Life

by Keith Richards

  There are myths and rumors about Anita in jail, mostly originated by Spanish Tony and his tabloid ghostwriter in Tony’s book about me and copied faithfully by other book writers. That Anita was raped in jail, that I had to pay a very large sum of money to spring her, that it was all a conspiracy by the white nabobs of Jamaica and so on. But none of this happened. The cells in the Saint Ann’s slammer weren’t nice—there was nothing to sleep on, Anita was barely allowed to wash, and it was crawling with cockroaches. None of which did much to calm the bouts of paranoia and hallucination that she suffered then. And they mocked her—“rude girl, rude girl.” But she wasn’t raped, and I didn’t have to pay a bribe. The bust was simply punishment for ignoring their warnings. All this was explained to the lawyer, Hugh Hart, who came to spring her. He discovered that the police were relieved to be rid of her. They didn’t know what to do with her. They hadn’t yet charged her with any offense. Hart got her out by promising to get her off the island. So she was driven home to collect the children and then to a plane for London. Anita was not making a lot of the right moves at the right time. At the same time, Anita’s Anita. You don’t take her on for nothing. I still loved her and she was the mother of my kids. I don’t let go; I have to be kicked out. But Anita and I were starting to be no good together.

  My Jamaican roots, by contrast with Anita’s expulsion, would only get deeper, even though I wasn’t able to get back there for a few years. Before Anita’s bust I had already realized I needed a little more protection, that we were getting exposed on the beach at Mammee Bay. I already loved Jamaica enough to look for a really nice house there. I didn’t want any more rent-a-houses. So we went touring with our landlord at the time, Ernie Smatt, who showed me Tommy Steele’s house tucked away up in the hills above Ocho Rios. Its name was Point of View and I still own it to this day. This house had a perfect location, sitting on a small cliff looking out over the bay, in fairly dense hillside woodland. Its location had been picked with the greatest care by an Italian prisoner of war called Andrea Maffessanti, who had been shipped out to Jamaica with a bunch of other Italian POWs. Maffessanti was an architect, and while he was a prisoner he was also looking around for perfect spots to build houses. And he either got them made or he sold his drawings, because many houses there are attributed to him. He was there for two or three years, studying wind and weather, which is why the house is slightly L shaped. During the day you get the breeze off of the sea, from the front, where you’re overlooking the harbor. At six o’clock in the evening, the breeze changes and comes down from the mountain. He had it shaped so the cool breeze comes down past the kitchen, from the land. A brilliant piece of architecture. I got it for eighty grand. The house was kind of dark, with air-conditioning machines, which I tore out immediately. Because of Maffessanti’s design, the house is naturally ventilated. We just put some more fans in, and it’s always worked that way since then.

  I bought it and left it on the vine. It was a very busy period, and also I was on the dope.

  We toured Europe in September and October 1973, after the release of Goats Head Soup. The lineup now included, almost permanently until 1977, Billy Preston playing keyboards, usually organ. He’d already had a meteoric career, playing with Little Richard and with the Beatles almost as a fifth member of the band, and writing and churning out his own number one hits. He was from California, born in Houston, a soul and gospel musician who ended up playing with almost everybody who was good. We now toured with two trumpets, two saxophones and two keyboards—Billy’s organ alongside Nicky Hopkins’s piano—as sidemen.

  Billy produced a different sound for us. If you listen to the records with Billy Preston, like “Melody,” he fit perfectly. But all the way through a show with Billy, it was like playing with somebody who was going to put his own stamp on everything. He was used to being a star in his own right. There was one time in Glasgow when he was playing so loud he was drowning out the rest of the band. I took him backstage and showed him the blade. “You know what this is, Bill? Dear William. If you don’t turn that fucking thing down right now, you’re going to feel it.” It’s not Billy Preston and the Rolling Stones. You are the keyboard player with the Rolling Stones. But most of the time I never had a problem with it. Certainly Charlie quite enjoyed the jazz influence, and we did a lot of good stuff together.

