SEX, SONGS AND THE STONES - AN INTERVIEW WITH MARSHALL CHESS

por Jon Wilde

publicado originalmente no SABOTAGE TIMES

January 22, 2012

Marshall Chess, the son of Chess Records co-founder Leonard Chess, spent his childhood hanging out with legends like Muddy Waters and experienced the heyday of the blues at close quarters. Through the Fifties and Sixties he befriended and worked with a pantheon of blues and soul innovators including Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, John Lee Hooker, Etta James and Fontella Bass.

With the advent of rock’n’roll, he worked alongside Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, eventually becoming the latter’s road manager.

Following the death of his father and the sale of Chess Records in the late Sixties, Marshall became president of Rolling Stones Records. A permanent fixture of the band’s exclusive inner circle he partied hard while overseeing seminal albums like Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street during The Stones’ most fervently creative period.

In the early 1980s he worked at Sugar Hill Records and witnessed the creation of the earliest hip-hop masterpieces.

Now a youthful and zestful 72, he lives in a forest in upstate New York.

In this Sabotage Times archive interview from 2012, he reels back through his rampantly incident-packed past.

JW: What is your earliest memory?

MC: Gunshot. Loud gunshot. Before my father became a partner in Aristocrat Records, the precursor to Chess Records, he ran a club called The Macamba Lounge in Chicago, which opened in ’46. It was a hangout for jazz musicians, prostitutes, pimps, drug-dealers and hoodlums. It was a jumping kind of place, you could say. My father took me there when I was five. We walked in around eight o’clock at night. As we entered, there was a gunshot in the club. My father threw me over the bar into the hands of my uncle Phil. My uncle threw himself on top of me, pressing my face to the wooden floor. To this day I can still smell the rotten alcohol and cigarettes that the floor smelled of. That smell will never leave me. The club burned down shortly after that and my dad and my uncle went to work for Aristocrat Records whose first artist was Muddy Waters. After three years they bought the company and renamed it Chess and it grew into one of the most important record labels of all time. Maybe the most important.

JW: Do you recall the first time you met Muddy Waters?

MC: Sure. No forgetting that. I was six, playing in my front yard. This Cadillac pulls up. Muddy steps out and he’s wearing this fluorescent green suit. He was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. He says, “You must be Little Chess. I’m here to see your daddy.” I got to know him real well. He used to call me his little white grandson. Like all the musicians on Chess he mostly talked about drinking and sex. Muddy was particularly interested in sex. That was his thing. He’d always be asking me, “Did you get any yet?” When I started getting interested in girls, I was just looking to cop a feel or get a kiss. So Muddy sat down and wrote me a note that I copied and handed to this girl I was particularly interested in. Muddy was a gentleman of the highest order. Had he been born five hundred years earlier, he’d have been the leader of a tribe. He had that special aura about him.

JW: When did you start working for Chess?

MC: I was always hanging around the office as a kid, as often as I could. From the age of ten I’d go on trips with my dad, travelling through the American south, plugging records to the radio stations. But I got properly involved when I was thirteen. See my dad was a workaholic, never stopped. I figured the only way I could spend proper time with him was to go to work with him. He’d bought me a motor scooter and I’d ride that, illegally, down to the Chess office every morning of the summer holiday. I’d hang around the studio wearing my custom-made suit. I’d sweep floors, fetch drinks for the musicians, pack boxes, help load up the trucks, anything that needed doing.

JW: How prevalent was drinking and drug-taking among the Chess artists?

MC: It was mostly drinking, 99%. Some of the artists would smoke marijuana but never in the studio. They’d do their smoking in the toilet next door and my father would always yell about it. This was long before rock stars habitually used cocaine and heroin. But the Chess guys drank. They’d drink first thing in the morning. A lot of them were alcoholics. But they didn’t consider it that. Drinking was just part of the blues culture.

Little Walter was an exception in that he was an alcoholic and a drug-abuser. Those traits often go hand in hand with genius. Miles Davis once said to me that Little Walter was as much a musical genius as Mozart and I wouldn’t disagree. The way he played harmonica completely transformed the blues. There was nobody at Chess more talented than Little Walter.

JW: Were you present at many of the legendary Chess recording sessions?

