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| stonesmik |
An interview with Bill "That Ted" Wyman on the website of his publisher Dorling Kindersley at http://uk.dk.com/?11CS^home
Rolling With The Stones is your second book with Dorling Kindersley - they published your Blues Odyssey in 2001. What made you stay with DK for your second book?
I liked the first book, and I was very impressed so the reason we went with them was because we thought they could do that kind of a job. But I was still (I think) really impressed by the finished product, it always comes out a little bit better than you anticipate. It's like a record, when you make a record and you mix it and it sounds good and then it's mastered and you hear the mastering when it's all been heightened and all that and it sounds better still - it's the same thing with a book. So I agreed to do it with them because I wanted the same sort of quality and involvement.
Many objects from your own extensive collection of Stones memorabilia were photographed for the book - can you tell us a bit about your collection?
Well it is rather a unique collection so, I don't know anybody in the 60's in any band that ever kept hardly anything really, and there's many stories of me talking with The Beatles and suddenly discovering that they had nothing, and then I was giving them stuff. I gave Paul and Ringo videos of their shows in America, their first shows, and the ads for the shows and all that kind of stuff, yeah, because they had nothing. And they were shocked that I had them. I had Shea Stadium, I had the first Washington show when Ringo had to turn his drums round with the crowd going nuts and the whole band stopped, just about to play and they stopped and had to run round and help Ringo turn his drums round cos he was facing in the wrong direction! In a circular stage in the middle of the auditorium. So and then I suddenly realised that other people didn't keep things, and people always made fun of me keeping things and asking for a programme or a poster or a ticket stub or something, they were always 'what are you doing that for?'. Well now they know. I only did it to start with for my son who was 8 months old when I joined the band and I thought I'd keep a few artefacts, as you would, like if you were at school and you won a medal or a little cup for sport or something or being tennis champion, you keep it on your mantelpiece and when your kids grow up you say, 'I won that when I was 17 at school.' So I kept these just to say I'd been in a band for 10 minutes you know, we were on television twice, made a record, no-one saw how far you would go with this thing�.
Your personal collection of Stones memorabilia is now vast - have you been collecting ever since the 60's?
Well once I'd started I thought 'why stop?!' So it became a little scrap book which was about that big, it was like a little photo thing with about 30 pages in it, and then I bought one of the bigger ones and then I bought another bigger one , and then I bought 6 and suddenly I had 13 of these albums with and clippings and everything, and I didn't have time to keep up with it so I just used to put them in a cardboard box. And then it became 2 cardboard boxes and then it became a trunk (which I'd bought on tour or something) and then I bought another trunk, and then it became 30 trunks and then it became an attic, and then it became 3 attics and then it became a barn, and it just goes on, you know, because it just gets bigger and bigger. And that's why I opened that restaurant just to get some of it out of my attic, to put up on the walls. When Sotheby's came to value it in the 1980's I said 'you've got to give me a valuation of it in case it burns down, and I've got to insure it '. And they said 'there's no price, we can't give you a price on it because it's irreplaceable' so if you can't replace it, what's it worth? It's worth whatever anybody that's a collector would pay for it. It's like a unique house or something: if there's only one of them you can't value it.
Tell us about your early years - did you always want to be in a band? You have mentioned how seeing a jazz band for the first time deeply affected you�
Just after the War in 46 or something - yeah, I was 9. And this jazz band were doing Jitterbug (which was an early form of Jiving) which came out with Rock n' Roll Bill Haley. But before that was Jitterbug to dance bands and I just thought, 'god I'd love to be in a band.' But in those days bands were very competent musicians, not like today, and to be in a dance band, just an average dance band, Sid Phillips band or something like that, (who is the father of Simon Phillips the drummer), you had to be a great clarinettist or a great trumpet or a great drummer or a great bass player and you had to have gone to school and learned music and all that. So the only way I could get into a band in those days, this is before rock n' roll or anything, and skiffle, was to learn an instrument properly so I did do piano lessons as a child and I did do some clarinet lessons at school, but I didn't like that, I didn't like that in the mouth bit, you know, and I didn't like carrying round that little bloody thing to school and back, all that 'ooh, whatcha got there?' you know, 'cause I came from a slum area, so I didn't like walking, kids don't like taking violins things to school!
