BACK IN THE ’80s, I wrote, co-produced, and voiced a syndicated radio feature called Rock Calendar. Its purpose was to highlight a specific rock ’n’ roll event that took place on every calendar day of the year (365 shows; 366 in leap years). Knowing that a number of those dates would involve the Rolling Stones, I set my sights on talking to the group member who would most enjoy the task of sifting through the band’s history. After a little research, by process of elimination, I knew that it wasn’t going to be Mick or Charlie, and for a whole set of different reasons, probably not Keith or Ron either. It became a no-brainer to choose Bill Wyman. He had even described himself as the group historian, so that is exactly where we began the conversation:
BILL WYMAN: Yeah, I am, because I’m the only one who really cares about it; no one else gives a damn, really. Charlie Watts gives his gold records away to his chauffeur or to the taxi driver who brings him to the airport; he doesn’t care about those things. So I’ve compiled this whole mass of stuff which I store in various places and refer to occasionally because it really pisses me off every time a book or article comes out the dates are wrong . . . the facts . . . everything’s wrong! And one of these days I’m going to put the record straight. [He did in his 1990 book Stone Alone.]
PETE FORNATALE: You had a solo hit in 1981—“(Si, Si) Je Suis un Rock Star”—tell me about that experience.
BILL WYMAN: It’s really exciting—it’s like the first time we as a group had a hit; everything feels new again. We all have our insecurities and doubts about whether we as individuals are as good alone as our position in a famous band implies we should be. We all feel this way—Mick, Keith, Charlie, Ron—so you always try to do something outside the band to build your confidence and assuage those doubts. I’d attempted that before with two solo albums, but they were done much more for the fun of it, and to learn a bit about producing and arranging.
PETE FORNATALE: Both of which got a lukewarm reception.
BILL WYMAN: Yeah, after that I said, “Let’s just forget about this. I’m not meant to be doing solo stuff.” I didn’t want to face that same non-response again. But then this song came up and I did a demo and everybody said, “You’ve got to record that.” So I did . . . reluctantly I might add!
PETE FORNATALE: Why have you not written more for the Stones?
BILL WYMAN: Firstly, I don’t think I write songs that are appropriate for the band. And secondly, we record once every eighteen months or so; and Mick and Keith have such a tremendous amount of material that there really isn’t room left over. Woody gets a bit in here and there, but he lives in the same country as they do, so he hangs out a bit more; I live in the south of France.
PETE FORNATALE: What about the rumors about Mick and Keith erasing each other’s tracks on various albums?
BILL WYMAN: The story is that Mick and Keith are the producers. They work together on the basic tracks but from then on they work separately and form their own opinions. So you end up with various mixes that Keith’s done as well as alternate mixes that Mick has done of the same material. At that point they haggle out which versions of each tune are best. I’ve never heard of them erasing each other’s tapes (laughs)—it’s more a question of fighting it out over which version of any given song will appear on an album.
PETE FORNATALE: Let me ask you some impressions about your fellow Stones. Mick?
BILL WYMAN: Alright, Mick. It’s difficult because I know both the public image and the real person and they both merge into his character for me—the sublime and the ridiculous! (laughs) He is totally different in public than he is in private life. Unfortunately, he seems to think—as most of us probably do—that there’s a way you react in public and a way you react at home. Sometimes he carries his public persona over into his private life, which gets to be a real pain in the ass because you know he’s full of shit. So you have to remind him and bring him down . . . Come on, Mick! And then he comes back to normal.
PETE FORNATALE: How does it manifest?
BILL WYMAN: His voice changes, for one thing, and he starts talking with that pseudo-Southern accent. And sometimes in private he starts using a very rough, Cockney accent, which is also not his real voice. It’s actually more like the way Charlie and I talk, dropping the Hs and all that. He never talked like that before, because he came from a middle-class family and went to middle-class schools. I’ve got interviews with him on radio and television from the ’60s where he’s talking like the Queen does—“Oh, well, it’s quite interesting to . . .” He’s getting a bit like Peter Sellers: I don’t think he knows which one is the real Mick Jagger (laughs). It keeps the mystery going.
PETE FORNATALE: Keith?
BILL WYMAN: Shy, introverted. He’s very nice, really. He can be a real bust, though (laughs). If he’s in his regular mood, he’s great. But if he’s in a bad mood you can’t be in a good mood with him, because he kind of dominates the mood of the room. Maybe he had a hard couple of hours at home or his car broke down, or he lost his favorite cassette and he doesn’t really want to talk, so you just leave it for a few hours and then he’s alright. As I say, he’s very introverted and to overcome that he makes the appearance of being very carefree and brash, flailing his arms and rubbing his hair when he comes into the room. He’s a bit insecure I think.
