Life

by Keith Richards

  Some of my most outrageous nights I can only believe actually happened because of corroborating evidence. No wonder I’m famous for partying! The ultimate party, if it’s any good, you can’t remember it. You get these brief vignettes of what you did. “Oh, you don’t remember shooting the gun? Pull up the carpet, look at those holes, man.” I feel a bit of shame and embarrassment. “You can’t remember that? When you got your dick out, swinging from the chandelier, anybody up for grabs, wrap it in a five-pound note?” Nope, don’t remember a thing about it.

  It’s very hard to explain all that excessive partying. You didn’t say, OK, we’re going to have a party tonight. It just happened. It was a search for oblivion, I suppose, though not intentionally. Being in a band, you are cooped up a lot, and the more famous you get the more of a prison you find yourself in. The convolutions you go through just to not be you for a few hours.

  I can improvise when I’m unconscious. This is one of my amazing tricks, apparently. I try and stay in contact with the Keith Richards I know. But I do know there’s another one that lurks, occasionally, about. Some of the best stories about me relate to when I’m not actually there, or at least not consciously so. I am obviously operating, because I’ve had it corroborated by too many people, but I can reach a point, especially on cocaine after a few days, where I just crack, where I think I’m totally crashed out and asleep, but in actual fact I’m doing things that are quite outrageous. This is called pushing the envelope. But nobody showed me how big the envelope is. There is a certain point where suddenly everything cuts off because you’ve been pushing it too far, but it’s just too much fun and you’re writing songs, and then there’s some bitches and you go to that rock-and-roll thing and loads of friends are coming by and refueling you, and there is a point where the switch does go off and you still keep moving. It’s like another generator kicks in, but the memory and the mind have totally gone. My friend Freddie Sessler would have been a mine of information about this, God rest his soul.

  Chandeliers do produce one memory, which might be classed as a close shave. I wrote it in a notebook under the heading “A Celestial Shotgun.”

  A lady (nameless) whom I was entertaining was so grateful, she insisted on entertaining me. She stripped naked and leaped up and grasped the huge chandelier, then proceeded to perform some very athletic convolutions as the light beams dazzled around the room. It was very entertaining. Then, with the nimbleness of an acrobat, she let go and landed on the couch beside me. At that moment the chandelier detached itself from its moorings and shattered on the floor. We both huddled together under a blast of crystal, laughing hysterically as it rained down on us. Then it got even more entertaining.

  We had some sport with Truman Capote, author of In Cold Blood, one of the group of Mick’s society friends who had attached themselves to the tour and who included Princess Lee Radziwill, Princess Radish to us, as Truman was just Truby. He was on assignment from some high-paying magazine, so he was ostensibly working. Truby said something bitchy and whiny backstage—he was being an old fart, actually complaining about the noise. It was just some snide, queenie remark and sometimes I don’t give a damn, other times it just gets up my nose. This happened after a show and I was already on cloud nine. Motherfucker needed a lesson. I mean, this snooty New York attitude. You’re in Dallas. It got a little raucous. I remember, back at the hotel, kicking Truman’s door. I’d splattered it with ketchup I’d picked up off a trolley. Come out, you old queen. What are you doing round here? You want cold blood? You’re on the road now, Truby! Come and say it out here in the corridor. Taken out of context, it sounds like I’m some right sort of Johnny Rotten, but I must have been provoked.

  What was hilarious was how Truman for some unknown reason took a shine to Bobby. Truman was on the Johnny Carson show at the end of his little stint with the Stones, and Johnny asked him, what do you think about all this rock-and-roll hoopla and bizarre stuff you’ve been doing? Oh yes, I’ve been on the road with the Rolling Stones. And Bobby is watching this on TV, of course. Johnny said, well, tell us some of your experiences. Who did you meet? Oh, I met this delightful young man from Texas. And Bobby’s going, no! Don’t do it! And Bobby’s phone started ringing immediately from the Texas League of Gentlemen: ah, you and Truman, huh?

