FTV: Bill Wyman

 

     Quick, when you think of the Rolling Stones, whose name(s) come to mind?   Mick Jagger and Keith Richard(s), aka Mick and Keef or the Glimmer Twins,  of course.  The second ‘(s)’ is present for Keith because early on, Keef was just plain ‘Keith Richard’.  Along the way, the adoring press and/or fans added the extra letter.  So why don’t founding member Brian Jones, drummer Charlie Watts, keyboard player Ian Stewart, and bassist Bill Wyman spring to mind whenever the Stones come up in conversation?

     Starting with Jones, he gets a whole different kind of coverage because a) very few people remember that Mick and Keef joined Brian’s band, b) Jones eventually got bumped out of the Stones as they moved from the blues to a more commercial sound, and c) he died tragically many years ago.  He was an immensely talented musician who schooled M & K about American blues and added a lot of musical flavors to their earliest records.  Jone’s death is another part of his whole sad story and more details of his life can be found in the FTV archives at www.woas-fm.org (FTV:  Brian Jones – February 3, 2021).

     We have also covered Charlie Watts in the past (FTV:  Charlie Watts – November 24, 2021).  Charlie was a bit older than the other lads and was already in an established band when the Stones recruited him.  Being a family guy with bills to pay, they finally lured him with the promise of a steady weekly paycheck and many gigs.  To make good on the first enticement they had to dig deep into their own pockets.  The ‘many gigs’ part was a stretch of the truth and it took a little longer to make that happen.  Charlie was pretty quiet but not a wallflower.  Mick made the mistake of calling Watts, ‘my drummer’ which resulted in a punch in the nose which Charlie punctuated with, “Don’t ever call me that again.  You’re my singer.”  Watching Watt’s facial expressions behind some of Mick’s moves in videos and on stage are a small window into what he thought of the whole stardom trip.  His death was another solid blow to the band’s kisser but there was never any question about them continuing on when he died (with drummer Steve Jordan taking over the drum throne).  Jordan had been Watt’s substitute a few times in the past and also played with Keef’s X Pensive Winos band when the Glimmer Twins were feuding.

     Ian Stewart, the unseen sixth Stone, was also a founding member of the band.  His keyboard pounding was a big part of their music but his aesthetics were deemed ‘too square’ when the band began to flaunt a hipper image.  Manager Andrew Loog Oldham felt Ian did not fit the band’s new image so he became the road manager and unseen pianist in May of 1963.  In their glory years, Ian may have been a phantom during concerts but his importance can not be ignored.  Sadly, Stewart also passed from this mortal coil on December 12, 1985.

     This brings us to Bill Wyman.  If people thought Charlie Watts was the ‘quiet Stone’ (with the solid right hook), they must have thought Wyman was a statue.  He didn’t emote much on stage  or in the music press, but there was much more to Bill Wyman than he was willing to show.  I read that when Peter Frampton was just a teen, he used to visit the Wyman home.   The future guitarist for the Herd / Humble Pie  / and later as a solo star, I discovered Peter got a lot of advice from Bill which showed another side of the bass player.  Just because one is content to stay in the shadows when the two front guys hog the spotlight (Keef and Mick – hog the spotlight?), it doesn’t mean they are inert off stage as well.  Bill Wyman was a true mentor to Frampton and even got him into Wyman’s former band when Bill went off to join the Stones’ circus.

     William George Perks was born on October 24, 1936 in Lewisham, London England which would make him 88 years old at this time.  His father (William, Sr)  was a bricklayer and Bill was one of six children looked after by his mother, Katleen Perks.  His early life in wartime was spent mostly in Penge, Southeast London and his childhood was ‘scarred by poverty’.  The family survived The Blitz and an enemy fighter strafing that killed some of their neighbors.  His tenure at Grammar School (1947 to Easter of 1953) ended before the GCE exams when his father insisted he take a job for a bookmaker.  Bill was called up for his two year national service in the Royal Air Force in January 1955.  He signed up for an extra year and spent the last part of his service in the Motor Transport Section at Oldenburg Air Base in North Germany.  The dance halls in Germany and American Armed Forces Network radio served as his introduction to rock and roll.  When he bought his first guitar, Bill and fellow RAF pal Casey Jones formed a skiffle band on base.