What happened when you joined the Stones?
Well Brian had started it and advertised and Ian Stewart was the first person to answer his ad so it was Brian and Ian Stewart, and then a bunch of different people like Brian Knight and people like that who were offshoots from Alexis Korner (they were like the second group of people, they'd all kind of played on bits and pieces together and gone and tried to form different bands), and then Mick came along one time and he brought Keith after a few rehearsals, and that was the basis of it. But it was Brian's band and he named it (and he chose what sort of direction it would go in and the music, what they played), and then I joined in. Oh, my drummer joined them in the Autumn of 62, (my drummer from my band in South London) and then he invited me, he said 'their bass player's left' (that was Dick Taylor, who was from Dartford of course, well he was actually from Blackheath but they were in the same school in Dartford.) He decided to go back and study because there was no money in it and they weren't getting anywhere, and my drummer said 'the bass player's left, you know they ain't got a bass player' so I listened to some stuff they were doing which was mostly Jimmy Reed, twelve bars, but it was great so I went and well it worked out within a few rehearsals, they weren't sure about me the first night because I was a bit of a Ted you know!
Tell us about your first American tour when Andrew Oldham was your manager - what happened?
Our first time in America wasn't a very good tour because they didn't know us because we hadn't had a hit record. The only band that ever went there without a hit record, were the Stones! Our record was at 98 in the charts when we went so no-one knew us, so people just didn't come to our shows - we'd be in a 10,000 stadium and there'd be 300 people there. And we wanted some publicity obviously, so what did Andrew (Loog Oldham, their manager) do in Chicago when we were recording at Chess Studios where Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, Little Water, all those people recorded, what did he do? He organised a press conference on a traffic island in the middle of the main street! That's like organising a press conference for a band now in the centre of Oxford Circus, sitting with all the cameras and all that in the middle of Oxford Circus with the traffic going by, was the same kind of thing, and what happened was (of course), all traffic stopped. Michigan Avenue - traffic stopped both ways out of curiosity and people running across the street, fans and all that, and the police came and sort of ushered us off, as they did with The Beatles when they played on the top of the building, same thing, they ushered us off. So it hit all the papers because it was right outside the Chicago Herald Tribune's office and the TV people came and all that and it was all like, we got rid of them, the police told them to go, but that was the whole reason for doing it�.
The band must have really put the hours in to become so successful so quickly. Were you working very hard during those first few years?
Yeah we had been, we had our first record a year earlier in England and in that year, '63, out of 365 days we probably worked all but about 10 days of that year. A lot of those days were morning: up to town photo shoot for girlie magazines - Mirabelle, Rave, Valentine, Fabulous (or whatever it was), Boyfriend -, yeah, all those girlie magazines and all that which they had in the States, you know they had the same sort of thing, Sixteen magazine and all that, but we didn't know about that. That was morning, and then to the office, received your little cheque for the week if there was one, discussed whatever it was, and then in the afternoon you went off to the recording studio and you cut two tracks for the next album in three hours or three tracks or four (or whatever it was), spent the afternoon there and then in the evening you went off to Watford or Southend and did two shows. And then you came back from that and you were knackered, you know, and you'd get home at one in the morning and then the next day, once again you'd be off into town and you'd go and cut Saturday Club. For the Saturday you'd do the recording, live recording of five or six songs for the Saturday, �36, no - �32, between us for that, whole afternoon's work, you'd end up with a fiver in your pocket if you were lucky, for six completely fresh recorded tracks. And then in the afternoon again probably another photo shoot or another studio thing doing something for somebody else like Cleo or one of those Andrew's things, and then you'd be off to do two more shows in the evening and it went on like that the whole year - it was just non stop. And when I look at what happens these days when people go out and do an eight gig tour and after the third show they can't make it anymore, they're 'exhausted' or something. It's just bizarre because we were doing that for probably three years solid, and so were The Beatles�
Can you tell us a bit about Brian Jones and the contribution he made to the band?
