Life

by Keith Richards

  Bert, on the other hand, lived a life of strict routine. He used to get up and have a swim, fix his own breakfast. He had these very set meals, now cooked by Roy. He always had a glass of Harveys Bristol Cream at seven bells. Because Wheel of Fortune came on at seven thirty. He always watched Wheel of Fortune. He had a thing for Vanna White, used to cheer her on, yell at people who were rude to her. And then at eight o’clock he’d have dinner and then watch TV till midnight, drinking Bass and dark Navy rum.

  Thank God the houses were large enough that sometimes I could just disappear and I didn’t have to see people. One person could have a wing to himself, and basically I wouldn’t know what the hell they were doing for weeks on end. People say, oh, remember when Jean-Michel Basquiat visited for a week? No! Maybe I was in the east wing then. We used to change bedrooms every few months, just to make it interesting. I wouldn’t see Roy for two weeks. I didn’t know where his bedroom was.

  The landlord never did any maintenance on the place, so it was just getting worse and worse and worse. Once my bedroom became too decrepit, I would move into another one—luckily there were about fifteen of them—until eventually I moved all the way to the attic. It was the last place left! A huge attic space, the size of a cathedral up there, and I had my bed and a TV and my desk, and I would just lock the door and not let anyone else up there. By then we said, we can’t stay here anymore; it’s falling down. Or we’ve destroyed it. So that’s why we moved to the final mansion at Mill Neck, on the edge of Oyster Bay.

  Around ’83, Anita moved back to England because of visa problems and stayed there, coming over only for the occasional visit. So she wasn’t there for this last gigantic house with twelve or thirteen bedrooms, so incredibly cold in the winter. We had a fireplace in one living room. Roy’s room was heated, Bert’s room was heated, and we would all sort of meet up sometimes in the kitchen. If you walked in the hallway, you had to put an overcoat on. This house had an elevator up to the rooms we lived in. One day the elevator broke down and we didn’t go out for two weeks. Then we discovered that the front door had been left open and the whole ground floor had frozen into an ice ballroom, icicles hanging from the chandeliers. It was like Narnia. It was like Gormenghast. I came upon the African frogs we had as pets frozen solid in their tank, many years pre Damien Hirst.

  Around this time I asked Keith if I could have guitar lessons. “No son of mine is going to be a guitar player,” he said. “Certainly not. I want you to grow up to be a lawyer or accountant.” He was joking, of course, but very dry, and I was quite traumatized.

  The amazing thing is that I went to school, Portledge, a posh local school in Locust Valley, driven by Roy. But intermittently, let’s put it that way. My attendance record wasn’t very good. I didn’t really mind all this self-sufficiency. I was kind of happy to not have everyone around, really, because it was exhausting with Anita and Keith. I just wanted to go to school as best I could and get things done and have some sort of normal life, and I felt I could do that much better by myself. Or at least with Roy. Eventually I got kicked out of the Locust Valley school for not showing up, not doing my homework, and I just gave up on school, really. Keith was getting advice from one of his relations saying that I was a complete delinquent and I should go to military academy. There was even a move to convince Keith to send me off to West Point. I wouldn’t have minded, actually. But Keith said, well, what do you want to do? He said, do you want to just give up school altogether, and I said, well, no, I want to get my education; I want to go to England because I can’t do it in America. So I came over to England in 1988 and moved in across the street from Anita on Tite Street in Chelsea and got a flat. And lest it be forgotten, I got four A levels.

  For Marlon himself, and for me, it was the defining point. It was his decision to go back to England. He said to me, all I’m going to get is Long Island bullshit. And that’s when I took my hat off to Marlon. He could take his choice, he could be the Long Island brat, but thank God he’s smarter than that and got out of there and managed to cope. Maybe Bert was one of the first solid anchors. Maybe he became the steadying force. The proof is in the pudding. I’m sure things could have been done far better, but we were on the run. And Marlon had a unique upbringing. Far from normal. Hence, probably, why he’s bringing up his own kids in a very secure way, hands on all the time. Because he never got that. By now Marlon understands; it was the times, and the circumstances, that made it tough on him. It was very difficult to be one of the Rolling Stones and take care of your kids at the same time.

