“Mick was always good with the locals,” Richards writes, half-admiringly, half-condescendingly—like a pirate captain commending a handsome cabin boy who has the ability to “talk posh” to the gentry.
The following 620 pages scarcely let up from there. Although things tail off in the mid-eighties—as they invariably do in the stories of sixties icons. By then, they are retired from the heart of the storm to their mansions, and are merely watching Madonna from the sidelines, puzzled—the first half of Life, up until 1984, is in a league of its own. As rock memoirs go, only Bob Dylan’s imperial, awe-inspiring Chronicles can beat it.
Sitting in Richards’ agent’s office, reading it—the secrecy around it is immense; I have to sign confidentiality agreements before I can even see the manuscript—was like getting into a Tardis, and being witness to events only ever previously recounted by hearsay.
One of the first stories is one of the most amazing—Richards quoting from a letter he sent his aunt in 1961: “This morning on Dartford Station a guy I knew at primary school came up to me. He’s got every record Chuck Berry ever made. He is called Mick Jagger.”
It’s like discovering Cleopatra’s page-a-day diary, and the entry: “Tuesday, 4:30 PM: meeting with Mark Antony.”
And so it goes on from here—recruiting all the Stones one by one, Bill Wyman sighingly tolerated because he has a better amp than anyone else. They work hard, but it comes ridiculously easy: the first song they ever write together—locked in the kitchen by their manager, until they come up with something—is “As Tears Go By,” which both goes to Number One, and bags Jagger the beautiful Marianne Faithfull as a girlfriend. They buy houses. They buy drugs. Here’s the Redlands bust, recounted by the man who owned the house: casually mentioning another guest—David Schidermann, the acid dealer. As the inventor of both the Strawberry Fields acid and the Purple Haze acid, Schidermann dosed the charts with two of the greatest psychedelic singles ever made.
Keith can tell us the Marianne Faithfull/Mars Bar story is a myth—but adds, casually, that he was the man who left a Mars Bar on the coffee table, as a snack, for when he was stoned.
Here’s John Lennon—“Johnny. A silly sod, in many ways”—coming round with Yoko, and keeling over in the bathroom.
“I don’t think John ever left my house, except horizontally,” Richards sighs, having found Lennon—godhead for a generation—lying by the toilet, murmuring, “Don’t move me—these tiles are beautiful.”
On another night with Lennon, Richards tries to explain to him where the Beatles—the fucking Beatles!—have been going wrong, all these years: “You wear your guitar too high. It’s not a violin. No wonder you don’t swing. No wonder you can rock, but not roll.”
Redlands burns to the ground, and Richards—high—escapes with only “a cutlass, and a box of goodies, hur hur. Fuck the passports.”
Allen Ginsberg—the high priest of beatnik—is regarded as a bit of a twat: coming over to Keith’s house, he “plays a concertina and makes ‘Ommmmmm’ sounds,” as Richards relates, still sounding beleagured by an unwelcome houseguest, thirty years later. Brian Jones is dismissed as little more than “a wifebeater.”
In this rollercoaster blur, Altamont—where the Hell’s Angels, high on LSD and speed, stab Meredith Hunter to death—is merely an incidental point. For generations of lazy documentary makers, it’s been seen as the point that the sixties turned sour: the moment that Flower Power idealism dies; the undeniable beginning of the darkness.
To the man on stage at the time, however, playing “Under My Thumb” as Meredith dies, it’s a story that merits little more than two paragraphs. The first Stones fan to die had been back in 1965—plunging from the balcony of an early gig. By 1969, Keith Richards had seen it all. He couldn’t be surprised by anything.
But for all the drugs, car chases, jets, stadiums, Presidents, fistfights and deaths, the core of Life is a small, human, timeless story. The story of Keith Richards’ life revolves around two things: the friend he never quite understands, and the girl who got away: bandmate Mick Jagger, and former wife, and mother of three of his children, Anita Pallenberg.
Reading Life, I was shocked by how candid Richards is about his relationship with both Jagger and Pallenberg. Indeed, I gasped at two of the stories. My thought was, as I read them, “Keith Richards—you’re going to be in trouble.”
