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Ronnie Wood's Smile: And Where It Led
Ronnie Wood's Smile: And Where It Led
Ronnie Wood's Smile: And Where It Led
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Ronnie Wood's Smile: And Where It Led

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While countless pages have been written about the Rolling Stones and its members, little attention has been given to the motivations and machinations of the fan base that makes this band the top grossing act in musical history. Author Wendy Mullen describes her descent from regular fan to near stalker as her interest in guitarist Ronnie Wood is propelled almost to obsession by the rise of the internet and a few interactions with Ronnie on stage. You neednt be a Stones fan to be amused by the array of comical characters and adventures that ensue; resist though you may, this funny, self-effacing tale will suck you into caring about her pursuit as much as the author does and will reveal your own fascinations and obsessions.



www.slideonron.com

LanguageEnglish
PublisherAuthorHouse
Release dateJan 26, 2005
ISBN9781420812800
Ronnie Wood's Smile: And Where It Led
Author

Wendy Ellison Mullen

Wendy Ellison Mullen holds a Ph.D. in English Literature and Composition Theory.  She is a writer, a teacher of writing, a singer of opera and blues, a guitar player of sorts, and a card-carrying soccer Mom.  She lives in Seattle with her husband, who likes the Stones; her two daughters, who hate them; and her collection of Ronnie Wood CDs.   Wendy is the webmistress of the original Ronnie Wood website on the net.

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    Ronnie Wood's Smile - Wendy Ellison Mullen

    Ronnie Wood’s Smile

    And where it led

    by

    Wendy Ellison Mullen

    Title_Page_Logo.ai

    © 2005 Wendy Ellison Mullen.

    All Rights Reserved.

    No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

    First published by AuthorHouse 03/01/05

    ISBN: 1-4208-1280-7 (e)

    ISBN: 1-4208-1279-3 (sc)

    ISBN: 9781420812800 (ebk)

    Printed in the United States of America

    Bloomington, Indiana

    Contents

    Introduction

    1 Seattle

    The First Smile

    2 A Website Is Born

    3 Portland

    & the T-Shirt

    4 Anaheim

    The scarf tradition begins

    5 San Jose, Part 1

    Oh, it’s YOU!

    6 San Jose, Part 2

    Thank you, dahling…

    7 SlideOnRon

    8 Dublin

    I know you’re with the band…

    9 Shepherd’s Bush

    That’s MY guitar!

    10 The CC Club

    Slash is good, isn’t he?

    11 The Great Ticket Chase

    12 The Orpheum

    Hot, hot, hot

    13 The Aragon

    14 The Wiltern

    Just a guy trying to look like Tom Petty.

    15 San Francisco

    Stormy Weather

    16 The Rolling Stones Shebeen

    Epilogue

    Quoted Songs

    To Larry for delivering the letter

    To Craig for dragging me on one foot

    To Peter for not complaining about the constant music in the house

    To Chuch Magee for coming to trust me

    To Johnny Starbuck for helping when he didn’t have to

    And most of all

    To Robbie McGrath for giving me

    an ending

    Introduction

    When people ask me what I do for a hobby, I say (when I’m feeling honest) I follow the Rolling Stones. Some people golf, others play bridge, some scuba-dive—me, I’m a hard-core Stones fan–an unusual hobby for a woman who used to want to be an opera singer, to say the least–and the reaction I get when I admit to it is either puzzlement or amazement–or very occasionally disgust. Usually I end up having to explain why being a fan of a rock band can actually be a hobby, which is why I don’t always admit to it. Some days it’s more like a full-time job than a hobby. I spend my free moments emailing other fans, reading reviews of the current tour (when there is one), collecting obscure recordings (often unlistenable), tracking down decent photographs, and working on my Ronnie Wood website into the wee hours of the night. On any given day, I’ve put in between one and four hours.

    The website takes the most time. I manage the original and, if I do say so myself, perhaps the best site on the World Wide Web dedicated to guitarist Ronnie Wood, the least famous member of the Rolling Stones. My site gets a couple of hundred hits a week. People write me out of the blue with strange little questions about Ronnie…what ever happened to his first wife? What guitar does he play on Street Fighting Man? What are his kids’ names? What’s his wedding anniversary? And the question I’ve gotten the most: ‘Can you tell me the chords to Breathe On Me?’ What surprises me more than anything about this potpourri of questions is that more than half the time I know the answers. People actually believe I’m some kind of Ronnie Wood expert. Just recently I even gave a lecture on Ronnie and the Stones for a music appreciation class at Seattle Pacific University. I’m starting to believe in my expertise myself.

