rap, the beer would foam up and run all over the table.
There was a jukebox there and people dancing and a girl named Monika who I’d danced with before came over to our table and held out her hand to me and said “Kom, tanz mit mir”. The guys all acted silly and somebody said “Yeah, Gun, go dance with her, I’ll watch your beer.” I took Monika’s hand and went out on the dance floor with her and we danced to a rock and roll version of “My Bonnie” by Tony Sheridan and the Beatles, and then what I think was a German rock and roll song called “My Baby Baby Balla Balla”, of which all I can remember is the title and the chorus which was, of course, “My baby baby balla balla”. About as annoying a song as I’d ever heard, but what the heck.
I had a pass and didn’t have to be back to the barracks until midnight and I was with my friends and Monika was cute and it was fun to dance with her and to try to talk with her because she didn’t speak English and although I became pretty comfortable in the German language after a couple of years there, I’d only been there six months and my German was pretty rudimentary.
The music stopped and the place seemed noisier than it was with the music playing. It was crowded. There was raucous laughter and loud voices. The clink of bottles. It was smoky and hot. And there was no music. Monika took my hand and pulled me over to the jukebox. I put a couple of coins in the slot and she held my hand and looked at the selection for a minute and then pushed some buttons. A series of guitar chords thundered out of the jukebox and the dance floor filled up again. The guitar chords repeated and then some guy started to sing. I liked it. I couldn’t hear what he was singing, whoever he was, but the music had everybody rocking. I picked up on the chorus; “Because I used to love her, but it’s all over now”, followed by jangling guitars, a heavy bass line and an irresistible drumbeat. “Because I used to love her, but it’s all over now”. I loved it. Who the heck is this? I thought. I leaned toward her as we danced. “Monika”, I said, “Wo ist das?” She looked puzzled. I pointed to the juke box and said again “Wo ist das?” then I realized I was probably saying “Where is that” instead of “who is that”. I was pointing to the jukebox and asking her “where is that?”
I shook my head and tried again “Wer? ist das?” This time she laughed, amused at my mistake. She pulled me toward her and said into my ear, speaking loudly to be heard over the music, “Der Rolling Stones.”
Der Rolling Stones. The Rolling Stones? I remembered seeing a picture of the Rolling Stones. Five sullen looking, long haired guys who all seemed to be in bad moods, standing on the steps of a building in London on a gloomy, overcast day. I had not been impressed. Now I was. The Rolling Stones.
Well, I’ve probably heard that song five thousand times since then. It’s been more than forty-five years. I bought my first Stones album in the PX there on the post in Bamberg. I think it was “12×5”. On the way back to the barracks I read the really silly liner notes by their manager, a guy named Andrew Loog Oldham, who had obviously just finished reading “A Clockwork Orange.” They almost made me wish I hadn’t bought it, but when I put it on the turntable, I was glad, and I listened to it over and over. When I got home in the summer of 1966, the second thing I did was buy “Aftermath”. I nearly wore it out and I bought another copy. I still have both of them.
I don’t know what became of Monika. The Cafe Engel is probably long gone. Brian Jones has been dead for over forty years. Mick Jagger said that he couldn’t imagine himself singing “Satisfaction” when he was forty years old, and he passed that mark many years ago. Mick Taylor came and went. Ronnie Wood left the Faces and joined up. Bill Wyman retired. But the Stones are still doing it. They’re not doing it with the same energy, or the same creativity, and I have to admit that I gave up buying their new albums a couple of releases back, but they’re still the Rolling Stones. Charlie Watts has aged with grace and dignity. Mick can often seem like a parody of himself. But, love him or hate him, admire him or dismiss him, rock and roll beats in Keith’s heart. And mine. Hey, brother, thanks for the music.