Epic Encounters with Rolling Stones 'New Kid' Ronnie Wood

He may with a mere 42 years of guitar-playing service still be the new boy in the band, but Ronnie Wood officially knows more about the Rolling Stones than Mick, Keith and Charlie do.

“Mick said to me, ‘You have to write the official Rolling Stones book because you’re the only one who remembers all the stuff we got up to in the sixties – and you weren’t even in the band then!’” Ronnie cackled a few years back over a glass of very fine wine in the Shelbourne with yours truly, snooker ace Jimmy White and a professional Irish poker player who politely declined to tell me his name because he wasn’t supposed to be in the country.

“Given the number of times I saw ‘em live and the friends we had in common, I could probably go on Mastermind and have the Stones’ first decade as my specialist subject!” resumed Ronnie who, to illustrate his point, remembered exactly what both him and the Rolling Stones were doing on February 28, 1965.

“My first band, The Birds – as distinct from The B-Y-R-D-S – did a version of Eddie Holland’s ‘Leaving Here’, which got to number 49 on the chart and nabbed us a bottom-of-the-bill spot at the NME Pop Poll Winners’ Concert. Which, by the way remains one of the best nights of my life. In addition to sharing a dressing-room with Mr. Number One, Cliff Richard, we got to see and hang out with The Beatles, the Stones and Diana Ross who was the most exotic creature I’d ever seen. If my memory serves me right (It did, Ed) the Stones won Best R&B Group and Best Single with ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’.”

Talking of best nights of your life, I was lucky enough to be on the invite-list for the star studded bash Lillie’s Bordello threw for Ronnie in January 2002 after he’d played a stormer of a gig in Vicar St. with Slash to celebrate the release of his Not For Beginners solo album.

My hazy memories of the party include talking football (and bollocks) with Slash who’s an ardent Stoke City supporter, helping Julia Roberts find her lost jacket, apologising profusely to Vinnie Jones for treading on his foot, and thinking somebody had spiked my drink and I was hallucinating when Van Morrison and Ronan Keating joined Eurovision winner Paul Harrington for a spot of karaoke. Marianne Faithful was at the gig but mightn’t have made it to Grafton Street, and Ronnie’s ex-wife Jo was on champagne topping up duties.

“Yeah, that was a good old giggle,” Ronnie recalled as we looked out over Stephen’s Green. “I’ve played with a lot of shit hot guitarists in my time, and Slash is right up there.”

Asked when he’d first seen the Stones live, Ronnie immediately shot back: “In a marquee at the Richmond Jazz & Blues Festival. I’d just come out of Cyril Davies – this blues pioneer who my brother, Art, used to play with – and saw this other tent rocking. I watched them do their set and then encore with ‘Bye Bye Johnny’, which was the cue for the crowd to go completely nuts. As they sung along and jumped on each other’s shoulders, I thought, ‘That looks like a good job!’ As I was leaving, I smashed my leg on an iron tent peg but was so pumped up with adrenaline that I didn’t feel a thing. The next time I met ‘em was on the eve of Hyde Park. Mick and Charlie said ‘See you’ as they left, and I went, ‘Yeah, sooner than you think!’ The rock ‘n’ roll Gods must have been smiling on me, ‘cause I was sitting between Mick Jagger and Mick Taylor when he said he was leaving the Stones. Mick immediately asked me if I’d like to take his place, but at that time I really didn’t want to break The Faces up. We left it that if they ever got desperate he’d give me a call, which happened a year later. I went for the audition in Munich, only to find that Eric Clapton, Harvey Mandell, Steve Marriott, Wayne Perkins, Jeff Beck and all these other marvelous guitarists were there as well. I had an inkling that I had the gig when, after telling ‘em how this song of mine went, Charlie went ‘Bloody hell, he’s bossing us around already!’ We’d already done ‘It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll’ together in my studio in Richmond, so there was a bit of previous.”

Having toured with them as a stand-in before that, Ronnie officially joined the Stones in 1976, when band morale was at an all-time low and Keith was debilitated by heroin addiction. Part of his job at the time was to act as diplomat and buffer between Jagger, Richards and Bill Wyman.