“In trouble?” Richards says, laughing. “Hur hur. Why?”
Well, let’s take Mick Jagger. You reveal that your secret nickname for him is “Your Majesty,” or “Brenda”—and that you openly had conversations with the other Stones, in front of Mick, referring to “that bitch Brenda.” Your review of Mick’s solo album, Goddess in the Doorway—which you refer to as Dogshit on the Doorstep—is “It’s like Mein Kampf—everyone had it, but no one read it.” You describe an annoying pet mynah bird as “like living with Mick.” There’s a chapter that starts, “It was the beginning of the eighties when Mick started to become unbearable.” There are quotes like, “Mick plays harmonica from the heart—but he doesn’t sing like that.” “Mick Jagger is aspiring to be Mick Jagger.” “I think Mick thinks I belong to him.” “I used to love Mick, but I haven’t been to his dressing room in twenty years. Sometimes I think, ‘I miss my friend. I wonder, ‘Where did he go?’ ”
Has Mick read the book?
Keith seems resolutely unfazed.
“Yeah!” he says, equanimously. “I think it opened his eyes a bit, actually.”
“Were there any bits he asked you to leave out?” I ask.
Keith starts laughing again. “WURGH WURGH WURGH.” It sounds like a crow stuck in a chimney.
“Yeah! Funnily enough, it was the weirdest thing he wanted taken out. I mean, look. You know, I love the man. I’ve known him since I was four years old, right. But the bit he wanted taken out was how he used a voice coach.”
“Really?”
“Yeah! And everyone knew it anyway. It’s been in a million interviews, but for some reason, he was like, ‘You know—could we leave that out?’ And I went ‘No! I’m trying to say the truth here.’ ”
I pause for a minute. I clear my throat.
“So he didn’t ask you to take out the bit about how small his cock is, then?” I ask, in a rather prim voice.
“Hey—I was only told that by others,” Keith says, with a wolfish smile and a shrug.
This is the height of disingenuousness, because the “other” Richards is referring to is Marianne Faithfull—Jagger’s girlfriend at the time—and a story that is one of the key “OH MY GOD!” moments of the book.
Rumors have long circled about just what was going on in 1969—the year the world’s two most glamorous couples were Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg, and Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull.
As Pallenberg and Jagger started work on Performance, in the roles of lovers, Richards was convinced that director Nicolas Roeg—whom he hates—is trying to get Mick and Anita together for real, so that he can have “hardcore pornography” in his film.
In one of the most evocatively written passages in the book, Richards describes how the jealousy and fear that he’s losing Anita to Jagger, coupled with his escalating heroin abuse, results in him writing “Gimme Shelter” on a filthy, stormy day—staring out of the window of his house, waiting for the sound of Anita’s car. It never arrives. She doesn’t come home that night. He presumes she lies in his bandmate’s bed.
Partly in retaliation, Richards then goes about bedding Marianne Faithfull. Despite the undeniable dark, fratricidal overtones of screwing Jagger’s girlfriend, Richards’ account of it in Life is recounted in Pirate Tavern mode, concluding with his joy at having “my head nestled between those two beautiful jugs.”
When Faithfull and Richards hear Jagger returning home, Richards jumps out of the window, like Robin Askwith in Confessions of a Window Cleaner, leaving his socks, and h
is cuckolded bandmate’s girlfriend, behind him. As a final stab, forty years later, Richards adds:
“[Marianne] 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.”
For a Stones fan, it’s a real double-or-quits moment. On the one hand, as a description of what it’s like to be inside a legendary song as it make landfall, Keith Richards’ recollections of writing “Gimme Shelter” are without parallel. On the other hand, there is the massive risk that—after reading the chapter—every subsequent listening of the song will be haunted by the image of Mick Jagger’s allegedly tiny todger, nestled on a pair of gigantic testicles.
It’s one of those side effects of rock ’n’ roll that no one ever warns you about.
“Well, I did say he had enormous balls,” Richards says now, generously. “I’m sure he’s had worse thrown at him by women. I mean, Jerry Hall pretty much decimated him anyway.”
