By Neil McCormick
The Daily Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
Published: 7:00AM BST 16 Oct 2010
Rolling Stones member Keith Richards performs on stage at Twickenham Stadium Photo: GETTY IMAGES
“My life’s been dedicated to avoiding trouble,” Keith Richards once told me, “so it’s pretty funny how much I’ve run into.”
When he laughs, you can hear the years rattling around his chest and throat. Five decades on the edge have made him the living personification of all the most extravagant myths of sex, drugs and rock n roll. He is the Human Riff, the world’s most elegantly wasted human being, rock’s ultimate survivor. Or so the story goes, endlessly recycled in rock magazines and unofficial biographies. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s all Grimms fairy tales,” according to the man himself.
Now Keith is telling his own story, in his autobiography, Life (published by Little, Brown & Co on October 26th). It was written with James Fox, author of White Mischief, who has known Richards since the early 70s. According to Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana, “Keith holds nothing back. It’s funny, gossipy, profane and moving... Outside of Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, it’s probably the best rock memoir ever written.”
After a lifetime of legendary debauchery, you might not think Keith could remember much. The truth is he remembers everything, just not always in the right order. I have met him a few times over the years, most memorably when he practically kidnapped me for two days in LA in the early 90s, driving me around in his limo and keeping me talking till sunrise. But the first time I interviewed him, as a young journalist in the 80s, I feared it was a disaster. He was at the wrong end of a bottle of Jack Daniels and was all but incoherent, talking in long, florid quotes that made little sense. But when I got home and listened to the tape, I started to piece it together, jigsaw fashion. I realised I had got a great interview, all jumbled up.
Keith glares at the world from publicity stills with the fearlessness of someone who really has “been there and done it”. In person, he’s smaller, looser, paunchier, softer than you might expect. His face is a mass of lines and wrinkles. At times, listening to him talk is like watching a drunk stagger down a corridor: his voice lilts and tilts, his sentences change direction. You’re never quite sure if he’s going to make it to the end, without collapsing. Somehow, he does.
The second night in LA, we wound up in his hotel room talking. He’d been up since noon the previous day, and was still going strong at 6am, slumped in an armchair, drinking vodka and fizzy orange, a vile concoction that tastes more of pop than alcohol but has been Keith’s favourite tipple for two decades. Keith made numerous visits to the bathroom, from which he would return curiously refreshed. Whatever he was taking, he wasn’t offering it around, so I sagged in my chair, determined to get the story.
And then, out of nowhere, he started telling me a long, funny tale about a house he accidentally burned down in LA in 1978, escaping naked with a woman, not his (then) partner, Anita Pallenberg. It is an outrageous story that hadn’t appeared in print before. When I later researched it, it seemed to be substantially true. I was even taken to the spot in Laurel Canyon where the house had stood. Keith recalled, “everything had burned down, except for one wooden stump of a pillar, and in the bedroom this little portion of a chest of drawers, which had my passport, all my favourite tapes, jewellery, a shooter with five hundred rounds of ammunition. All untouched. And a friend of mine went back the next day when everything else was still too hot to touch, smouldering, and came back with my stuff. So what am I supposed to gather from my life? That I’m blessed? Should I count on it?”
The funniest incident from that night was watching Keith struggle with a phone, before instructing his ever present assistant to get hold of his wife, Patti Hansen, uttering the immortal line, “You know I’m no good with phones.”
I’m not sure Keith was good with anything, except music. But that is enough. “The rock’n’roll is important,” he insists. “The sex and drugs is just something that happened to me along the way.” Keith lights up when he talks about music, becoming enthused to the point of reverence. Whatever people think about his lifestyle, it is his sense of complete immersion in the grooves and the chords that really defines him.
In 1989, he was hailed as a “living legend” at an awards ceremony. “That’s all right,” Richards responded “but immortal is even better.” At times he really has seemed unstoppable. With his lifestyle, few would have bet on him making it to 67. Anita Pallenberg once said she thought he would die onstage. “If I had my way, I probably would,” he told me. “I can think of worse places to croak.”
He has defended his prodigious drug intake as a response to the intensity of life on the road, liking it to World War II bomber pilots who had to keep going at all costs. In the past decade, Keith has insisted he is drug free. Not because of moral or heath issues, mind you, but because “the quality’s gone down.” It is, at least, an answer that maintains his defiance. If there is anything more obnoxious than a hardened drug user, it is a former drug user telling people why they shouldn’t use drugs. “I’ve given up everything now,” he claimed in a recent interview, although he was drinking vodka and chain smoking Marlboros at the time.
He’s on the promotional trail for his book right now, conducting himself in interviews with his usual piratical swagger. “You only get the truth from me,” he likes to boast. Well, up to a point. His is a truth filtered through a lifetime of anecdotal repetition and distorted by constant self-justification, a truth made up of soundbites.
But there was an off guard moment during our long nights in LA, after a video and a photo shoot focussed on his skull rings and snakes head cane, when the hullabaloo had died down, and he whispered something totally unexpected. “I get real sick of the skulls and shit,” he said, with a resigned sigh. “The image thing is a ball and chain. There’s nobody like Keith Richards that would ever be alive. No way. But you can’t buck the image. As long as I don’t have to be that guy all the time, or with my friends. I guess the Keith Richards hard man is something that gives me the room to be who I really am. He’s my perimeter defences.”
My most abiding personal memory of Keith is driving through LA after midnight, in a limo, gliding down a deserted freeway. There was champagne on ice, a bottle of 100 per cent proof vodka, a bunch of bananas in a fruit bowl and a woman who seemed to have neglected to put on her underwear. Keith’s assistant found an oldies station doing a Motown weekend on the radio, and Keith was in rapture. He smoked cigarettes, drank Evian mineral water, and rhapsodised about every song that came on. When we reached the hotel after an hour’s drive, he didn’t want to stop. “Just keep driving,” Keith demanded. “Let’s keep driving all night.”
Keith Richards' best one-liners
'I never knew the chick.’ - on hearing of Princess Diana’s death.
'Put the f---ers in a pan and let them rock’ - his recipe for bangers and mash.
'Her Majesty. Brenda.’ - his nicknames for Jagger.
'I’ve never had a problem with drugs. I’ve had problems with the police.’
'The breakfast of champions’ - his nickname for cocaine and heroin.
'Passing the vodka bottle. And playing the guitar.’ - on keeping fit.
'I’m not putting death on the agenda. I don’t want to see my old friend Lucifer just yet. He’s the guy I’m gonna see, isn’t it? I’m not going to the Other Place, let’s face it.’
'It’s the height of impoliteness to turn blue in someone else’s bathroom’ - on the perils of taking too many drugs in hotels.
'I don’t think John [Lennon] ever left my house, except horizontally.’
'It’s like Mein Kampf - everyone had it, but no one read it’ - on Mick Jagger’s autobiography.
'Marianne [Faithfull] had no fun with Mick’s tiny todger. I know he’s got an enormous pair of balls - but it doesn’t quite fill the gap.’
“I used to love Mick, but I haven’t been to his dressing room in 20 years. Sometimes I think: 'I miss my friend.’ I wonder: 'Where did he go?”
'I’ve given up everything now - which is a trip in itself’ - on coming off hard drugs.
“I never thought I was wasted, but I probably was.”
'You keep your back to the wall at all times’ - teaching his Pirates of the Caribbean co-star Johnny Depp how to walk round a corner drunk.
“If you’re going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet.”
Related Link:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopmusic/8066637/Whats-the-difference-between-babies-and-getting-senile-Keith-Richards-mused.-Only-that-you-have-to-shave..html
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