60 YEARS AGO TODAY:
10/23 – The Jimi Hendrix Experience record their first single, “Hey Joe,” at De Lane Lea studios in London. It will become one of the band’s signature tunes.
Although the record doesn't do much here in The States (where it was delegated to the B-Side of Hendrix's second US single, "Foxey Lady"), it will be a Top Ten Single in the UK, where it peaks at #6.
60 YEARS AGO TODAY:
10/22/66 – The Supremes become the first female group to have a No.1 album on the US chart when “The Supremes A Go-Go” knocks The Beatles’ “Revolver” from the top of the charts.
... and he's got a brand new 10-CD Box Set coming out to celebrate ... which has absolutely nothing at all to do with The Rolling Stones!!!
Harvey Kubernik sent me this interview that he did with Wyman several years ago ... which ties in nicely with the brand new 10-CD Box Set of his recordings made with The Rhythm Kings, which is also coming out this weekend.
I have read two of Bill’s books, tracing the history of The Rolling Stones, and can assure you that they are both EXCELLENT, well-documented accounts presented from an even better than “fly on the wall” perspective. "Stone Alone" and "Rolling With The Stones" are both HIGHLY recommended reading. (kk)
Bill Wyman, performing with The Stones in Amsterdam, October 9th, 1970 -
Photo by Henry Diltz from the Diltz Archives, courtesy of Gary Strobl
Bill Wyman: A Rolling Stones Arrives at Age 90 with a new 10-CD Box Set of The Rhythm Kings.
Harvey Kubernik’s 2009 interview with Bill Wyman About The Rolling Stones
By Harvey Kubernik ( © 2009 )
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The Rolling Stones’ bass player Bill Wyman, in their 1962-1993 heyday, always kept himself busy out of the recording studio and off stage.
Besides writing books, he stayed very active in the Rhythm Kings. Wyman, this week via Demon Music, has released a 10-CD boxed set of 144 tracks housing the band’s output.
The collection has five studio albums, two live albums, some outtakes, and a Best of the Bootleg Kings, a compilation of live performances Wyman did for this endeavor. It also contains non-album B-sides and additional live recordings.
The Rhythm Kings Ultimate Collection coincides with Bill’s 90th birthday on October 24, 2026.
In 2009, I interviewed Bill Wyman at length about his book Rolling With The Stones, published by D.K. Publishing. The tome was a collaboration with author Richard Havers. It sold 300,000 copies worldwide.
Illustrated with more than 3,000 photographs taken by Bill and some of the world’s greatest photographers, this volume emerges as the one book all fans and casual followers of the Rolling Stones need to own. It’s a large collection, a complete all-access biography of the group that integrates manuscripts, press clippings, copious diaries, stage outfits, instruments, posters, set lists, private photographs and so much more.
"Publishers Weekly" proclaimed “Wyman’s obsession makes for a Rolling Stones fan’s delight ... And thanks to either reams of diaries or marvelous powers of recall unaffected by decades spent in a hard-partying rock band, he provides copious historical and observational data as well.”
Wyman displays an honest and humorous narrative, and Havers offers commentary that incorporates a lot of key moments in the band’s history.
In the book’s foreword, Bill explains the origin of "Rolling With The Stones", and immediately you realize, when glancing through the pages, that this illustrated scrapbook is well worth the $50.00 price it goes for in retail.
“I wanted to tell the band’s story from an historical viewpoint, because so much that has been written about the Stones skirts the truth, embellishes the truth or, in some cases, tells total untruths.”
The gorgeous design and layout only underscore how potent the elements are. I never thought that a rock ‘n’ roll outfit like The Rolling Stones could be captured on flat page documentation.
Wyman and Havers have developed a shorthand way of providing research and archive displayed with sensitivity and a lack of ego, rarely found in music books, particularly those about the Rolling Stones.
The whole package and compilation is absorbing that you sometimes forget the curator and guide was in the band for decades. And that previously, Wyman had written three books: Stone Alone: The Story of a Rock and Roll Band, Wyman Shoots Chagall, and Bill Wyman’s Blues Odyssey.
Bill Wyman was born in Southwest London in October, 1936, and joined The Rolling Stones in 1962.
When he became a Rolling Stone in ’62, Wyman kept a diary “so my son Stephen, then 1, would know I made two singles.”
He amicably left the band in 1993 with “no regrets,” and that year married Suzanne Acosta, a local Los Angeles area girl from Palisades High School. Wyman lives with his wife and three daughters in London.