     Between the ages of 10 and 13, Bill took piano lessons.  A year after his first marriage (he was 24, she was 18), he bought a Burns electric guitar.  He was dissatisfied with his progress and switched to bass after hearing one played at a Barron Knight show.  In 1961 he created a fretless bass by removing the frets from the Dallas Tuxedo bass he played in the south London band, The Cliftons.  Drummer Tony Chapman let him know that a rhythm and blues band called the Rolling Stones was seeking a bass player.  Wyman auditioned at a club in Chelsea on December 7, 1962.  When he replaced original bassist Dick Taylor, he became the oldest member of the band.  Wyman changed his last name in August of 1964, using a phonetic spelling of another Royal Air Force service friend named Lee Whyman.

     Wyman performed background vocals on early recordings and in concert up through 1967.  He was a less prolific writer for the Stones, supplying only two songs;  In Another Land on which he sang lead vocals and Sweet Lisle Lucy which Jagger sang.  Without consulting Wyman or the band, manager Alan Klein retitled the latter tune (written about London’s infamous red light district centered on Soho’s Lisle Street) Downtown Suzie.  Bill was not happy. 

     Wyman and Jones were close friends and often roomed together on the road.  They remained close even after Brian was drifting away from (and then out of) the band.  Bill was distraught when Jones died.  He and drummer Charlie Watts were the only Stones to attend Brian’s funeral.  Wyman also became good friends with Mick Taylor, Jone’s replacement in the Stones.  When Taylor also departed from the band in 1974, Bill continued to work with him on various records.

     Wyman has written two books based on the journals he has kept throughout his life.  The first was a 1990 autobiography (Stone Alone) and a 2002 chronicle of life with the band called Rolling with the Stones.  Among the revelations in his written work, he states that the riff that Jumpin’ Jack Flash was built around was written by Brian Jones, Charlie Watts, and himself.  He also revealed that the band’s vote to release (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction as a single was a 3-2 affair.  The Jones, Watts, Wyman block voted ‘yes’ while Mick and Keef voted ‘no’ feeling it was not ‘sufficiently commercial’.  Sales numbers and the track’s longevity on Classic Rock Radio would certainly prove M & K were wrong.  

     While still a Stone, Bill participated in a variety of musical projects.  He can be found on 1971’s The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions which also featured Eric Clapton, Charlie Watts, Steve Winwood, and (of course) Howlin’ Wolf himself.  He released his first solo single in 1981 ((Si Si) Je Suis un Rock Star) which went top twenty in many markets.  Wyman also composed the soundtrack for the Ryan O’Neil / Omar Sharif film Green Ice (1981) and later in the decade, he composed music for a couple of Italian films as well.  

     When his friend Ronnie Lane (formerly of Faces and the Small Faces) began battling Multiple Sclerosis in 1983, Bill put together a fundraising campaign.  Called Action Research into Multiple Sclerosis, it was a concert tour by Willie and the Poor Boys.  The group (including a rotating group of musicians that included Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and Charlie Watts, among others) toured the United States and the United Kingdom.  Truly, Bill Wyman was gathering no moss in and out of the Rolling Stones.

     After their 1989-1990 Steel Wheels and Urban Jungle Tours, Wyman  left the band officially in January of 1993.  Another rotating cast of musicians came together in 1997 as ‘Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings’.  Described as a ‘cross-generational group that performs covers of blues, jazz, soul, rock & roll, and occasional Stones songs’, Wyman sticks to playing bass and occasional vocals (like Chuck Berry’s You Never Can Tell and the Stones Honky Tonk Women).  A 2009 reunion show by the Faces found Bill subbing for the late Ronnie Lane (which he had also done in 1986 and 1993).  He also performed on two tracks of an Ian Stewart tribute album (Boogie for Stu) released in April of 2011.  