MC: Sure. Right from the start. I was present at the recording of Gene Ammons’ My Foolish Heart, the first ever Chess record. It was late at night and I couldn’t stay awake. They put two chairs together to make a bed for me and I dozed through the whole thing. But I got a taste for the recording studio after that. The session that’s most vibrant in my memory is Chuck Berry’s No Particular Place To Go. It was 1963. Chuck had just come out of prison, having served eighteen months for transporting a 14-year-old Apache waitress across a state line. He came straight from prison to Chicago. My dad told me to go meet him, gave me a hundred dollars, and I took Chuck to State Street to this men’s clothing store to buy him a couple of outfits. That same week he cut No Particular Place To Go at Chess Studios and I was there to witness it. The place was rocking. Two weeks after that I became his road manager and we were off on tour.

JW: Chuck Berry has a reputation for being difficult. Was that your impression of him?

MC: I met a lot of eccentric people working at Chess but Chuck was by far the most extreme in that sense. He has lived life by his own rules and doesn’t really care about other people’s rules. In a way you have to respect that. But it’s hard to deal with at times. He’s a true outlaw and laid the foundations for that rock’n’roll lifestyle. He went to jail for a second time in 1979 because he refused to pay his taxes. He could have paid up and avoided prison. But he didn’t care. I didn’t personally have any problems with him. It helped that I didn’t have to deal with the business end of his career.

Me and Chuck go back a long way. I was thirteen when he signed to Chess, having been recommended by Muddy Waters. He’d stop over at our house. He’d sleep in my bedroom. I used to take him out for breakfast and he’d always amaze me by ordering a strawberry shortcake as a starter. Chuck did everything differently to other people. Mostly we talked about cars and girls. He especially loved girls. He had one of the world’s first Polaroid cameras and had hundreds of pictures of beautiful girls. He was a creative guy. A poet. A genuine artist. He was a great musician and an inspired lyricist. He really understood the psychology of white teenagers. The teenage revolution began in 1955. Suddenly kids were driving around in flash cars, going to drive-in movies, drive-in hamburger joints. This was a whole new crazy cultural shift in America. It wasn’t happening in the black population but Chuck instinctively understood what was happening with the white kids and he captured that entire upheaval in his songs.

Chuck revolutionised the fortunes of Chess Records. From 1950 to 1955 we’d had blues hits. But even a number one record on the blues chart sold no more than 20,000. Then we signed Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. Suddenly it all changed. I met Chuck recently in New York, hadn’t seen him in twelve years. I was telling him about the time in 1955 when my dad was driving through Chicago and we heard Maybellene being played for the first time on the biggest white radio station. My dad was so happy at that moment because he knew he’d got his first crossover hit. Life was different for us after that. We’d always been poor. Any profits from Chess were ploughed back into the label. My mother didn’t have a dollar to buy me a water pistol when all the other kids in the neighbourhood had them. As soon as Chess were having hits on the pop chart, my parents got lavish in terms of buying stuff for their kids. I was telling Chuck all this and saying that he’d radically changed my life. He said, “It wasn’t one-way traffic, Marshall. You guys made my life great. I couldn’t have gone anywhere without Chess Records.” That was an emotional meeting for me. I think it was emotional for Chuck too.

JW: What was the secret of Chess’s success?

MC: It was the artists. We had Beethoven, Bach and Mozart on the same label. That’s Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry and Howlin’ Wolf. But it was also down to the feel for music that my father and uncle had. It goes back to their roots in this small village in Poland where one man had a wind-up Victrola. When he wound that thing up the whole fucking village would stand under the window to hear some music. When they moved to Chicago, their father (my grandfather) ran a scrap metal yard in the black neighbourhood. There was a black gospel church across the street, the kind with an upright piano, tambourine and drum. My grandfather used to take a strap to the boys because they were always late from listening to the music coming from the church. That would have been their first experience of black music. During the war my father wanted his own business and the cheapest rent was in black neighbourhoods. So he opened a liquor store. There was a huge influx of black workers who came up from the south where they were earning next to nothing. Suddenly they were making good money in the Chicago factories and wanted to party on the weekend so they bought plenty of alcohol. Then my daddy had a tavern with a jukebox. They kept feeding that jukebox with nickels and my dad had the first inkling of what made a hit record. Then came the Macambo Lounge. It was step by step. By the time my father and uncle started Chess they understood about music. Then they learned even more from the musicians they signed.