  I remember the gig in Boston on July 19, 1972, for two reasons. The first was the motorcade the Boston police provided to get us to the stadium when their buddies in Rhode Island had wanted to lock us up. We’d landed in Providence from Canada, and while they were searching all the baggage, I was sleeping on the fender of a fire truck, one of those nice, curved old-fashioned ones with the mudguards. I felt a sudden explosion of heat—a flashbulb right in my face—and I just leaped up and grabbed the camera. Fuck off. Kicked the photographer. And I got arrested. And Mick and Bobby Keys and Marshall Chess demanded to be arrested with me. I’ve got to give that to Mick. But in Boston that day the Puerto Ricans got pissed off in their section of town and they were kicking up shit. And the mayor of Boston was saying, you let those fuckers go right now, because I’ve got to deal with this riot, and don’t give me a Rolling Stones riot on the same day. And so we were sprung, and these cops escorted us to Boston posthaste, with outriders and civic fanfare.

  The other big event that day was the knock on my hotel room door that led to my facing Freddie Sessler for the first time. I don’t know how he got there, but back then everybody would come to my room. It doesn’t happen anymore—I couldn’t stand the pace—but in this case I wasn’t busy at the moment and he looked intriguing. Jewish to the max, dressed in ridiculous clothes. What a character. “I’ve got something you’ll like,” he said. And he pulled out this full ounce, with a still-unbroken seal, of pure Merck cocaine. The real deal. “This is a gift. I love your music.” This is the stuff that when you open it, it almost flies out the bottle, swoosh. And I liked my cocaine off and on up until then, but apart from the cocaine you got from junkies in England, it was street shit; you never knew if it was amphetamine. And from now, once a month, Freddie would deliver a full ounce of pure cocaine. No money changed hands. Freddie never wanted to be labeled as a “supplier.” He wasn’t a dealer you could call up and ask, “Hey, Fred, you got any…?”

  It was beyond that. Freddie and I just hit it off. He was an incredible character. He was twenty years older than me. His history, even by the average experience of any Jew who lived through the Nazi invasion of Poland, was a story of horror and almost miraculous survival. Only three of the fifty-four of his relatives in Poland survived. A story not unlike that of the young Roman Polanski, having to fend for himself and evade the Nazis who had taken the rest of his relations to the camps. I didn’t find out the details of this for a while, but in the meantime Freddie quickly became a fixture on tour. He took on the role of my second dad for ten or fifteen years after that, probably without realizing it. I recognized something in Freddie almost immediately. He was a pirate and an adventurer and an outsider, though at the same time one with extraordinarily good contacts. He was incredibly funny, sharp as a razor with all the experience behind it. He’d made a fortune about five times over, blown it each time and made it again—the first one out of pencils. He said, what gets shorter every time you use it? He made a fortune out of office supplies. And then he got another idea, flying round New York in a holding pattern for an hour, looking at all the buildings and the lights. Whoever supplies those lightbulbs is making a fucking fortune. Two weeks later it’s him. Very simple ideas. Some others were not so simple, or successful. Snake venom for curing multiple sclerosis. He put a lot of money into the doomed Amphicar, the amphibious vehicle that was described, in one review, as “the car that may revolutionize drowning.” It never quite made it. Dan Aykroyd has one, but who apart from him needs a car that can cross rivers when you’ve got bridges? Freddie was like a Leonardo of sorts, but running these businesses? Forget about it. The minute it worked he was bored to death and he’d blow it.

  Of course Mick di
dn’t take to Freddie, nor did a lot of other people. He was too loose a cannon. Gram probably drove a bigger wedge between Mick and me than Freddie did because that was music. But Mick despised Freddie. He only put up with him because to annoy Freddie would be to annoy me. I think Freddie and Mick did have a couple of good times together, but they were rare. Freddie would do things for Mick and not even let me know, put him in touch with this whore or this bitch. He would grease Mick’s path. Mick would get in touch with Freddie when he wanted something, and Freddie would oblige.

