Bill Wyman on leaving The Rolling Stones: “I should’ve done it a lot earlier”
Former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman doesn’t have any regrets about leaving the band in 1993. In fact, in an interview with Classic Rock magazine, he suggests he stuck around a bit too long.
“Well, I should’ve done it a lot earlier … in the eighties,” he says. “I hung on for a three-tour ending across ’89 and ’90, after seven years of nothing, and I’d ended up with a bank overdraft of 200,000 pounds because we weren’t earning anything.”
Wyman was referring to the three legs of the Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle tour, which was the longest tour the band had done at that point.
He goes on to say money problems weren’t an issue for everyone in the band, noting Mick Jagger and Keith Richards “were totally wealthy, so they weren’t bothered,” but he, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood “were scraping by.”
“Anyway, I only started playing with them again in the hope it’d only be a couple of years, because I had all these other things I wanted to do,” he says.
Wyman also brought up money issues when discussing the band’s decision to leave the U.K. in 1971 because of a 93% tax, sharing they owed so much that “we could never make enough to pay it back.”
“We had no f***** money,” he says, although Mick and Keith were better off because of their songwriting and publishing.
“You’re in the red with your bank, so you weren’t partying all the time, you were worrying about how to pay your bills,” he said. “It was a nightmare.”
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