When I want to quietly invoke “I am cooler than you,” I post this picture of me wishing Keith Richards a Happy Birthday (in 1988; he turned 45 that year) as the late John Spacely coyly says with his smirk, “no pictures, please.”
Keith was busy celebrating that night - it was his birthday, his wedding anniversary, and this party where we’re pictured was the 10th Anniversary Party of the Beggars Banquet zine, created and published by Bill German, and endorsed by the Rolling Stones themselves, who gave the lad access to them for exclusive interviews and photo opportunities.
Like Pleasant Gehman and me before him, Bill German was a young writer with a specific passion, and in that inadvertent teenage entrepreneur way, turned his passion into his profession, and simultaneously got the attention of and earned the respect of the artists he admired. I think we gravitate towards “our people,” and Bill and I were in the same boat, but a few years apart.
Still, we’re in awe of our own teenaged selves. How did we get there? Is The Game in our blood?
For me, what’s a little cooler than a picture of what appears to be an intimate moment with the world’s most famous bad boy is that, Mercy Mercy, on his 45th birthday, Keith Richards introduced me to Don Covay.
I was inspired to find these scans (rough as they are) when a Tom Petty’s Buried Treasure episode featuring “Mercy, Mercy” came on as I was driving (don’t worry, I pulled over to snap that image).
So, there he is: Mr. Don Covay, who passed away in 2015. (In the background is John Spacely. The hand at the bottom of the frame belongs to Bill German.)
Don began his musical career in 1957, the year before I was born*, as a member of Little Richard’s Revue, where he was not only a member of the ensemble, but the opening act, and Richard’s driver! The song most associated with Don Covay is “Mercy, Mercy,” which the Rolling Stones covered a year after Covay himself recorded it. Jimi Hendrix was the guitarist on Covay’s recording! *I inserted my birth into the Don Covay career timeline to punctuate that my entire life has always had Don Covay music in it. When Keith introduced us, my inner voice was shrieking HAVE MERCY ON ME, while I was trying to be nonchalant. Yet I look at that photo and I appear to have the tell-tale puppy dog eyes.
Thirty-six years later, I still can’t grasp that I had birthday cake with Keith Richards and Don Covay. But Keith would out-do himself a couple years later with another legend. That’s a story for another post, but to pique your interest, it involves pad Thai, the 19th floor on 19th street, and not a single nervous breakdown.
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