Bobby Keys remembers 40 rollicking years with the Rolling StonesBy Gene Triplett
Published: March 23, 2012
Bobby Keys claims he taught Keith Richards a thing or two about partying like a rock star.
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http://photos3.newsok.com/cache/w300-a26ebf991a0467927b44c27787aaf8ba.jpg But of course, the Texas-born sax man had a couple of years more road experience than the Rolling Stones guitarist, even though both men were born on exactly the same day, Dec. 18, 1943.
Keys has been at it since he was a teenager, having convinced his grandfather to sign his guardianship over to former Buddy Holly drummer J.I. Allison in 1961 so he could go on tour with fellow Texas rocker Buddy Knox of “Party Doll” fame.
Keys even spent some time raising a bit of hell on the Tulsa music scene before finally becoming an auxiliary Stone — and fast friends with that band's legendarily indestructible party beast.
“I taught that boy (Richards) tricks he never knew,” Keys said with a deep Texas drawl and a mischievous chuckle during a recent phone interview from his Nashville home. “No, I'd say we both exploited each other's strengths. We were pretty strong partiers.”
New memoir
Keys tells (almost) all about his 40 years of touring and recording with the Stones, and the colorful years leading up to that association, in his new memoir, “Every Night's a Saturday Night,” cowritten with journalist Bill Ditenhafer with a forward by Richards.
It begins with his childhood and teen years in Slaton, Texas and nearby Lubbock, where he bribed his way into Buddy Holly's garage with burgers, fries and Cokes from the Hi-D-Ho Drive-In so that future pop star Holly and his band, the Crickets, would allow him to hang around and watch them practice.
Keys was raised by his grandparents in Slaton, but his aunt Aunt Leora lived in Lubbock, right across the street from Holly's parents' house. Holly was the first electric guitarist Keys had ever heard, and he was hooked like a little kid following the Pied Piper.
“It just stirred something inside of me,” Keys said.
As he grew into teen-hood, Keys became friends with Holly and the Crickets, particularly drummer Allison and bassist Joe B. Mauldin. The saxophone became Keys' instrument of choice because it was the only one unclaimed when he joined his school band, but he dedicated himself to learning how to play, seeing it as his ticket into the world of rock 'n' roll and R&B.
After Holly's short streak of success, which ended with his death in a plane crash on Feb. 3, 1959, the Crickets went on hiatus and Keys was spending more and more time in Lubbock, even living with Mauldin during his senior year in high school. The two eventually formed a band, the Hollyhawks, and were playing gigs as far away from home as Tucson, Phoenix and Albuquerque.
Then Knox, a native of Happy, Texas, who'd had a smash hit in 1957 with his original song “Party Doll,” told Allison he was looking for a sax player to take on tour with him. Allison recommended Keys and the young sax-blower kissed home and high school goodbye.
Right time, right place
He was immediately hooked on the road, which led to big cities such as New York, where his association with Knox landed him a recording session in 1961 with Dion, during which Keys recorded the sax accompaniment and solo on “The Wanderer.”
In 1962, Keys was once again in the right place at the right time in Los Angeles, when an old friend from Lubbock, now a songwriter in L.A., called Keys in as a last-minute replacement for a player who couldn't make a recording date. The kid found himself playing sax on the session for Elvis Presley's “Return to Sender.”
“I was a teenager, I was 18,” Keys said. “It's still one of the coolest things I've ever done.”
But later that year, Knox had to abandon the tour for family reasons, and Keys and the other band members found themselves stuck in Tulsa.
“We got sorta stranded there,” Keys said. “I remember we were playin' in a place called the Fondalight Club. … I was playin' with a guy named Jimmy Markham (singer, harmonica player), who still lives there to this day. Through Jimmy I met (fiddle player) Bill Boatman, (drummer) Jimmy Karstein and (bassist) Carl Radle and a whole bunch of people.”