JW: Howlin’ Wolf is said to have been an intimidating presence. How did you find him?

MC: He was a gentle giant. If Wolf intimidated anybody it was because of his size. He was six feet six, weighed three hundred pounds. When he shook your hand it was like being squeezed by an enormous baseball glove. He had the biggest feet you’ve ever seen. He had to cut the sides of his shoes to get his feet in there. He was a sweet man, softly spoken, more of a listener. Then he’d get on stage and he was a man transformed. You’ve never seen anything so intense. On stage he could be very intimidating. The blues singer Koko Taylor once told me that he’d have to drink half a bottle of whiskey to get himself into the state where he could crawl around on stage and really let go with his voice. Sam Phillips once said that the greatest regret of his life was not signing Wolf to Sun Records. In fact, Chess almost ended up signing Elvis before he went to RCA.

JW: What other Chess artists left a big impression on you?

MC: Etta James was someone who knew how to make an entrance. I was in the Chess building when she first turned up in 1960. She walked down this narrow hallway and there was no missing her. She was a big lady in those days, maybe 200 pounds. And she was the first black woman I’d seen with blonde hair. She had quite an entourage with her – a hairdresser, a dressmaker, a bull dyke lesbian dressed as a man, even a midget. It was like a live action Fellini movie. I never did find out the midget’s role in all of it. Etta always liked an entourage. She was a colourful character. She was drinking and taking drugs. She was out there. And she had this voice that my father knew how to get the best out of. Motivating the artists in the studio, that was one of my father’s great gifts. I learned a lot from him in that respect.

JW: When did you start producing records for Chess?

MC: I would have been sixteen. We worked fast in the studio. The aim was always three completed songs in a three hour session. But the musicians needed to be pushed all the time. I’d try to emulate my dad by urging the musicians on. “One more time, let’s try that one again.” Little by little I started to actually produce. My first proper recording session was 1958, Bo Diddley’s Clock Strikes Twelve, with Bo playing electric violin.

JW: You have been vocal in your criticism of the movie Cadillac Records. What was your main beef with it?

MC: It claimed to be based on the Chess story but they wrote my uncle Phil completely out of the story. When I made the deal to oversee the music in the film they agreed that my uncle Phil would be in it. He was in the script and they’d even hired an actor to play him. I believe they never intended to include him in the film because he’s still alive and they’d have had to pay him. When I saw the cut I asked them what happened to Phil and they said, “It didn’t work.” After fifty years in the business I was finally Hollywooded. Basically they lied.

Phil was as crucial to Chess Records as my father. It couldn’t have happened without Phil. He and my father had a symbiotic relationship. Like many brothers they were opposites. My father was an extrovert – pumped up, often hysterical, running everywhere at once. He was a type A personality. Phil, on the other hand, would light a cigar, put his feet on the table and look at tropical fish. They were completely different personalities but they utilized that. They divided the country into territories and hit the road to get DJs to play and stores to buy their records. All of us at Chess, we were record men. It’s something that doesn’t exist any more. We did it all – we signed the artists, picked the material, recorded the songs. Then we did all the manufacturing, distribution and promotion. Lock, stock and barrel. My father and uncle divided all that up by personality. Phil shouldn’t be overlooked. Ever. He’s a crucial part of the Chess story.

JW: Over the years there’s been much debate about whether artists were exploited by Chess, that they didn’t receive their full dues. What’s your take on that?

MC: You have to remember that the industry was in its infancy. There were no entertainment lawyers around then to analyse the figures. Like most small independent labels Chess was run in a Wild West kind of way. Musicians would come into the Chess office all the time asking for money. It could get fairly chaotic. My father and uncle had their own business model but they thought it was a fair one. Not for a single moment did I think that the artists were being ripped off. Just as a modern record company will charge an artist for video-making or promotion, Chess might have paid a DJ thousands of dollars to get a record played, then recouped it from royalties but they never short-changed an artist out of the sales of his or her records.

A lot of bullshit is talked about it. In the movie Cadillac Records you see the character based on my dad paying off Muddy Waters with a Cadillac. That never happened. We might have helped the artists get deals on their Cadillacs because they didn’t have bank accounts, but we never gave them cars instead of royalties. There’s never been a law suit against Chess Records, not a single one. No-one has ever shown that Chess Records was in any way crooked in its accounting.

