Read Online True Adventures of the Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth - Free Book Online Page B

things at all. I did the third year again, and I did the fourth year, and at the end of the fourth year—remember, everybody else was at the end of the fifth year—I made things so bad—culminating in a spate of truancy which they wouldn’t take from me—they kicked me out.
    â€œThe particular thing was splitting constantly very early in the day, and just generally turning out contrary to their demands, and millions of things, like I used to wear two pairs of pants to school, a very tight pair and a very baggy pair which I would put on as soon as I got near the school, because they would just send you home if you had tight pants on. That’s another thing about English schools, you had to wear the school uniform . . . the cap, very strange contraption, like a skullcap with a peak on it, school badge on the front. And a dark blazer with a badge on the breast pocket, a tie, and gray flannel trousers. I refused to go to and from school with those fucking clothes on.
    â€œBut in kicking me out, they as a final show of benevolence fixed up this place for me in art school. Actually that was the best thing they could have done for me, because the art schools in England are very freaky. Half the staff anyway are in advertising agencies, and to keep up the art bit and make a bit of extra bread they teach school like one day a week. Freaks, drunks, potheads. Also there’s a lot of kids. I was fifteen and there are kids there nineteen, in their last year. A lot of music goes on at art schools. That’s where I got hung up on guitar, because there were a lot of guitar players around then, playing anything from Big Bill Broonzy to Woody Guthrie. I also got hung up on Chuck Berry, though what I was playing was the art school stuff, the Guthrie sound and blues. Not really blues, mostly ballads and Jesse Fuller stuff. In art school I met Dick Taylor, a guitar player. He was the first cat I played with. We were playing a bit of blues, Chuck Berry stuff on acoustic guitars, and I think I’d just about now got an amplifier like a little beat-up radio. There was another cat at art school called Michael Ross. He decided to form a country and western band—this is
real
amateur—Sanford Clark songs and a few Johnny Cash songs, ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky.’ The first time I got onstage and played was with this C&W band. One gig I remember was a sports dance at Eltham, which is near Sidcup, where the art school I went to was.
    â€œI left technical school when I was fifteen. I did three years of art school. I was just starting the last year when Mick and I happened to meet up on the train at Dartford Station. Between the ages of eleven and seventeen you go through a lot of changes. So I didn’t know what he was like. It was like seeing an old friend, but it was also like meeting a new person. He’d left grammar school and he was going to the London School of Economics, very heavily into a university student number. He had some records with him, and I said Wotcha got? Turned out to be Chuck Berry,
Rocking at the Hop.
    â€œHe was into singin’ in the bath sort of stuff, he had been singin’ with a rock group a few years previous, couple of years. Buddy Holly stuff and ‘Sweet Little Sixteen,’ Eddie Cochran stuff, at youth clubs and things in Dartford, but he hadn’t done that for a while when I met him.I told him I was messin’ around with Dick Taylor. It turned out that Mick knew Dick Taylor because they’d been to grammar school together, so, fine, why don’t we all get together? I think one night we all went round to Dick’s place and had a rehearsal, just a jam. That was the first time we got into playing. Just back-room stuff, just for ourselves. So we started gettin’ it together in front rooms and back rooms, at Dick Taylor’s home particularly. We started doing things like Billy Boy Arnold stuff, ‘Ride an Eldorado Cadillac,’ Eddie