He was a very sensitive person, he was really sensitive so he took everything to heart, even if you said 'you hair don't look very clean today' I mean he'd take it to heart, and mope and worry about it all day long. I know his use of a multitude of instruments through from 65 onwards was fantastic and everybody would say so - Mick and Keith would say it, Andrew said it and everyone would say it. You know his colouring is on every track you know: like Ruby Tuesday and all those things, playing dulcimer - he's playing a whole assortment of instruments, little flute things. He could pick up any instrument and get something out of just create something special just for that particular song, a little riff or something like The Last Time - ding ding doodle ing doodle ing - that's Brian, you know, it made the whole thing, just rolled it along. And that's when all the viewers said "sounds a bit country to me" because they hadn't heard that kind of a riff. Oh no, he was highly talented as a musician but he just let it all slide, as a lot of talented people do. There's been people in art like it, there's been people in classical music, it just goes right the way through, they were their own worst enemies and he was a bit like that. So, very sad and very hard to replace, in fact you can't replace them really because they're unique and you have to find someone else who will come in and take their place in a different way.
Moving through to the 70's, can you tell us about when Ronnie Wood came in to replace Mick Taylor?
Well Mick was upset that he couldn't be more involved in the songwriting and he kind of called our bluff, he kind of said 'if I can't be involved more I'm leaving' and instead of them saying 'oh don't leave' you know, they went 'ok' and that was it, he was gone. So it was replacement time and myself and Ian Stewart had recommended Peter Frampton as a possible and there were various other people: Rory Gallagher came to rehearsals, Jeff Beck. Jeff Beck didn't like the band cos most of the songs were 12 bars, funnily enough, which reflected on what I was saying in 1962, Rory hung around for a while, Harvey Mandell from Canned Heat had joined by then but he was into too many effects pedals and stuff. There were a few other people that were quite good, but Woody just kind of fell into place really, and it took him a while to make his mind up cos he was doing very well with The Faces and Rod Stewart by then, so it was a hard move for him to go from them to us, but he did it in the end, early 70, no late 74, and he was a bit of a like a Keith clone in a way. Without being insulting, but Rod was kind of like a Woody clone wasn't he?! Rod always did his hair like Woody and sort of acted in the same kind of way so, but Woody fitted in quite well, he was a nice middle bit between Keith and Mick and Charlie and me, the link, the bridge (or whatever you might call it), the catalyst which made the whole thing pull together better, after it had got a bit fragmented.
You did some big tours during the 80's - tell us about those�
Well there were huge gaps in 81 and 82 - there was America and the whole of Europe: two huge tours, the biggest that had ever been by any band, as each one always was from the 72 onwards really. No-one had ever done a tour in America in 82, and a tour of England and played to almost 6 million people, and I don't know how many gigs, not many, it was huge, huge massive stuff. And then 83 to 89 we didn't do one show really, we didn't do one tour. We did the odd show yeah, Ian Stewart's memorial and things like that but we didn't tour for 7 years. Now for any band to stop touring, I mean Elvis suffered from going in the army for 2 years, didn't he? When he came out he wasn't the same guy and he went into doing terrible films and things, and wasn't quite the Elvis that we all liked, you know the Sun thing, you know all the great songs, he started to do ballads - 'I did it my way' and all those terrible things - it could have happened to the Stones as well. It was like there was 7 years of nothing, and then in 89, and so everybody went onto doing solo stuff, I'd already done solo stuff in the 70's when it was a bit empty of work in a way for 6 months here and 6 months there�
Your first book about the Stones was entitled Stone Alone - how is Rolling With The Stones going to be different?
Well Stone Alone is a book of day to day happenings within the band in the 60's and the childhood's, with a few pictures in the middle. This book is a book of enormous quantities of visual work; you know -pictures and memorabilia, with a much smaller content in the written word. So it's so much more visual and it will be displayed in a different way. When you open it you can open it and shut it, like with the Blues book I did. It's the same style, cos I think it's perfect for this company (Dorling Kindersley). Because that's what they do best.
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