| 27th August 2007 05:25 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Wood and it be good
Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll? Just add 'art' to the mix and you have a picture of a great survivor who's still excited to be a Rolling Stone. As the band tour Britain, Ronnie Wood tells Carole Cadwalladr of his Gypsy heritage, battle with rehab - and his advice to Kate Moss
Sunday August 26, 2007
The Observer
Hugh Montgomery
By rights, Ronnie Wood should be dead. Half of his friends are - his one-time flatmate Jimi Hendrix, his ex-wife Krissy, the Who's Keith Moon, his old drinking partner Peter Cook. On an average day he'd get through 'eight pints of Guinness then on to the vodka, a couple of bottles of that. Then go on to the sambuca, a bottle of that.' He's been in and out of rehab six times, and he had his cocaine-ravaged septum replaced with a plastic one long before it became fashionable.
That he's not dead is perhaps his greatest feat, although he's performed a few others along the way: playing in a series of major bands in the Seventies; going from being a fan of the Rolling Stones to being a Rolling Stone; losing his fortune several times over and then making it again; and, after four decades of being Ronnie Wood, rock star and piss-up artist, he's now simply Ronnie Wood, rock star and artist.
Almost everywhere the Stones go, Ronnie's art show now goes too. And it's quite a thing to see in action. The day before the Rolling Stones play St Petersburg, Gallery D137 is hosting an exhibition of his work, and the cream of the city's cultural elite has turned up for the opening. The director of the Hermitage is in attendance, as is the curator of the Russian State Museum, plus various bona fide beard-wearing members of the Russian intelligentsia and some of the city's hipper young artists.
There's a tense hour-and-a-half wait until finally his fleet of Mercedes swings into view, and then a spontaneous round of applause. Earlier his manager, Donna, had cut short my interview with the words, 'Don't worry, you'll be able to chat to him at the party.' Ha! It's only when Ronnie arrives that I realise quite what a fob-off this is. With every step he takes, 60 people follow silently in his wake, simply staring.
But then he is quite a sight. One of the last great rock survivors, his face looks like it's weathered several centuries of wear and tear, although his hair - his crowning trademark mane - and skinny rock-boy jeans have remained basically unchanged since 1973. For the first 20 minutes, everyone in the gallery, the creme de la creme of St Petersburg, forms a circle around him and simply stands in silence, taking photos. It is a private view, but not really, it has to be said, of the paintings.
Ah, yes, the paintings. They're arranged around the gallery walls: acrylics of the Stones live onstage, etchings of his wife, Jo, a truly bizarre sketch of Mick Jagger dressed as Nelson holding a pair of maracas and a sword, and a few of his latest works: behind-the-scenes oils of dancers at the Royal Ballet.
They are, I have to say, a mixed bag. According to Wood: 'My very good friend Tracey Emin said to me, "Some I like and some I don't. Some are really good and some are horrible.'"
Which does just about sum it up. The ones of the Stones - which command the highest prices - are uniformly awful, while his most recent work of the Royal Ballet dancers is surprisingly graceful and delicate. It's probably safe to say that critical opinion is divided. Brian Sewell, the Evening Standard's acerbic reviewer, recently called him 'an accomplished and respectable painter'; but then again the editor of Modern Painters referred to the prices he commands as showing 'what a sad state of affairs the world of art is'.
There's no point being cynical about any of this, though, or of accusing him of exploiting his celebrity for cash, because he's the first to admit this himself. He went to Ealing Art College in the Sixties and has dabbled ever since, but it was only when he got strapped for cash that he got serious.
'I never really lost it, the touch for it. But what I did was, I ignored it as a money-making thing. During the Eighties, when I was hurting for money, I thought, "Hang on a minute - I can paint." I was living in New York and I thought it would get the grocery money coming in, and it escalated from there.'
It's not exactly grocery money any more. He recently sold a painting to an American collector for £1m. According to Jamie, his stepson and financial Svengali, 'If he concentrated on the art he'd probably make more money out of it than he does out of the Stones.'
