Escaping Mick: Why did Keith Richards form the X-Pensive Winos?
On the cover of The Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers is the denim-clad crotch of a gentleman with a rather prominent and sizable personal pipe. Many have assumed that these perverse pantaloons and, therefore, the lump therein belong to swaggering frontman Mick Jagger. However, that’s not the case. The famed crotch in question actually belongs to model and Andy Warhol acolyte Joe Dallesandro.
If Keith Richards’ brutal critique of Jagger’s member is anything to go by, then old Dallesandro was drafted in for good reason. The guitarist once wrote: “Marianne Faithfull had no fun with his tiny todger. I know he’s got an enormous pair of balls- but it doesn’t quite fill the gap.” So, perhaps Sticky Fingers is an even more apt title than the world first thought.
This is perhaps the most playful of Richards’ critiques of Jagger’s supposed inadequacies. In fact, you could play it off as a wind-up if it wasn’t for the fact that he’s levelled far more substantiated attacks against his frontman over the years. They love and hate like brothers, provided the brothers in question were hellraisers, the likes of which the world has rarely seen since the days of Ned Kelly.
However, on occasion, some of Richards’ quips have carried more weight than the flippant remarks of a momentarily aggrieved sibling. One of the most telling arrived when he took a break from The Rolling Stones and pursued a different route with The X-Pensive Winos. It was during this time that he realised he had always been writing with Jagger in mind, and now he was free to push his muses in less restricting directions.
He happily admits that he had always been the Stones’ most dedicated member, the captain of the team and head cheerleader to boot, so turning away from them even briefly was a big move, and it wasn’t just a flight of fancy to write with someone else in mind for a change that prompted him to form a new band. The 1980s saw Jagger and Richards enter a period of genuine feuding.
Why were Mick Jagger and Keith Richards feuding in the 1980s?
After over 20 years in a band together, tirelessly playing shows, being slapped with tax evasion issues, countless arrests, the casualty of Altamont, the death of Brian Jones, and the exodus of old bandmates, wear and tear was inevitable. Things were becoming increasingly frayed for myriad reasons. Richards’ substance abuse was frustrating Jagger, but the guitarist would argue that the frontman was increasingly unreliable in other ways, writing: “Mick started doing his little Errol Flynn impression on his own and left me to do the dirty work with the band.”
Jagger’s flippancy, however, was also borne from the fact that he worried the band were being overtaken by hip peers. Richards has always opined that Bowie was simply “all pose”. Jagger thought there was something more to it – how couldn’t there be, he was sweeping up all the trendy kids who were once screaming for him. “He watched what David Bowie was doing and wanted to do it. Bowie was a major, major attraction,” Richards continues. “Somebody had taken Mick on in the costume and bizarreness department.”
Richards thought this meant Jagger was jeopardising his true talent in favour of a fad-driven facsimile when he arrived in the studio with rather un-Stones-like ideas. “The fact is, Mick could deliver ten times more than Bowie in just a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, singing ‘I’m a Ma’,” Richards wrote. “Why would you want to be anything else if you’re Mick Jagger? Is being the greatest entertainer in show business not enough? He forgot that it was he who was new, who created and set the trends in the first place, for years. It’s fascinating. I can’t figure it out. It’s almost as if Mick was aspiring to be Mick Jagger, chasing his own phantom.”
These problems came to a head when Jagger released his own solo record. Suddenly, Richards wasn’t only in competition, but he felt he had to save the legacy of the act that spawned Jagger. “I think that everybody – with the possible exception of Mick himself – has learned the lesson that Mick Jagger’s really good when he’s with the Rolling Stones,” Richards told Guitar World. “But when he ain’t, I don’t think anybody gives a fuckin’ toss. Whether he gets the message or not.“
Jagger’s solo flop, She’s The Boss, stirred Richards into action. ”I think it was that time, around ’85, when Mick and I both realised that we had to take a break. So I just intended to take a break, but the next thing I know Mick’s off making records and all this stuff. After about a year I was like: Oh, man. I’ve gotta do something,” he told Louder Sound.
Who was in the X-Pensive Winos?
”I’d since been hanging around with Steve Jordan and Charley Drayton, and I’d got this gig with Aretha Franklin doing Jumping Jack Flash with Steve, and that led to Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll with Chuck Berry. By the time we’d finished doing that, it felt ready to try it on myself,” he said. He had written a few songs with himself in mind and demoed them with Jordan. A fresh sound was coming to the fore thanks to this liberating experience and he figured they best put them to tape.
So, he recruited Waddy Watchel on guitar, Ivan Neville on keyboard, Charley Drayton on bass, Jordan joined on drums and production, and the band was formed. A slew of featuring members would add to their rock ‘n’ roll circus-like outlook, and his counterpoint to a tumultuous period for The Rolling Stones came staggering into existence.
