Scotty and Elvis: Aboard the Mystery Train

13 Jamming with a Rolling Stone

224 Ħ 13 Ħ JAMMING WITH A ROLLING STONE The way Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards tells it, he was thirteen the first time he heard me play guitar. It was late at night and—stubbornly against his parents’ explicit orders to go to sleep—he was in his bedroom behind closed doors listening to Radio Luxembourg on a transistor radio. One minute the reception was fine, the next it was riddled with nerveshattering static. Back and forth it went. Suddenly, from the bottomless depths of a sonic wave of ever-changing white noise, emerged the heartstopping music of “Heartbreak Hotel.” Keith literally chased the song about his room as he ran from one corner to the other, holding the radio up over his head to snare a few additional uninterrupted moments of music. In an instant, “Heartbreak Hotel” had energized him and forever changed his life. “I had been playing guitar, but not knowing what to play . . . without any direction,” Keith said in an interview for this book. “When I heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’ I knew that was what I wanted to do in life. It was as plain as day. I no longer wanted to be a train driver or a Van Gogh or a rocket scientist. All I wanted to do in the world was to be able to play and sound like that. Those early records were incredible. Everyone else wanted to be Elvis. I wanted to be Scotty.” For 40 years Keith dreamed of playing on a record with his hero. On July 9, 1996—40 years, 2 months, and 18 days after “Heartbreak Hotel” first topped the charts—that dream came true when Keith went to Woodstock, New York, to meet up with D. J. and me for a recording session at a studio owned by Levon Helm, who had made his own indelible mark on music history as a member of the Band. We had no way of knowing it at the time, but Levon was only a couple of years away from being diagnosed with throat cancer. Just looking at him, there was no hint of trouble. D. J. and I went to the Woodstock studio to record a new song, “Deuce and a Quarter,” with the three surviving members of the Band: Levon 225 Ħ JAMMING WITH A ROLLING STONE Ħ on drums, Garth Hudson on keyboards, and Rick Danko on bass. Also joining in the session were more recent Band members Richard Bell on piano, Randy Ciarlante on drums, and Jim Weider on guitar. Producer Stan Lynch, for more than two decades the drummer with Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, was there to supervise the session. The song, which was written by two Nashville songwriters, Gwil Owen and Kevin Gordon, was recorded for the album All the King’s Men. D. J. was ailing somewhat when we arrived at Woodstock, but after a short stay in the hospital he was ready to get down to work. We laid the track the first night. On the second night Levon arrived and sang, after which we did the overdubs. The Band was great to work with. They reminded me of the early days when we started bringing extra musicians into the band during the recording sessions. Nobody was there to try to be a star or show someone else up. Everyone wanted to do it right and make it work. At around 6:30 of the third day, Keith Richards arrived at the studio, accompanied by a rather large bottle of vodka, a generous supply of orange soda, and his 82-year-old father, Bert. I greeted Keith in the center of the crowded studio, and Keith introduced me to his father, a diminutive man with bushy white hair set off by a jaunty red cap. I took to Bert right away. I don’t know if he is Scottish or not, but he looks like he is. He looks like you’d expect a bunch of sheep to fall in behind him. Right away I noticed that Bert was very interested in the session, watching every detail from a choice spot in the balcony of the studio, but I didn’t find out why he was so interested until later. Keith said that when he first told his father about the session, he insisted on attending, explaining that he just had to meet the man who had kept his son glued to the radio 40 years ago. Some six months before the Woodstock session, Keith spent an...