During my hour interview with Bill at the Hotel Oceana in Santa Monica, California, we covered a lot of topics.
Q: Bill, the materials for this book are mind-blowing. And I know it barely scratched the surface of your extensive archive.
A. We literally used 1% or 2% of what I have. It doesn’t mean we’re gonna do another nine books, though. (laughs). One was enough. Move on to something else.
Q: Where did the concept of this book come from, and describe the process working with Richard Havers.
A: Well, the idea came because of the success of The Blues Odyssey last year. We were so pleased with that, and the award I got from the Blues Foundation, and that I’d already spoken to Richard previously, that I was going to do the follow-up to Stone Alone, which I did in 1990, that covered the childhood and the ‘60s, basically. We’re going to do the ‘70s into the ’80-81 tour this year. I was so pleased with the way the blues book went, and so was DK, it was one of their best sellers of the year. They asked, “Have you got another book for next year?” So, I said, “I was going to do the second book on the Stones.” They said ,“We’d love to do a book on the Stones.” So, I thought, if we’re going to do a book on the Stones, it’s not going to be like Stone Alone, which was all written with a few photos. ‘Cause that was a complaint I got from all the fans who said “There weren’t enough photos! We loved the book, but there weren’t enough photos.” So, I said “So, we’ll do a book on the Stones, but we’ll do it like the blues book with maps, with information on the tours, and everything.”
And that’s why we did it. And DK was thrilled. “We’ll go for it!” And we did it in nine months. Which I thought was impossible. I said there was no way it can be done under two years because there was so much stuff to sift through. And analyze. What do you leave out? That was the problem. Not what to put in.
Q: What kind of blueprint did you utilize just to get this thing started?
A: Well, I didn’t give him seven million words. What I did was already made for myself for the second book a skeleton of the main events. When I say main events, it was “Mick flew to Paris on holiday with Marianne Faithfull for the weekend.” That was a main event for me. Next line, “Keith moved from that address to that address.” Then the next one was “we did a radio show.” And I got that chronology right away from the beginning. And I gave Richard that, and from that he worked out, bless his heart, how many chapters, what we would cover per chapter, and all that. So we laid a skeleton out and then we started to fill it.
So, Richard would say, “All right, what you got on April 1964?” And I’d respond with “I’ve got 30,000 words.” “All right, we’ve got to get that down to four pages. Or six pages.” So, I’d give it all to Richard, and we’d go back and forth. Then he’d ask, “How many illustrations you got for April, 1964?” And I’d say, “Well, I’ve got about a thousand or two thousand scans.” So he and DK would go through them and choose the ones they thought were the most interesting, different, unusual, and unknown. And then, we’d barter with them. “No, I’d rather have the picture of me playing the tambourine with the boot.” Or, “What about the picture I took of Keith in the dressing room with his spotty shirt lookin’ at his tie in the mirror?” ‘Cause all my photos have never been published, you see. I took 10,000 photos in my career with the Stones. And I’ve taken reels and reels of movies as well. We were doin’ it that way.
Then DK would come along with a spreadsheet, or eight spreadsheets, “Here’s the first part of Chapter 2. Are you happy with it?” We’d say “Great, but that’s crap.” It was all like that. It was a team effort, yeah. I’d also say, “Change that picture; I have much better pictures of that.” “I don’t like that Bo Diddley picture … I have much better pictures.” People who we toured with. DK would get very frustrated with us ‘cause they would think they had it finished, then we’d say no. And we put in a lot of the support bands.
They would change some writing. (laughs). Editing bits just to show they were working, I think. (grins). So, they were involved. And there were times we had to put things back in. And when you’ve been working on it you tend to think things are still in there, that you’ve already had taken out. I’d even say, “What about that wonderful photo of Brian (Jones)?” “Well, it’s there!” And we’d say, “Put the other one back in.” I’d get up about ten and start working, break for meals, and work until four or five in the morning.
Q: The band always worked well in black and white photos. Who needs colour all the time?
A: Yea. Well, our first six years of TV was all black and white because we didn’t have colour in England until 1968. All the shows like READY, STEADY GO! were all shot in black and white. The band were a black and white band. They were a mono band sound-wise, so we always tried to mix in kind of a mono feel. We didn’t have things right out wide on the left and right. It was only the record companies that did that with fake stereo and stuff, which sounded bloody horrible in the mid-‘60s. We always tried to mix our sound to sound monish because we liked that sound, that ballsy thing, and everybody else cleaned it up, didn’t they?