The art is why I'm here, but this raises a few problems interview-wise: namely that Wood, who's a natural raconteur and tale-teller, whose default mode when it comes to his addictions and vices is honesty, and who has lived more lives than most, is strangely unforthcoming on the subject, to the point of downright discomfort.
'My influences?' he says. 'Well, I range from my earlier influences at art school, really. Braque and Picasso, and on the other scale, you know, all your Caravaggios and Velazquezes. All the classic artists. You know, like, Rembrandt. And I like to take it my own way. Photographic representation and all that.'
It really doesn't get much better than this, although it's to his credit, really. He just likes to paint, but he's not one to dress it up it as anything else: 'I don't have enough of a track record.' He's quite aware that he makes good money from it because he's Ronnie Wood. He's a Stone, part of rock'n'roll's history. It's just a pity that his management don't see it quite like this. He comes to life when he talks about the good old days and his wife and his family, but then just as he's getting going, Donna steps in and afterwards complains to me that I was just asking 'the same old shit'.
Yes, but what shit. He first saw the Stones play in 1964 at the Richmond Jazz and Blues festival. 'And I thought, "That looks like a good job." I thought: "One day I'm going to be in that band." And then I went through from the Birds, the Creation, then the Jeff Beck Group, then the Faces with Rod [Stewart]. I'd bump into Mick [Jagger] or Charlie [Watts] at parties. We'd meet at these parties and when Mick Taylor left, Mick said, "What am I going to do? Would you join?" And I said, "No, I don't want to split the Faces up." And he said, "If I get desperate can I ring you?" And I said, "Yeah." And a year later, he rang and said, "I'm desperate." And the Faces happened to be splitting up. And that was it.'
Ronnie was, first and foremost, a fan. And even now he hasn't really lost that. Stepson Jamie tells me that he's still 'like a kid. He gets really over-excited when somebody's coming over the house. If Elton comes over. Or if Mick does.'
He still gets excited if Mick comes over? 'Yeah. He's jumping around all over the place.'
But then, having given up all his major vices, he mainlines espresso coffee, chain-smokes his cigarettes and bounces around Gallery D137 before the interview begins, rearranging pictures and trying rather unsuccessfully to mask his disappointment at the gallery space - a low-ceilinged cellar - to Danny, his art agent. 'In Paris, one of these pictures had a whole wall to itself,' he complains.
'It's very different here in Russia,' says Danny.
'Yeah? Well, maybe hang them all higher so that at least people will be able to see them better. It's not very big here, is it?' he says with just a touch of petulance.
'What do you think you'd be doing now if you hadn't joined the Stones,' I ask him later.
'I've always been in the hands of fate. I don't know what I'd be doing but I know that I'd be doing something great.'
He's not short of self-confidence but then why would you be, if you tour the world filling stadium after stadium? The Stones' A Bigger Bang tour has been on the road for almost two years now (it was interrupted midway through last year on account of Keith Richards falling out of a coconut tree in Fiji) and these days, wherever the Stones goes, his art comes too.
'When I started out they were like, "What you are doing? Are you sure? Just concentrate on the guitar." But they're very supportive now. Mick said he might even turn up tonight.'
Mick, he says, has got 'nicer' over the years. But, then, it's not like it was back in the olden days when the roadies laid out lines of coke and heroin on the amplifiers for the band to snort mid-set; or when the groupies in the front row would take off their tops and then follow them back to their hotels.
In 1971 Ronnie married Krissy Findlay, a model, and it's almost impossible to keep track of their romantic entanglements. She managed to have affairs with John Lennon and George Harrison while still married to him, and then ran off with Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page. Wood, on the other hand, was rumoured to have had an affair with Margaret Trudeau (something she has never confirmed), then still married to the Canadian Prime Minister, and George Harrison's wife, Pattie Boyd (who later married Eric Clapton).
The shenanigans stopped when he met his current wife, Jo, then a model, at a party. 'She told me that she worked at the broken biscuit counter at the main West End Woolies and I fell for it hook, line and sinker. I went and waited outside the entrance of Woolworths the next day and of course she never appeared.'