“It does seem like you’re trying to . . . wind him up,” I say.
“We’ve had our beefs but hey, who doesn’t. You try and keep something together for fifty years,” Richards says, palpably not caring.
There is similar, breathtaking candor in his recounting of his relationship with Anita Pallenberg. In a physically abusive relationship with fellow Stone Brian Jones, Pallenberg has the hots for Richards, and Richards has the hots for Pallenberg. When Jones gets hospitalized with asthma, Richards and Pallenberg end up together in a car, being driven from Barcelona to Valencia. Without a word ever being exchanged, Pallenberg kicks off their relationship by silently unzipping Richards’ jeans and giving him a blowjob.
“I remember the smell of the orange trees in Valencia,” Richards writes, still sounding post-coital, forty years later. “When you get laid by Anita Pallenberg for the first time, you remember things.”
“Oh—the great blowjob in the car?” Keith says today, when I bring it up—again, quite primly.
“What was your chauffeur was doing all this time?” I ask, incredulously.
“He’s got to keep his eyes on the road,” Keith shrugs. “I should imagine he was going, ‘about time,’ to be honest. It had been in the air for ages.”
Although it was Richards who eventually called time on the marriage, when Pallenberg’s subsequent heroin addiction got out of hand, Pallenberg still comes across as “unfinished business” in Life—with Richards repeatedly addressing Pallenberg directly from the pages, calling on her to think of what would have happened if they’d managed to stay together, in rocking chairs “watching the grandkids.” Although Richards is now married to, and has two children with, Patti Hansen, Pallenberg recurs through out the book like perfume; melody; a ghost. While Richards rails at Jagger, he sighs over Pallenberg. The girl that gave herself away.
Perhaps you keep coming back to Anita and Mick, I suggest to Richards, because as an artist, there’s nothing to say about the people you love and understand. It’s the ones who mystify you that you need to write songs and books about. That’s how you try and figure them out.
“Yeah,” Richards nods. “You’ve got nothing to say when it’s all understood.”
It’s the best inference to make—because any other suggests Richards is still a little in love with the woman whose clothes he’s wearing on the cover of Their Satanic Majesties Request.
At sixty-seven, having come into life-transforming wealth and fame in one of the most controversial bands of the counter-cultural era, one could easily assume that Keith Richards became a pirate because of rock ’n’ roll—around the time the Stones went out on the road, and never really came back: “A pirate nation, moving under our own flag, with lawyers, clowns and attendants.”
But the other revelation of Life is that this was how Richards was raised: Richards has always been a pirate. He describes post-war Dartford as somewhere where “everyone’s a thief.” Dartford—where the highwaymen would hold up the stage to London, explosions from the fireworks factory “would take out the windows for miles around,” and patients from the lunatic asylum would regularly abscond.
“In the morning, you’d find a loony on the heath, in his little nightshirt,” Richards recalls, fondly.
Richards’ family were not respectable, or God-fearing. They numbered musicians, actors and prostitutes. His mother would “cross the road” to avoid the priest, and divorced his father to marry a younger lover.
Richards’ mother, Doris, was a classic, working-class matriarch—her last words to Keith, as he played to her on her deathbed, were “You’re out of tune”—and as an only child of a poor, bohemian couple, the only things Richards was brought up to respect were the local library and music. When he got his first guitar, he slept with it in his bed.
Twenty years later, guests to Redlands recall Richards’ guitar collection being on every sofa and chair, and being left with nowhere to sit but the floor.
So when you come and talk to Keith Richards, this is who you feel you are meeting: not a millionaire Rolling Stone, with houses in Suffolk, Connecticut and Turks & Caicos—but the guy from Dartford who would always have been out of kilter with normal society, however his life had turned out. You get the very strong feeling that this is what Keith Richards would be like even if we were down the pub, instead of Claridge’s, and Keith had got here on the bus—not least because his bandana is, on closer inspection, quite grubby, and he’s wearing a pair of beat-up track pants, and the kind of incongruously bright turquoise sneakers you often see on meths-drinking tramps.
Ask him about his daughter—twenty-four-year-old Alexandra—doing a nude shoot for Playboy, and he seems truly baffled by notion he could have been disapproving.
