The comical story of The X-pensive Winos’ appearance on ‘Saturday Night Live’
Keith Richards once said that “you have the sun, you have the moon, you have the air that you breathe, and you have the Rolling Stones!” but in the mid-1980s, Mick Jagger decided to see what life was like beyond the Stones.
The group had signed to Columbia Records in 1983, and part of the deal included the option for the band members to work on and release solo projects, as well, although it seems that only Jagger was aware of this minor detail.
In 1985, the singer released his debut solo album, She’s the Boss, to lukewarm reviews and a frosty reception from his longtime collaborator Keith Richards, who thought the band should come before its individual members. Richards even later compared Jagger’s solo album to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, of all things, writing in his 2010 memoir Life that “everybody had a copy, but nobody listened to it.”
Whilst Jagger was busy working on his solo follow-up, Primitive Cool, Richards decided to get his own band together and put out some non-Rolling Stones works as well.
The X-Pensive Wino’s are a rag-tag bunch of musicians who could make a racket with the best of them. Forming in 1987, Richards was joined by Steve Jordan on drums (who went on to replace the late Charlie Watts in The Rolling Stones in 2021, with Watts’ blessing), Waddy Wachtel on guitar, Ivan Neville on the keyboard and the multi-talented Charley Drayton on bass.
Their first album, Talk is Cheap, arrived in 1988 and features additional playing from Bernie Worrell, Bootsy Collins and Maceo Parker. With songs like ‘Take It So Hard’, ‘I Could Have Stood You Up’, ‘Make No Mistake’, ‘You Don’t Move Me’ and ‘Whip It Up’, Richards and his crew sounded far more exciting, more wild, more joyous and more virile than Jagger did anywhere on his solo albums, with Richards’ vocals far realer and truer, despite all their ragged glory, than anything you can find on Jagger’s works, and his new band even one-upped most of The Stones’ most recent outings, too.
With strong reviews and the album selling well, as well as a highly anticipated tour booked to boot, The X-Pensive Winos were lined up to play on Saturday Night Live in October ‘88.
Remembering the show, Saturday Night Live bandleader GE Smith said, “Keith Richards? If you’re a guy like me, there is the icon. You know? That’s it. Thats the ultimate white boy rock guitar player, is Keith Richards. Everything about him, the moves, the way he wears the guitar, the guitars he plays. Everything, everything about him. His playing? He’s a fantastic player.”
With his hero waiting in the wings, behind the stage curtain and ready to be brought on, Smith recalled the moments leading up to the Winos’ performance. “So we’re doing the [SNL house] band shot, coming into the commercial break right before Keith and the Winos are gonna be on, and it was a song that I had written, a song called ‘The E Town Crawl’, and we just were catching it. Some nights, stuff just works! We were catching it, we were kicking and I was playing some stuff, T-Bone [Burnett] is honking away on the bass, we were having a good time, and all of a sudden I see that little slit in the curtain part and Keith sticks his face out. He looks at me and he goes, ‘Don’t play that good before I come on!’”
Coming from an icon like Keith Richards, Smith took it as the “ultimate complement”. Richards isn’t known as one of the best live performers in the world for nothing, though, and went on to play a blistering version of ‘Take It So Hard’ with his band.
