The 3 Words KEITH RICHARDS Said on Wardour Street in 1963 That Nobody Has Ever Forgotten D
The club manager explained the policy, the way policies that cannot be defended are always explained quickly, without eye contact, with the word unfortunately doing more work than it was designed to do. The policy was that Chuck Berry could not perform through the main entrance. The policy was that there was a separate arrangement for certain performers.
Keith Richards heard every word of this explanation from 6 ft away on a Wardour Street pavement in the spring of 1963. Keith Richards was 20 years old. The Rolling Stones had not yet released their first single. Nobody outside London knew who Keith Richards was. Tell us in the comments where you’re watching from and subscribe if you haven’t already.
What Keith Richards said next changed what happened inside that building for the next 40 years. It was April 1963. The Rolling Stones had been together for less than a year, playing pubs and small clubs in and around London with the specific mixture of determination and financial precariousness that characterized every band in the city that had not yet found a paying audience large enough to constitute a business.
They had been sleeping on floors and splitting earnings that did not cover the cost of the petrol to get to the venues they were earning them in, and none of this had yet deterred any of them. Which was the specific quality that Keith Richards would later identify as the distinguishing characteristic of the people who actually make it through the early period.
The band had been playing a residency at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond on Sunday evenings that had begun building a following, a following small enough that individual faces in the crowd were recognizable from week to week, but growing, which was the thing that mattered. Keith Richards was 20 years old and had been playing guitar since he was 15, had been playing seriously since he was 17, had been playing in a band with Mick Jagger and Brian Jones since the previous year, and had arrived at the point where he could feel in the quality of the weekly crowd at the Crawdaddy and in the conversations that followed the shows that something was beginning to happen. Not something that had a shape or a timeline yet, something that was in the process of becoming shapeable. The club on Wardour Street was called the Marquee. It had been in its current basement location since 1958 below a cinema on the east side of the street and it was by the spring of 1963 the venue in London that a musician needed
to play if a musician wanted to be taken seriously by the people who were in the process of deciding which musicians would matter. The Marquee was not large. It held several hundred people at capacity and the stage was low enough that the front row of the audience was eye level with the performers’ feet.
But it was the place. It occupied a specific position in the London music ecosystem of 1963 that was not about physical size or geographical convenience but about meaning, about what it signified to have played there and to be known to have played there. The clubs and pubs and small ballrooms of the London circuit were a network and the Marquee was the node in that network that everything else oriented itself around.
If it happened at the Marquee, it happened. If it didn’t happen at the Marquee, it was still in the process of happening. Keith Richards had been to the Marquee as an audience member many times. Keith Richards had not yet played there. Chuck Berry was not an unknown commodity in the spring of 1963. Chuck Berry was 36 years old, had been recording and touring since 1955 and had produced in those eight years a catalog of songs that had done something to popular music that is difficult to describe accurately without understanding how different popular music had been before it. Chuck Berry had changed the vocabulary of the electric guitar in a specific, irreversible way. He had taken an instrument that existed in rock and roll primarily as a rhythmic texture and made it the primary vehicle for melodic invention, personality, and narrative. He had done this in a sequence of recordings beginning with Maybellene in 1955 and continuing through Johnny B. Goode, Roll Over Beethoven, Carol, Sweet
Little Sixteen, and a dozen others, each one a different demonstration of the same core discovery, which was that the guitar could be the voice. Keith Richards had been learning to play guitar from Chuck Berry records since he was 15 years old, not from teachers, not from books, not from formal instruction of any kind, from the recordings themselves, playing them on repeat until the shapes under his fingers began to produce something close to the sounds on the record, and then playing them again until it was closer, and then again until the gap between what Keith Richards produced and what Chuck Berry had produced contained only the difference that time and accumulated hours would eventually close. Chuck Berry was, in the specific and literal sense, the reason Keith Richards played the way Keith Richards played. Chuck Berry was the origin. Everything else in Keith Richards’s musical development was downstream of that. The booking at the Marquee that spring evening had been arranged through a promoter who had not, apparently, communicated certain
information to the venue’s management in advance. The information was that Chuck Berry was black. This was not unusual in London in 1963. Not the fact that it hadn’t been communicated in advance, and not the fact that it apparently needed to be communicated at all, because the information would trigger a policy at the venue maintained and that the promoter presumably knew about and had decided to navigate by not mentioning it rather than by addressing it.
The Marquee’s management maintained a policy about black performers that the manager communicated to Chuck Berry and his road manager on the pavement outside the venue’s main entrance on Wardour Street. The policy, stated plainly, was that black performers could not enter through the front door of the venue.
The policy was that there was a service entrance at the side of the building that was available for this purpose. The manager communicated this without hesitation and without apparent awareness that what he was saying was anything other than a practical arrangement. A logistical fact, not a moral position. This was the particular quality that made it, in the hearing of Keith Richards, who was standing 6 ft away having arrived early for the show, something that required an immediate response rather than a considered one. The manager finished speaking. Chuck Berry’s road manager was absorbing the information. Keith Richards, who had listened to the entire exchange without interrupting it, had already arrived at the only conclusion available to him. Then Keith Richards said three words, “Then we leave.” Keith Richards said this quietly, without particular emphasis, and then looked at the Marquee’s manager with an expression that was not angry, and not
combative, and not theatrical in any way, simply the expression of someone who has said what they mean and is waiting for the information to reach the other person. The manager looked at Keith Richards. The manager appeared to register for the first time that the young man in the dark jacket who had been standing 6 ft away had been listening to the entire conversation.