  Billy died of complications brought about by various kinds of overindulgence, in 2006. And there was no reason for him to have gone that way. He could have gone up and up. He had all the talent in the world. I think he’d been in the game too long; he’d started very young. And he was gay at a time when nobody could be openly gay, which added difficulties to his life. Billy could be, most of the time, a bundle of fun. But sometimes he would get on the rag. I had to stop him beating up his boyfriend in an elevator once. Billy, hold it right there or I’ll tear your wig off. He had this ludicrous Afro wig. Meanwhile, he looked perfectly good with the Billy Eckstine look underneath.

  I was taking a pee with Bobby Keys in Innsbruck, just after a show, and Bob usually has a joke or two at these moments. But he’s very quiet. And he goes, “Ah, I got bad news.… GP’s dead.” It was like a kick to the solar plexus. I looked at him. Gram, dead? I thought he was straight, I thought he was on the ups. Story later, says Bobby. All I’ve heard is that he’s dead. Oh, my man. You never know quite how it’s going to affect you; it never hits you at once. Another goodbye to another good friend.

  We heard later that Gram was clean when he went overboard. He took a normal-sized dose. “Oh, just one…” But cold turkey had already wiped out his body’s resilience against it, and boom. There’s that fatal mistake with junkies. When you’ve cleaned up, the body’s just been through that shock. They think, I’ll just use one little hit, but they give themselves the same shot that they were taking the week before, to which they’ve built up a tolerance in amazing proportions, which is why the comedown is so heavy. And the body just says, well, fuck it, I give up. If you’re going to do things like that, you should try and remember the amount you took the first time you ever took it. Start again. A third less. A pinch.

  In order to deal with Gram’s death, I said, I can’t stay in Innsbruck tonight. I’m going to rent a car, and we’re going to Munich and we’re going on an impossible task. We’re going to look for one woman. Because I knew about her, I’d seen her once or twice, and she fascinated me. I know this is pointless, but we’re going to go into Munich to look for her. Let’s go tonight. Let’s just forget about it and go do something else. I hate all that crying shit, and moping. There’s nothing you can do about it. The fucker’s dead and all you do is get mad at him for dying. So you take your mind off it. I’m going to look for one of the most beautiful women in the world. I’ll never find her, but that’s what we’ll go for. A focus. A target. And Bobby and I rented a BMW, this was one in the morning, and took off.

  The target was Uschi Obermaier. If there was one thing that could soothe my soul, it was her. She was beautiful. She was quite famous in Germany as a model who had graduated into an icon of the student protest movement that was traumatizing relations between the generations in Germany and threatening to tear the country apart. She was the poster girl of the left; her picture was everywhere. She was a mad rock-and-roll fan, which is how she’d found her way to Mick at first and how I’d met her, very briefly, once. Mick had invited her to come to Stuttgart and she was looking for him in the hotel. She ran into me instead and I took her to Mick’s door. But I’d seen her picture on posters and in magazines, and there was something about her that got to me. Uschi’s boyfriend, a guy called Rainer Langhans, had been one of the founders of Commune 1, a public live-in designed to wage war against the nuclear family and the authoritarian state. She’d been co-opted into Commune 1 when she took up with Rainer, but Uschi’s other title, of which she was proud, was the Bavarian Barbarian. She had never taken the ideology seriously, openly drinking banned Pepsi-Cola and smoking menthol cigarettes and upsetting other Commune
dictates. She was photographed naked by Stern magazine rolling joints; she was certainly wholehearted in her desire to outrage the German bourgeoisie. But when the commune world hardened up into two camps—terror groups like Baader-Meinhof on one hand and the Greens on the other—Uschi retired from the fray, at least retired from Rainer, and went back to Munich. Her road is littered with guys who tried to tame her. They tried to tame something that’s untamable. She’s the best bad girl I know.