    Being an internationally consulted expert on Ronnie Wood is a valid, if eccentric, identity. I’m working up to using it in introductions with the various people I run into in daily life—doctors, stock-brokers, fellow dinner-party guests—the kind of people who are always asking what one does. Usually when faced with the inevitable question How is it that you live, and what is it you do? I dissemble. Since I gave up teaching English a few years back, there is no easy answer to this ubiquitous query. Perhaps though, next time I’m asked, I shall smile, wring their hand, clap them on the back, and declare, I’m the world’s foremost authority on Ronnie Wood! Perhaps they’ll mistake him for some Dead Figure of Consequence. It would be amusing to see how long these strangers would pretend to know who I’m talking about. Let’s face it: Keith Richards is a household name, but Ronnie Wood isn’t. If I let slip that I have a PhD in literature, people would probably assume he’s some obscure poet. (He is.) After all, in our world, it’s a respected profession to be an expert on an artist… Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Monet, Brahms: Universities give out jobs and assign Chairs on this basis. But the subject of such study is usually dead and, with the possible exception of Elvis, never in the genre of rock’n’roll. In this case, of course, my subject is still alive, could care less if anyone is ever expert on him, and could perfectly well answer all these questions by himself if he cared to bother.

    Or maybe not.

    Last December, for instance, he was rehearsing with a band for a handful of solo concerts he gave in Dublin and London (solo meaning with-musicians-other-than-the-Rolling-Stones not all-alone-on-stage.) Ronnie has been performing with bands since the ‘60s and has written songs with all of them and so has quite a body of work to choose from when he goes to perform. In this case, he decided to play a certain song, but, being a guitarist and probably not the most organized guy in the world, he didn’t remember the words to it. One can’t really imagine a rock-star having a nice file full of manila folders neatly arranged alphabetically in a cabinet somewhere. At least not Ronnie Wood anyway. He had to ask the keyboardist who was working with him, a very nice guy named Tramper Price, to go to the Internet and find the words to the song.

    Tramper obliged. He pulled up my site from one of the search engines, found the lyrics, printed them out, and handed them to Ronnie. Now how weird is that? My fascination with Ronnie helps out the man himself. Ronnie writes a song, records it, forgets it, and then I transcribe it and give it back to him. You see? He needs me. Even if he doesn’t realize it yet. I chuckle to myself and wonder if the song was Breathe On Me. Perhaps he needed the chords too.

    Probably not.

    This, then, is the tale of how I got to be one of the foremost authorities on Ronnie Wood. Song-writer. Accomplished guitarist. An artist and painter of celebrity portraits. A man completely indifferent to my own existence. It is a tale where celebrity and obscurity live side by side, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in offensive intrusion. But most of all, it is a tale of dreams. For we all need someone we can dream on …and if we want to, we can dream on the Rolling Stones.

    And many of us do.

    Question: Who joined the Rolling Stones as the second guitarist in 1975?

    Answer: Ronnie Wood

    1 Seattle

    The First Smile

    The Rolling Stones and I never managed to be in the same city at the same time until 1994 when they played a concert in Seattle. Okay, so they’d probably played in Boston in 1964 or 1965 when I was in the second or third grade, but that didn’t exactly count. I hadn’t even known about it. And then there was the time in 1972 when my boyfriend invited me to drive one hundred miles south to Los Angeles to see Hair; I was 15, and he was 16. As we headed out the door, embarrassed I guess about the then-famous nude scene, he lied to his mother when she asked where we were going. To see the Rolling Stones, he said. I thought this a really pathetic lie because anyone would know that the Stones weren’t in town or else surely we’d be going to see them instead of seeing Hair. At least I would. But it turns out they were in Los Angeles that summer; I just didn’t know it. Anyway, that was as close as I’d come in 30 years to seeing them. Implicated in a lie about seeing them.

    But this time I heard the concert announcement on the radio and the ticket sale date. This was my chance to see The Rolling Stones—a band that had been in my earliest memories. I was so excited; I had to go…

    The show was scheduled for the Kingdome. 50,000 fans. That sounded really scary–my mind skipping back to the Santana concert in 1972 where the crowd was so anxious to enter that I was actually lifted off my feet by the crush–and I wanted Peter, my husband, to come with me. After all, he liked the Rolling Stones too. But his reaction was bleak: $50 to see a rock concert? No way. That’s absurd. I refuse to go on principle. You go ahead.

    What a price…what a price to pay.

