Ron Wood goes solo (at least in book form)
The first memoir by a member of the Rolling Stones, “Ronnie” (St. Martin’s Press) is a freewheeling narrative of how a boy can grow up in a council flat near Heathrow Airport and end up joining the world’s biggest band at the height of their success in 1975.
From an early age, all Ron Wood wanted to do was paint and play music and he would look in awe at his brothers. It was also a fervent time, “very rife,” as he puts it, when every member of rock royalty seemed to rub up against each other in England. Wood’s elder brother Art was in a band with Charlie Watts, who then left to try drumming for “an interval band” called the Rolling Stones. Eventually, Wood ended up playing for the Faces with Rod Stewart. At one point he mentions that he still gets royalty statements from that band, recalling one for 17 pounds and six pence.
“I was thinking about that just this morning,” he laughs. “That check’s still behind me bar. I didn’t have the heart to cash it. They sent me another one recently for three hundred pounds something and that’s behind the bar as well. My trophies!”
The outrageously funny stories come thick and fast. He’s played doctor to willing groupies along with Rod Stewart, smoked up fortunes in cocaine, been held in a Caribbean prison for a week and spent a lot of time with Keith Richards, who he describes with endless affection as an elder brother. In one ridiculous section, his first wife is about to give birth during a Halloween party in Malibu and he drives her to the hospital, while dropping off guests like Warren Beatty at their various houses. Later, after his first son Jesse James is born, Diana Ross points out that it might be time to buy a crib and some baby toys.
The 1970s bring Wood’s career defining moment, at the tender of age of 28, when he unofficially joined the Stones on their U.S. tour. In one very funny section, he has to teach Mick and Keith some of their own songs. “Just because I wrote it, doesn’t mean I know it,” says Keith.
The Stones had whittled their applicant list for the job down to three guitarists: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Wood. Clapton at the time told Wood, “I’m a better guitar player than you are.’ And Wood replied, ‘Yes, but you have to live with these guys.”
Now sober, as are so many of the survivors from the ’60s, Wood says, ‘It’s amazing. I go to LA and play with Slash and all those guys are straight now. But I remember them all as they were, and I remember myself as I used to be, and that is very sobering and makes it all even more amazing.”