JW: Didn’t Willie Dixon successfully sue Led Zeppelin over Whole Lotta Love, proving they had plagiarised his song You Need Love?

MC: That’s right. They ended up settling out of court. Willie is a complex case. He played upright bass, wrote songs, arranged songs, and produced. There wasn’t much that Willie didn’t do around Chess. His first real job at the label was to round up the musicians for sessions. These guys weren’t easy to get hold of. They had many different women so you never knew where they were staying. None of them had telephones. They were hard to track down. But Willie could always find out where they were. He was like a private detective. He was also the most prolific songwriter we had. Those who didn’t like him would call him a song-taker. He’d hear a few lines from somewhere, add his own words and put his name to the song. In the blues business there’s so many people who’ll claim they were cheated out of royalties or that someone stole their songs. But you never really find out what went down in the back rooms. Willie is depicted as someone who was unhappy with his treatment at Chess but that’s not true. Willie was one of the family. His problems with copyright came after Chess was sold. Eventually he got all his songs back.

JW: One of the most famous stories told about Chess is Keith Richards’ tale about turning up at the studio in 1964 to record The Rolling Stones’ second album only to find Muddy Waters painting the ceiling. It’s not true, is it?

MC: No truth in it at all. But Keith maintains to this day that it actually happened. I’ve laughed in his face many times as he’s insisted he saw Muddy up a ladder with a paint brush in hand. I guess people want to believe that it’s true. It says something about how unfashionable the blues had become at that time. By ’64 nobody really wanted to know. White people had never bought blues records. The audience had always been black. A new generation of black people looked down on the blues. They saw it as slavery music. Instead they were listening to Motown and Stax. It was bands like The Stones and The Yardbirds who introduced the blues to a white market. Of course Chess wasn’t just about the blues. We did jazz, doo wop, rock’n’roll, even comedy. In the 60s we branched out into soul.

JW: One of the most controversial releases was Muddy Waters’ Electric Mud. Didn’t one reviewer describe it as, “the worst blues album ever made”?

MC: Yeah, and the whole thing was my concept! It was 1968 and I was a part of the whole pot-smoking, free love generation. The music I started getting involved with came directly out of that culture. I’d made an album with the psychedelic soul band, Rotary Connection, and it went on to sell 200,000. Meanwhile Muddy Waters had a problem. He wasn’t selling albums and the blues market was dwindling. So I came up with this concept, to team him up with members of Rotary Connection. It was like a movie director choosing an actor like Marlon Brando to play a certain role. The intention was never to change Muddy’s genre of Delta blues. It was taking the blues to this drug-taking generation that was exploding across America. It was an experiment. Electric Mud was a big success when it was released. It exploded. FM radio loved it, couldn’t stop playing it. We shipped 150,000 in the first month. It was the biggest album Muddy ever had. Then Rolling Stone magazine got round to reviewing it and they said it was the worst blues album ever made. That changed everything. The radio stopped playing it. People stopped buying it. Then Muddy came out and said he never liked it in the first place. But he was pandering to that stupid review. He wasn’t saying what he really felt. A lot of people love that album. The Stones and Led Zep loved it. Chuck D told me it was the album that first inspired him.

After that we did a similar project with Howlin’ Wolf using the same band. He really, really didn’t like the way it came out. In fact he described it as “dog shit”. My idea for the album cover didn’t help matters. Instead of using a photo we just printed a statement which read, “This is Howlin’ Wolf’s new album. He doesn’t like it.” Take it from me, saying on the cover that the artist doesn’t like the record is a really stupid idea.

JW: In 1969, Chess was sold to GRT (General Recorded Tape) for $6.5m. Rumours still persist that civil rights groups were pressurising Chess to hire black executives and cede control. Any truth in that?

MC: That might have been a sideline reason to sell up. But it wasn’t the only reason. My father and uncle had already launched a radio station called WVON (Voice Of The Negro) which had become the biggest black station in America. They came up with a plan to sell the record label and radio station to invest in black television. Then, completely unexpectedly, my father died of a heart attack. He was 52. If he’d possessed a crystal ball, he’d never have sold Chess Records. He wasn’t to know how historically important and how valuable that music would become. No-one knew.