They've been together ever since and are one of rock'n'roll's most enduring marriages. I meet Jo later, at the party. She's the spit of Goldie Hawn and rolls her eyes when I tell her that Ronnie seems 'very well looked after'.
'He certainly is! Not that I ever get any thanks for it.'
'He sounded very appreciative.'
'Did he? He never says it to me.'
She's been with him on every tour since they met, picks out his clothes, and cooks him egg and beans on a travelling stove she sets up in their hotel room, having gone seriously organic a decade or so ago. 'It just means that wherever we are, we can have something simple but good.'
It's such a family affair, the Wood business empire. They've all turned up en masse in St Petersburg. Tyrone, the youngest, manages Scream, Ronnie's Mayfair art gallery; Jesse, his son by his first wife, looks after his musical archive; Leah has followed her father's footsteps into music and now art school; Jack Macdonald, her fiance, has been ghosting Ronnie's autobiography; and overseeing it all, 'or holding us all together' as Tyrone puts it, is Jamie, Jo's son by her first marriage. They all work in the same one-room office, and judging from Jack and Jodie, Jamie's wife, it seems that marry a Wood and you don't just gain a spouse, you become part of The Firm.
Until recently they all lived in the family mansion in Kingston, 'and now none of them has moved far away,' says Wood.
Jamie is the financial brains of the outfit, because, he says, 'Ronnie's absolutely hopeless with money. He doesn't have a clue. First, because he never spends any. And then every so often he'll go off on a spree and be really guilty because he'll spend £10,000 and he thinks that's a lot of money.'
In the Eighties, when Ronnie was still a waged guitarist with the Stones (it took him 17 years before he gained acceptance as a fully fledged member), the money simply ran out. When they didn't tour, he didn't get paid. He had to sell their house in LA, started painting, and clawed his way back. And then he had to do it all over again, a few years ago, when a string of investments went bad.
'That was rock bottom,' says Wood. 'I basically had to start all over again.' It seems to have worked though. The Sunday Times Rich List estimates his fortune at around £70m these days.
It all looks rosy now - manager Donna refers to the family as 'the Waltons of rock' - but it doesn't sound like that much fun when the children were growing up. In 1980, Ronnie and Jo were arrested on the Caribbean island of St Maarten, charged with possession of 200g of cocaine and jailed for five days. And Tyrone tells me that when he was 15 he was made to go on tour for a year 'and I hated it. I really didn't want to go. I didn't want to leave my girlfriend. And, of course, I didn't go to school, so I never did my GCSEs and I went straight into a job. Now I just love home. I love being home more than anything.'
Jamie, meanwhile, left home at 16 and discovered drugs ('It's why I'm good with money'), before straightening out and coming back to take control of the family's finances.
It was the alcohol more than anything, though, that spun out of control. In an interview a couple of years ago, Jo said: 'Socially everyone loved him. Ronnie was great. But when he got back home he was horrible.'
'There was a point when I was drinking,' he says, 'and it wasn't making any difference, except it was making me really depressed. Grumpy and grr... Fuck off! It was just not me. And my health. I didn't feel well. I had heartburn. I felt sick all the time.'
Is that when he went into rehab the first time? 'No, I was forced to go into rehab the first time. All my friends were like, "You've got a problem." And I was like, "No, I'm fine." So I didn't go in with the right attitude, and then I went in a few other times for me. And it's a gradual process. I have a life coach out with me on tour, a very nice guy from LA. He just prepares me for each day. I mean, here we are in the home of vodka and you know in the old days I would have tried every different brand.'
At one point he was given a year to live if he didn't clean up his act. Now he says he's just had a health check: 'Camera down the throat, camera up the bum, and it's all good.'
It's still hard, he says, playing sober on stage. 'Not having that stiffener to calm your nerves. Old habits die really hard. But it shows with my playing. I feel much more satisfied. But it takes a long while. I'm not going to beat myself up if I have to go back to rehab again. I'm just trying to take it one day at a time.'
