Lesser Known Lore of The Rolling Stones - Part I
True Stories of the World's Greatest Rock N' Roll Band
Sunday, July 21st, the Rolling Stones will perform the final concert of their Hackney Diamonds ‘24 North American tour. For over six decades they’ve explored uncharted musical territory, as the only active Rock band with a career spanning sixty-two years since their stage debut as “The Rollin’ Stones” at the Marquee Club in London, on Thursday, July 12th, 1962.
Best estimates say they’ve performed more than two thousand concerts around the planet since then to millions of adoring fans of many generations. The revenue generated by their music, merchandise and concerts is astronomical to comprehend. Keith Richards once summarized, “You’ve got the sun, you’ve got the moon, and you’ve got the Rolling Stones.”
Original member Brian Jones named the band after Muddy Waters’ 1950 blues single “Rollin’ Stone”. Jones shockingly drowned in his swimming pool at the estate where Winnie The Pooh was born sometime between July 2nd and 3rd, 1969. Through the years many have speculated he was killed by a disgruntled construction worker living on the property, an idea both credited and confused by a public confession and retraction. It was most likely drunken horseplay that went very tragically wrong.
Bassist Bill Wyman quit the group in 1993, saying he didn’t feel like flying around the world to tour anymore. He joined the band on stage in London for two songs on two dates in November 2012 as part of their fiftieth anniversary tour, and contributed bass to the song “Live By The Sword” on their latest album, 2023’s Hackney Diamonds.
Charlie Watts was the iconic drummer who would really rather be playing jazz yet dedicated his life to keeping the beat for the Stones until passing in August of 2021. His ultra-nonchalant, gentlemanly demeanor made him universally beloved by fans. Watts was the true heart and soul of the band and one of the greatest drummers of all time.
Since the early 1970’s vapid critics and shallow naysayers have asked the Stones when they will quit and retire, as they were obviously too old to keep playing Rock N’ Roll music well into their thirties. Next week on July 26 Mick Jagger will celebrate his eighty-first birthday. Keith Richards will turn eighty-one in December and Ronnie Wood turned seventy-seven in June. In the past eighteen years the three have collectively survived cancer, heart valve replacement and neurosurgery after falling out of a seven-foot tall coconut tree in Fiji.
Prior to the current Hackney Diamonds run, their No Filter Tour from 2017 - 2021 grossed (adjusted for 2023 dollars) over $614 million across fifty-eight shows. From 2005 - 2007 the Bigger Bang Tour grossed over $820 million over one-hundred and forty-four shows. On March 25th, 2016 the Stones played a free show in Cuba for an estimated crowd of over a million people, later released as the concert film Havana Moon.
Through tragedy, loss, divorce, addiction, arrest, division, car crashes, crowd riots and near-death experiences, the Glimmer Twins aka Jagger/Richards continue to persist and insist on playing Rock N’ Roll. In celebration of their monumental achievements and exceptional contributions to popular music, 1000% Magazine is proud to present ten lesser-known true stories of the London band over two special issues.
PART I:
Jumpin’ Jack Flash Was A Real Person
Keith Is Highly Flammable
Ronnie Heard Taylor Tell Jagger ‘I Quit’
David Bowie Knows It’s Only Rock N’ Roll
Charlie Pretends To Drive
PART II:
The Very Not-Great Guitar Robbery
Bill Wyman Made The Best Solo Stones Single
Hell’s Angels Jagger Murder Plot Sinks
Mick Did Not Vibe With Gram Parsons
The Blind Angel Saves Keith
1. JUMPIN’ JACK FLASH WAS A REAL PERSON
In a catalog brimming with powerful songs, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” towers as one of the very best. It marks a turning point toward a golden period for the Stones after the lukewarm, befuddled reception to their Beatles-imitating 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request and the acid-soaked confusion of the psychedelic era, which in retrospect didn’t seem to suit the band as well as it did fit some of their contemporaries.
Statistics prove it’s dominance in the Stones live repertoire, showing it’s longtime status as the most played song of all their concerts, approximately over twelve-hundred times. Stones super fan documentarian Flipside CT produced a two-hour and twenty minute feature The Making of Jumpin Jack Flash that is incredibly detailed, fascinating and highly recommended watching for fans of this standout non-album single.