  Anyway, that night we checked into the Bayerischer Hof, where everybody’s got a Rembrandt over his bed, a real one. Bob said, right, what are we going to do now, Keith? I said, Bob, now we’re going down to Schwabing and hit the strip, the club circuit. Let’s do what Gram would have done if we’d croaked. I said, we’ve got to look for Uschi Obermaier in this city. I’ve got to have a target. No particular reason—it was the only thing I knew in Munich to aim at. I didn’t even know if she was in town. So we buffed ourselves up a bit and started to hit the clubs. And things were rocking, but it wasn’t what we were looking for. And by about the fifth or sixth club, there’s some damn good records being played, so I went up and talked to the DJ, who I happened to know, George the Greek. And on top of that he happened to know the Obermaier.

  But even if I find her, what am I going to do? I’m in no condition to put the make on her, and there’s not much time anyway. So… OK, well, we’ve actually found someone who knows her, this is already a miracle, but I’m lost for a plan. George says, I know her address, but she’s with her old man. I said, George, let’s go round there. And we parked opposite the flat, and I said, George, will you go up and say that KR’s looking for her? I was determined to make the full circle with GP dying. And George goes up and knocks on her door, and out she struts, just to the window, and goes, who are you? Why? I don’t know why, a friend of mine’s just died, and I’m pretty fucked up. I just want to say hello. You were the target, and we found you. We’ll leave it at that. Then she came down and gave me a kiss and went back upstairs. But hey, we actually pulled it off! Mission accomplished.

  The second time I tried to get in touch with Uschi, I got Freddie Sessler to track her down on the phone. He called her agency. And the agent said, “I’m not allowed to give those numbers out,” and there’s Freddie greasing the line and Freddie could grease like nobody. Freddie was versed in many languages. Uschi and I didn’t speak each other’s language. When I got her number and she answered she said, “Hi, Mick.” I said, “No, it’s Keith.” She was living in Hamburg at the time and I sent a car round to drive her to Rotterdam. She basically had to do a runner from her old man. They had a fight; she got in the car and came to Rotterdam. She ripped my earring out that night in the bed. We were in this Japanese-style hotel in Rotterdam—next morning I realize my ear is stuck with my own blood to the pillow. As a result of which I have a permanent malformation of the right earlobe.

  With Uschi Obermaier, especially at that time, it was lust, pure and simple. And then she grew on me and entered my heart. We’d draw pictures or use sign language. But even if we couldn’t talk to each other, I’d found a friend. As simple as that, really. And I loved her dearly. We dabbled around off and on with each other in the ’70s, and then she took off with her new love, boyfriend Dieter Bockhorn, to Afghanistan, and she slipped from my mind and my heart. And then I heard that she’d died, of a miscarriage somewhere in Turkey. Which was almost true, but it turned out she was smarter than that. I found out the real story many years later on a beach in Mexico, on the most important day of my life.

  This was a terrible period for casualties. Towards the end of that summer, Gus, my granddad, died; Michael Cooper, my deep mate, committed suicide—a fragile psyche, I’d always seen it as a potential. All the good ones die on you. And where does that leave me? The only answer is to make new friends. But then some of the live ones dropped off the active list. We wore out Jimmy Miller, who slowly succumbed to the dope and ended up carving swastikas into the mixing board while he worked on his swan song album for us, Goats Head Soup. Andy Johns lasted until late 1973. We were cutting “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll” in Munich when he got fired for the same reason —hitting the hard stuff too hard. (He survived and worked ever after.) And then my buddy Bobby Keys—I couldn’t save him from his own rock-and-roll shipwreck around that same time.

  Bobby went down in a tub of Dom Pérignon. Bobby Keys, so the story goes, is the only man who knows how many bottles of it it takes to fill a bath, because that’s what he was floating in. This was just before the second-to-last gig on the ’73 European tour, in Belgium. No sign of Bobby at the band assembly that day, and finally I was asked if I knew where my buddy was—there had been no reply from his hotel room. So I went to his room and said, Bob, we gotta go, we gotta go right now. He’s got a cigar, bathtub full of champagne and this French chick in with him. And he said, fuck off. So be it. Great image and everything like that, but you might regret it, Bob. The accountant informed Bobby afterwards that he had earned no money at all on the tour as a result of that bathtub; in fact he owed. And it took me ten goddamn years or more to get him back in the band, because Mick was implacable, and rightly so. And Mick can be merciless in that way. I couldn’t answer for Bobby. All I could do was help him get clean, and I did.