Q: Honestly,, when I view your book, I am impressed by the integration of the Los Angeles and Hollywood imagery collected. Your band started their debut U.S. tour in nearby San Bernardino. You had multiple shots from The San Bernardino Sun Telegraph to document it.
And, to tell you the truth, in Andrew Loog Oldham’s autobiography "2Stoned," he included a photo of you and the Stones shopping for clothes in Hollywood at the Beau Gentry store. I’d never seen it in previous Stones’ histories, but you even have the yellow receipt from your purchase of pants, belts and shirts at the store in Rolling With The Stones. I’m sure some of the same clothes that I tried to buy when I saw the inside jacket photos on Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass) album taken by Gered Mankowitz in Hollywood at RCA studios. And, you took it a step further and placed another supplemental photo from that legendary Guy Webster local shoot in Franklin Canyon in West Hollywood. For me, it’s bio-regional reality. You really went the extra mile for the consumer, which is most appreciated.
A: I’ll tell you what we did with some of them, between me and you (winks), from contact sheets, because there were no originals anymore. And I’ll tell you what, since the book was published, I had Ethan Russell, Jerry Schatzberg, and two or three other people, including Michael Joseph, who did the Beggar’s Banquet photos, come to me and ask for copies of photos, or a particular photo, which they took, because they hadn’t got them anymore. I had copies they hadn’t.
Q: And I’m pleased that there are so many photos not of the Stones on stage or in concert.
A: I didn’t want it to be like the average Stones’ book. I’ve got like 300 on the Stones in my collection, and 90 per cent of them are crap, really. They just focus on scandal, gossip, hearsay. Marianne Faithfull … Anita Pallenberg … Bianca’s marriage to Mick … All the drug busts. Peeing in the garage. So, it goes on. And that’s not the life I lived. They were just things that happened, and at the time were important.
Q: Let’s be realistic. It’s a book about a band from someone in the band. How refreshing.
A: Yes. And I could refer to my diaries and get the facts right. You know, you can talk to Mick, and Mick will remember bits and pieces. He won’t always remember if they are in the right years or the right tours, even. He’ll remember bits that I’ve forgotten, probably, and Charlie will as well, but they’re very few and far between.
Q: Your ability to weave in some correctional data in the writings and captions, sometimes contrary to some of your former band mates’ recollections well documented in a band-authorized video documentary, and some album credits, is one of the strengths of this new book.
For example, because I work in and out of recording studios, and know a lot of musicians from many eras, I was pleased to see the factual bass credits for Exile On Main St on one of the pages that finally correlated to some of my own research. You know what tracks you played on. It’s very obvious. I’ve had other members of the Stones run it down to me as well over the years but not for publication. And the Stones’ CD re-releases and reissues never clear this stuff up.
And, I thought your detailing of the Stones’ visit to Chess Studios in Chicago was so accurate and different than even the way Keith Richards always paints it. This book sometimes is counter to some in-house Stones’ history. Your text has Willie Dixon trying to sell you and the band a song at Chess Studios, and that is not as accurate as Keith describing in the Stones 25 X 5 video seeing and meeting Muddy Waters for the first time when he was painting the walls around the recording studio. That was bull shit. Marshall Chess told me that as well. I talked to both Muddy and Willie about the Rolling Stones and Chess studios years ago, too. Your diaries underscore the history.
A: Willie Dixon, true. He thought we were naïve white kids who didn’t know these songs. At the same time, when I met Jimmy Reed, when I played with The Heard in South London, Wallington, and met Jimmy Reed, his manager came over and said, “I’ve got a great song for your guys. It’s called “Big Boss Man.”
We’d been listening and playing “Big Boss Man” for two years and he didn’t know that. He thought, “These white kids won’t know it.” And it was the same with Willie Dixon.
The Chess text you refer is different than the way Keith talks about how he saw Muddy painting the walls at Chess. It’s funny. It gets headlines, and it gets a laugh. Willie tried to pawn a song on us … and Muddy did help us in with the gear. It’s in my diary that day.