Some of the lyrics feel biblical in grandeur and others make direct references to events in the band members lives, such as the opener “I was born in a crossfire hurricane” alluding to Keith’s childhood neighborhood of Dartford being relentlessly bombed by the Germans during WWII.
Where does the enigmatic title character come from? Keith explains in his 2010 best-selling memoir Life, page 240;
“But if someone said, “You can play only one of your riffs ever again,” I’d say, “OK, give me ‘Flash.” I love “Satisfaction” dearly and everything, but those chords are pretty much a de rigueur course as far as songwriting goes. But “Flash” is particularly interesting. “It’s alllllll right now.” It’s almost Arabic or very old, archaic, classical, the chord setups you could only hear in Gregorian chants or something like that. And it’s that weird mixture of your actual rock and roll and at the same time this weird echo of very, very ancient music that you don’t even know. It’s much older than I am, and that’s unbelievable! It’s like a recall of something, and I don’t know where it came from.
But I know where the lyrics come from. They came from a gray dawn at Redlands. Mick and I had been up all night, it was raining outside and there was the sound of these heavy stomping rubber boots near the window, belonging to my gardener, Jack Dyer, a real country man from Sussex. It woke Mick up. He said, “What’s that?” I said, “Oh, that’s Jack. That’s Jumping Jack.” I started to work around the phrase on the guitar, which was in open tuning, singing the phrase “Jumping Jack.” Mick said, “Flash,” and suddenly we had this phrase with a great rhythm and ring to it. So we got to work on it and wrote it.”
2. KEITH IS HIGHLY FLAMMABLE
As we all know from the film Wayne’s World 2, Keith Richards cannot be killed by conventional weapons.
While Keith looks forward to his eighty-first birthday in five months, the world continues to ponder all the other things that can’t kill Keith Richards, but do take out an awful lot of other people, like bursting into flames.
If you believe in a force in the Universe many humans call some variation of ‘God’, whatever that force is definitely loves the music of the Rolling Stones. It has cradled and protected the main guitar player from the jaws of Death more times than have been reported to the general public. So consider these incidents with caution and pray to whatever God that Keith prays to, probably Music.
IT’S LIKE A SAUNA IN HERE - THE PLAYBOY MANSION, CHICAGO 1972
Keith reminisces in Life, page 328:
“So Hugh Hefner thought it would be a laugh to invite some of us to stay in the Playboy Mansion. I think he regretted it… He threw the place open for the Stones and we were there for over a week.
Hefner had been shot at just before our visit and the place resembled the state house of some Caribbean dictatorship, with heavily armed security everywhere. But Bobby (Keys) and I avoided that, and the tourists who had come to watch us playing in the Playboy Mansion, and retreated into our own entertainment…
I felt the script had been written, play it to the hilt. Bobby and I played it a little too far when we set fire to the bathroom. Well, we didn’t, the dope did. Not our fault. Bobby and I were just sitting in the john, comfortable, nice john, sitting on the floor, and we’ve got the doc’s bag (the Stones had a fully licensed physician onboard as part of the 1972 tour entourage) and we’re just smorgasbording. “I wonder what these do?” Bong. And at a certain point… talk about hazy, or foggy, Bobby says, “It’s smoky in here.” And I’m looking at Bobby and can’t see him. And the drapes are smoldering away; everything was just about to go off big-time. To the point where I can’t see him, he’s disappeared in this fog. “Yes, I guess it is a bit smoky in here.” It was a really delayed reaction. And then suddenly a flurry at the door and the fire alarms start going, beep beep beep. “What’s that noise, Bob?” “I don’t know. Should we open the window?” Someone shouts through the door, “Are you all right?” “Oh yeah, we’re f*cking great, man.” So he just turns away, and we don’t know exactly what to do. Maybe if we’re quiet and walk out and we pay for the reconstruction? And then a little later there was a thumping on the door, waiters and guys in black suits bringing buckets of water. They get the door open and we’re sitting on the floor, our pupils very pinned. I said, “We could have done that ourselves. How dare you burst in on our private affair?” Hugh decamped soon after that and moved to LA.”
