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“That’s Not Music—Pack It In”—Club Owner Had No Idea He Was Throwing Out KEITH RICHARDS

by Bien Tap Vien•

“That’s Not Music—Pack It In”—Club Owner Had No Idea He Was Throwing Out KEITH RICHARDS

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In the summer of 1971, a club owner in Birmingham told a man sitting in the back of his venue that what he was playing was not music. The man said nothing. The man left. The club owner spent the following 40 years telling people about the conversation. Not because it made him look good, but because the only honest way to tell it was the way it actually happened, which was that he was wrong and the man he said it to was Keith Richards.

Roy Hadfield had been running the Anchor Club on Bristol Street in Birmingham since 1965. The anchor was not a large venue. It held approximately 200 people at capacity, had a stage at the far end that was elevated 18 in above the floor, and had the specific atmosphere of a room that had absorbed the sound of live music for 6 years, and had been changed by it in ways that were visible in the walls and the floor and the particular quality of attention that regular audiences bring to a space they have come to trust. Roy Hadfield had opened

the anchor in the spring of 1965 with the specific conviction of a man who believed that Birmingham deserved a serious music venue and that he was the person to provide it and he had spent the following six years proving that conviction correct. Roy Hadfield was 43 years old in August of 1971. Roy Hadfield had heard thousands of musicians play in his venue.

Roy Hadfield had heard musicians at every level of competence and every level of ambition. people who were learning, people who were working, people who had arrived at the specific plateau of proficiency that allowed them to perform without embarrassing themselves and without surprising anyone. Roy Hadfield had heard musicians who were technically accomplished but emotionally absent.

Musicians who were emotionally present but technically limited. Musicians who had the right notes and the wrong feeling. Musicians who had the wrong notes and the right feeling. Roy Hadfield had developed across six years of listening a taxonomy of all of these categories and a genuine facility for placing any musician he heard within it quickly and accurately.

Roy Hadfield had also on a handful of occasions across six years heard something in his venue that was in a different category entirely. Something that stopped the room in the way that certain things stop rooms that made the people present aware that they were hearing something they would not forget. Roy Hadfield knew what that sounded like.

Roy Hadfield had experienced it four times in six years, and each time he had stood at the bar and listened without moving and felt the room change around him. Roy Hadfield believed he could identify the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary within the first 30 seconds of hearing a musician play. Roy Hadfield had been right about this identification so many times across six years that his confidence in the ability had become absolute.

Roy Hadfield was the authority in his own room. Roy Hadfield had earned that authority. Roy Hadfield was wrong on the evening of August 14th, 1971 in a way that he spent 40 years processing. Keith Richards was in Birmingham for reasons that need not be detailed. The Rolling Stones had been working extensively throughout 1971.

The Sticky Fingers album had been released in April. The band was between tour legs and Keith Richards was doing what Keith Richards did when the schedule created space. Keith Richards did not take time off in the conventional sense. Keith Richards took time in a different way by moving through cities without an agenda, finding the rooms that had the right kind of atmosphere and being in them for as long as they remained interesting.

The Rolling Stones touring schedule in the summer of 1971 created pockets of time in cities across Britain and Europe. And Keith Richards had developed the habit of filling those pockets by finding the kind of room that had music in it and sitting in it and listening. Keith Richards had been doing this since the early 1960s.

moving through the music scenes of cities that the official tour schedule brought him to, finding the places where music was happening informally and without institutional support, sitting in corners and listening with the specific attention of someone who is always learning. Sometimes Keith Richards played. Keith Richards had found the Anchor Club on Bristol Street in the late afternoon of August 14th, had come inside without anyone recognizing him, had ordered a drink, and had settled into the back corner with the acoustic guitar that

Keith Richards carried as a matter of course on these expeditions. The anchor club on the evening of August 14th, 1971, was about half full. A Thursday evening crowd, people who came to the anchor because it was the kind of place they came to on Thursday evenings and had been coming to for years. The scheduled performer that evening was a local singer named Terry Banks, who had been playing the anchor regularly for 18 months and whose sets Roy Hadfield could have reproduced from memory.

Terry Banks was on a break between his first and second sets when Keith Richards, sitting in the back corner with his acoustic guitar, began to play quietly to himself. Keith Richards was not performing. Keith Richards was not playing for the room. Keith Richards was doing what Keith Richards did in the pockets of time that touring created.

Playing because not playing was not an option and the guitar was there and the room had the right kind of acoustic quality and the drink was good and there was no particular reason not to. Keith Richards played a progression that he had been working on for several days quietly and with the focused inward attention of someone engaged in a private process that happens to be occurring in a public space.

Several people in the nearby tables heard what Keith Richards was playing and turn toward it without deciding to. This is what happens when something genuinely good enters a room that has been filled with ordinary sound. The ears make the decision before the brain does, and the body follows the ears before the mind has had time to ratify the instruction.

Three people at two separate tables had stopped their conversations by the time Roy Hadfield came out from behind the bar. A fourth person, a woman who had been on her way to the bathroom at the far end of the room, had stopped walking and was standing in the middle of the floor with her hand on the back of an empty chair listening.

None of these people had been asked to listen. The music had simply been good enough to make stopping feel like the right response. Roy Hadfield heard the guitar from the bar. Roy Hadfield heard it for approximately 15 seconds. In those 15 seconds, Roy Hadfield made the assessment that Roy Hadfield made about musicians.

the 32nd assessment that Roy Hadfield had been making for six years and had been right about by Roy Hadfield’s own reckoning almost every time. Roy Hadfield classified what he was hearing as amateur playing unscheduled and unwanted in the middle of an evening when his venue was operating to a format that did not include an unannounced guitar in the back corner.

Roy Hadfield walked to the back corner. Roy Hadfield stood in front of Keith Richards. Keith Richards looked up. Roy Hadfield said, “Oi, what do you call that? That’s not music, that is. Pack it in.” Keith Richards looked at Roy Hadfield for a moment. Keith Richards said nothing. The people at the two nearby tables who had turned to listen were watching this exchange.

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