“Who are you?” the manager said. Keith Richards told him. The Rolling Stones were booked to play the Marquee that evening as the supporting act on the same bill as Chuck Berry. If Chuck Berry was being directed to a service entrance, Keith Richards said, then the Rolling Stones were using the service entrance, also. If Chuck Berry was not performing through the main entrance, then the Rolling Stones were not performing.
There was no version of tonight in which this arrangement was acceptable. The manager looked at Keith Richards. The manager looked at the small group of people. Road managers, band members, a few early arrivals who had gathered on the Wardour Street pavement during this exchange. The manager looked at Chuck Berry’s road manager.
The manager made a decision. The decision was that Chuck Berry would use the main entrance. Tell us in the comments where you’re watching from, and if you’re not subscribed yet, now is the right moment because what happened in the next minute on that Wardour Street pavement is the part of this story that nobody who was there has ever forgotten and that Keith Richards himself described many years later as the simplest decision he ever made.
The Marquee’s management did not announce this as a policy change or acknowledge that the previous arrangement had been wrong. What happened was that the manager stepped back from the entrance and Chuck Berry walked through the main door of the Marquee Club on Wardour Street on an April evening in 1963.
Chuck Berry walked through it with the specific practiced composure of a man who has encountered this category of situation across many years and many countries and has developed through that long acquaintance a way of moving through it that does not perform distress or perform triumph but simply continues because the continuing is the necessary thing and anything performed around it would be a distraction from the work.
There were people on the Wardour Street pavement who watched Chuck Berry walk through that door. Some of them had watched the entire exchange and understood what the walking through the door represented. Some of them had arrived in the middle of it and understood only that something had happened and that it had been resolved in this direction rather than the other.
All of them watched Chuck Berry walk through the main entrance of the Marquee Club on a spring evening in London in 1963. Chuck Berry walked through it at the same pace at which he had been standing outside it, no slower, no faster, nothing in the body language that registered the previous 5 minutes as anything other than a delay that had been resolved. Chuck Berry walked in.
Keith Richards walked in behind him. The Rolling Stones followed. The show that evening was remembered afterward primarily for the music. Chuck Berry played for 90 minutes in a room of several hundred people who had come to see what the name on the poster could actually deliver in a basement venue with a low stage and a sound system that was, by any objective standard, inadequate for the volume and complexity of what it was being asked to carry.
The room was packed to a density that would not have met current safety standards. The air was warm and thick with the particular quality that small music venues in London in 1963 shared, which was the quality of a space that had been used for this purpose repeatedly and had absorbed it.
The sound of previous performances in the walls, the specific acoustic signature of a room that had been trained to hold music. Chuck Berry played at a level that made all of these conditions irrelevant. He played with the authority of someone who has been doing the thing long enough that the quality of the surroundings has become secondary, not because he doesn’t notice them, but because the source of the music is deep enough to continue producing regardless of what the room is doing to it.
The first three songs went through the inadequate sound system and out to the packed room and back to the walls. And by the fourth song, the crowd had stopped trying to manage their response to the volume and the heat and had simply surrendered to the fact of what was happening. Keith Richards stood at the side of the stage for the entire 90 minutes.
A photograph taken that night by an audience member with a camera that was not designed for the lighting conditions shows Keith Richards in profile watching Chuck Berry’s right hand on the guitar neck with the expression of someone who has been studying this for 5 years and is still finding new information in every bar.
The expression on Keith Richards’ face in the photograph is not the expression of a fan, it is the expression of a student who has found the source and will not look away from it. The Marquee changed its entrance policy in the weeks following that evening. The change was not announced at a management meeting or codified in any written document that anyone has been able to locate.
It was simply the case that the policy that had existed before that April evening in 1963 no longer existed afterward and that everyone who worked at the venue understood this without needing it to be stated. The reasoning was practical. The continuation of a policy that had been confronted on a Wardour Street pavement by a 20-year-old musician and had not survived the confrontation was not something the management was interested in defending or reasserting.
The Marquee went on to become one of the most significant live music venues in London’s history. Over the subsequent decades, virtually every significant British rock and blues act of the era played there. None of them used a separate entrance. The Rolling Stones released their first single two months later in June 1963.
By the end of 1964, Keith Richards was among the most recognizable musicians in Britain. By mid-1965, Satisfaction was the most played song on American radio and the Rolling Stones were playing venues that bore no resemblance to the Crawdaddy residency in Richmond or the basement of the Marquee.
By 1969, the Rolling Stones were playing stadiums on multiple continents and the question of which door they used at any venue was handled by a security team of 14 people. None of this was knowable in April 1963 on a pavement on Wardour Street. What was knowable was simpler and more immediate. There was a man who had taught Keith Richards to play guitar and that man was being told to use a different door and Keith Richards was 20 years old and had three words available to him.
Keith Richards used them. Three words spoken once without repetition or elaboration or theatrical weight, simply stated and then left to stand in the Wardour Street air while the manager processed what had been said and understood what the alternatives were and arrived at his decision. The manager stepped back.
The door opened. Chuck Berry walked through. Keith Richards walked through behind him. And then they went inside and played music, which was what they had come to do, which was the only thing that had ever mattered about any of it and which the previous 15 minutes on the pavement had been entirely in the service of.
If this story gave you something, the reminder that the right thing to say is sometimes three words and that knowing when to say them is the whole of the matter, share it today with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe to this channel if you haven’t already and tell us in the comments where you’re watching from and what in this story stayed with you.
Every week, another story from a life that always knew, without ambiguity, which door everyone deserved to walk through and never once needed to be any older than 20 to say so.
