GRANPA IS A ROLLING STONE
GRANPA IS A ROLLING STONE
Keith Richards: as years go by.
“They’re about five minutes away,” says Hervé, the owner of Luc’s, a French bistro tucked away in a back alley in the Norman Rockwell-esque town of Ridgefield, Connecticut. Customers are gently told that the front patio is closed.
At exactly 3pm, Keith Richards steps out of a chauffeur-driven black Mercedes. (Despite what you might think, Richards is usually punctual to a fault.) He’s missing his usual bandanna and the piratical fish hooks that often adorn his hair. A sandalwood aroma follows him.
Richards, 71, lives about 15 minutes away, in a sprawling, Italian-style villa with a tennis court and a guesthouse, next to a 1,700-acre nature reserve. Visitors are greeted by two french bulldogs; the walls are full of photos from Stones tours. He has lived in Connecticut since the late 1980s, after his daughters Alexandra and Theodora were born. Richards and his wife, Patti Hansen, were living in Manhattan’s East Village, which lacked green space and held some less-than-domestic associations for him. “On the odd occasion there was a [heroin] drought in the Seventies,” he remembers, “we’d have to go down the East Side and carry a shooter. Just in case. A year or two after they were born, I said, ‘I can’t bring the kids up on Fourth Street.’ Not when there’s fresh air and some countryside not far away.”
While
touring America in 1965, Richards narrowly avoided death by
electrocution when he bumped his guitar into a mic stand. After “flying
through the air backwards” he was carried out with oxygen tubes in him,
but was back on stage the following night
At home, he will watch cable news, which often makes him angry, like when he
saw James Blake, the former tennis player, getting tackled by a cop.
“Another pointer that you can’t get rid of racism with the stroke of a pen,”
says Richards. He also followed the black protests in Baltimore and
Ferguson: “Cops used to slap you around the ear and send you home. Now they
shoot you.” He has a large library and is currently reading about the early 19th-century sea captain Thomas Cochrane. He told his biographer, James Fox, to read Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander, a historical novel set in 1800, to better understand his “friendship and adversity” with Mick Jagger. (“He felt it was something that explained his sadness,” says Fox.) He orders a vodka and tonic. As the waiter walks away, Richards speaks up: “Double ’em!”
Lately, he has been recovering from a painful injury, which he’s been keeping secret. At the July 4 show in Indianapolis, he was running down the catwalk toward the stage during the sax solo of Miss You and tripped face forward. “Somebody tossed a red straw boater hat, and it landed right in front of my feet,” he says. “I kicked it aside — ‘All right, that’s out the way’ — and it f****** bounced back in front of me, and I hit the floor. Suddenly, I’m on my hands and knees in front of 60,000 people, you know? My bracelet came off from the shock. It was, ‘OK, get out of this one, pal!’
“I might’ve cracked a rib,” he says. “There’s nothing doctors can do about it. I thought, ‘Shit, if I let them know how much I’m hurting, the doctors and the insurance companies will be like, ‘Cancel the next gigs.’ F*** it. I’ll live with it. After 50 years on the stage, you’re going to fall over occasionally and take a knock.”
It’s a classic Richards story — the close scrape and the getaway. His career is full of those stories, whether it’s the mayor of Boston personally bailing him and Jagger out of jail to play a 1972 show, or Richards dodging a possible seven-year heroin-trafficking sentence in 1977 in Canada by agreeing to play a concert for the blind. (Pete Townshend has said the Stones have “a sinister reputation for miracles”.)
But Richards’s greatest getaway is the sheer fact of his physical survival — that he’s lived faster than anybody and yet failed to die young. His uncanny resilience first became part of the cultural lore in the 1970s, when New Musical Express voted him “Most Likely to Die” for 10 years in a row.
But there’s no disputing what Richards has left us: he’s the guy who helped bring the blues to white America, who has given us some of the greatest ballads of all time (Ruby Tuesday, Wild Horses) and the most menacing anthems (Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Midnight Rambler).
Richards needed every bit of his iron constitution in April 2006, when he slipped while jumping off a branch on holiday in Fiji, slamming his head on a tree trunk. Two days later, he suffered two seizures and was flown to Auckland, where surgeons removed a blood clot from the surface of his brain. He was told he should not work for six months, but was back on the road in six weeks, taking Dilantin, an anti-epileptic drug with side effects that can include decreased co-ordination and confusion (he still takes the drug).