From Hugh Hefner’s personal diary, entry dated June 28th, 1972:
“For your information, the following is a list of damage that resulted from the visit of the Rolling Stones: The White rug in the Red and Blue Room bathroom was burnt and needed to be replaced; the toilet seat was also burnt and had to be replaced; two bath mats and four towels were also burnt; Red Room chair and couch are stained, possibly to the point of needing reupholstering; Red Room bedspread is badly stained. We are hoping it will come out in cleaning.”
RING ROOM SERVICE FOR THE FIRE BRIGADE - THE LONDONDERRY HOUSE HOTEL, LONDON 1973
This unintentional hotel destruction was covered in all the newspapers of the time and in Chris Salewicz’s 2002 book Mick & Keith, page 227:
“…in London, on 24 October 1973, Keith pleaded guilty to possession at 3 Cheyne Walk of cannabis, heroin and Mandrax, as well as a revolver, a shotgun and ammunition. The defense rested on the grounds that Keith was hardly ever in London, and that a large number of individuals passed through the Chelsea house. Although Keith was technically guilty, as the contraband items had been found in his home, anyone could have left them there…
Keith was fined a total of £205; Anita received a one-year conditional discharge on charges related to the Mandrax. At a celebratory party afterwards at the Londonderry Hotel on Park Lane, Keith jacked up and then nodded out, setting a bed on fire with his burning cigarette. Several children were playing in the room where the fire started, though no one was hurt. Keith, born under the fire sign of Sagittarius, had begun to attribute the seemingly endless succession of blazes that burned after him like a bushfire to spontaneous combustion; all the same, the Londonderry announced that it would no longer accept bookings from the Rolling Stones, for whom it had been the London hotel of choice since 1969.”
GOODBYE SHELTER - REDLANDS, SUSSEX 1973
Stones confidant, sometimes henchman, sometimes unreliable narrator “Spanish” Tony Sanchez was there for this five-alarm blaze and wrote about it in 1979’s scandalous Up And Down With The Rolling Stones, page 281:
“While Keith and Anita were waiting for the cottage at the Wick to be made ready, they decided to stay at Redlands for a few weeks. But even there there was to be no peace. On July 31 they were in the main house while I was living in an adjoining property called the Fifth, which Keith had bought. Suddenly I saw smoke billowing in the air from the thatched roof of Redlands and heard the clank of fire engines as they sped up the narrow country lane to the house. I ran over and saw Keith and Anita frantically dragging their possessions our of the blazing house. I dived into the garage to drive Keith’s Ferrari and my Alfa out of danger, then helped Keith carry out his six-hundred-year-old refectory table and his set of Charles II chairs. When it was over, Keith and Anita moved into the Fifth, filled in their insurance claim and engaged an architect to rebuild the house so that it would be even bigger and better than before.”
NUDE RESCUE - LAUREL CANYON 1978
Keith flinches and still finds humor at this frightening escape in Life, page 412:
“I took Lil on tour with me, where she was my accomplice in another of my fate-cheating close shaves - the list now too long to be taken lightly. This time it was from fire in our rented house in Laurel Canyon, LA. Lil and I had gone to bed, and Lil, so she said later, heard this distant bang and got up and opened the curtain a little and it was strangely bright outside. Not right. She opened the bathroom door and fire exploded into the room. And we had a few seconds to jump out of the window. I’m dressed in a short t-shirt only and Lil is naked. And we’re exposed - people are gathered, freaking out, trying to put the fire out - and this is a big story as soon as the press gets here. Up pulls a car and we get in gratefully. Amazingly, it’s a cousin of Anita! We are in a state of shock. We go to her house, borrow some clothes, go to a hotel. The next day someone went round to have a look and there was a large sign stuck in the blackened grass that read, “Thanks a lot, Keith.”
3. RONNIE HEARD TAYLOR TELL JAGGER ‘I QUIT’
By 1969 Brian Jones mental and physical health had crumbled to such a sad extent that he could barely muster the effort to play anything in the studio, much less go on a rigorous tour of America, which was priority number one for the band after getting their groove back on Beggar’s Banquet and building the soon-to-be classic Let It Bleed.
Mick Taylor won the coveted role of new guitarist in the Stones and quickly went on to add a virtuoso level brilliance of lead playing to the band, elevating the sound both on record and on stage to places it had never been before. You can hear his early work in action all over the live album from the ‘69 tour, Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out. In his review for Rolling Stone magazine, legendary Rock journalist Lester Bangs proclaimed “I have no doubt that it's the best rock concert ever put on record.”