  As for Anita, she survived too. Now she is the benign grandmother to Marlon’s three children. She’s a kind of elder and icon in the fashion world, in which she involves herself; people see her as a source of inspiration. And she’s developed her green thumb lately. I know a bit about gardening, but I think she knows more than I do. She took care of my trees in Redlands. She chopped off the ivy. The trees were being choked to death by ivy, several of them. I gave her a machete. And the trees are blooming again; the ivy’s gone. She knows what to do. She has an allotment somewhere in London that she cultivates; rides down on her bicycle.

  Patti and I had been together for four years by December 1983. I loved her soul and I knew in my heart I wanted to make this thing legitimate. And I was coming up to my fortieth birthday. What was more appropriate? We’d been shooting videos in Mexico City, for “Undercover of the Night,” with Julien Temple, who shot many of our videos in those days. We shot three or four movies in Mexico while we were there. And at the end I decided, right, fuck it, time off, go down to Cabo San Lucas, then a small town with two hotels on the beach, one of which was the Twin Dolphin.

  We have “conferences,” me and my friends scattered across the globe, group meetings—sitting conferences, like bishops’ conferences, ready to be convened at any time. There’s the Eastern and the Western in the USA, which are straightforward, but the one that was nuts was the Southwestern conference, much of which took place in New Mexico. The names of its members: Red Dog; Gary Ashley, who’s now dead and gone; Stroker, real name Dicky Johnson. They’re called the Southwestern conference because you’d never see them east of the Mississippi. They’re a solid bunch, absolute madmen, all of them. They brook no interference from sanity, bless their hearts. I’d hung with these guys on many occasions. I got to Cabo San Lucas on this trip, and within a week, I’d met Gregorio Azar, who had a house there. Gregorio’s father owns Azar nuts, which was the biggest nut business in the Southwest. He’d heard I was staying at the Twin Dolphin, which is one of the few hotels there. I didn’t know him at the time, but he knew all of the other Southwest conference guys, came out with the right names at the right time. A friend of Gary Ashley and Red Dog? Cool, come on in. And so we started to hang and he was co-opted.

  I proposed to Patti on the rooftop of Gregorio’s house in Cabo San Lucas. Come on, let’s get married on my birthday. She said, do you mean it? I said yeah. Immediately she jumped on my back. I didn’t feel anything, but I just heard something go snap and I looked down and there’s two beautiful fountains of blood coming out from behind my toenail. Within five seconds of me saying, yeah, I mean it, she broke my toe. Next time it’ll be the heart, right? Half an hour later it had started to throb and then I was on a crutch for the next two weeks. A few days before our wedding day, I found myself running through the Mexican desert on a crutch with a black coat and chasers on. We’d had a fight, Patti and I, some premarriage thing, I don’t know what it was about, but here I was, hobbling through cacti, chasing her into the desert, “Come here, you bitch!” like Long John Silver.

  On the day before the wedding, Gregorio says to me, by the way, have you heard about this German chick with the big Mercedes bus and the tepee? And I went chilled. She’s German? Big Mercedes bus? Tepee? Get out of here. The bus was parked on a beach in Cabo San Lucas. I knew from magazines that Uschi Obermaier had been traveling the hippie trail through Afghanistan, Turkey and India in recent years, with this huge bus,
fur lined and with a sauna in it. She was traveling with her husband, Dieter Bockhorn. I knew for sure that she was in Cabo San Lucas when I opened the door of my room in the Twin Dolphin, which is right on the beach, and there was this little vase of flowers outside. There could have been no stranger or weirder coincidence than this—for us to meet on the eve of my wedding in this remote part of Mexico, about as far as you could get from Afghanistan or Germany or anywhere Uschi had been. What was she doing here? And then Uschi and Dieter came by, and I told her I was getting married and I was very much in love with Patti. We talked about the intervening years, rumors of her demise—and the reality, which was her travels in her bus through the world, through India and Turkey and God knows where. A few nights later, on New Year’s Eve, Dieter was killed on his motorcycle, his severed head, still in his helmet, on one side of the road; his body had gone over the bridge. I went to see Uschi. There was a big black dog barking in the doorway. Who’s there? I said, it’s the Englishman. The door opened. I’ve heard what’s happened. Is there anything I can do to help? She said, thank you but no, I have friends and everything is being taken care of. So I left Uschi in these bizarre and tragic circumstances, our most unlikely meetings having been framed by shock and grief, first mine and then hers.