“You know—my girls are like me,” he says. “They try to avoid work as much as possible, hehehe. A bit of modelling is a bit of freedom. Hey, baby—with a frame like that, flaunt it.”
The story of how he came to work with Johnny Depp on Pirates of the Caribbean is a case in point.
“It took me two years before I realized who he was,” Keith says, lighting another fag. “He was just one of my son Marlon’s mates, hanging around the house playing guitar. I never ask Marlon’s mates who they are, because you know, ‘I’m a dope dealer,’ hahaha. Then one day he was at dinner”—Richards mimes Johnny Depp holding a knife and fork—“and I’m like, ‘Whoa! Scissorhands!’ Hahaha. Then I find out he’s an actor, and like one of the biggest Keith Richards fans in the world—and how do I deal with that? ‘Get over it, Johnny.’ HURGH HURGH.”
Depp and Richards are currently shooting Pirates of the Caribbean 4, where Richards plays, for the second time, Captain Jack Sparrow’s father—“It takes two hours to put the wig and make-up on. Back into the hairy prison. ‘Ooooh, sorry about my sword, babe,’ hahaha.”
Filming a barroom scene, Richards has roped in “a couple of mates. Well it’s a bar-room, innit?”
In between the last film and this, Depp has been shooting a documentary on Richards: “Kinda behind the scenes stuff. Johnny does interviews. Dunno when it’s going to be finished.” He shrugs again. The idea of being followed around by a documentary crew, and one of the most famous actors in the world, seems resolutely normal.
Possibly because of his upbringing—“I’m just a retarded gangster, really. Maybe that’s what I should have called the book. Retarded Gangster”—Richards seems genuinely at ease with his fame. He lives now, as he always has since a child, in a world outside most others’—he doesn’t watch TV (“Lovejoy,” he says, finally, having struggled to think for some minutes about his favorite show), exists on old-fashioned comfort food (the book includes his recipe for bangers and mash: “Put the fuckers in the pan and let them rock”), has never voted (“I suppose democracy is the best there is to offer. But for a lot of people, it’s like telling the slaves they’re free. ‘Hey man—where’s the next meal coming from?’ ”), and as for when he last travel
ed by public transport, he wrinkles his forehead and asks, mistily, “Have they still got trams?”
This leaves him at ease in the company of other infamous people (“My favorite head of state? Václev Havel. Very impressed with the man. He had a telescope in his office, trained on his old prison cell. He used to refer to it as ‘my old house.’ I liked Clinton. He’s a lousy sax player. A little indiscreet, but as a guy—I’d take him on any time. He’s great.” As for Tony Blair: “I wrote him a letter [about the Iraq war], telling him he had to stick to his guns. I got a letter back, saying ‘Thanks for the support.’”) He views the recent imprisonment of George Michael with equimanity, and not a little amusement.
“Fame has killed more very talented guys than drugs,” he says, sighing. “Jimi Hendrix didn’t die of an overdose—he died of fame. Brian [Jones], too. I lost a lot of friends to fame. There’s that bit in the book, where I talk about how I cope with fame, and say ‘Mick chose flattery, and I chose junk.’ Because I kept my feet on the ground—even when they were in the gutter. You know what? I bet George Michael is loving it. I say, ‘Stay in jail, George.’ There’s probably some dope, and some gays. He probably won’t want to leave—it’s the best place for him. He’s playing around with fame. I can’t remember a song of his. I don’t want to knock the guy, but I’m an immortal legend, according to some,” he shrugs.
The implication is that, however wasted Richards got, he wouldn’t have crashed into a branch of Snappy Snaps on something as lightweight as a joint.
Keith Richards is a man without regret. When I ask him if—given the chance to do it all over again—he’d start taking heroin, he doesn’t pause. “Oh yes. Yes. There was a lot of experience in there—you meet a lot of weird people, different takes on life that you’re not going to find if you don’t go there. I loved a good high. And if you stay up, you get the songs that everyone else misses, because they’re asleep. There’s songs zooming around everywhere. There’s songs zooming through here right now, in the air.”
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