“There was a lot of time chilling out potentially bad vibe situations,” he admitted. “It took quite a lot of hard work, but I wouldn’t have changed anything, it’s just the way it was. Nine times out of ten I’d jump in the deep end and risk whatever flak I was gonna get in order for the whole thing to keep ticking over nicely.”

Among the many things Ronnie is grateful to the Stones for is affording him the opportunity to hang out with John Lee Hooker and his “honeys”. “The last time I met the dirty old sod, he had these two beauties with him,” Ronnie reminisced. “Eighty-whatever-he-was and the chicks still adored him. It was like losing a favourite uncle when he died. I met him first many, many years ago with Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells and his amazing gang of nutcases. The last time he played with the Stones, he did two shows in a row. The first left us all nervous wrecks ‘cause it was in a weird key, so the next night I was put on John Lee duty. As we’re going on stage, I go ‘Give us a clue, mate’, and he growls, ‘Eeeeeeeeeeeee.’ The rest of the lads were like, ‘Thank fuck!’”

Ronnie’s closest Stones ally is probably Keith Richards, with whom he shared the sphincter-relaxing experience of being Bob Dylan’s backing band at Live Aid.

“It was off the bloody scale, mate!” he nods. “Before Live Aid, we spent a couple of days in my New York house rehearsing everything in his back catalogue. I tell you, myself, Keith and Ian (McLagan, Stones keys man) have never worked so fucking hard in our lives. What does he do as we’re walking on? Suggest we start with the one bloody song we haven’t learned! ‘Does that mean we shouldn’t do it?’ he says, and I go, ‘Yeah, it does mean that!’ Anyway, we’re up there beginning to relax when pliiiinnngg!, Bob breaks a string. Not having a roadie that day, I had to give him my guitar and use a cheapo replacement which somebody handed me from backstage and which was completely out of tune. I ended up using one string with a slide on it.”

After winning a competition on the BBC kids programme, Sketch Club – an achievement he refers to as his “awakening to art” – Ronnie went on to study at Ealing Art College whose ‘60s student intake also included Freddie Mercury and Pete Townshend. The passion has endured, with all the Stones past and present featuring in Ronnie’s 1990 ‘Beggars Banquet’ painting and Mick included in the monster mural of sixty celebs dining in the Ivy restaurant that was commissioned by Andrew and Madeline Lloyd-Webber.

“It’s interpretative, so I’ve got Jerry Hall giving Mick a filthy look ‘cause he’s chatting up a young chick; Mariella Frostrup having a laugh with Marie Helvin and Salman Rushdie; Cilla on the next table with Lord and Lady Birt and Eddie Jordan being given a shoulder massage by Naomi Campbell. That’s one person who’s hoping that life imitates art!” As the wine flowed that day in the Shelbourne – we were on to bottle number five when I had to leave – Ronnie opened up about his then recent stay in The Priory.

“I don’t drink vodka anymore but I still like my Guinness and a glass of wine,” he proffered. “You can’t totally shut it off. Keep it to a gentle rain – nobody likes a drought or a flood!”

While it didn’t involve any of the Stones, I’d be severely short-changing you if we didn’t have room for the fabulous Keith Moon story recounted that day.

“He was a total midget nutcase – made of steel, he thought – and incapable of saying ‘no’ to anything or anyone. I used to say to him, ‘Keith, you’re meant to take one of those pills, not the whole bottle!’ We were in the Speakeasy one night when he went ‘Try this, dear boy’, and handed me my first Mandrax. I was a bit, ‘er, I’m not sure about this’ at first, but then I got pissed and gobbled it down. The effect in those days was (clicked fingers), so by the time I got into my Jaguar XK150 with Keith, his driver Kellogg’s, my manager and ex-wife, I was off my tits. I went straight over Hyde Park Corner rather than round it, straight over the next roundabout wherever that fucking was and down a mews where I wedged my car. The others were going ‘No, you can’t’ and trying to grab the wheel, but there was no stopping me. I’d get up to those sort of hi-jinx once a month, but Keith was like it every single day. How he managed to survive the ‘60s, I’ll never know.”