Bill Wyman
Over five years ago, Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman,announced that after 31 years,he was quitting the band. Stones fans around the world were shocked and The Glimmer Twins, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, both publicly denounced Wyman for his decision to retire from the Stones. Yet according to Wyman, his decision to leave what some have called “The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World”, was the beginning of a turning point in not only his musical career, but his personal life as well.
Wyman said during an interiew,”Since I’ve left the band I’ve never been happier. Everything has kind of jelled. In my private life, I’d always been happy before, until a few years ago when I had a bad situation with marrying that young girl,(Wyman had married 17-year-old British model Mandy Smith) which your readers probably heard about. That relationship was very destructive. It made things difficult for me. As soon as I cleared that up, things started to get better for me.”
Another difficult time during that period in his life, came when Wyman’s father died when he was on tour with the Stones in 1990.
Wyman was working in Japan touring with the band. “I mean he was ill,”Wyman said,” but I couldn’t come back to England to be with my father because of the commitment to complete the Japanese tour dates.” Once Wyman came back home to London, he began to sort out his marriage to Mandy Smith, which he still feels was a difficult and “destructive” relationship. “I realized how destructive being with that girl was to me,”Wyman said,” so I got rid of that. Then I basically sorted out my life over the next 18 months. I totally changed everything. I left the band, which was a great relief in some respects. Then I got together with an old girlfriend of mine, a woman who is a model, whom I first met in Paris in 1979 She’s from Santa Monica and we’ve got married(he laughs). Wyman’s wife’s name is Suzanne. We’ve now got two fantastic little girls (The couple’s daughter’s are Katie age 3 and Jessie age 2). And we’ve got another one arriving in May. In the five years since the confused, difficult period of my life, I’m as happy as can be. Everything is wonderful.”
The Wyman family resides at their Gedding Hall Estate in Suffolk, Easton England.
With the Stones currently on a world tour in support of their latest album”Bridges To Babylon”, there has been much speculation in the media and among Stones fans as to why Wyman refused to tour with the band any further. For the record, Wyman has decided to provide some insight into the reasons he decided to call it quits with the Stones. “In 1989 and 90, we’d done the biggest tours that had ever been. We’d also done that previously in 1981 and 1982. In 1989 we did the Steel Wheels Tour in America, which was the biggest tour ever for that country. Then we did the biggest tour ever of Japan, Australia, Europe and England. We played 120 shows to seven and a quarter million people. And the average audience on that tour was 60,000 per show. I mean it was a joke. We’d had how many hit singles and how many hit albums,”Wyman continued,” we’d done movies, I’d done soundtracks and I’d had success with solo hits. Well, at that time, I kind of looked at myself then and I was going through this confused period and I thought,’What’s the point in continuing?’ We’ve done everything, we’ve achieved everything we’ve ever intended and aimed for. There’s absolutely no reason to continue. The only reason to continue is to repeat everything we’d already done and try to do it a bit better, which we’d been doing for some years already. Or just do it for the money. There was no ambition to do it, there was no reason to do it anymore. So I saw absolutely no point in doing it unless I just wanted to pick up the money and get a bit richer or whatever. That’s why I’ve left.”
During the past five years Wyman has been away from the Stones, the 61-year-old has been working on eight different projects.
Among them is Wyman’s new album titled “Struttin’ Our Stuff” which Wyman recorded last year with his band The Rhythm Kings. Bill Wyman & The Rhythm Kings is Wyman on bass and vocals, Beverly Skeete(vocals), Terry Taylor(guitar/keyboards), Dave Hartley(piano) and drummer Graham Broad. “Struttin’ Our Stuff” also includes instrumental contributions for Eric Clapton, Peter Frampton, Albert Lee, Bobby Keys, Gary Brooker, Max Middleton and Ray Cooper. The majority of material on “Struttin’ Our Stuff” is a variety of styles from obscure jazz, swing,big band and R&B tracks dating back to the ’20’s. Wyman is an avid collector of vintage music recordings and many of the songs he chose for the album came from recordings in his collection. “I’ve always wondered why,”Wyman said,” when I hear songs from the ’20’s and ’30’s, that specific music gives me a sort of nostalgia feel when I hear it. I don’t believe in reincarnation or that sort of thing(he laughs), but if there was such a thing maybe in a previous life, then I might have been a musician in the ’20’s or ’30’s. I really feel like I know the music from that period of time and I shouldn’t because I wasn’t around much then.” In time, Wyman has gradually come to the realization that, growing up as a child during the War in London, he must have heard the same songs he has in his collection, on the radio. “When I was very small,”He said,”maybe three, four or five years old, I used to go to my grandparents back then. We didn’t have radios or record players in our home and obviously there was no TV, but I would go to my grandparents often and stay with them sometimes and they had a radio and a record player. So I’d visit them before the War and during the War and stay with them sometimes. It was there that I first heard this music from the ’20’s and ’30’s.
On my dad’s side,”Wyman continued,” I had four aunts and six uncles and I’d go and visit them too. They had radios and they’d always be sitting around the radio raving about some singer. Well, I was so little I couldn’t make out the difference between one singer on the radio and the next. I could never work out how they knew who each singer was and how they could distinguish between one and another. I was probably about four years old at the time. So about five years ago(currently), I came to the realization that I must have heard this wonderful music of the ’20’s and ’30’s back when I visited my grandmother and aunts and uncles when I was a young child.”
Over the past 41 years he has been collecting vintage recordings, Wyman has built an extensive collection of that kind of music.
Wyman’s collection goes back to the rag time era and Vaudeville. “As I’ve built my collection bit by bit,”Wyman said,”I’ve learned about other people building their own collections and I’ve gotten stuff for them. When we used to tour in 1963 in Belgium,Denmark, and Holland you’d go into these little obscure record shops and they had racks of blues stuff. I mean racks of it. You could go into English record shops and find maybe 12 blues albums in the entire shop, but in these shops in Europe, you’d find 12,000 albums in one shop alone. Me and Charlie Watts and Ian Stewart, we’d be in our glory leafing through these things. I mean we’d come out of these shops with twenty, maybe thirty albums. We’d ship some home and back then we’d carry a record player with us on tour so we could hear these rare albums. I’ve picked up wonderful stuff which was released only in Holland, Denmark and Germany. I’d find albums by all these really obscure people.”
When Wyman began selecting tracks for “Struttin Our Stuff”, last year, he decided to record many obscure tracks from the albums in his collection. “There’s songs on these albums that I know by heart,”he said,”that most people have never,ever heard of. So for this new album, I didn’t do the obvious. Like Eric Clapton, he’s a great friend and I’ve known him for years obviously, and he does a lot of blues records. But on his blues records, he always records the most well known piece by the most well known artists. If he does a song on his album, it’s the one everybody knows. The albums Eric makes are all very nice and such but everybody knows the songs. For mine, I pick the most obscure songs that nobody has ever heard. When I do solo records,”Wyman continued,” I try and sound as far from the Stones as possible. Because there’s no reason to do it if you’re going to sound like the Stones. You might as well be in the band. It always confuses me when any member of any band does a solo record and sounds like the band they’re in. I mean look at Ringo and George Harrison and not only the older bands, but Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford. They all sound like the band they’re in and I don’t see the point of it.”