At least 50 per cent of rock and roll is image. Sure, deft fretting skills and an enchanting vocal range can help, but as the punk movement perfectly illustrated, attitude is key. Throughout the 1960s, British invasion bands paved a new era for rock music, which blossomed with the hippie movement but would ultimately defy the core principles. Alongside The Velvet Underground and The Stooges, The Rolling Stones proposed a darker, more hedonistic blueprint for the 1970s punk era.
The Stones were marketed as the “bad boy” alternative to The Beatles by their original manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, in the 1960s. For the most part, this was a false visage. Still, on several occasions, the Stones’ hedonistic and chaotic lifestyles led to cases of life-threatening violence – not exactly in keeping with the peace and love motif.
It’s no secret that Keith Richards was the most chaotic of the Stones. The most dubious elements of his legacy can be attributed to his long-lived struggle with addiction, chiefly heroin. Heroin addicts are usually docile and relaxed when they have the opiate surging through their system. However, when recovering, the mind can turn on a sixpence and elicit fits of rage.
In his 2007 autobiography, Ronnie Wood, who joined the Stones in 1975 to fill in for Mick Taylor, recounted several gripping stories from the band’s wild heyday. In the most shocking of these tales, Richards held a gun to Wood’s head after a drug-fuelled argument about cocaine. “After a row with Keith one day, he stormed off to get his gun,” Wood recalled. “I warned everyone to ‘clear the decks’. Keith came back with his Derringer gun, pointed it at me and yelled, ‘You fucking bastard Woody!’ But I had my own gun, a .44 Magnum. I didn’t have any bullets for it, but I calmly pulled it out. And that was the last time Keith pulled a gun on me… until the next time.”
Elsewhere in Wood’s unfiltered autobiography, he recalled another dicey moment with his fellow guitarist. “Keith burst into my room, broke the glass container of my pipe, and headed towards me looking at my head… he broke a bottle and cut me with it,” Wood wrote. “I stormed out of there and went straight to Mick and Charlie, who were working on a song in a room just down the hall. And as I looked at them bleeding and staining the carpet, Mick looked at me and said, ‘Do you have any ideas for the bridge?’”
He added: “Returning to my room, Richards pulled the razor from him, put it to my neck, and yelled, ‘I’d cut your fucking throat, but your girlfriend would never forgive me for the fuss she’d make…’. This is said by someone who used heroin for ten years.”
Though Richards undoubtedly took centre stage for the lion’s share of the Stones’ wildest moments, he wasn’t the only one who resorted to violence. In Richards’ autobiography, titled Life, he recalled one night when Jagger was drunk and repeatedly called up to Charlie Watts’ hotel room shouting, “Where’s my drummer?”
Clearly not happy with the tone of Jagger’s persistence nor his bold sense of possession, Watts marched down to the frontman’s hotel room to give him a physical lesson he wouldn’t forget in a hurry. About 20 minutes after the phone calls, Richards remembered a knock at the door. “There was Charlie Watts, Savile Row suit, perfectly dressed, tie, shaved, the whole fucking bit,” he wrote. “I opened the door, and he didn’t even look at me, he walked straight past me, got hold of Mick and said: ‘Never call me your drummer again.’ Then he hauled him up by the lapels of his jacket and gave him a right hook. Mick fell back onto a silver platter of smoked salmon and began to slide towards the open window and the canal below… It takes a lot to wind that man up.”