Everything unravelled at that point. Not only did I lose my dad but I also lost a fortune. I’d been promised a lot of money from the sale of Chess to start my own label. But my father died without signing his will and I never got the money. The problem with the will meant that 70% of the proceeds from the sale of Chess went in tax. The people who bought Chess had no idea how to run it. They made me president of the label after quite a struggle on my part. But it was never going to work out. These people didn’t know the first thing about music. The first indication of the nightmare to come was that they called me in to discuss forecasts. They expected me to predict the kind of profits the shareholders could expect in the next year. It had never worked like that. To us, it was simply a question of making the next hit record. So they sent me to management school in New York for a week. I hated it. During all my time at Chess it never felt like a job. It was a joy. Suddenly it was a different ball game. For the first time in my life I felt I was at work rather than doing what I enjoyed. It was drudgery. That was a tough time for me. There was a lot of psychological turmoil. I really didn’t know what I was going to do next.

JW: Then you bounced back to become president of Rolling Stones Records. How did that come about?

MC: I’d known The Stones from the time they’d come to Chess to record. When they returned for the second time I was running the studio and got to know them. Then, in 1970, I was tipped off that they were about to leave Decca. So I got hold of Mick Jagger’s number and called him up. He invited me round to his house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. It was a slightly bizarre meeting. I sat on the sofa and outlined my idea of running The Stones’ new label and Mick was dancing around the room to Clifton Chenier’s Black Snake Blues. Straight after that I walked up the road to meet Keith Richards. He was sitting at this big psychedelic yellow piano, jamming with Gram Parsons. First thing Keith does is remark how badly dressed I am. In the Chess days we were always sharply dressed because the artists respected that. I always wore a suit and tie, a ring on the little finger. Now I looked like Al Pacino in the Serpico movie – scruffy jeans, t-shirt, long hair. Anyway we shook hands on a deal and I was now the founding president of Rolling Stones Records.

JW: Wasn’t one of your first moves to come up with the idea of the famous lips-and-tongue logo for the band?

MC: The Stones were in Amsterdam. I landed at Rotterdam airport. I was driving along to meet the band and saw a Shell petrol station with the classic yellow logo. It was so beautifully simplistic. I mention this later when I’m sitting around with The Stones, saying that we should come up with a design that is totally recognisable without having the band’s name on it. Out of that conversation came the idea of having the tongue and lips. As label manager it was my job to audition a variety of artists who came up with an extraordinary variety of tongues. As soon as we saw John Pasche’s now famous design, there was no doubt that was the one and we bought it outright.

JW: How long did it take you to penetrate The Stones’ inner circle?

MC: It happened straight away. They accepted me immediately because of my connection with Chess Records. For a time I lived with Keith at Cheyne Walk. I had the servant’s quarters at the top of the house. Keith wasn’t your typical house-mate. He would stay up for three days, then sleep for three days. He always did have a unique physiology. I’d always been a morning person. At Chess, it was a case of start working at 9am, finish at 7pm. It was a very structured life. Working with The Stones played havoc with my body clock. Meetings would start at 11pm, 1am, whenever. Working with The Stones becomes you life. It’s not like a job at all. The only way to survive it was to live it.

JW: On a scale of one to ten, how hedonistic a time were you having?

MC: Oh, it was right up there. To the max. It was at the very start of that whole sex, drugs and rock’n’roll lifestyle. I was the same age as The Stones and fell right in with all that. What was there not to like about any of it? I was in my twenties. My marriage has broken up so I had no responsibilities in that way. I wouldn’t say I was a major womaniser but I definitely knew how to enjoy myself. Like any man I appreciate a pretty woman. On those Stones tours there was a lot of very hot women around the band and a lot of extra ones to go around.

Drugs? Before I joined The Stones I’d smoked marijuana, that was it. Suddenly every drug on the planet was freely available. As soon as we started touring, I found myself with multiple addictions. By the end of the first big tour I was doing everything there was to do. I liked to be high all the time. When you’re living that life you don’t stop for a moment to think that there’s gonna be a long, dark tunnel waiting for you somewhere down the line.

JW: You were executive producer on all The Stones’ albums from 1971’s Sticky Fingers to 1976’s Black And Blue. What did you bring to the studio?