Things got even better on Sticky Fingers (1971), Exile On Main Street (1972), the underrated Goat’s Head Soup (1973) and It’s Only Rock N’ Roll (1974), as Mick Taylor’s confidence grew and he crafted some of the best lead guitar parts ever heard for the Stones. Reference his soaring melodies on “Time Waits For No One” starting around the three-and-a-half minute mark.
Despite the sonic magic they made together, life as a Rolling Stone was taking a serious toll on Taylor in the later months of 1974. Since joining as a health-conscious and strict vegetarian that rarely if ever even smoked he had been dragged into the undertow of heroin addiction. The bigger bone to pick was that Jagger had promised to give Taylor his proper songwriting credits for “Till The Next Goodbye” and “Time Waits For No One”, from the album It’s Only Rock N’ Roll. He recounted this to British journalist Nick Kent, who had recently seen the finished artwork and confirmed Taylor’s omission, as the credits were solely listed as “Jagger/Richards” across the sleeve. Combined with the same slight for several key tracks on Sticky Fingers, for Taylor this was the last straw.
Oddly enough, if you happened to be at this particular swanky party in 1974, in one room you would have seen sitting together in a row (1) the current Stones guitarist (Taylor), (2) the Stones singer (Jagger) and (3) the mercurial man who would soon become the next Stones guitar slinger.
Wood recalls in his 2007 memoir Ronnie, page 109:
“I was still close to Robert Stigwood, at least as close as you could get to him, and loved going to his big country house in Berkshire because he threw wonderful parties. One night, late in 1974, I found myself at his place, sitting in between the two Micks, Jagger and Taylor, when MT leant over and told MJ, ‘I’m leaving the group.’
That’s always been a sort of a cliché among musicians, because we are always saying it to each other, so when Taylor said it to Jagger I just laughed. But Taylor looked at me and said, ‘I’m serious,’ and just like that, he got up and left the party…
So Jagger looked at me and said, ‘I think he is serious.’
I replied, ‘Sounds like it.’
Mick thought about that for a few moments and mumbled, ‘What am I going to do? Will you join?’
I answered, ‘Of course I would, except I’m with the Faces and I can’t let them down. I don’t want to split them up.’
He said, ‘I don’t want to split up the Faces either, but if I get desperate can I ring you?’
I said, sure, and we left it like that. We even shook hands on it.”
4. BOWIE KNOWS IT’S ONLY ROCK N ROLL
If “Satisfaction” was the first Stones anthem, “It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll” was their defiant follow-up mission statement.
The song is mostly credited to Jagger, who at the time was married to Bianca. Bianca was very focused on and infatuated with high-society and being part of the international jet-set. No doubt this aspect of her personality set her apart from the crowd and initially appealed to Jagger. There was a sense that Bianca had a certain disdain and thinly veiled distaste for the Rock musician lifestyle, and privately attempted to persuade Mick he should leave it all behind to evolve into life as a politician or diplomat. The thinking goes that this domestic disharmony led to Mick’s lightning bolt of inspiration that became the chorus / hook and title of the song and corresponding album.
Just the phonetics of the name Ronnie Wood evoke a bouncy playfulness, like you’re at a fun party. It’s a universal given by now that Ronnie has always been a generous host and entertaining guest - he is a Party - so one can easily picture him having all his musician friends over to jam and hang and laugh, pretty much all the time, which is exactly what he was doing toward the mid-1970’s at his own private studio behind a Leeds-adjacent Richmond Hill mansion called The Wick.
Everyone and anyone who was anyone in British Rock passed through The Wick’s studio. At least one of those late nights into early mornings featured - from Dartford, Mick Jagger! From Hillingdon, West London, Ronnie Wood and from Brixton, David Bowie.
Excerpted from Ronnie, pages 96 - 99:
“In 1971, the most beautiful house in the world came up for sale - the Wick, in Richmond Hill, which was built in 1775, had twenty rooms, a beautiful view of the bend in the Thames, and belonged to the actor Sir John Mills.
Like most purchases of mine, I went way beyond my means. I was a young man buying one of London’s most beautiful properties… I now owned the most beautiful house in the world and the most beautiful snooker table in the world.