  People would knock Freddie, say he was crude, insulting, vulgar, and why not? You could think anything you wanted of him, but Freddie was one of the best men I ever met. Totally horrible, revolting. Absolutely over the top, stupid at times, but solid. I can’t think of another bloke that was solid all the way. I was stupid in those days and over the top too. I’d dare Freddie to be more outrageous than he really wanted to be, which was my fault, but I knew there was a thing in the man. He didn’t care; he didn’t give a shit. He thought he’d died at fifteen. “I’m dead anyway, even if I’m still alive. Everything else from here on is gravy, even if it’s shit. Let’s make the shit into gravy if we can.” And that’s the way I took Freddie’s basic “fuck it” attitude. Fifteen was when he watched his grandfather, the most revered figure in his life, and his uncle being tortured and then shot by two Nazi officers in broad daylight in the main square of their town, while he held on to his terrified grandmother. His grandfather was selected for this horrifying punishment because he was the leader of the Jewish community in the area. Then Freddie too was picked up, and that was the last he saw of any member of his family then living in Poland. All were taken off to the camps.

  Freddie left an autobiographical manuscript dedicated to me, which is embarrassing because the other dedicatee is Jakub Goldstein, the grandfather whom he watched being murdered. The horrors are described, but it’s also a fascinating story of survival, very Pasternak in subject matter, and it explains what made this man I came to be so close to. He tells first, for example, of a well-off middle-class Jewish family in Kraków in 1939, going to their summer home outside the town, with its stables and barns, smokehouses and mowed lawns, and a Gypsy woman comes across the poppy fields and says, I’ll read your fortune, cross my palm with silver and all of that. And she predicts doom for the entire family, except specifically three members, two of them absent from Poland, the third being Freddie, who she says will go east to Siberia.

  The Germans came in September 1939. Freddie was sent to a labor camp in Poland, a hastily organized prison from which he escaped. He spent several weeks running at night and hiding in the frozen forest, stealing from farmhouses, heading eastward to the Russian-occupied sector of Poland. He crossed a frozen river at night with bullets landing around him and ran straight into the arms of the Red Army. These were the days of the Hitler-Stalin pact, but anything was better than Germans. Freddie was sent to a Siberian Gulag, as the fortune-teller had predicted.

  Freddie was sixteen. The plot, of unremitting punishment and desperation, is something like Candide, as are the descriptions of the Siberian conditions that Freddie managed to survive. In later life Freddie would wake up screaming with nightmares about it.

  He and the few of his Polish fellow prisoners who were still alive were released when Germany invaded Russia. With thousands of released prisoners from other camps, Freddie started out to reach the railhead, a distance of a hundred miles or so. Only three hundred made it. Freddie joined the Polish army in Tashkent, contracted typhoid, got discharged and joined the Polish navy in 1942. His job was watching radar for long hours. The ship’s doctor introduced him to pharmaceutical cocaine. After that things began to get a little better.

  Fred’s brother Siegi, the only other surviving member of his family of seven children, was in Paris at the Sorbonne when the Germans invaded Poland. He joined the Polish army and later managed to get to England. Freddie joined him in London after the war. Siegi became a famous club owner and restaurateur, co-owner of Les Ambassadeurs, which quickly became a hangout for four-star generals and Hollywood stars who came to entertain US troops. When he opened Siegi’s Club in Charles Street, Mayfair, in 1950, he’d become personal friends with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Ronald Reagan and Bing Crosby. It became the hangout of Princess Margaret, the Aga Khan and the like. So Siegi and by proxy Freddie, who knew Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe, were very well connected. It served Freddie well on at least two occasions I know of. Once when he was coming through a New York airport and was arrested for some gear in his briefcase and they were going to put him away and somehow they didn’t—the whole incident disappeared. And much later in 1999, on the No Security tour, he was arrested for possession in Las Vegas, taken to the cells, the whole caboodle. Freddie made one call—this was witnessed by Jim Callaghan, my muscle at the time —and three hours later he had a letter of apology from the mayor’s office, and the gear and the money were handed back.

  When I met Freddie he had his Hair Extension Center in New York—inspired by his own woven hair attachments. Cocaine and Quaaludes were his favorite drugs and he had access to the very best of them. (A scheme in Miami to treat obesity with appetite suppressants and Quaaludes, which turned into the Miami Venom Institute to treat degenerative diseases with snake venom, was closed down by the FDA. Freddie moved it to Jamaica, where he came seriously a cropper with the government.) Freddie actually owned drugstores. And he owned doctors too. He had them strategically positioned across New York, and they would write prescriptions to his drugstores. He bought a stationery business and set up this tired old doctor with a script pad, and during any one week there was $20,000 worth of pharmaceuticals coming in and going out of Freddie’s various businesses. He never sold “recreational” drugs, but he did like to give his friends the same access he had; he liked to relieve them, he said, from getting it on the street. It gave him great satisfaction to contribute to someone’s pleasure or to the greater glory of rock and roll.