MC: Attitude. Of course, The Stones already had plenty of that, but I definitely added to it. It was a case of, “Fuck everybody, fuck the label, fuck the cost, because we’re going to make the greatest music and nothing is gonna get in the way of that.” In the seven years with The Stones, I spent more time in the studio than anybody with the exception of Mick and Keith. I’ve always loved recording studios. For me it’s like entering a church or a temple. I love the mood of those places. I love sitting behind that mixing-desk, watching events unfold. I find it completely fascinating.

Also I’d learned so much from watching my dad and uncle work with the Chess musicians. They knew exactly how to push their artists so they got the best out of them. There were times when my father would take over on the drums during Muddy Waters sessions to get the exact sound he wanted. The thing with The Stones was that they were surrounded by people who were completely enamoured of them. So everything was great all the time. But I used to push them and push them some more. Doing Sticky Fingers, Mick would be laying down the vocal on Moolight Mile and I’d be screaming, ““Come on you motherfucker, another one.” Because I thought it could be improved.

JW: What is your defining memory of working on Exile On Main Street in the South of France?

MC: The meals. Soon after we arrived it dawned on everyone that there was fifteen people to feed every day and we needed a chef. In this fabulous mansion there was this great long, baronial table that was half inside the house and half outside but covered, looking out on the bay. To make this work, I had to restore a kitchen in the cellar and all the food was sent up in one of those dumb waiters. Then I had to hire a chef. Every afternoon at five o’clock we all gathered around this long table for our first meal of the day. Most of us had just got out of bed. I’d pass around bowls of joints as we waited for the food to arrive. It was like something from a King Arthur movie, quite a thing for a boy from Chicago.

Then I was summoned to Holland Park in London for a meeting with Prince Rupert Lowenstein who looked after The Stones’ finances. I’m sitting there with him and Keith Richards. After polite preliminaries Rupert got down to business and asked me what the hell I was thinking about spending £200,000 and building a kitchen. All of a sudden, Keith, who is obviously inebriated on something or other, starts flapping his arms around and says, “Whatever Marshall says we’re gonna go with.” And he’s spilling this tea all over Rupert’s £40,000 carpet. The Stones always stood up for me when necessary. They were very loyal in that way.

JW: During the making of Exile did you all sense that the album was going to be a career highlight?

MC: We certainly didn’t think we were working on an album that would be hailed as a masterpiece all these years later. You never hear something that way. Also you never hear it like a member of the public hears it when he drops the needle on the vinyl or pops the CD into the deck. I’m hearing the album from the acoustic versions when they first play the songs, through the tracks and vocals being laid down, to the final mixes. When you’re involved you see it more like a sculptor does, remembering how it evolved from a block of stone. You don’t ever hear it fresh. Besides, there was time to think about posterity. Everything about the making of Exile was so intense. It wasn’t just the South of France. We also worked in England, Jamaica and Germany. As well as the album, I was also working on making a film and setting up a world tour.

It was an extraordinary time and involved a lot of extraordinary people. The Stones drew some amazing people into their orbit. Because of that I got to meet some of the greatest artists in the world. I’d find myself in a room talking to Andy Warhol who was strange but interesting. Another time I met Man Ray and Rudolph Nureyev. Mick turned me on to photographer Robert Frank who was hired to do the cover for Exile On Main Street and the film that became Cocksucker Blues.

JW: What was the true story behind Cocksucker Blues not getting a release?

MC: The record company never picked up the option for the film as it was too shocking for them. They’re businessmen. They’re looking to make money. And we’re talking about a film that shows people taking drugs and having sex. There were people in the film who were OK about being filmed while they were taking drugs and fucking. But they wouldn’t sign the release afterwards and that led to all kinds of legal complications. I don’t think The Stones liked the film too much. The whole experience was a lesson to me. I loved Robert Frank and, out of all the people I met through The Stones, he was the biggest influence on me. He was a true beatnik philosopher. But he did not like The Stones. He didn’t like the way they treated people. He disliked the aura around the band. The tour turned him off completely. When he was editing the film I told him that this was a true lesson in realism. The film really showed what it was like to be a huge rock’n’roll band on the road and at their very peak. He caught the excess but he also caught the monotony, the ego trips, the darkness of it all. When I showed the cut to the band in Munich they didn’t like what they were seeing. There were all kinds of problems with it.

JW: How do you remember The Stones on tour?