Alcoholism is, he says, in his blood. It's quite a big thing with him, this idea of blood. His still-black hair is, he says, 'one of the blessings of being a Gypo'. And on the wall of the gallery there's a super-romanticised self-portrait of him as a boy being dandled on his father's knee, a Romany caravan behind and two narrowboats in front. He was actually brought up in a council house in Yiewsley, Middlesex, but 'my roots are on the water. All my family back to the 1700s were water Gypsies. My brothers and me, we were the first ones to be born on dry land. All the rest of them were born on barges in the canals.'
They were, he says, 'not the thieving Gypsy type. They were working Gypsies. My dad was transporting raw materials in the war. My dad was called Timber, and I was Young Timber. He played in a 24-piece harmonica band that toured the racetracks of England. And every weekend it was a good old booze-up. I was brought up with parties basically.'
He still likes his parties, even without the alcohol, although Keith, apparently, is still mourning the loss of his drinking partner. Ronnie is rock's versi on of Mr Congeniality: nobody has a bad word to say about him, and it's hard to escape the impression that so many bands wanted him, not just for his guitar-playing ability, but for his easy-going matey charm.
Even today he's a magnet to the next generation of party girls and boys who've fought their own battles with partying a bit too much. Tracey Emin, for one, and Kate Moss for another. According to the previous day's Sun, he's been dispensing 'love advice' to Kate Moss. 'Well, somebody had to,' he says. 'I'm just encouraging her. You know, saying, "Go on, girl, I'm glad that you've cleaned up your act, and got rid of him."'
Is that what you've been advising?
'Yeah, well he wasn't exactly very good for her, was he? She was saying, "How can I keep him away? Do you mind if I stay at your house?" And I was like, "Yeah, great. Take it. Take your daughter and nanny and as long as you need."'
I hadn't expected him to answer this. But ask him a straight question and you more or less get a straight answer. And the same with his family too, who are all chatty and friendly and down-to-earth.
But, then, Ronnie's style of rock god fame comes from a different age of celebrity. Or maybe it's just that, as Jamie says: 'You've got to remember that my mum's from Basildon and he's from Middlesex. They're very normal people.'
Jamie is of a different era, too. He 'loves money' he tells me, and his ambition is to make Ronnie 'the greatest artist of all time - get him into museums, the works'. But he also tells me he wanted to work with his family because 'I remember going into those Paki shops, you know? Where they all work together. And I thought I'd like us to be a Paki family.'
They're not terribly PC, the Waltons of rock, but they're certainly not stupid: as they disappear into the night in their fleet of Mercedes, off to the next Stones concert and the next art show, they know which side their bread is buttered on. And they really do know how to make a party just by walking into a room.
Donna has got it very wrong. Ronnie Wood's history is very far from being the 'same old shit'. And I defy anyone to believe that his paintings are his 'art' when it's actually his life.
Life story
Childhood
Born 1947, in Hillingdon, London. Made his musical debut aged nine, playing washboard in his brothers' skiffle band.
Family
One son by first wife, Krissy, and two children by Jo, a former model, whom he married in 1985. Jo's son Jamie from a previous marriage completes the extended family.
Music
Began playing guitar with the Birds in 1964, moving on to the Creation, the Jeff Beck Group and the Faces. Joined the Rolling Stones on their 1975 tour following Mick Taylor's departure, and has played with them ever since, as well as releasing several solo albums.
Art
Trained at Ealing Art College in the early Sixties. Started selling his paintings during the Eighties, when he ran out of money. His work was first brought to market in 1987 and now commands prices up to £1m.
Personal trouble
Has had a lengthy battle with alcoholism. In 1980, Ronnie and Jo were arrested in the Caribbean for possession of 200g of cocaine and jailed for five days, then deported.
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
| 27th August 2007 08:47 AM |
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| Mr Jurkka |
His just immortal. |
| 27th August 2007 10:27 AM |
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| MrPleasant |
"-Wood"
"-Yes?"