  Doris and Bert came for our wedding ceremony, the first time they’d met in twenty years, and Angela locked them in a room and forced them to talk to each other. Marlon came; Mick was the best man. Four years Patti and I had been together, four years of road testing, and I’d expended enough sperm to fertilize the whole world, and no babies. Not that I really expected to have children by Patti. “I can’t have babies,” she’d said. Well, I guess you can’t! But it’s not the reason I’m gonna marry you. Put that little curtain ring round her finger and in six months guess what? “I’m pregnant.” So the dungeon that we were planning, no, it’s going to be a nursery now. All right, paint it pink and put a cot in, take the chains off the walls, get the mirrors down. I thought by then I’d done my fathering bit, with Marlon and Angela. They’re growing up all right, we’ve done it and we’ve made it. No more diapers. But no! Here comes another one. Her name’s Theodora. And then a year later another one, Alexandra. Little T&A. And they weren’t even a gleam in my eye when I wrote that song.

  Jane Rose

  Chapter Twelve

  Secret solo deals and skulduggery. World War III breaks out—between the Glimmer Twins. I ally myself with Steve Jordan and make a difficult film with Chuck Berry, then cut loose and form the X-Pensive Winos. Reunion with Mick in Barbados; Voodoo, the rescued cat (opposite), and his lounge; rebirth of the Stones and the start of the megatours with Steel Wheels. Bridges to Babylon and four songs with a parallel narrative.

  It was the beginning of the ’80s when Mick started to become unbearable. That’s when he became Brenda, or Her Majesty, or just Madam. We were in Paris, back at Pathé Marconi, in November and December of 1982, working on songs for Undercover. I went to WHSmith, the English bookshop on the Rue de Rivoli. I forget the title of the book, but there it was, some lurid novel by Brenda Jagger. Gotcha, mate! Now you’re Brenda whether you know it or like it or not. He certainly didn’t like it. It took him ages to find out. We’d be talking about “that bitch Brenda” with him in the room, and he wouldn’t know. But there’s a terrible thing that starts, and it’s very much like the way Mick and I behaved towards Brian. Once you release that acid, it begins to corrode.

  This situation was a culmination of things that had been going on for several years. The immediate problem was that Mick had developed an overriding desire to control everything. As far as he was concerned, it was Mick Jagger and them. That was the attitude that we all got. It didn’t matter how much he tried, he couldn’t stop appearing, to himself at least, as numero uno. Now there was Mick’s world, which was a socialite world, and our world. This didn’t work at all well with keeping a band together or keeping them happy. Oh dear me, after all these years, the swollen head’s arrived. He’d gotten to where it wouldn’t fit through the doorway. The band, including myself, were now basically hirelings. That had always been his attitude to everyone else, but never to the band. When it dripped over onto us, that was it.

  An inflated ego is always very difficult in a band, especially a band that’s been going a long time, and is tight, and really relies upon, at least amongst its members, a certain bizarre integrity. The band is a team. It’s very democratic in a way. Everything has to be decided between us—it’s so much for a left leg from the top of the knee, and so much for your testicles. Anybody that tries to elevate himself above the others endangers himself. Charlie and I would raise our eyes to the ceiling. Do you believe that? And for a while we just put up with it when Mick tried to take the whole thing over. When you think about it, we’d been together twenty-five years or so before the shit really hit the fan. So the view was, this was bound to happen. This happens to all bands eventually, and now’s the test. Does it hold together?

  It must have been pretty bad for anyone around us who worked on Undercover. A hostile, discordant atmosphere. We were barely talking or communicating, and if we were, we were bickering and sniping. Mick attacking Ronnie, me defending him. Eventually, in the Pathé Marconi studios in Paris, trying to finish the album, Mick would come in from midday until five p.m. and I’d appear from midnight until five a.m. It was only the early skirmishing, the phony war. The work itself wasn’t bad, somehow; the album did well.

