Teenagers

"The record wormed its way into the top twenty, and suddenly, in a matter of a week or so, we’d been transformed into pop stars. This is very difficult with a bunch of guys that are really like “get outta here,” you know, “fuck off.” And suddenly they’re dressing us up in dogtooth-check fucking suits and we’re rushed along on the tide. It was like a tsunami. One minute, hey, you wanted to make a record, you’ve made a record and it’s in the goddamn top twenty, and now you’ve got to do Thank Your Lucky Stars. TV you’d never thought about. We were propelled into show business. Because we were so anti-showbiz, it was the cold shoulder to us, enough already. But then we realized that we did have to make certain concessions.

Loc. 1923-28

We don’t want to be some fucking ersatz Beatles. Shit, we’ve worked this hard to be a very, very good blues band. But the money’s better, and suddenly with the size of the audience, like it or not, you’re no longer just a blues band, you’re now what they’re going to call a pop band, which we despised.

Loc. 2006-8 

I’d say, we never finished a show. The only question was how it would end, with a riot, with the cops breaking it up, with too many medical cases, and how the hell to get out of there. The biggest part of the day was planning the in and the out. The actual gig you didn’t even get to know much about. It was just mayhem. We came there to listen to the audience! Nothing like a good ten, fifteen minutes of pubescent female shrieking to cover up all your mistakes. Or three thousand teenage chicks throwing themselves at you. Or being carried out on stretchers. All the bouffants awry, skirts up to their waists, sweating, red, eyes rolling. That’s the spirit, girl. That’s the way we like ’em. On the set list, for what it was worth, we had “Not Fade Away,” “Walking the Dog,” “Around and Around,” “I’m a King Bee.”

Loc. 2017-23

We used to play “Popeye the Sailor Man” some nights, and the audience didn’t know any different because they couldn’t hear us. So they weren’t reacting to the music. The beat maybe, because you’d always hear the drums, just the rhythm, but the rest of it, no, you couldn’t hear the voices, you couldn’t hear the guitars, totally out of the question. What they were reacting to was being in this enclosed space with us—this illusion, me, Mick and Brian. The music might be the trigger, but the bullet, nobody knows what that is. Usually it was harmless, for them, though not always for us. Amongst the many thousands a few did get hurt, and a few died. Some chick third balcony up flung herself off and severely hurt the person she landed on underneath, and she herself broke her neck and died. Now and again shit happened. But the limp and fainted bodies going by us after the first ten minutes of playing, that happened every night. Or sometimes they’d stack them up on the side of the stage because there were so many of them. It was like the western front. And it got nasty in the provinces—new territory for us.

 Loc. 2030-37

Hamilton in Scotland, just outside of Glasgow. They put a chicken wire fence in front of us because of the sharpened pennies and beer bottles they flung at us—the guys that didn’t like the chicks screaming at us. They had dogs parading inside the wire. The wire mesh was quite common in certain areas, especially around Glasgow at that time.

Loc. 2037-40 

“Very good show. Not a dry seat in the house.”

 Loc. 2046

The ’50s chicks being brought up all very jolly hockey sticks, and then somewhere there seemed to be a moment when they just decided they wanted to let themselves go. The opportunity arose for them to do that, and who’s going to stop them? It was all dripping with sexual lust, though they didn’t know what to do about it. But suddenly you’re on the end of it. It’s a frenzy. Once it’s let out, it’s an incredible force. You stood as much chance in a fucking river full of piranhas. They were beyond what they wanted to be. They’d lost themselves. These chicks were coming out there, bleeding, clothes torn off, pissed panties, and you took that for granted every night. That was the gig. It could have been anybody, quite honestly. They didn’t give a shit that I was trying to be a blues player.

Loc. 2048-53

One minute no chick in the world. No fucking way, and they’re going la la la la la. And the next they’re sniffing around. And you’re going wow, when I changed from Old Spice to Habit Rouge, things definitely got better. So what is it they want? Fame? The money? Or is it for real? And of course when you’ve not had much chance with beautiful women, you start to get suspicious. I’ve been saved by chicks more times than by guys. Sometimes just that little hug and kiss and nothing else happens. Just keep me warm for the night, just hold on to each other when times are hard, times are rough. And I’d say, “Fuck, why are you bothering with me when you know I’m an asshole and I’ll be gone tomorrow?” “I don’t know. I guess you’re worth it.” “Well, I’m not going to argue.”

Loc. 2058-64

The first time I encountered that was with these little English chicks up in the north, on that first tour. You end up, after the show, at a pub or the bar of the hotel, and suddenly you’re in the room with some very sweet chick who’s going to Sheffield University and studying sociology who decides to be really nice to you. “I thought you were a smart chick. I’m a guitar player. I’m just going through town.” “Yeah, but I like you.” Liking is sometimes better than loving.

Loc. 2064-67 

By the late ’50s, teenagers were a targeted new market, an advertising windup. “Teenager” comes from advertising; it’s quite cold-blooded. Calling them teenagers created a whole thing amongst teenagers themselves, a self-consciousness. It created a market not just for clothes and cosmetics, but also for music and literature and everything else; it put that age group in a separate bag. And there was an explosion, a big hatch of pubescents around that time. Beatlemania and Stone mania. These were chicks that were just dying for something else. Four or five skinny blokes provided the outlet, but they would have found it somewhere else.

Loc. 2067-72

The power of the teenage females of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, when they’re in a gang, has never left me. They nearly killed me. I was never more in fear for my life than I was from teenage girls. The ones that choked me, tore me to shreds, if you got caught in a frenzied crowd of them—it’s hard to express how frightening they could be. You’d rather be in a trench fighting the enemy than to be faced with this unstoppable, killer wave of lust and desire, or whatever it is—it’s unknown even to them. The cops are running away, and you’re faced with this savagery of unleashed emotions.

Loc. 2072-76

I think it was Middlesbrough. And I couldn’t get in the car. It was an Austin Princess, and I’m trying to get in the car and these bitches are ripping me apart. The problem is if they get their hands on you, they don’t know what to do with you. They nearly strangled me with a necklace, one grabbed one side of it, the other grabbed the other, and they’re going, “Keith, Keith,” and meanwhile they’re choking me. I get hold of the handle and it comes off in my hand, and the car goes zooming off, and I’m left with this goddamn handle in my hand. I got left in the lurch that day. The driver panicked. The rest of the guys had gotten in the car, and he just wasn’t going to stick around any longer. So I was left in this pack of female hyenas. Next thing, I woke up in this back alley stage door entrance, because the cops had obviously moved everyone on. I’d passed out, I’d suffocated, they were all over me. What are you going to do with me now you’ve got me?

Loc. 2077-83

Keith Richards and James Fox (Contributor), Life, kindle.