    But I was afraid—afraid to go by myself into the huge mob I imagined Stones fans to be. I’d never even attended a sporting event in a stadium of any size; it just wasn’t in my repertoire. Without any experience in these matters, it seemed somehow rash to go into a crowd of 50,000 by oneself (my how I’ve changed!) –and so I got out my personal address book and started calling people. Friend after friend turned me down.

    I don’t like rock concerts, said the first.

    I won’t see a show in the Kingdome, said the second.

    I saw them in Amsterdam in back in 1822 and they were awful.

    I don’t like crowds.

    I saw them the last time they came, and the sound was terrible—pure mush.

    Oh, I’d love to!! How much?… $50??? I can’t afford that. I’m sorry.

    I was stymied and frustrated and made rather nervous by the guy who’d said the Stones had been terrible the last time they had played in the Kingdome. Not too mention my Danish friend who’d seen them in Amsterdam. Maybe they weren’t any good live. After all that was the reason I’d given up going to rock concerts back in the mid-seventies—out of tune singing, bad sound, and sloppy musicianship.

    The tickets went on sale. I didn’t buy any. I would pass. I wouldn’t see the Rolling Stones. The Road Not Taken. They probably weren’t as good as their records anyway, I placated myself. The sound in the Kingdome would be mush. Like a Biblical dictum, it was meet and right, so not to do.

    The day of the concert finally came. I was still teaching high school at the time, and had an office on the top floor of an older building. In my little cubby of a room, with a high round window that I couldn’t even see out of, and several copies of Beowulf and The Merchant of Venice abandoned by former students and stacked here and there, I moped. No one in the floors below could hear my radio tuned to the one radio station in town blasting nothing but Rolling Stones songs all day to celebrate the band’s arrival and depress the hell out of ticketless me.

    I was miserable. What a fool I’ve been. Why hadn’t I just bought a ticket???? Now the show was sold out. Song after song rolled over me…suddenly I heard the door at the bottom of the 3rd floor stairs slam shut, someone was on their way up to my hideout. I was so gloomy, I didn’t even reach over to turn down the music.

    One never recognizes those key days, those days when one’s life takes an abrupt turn, for better or worse, and one starts down a Dickensian path of roses or of chains or of electric guitars. Nothing alerted me that this day set in place string of events that would alter the course of my life and linger long in my memory.

    And so my path changed when I heard the clip clap of her feet on the stairs and in walked Hallie, a former student, come to beg a recommendation off me for a summer job. I veered suddenly in a new direction. Instantly she congratulated me, assuming I was attending the concert because of the music that she’d heard as soon as she’d opened the stairway door. When I told her I didn’t have tickets, she replied Neither do I! and so we moped and commiserated and cursed and eventually found ourselves calling Ticketmaster who gave us the excellent news that additional seats on the floor had just been released. Wow!! Did I ever feel lucky and special. The hand of fate was on me now.

    By seven o’clock that evening, I was prancing around my house, excitement mounting as I waited for my young friend. Finally a horn honked, I got my coat and grabbed my hat, made the [car] in seconds flat. (Oops. Wrong band.) Hallie was in reverse as I closed my car door. Her sister Nicole, another former student, was grinning, thrilled to be included at the last minute. The next hour had us combing the streets of Seattle for a parking spot, jogging to the venue, entering as the opening band finished, and discovering that our seats did not exist!

    Tossed from usher to Ticketmaster to usher, our sojourn finally ended, and we found ourselves almost at the front of the floor. The hands of fate picked me up and they put me back down. The great stage towered above us and to the right. Directly to our left rose an enormous pillar of metal frames and mesh. Stories tall stood the speakers. We had landed on the edge of one extension of the stage. The rectangular part of the main stage was huge, and from each end extended a 6 or 8 foot wide ramp…this ramp could bring the performers right in front of us.

    Almost immediately the lights dimmed, and the rhythmic drumming began, the crowd rose to its feet, and there was Mick Jagger, rolling right out of my childhood, through my dreams and out on to the center of the stage. He sang prophetically, "I’m gonna tell you how it’s a gonna be…you’re gonna give your love to me. . ."