The greatest thing about Chess Records wasn’t the recording, or having Buddy Guy walk in, Muddy, and Chuck Berry coming and saying ‘Swing on, gentlemen, you are sounding most well, if I may say so,” and he knew he was going to make some money. But it was being told we could go down in the cellar and pick some albums if we wanted. Racks of Little Walter albums we had never seen. That was the magic of Chess for us. And me plugging into a plug direct for the bass. Direct!
And I cleared up the bass credits on Exile On Main St. because they got them wrong on the album. When I told Mick, “I said you got the credits wrong,” and he got pissed off and stomped off angrily because he never checked with me.
Q: It’s like my favorite Stones album.
A: I liked it, but it was slagged off by the critics. When it came out, everybody said ‘the worst album the Stones ever made.’ And five years later those same people were saying it was ‘the classic Stones album.’ The same people. I’ve got the reviews.
Q: And from reading your books now you’ve got me looking for a tape of the Stones doing a Kellogg’s Cornflakes cereal commercial from around 1963 or 1964.
A: I got it. Two copies. I’ve got it on sound, twice. Everybody’s trying to get it off me.
(EDITOR'S NOTE: Actually, it was Rice Krispies ... and here are! - kk)
Q: As someone who grew up in L.A. and Hollywood, and frequented some of the thread shops, I was digging on the Beau Gentry receipt ‘cause the reproduction was so spot on you could read the tiny print that always proclaimed “Continental Style With A Flair.” Who would have thought you were grabbing and collecting these items in 1964 and 1965? Fashion artifacts.
Q: Well, the publisher and everyone else was shocked when I bought my ration book and identity card from 1953!
Q: In the foreword to Rolling With The Stones, you begin with a quote from American novelist James Baldwin who lived near you in France in the 1970s. You mention his words “If you know where from whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.” His words are fundamental to what this book is all about-history. And you write “I’ve always understood where I came from and am proud of what I achieved.”
A: Jimmy was lovely. Set the tone. Jimmy was a great guy and I knew him really well for many years. We had lovely evenings together in the south of France. I used to go ‘round his house and he’d come by my house and he’d just sit and play Ray Charles songs.
And Andrew Loog Oldham was a person I wanted to thank and offer a tribute to in the foreword as well. He came around and saw my band last year and loved it. I’m just telling it like it is because that’s the way it was.
When I wrote Stone Alone, I wasn’t particularly kind to anybody. I told the truth and some people in the band didn’t like it. They wanted to go through it with a black pen, right? I won’t mention names. And I said, ‘No, this is my book, and you can’t do that.’ I wrote the way it was with Andrew.
Andrew was the first person that phoned me up after Stone Alone was published, and said, “You weren’t too kind about me in the book, were you?” And I said, “I told the truth, Andrew.” “I know. I think it’s great.” And I’ve been friends with Andrew ever since. So, Andrew didn’t take offense ‘cause it was the truth. I didn’t set out to tell prove a point or have an agenda. Just say it the way it really happened. And some people didn’t like that.
Q: Not because I knew Ray Coleman, who did Stone Alone with you, but were you happy collaborating with him on that book? I know he was a fan, loved music, had great organizational skills, but did he bring anything to you in Stone Alone that influenced your new book?
A: Not a lot. He wrote well on what I did, but took all the humour out. He took all the swear words out. Like Ian Stewart would be talkin’ about Chuck Berry, and originally it would say “All Chuck Berry’s fuckin’ fault,” and at the bottom of Stew’s quote he’d put “take out ‘fuckin’’ and smoothed it over, or made it neater. He kind of edited my work in a very sort of proper way and took a lot of humour out, and I had to keep popping it back in, and keep re-editing myself.
In the new book, Richard and I think the same way. We both grew up in South London. Very similar backgrounds. And he laughs at my jokes! Richard and I work very well together. We’ve done a lot of things over the years since we first met, charity things. Richard has done us some favours, and we’d done him some favours, and we’d always ended up with a good rapport between us. It works very well. He writes great and always pleases me with the way he puts my words into a better way of reading them. That’s not what I’m good at. I’m good at research and analyzing.
Q: I also enjoyed the way you produced the pages and visuals on some departed members like Brian Jones, then Ian Stewart, and a bit on Jack Nitzsche. But they didn’t get extra space or attention because they aren’t around anymore.
A: No, I kind of did that in my Stone Alone, giving Brian a chapter. There’s a two-page spread on Brian at the end. Because I do say, and do honestly believe, that if there wasn’t a Brian Jones, there wouldn’t have been a Rolling Stones. There would have been another band from Dartford which I wouldn’t have been in, and Charlie probably wouldn’t have been in. But there wouldn’t have been the Rolling Stones, because that was Brian Jones. He named the band, and he enlisted the members one by one. He decided what style of music we would play.
