Bill Wyman says Keith Richards still sends him Christmas gifts
Next year, Bill Wyman will officially celebrate his 30th anniversary of leaving The Rolling Stones. At this point, Wyman has been out of the band for nearly as long as he was with them. But in a recent interview with Classic Rock, the 86-year-old claims that his relationship with the band is akin to that of old family members.
“Keith still sends me scented candles at Christmas,” Wyman revealed. “We all send each other birthday and Christmas presents. It’s still a family thing, social not business, and it works really well. It’s like distant relatives – you’ve got an Auntie Elsie and an Uncle Fred who are really charming, but you don’t want to see them all the time.”
It wasn’t always that way. According to Wyman, the band were shocked when he announced his departure from the Stones in 1993. The reactions he got from each band member varied, from pithy put-downs to menacing omens.
“When I first left the Stones, it took a few months to rebuild that relationship with them,” Wyman says. “It was quite stressful, and they didn’t want me to leave. So they became bitchy. Instead of being nice and saying: ‘Great 30 years. Cheers, mate,’ Mick would say the most absurd, stupid things with that spoilt attitude he had. He’d say things like: ‘Oh well, if anybody has to play bass, I’ll do it. It can’t be that hard.’ And Keith said: ‘No one leaves this band unless they’re in a wooden box.’
Wyman even insists that the band continued to hound him for two years, hoping he would change his mind about leaving. “Anyway, they left the door open for me for two years. Charlie and Mick would phone and say: ‘You’re not really leaving, are you? Have you re-thought it?’ Then when it came time for them to do the ’94/’95 tour, they had to make a final decision. Mick and Charlie came over and spent the evening with me, trying to talk me into staying. Have I had any regrets about not going back? None whatsoever.”
Wyman revealed quite a bit in the interview, including his view on the initial hierarchy of The Rolling Stones’ power dynamic. Wyman was there to see the transition between Brian Jones’ days in charge and the eventual takeover staged by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Despite the change, Wyman continues to see Jones as the main impetus for what made the Stones huge.
“Whenever the Stones would go on tour, me and Brian would always share a room,” Wyman shared. “He could be really sweet and lovely and was more intelligent than any of the others. He was very articulate. But he could also be a little bastard sometimes. He had an evil streak which a lot of people only remember him for. Brian would do nasty things, like steal my girl or something one night. So he’d do the dirty, then you’d end up forgiving him because he’d have that little innocent, angelic smile: ‘Sorry, man. I didn’t mean it.’ So you’d love him and hate him.”
“I’ve always said good things about him because he was the creator of The Rolling Stones,” Wyman said. “I don’t care what you say about Mick and Keith, if it hadn’t been for Brian, they probably would have had a different band in Dartford, out in the sticks where they lived. They weren’t Londoners, though Mick always tries on his cockney accent, which he doesn’t deserve, really. The only working-class ones in the Stones were me and Charlie [Watts, drummer].”