    Soon, I was mesmerized. Time passed but I didn’t know it. I was completely caught up in the sounds I was hearing. There was Mick Jagger, dancing right in front of me when he occasionally came out to the end of the extension; and over on Mick’s left was Keith Richards, now holding arms and guitar perfectly still, fingers flying, now raising elbows and one knee in an upstroke of rhythm. Charlie Watts sat perched at the back of center stage, among a tribe of drums. And there was the other guitarist. What was his name again? I tried to recall, but was drawn back into the music. It didn’t matter. The music drove the hour, rolled it up and flowed into the next with barely a pause and into the third—all while I remained unaware of time. The power of the band was extraordinary. Why had I ever imagined that the Rolling Stones wouldn’t be able to play live? Foolish woman! Gone were all doubts about whether rock could be as compelling as classical music. That night in Seattle in December 15, 1994, I rediscovered the music of the Rolling Stones. I’d lost it for a few years. But I was back. They were here. Life was now. The power. The rhythmic drive. The absolute necessity of moving with the music. And yes, the volume. The volume was definitely part of it.

    I leaned on the rail to the barrier between the audience and the stage, nodding my head or dancing with my upper body. The audience remained standing throughout the show, except for a few Philistines who sat down during Keith’s set. (I was, then, one of them.) And then during It’s Only Rock’n’Roll, I saw that other guitarist come two-stepping down the extension as he played the guitar, long black hair sailing out behind him. Up to this point, only Mick had ventured out as far as we were. But Mick is ever the professional performer, playing up and to the back of the house; he never looks down. But this guitarist was different. He came out towards us as though with a purpose, scanning the audience before him. When he saw me, he stopped. His hands came off the guitar, and he grinned. He looked at me alone. Oh what a beautiful smile! And as we stood there for a brief moment eye to eye, two look at two, a couple amidst 50,000, he spoke to me. Love is strong and you’re so sweet and someday soon we’ve got to meet. His smile pierced through me and drew me in. We were together. Alone in a crowd. At the foot of 15 stories of stereo speakers pulsing with rhythm. A glimpse of you was all it took/ A stranger’s glance it got me hooked. Mick danced somewhere in the distance.

    What exactly he said, I’ll probably never know. But it was two syllables. Two vivid syllables. Then he turned away and started playing the guitar again, jumping back into the song. My mind was still reaching out to him, as I was left watching his back, completely amazed. I’ll follow you across the stars. I’ll look for you in seedy bars. Hallie and Nicole clapped me on the back and yelled, What did he say? They laughed and gesticulated. It’s more than just a dream. And for a moment I wondered why he had looked at me instead of at these young college girls. Wow. I need some time…we make a beautiful team. And how handsome he was?! Why had I ever thought he was anything other than gorgeous? All those growling grimaces on the covers of albums were just poses. I knew the real … .Ronnie. Ronnie. It came to me. Ronnie Wood. The warm, smiling, magnetic Ronnie Wood.

    But even as these thoughts washed over me, the image of that smile started to fade. I tried to hold on to it in my mind’s eye but it was dimming. Fading away. Love is love but not fade away, Mick had sung. And oh, how I wanted to remember that smile.

    Somehow I lived through the last few songs, and then Hallie, Nicole, and I burst forth on to the night streets of Seattle reborn. I was nine years old again. I sang and strutted, when a man comes on the radio… Hallie and Nicole sang back up: Hey Hey Hey! The excitement carried us the two miles back to our car in no time. Start me up and I’ll never stop.

    The next day I taught my classes with my ears ringing. A student waltzed in a quarter of an hour late, I’m gonna tell you how it’s a gonna be, I chanted. You’re late! Without missing a beat, he replied, My love’s bigger than a Cadillac…I tried to show you but you’re driving me back. Touché’. This cute blue-eyed longhaired straggler was all of 17. How did he know this song? It was the last day of school before Christmas vacation, we danced and sang and played Jeopardy on the blackboard, until the lot of us burst forth on dreary, traffic-filled world of commuters. Just another day for them.

    But not for me.

    After school I braved the rain and traffic, taking the long way home to swing past Silver Platters, the CD store. I flipped through Stones albums I’d never known existed (the last Stones album I’d purchased had been Goat’s Head Soup). Look at all these! My ears were ringing at once in anticipation and in memory of the all-too-real resonance of our concert seats beneath the speaker banks.

    Another customer came up to me. Were you at the concert last night?

    Of course! I said, amazed once again that I had come so close to missing it, to dooming myself to going home, feeding my fish, falling asleep on a stack of English papers. But instead today I was out buying CDs, a new initiate of an exclusive club with impeccable taste, and here was another member. We got it. We the initiates understood the power of the Stones. Until you understand, you are stuck puzzling on the outside, aware only of the buzz, deaf to the roar of the crowd. We exchanged the passwords: were you at The Concert? Answer: of course. I was on the in. I was part of what was happening. And it’s all right now—in fact it’s a gas.