He phoned and wrote to agents, bookers, and NME, Jazz News, DISC, letters about R&B and blues and all of that. I mean it was his band. So, I have to acknowledge that, or it wouldn’t be there without him. And he’s been kind of glossed over and pushed aside by most people.
And Stew was the second person to join the band. Stew was the first person who joined Brian. Before Mick and Keith.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards - photos courtesy of The Henry Diltz Archives / Gary Strobl
Q: Both your books demonstrate how vital Hollywood and Los Angeles were in the live shows and location recording endeavors of the Rolling Stones. And the city always welcomed the band. You also married an L.A. girl.
Stone Alone points to former Teddy Bear Marshall Lieb having the band bring your pal Joey Paige to his Malibu pad for a party. Phil Spector’s involvement with the group early in your career. Rolling With The Stones underlines how Hollywood and Los Angeles informed the band. About fuckin’ time someone delivered the reality. As I wrote in Andrew Loog Oldham’s autobiography 2Stoned, “I shudder at the thought of what the 1964-1967 recordings at RCA would sound like if they had been done in New York …”
In your book, you really explain just how essential Southern California and the Hollywood of the sixties were to you and the Stones.
A: Hollywood and Los Angeles, very important.
Q: You, Brian and Jack Nitzsche used to go to the Nazi memorabilia shop on Hollywood Boulevard, Hell Bent For Leather. The owner drove his WWII tank on the street. Nitzsche told me stories about the place. My mother wasn’t really thrilled about that shop.
A: Yeah! I bought stuff there. And I used to go to Marshall Leib’s house for breakfast with Joey. They took us on to the beach for the first time.
Q: Tell me about RCA studios on Sunset Blvd. and recording albums like Aftermath.
A: We had recorded at Chess for a couple of dates, a few times. When we came into L.A., we went to RCA. We walked into the studio and it was too big. We were really worried. We were intimidated. We were used to recording in little places like Regent Sound. The studio was like this hotel room. And Chess wasn’t very big either. Suddenly we’re at RCA and it’s enormous. It was like Olympic (in England) later. But we solved that same problem. We thought “God, we can’t record in here. We’re gonna get the wrong sound.”
But Andrew had this brain wave and he put us all in the corner of one room, turned all the lights down, and just tucked us all around in a little small circle. And we forgot about the rest of the room and the height of the ceiling. And we just did it in this little corner.
Like even today, when I play with my ten- piece band The Rhythm Kings we go onto these big stages, and we all get in the middle, and we put stools up, and we play like a family get together. It personalizes it much more, and as soon as the Stones did that, and got into this little area and started playing, it worked.
And Dave Hassinger, the engineer, got all the sounds we wanted. Brian picked up all the instruments in the studio. The dulcimers, the glockenspiel, the marimbas. And I played some of that stuff as well. The organ, where I lay on the floor and pumped the rhythm for “Paint It, Black.” We just experimented in there. Brian brought in electric dulcimers, autoharps. He just did so much to those songs from 1964-1966 in RCA. Brian created so many new sounds. Then he got the sitar together, just so he could play a riff. He wasn’t as good as George Harrison on it. George really learned the sitar and studied it. Brian didn’t. He just picked it up and worked out a little riff for one song. He did it with flutes. And he was brilliant at that. Dave Hassinger helped us do those things and he was always…We never had one bad word with Dave.
At the time we didn’t know the R&B heritage of the RCA studios. All we knew was here was this engineer and on the same thing as we were. Dave used to say we’d just come in and do it. And Nitzsche said it was the first time in his life that he saw a band just come in with no thought or no preparation or anything. He said it in books before. We’d just do it and it sorta blew his mind. Because we had no pre-plans and just do it in three takes. “Let’s do that one.”
And I invited our RCA engineer, Dave Hassinger, to my party tonight. I haven’t seen him since 1966. He was lovely. Hassinger was one of the pro-voters for “Satisfaction” being a single. RCA was our first studio that had four tracks. We were on two and three tracks before that. Jack Nitzsche was a sweet man.
I interviewed legendary recording engineer and producer Al Schmitt, who worked at the famed RCA studios from 1959-1967.