"-Nothing"
"-Fuck you"
"-Your mother". |
| 27th August 2007 04:35 PM |
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| fireontheplatter |
ron wood is great i think
he can play the guitar like nobodys business
and is a very very talanted artist.
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| 27th August 2007 04:42 PM |
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| Saint Sway |
his auto biography will be out in mid Nov.
I am told its great
inside reports are that its a fascinating read with hilarious and riveting tales during his pre-stones days. But he paints a very rosy picture of his time in the Stones. And doesnt dish any dirt on any of our boys. |
| 27th August 2007 04:44 PM |
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| Joey |
quote:
fireontheplatter wrote:
ron wood is great i think
he can play the guitar like nobodys business
and is a very very talanted artist.
Ronnie is covering Keith's Arse these days .. Go Figure !!!
" Hit Me Ronnie !! "
J. Snuggles |
| 27th August 2007 06:42 PM |
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| mojoman |
got? |
| 27th August 2007 09:47 PM |
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| Glimmer Twin |
I've grown to really love Ronnie. He can play guitar as well as anyone. |
| 28th August 2007 03:26 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Rolling Rolling Rolling Stones
August 28, 2007
The Sun
Victoria Newton
RONNIE WOOD has told me the ROLLING STONES have no plans to retire after a storming finish to their Bigger Bang tour.
The band were at London’s O2 Arena to close their epic two-year stint on the road — and it was the best of the shows I’ve been lucky enough to see.
I caught up with rocker Ronnie in his dressing room and he promises the band will be back on stage again before long — despite rumours this tour would be their last.
But Ronnie, who turned 60 in June, does plan to take a well-earned break during which he’ll get back to doing some more painting.
He said: “We need a rest but of course we will tour again. We’ll never stop!”
Glad to hear it.
Ron celebrated his 60th birthday in real style this weekend — with a giant guitar-shaped cake from The Sun.
And he was regaling me with tales about the impressive gipsy-themed party his beautiful wife Jo threw for him at their home in Kingston, Surrey, on Friday night.
His kids bought him a Romany caravan for his big day.
Ronnie said: “I may be off the booze but I was still the last one to bed. I’m still the most badly behaved out of everyone, I think.”
Guests at the bash — which featured gipsy music, dancers and magician Dynamo — included bandmate MICK JAGGER, snooker’s RONNIE O’SULLIVAN and movie beauty SIENNA MILLER.
Also there was the extended Stones clan, with the offspring of each member proving they can party just as hard as their famous dads.
But the one thing Ronnie didn’t have at the party was a big cake — so he was thrilled to accept one from me on behalf of Sun readers.
He said: “Wow, the cake is amazing. Thank you. It looks too good to eat.”
Drummer CHARLIE WATTS was equally impressed, saying: “Look at that, that’s amazing.”
Don’t worry Charlie, you can have a piece later.
Such is the politics of the Stones camp that I almost didn’t make it backstage at the O2 Arena over fears frontman Mick would get his tight knickers in a twist.
But I braved the frontline to make it back to Ronnie’s room, where I found him surrounded by family and friends.
I couldn’t resist adding a packet of fags to the top of the cake after all the fuss caused by Ronnie and Keef lighting up on stage at the O2 last week in defiance of the smoking ban.
I heard a rumour the band were hit with a £7,500 fine — although officially that has been denied.
When asked about it, Ronnie said: “The fags were there and I just fancied one.”
Let’s face it, it’s the most rock ’n’ roll thing the Stones have done for years so I don’t know why some aides for the band have been so worried about it.
I also hear the plush Savoy hotel made special arrangements for the Stones to enjoy a crafty fag indoors.
But if you’re booking 70 rooms for the after-tour party, then allowing the biggest band in the world a spot to smoke is a small price to pay.
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
| 28th August 2007 05:08 AM |
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| MrPleasant |
-shit |
| 28th August 2007 05:10 AM |
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| Jumacfly |
nice read TTM, thanks as usual  |
| 28th August 2007 05:40 AM |
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| F505 |
Long story about a lame guitarist. |
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