     Wyman and Taylor appeared as special guests for a couple of tracks with the Rolling Stones in 2012.  Bill later announced he would not be playing occasional shows with them after 2013.  He had previously been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Stones (1989).  Wyman participated in the making of a documentary about him (Oliver Murray’s The Quiet One) in 2019.  He  briefly returned to record Live by the Sword with the Stones for their 2023 album Hackney Diamonds (his first recording with them since 1991).  A ninth solo album (Drive My Car) released in August of 2024 shows that Bill Wyman still has an active career.

     Wyman’s personal life was almost as busy (and complicated) as his band life.  His first marriage lasted from 1958 until 1969 and produced a son.  He later fathered a child with a woman he met on an Australian tour in 1965.  Bill was unaware of this daughter until the Stones returned to Australia.  At this time he was told the mother and daughter had moved to New Zealand and neither they nor he tried to make contact.  His marriage to 18 year old Mandy Smith in 1989 (Bill would have been 52) would only last two years but would take a strange turn.  Bill’s son from his first marriage would later wed Smith’s mother, making Wyman, “his own son-in-law, the father-in-law of his ex-mother-in-law, as well as the step-grandfather of his ex-wife.”  Yes, it is very confusing.  Wife number three, Suzanne Accosta, had been friends with Bill since 1980.  In the wake of the short lived marriage to Smith, the couple wed in 1993 with the union adding three daughters to his brood.

     ‘All Stones and no play’ would not have suited Bill Wyman.  A man of many interests, it is a certainty he was never bored.  He became a lifelong fan of the Crystal Palace football team after attending a match with his father as a birthday present.  During a 1990 European tour with the Stones, he faked a toothache, flew back to England to see the dentist, but in reality he went to see Palace play in the 1990 FA Cup at Wembley.  After years of touring, he developed a fear of flying soon after the Steel Wheels tour (which would have complicated his ‘zip back to London to watch Crystal Palace play’ scheme).

     As if he didn’t have enough to keep him occupied, Wyman began selling metal detectors in 2007.  The selling bit came about because he was deep enough in the treasure hunting gig that he published an illustrated book about it in 2005.  Entitled Treasure Islands, it was co-written with Richard Havers.  There is no evidence that his hobbies were disrupted at all when he gave up smoking (a 55 year old habit) in 2009.

     Throughout his career, Wyman has been an avid photographer.  Retrospectives of his works were launched in 2010 (an exhibition in St. Paul de Vence) and in 2013 (at the Rook & Raven Gallery in London).  The London showing featured a selection of Bill’s images that had been reworked by artists.  The latter part of the 2010s put a scare in Wyman when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer (2016) but he was projected then to make a full recovery.

     All in all, Bill Wyman has led the life he wanted to live.  He quit the Rolling Stones for a couple of reasons, but mostly it was his desire to spend time on other interests and projects outside the band.  In interviews, he was not shy about saying the Stones often felt like a one-man show, not a team effort.  Mick Jagger’s need to be in the spotlight kind of pushed everybody else into the background.  When Charlie Watts died, he further noted there was no question the band would go on without him because, “They have nothing else they can do.”  With that said, he also claims he left because he felt unappreciated – he just wanted to do other things.

     Is Bill bored with life outside of the Stones?  He is keeping himself plenty busy as a published author, an active collector, and a working musician who gets to pick and choose what and when (and with whom) he plays.  No, Bill Wyman is doing just fine, thank you.

 

Top Piece Video:  Speaking of Willie and the Poor Boys – here is a TV clip from 1984 . . . looks like they are having fun, doesn’t it?