Before the Stones arrived to record in 1964, RCA had been home to Sam Cooke, Ann Margaret, Elvis Presley, Shorty Rogers, Gogi Grant, Jesse Belvin, Henry Mancini and Elmer Bernstein, among others. Hassinger was Schmitt’s pupil and broke him in as an engineer. Schmitt went down the hall to listen to “Satisfaction” the day it was waxed at the facility.
I asked Schmitt to describe the RCA sound complex and his technical reflections should further educate all Stones’ fans of their 1964-1967 studio work in Hollywood.
“Studio A and B were both the same size,” he remembers. “They were big rooms, and then there was also Studio C, a smaller room. You could mix in either room. The studios had very high ceilings and a nice parkay floor. Very nice. One of the things that made them so unique was that we had all those great live echo chambers. I think there were seven of them.
There was very little overdubbing then. The nice thing about doing everything at one time was that you knew exactly what it was going to sound like. When you started layering things you were never sure. Then a lot of experimenting came in and it took longer and longer to make records and the expenses went up, ya know.
RCA had a great microphone collection. Just fabulous. Great Neumann and Telfunken microphones. Great RCA microphones. Plus, they had the great, original Neve console. And they were just spectacular. They were so punchy. There was a punch and a warmth and still one of the best consoles ever made. They were using a lot of Scotch tape then. Dave learned microphone techniques and how to use them, the most important thing.
There were no isolation booths. None whatsoever. But we had gobos, we would move around. Like a separator where you could isolate things. We did have some small rugs that we would put down sometimes under the drums and things, but no too much.
The Stones also started a situation where songs weren’t done in a standard four-hour session. They had the studio for weeks to do albums. That was new.”
Q: Bill, the Rolling Stones in concert.
A: The band was great live always. Always. The Stones were a better live band than any other band at that time. I’m not saying they were the greatest songwriters or the greatest recording artists, but they were the best live band wherever you went. You could go up on stage and blow everybody away no matter who they were.
Q: What did you attribute the live concert greatness of the Rolling Stones, besides the obvious chemistry you had?
A: Practice. Doin’ them little clubs in the beginning. Going through all of that learning process, that apprenticeship. Starting off not thinking about being rich and famous and having a career and making a record or going on TV or touring America. We’re going out in a limousine like kids think now when they go into a band. None of that. It was let’s play this music and if people like it, that’s a bonus. And if we got a bit of change in our pockets, that was a bigger bonus. And it was that simple. That’s why when we played in the clubs at the beginning we sat on stools, we drank beer, we had no uniforms, smoked in between songs. It was ridiculous. We had our backs to the audience sometimes. Nobody did that. In a little circle on stage. You can see those early pictures we were all close together.
Q: Are you aware, and I’m sure you are, that on the new batch of Rolling Stones’ reissues you are kinda turned up in the mix, or maybe it was when the recordings were newly remastered. It made me think that you, as the bassist, really played a lead instrument, and not just a support instrument with the Stones.
I mean, I can go on for hours pointing out your bass lines on “Spider and The Fly,” “19th Nervous Breakdown,” and have heard a few times it really was your riff that started the song in the early process developing “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” in the first place.
A: On the new reissues, the bottom end you can hear it now.
Q. And always live on stage in concert.
A: But I was always mixed down in the recordings.
Q: For 30 years …
A: I always thought … as long as Charlie and I could get it together, then the rest of the band could do what they’d like, and it worked. And that’s what happened in the studio, and that’s what happened live. Me and Charlie were really always on the ball, always straight, always together and had it down.
If we had our shit together, we got it right. What he was doing and what I was doing, standing next to him and watching his bass drum, and all that, which a lot of bass players don’t do, stupidly, once we got our thing going, and the group was there, then anything could happen. That’s all there was. There was simplicity. It wasn’t how many notes you played, it’s where you left nice holes, and I learned that from Duck Dunn and people like that.
Q: I remember talking to you once before, about the Stones recording a cover of “My Girl,” which ended up on Flowers; you had a tough time playing bass on that song.
A: It was just the wrong way around for me. And if I listen now to “Smokestack Lightnin’” by Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon plays the bass backwards on that. And I’ve only noticed that in the last ten years.”
Our chat then came to an end. Wyman then told me these were the best questions he fielded in weeks, and at times thought he was talking to a writer from Beat Instrumental, a British music periodical popular in the 1960s. What a lovely compliment.
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