This was a time when “the great Okie Musicians Migration to Los Angeles,” as Keys calls it, was well under way. Keys spent a few months playing clubs around Tulsa until Buddy Knox's booking agent got him a gig with a band that was going to back clean-cut teen idol Bobby Vee on Dick Clark's Caravan of Stars Tour, which also included Little Anthony & the Imperials, Freddie Cannon, Major Lance, the Shangri-La's and many others.
Stones connection
It was on that tour, when it stopped at the Teenage World's Fair in San Antonio in June 1964, that Keys first met the Rolling Stones. They were interested that Keys had known Buddy Holly, as the Stones' current single at the time was a cover of Holly's “Not Fade Away.”
Keys, in turn, was most impressed with Richards, because he reminded the sax-player of Holly.
In his book, Keys wrote, “even though they didn't look alike physically, they had a lot of the same qualities. They were both highly motivated people. I mean, Holly knew he was gonna make it … he had no fear. And that's what I saw right away in Keith Richards. It was one of those moments, like a chill-down-to-the-spine moment. He just had that same look in his eye.”
When the Dick Clark tour ended, Keys headed back to Tulsa, and ended up getting swept along in that “Okie Musicians Migration” to L.A., where “you couldn't throw a stick without hittin' an Okie — or maybe even two of 'em.”
“Man, they were in abundance,” Keys said. “They were all out there, I think, following my Texas buddies … Jerry Allison, Joe B. Mauldin, Sonny Curtis and, of course, Snuff Garrett. Texans and Okies just seemed to get together.”
Keys recalls becoming a regular at “West Coast Okies Headquarters,” which was Leon Russell's house in North Hollywood, and that's where Keys connected with the beginnings of Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett's band, which included Oklahomans Karstein on drums, Radle on bass, Johnny (later J.J.) Cale on guitar, and later Jim Keltner on drums.
It was through his stint with the Bramletts and his friendship with Russell that he met such British luminaries as Eric Clapton and George Harrison, which led to still more introductions — and gigs on record or onstage — with John Lennon, Joe Cocker (on the Mad Dogs & Englishmen Tour with Russell as band leader), Yoko Ono, Ringo Starr, Keith Moon, Warren Zevon and Sheryl Crow, to name a few.
Branching out
He was finishing sessions in London on Harrison's “All Things Must Pass” in 1969 when he ran into Mick Jagger at a nightclub.
“He was wanting to maybe branch out the Stones stuff and they had a couple of songs that were oriented more toward Otis Redding and the Memphis-Stax sound, and he saw the opportunity for Jim (Price, Keys' longtime horn section partner) and I to play there and see if it was what he was lookin' for. Apparently it was.”
Indeed, it was the beginning of a long and beautiful creative and personal friendship with the Stones. There are a few anecdotes in Keys' book about “whenever Keith and I would get drunk and rowdy,” smoke hash and mess with “drugs and chicks,” and stories about living with Jagger early on, when the singer was a bachelor, and they “caroused around London together. What can I say? It was not a bad time. We were a couple of bachelors, especially a guy from Texas, ridin' around in a Rolls-Royce with this internationally-known son of Satan.”
But in his memoir, Keys goes easy on the “sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll” aspects of his career, concentrating more on the music he's made, and the people with whom he's made it over the years — particularly the people he's become closest to, such as Richards.
“I just got a fax from Keith yesterday. He started readin' the book, and he says he likes it better than his,” Keys said.
“He's the best son of a bitch I ever met in my life, you know, in every way. You can depend on him. He's honest. He does not lie. He does not bull - - - -. And besides, he plays guitar just about as good as anybody I've every played with. And I just like him. I like his spirit. I like his heart.”
These days Keys is keeping busy with his own band, the Suffering Bastards, but he's ready for his next call from his friend in this 50th anniversary year of the Stones.
“I feel that if they do another tour, whatever they do, there's a good chance I'll be there,” he said.