  Well, Mick got very big ideas. All lead singers do. It’s a known affliction called LVS, lead vocalist syndrome. There had been early symptoms, but it was now rampant. A video display in the stadium in Tempe, Arizona, where the Stones were performing and Hal Ashby was shooting Let’s Spend the Night Together announced, “Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones.” Since when? Mick was a controller of every detail, and it was no producer’s oversight. The shots were excised.

  If you combine congenital LVS with a nonstop bombardment of flattery every waking moment over years and years, you can start to believe the incoming. Even if you’re not flattered by flattery or you’re anti-flattery, it will go to your head; it will do something to you. And even if you don’t completely believe it, you say, well, everybody else does—I’ll roll with it. You forget that it’s just part of the job. It’s amazing how even quite sensible people like Mick Jagger could get carried away by it. Actually believe they were special. I’ve had problems ever since I was nineteen with people saying, you’re fantastic, and you know you ain’t. Downfall, boy. I could see how other people were sucked in so easily; I became a puritan in that respect. I will never go that way. I’ll disfigure myself. Which I did, by letting some teeth fall out. I’m not playing this game. I’m not in show business. Playing the music is the best I can do, and I know it’s worth a listen.

  Mick had become uncertain, had started second-guessing his own talent—that seemed, ironically, to be at the root of the self-inflation. For many years through the ’60s, Mick was incredibly charming and humorous. He was natural. It was electrifying the way he could work those small spaces, as a singer and as a dancer; fascinating to watch and work with—the spins, the moves. He never thought about it. That performance was exciting without him appearing to do anything. And he’s still good, even though to my mind it’s dissipated on the big stages. That’s what people have wanted to see: spectacle. But it’s not necessarily what he’s best at.

  Somewhere, though, he got unnatural. He forgot how good he was in that small spot. He forgot his natural rhythm. I know he disagrees with me. What somebody else was doing was far more interesting to him than what he was doing. He even began to act as if he wanted to be someone else. Mick is quite competitive, and he started to get competitive about other bands. He watched what David Bowie was doing and wanted to do it. Bowie was a major, major attraction. Somebody had taken Mick on in the costume and bizarreness department. But the fact is, Mick could deliver ten times more than Bowie in just a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, singing “I’m
a Man.” Why would you want to be anything else if you’re Mick Jagger? Is being the greatest entertainer in show business not enough? He forgot that it was he who was new, who created and set the trends in the first place, for years. It’s fascinating. I can’t figure it out. It’s almost as if Mick was aspiring to be Mick Jagger, chasing his own phantom. And getting design consultants to help him do it. No one taught him to dance, until he took dance lessons. Charlie and Ronnie and I quite often chuckle when we see Mick out there doing a move that we know some dance instructor just laid on him, instead of being himself. We know the minute he’s going plastic. Shit, Charlie and I have been watching that ass for forty-odd years; we know when the moneymaker’s shaking and when it’s being told what to do. Mick’s taken up singing lessons, but that may be to preserve his voice.

  Coming back after a few months apart, I realized that Mick’s taste in music had often changed quite drastically. He wanted to lay on me the latest hit he heard at a disco. But it’s already been done, pal. At the time we were doing Undercover in 1983, he was just trying to out-disco everybody. It all sounded to me like some rehash of something he heard in a club one night. Already five years earlier, on Some Girls, we’d got “Miss You” out of it, which was one of the best disco records of all time. But Mick was chasing musical fashion. I had a lot of problems with him trying to second-guess the audience. This is what they’re into this year. Yeah, what about next year, pal? You just become one of the crowd. And anyway, that’s never the way we’ve worked. Let’s just do it the way we’ve always done it, which is do we like it? Does it pass our test? When it comes down to it, Mick and I wrote our first song in a kitchen. That’s as big as the world is. If we’d been thinking about how the public was going to react, we’d never have made a record. I also understood Mick’s problem, because lead singers always get into this competition: what’s Rod doing, what’s Elton doing, David Bowie, what’s he up to?