My first major project there was to spend £25,000 building a music studio down in the basement so that I could make a solo album. I put in state-of-the-art equipment incorporating a Neve desk, Studer and Revox tape recorders, a Three M8 track machine with interchangeable four-track heads and another sixteen-track machine. From the first day the studio was ready, the house was throbbing with friends twenty-four hours a day, all coming around to play music… We’d fall asleep on the studio floor and wake up to find a room full of musicians who hadn’t been there when we crashed. Greg Allman, Paul McCartney, Keith Richards and Ringo. We’d play music until we couldn’t play any more, go to the pub for a couple of days, then come back to the studio.
When I was writing “I Can Feel The Fire”, Mick (Jagger) gave me a hand on the song. I then helped him out on “It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll”… The session came together with odds and ends, but we got the basic track cut. We recorded in my studio at the Wick, with Mick doing the vocals and both of us on guitar, Willie Weeks on bass and Kenney Jones on drums. David Bowie and I did backup vocals. We’re the guys singing, “I like it, I like it”. Mick then got the Stones to overdub on it. Charlie even kept Kenney’s drums for that set. He said he wouldn’t have done it any other way.”
Keith recalled how struck by the song he was in Life, page 369:
“There was an extraordinary flow of players and talent concentrated in that time and place, gathered around Woody’s record. George Harrison walked in one night. Rod Stewart would pop in occasionally. Mick came and sang on the record, and Mick Taylor played. After not hanging about much on the London rock-and-roll scene for a couple of years, it was nice to see everybody and not have to move. They’d come to you. There was always jamming. Ronnie and I hit it off straight-away, day in, day out, we had a load of good laughs. He said, I’m running short of songs, so I knocked up a couple of songs for him, “Sure the One You Need” and “We Got to Get Our Shit Together.”
That’s where I first heard “It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll,” in Ronnie’s studio. It’s Mick’s song and he’d cut it with Bowie as a dub. Mick had gotten this idea and they started to rock on it. It was damn good. Shit, Mick, what are you doing it with Bowie for? Come on, we’ve got to steal that m*th*rf*ck*r back. And we did, without too much difficulty. Just the title by itself was so beautifully simple, even if it hadn’t been a great song in its own right. I mean, come on. “It’s only rock and roll but I like it.”
Here’s the demo version with Bowie on vocals:
5. CHARLIE PRETENDS TO DRIVE
Charlie Watts was one in a billion. The Glimmer Twins demand most of the attention, which suited Charlie just fine. Any Stones aficionado will tell you that Watts was a remarkably charming eccentric with an endless supply of deadpan one-liners and profound humor.
One of the best exchanges of any Stones interview ever took place in 1986, when BBC journalist David Hepworth spoke to Charlie during a music video shoot.
Hepworth: “You must have done a great deal of hanging about in twenty-five years with the Rolling Stones.”
Watts: “Mm. Work five years and twenty years hanging around.”
Charlie loved being at home with his wife Shirley and daughter Seraphina in North Devon, where the Watts estate held an Arabian horse farm and an extensive collection of outrageously expensive luxury cars in pristine condition. Watts never had any motivation to get a license, so he never drove any of them anywhere. He had much more fun getting dressed to the nines in tailored suits and sitting behind the wheel with the engines running, going nowhere fast.
Ronnie describes this sedentary habit in Ronnie, page 96:
“Charlie doesn’t drive. He never got a license because he suffers from some sort of bizarre fear of engines, but that hasn’t stopped him from buying cars. He once bought a 1936 Alfa Romeo simply because he loved looking at the dashboard. Charlie also owns a really beautiful burgundy Lagonda. Recently he commissioned a scale model of it from my brother-in-law Vinnie. But when he first bought the Lagonda he also bought himself a burgundy suit to match, so that he could wear it when he sat behind the wheel in his drive, engine ticking over, going nowhere.”
Charlie admitted the same in a 2018 interview with NME:
NME: “You’ve been married for 54 years – that’s rare for a rockstar. What’s your secret?”
Watts: “Because I’m not really a rockstar. I don’t have all the trappings of that. Having said that, I do have four vintage cars and can’t drive the bloody things. I’ve never been interested in doing interviews or being seen. I love it and I do interviews because I want people to come and see the band. The Rolling Stones exist because people come to the shows.”
*STAY TUNED FOR PART II…
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