MC: Those tours were epics. I even got to play on stage with the band a few times. On the 1973 tour of Europe I played trumpet and conga drums on the last three numbers of The Stones’ set, finishing up with Street Fighting Man. I used to be a bugler in the Boy Scouts, then I played in my high school band. My dream was to become a musician but my family discouraged that. They thought it was a stupid life. They had a point. In those days being a musician was a hard road to travel. There were no rock stars. But I regret it to this day because I think I’d have been a great musician. I had it in me.

The Stones were using Stevie Wonder’s horn section to fatten their sound and they insisted I join them on stage. Walking out to play in front of 20,000 people, that was a thrill. I blew so hard my lips were bruised. My abiding memory is Mick showering me with rose petals at the end of the show and 30,000 people focussing their energy on me. It was such an intense feeling.

The Stones didn’t play encores in those days, they just climbed onto the van and sped away while people were still cheering for more. I’ll never forget the feeling of being in that van. It was like being in a mosque or a Buddhist meditation ceremony. Nobody said a word. Everyone was spent. It was a beautiful calm. No wonder bands like The Stones can’t quit touring. They’ll still be on the road when they’re a hundred.

JW: At what stage did your partying get out of hand?

MC: It was on tour that the real partying went on, after the shows. I did seven years of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. I came out of it a better man than when I went in. I made it out. Jimmy Miller and Nicky Hopkins didn’t make it out alive. At the end of my time with The Stones I had major problems with various addictions. At the end of Black And Blue I decided to quit. I woke up in a five star hotel in Montreaux and I felt like shit. I walked into the bathroom, looked in the mirror and I could see the shape I was in – black circles around my eyes, painfully thin, horrible to look at. That night I told Mick I wanted out. It was like telling a girlfriend I’d been dating for eight years that I was leaving because it wasn’t working any more. If I hadn’t got out I wouldn’t have survived. Quite simply, I’d have died. After I left The Stones it was a tough job coping with the change. My phone calls dropped from seventy a day to two a day. I had a million friends who loved me because I was a part of The Stones. Soon as I left, they didn’t want to know. I had to get used to some kind of normality.

JW: How long did it take you to straighten out?

MC: It took me years to get straight, properly straight. You stop taking drugs but it takes forever for your brain to start working normally again. I still smoke marijuana but I think of that as like having a beer. I haven’t touched anything harder since 1978. It’s really difficult to come off all that stuff. It’s like climbing Everest. When you get to the top you get a tremendous sense of well-being.

JW: William Blake argued that the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Was he right?

MC: I’ve never heard that line. That’s saying it better than I ever could. Drugs might not make you wise when you’re doing them. The wisdom comes when you stop.

JW: In 1980 you got involved with Sugar Hill Records. How did that come about?

MC: I found out that Sugar Hill owned the Chess back catalogue. My lawyers said I should go and see this guy called Joe Robinson and offer him $1m for the catalogue. I met with Joe and put the proposal to him. He said, “Man I’d have kissed your white ass if you’d come in six months ago. I’ve just had a global hit with The Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight and I’ve just bought two Rolls Royces.” So he was riding the first wave of rap and didn’t need my million dollars. But I did make a deal with him to resurrect those Chess recordings and spent a lot of time at Sugar Hill. I was there when White Lines and The Message were cut. Then I got friendly with Keith Leblanc and together we worked on No Sell Out which sampled the voice of Malcolm X. I felt at home in the world of hip-hop. I’ve always been at home in the world of black music. I could see a direct line from the bluesmen of Chess to the early hip-hop artists. There was a lot of street poetry in both those musical forms.

JW: And since then?

MC: Eighteen years ago I started work on the publishing arm of Chess Records and gradually became involved with the Latin side which was the fastest growing market in the States. Now I’m in charge of more than 25,000 Latin songs.

I’m far from finished. It’s 51 years since I picked up my first pay-check. I’ve stashed enough way to be able to afford to take it a little easier. But I’m waiting for the next great thing to tap me in the shoulder. I believe there’s another major chapter in my life waiting to start.

JW: Looking back over your life, what are you most grateful for?

MC: All the music. And all the luck that came my way. I never really chose the things that happened to me. They just happened. If I’ve learned anything it’s to keep my ears open and trust that something good is going to come along and sweep me up. Most of all I’m grateful that my name is synonymous with Chess Records. I’m in awe of the great music that came from that label. My family’s legacy is a motherfucker. I’m so proud of that.