Life by Keith Richards; James Fox Page B

motorbike racers. Nobody could quite put their finger on me. Somehow I managed to have a foot in both camps without having to split my balls. I had my own uniform, winter or summer: Wrangler jacket, purple shirt and black drainpipes. I got a reputation for being impervious to the cold, because I didn’t vary my wardrobe much. As for drugs, it was before my time, except for the occasional use of Doris’s period pills. The thing people had started taking was ephedrine, which was horrible, so that didn’t last long. And then there were nasal inhalers, which were full of Dexedrine and smelled of lavender. You took the top off it and rolled up the cotton wool stuff and made little pills. Dexedrine for colds!
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    T he figure I’m standing next to in the school picture is Michael Ross. I can no longer listen to certain records without Michael Ross coming to mind. My first public performance was with Michael; we did a couple of school gigs together. He was a special guy, extrovert, talented, up for all risk and adventure. He was a really gifted illustrator, taught me many tricks of how to work pen and ink. And he was into music big-time. Michael and I liked the same kind of music, something that was available for us to play. That’s why we gravitated to country music and blues, because we could play it with just ourselves. One’s enough, so much better with two. He introduced me to Sanford Clark, a heavy-duty country singer, very like Johnny Cash, came out of the cotton fields and the air force with a US hit called “The Fool.” We played his “Son of a Gun,” partly because it was the only thing the instruments would bear, but a great song. We did a school party, somewhere round Bexley, in the gymnasium, sang a lot of country stuff as best as we could at the time, with only two guitars and nothing else. What I remember most about our first gig was that we pulled a couple of birds and spent the whole night in a park somewhere, in one of those shelters with a bench and a little roof over it. We didn’t really do anything. I touched her breast or something. We were just snogging all night, all those tongues going like eels. And then we just slept there till morning, and I thought, “My first gig and I end up with a chick. Shit! Maybe I’ve got a future here.”
    Ross and I played more. It drifted on without any sort of concentrated thought, but you go back again next weekend and there’s a bigger crowd.… And there’s nothing like an audience doing that to encourage you. I guess somewhere in there was the glimmer.
    I had spent my entire school life expecting to do National Service. It was in my brain—I was going to art school and then into the army. And suddenly, just before my seventeenth birthday, in November 1960, it was announced that it was over, ended forever. (The Rolling Stones would soon be cited as the single reason why it should be brought back.) But that innocent day I remember, at art school, you could almost hear a massive exhale, a huge sense of relief that went through the school. There was no more work that day. I remember all of us guys at that age looking at one another, realizing we’re not being sent to a drafty destroyer somewhere, or marching about at Aldershot. Bill Wyman did National Service, in the RAF in Germany, and he quite enjoyed it. But he’s older than I am.
    At the same time it was “Motherfuckers!” We’d spent all of these years with that cloud over us. Some guys round school would start to deliberately develop a twitch, working their way up to a dangerous personality disorder, so they could be let off. It was a whole built-in system, everyone comparing notes about how you could get out of it. “I’ve got corns, I can’t march.”
    It changes guys. I saw my older cousins, older friends who’d been through it. They’d come out different men, basically. Left right left right. That drill. It’s brainwashing. You can do it in your goddamn sleep. Sometimes these