Ronnie Wood Revisits His Lost Sixties Tour Diary

Before Ronnie Wood joined the Rolling Stones in 1975, he made his name as an ace guitarist with the Faces and the Jeff Beck Group – and before that, as a teenager in West London, he played in a bluesy group called the Birds. Wood, 68, recently discovered his personal road notes from a 1965 tour with that band. “It’s the diary of a 17-year-old rock & roller,” he says. “It was leather-bound, with gold edging to the pages, and I used to keep it quite diligently. I’d forgotten all the details!” Wood fleshed out the diary – which features cameos from Eric Clapton, the Who, and more – with new reminiscences and illustrations for a book, How Can It Be? (available now in a signed, limited edition of 1,965 copies, with a wider release due this fall).

Wood called during a day off on the Stones’ new stadium tour to talk about his rock & roll youth, getting sober, hanging with Harry Styles and more.

How would you describe yourself at 17? What kind of a teenager were you?
Much like I am now, I think. I was very pretentious, and very aware of the audiences, whether they accepted us or gave us a hard time.

What were the crowds like at those shows in ’65?
Heavy emphasis on the girls. A lot of it was to impress them – you gauged how well you were doing if they screamed. It took us ages to warm them up sometimes. You had to convert these unbelievers to let their hair down a bit. Then, in certain areas, like in the west of England down at Salisbury, they wanted a piece of you – a piece of your hair, a piece of your clothing. They were really quite savage. And we had no security! We got through that by the skin of our teeth.

Was there a lot of drinking on the road?
Yeah, those were the days of experimenting with scotch and Coke and brandy and things, and perhaps not knowing the limits. There are some entries where it says, “Great night last night. Sick twice.” But in those days it used to bounce off us – that and all the travel we did in the van. We’d grin and bear it. If I had to do it now, I probably wouldn’t last a week.

A few of the entries mention partying with Keith Moon. What was that like?
[Laughs] He was a hell-raiser, but a hell of a gentleman at the same time. It was hard to think that the same guy that was really polite to your mother in his smoking jacket was also the guy that was drilling through the hotel room to get in bed with [John] Entwistle because he didn’t want to be lonely. The Who were very encouraging to us. One night they came out to this tiny little dive outside London where we were up onstage, and they were shouting up from the crowd, “We’re Number One!” We were going, “You bastards!” It was a friendly rivalry.