this we didn't need

(Information / perspective to have, for the 1965 part:  in England they call public school private school and vice versa.  [I don't even want to know why.]  So when Keith Richards refers to the guy as "some wonky public schoolboy" -- he isn't putting the guy down for having been educated in public school not private -- he's referring to the idea that the gun-guy had what they consider a "better" education--that he's from a social-and-economic level higher than his own....)

1968
The Stones recorded the songs for Beggars Banquet in 1968; the album was released in December of that year.

1967
-------------- [excerpts - Life, Keith Richards' autobiography] -------------------- Nineteen sixty-seven was the watershed year, the year the seams gave way.  There was that feeling that trouble was coming, which it did later, with all the riots, street fighting and all of that.  There was a tension in the air.  It's like negative and positive ions before a storm, you get that breathlessness that something's got to break.  In fact, all it did was crack.

We'd finished touring the previous summer, a grueling American tour, and wouldn't tour there again for two years.  In all that time, the first four years of the band, I don't think we ever had more than two days' rest between playing, traveling and recording.  We were always on the road.

1966
By the end of 1966, we were all exhausted.  We'd been on the road without a break for almost four years.  The crack-ups were coming.

1965
We'd already had a wobbler with the formidable but brittle Andrew Oldham in Chicago in 1965, when we were recording at Chess.  Andrew was a lover of speed, but this time he was drunk too and very distressed about his relationship with Sheila....He started waving a shooter around in my hotel room.

This we didn't need.  I hadn't come all the way to Chicago to get shot by some wonky public schoolboy whose gun barrel I was staring down.  Which looks very ominous at the time, that little black hole.  Mick and I got the gun away from him, slapped him around a bit, put him to bed and forgot about it.

I don't even know what happened to the shooter, an automatic.  Tossed it out the window, probably.  We're just getting going.  Let's make this a forget-it.

1962
I don't think the Stones would have actually coagulated without Ian Stewart pulling it together.  He was the one that rented the first rehearsal rooms, told people to get there at a certain time; otherwise it was so nebulous.  We didn't know shit from Shinola.

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{Life, by Keith Richards and James Fox.  Copyright 2010 (paperback)}

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