  As for me, I was now put on the death list by a cheering press, starting with the music papers. A new angle. Not interested so much in the music, early in 1973. New Musical Express drew up a top ten of rock stars most likely to die, and put me at number one. I’m also the Prince of Darkness, the world’s most elegantly wasted man and so on—these titles that have stuck to me were coined then and were good forever. I often felt wished to death in this period, even by well-meaning people. At first you were a novelty. But then that’s what they thought about rock and roll, even into the ’60s. And then they wished you to fuck off. And then when you didn’t fuck off, they wished you to death.

  Ten years I was number one on that list! It used to make me laugh. That was the only chart on which I was number one for ten years in a row. I was kind of proud of that position. I don’t think anybody’s held that position as long as I have. I was really disappointed when I went down the charts. Finally dropping down to number nine. Oh my God, it’s over.

  These necromantics were given a boost by the story that I went to Switzerland to get my blood changed—perhaps the one thing everybody seems to know about me. OK for Keith, he can just go and have his blood changed and carry on. It’s said to have been some transaction with the devil deep under the stones of Zurich, face white as parchment, a kind of vampire attack in reverse and the rosiness returns to his cheeks. But I never changed it! That story comes from the fact that when I was going to Switzerland, to the clinic to clean up, I had to land at Heathrow and change planes. And there’s the Street of Shame following me, “Hey, Keith.” I said, “Look, shut the fuck up. I’m going to have me blood changed.” Boom, that’s it. And then off to the plane. After that, it’s like it’s in the Bible or something. I just said it to fob them off. It’s been there ever since.

  I can’t untie the threads of how much I played up to the part that was written for me. I mean the skull ring and the broken tooth and the kohl. Is it half and half? I think in a way your persona, your image, as it used to be known, is like a ball and chain. People think I’m still a goddamn junkie. It’s thirty years since I gave up the dope! Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down, you can see it. I think some of it is that there is so much pressure to be that person that you become it, maybe, to a certain point that you can bear. It’s impossible not to end up being a parody of what you thought you were.

  There is something inside me that just wants to excite that thing in other people, because I know it’s there in everybody. There’s a demon in me, and there’s a demon in everybody else. I get a uniquely ridiculous response—the skulls flow in by the truckload, sent by well-wishers. People love that image. They imagined me, they made me, the folks out there created this fo
lk hero. Bless their hearts. And I’ll do the best I can to fulfill their needs. They’re wishing me to do things that they can’t. They’ve got to do this job, they’ve got this life, they’re an insurance salesman… but at the same time, inside of them is a raging Keith Richards. When you talk of a folk hero, they’ve written the script for you and you better fulfill it. And I did my best. It’s no exaggeration that I was basically living like an outlaw. And I got into it! I knew that I was on everybody’s list. All I had to do was recant and I’d be all right. But that was something I just couldn’t do.

  The dope, and the cops on our back, had gotten to a low point. This is going down the tube. But I never felt that I was. I thought, I can handle this. This is the way things are going, this is the way things are thrown at me, all I have to do is get through. I might have all this shit hitting me from this direction, but I know there’s a lot of people out there going, go, Keith. In a way it’s an election without a ballot. Who wins? The authorities or the public? And there’s me in the middle, or the Stones in the middle. At the time, I suppose sometimes I did wonder, is it just fun for everybody? Oh, Keith busted again. Woken up in the fucking early morning with your kids around and you’ve only been asleep for two hours, if that. I don’t mind a polite arrest. It was their manners. They barge in like a SWAT team. It really pissed me off. And you can’t do anything about it at the particular time; you’ve just got to swallow it. You know you’re being stitched up. “Mr. Richards says you shoved him up against the gate and said assume the position and kicked him in the ankles?” “Oh, no, no, no, wouldn’t have done that. Mr. Richards is exaggerating.”