  Freddie’s costumes were terrible. He would wear cowboy boots with a leisure suit tucked into them. “How do you like this? Pretty cool, eh?” Silk fucking jacket and little hipster pants with a great big arse sticking out the back. Freddie’s sense of fashion was absolutely unbelievable. It was Polish. He would have these girlfriends, and they would deliberately dress him up ridiculously and say, “You look great!” A Hawaiian shirt and a brown Nudie suit tucked into some cowboy boots, and they’d put a bowler hat on him. But Freddie didn’t give a damn; he knew what was going on. He was always trawling for young girls and groupies down in the lobby. Sometimes he disgusted and revolted me. Three what looked like underage chicks in the room. “Freddie, get them out. We’re not going there, baby.”

  One time in Chicago there was a big party in my room and loads of bimbos, Freddie’s groupies. They’d been there for twelve hours and I was getting sick of it, and I kept telling them to go and they wouldn’t. I wanted to clear the room and no one would listen to me. Get the fuck out. For five minutes I tried. So boom, I fired a shot through the floor. Ronnie and Krissie, his first wife, were also there, so I knew that there was nobody down in their room, which was directly below mine. And that cleared the room in a cloud of dust and skirts and bras. What amazed me was after that, I was stuffing the shooter, waiting for security to come up or the cops, and nothing fucking happened! The times guns have gone off in hotel rooms and never, ever has security or cops or anybody arrived. Not in America, at least. I have to say I was using guns too much, but I was pretty out of it at the time. I gave them up when I got clean.

  A lot of people didn’t like Freddie; management hated him. “This guy’s bad for Keith.” People like Peter Rudge, the manager, and Bill Carter, the lawyer, saw Freddie as a big risk. But Freddie wasn’t just getting high and bent on self-gratification. He had the weird, beautiful vision of let’s be who we are, it doesn’t matter. Freddie was part of the ’60s thing in a way, and he had that fearlessness: let’s just break th
e boundaries. Who are we to bow to every goddamn cop, every accepted social correctness? (Which has got even worse. Freddie would have hated it now.) It was just scratch the surface, let’s see what’s underneath these people. And mostly you’d find there’s very little substantial conviction behind them, if you just take ’em on. They crumble.

  Freddie and I knew what we had to offer each other. Freddie offered me protection. He had a way of filtering people out of the traveling gang. I can understand people seeing Freddie Sessler as a threat. First off, he was very close to me, which meant he couldn’t be reined in that easily. And that was basically ninety percent of the barrier. Then I always heard the stories of how Freddie was ripping me off, scalping tickets and so on. So fucking what? Compared to the spirit and friendship? Go ahead, pal, scalp as much as you fucking like.

  Switzerland was my base for the next four years or so. I couldn’t live in France for legal reasons or in Britain for tax reasons. In 1972, we moved up to Villars, in the hills above Montreux, east of Lake Geneva—a very small and secluded place. You could ski—I did ski —right up to the back door. The place was found for me by Claude Nobs, a mate of mine who started the Montreux Jazz Festival. I made other connections: Sandro Sursock became a solid friend. He was the godson of the Aga Khan, a lovely bloke. There was another one called Tibor, whose father was connected to the Czechoslovakian embassy. Your typical goddamn Slav. Randy little bastard. He lives in San Diego now and raises dogs. Sandro and he were friends. They waited around the exit of the local girls’ college and they’d take their pick. They were rolling in it. And we’d all roar around in cars—in my case an E-Type Jaguar.

  I made a statement at that time in an interview that is worth recording here. “Up until the mid-1970s, Mick and I were inseparable. We made every decision for the group. We’d get together and kick things around, write all our songs. But once we were split up, I started going my way, which was the downhill road to dopesville, and Mick ascended to jet land. We were dealing with a load of problems that built up, being who we were and what the sixties had been.”