If the Rolling Stones have been together for sixty years, it is because they have always known that if they split up, their solo careers would not be as relevant as those of their great rivals the Beatles. Perhaps it is also because they are very comfortable on a rock’n’roll throne that no one seems to have disputed with them all this time, and even because they love each other a lot and would miss each other sooner rather than later. This last theory, however, seems the most far-fetched considering the fights they have had since the group was born in 1962.
The most serious of all of them is surely the one between Ron Wood and Keith Richards in the mid-eighties, surely the most turbulent and unstable time for the band.
The episode was recounted by Wood himself in his memoirs: his Biography tells Ron Wood: “Everybody was mad at me at the time, and one day, after a fight with Keith, he stormed off to get his gun… After a while he came back with his ‘Derringer’, pointed it at me and insulted me. I calmly took out my ’44 Magnum’, and that was the last time Keith threatened me with his gun…until he does it again».
Of all the fights between the Stones that have been told during all these years, many are urban legends. So we will trust what they have told themselves. In the same book, Ron Wood recounted another of órdago, produced in a hotel more or less at the same time of the threat of western duel: «Keith burst into my room, broke the glass container of my pipe, and headed towards me looking at my head… he broke a bottle and cut me with it. I stormed out of there and went straight to Mick (Jagger) and Charlie (Watts), who were working on a song in a room just down the hall. And as I looked at them bleeding and staining the carpet, Mick looked at me and said, ‘Do you have any ideas for the bridge?’ Returning to my room, Richards pulled the razor from him, put it to my neck, and yelled, ‘I’d cut your fucking throat, but your girlfriend would never forgive me for the fuss she’d make…’. This is said by someone who used heroin for ten years.
In 1984, the one who got hurt in a fight was Mick Jagger, who received a punch from the calm Stone, Charlie Watts, who lost his nerve feeling belittled by the singer. This is how Keith Richards related it in his autobiography ‘Vida’ published in 2018. “We were in Amsterdam, and when we got back to the hotel around five in the morning, Mick called Charlie from the room phone because he had insisted on taking the last with him. I told him not to call him, not at that hour. But he did and he said, ‘Where’s my drummer?’ There was no answer. He hung up the phone. Mick and I were still sitting there, pretty pissed off… when, about twenty minutes later, there was a knock on the door. It was Charlie Watts. He was dressed in a Savile Row suit, perfectly dressed, tie, shaved, all the fucking gear. He could smell his cologne! I opened the door and he didn’t even look at me, he walked right past me and grabbed Mick and said, ‘Don’t you ever call me ‘your drummer’ again. I’m not your drummer, you’re my fucking singer. Then he picked it up by the lapels of the jacket he was wearing, which was mine, and gave it a right hook. Charlie threw his drummer punch, a punch I’ve seen a couple of times and it’s lethal; It takes a lot of balance and timing. You have to provoke him a lot to do something like that. And he threw it at Mick ». After being punched, Mick fell onto a silver platter of smoked salmon and then tried to sneak out a window, but Richards stopped him because the jacket was the one he had worn to his wedding and he didn’t want to lose it. So he tried to calm Watts down. “He took me twenty-four hours after that to convince Charlie not to shake him anymore. I thought it was over when I took him into his room, but twelve hours later he was still saying, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to go down and do it again.’
Also in the mid-eighties was when the relationship between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards reached its worst moment. The singer preferred to be more focused on developing his solo career, which Richards didn’t like at all. The thing did not come to blows (at least that we know), but it did come to music: Richards decided to respond by composing ‘All about you’, a song in which he did not hide his boredom with his partner, with lyrics that said: ‘ You always seem to haunt me, always try to haunt me, serving out injunctions, shouting out instructions / It is such a sad thing, to watch a good love die, I’ve had it up to here babe, I’ve got to say goodbye’ .
