No Rolling Stones, No Regrets

How odd that the first original Rolling Stone to quit that august group should be the one to most vividly live up to the aphorism about--sorry, we have to invoke it--gathering no moss.

Bassist Bill Wyman quit in 1992 after 31 years co-anchoring the Rolling Stones rhythm section with drummer Charlie Watts.

“People think I’m a crazy idiot,” Wyman says with a laugh. “And I swear, it’s been the happiest time in my life since I left.”

Wyman is calling from his summer estate in the south of France on a rare day off from his first international tour since 1992. He’s on the road with the Rhythm Kings, an aggregation of British music vets that includes singer-keyboardists Gary Brooker (Procol Harum) and Georgie Fame (the Blue Flames) and guitarists Albert Lee and Martin Taylor.

“I’ve never regretted my decision for one minute,” Wyman says of his departure from the Stones. “I didn’t have any more objectives to aim for in the band, thought it was just going to be repetitive, which it had already been for a few years. I knew that if I stayed for another 10 years, I’d still be doing ‘Street Fighting Man,’ ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ on stage to the same kind of audiences. There wasn’t much more to aim for there. I thought it was the right time to go, when we were at the top, to move on and do other things and try to achieve something personally.”

Which Wyman has done in spades.

The first Rolling Stone to record a solo album (1974’s “Monkey Grip”), Wyman was also the first to pen an autobiography (1994’s “Stone Alone”), which seems to have set off a writing jag.

Next was 1998’s “Wyman Shoots Chagall,” a beautiful limited-edition book from Genesis Publications detailing Wyman’s decade-long friendship with the fabled Russian painter, who was his neighbor in St.-Paul-de-Vence, France. October brings “Bill Wyman’s Blues Odyssey,” a meticulously researched, profusely illustrated coffee-table book that is Wyman’s personal tribute to the music and people who inspired him to become a musician. And Wyman has finished a second volume of “Stone Alone.”

Right now, Wyman is focused on the Rhythm Kings, making their U.S. debut this month. Until now, Wyman, 64, has chosen to focus on his new family, which includes his third wife, American fashion designer Suzanne Accosta, and three daughters younger than 7.

One relationship in the Rhythm Kings predates the Rolling Stones: In the late ‘50s, Wyman and Brooker used to battle in their respective bands, the Cliftons and the Paramounts. In fact, the Rhythm Kings’ paychecks may feel harrowingly familiar.

“They’re doing it for no money,” Wyman says. “They’re doing it for the same reason I am, the same reason we all began playing music in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s: You just did it for the love of it. You didn’t do it to be rich and famous and make records, be on television and travel the world. That was pie in the sky, so improbable you didn’t even consider it.

“The fortunate ones did become rich and famous, but a lot of them didn’t,” he says. “All the people in this band went through that and we’re back together now, doing music just because we love to play together. That’s the be-all and end-all of it, really.”

The Rhythm Kings, who favor R&B;, blues and swing, have been what the Rolling Stones never were: prolific. “Double Bill,” a new double album, is their fourth album in four years.

“When I cut this one, we did 22 songs in eight days, and it wasn’t just whacked-off cheap and nasty,” Wyman boasts. With the Stones, “you’d have to leave home for six months to record 10 songs in Toronto or Paris, and most of the time you’d be sitting around doing nothing.... It became a total wastage of time to me.”

Such frustrations informed “Stone Alone,” a day-by-day accounting of the Stones’ early years made possible by the fact that Wyman became the band’s chief archivist.

“Well, I’m the only one that ever bothered, it’s as simple as that, really,” he chortles. “It wasn’t a job I took on with the advice of the other guys! Or was helped by anybody. It was something that I did on my own. When I would collect a poster from a show, or a ticket or backstage pass, they used to think it was quite amusing and eccentric. But now I’ve amassed such a collection over the years that I’m the envy of a lot of people.”

Wyman has pretty much finished Volume 2 of “Stone Alone,” covering 1969 to 1981, and suggests there might be one or two more books, covering the ‘80s through his departure from the band, as well as a post-Wyman history.

“But I might turn that into a history of the Rolling Stones, much the way I’ve done ‘Blues Odyssey,”’ Wyman says of the project that occupied him for almost two years. “It’s not an ultimate history of blues music; it’s my voyage through blues.” The 400-page book is impressively expansive in its coverage of musicians, recordings, songs and the varied roots and branches of the blues.

Digging among roots and branches must be instinctive to Wyman, who developed a passion for reading about ancient cultures during the Stones’ endless world tours. That passion has inspired yet another book, combining archeology and medieval English history and centered on his Tudor home in Suffolk.

“The oldest part dates to 1480, and it has a moat around it,” Wyman says, adding that an earlier version of the house shows up in the land survey William of Normandy conducted in 1066. “So I started to check out who else lived there, and with the help of researchers found every single person who has been there since 1150.”

When he started doing amateur archeology in his garden and fields, Wyman uncovered 300 Roman coins and brooches, “pieces of rings and necklaces and lots of pottery. And at a second site a mile away, I found Bronze Age ax blades and fragments. Obviously, this book won’t sell any. It just adds to the common knowledge, which I think is very important.”

Speaking of artifacts from the Stones Age, how are the lads?

“Charlie came to see us in London a few weeks ago, and we went and saw his jazz band at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club,” Wyman reports. “I’m very proud of having been in that band for 31 years and all that we achieved, and I’m still great friends with the majority of them.”

And, Wyman adds, he’s been able to explore so many new paths since he abandoned the Stones.

“So much time and money and effort was wasted because they’re hardly into anything else,” he explains. “Mick’s [Jagger] a bit involved in movies ... and Charlie’s got his jazz band and cricket. Ron [Wood] does his art and Keith [Richards] kind of plays with other people from time to time, but that’s basically it, apart from their families. They haven’t got any other real interests that absorb them. I’ve got tons .”