Except for the first three years of the band he’s always been a little bit difficult to relate to. Maybe because we’re totally different people. For instance, Keith will come into a hotel room and in fifteen minutes it looks like it’s been a gypsy camp for the last twenty years. He just makes things look like that. He throws things around. I couldn’t live like that. I could stay in a hotel room twenty years and it would still look like it did the first day I got there. And Woody’s exactly the same as Keith!
PETE FORNATALE: Well, Woody then?
BILL WYMAN: I think he’s getting too much like Keith. And one Keith’s enough. To have a Keith in the band is great, but to have a Keith and a Keith Mach Two gets a little strange for me. Musically, he’s fine. But it’s like Keith and the shadow, in a way. Woody wasn’t quite like that when he joined.
He was just all fun and games and laughing. He united the band much more when we were kind of drifting apart personality-wise. It’s very frustrating to be in the same band that long because what you liked in 1963 you don’t necessarily like in 1981. So there’s a lot of things that get left out, that you can’t deal with in the same band. That’s why Woody does solo albums, and Mick Taylor probably got really frustrated, and Brian Jones, too. So Charlie has to play with a jazz band, and I had to do some solo albums and some producing, and Mick did movies. You do have other things that you want to do. When we all came into this band, we probably never thought it would last more than two or three years and suddenly it’s a third of your life. That’s the whole thing about leaving after twenty years, because it’s enough for me. No matter how great it is. Wonderful to do, and be in that band, but I’ve got so many other things that I want to do in my life, I don’t want to still be going out on a stage in a wheelchair in ten years’ time.
Bill Wyman, backstage at Sullivan in 1965
PETE FORNATALE: Charlie said once that he hated rock ’n’ roll. Do you buy that?
BILL WYMAN: He probably said something like “I don’t like rock ’n’ roll” but he didn’t mean he didn’t like rock ’n’ roll music. He meant he didn’t like all the things that go with rock ’n’ roll—living in a hotel, constant traveling, etc. He much prefers to play jazz, where he can just get dropped off at a club and jam with some people and then go home. That’s a lot of what he does now. But I know he does like rock ’n’ roll music as well because he listens to a lot of it, a lot of new wave stuff and everything. English papers are terrible that way. They abbreviate what you say and précis it down to such little pieces that it becomes totally different from what you intended.
PETE FORNATALE: As far back as 1969, there were rumors that Bill Wyman was leaving the band or being forced out of the band or fired by Mick. Do you have any comments on those stories?
BILL WYMAN: The thing I said about retiring? Yeah it escalated into something amazing. What actually happened was the guy said, “How long do you think the band is gonna last?” And I said, “Well, probably a couple of years.” We’ve been saying that since ’62. So he says, “How long do you think you’re gonna go on?” And I answered, “Well, if we do last a few more years we’ll be at our twentieth anniversary in December of 1982 and if the band is still functioning then—which it may or may not, I don’t know—then I think that would be a good time to stop, while we’re still up there, and then start to do something else. Because you can’t play rock ’n’ roll forever.” Then that escalated into how I was quitting the band on that day in ’82 and I didn’t like Mick and Keith and so on. I felt a bit rotten, you know, the way it was put, it looked like I was being bitchy . . . and we’re not like that.
THE MVP OF THE SECOND HALF
The Rolling Stones new promoter for the 1989 tour was Torontonian Michael Cohl, who had worked with the Stones on a local level going back many years but never for a prolonged period. Cohl had figured out a way, through what he called package touring, to eliminate all the various middlemen and expand the concert business. He guaranteed the Stones a reported sum of 70 million dollars. All along, Cohl suspected he might just be setting the price for Bill Graham, but in the end the band chose Cohl, and a string of sellouts later proved that Cohl and the Stones were a match made in heaven.
One of the hallmarks of the Stones’ tours in the last quarter century has been their ability to take something that should be impersonal—the stadium concert—and turn it into something intimate and memorable, an intergenerational concert experience that is truly one of a kind. They’ve done this not only through the energy of their performances but also through creative staging, lighting, superior sound, special effects, and the use of video. Michael Cohl has played a big role in all of this.
In a famous 1989 interview, Keith famously said the Stones were at the beginning of the second half. Michael Cohl just might be the MVP of the second half.
I can only add two addenda to this. The first is that following the afternoon I spent with him gathering facts and stories for Rock Calendar, I could never, ever think of him again as “the quiet Stone.” And secondly, something he said to me as we were wrapping things up has only become more poignant in the years since:
BILL WYMAN: See, I can never buy a Stones album, put it on, and just listen and say, “Wow! That’s good” or “That’s bad,” because before it even goes in the shops I know the whole thing by heart . . . It’s like I’ve never seen a Rolling Stones concert, which might be a good kick one day . . . (After I leave) I just might do that!
The actual self-imposed end of Bill Wyman’s tenure with the Stones came about twelve years after our conversation. He was quoted as saying he left because he had developed a fear of flying and because he didn’t see anything new happening in the future. Richards seemed in denial about Wyman’s departure, at least jokingly so, “No one leaves this band except in a coffin,” he opined.