“Mick and Keith were totally wealthy, so they weren’t bothered, but me, Charlie and Ronnie were scraping by”: Bill Wyman says he should have left Rolling Stones “a lot earlier”
Former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman has no regrets about leaving one of the biggest rock bands in the world – if anything, he wishes he had done it “a lot earlier”.
In a new interview with Classic Rock, Wyman – who was with the Stones from 1962 to 1993 – speaks of the financial difficulties he faced when the band was forced to take a break from touring due to an ongoing feud between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
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“I should have left in the ’80s when it was falling apart,” he says. “I hung on for a three-tour ending across ‘89 and ‘90 [three legs of the Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle tour], after seven years of nothing, and I’d ended up with a bank overdraft of £200,000, because we weren’t earning anything.”
“Mick and Keith were totally wealthy, so they weren’t bothered, but me, Charlie [Watts] and Ronnie [Wood] were scraping by. Ronnie started to do art to feed his family.”
“Anyway, I only started playing with them again in the hope it’d only be a couple of years, because I had all these other things I wanted to do,” says Wyman. “I wanted to do archaeology, write books, do photography, I wanted to play charity cricket, I wanted to do all these other things. And thirty years on I’m still wanting to do them, to tell the truth.”
The musician adds that he was “so happy to leave in the end” – a fact the other members “absolutely didn’t like, and refused to accept”.
“They said: ‘You have not left.’ When they were doing the plan for the coming year, I said: ‘Well there’s no point in me discussing it, because I’m leaving.’ And they went: ‘You’re not leaving.’ I said: ‘I am leaving, I’ve left.’ And they wouldn’t believe me. Two years went by, and they were putting the band together again to make a new record in ’94. They said: ‘Are you still in the band?’ I said: ‘I left two years ago.’”
Wyman continues: “Mick and Charlie tried to talk me out of it, bless ‘em, but I didn’t want to. I just dropped everything. Cleared the air. Gave up a career, a terrible marriage… Got married again and formed the Rhythm Kings with Georgie Fame and Gary Brooker, just for fun.”
The post “Mick and Keith were totally wealthy, so they weren’t bothered, but me, Charlie and Ronnie were scraping by”: Bill Wyman says he should have left Rolling Stones “a lot earlier” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