His team was terrified he was going to fall during a show; the reviews were not kind to his guitar-playing. And the fog lasted well after the tour ended. “I think that bang on the head, that did quite a bit more damage [than people thought],” he says. “You take a blow like that, you kind of feel stunned for another year or two afterwards, really. You suddenly realise you’ve been semiconscious.” The Stones then went on a long break. Richards stopped playing guitar and turned his attention to writing his autobiography, Life, spending hundreds of hours with the author James Fox at Richards’s home in Turks and Caicos. The darker parts of the writing process — delving into his decade-long heroin addiction, which ended in 1978, and the death of his 12-week-old son, Tara, in 1976 — “was very, very difficult for him”, says Fox. “He touched on these very sad things that still haunt him, and it visibly affected him at the time. We had to go very gingerly. Keith’s way was to give himself a bottle, give himself protection, to create this boundary so you can go on creating inside it. He denied all this stuff with the help of lots of substances for a very long time.”
“[The book] drained more out of me than I’d thought,” says Richards. “I can play two Stones shows a day and I’m OK. But the prolonged research, and your whole life is coming back in front of you — oh, man.” He was highly critical of Jagger, describing a friendship soured by business, ego and old grudges, and the two didn’t speak for months.
Life topped The New York Times bestseller list. But the irony was not lost on
Richards that his biggest hit in years was not a piece of music. “You make
the best records you can for 50 years and suddenly, a book...” With the
Stones in hiatus, Richards told friends that he might retire from music. “I
thought the book might be the crowning glory,” he says. “I just hit one of
those points. Do you have anything more to say? Can you still get the guys
to do it? Because I’m useless without a gang.”
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| Take that Mick |
Richards still has a temper. Fox remembers leaving a Turks and Caicos bar with him when a local kid ran up to him with an iPhone, telling him to listen to his band. “Keith turned on him like a barracuda and said, ‘F*** off!’ He deserved it, because there were no manners, nothing. It was justified. But it certainly wasn’t the response the kid was expecting, if you can imagine.”
But Richards “is in a better place than he was even 10 years ago”, says Wachtel. “He just had a big smile on his face.”
Last year, Richards published another book, Gus & Me, a children’s tale about how his grandfather taught him to play guitar. “Gus never forced anything on me,” says Richards, sipping his second vodka-tonic. “He just suggested, or dangled things. Like the guitar, which hung on the wall. ‘When you can reach it, you can have it.’ ”
Now, Richards has five grandchildren of his own, aged 2 to 19, all of whom he sees regularly. “It’s not the first thing you think of in life, ‘I wonder what I’ll be like as a grandfather?’ ” he says. “But once it happens, there’s a certain relationship, that distance between parent and grandparent, which sometimes can be very, very useful and very inspiring. A couple of my grandsons, all they want to do is go on the road with me now.” He laughs. “Well, maybe this isn’t the best idea.”
Richards still talks about his musical heroes like a young fan. He exchanges faxes with Chuck Berry and stays in touch with Jerry Lee Lewis, who he calls “obstinate and beautifully unique”. Now that Berry, Little Richard and Fats Domino are in their eighties, and Lewis is on his farewell tour, the Stones will soon be the elder statesmen on the road. “Don’t remind me!” Richards says, covering his face with his hands.
“I never thought I’d get this far. Now, I have to think about this and wonder what to do with it. I don’t know, man. There’s always been the cats in front of me. This is the thing, with evolving… it’s my turn for growing old.”
Since the Stones got back on the road, in 2012, Richards has been more engaged. He’s worked with Jagger on choosing the set lists for each show, which he hadn’t done for years. One consequence of his Fiji accident was that he had to stop using cocaine before gigs and reduce his alcohol intake. “He was very determined to do that,” says a source close to him. Richards says it’s helped with his post-show recovery time: “Take cocaine onstage, and you’re drenched. Now, half an hour, drive me home, and I’m ready for anything.”
In Life, Richards boasted that for years he slept only twice a week (“This means I’ve been conscious for at least three lifetimes”). Now, he’s started going to bed at 1 or 2am and shrugs off the schedule he kept for all those years. “Done that. Been there,” he says.
Richards struggles with arthritis, which has taken a toll on his hands; many of his guitar parts, like the fills in Honky Tonk Women, have been simplified onstage. He may be on good behaviour, but he can’t help but stir up a little mischief: at a recent Pittsburgh show, he interrupted Jagger’s introduction of the Penn State Concert Choir, abruptly launching the band into Satisfaction. Sometimes he will begin playing in the middle of keyboardist Chuck Leavell’s “one, two, three, four” count-offs, or kick off songs at slower tempos than Jagger prefers.