    That day I bought Voodoo Lounge, in honor of the tour and a couple of the other albums I had on vinyl; and I also picked up Tattoo You to get Start Me Up and of course, It’s Only Rock’n’Roll in honor of Ronnie’s smile. As I approached the cash register, after exchanging more words of sublime understanding with a couple of other members of my new club who had wandered into the section, I had in my hands my first recorded work of Ronnie Wood. The first in a collection I did not know I’d begun.

    But that smile of his had almost completely faded in my memory. My ears still rang from the music, but I couldn’t see Ronnie anymore. Where was the smile? I could no longer visualize that charming fellow who had walked down the ramp and swept me up. Don’t fade away. Don’t fade away. And so I found myself on the first Saturday of Winter Break in Seattle’s University District, entering and exiting the poster stores, rifling through tray after tray of rock posters, looking for my smile. I’ll follow you through swirling seas/ down darkened woods/ with silent trees.

    My quest had begun.

    I found several Rolling Stones posters that day, but the majority of them was either just of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards or were before Ronnie joined the band, and in none of them was Ronnie smiling. I bought a couple anyway for my classroom.

    Suddenly Selena, the Mexican American singer, popped into my mind—and how she had a fan club whose primary function it seemed was to dispense photos of her for the asking. That is until the fan club president shot her. Surely the Rolling Stones had a fan club? But how does one find such an organization? It wasn’t exactly listed in the phone book. I flipped over my new copy of Voodoo Lounge and spotted the Virgin Records logo and address. So I shot a letter off to Virgin asking how to join the Rolling Stones Fan Club, and how to get a promotional photo of Ronnie Wood (smiling—please). I never heard a peep in response.

    Vacation ended and it was back to school. The experience of Ronnie’s smile was so present in my days that I found myself on a drizzly afternoon telling the tale to Rob the maintenance man—he was an actor and a music lover. Then blue turns to gray/ and try as you may, you just don’t feel good… I confided in Rob and told him of the smile and my quest for a photo of Ronnie and asked his advice. And you know that you must find [him] find [him] find him. A couple of days later, Rob handed me a piece of paper with an email address.

    I found this for you, he said. It’s the Rolling Stones internet fan club. Maybe they’d know how to get a photo for you.

    An internet fan club? How does that work? Remember this is January 1995, the Internet dark ages. My school had email, as did my husband’s computer company, and my brother’s university, but hardly anyone else I knew did. Virtually no one had Internet service at their home. Search engines like Google, did not exist. Rob said he wasn’t really sure, but if I wrote to this address, it would sign me up. I mumbled my thanks and wandered back up to my garret office, turned on my Mac and entered the world of Undercover.

    Undercover is the name of the first Rolling Stones mailing list discussion group on the internet. It’s a daily listserv, and members can join the immediate list and get every post as it’s sent, thus allowing them to enter into the conversation, or they can receive a daily digest version that puts all the posts of the day before into one long email. Undercover is also the name of an obscure, but very cool, Rolling Stones album released in the 80s. A great name for an Internet fan club… keep it all out of sight. Undercover, undercover of the night. I liked the idea of a nearly Secret Society, with passwords, and initiations. People in the know, hovering on the scene just out of sight. I was liking this new club of mine. Undercover of the Internet.

    Thus appeared everyday on my computer at school the Undercover Daily Digest, and in between scanning Wordsworth sonnets and student papers and watering my spider plants, I started to read about the continuation of the Voodoo Lounge tour as it moved out of the U.S and into other parts of the world. Individuals would write in about their personal concert experience. The band had taken about three weeks off after the two Vancouver shows succeeding the Seattle show I’d seen. They had re-opened in Mexico City and were off to Sao Paolo and Rio. Someone posted the set-list from each date. But these posts were just the tip of the chattering iceberg. Below lay dozens of people writing whatever came into their minds—perhaps it was their opinions on a particular song on a particular album, various on-going arguments about which guitarist played which bit on certain album cuts, folks asked questions, such as: does anyone know what Mick is saying in a certain song? And what was most amazing to me, someone always did. And lots and lots of inside jokes. Something about cheese. Lots and lots of acronyms. SHRA (Should Have Read Ahead) IAW_ (I Agree With fill-in-the-blank), SOTD (Song Of The Day), and perhaps my personal favorite: IMHO (In My Humble Opinion). OB Stones: perhaps unique to Undercover, this one means obligatory Stones reference –and is used before launching into a

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