bluesman

-------------------- [excerpt, Life, by Keith Richards] ---------------- When you start to play in public and you're playing with some guys that have done it before, you're low in the hierarchy and you always feel you're being tested.

You've got to be there, on time,

your equipment's got to be working,

which it rarely was in my case.  You have to measure up.  Suddenly you're in with the big boys, you're not just pissing around in school gyms.  Shit, this is pro.  At least semipro; pro with no money.

I left art school around this time.  At the end your teacher says, "Well, I think this is pretty good," and they send you off to J. Walter Thompson and you have an appointment, and

by then, in a way you know what's coming --

three or four real smarty-pants, with the usual bow ties.  "Keith, is it?  Nice to see you.  Show us what you've got."  And you lay the old folder out.  "Hmmmm.  I say, we've had a good look at this, Keith, and it does show some promise.  By the way, do you make a good cup of tea?"  I said yes, but not for you.

I walked off with my folio -- it was green, I remember -- and I dumped it in the garbage can when I got downstairs.  That was my final attempt to join society on their terms.  The second pink slip.

I didn't have the patience or the facility to be a hack in an advertising agency.

I was going to end up the tea boy.  I wasn't very nice tro them in the interview.  Basically I wanted an excuse to be thrown out on my own and thrown back on music.  I think, OK, I've got two free years, not in the army.  I'm going to be a bluesman.

I went to the Bricklayers Arms, a seedy pub in Soho, for the first time

for the first rehearsal for what turned out to be the Stones.

I think it was May of '62, lovely summer evening.  Just off Wardour Street.  Strip Alley.  I get there, I've got my guitar with me.  And as I get there the pub's just opened.  Typical brassy blond old barmaid, not many customers, stale beer.

She sees the guitar and says, "Upstairs."

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{Life.  Keith Richards with James Fox.  Copyright 2010, Back Bay / Little, Brown.}

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