Since they were reconciled, Richards and Jagger have had long talks, which Richards said they hadn’t had in a long time. One of the conversations focused on how to open up their sound. “I think Mick Jagger is probably the best blues-harp player that I’ve heard,” says Richards. “He’s up there with Little Walter — he amazes me. So we have this conversation, ‘You phrase like that — why don’t you try to sing more like that?’ And Mick would say, ‘It’s two totally different things!’ And my reply is, ‘It’s just blowing air out of your mouth!’
“I love studios, even when they’re empty,” Richards says, through a haze of smoke on a studio couch, staring at a couple of Gibson guitars through the glass control-room window at Germano Studios in Lower Manhattan. He’s quiet; there’s nothing but a faint electronic noise. “There’s that little hum. Silence is your canvas. You look out there and you thin k, ‘Ah, the possibilities!’ ”
A month after our first meeting we are at Germano Studios. Today, Richards has more wired energy, bouncing his leg, his dark eyes fixating heavily on every question. His hair spills out of a striped bandanna. He seems a little more dangerous, laughing as I mention the anecdote about him throwing a knife at a music exec who suggested he change a song during the Steel Wheels sessions in 1989. “I’ve got pretty good aim. It just missed him,” he says.
“I look upon records as an audio painting,” he says, gesturing grandly toward the mixing board. “ ‘What’s needed here? Overload it with guitars, then take them all out, and just use a bit of this one.’ It’s like your paintbrush is that damn desk with little faders. It’s never ceased to fascinate me.”
It’s time to go to the HQ of iHeart Radio. We arrive at the green room, and an assistant named Matt takes the plastic off a case of small airplane bottles of Absolut, removes one and pours a “nuclear waste” — two ounces of vodka, orange soda and lots of ice — into a red paper cup. Richards is bubbly, talking about all the smoking in old TV shows like Perry Mason. “When I grew up,” he says, “you thought you were grown-up when you could sneak into a pub and have a cigarette and a drink. And you just grow up. It’s a habit — it’s not an addiction.
“Cocaine is not an addiction,” he adds. “It’s only a habit. If you run out of coke, you’ll go to sleep and eat a lot, but ain’t nothing else gonna happen.”
As usual, he ignores the no-smoking sign and lights a cigarette. A producer comes in to brief him on the Q&A. He tells him he’ll be asked how he created the guitar sound on Street Fighting Man and other songs. Richards says: “I get the drift.”
“The only thing we ask,” the producer says, “is bite the f-bomb. Do your best to try not to let anything slip out.” ... “I don’t ‘f***’ a lot,” Richards says. He doesn’t like too much preparation before interviews, preferring to keep things spontaneous. “The only question I need to hear is, ‘How do you plead?’”
While he waits to go on, he talks about seeing Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live’s 40th-anniversary party. He does his best Trump impression, hunching down and pursing his lips. “You’re the greatest,” he says, mimicking Trump saying hello to him, then swooping around to shake someone else’s hand. “You’re the greatest.”
Richards is well aware of his own public persona. “I can understand my image in most people’s minds,” he says. “ ‘Good old Keith will take anything, and do whatever he wants to do.’ And that gave me the licence to do that. Nine-to-fivers would all like to have the freedom that I have. They’ve given me the licence to shit in the street.”
In a short while, in front of a studio audience, he will crack jokes about never knowing when the cops are going to show up; tell the story again of how he wrote Satisfaction in his sleep; and talk about meeting Muddy Waters in 1964 (“My legs are still shaking”).
Later, at home, he might read a historical novel, or watch a war documentary. But here, he is the Keith everyone is happy to know still exists — the Richards who, when he was facing a trial for allowing pot to be smoked on his property in 1967, told the judge: “We are not old men, and we are not worried about petty morals.”
“That one just popped out,” Richards says of that day in court. “It was sort
of surreal theatre to me. From that moment, I felt that it was not just me,
and not just the Stones, against the establishment — it was our generation.
I realised that there was a bigger jury out there behind me.”
“I’ll never forget,” says Fox, “when he did his book signing for Life in
Piccadilly, people camped out for two nights, just to meet this great
figure. And they filed by with enormous politeness and a kind of love for
hours. Keith was completely blown away by that. The fans didn’t just love
the Stones, they loved him.”
As he waited to go on the show, Richards’s knees are bouncing. He’s fiddling with his lighter, peeling the sticker off. A producer opens the door to give him a five-minute warning. Richards puts on his snakeskin jacket, slaps his knees and gets up: “It’s fucking’ showtime!”
© Rolling Stone. First published in Rolling Stone Magazine®
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