Wood on the tracks

Good lord, it’s Ronnie Wood on the blower. Stranger still, the Stones guitarist and portrait artist isn’t calling to promote a solo album or exhibition, but an autobiography. Woody has elected to beat his longtime pals and rock biog rivals Keef and Clapton to the punch with Ronnie, a raggedly written but rather entertaining string of shaggy dog Faces and Stones war stories, freebase horror tell-alls and cautionary tales of dirtbird drug dealers and squandered fortunes. It ain’t exactly Chronicles, but according to its author, was never intended as such.

“Chronicles, I thought it was a bit heavy going actually,” he admits. “I didn’t really relate to it as much as I would a book on Bob’s writings and drawings, which is much easier to absorb, much more gripping. Maybe I didn’t give it much of a chance.”
Wood is the first one to admit that his chosen modes of expression are sound and paint, and that the writing didn’t come easily.
“Yeah, it was a real toil, but a toil of love in the end,” he says. “I rescued the original manuscript and had to get Jack McDonald (ghost writer and daughter Leah’s fiancé) on board, and we enjoyed tweaking and re-tweaking. All in all it has been a good adventure and I’ve learned a lot about my life. A lot of people come up to me and go, ‘I’m beginning to understand now why you are like you are!’.”
Wood comes from Romany barge stock, the first of his clan to be born on dry land. This, he says, explains the ease with which he took to the nomadic life of a Rolling Stone.
“Yeah, I have childhood memories of the old condensed milk in the cabin of the old longboat, y’know,” he chuckles. “I traced my whole family tree right back to the 1700s, where they were all transporters of timber, everyone was navigator or a tugboat captain. They were basically English and European, but I should think one of the grandads took a shot East at some point, hence the Romany gypsy colouring that I have.”
The richest sections of Wood’s story paint fond portraits of the various characters who traipsed in and out of his family home, usually en route to the local watering hole. The effect is halfway between Steptoe & Son and a Faces album; the numerous booze-ups and punch-ups recounted suggest that he was destined for the bohemian life.
“We’d lots of characters coming and going and sleeping over,” he says. “You never knew quite who you’d find draped over the couch in the morning, especially after a heavy weekend. Early night time memories.”
The legendary late ‘60s London scene was just as congenial; a close-knit community of musicians that included the Stones, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart. (“At Christmas time all the different record companies would have parties, you’d go from one to the next and you’d end up at somebody’s flat jamming.”) Wood even shared a house with Jimi Hendrix at one point.
“Hendrix didn’t have much faith in his voice,” he remembers. “He knew he could play but he hated his own voice. I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s just like another instrument, don’t let it hang you up, just get on with it, ’cos people love what you do’. But he had no kind of self worth in that respect.”
Self-worth was not something the Stones ever lacked. Ronnie’s role as Keith Richards’ guitaring partner and collaborator in ‘the ancient art of weaving’ has been well documented over the years, but Ronnie concedes that it takes a robust personality as well as honed chops to survive the Stones’ inner circle.
“Yeah, like I said to Eric Clapton, you have to live with these guys, which is a whole other ball game, you know?” Wood says. “Humour is a lot to do with the connectability. And not being easily hurt by remarks, ’cos they could cut you down with words, and if you believed half of what they told you, you wouldn’t have any faith in yourself. You have to go with the flow, let it bounce off you and have faith in your own talent.”
Ronnie officially joined the Stones in 1976, when band morale was at an all-time low (although it would deteriorate even further a decade later) and Keith was debilitated by heroin addiction. Part of his job at the time was to act as diplomat and buffer between Jagger, Richards and Bill Wyman.
“There was a lot of time chilling out potentially bad vibe situations,” he says. “It took quite a lot of hard work, but I wouldn’t have changed anything, it’s just the way it was. Nine times out of ten I’d jump in the deep end and risk whatever flak I was gonna get in order for the whole thing to keep ticking over nicely.”
Ronnie’s memoir coincides with Martin Scorsese’s long awaited concert film Shine A Light. A lifelong fan, Scorsese has used Stones songs in his work as far back as Mean Streets, and indeed, since Goodfellas seems to have adopted the self-imposed rule of utilising ‘Gimme Shelter’ in every other film.
“He does, doesn’t he? We have a lot of confidence in him, and he’s always at about the same street level, a street kid. He was always bubbling with confidence and ideas and he’s exactly the same now, he’s just got older that’s all. But he’s still this little kid that likes experimenting all the time. I’m really looking forward to you seeing the shows from the Beacon Theatre in Shine A Light.”

Ronnie is published in hardback by MacMillan