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It started at a teen fair. In 1964, Bobby Keys was touring with Bobby Vee’s band, one stop among many on a relentless road circuit that had kept the Slaton kid working since he was fifteen. The Rolling Stones were also on the bill — a young British band just beginning their American conquest. Keys met them at the San Antonio Teen Fair, exchanged the kind of road-musician pleasantries that rarely lead anywhere, and moved on.
He could not have known then what that handshake would eventually become.
Keys and the Stones did not work together until 1969, when a mutual friend — Gram Parsons — rekindled the connection. Keys made his recording debut with the band on “Live with Me,” a track from Let It Bleed. By 1971 he was on Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St., playing the solo on “Brown Sugar” that became one of the most recognized eight bars in rock and roll history. He and Keith Richards discovered they had been born on the same day — December 18, 1943 — and the coincidence deepened into a friendship that lasted until Keys died in 2014.
The City That Sparked It All
San Antonio has always been a crossroads. In the early 1960s, the city’s teen music scene was lively enough to attract national touring acts — a mix of British Invasion bands and American pop acts crisscrossing the country in those pre-arena years, playing high school gyms and fairgrounds and auditoriums. The San Antonio Teen Fair was part of that circuit, the kind of event that brought unlikely combinations of artists together on the same stage.
Keys went on to play with John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker, and hundreds of other artists. He appeared on All Things Must Pass, Nilsson Schmilsson, Exile on Main St., and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Second Helping. The West Texas kid from Slaton became one of the most recorded saxophonists in rock history. It all traces back to a chance meeting in San Antonio, 1964, between a road musician and a band that was just beginning to understand what they could become.
